Curious by nature
With the release of her astutely observant book How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? Essays on Modern Life, British journalist and High Low podcaster, Pandora Sykes, talks to Vogue about the paradox of choice.
AUSTRALIA: It’s exciting to talk you, Pandora. I’m not sure if you’re aware, but The High Low is beloved in Australia. Do you gauge the stats on global audiences? PANDORA SYKES:
VOGUE
“Oh, that’s lovely to hear! We do have those statistics … I think about two thirds of the audience are UK, then it’s Australia, USA, Ireland and New Zealand, in that order. But I try not to give them too much attention because you can get a bit obsessed with that side.”
VA: Is that because it feels overwhelming? PS:
“I think it’s because we’re living in the kind of review culture where everyone is a critic now, so it’s possible to become consumed with what other people think of the work that you’re making, rather than the work that you are making, if that makes sense. I’ve had times where I’ve found that quite overwhelming and hard to keep my conviction and confidence, so I try not to think of the bigger picture because it does make me feel very nervous.”
VA: Congratulations on your book. For me, there were many moments of recognition in the anxieties of modern life that you dissect. Can you tell me about how it took shape?
PS:
“I can! I had been interested in writing essays for a while and really wanted a space where I could interrogate some of the ideas that interest me and go into much greater depth. At the beginning I didn’t think there was an overarching theme and then as soon as I started writing them down I became aware of things, like this idea of choice being something that can addle as much as it can free you. Examples I use in the book are that no-one’s life is improved by scrolling through 88 pages of black
dresses on the internet or seeing 175 different salad dressings in the supermarket. Initially I thought for women of my generation, millennials, choice is something we really struggled with, but the more I read the more I realised this kind of panic about not choosing the right life or not pursing the right goals or even the right models or lifestyle choices is something that every generation struggles with.”
VA: In your introduction you share your hope that readers might find comfort and cohesion in these essays. Tell me more about this. PS:
“I was aware that I was discussing quite a lot of anxieties about modern life and I didn’t want them to feel depressing; I wanted people to come away with some comfort even though – spoiler alert – the book does not answer any questions and is not a self-help book. But I did want people to find some comfort in the idea that these anxieties and trivialities are not fruitless. It’s human nature to do the things we do. I did want there to be at least some sense of cohesion to provide some sort of pass through the morass of modern life.”
VA: Some of the things I read about that resonated with me I was amazed were a ‘thing’ for other people too. Like the fact that keeping up with the latest TV shows can feel like a burden at times and it’s a relief to finish a series.
PS:
“I have a very strange relationship with television, particularly during a pandemic. The way a TV box series is structured at the moment means I feel panic until I finish it; it does become another thing on my ‘to-do’ list. Possibly that’s just because the television doesn’t work for me the way it does for other people because I’m aware that some listeners responding to The High Low said: ‘Gosh, you’re talking about too many books; it’s making me panicked.’ So I think how some people feel about books I feel about the television. It will be really interesting to see what 2021 looks like – there just won’t be as much content because people aren’t making it. I think there will be a flurry of books but in terms of visual content I wonder if we’ll do a slight a shift in that people will be seeking more experiences having not been able to have a huge amount this year or because those experiences have happened in contained environments.”
VA: This idea makes me happy …
PS:
VA: You reference and quote such a diverse range of people in your essays. Was the research as intense as I imagine?
PS:
“Me too!”
“I did a lot of research. It felt necessary for the book to give it credibility and depth. It was the first time I’d written long-read essays, the first time I’d gone in depth into social commentary, so I felt like I needed to do due diligence. I spent a lot of time pre-baby in the British Library [Sykes gave birth to her second baby in December], but it was very much a labour of love – I love non-fiction and bar some of the slightly strange academic essays on branding and Netflix, they were mostly books I wanted to read anyway.”
VA: Did you also find yourself something of a social anthropologist, honing in on friends’ behaviours?
PS:
“I think I’m always quite porous in that sense because I’ve always written about women. The lens with which I’ve done that has changed but it’s always been about trends in pop culture whether it’s what women are wearing, talking or thinking about, so it didn’t necessarily ramp up because of the book. I also didn’t want to just write a book about my own experiences. I wanted to use my own experiences as a springboard into a topic, which could then become more poly-vocal and include women with different identities and backgrounds and from different communities. I’d say the essays are about 30 per cent personal experiences and 70 per cent social commentary. What really came through is what we already know – that most of what is written and talked about in public discourse focuses on white middle-class straight women, like me, and so on occasions like that I would do my own research or conduct my own interviews. When I was writing about the cognitive load of gay women who had children, for example, there was zero data on that, so that’s when I’d interview lots of women.”
VA: PS: Tell me about the Twitter polls you conducted.
“I mean, they were absolutely not scientific! But they did provide insights because they were a reminder that what I think about the world is informed by my experiences. For instance, I thought before I wrote the book that most millennial women felt they were more sensitive than their mothers. My mother is incredibly stoic and I’ve never seen her cry, and so I thought that might be quite common. But when I did a Twitter poll asking: ‘Are you more sensitive than your mother?’, what came out was there’s a difference between sensitivity and emotional resilience and secondly that it was a 49/51 per cent result, so it absolutely wasn’t the case that millennial women felt they were more sensitive, that was just my experience.”
VA: Did you also learn things about yourself writing the essays and did the process change your perspective in any way?
PS:
“Constantly. Because when you’re immersed in a piece of work, your own thinking is challenged on every page. I tried to really lean into those challenges. I think it helped that I didn’t come to it with any solid conclusions. I think I was surprised and interested in how so much of what we think is modern and buzzy and zeitgeisty is very often just the same old themes repackaged and funnelled through new lenses. I actually didn’t find that depressing – that we’re just whacking new names on things – I found it reassuring. It’s entirely and necessarily human to try and figure out the lives we want to lead and what serves us and doesn’t serve us. I do think though that everything is amplified by the internet. Millennials were really the first generation to grow up with the internet – not as children, I’m really glad it’s not something I had as a child – but from about the age of 18, so our adulthood was shaped by it.”
VA: As a private person, was it hard to share personal details? PS:
“The challenge was to make people feel like they were getting a bit of me without me feeling like I’d given away parts of my life that I didn’t want to share. I had no interest in writing a memoir. My attitude has changed a lot since I started sharing my opinions or life on the internet, seven or eight years ago. Back then, I shared guilelessly, I didn’t see any negative impact and it didn’t bring me any anxiety. But I feel like there’s been a shift culturally – and for me personally – in how we analyse the sharing itself. I’m pleased we look at the ramifications of sharing and how that sharing mutates, but that analysis wasn’t there when I started. It’s not like I made any radical changes – I haven’t shut down my Instagram or Twitter accounts – but certainly I thought and continue to think a lot
“I did want to provide some sort of pass through the morass of modern life”
about the things that I disclosed and the way in which I disclosed that information. A book felt like a safer place.”
VA: PS: That makes sense. And does a book also allow more control?
“It wasn’t so much about being a place to control but more that when you share on social media, a podcast or in a magazine, you can only ever share snapshots, whereas this platform meant I had much more context to frame my stories. I was able to talk about personal things within a much bigger picture, so it wasn’t just my voice, I was a voice of many. It’s the mining of the self that I became more nervous about. I think since having children [daughter Zadie, two-and-ahalf, and son Sasha, eight months], I’ve rewired slightly differently and I have a lot more fear, which I think is quite common. The world becomes a scarier place when you have children, not just physically but psychologically.”
VA: Does being more discerning about what you share on social media mean there’s less criticism?
PS:
“For me it’s more that I became aware that anything you put into the public arena is fair game to dissect and analyse and so I needed to be comfortable with what I put out there. I also try and think a lot more about what my content would give other people. I took it right down to the bare bones and thought: ‘Does this make me feel good and does this make other people feel good? Is something that might make me feel really happy going to make other people feel shit?’ You can’t live your life like that in entirety I don’t think, or else you’d never share anything, but I just tried to be a bit more thoughtful about it and I think that just comes from growing up as well. There was a joyful freedom in my 20s; I am, in all areas, a lot more cautious in my 30s.”
VA: You point out that millennials have an aversion to boredom and a low tolerance for delayed gratification. We were forced to confront these things recently. Was there relief in being switched off?
PS:
“I’m wary of talking about silver linings because for some people this pandemic has been the most awful thing to have ever happened. But culturally and collectively, if we can all take one thing from it I would like to think it would be that we’ve had to navigate the suspension of regular routine. On a personal level I’ve had to learn how to live in the present, which is something I was terrible at; I’m a bit of a future catastrophist, always looking at what could go wrong in the future, and you just can’t do that at the moment. So taking joy in the present and trying to train my brain to stay in the day to day has been a really good experience. I think in terms of delayed gratification, we’ve had to unlearn all those routes to a seamless life. It’s become incredibly easy to have short-time gratification and with that taken away, I wonder if that will help culturally to look at long-term gratification again. There’s also the idea that if there’s anything we can take away it’s about being more thoughtful and more observant about the world around us. Certainly I found walking to the park every day that I am noticing more nature. I think that’s been a common observation, especially for those in cities – we’re so much more aware of fresh air and green grass.”
VA: Your essays are very much about our lives pre-Covid. Did that concern you after publication?
PS:
“At first I was so desperate to rewrite the prologue because it felt like such an insult for this book to be coming out during a pandemic because obviously no-one is living the lives that I have described, but it became impossible due to the publishing schedule for me to rewrite anything. But then I thought: ‘Well, maybe we can look at the lives that we led before the pandemic and consider what we take forward into the post-Covid world. How did we live those lives, how did they serve us and how can we make our lives serve us better in the future?’”
VA: PS: VA: You are the former fashion features editor of UK’s The Sunday Times but prefer not to be asked to comment on fashion. Is there a reason for that?
PS:
“I still really enjoy style, I still love clothes and the creative aspect of putting things together, and I love vintage shopping, but I think fashion is the dominant gene in that if you write about fashion it becomes the thing you are most known for. And I didn’t want that to my identity anymore – really wanted (needed, really) to try something new. An interesting thing for me was how my relationship with fashion changed when I left my job as a fashion editor. It was my job to keep on top of trends and essentially encourage people to shop. I don’t want anyone to ever feel bad about shopping, but that wasn’t something I wanted to do anymore. I also had to look at my relationship with clothes. Did I really love something, or did I love it because I knew it was trendy? I actually really enjoy writing about clothes so that’s not to say I won’t do it again, but I was aware that I wanted to write a book that wasn’t about fashion and I didn’t want to confuse people (or myself!) too much, so I want to hold back for now.”
Tell us what was it like to see your book for the first time?
“I don’t think I paused to appreciate the moment as much as I should because it’s sort of been this odd process – I was finishing the book and we were sending our proofs when my son was very little, so I was still, to be honest, feeling a bit loopy! I think I was probably really excited to see it then rushed off to feed him, but I hope that I might be able to take a moment to pause and reflect at some point soon.” How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? Essays on Modern Life (Penguin, $35) by Pandora Sykes, is out July 21.