Is He Doing Okay?

Laura Dern, a therapist, and a band from New Zealand walk into a bar...

I want to nip something in the bud, head it off at the pass, beat you to the punch.

When you read through this week’s recommendations and see me writing about grief, obsolescence, and questioning one’s life decisions, you may wonder, “Jeez, is he doing okay?”

The answer is, yes, I’m doing okay. (Thank you for asking.) Actually, I think I’m doing better than okay. Someone very close to me recently said, “This is the happiest I’ve heard you in a very long time.” That was nice to hear and also probably true.

But just because I’m happy and healthy at the moment doesn’t mean I shouldn’t engage with the darker uncertainties of life. I didn’t plan a theme for this week’s edition, but sometimes related items find you at once.

Besides, what you really should be saying is, “Jeez, he used a lot of clichés at the top there. Did he forget how to write?”

On to the list…

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The Best…

…Series I Watched This Week

Enlightened (2011-13) — HBO

Amy: Am I crazy?
Levi: No, you’re just full of hope. You’ve got more hope than most people do.

This moment between Amy (Laura Dern) and Levi (Luke Wilson) comes near the end of Enlightened’s second and final season, and it perfectly encapsulates the dynamic of the show.

The series, co-created by Dern and Mike White (The White Lotus), is about Amy, a 40-something-year-old woman who, when we first meet her, is going through a life crisis/emotional meltdown. When she emerges from the darkness (and returns from a treatment center), she’s determined to put only positivity into the world, to do good, to change the planet for the better.

Her first order of business: to right the wrongs perpetrated by her employer, a giant pharmaceutical company called Abaddonn.

The problem is that Amy is painfully naïve, hopelessly hopeful, and — to be honest — annoying and awkward. When she tries to make positive change in a straightforward and righteous way, she gets shut down, laughed at. So with nothing left to lose, she tries a different approach. And her choices have consequences that complicate the lives of everyone around her.

Watching it in 2023, the series plays as a precursor to last year’s mind-blowing Apple TV+ show Severance, as a darkly comedic corporate basement satire. Anyone who has ever worked as a cog in a giant corporation — myself included — will recognize parts of themselves and their colleagues in the workplace characters.

Even though I feel like I'm different from Amy in so many ways, I could completely relate to her feelings of isolation and loneliness, of not being heard, of total frustration. When she reassesses her life, I couldn’t help but reassess mine: Am I doing everything wrong, too? Am I doing *life* wrong? If you’re willing to go there, be prepared to question everything about yourself when you watch this series.

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…Book I Revisited This Week

It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand (Sounds True, 2017) — by Megan Devine

The feelings evoked by Enlightened, the stories in the new Apple TV+ series Shrinking, along with work I’m doing on another project (which I’ll tell you about very soon), all led me to take a second look at a book I recently read.

A couple months ago, I felt like within a single week, I kept getting news of people in my world who were suffering from something more than just ennui. Scary medical diagnoses. Out-of-order death. Life-altering events.

I took some selfish solace that none of these occurrences were happening to me (not that week, anyway). But I felt unprepared to be a friend to those for whom the worst had happened, ill-equipped to handle the overwhelming power and intensity of someone else’s grief.

So I turned to a book: It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, by Megan Devine. (I listened to the audiobook, read by the author.)

It sounds like a self-help book, and I suppose in the strictest sense, it is. But this is not a “Five Easy Steps to Overcome Your Grief and Live Your Best Life NOW” kind of book. It’s a raw, myth-debunking work written by someone who experienced the unexpected death of her partner, and who has worked as a therapist with hundreds of patients grappling with grief.

The book’s key concept is that grief is not something to be solved, fixed or overcome; it needs tending, because the pain of deep loss never fully goes away.

Devine largely directs her writing at those who are in the throes of deepest grief, but there are also points and suggestions for friends and loved ones who want to help. She argues that a mistake many people make is encouraging the griever to “just get over it” and that offering peppy platitudes, while often well-meaning, can be more insulting than helpful.

Though the intense grief of others can still feel dangerous and scary to me, having read this book, I now have better tools to face it, and hopefully to be a better friend in the process.

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…Song I Listened To This Week

“Expert in a Dying Field” (2022) — The Beths

When reader John H. suggested watching this music video, he had me at “New Zealand band.” No, it’s not my beloved Flight of the Conchords. (Band meeting, anyone?)

The band is The Beths and the song is “Expert in a Dying Field,” released in September 2022. It’s a catchy indie-rock confection that, like the other songs on the album (also called Expert in a Dying Field), grows in harmonic complexity the more you listen to it.

The video is an understated but clever take on obsolescence. And the title feels especially incisive at a time when the potential implications of ChatGPT seem to be on everyone’s minds. Maybe we’re all experts in a dying field?

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One correction from last week’s email: as pointed out by astute reader Jim B., I had my Harvard-educated transcendentalists mixed up. The quote, “I took a walk in the woods and came out taller than the trees,” comes from Thoreau, not Emerson. The Best Newsletter regrets the error.