Sticking point #11: “I cringe every time I hear the phrase ‘living your best life,’ because I always have this twitchy suspicion that I’m not.”
Raise your hand if you’ve ever been there: you watch an enviably clever creative collaboration birthed out of a networking event you decided not to attend; you look at someone else’s incredible productivity and curse your own plodding work habits; another artist posts photos from a month-long residency in some exotic locale, and, as you troll their social media feed, you are kicking yourself for not applying. Why does everybody else seem so much more fulfilled in their creative work? Why is everyone else so much savvier than you are? In her book Aphro-Ism, Aph Ko writes that social media provides a false sense of control over one’s own destiny, but this truth may not apply if you’re too preoccupied watching what everyone else is doing (or appears to be doing) to post any carefully curated photos of your own.
According to the Apple Dictionary, FOMO—an acronym for “fear of missing out”—is the “anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media website.” We artists may be loath to admit this, but FOMO affects us almost as keenly as it does teenagers, concertgoers, and unrepentant capitalists. If we’re not hopping on a plane every month or two to lead a workshop or give a keynote at some prestigious conference, if we’re not the ones stumbling upon a bookshop-speakeasy inside a bombed-out department store somewhere in Eastern Europe and posting pics that immediately go viral, then we’re tamping down the panic that we aren’t “sucking the marrow out” of the creative life—that perhaps, someday, someone who hasn’t been born yet will regard our careers as ineffectual or mediocre, if they consider our work at all.
If this fear motivates us to apply for grants and fellowships and implement more efficient work habits, it also results in the urge to join a queue before we even know what everybody’s waiting for. The more you use your devices, the worse you feel it, since marketing and advertising execs—being human themselves—know precisely how to exploit our insecurities. “The one and only way to protect yourself from ad manipulation is to work on your emotional intelligence,” writes content strategist Oksana Tunikova. “Once your EQ is high enough, you will be able to recognize manipulation in a few seconds and decide, consciously, whether the proposition is right for you.” You might think it’s easy to tell when someone is trying to manipulate you into buying a festival VIP pass or a three thousand dollar e-course, but things get murkier when said products appeal to your most cherished creative aspirations.
You may be surprised to find out who coined “sucking the marrow” as a life strategy: it was Henry David Thoreau, the world’s most notorious wannabe hermit. He wrote in Walden, “I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.” The bonus irony is that Thoreau identified as a vegetarian—“I am by nature a Pythagorean”—and while he did admit to occasionally catching and eating a fish, “A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.”
What does it mean “to live what is not life”? Thoreau defines such an existence as “frittered away by detail”: allowing oneself to engage in frequent distractions from the central question of what it means to be alive in human form upon this earth at this particular moment, and to pretend those distractions are the answer. So, it seems as if most of us are misusing the phrase “sucking the marrow”; Thoreau knew he was only “missing out” on things that weren’t worth experiencing anyhow.
Which is exactly how vegans feel about animal foods. My friend Meta Wagner, an arts professor at Emerson College, drove me a tiny bit bonkers when I read the following in her book, What’s Your Creative Type?: “A-Listers take to competition the way a lapsed vegan takes to a hunk of sirloin—that is to say, with great gusto.” Meta has subscribed to the notion that artists are more sensual and appreciative of luxury than “ordinary” folks are, that not to partake of oysters and caviar and foie gras is to deprive oneself. But where you see a long list of things we vegans can’t eat, we see a list of things that aren’t food: I “miss out” on a steak or a bowl of ceviche in a restaurant in the same way I don’t get to eat a bowling ball or an electric pencil sharpener.
Kerry Lemon, temporary tattoo design.
@kerryannelemon
All the same, I need to remember what it felt like to be a vegetarian skeptical of veganism if I hope to convince anyone. Food-related FOMO may be the most powerful variety—owing in part to bearded-hipster culture with its bacon-infused everything and backyard DIY butchery—but for me it was always ice cream. My grandfather worked for Sealtest for decades, and sometimes he’d answer the home phone with “Breyers, what’s your flavor?” Mine was mint chocolate chip. Much later on, while volunteering on a homestead farm in Vermont, I spent a blissful afternoon in a cabin in the woods—which my friend had built himself, plank by plank—and when he proffered a pint of artisanal mint chip ice cream from a local creamery, I decided that I could live quite happily without indoor plumbing.
But I didn’t marry that guy, and I don’t regret it. Several months later, I went to India, where it occurred to me that “not living what is not life” would mean eating ice cream made from soy and nuts and coconut instead, and, for the first couple years, I satisfied myself with what I could find in the freezer case in the natural foods aisle. And then I moved to Boston and discovered FoMu, as in “faux moo”: a gourmand’s paradise of dairy-free desserts. Cardamom pistachio, ginger dark-chocolate dukkah, golden milk, avocado, blueberry shortbread cheesecake. I have never brought an omnivore to FoMu who has not been willing to admit that this ice cream is as good or better than “the real thing.” It is every bit as rich. There is another vegan ice cream parlor with a punny name, Like No Udder, right down the street from where I live on the East Side of Providence, and their owners are friendlier and more hardcore-for-the-animals. While they do have more elaborate flavors like Thai iced tea and “unicorn poop” (made with Skittles)—they were also one of the first companies to sell vegan soft serve—Like No Udder is the place to go for an old-fashioned neighborhood ice cream parlor kind of experience (plus ’80s power ballads and cat videos on endless loop). You go to FoMu when you’re ready to swoon.
Recently I took the train to Boston with my friend Dan (whom you’ll meet properly in part two), who’d been wanting to try FoMu ice cream for as long as he’s been vegan. For lunch beforehand, we went to Whole Heart Provisions, a deluxe salad joint where you can have coconut curry and falafel and roasted Japanese eggplant topped with crispy-fried lentils and chickpeas on a bed of arugula and jasmine rice, with a choice of creamy, spicy dressings. A nine- or ten-dollar (compostable) bowl will more than fill you up.
As we feasted, I told my friend about this chapter I wanted to write—why Faux Moo is the antidote to “FOMO,” all of it, not just the ice cream—and in talking around it I came up with a two-step cure. Firstly: when you feel FOMO, what is it about that particular experience that you desire for yourself? If somebody’s doing something enviable, then apply for that residency or arrange the conditions for an adventure of your own, be it in Bali or Berkeley or the park down the street from your house. Explore, investigate, or do something bizarrely out of character and make art out of whatever results. Remember that you can’t see and do and be everything there is to see and do and be, even in the span of a thousand lifetimes. So pick one thing at a time and revel in it.
The second step is going to sound corny, but I don’t care: you have to commit to living the life that’s in front of you instead of obsessing over experiences you are never going to have (like, say, being Beyoncé). I observed a good example of this as Dan and I hopped on the number 1 bus to FoMu’s new location on Tremont Street in the South End. An elderly man in a wheelchair boarded the bus at Symphony Hall, and when the driver and another passenger helped him, he heartily thanked them both for their patience and respect. I spent the rest of the ride down Mass Ave watching the man in the wheelchair as he chatted brightly with the middle-aged couple sitting beside him. He told them he’s a Vietnam veteran, although he didn’t say if that’s why he’s in a wheelchair. “I wanted to grow old with my wife, too,” he chuckled, “but I’m seventy and she’s forty-three!”
Is this man “missing out” on plenty of amazing experiences in life? Absolutely. But it looks like he’s not wasting much time crying over it.
We arrived at the new FoMu—which has dispensed with the charming hand-lettered menu board, alas—but they still had my two favorite flavors, mint chip and lavender, and both were divine as ever. Dan ordered two scoops of peanut butter chocolate cookie and we sat in upholstered armchairs by the front window, silent and rapturous. There was nowhere we would rather be and no finer food we could ever dream of eating.