Do Better, Suck Less

What do you do with advice you didn’t ask for?

When the checkout guy at Natural Grocers told me to "do better; suck less," I don't think he meant to insult me. I think he was as surprised as I was by the way it came out. It was during the pandemic, and I had been feigning confusion to not find myself on the frequent shopper list. The truth is that I distrust corporate data collection. I appreciate customer discounts and rewards but resent my shopping preferences being studied even by a grocery store that calls itself "natural." That's why my name wasn't on the list. Perhaps since the process of signing up was relatively straightforward—you send a text, they send a link, you fill a form—the checkout guy recalled a piece of useful advice given by his former boss and said it to me. He said, "do better, suck less." He looked at me when he said it, like maybe he wasn't merely recalling something once said to him but telling me the truth. The insult hung in the space between my throat and my lungs while we finished the transaction. It wasn't so much my failure to become a frequent shopper that bothered me. It was this feeling that he was conveying a message from the universe.

Ironically, the produce at my local Natural Grocers kinda sucks. Photo by Scott Warman on Unsplash

I didn't always suck. Sucking emerged sometime in my early thirties when I became a new mom. It didn't feel like a big deal at first. I didn't give up on everything. I just stopped holding myself accountable to what felt like an impossible standard. I let go of things. Little things. I stopped trying to keep track of other people's birthdays, for example. I stopped holding in my stomach. I gave up on cloth diapers.

The pattern generalized. I stopped writing so many thank you cards and paying bills on time. It used to be a thing of mine, to write thank you cards and pay bills on time. But then I had kids and a job and a husband and in-laws and friends and colleagues. There were too many people to thank, too many bills. I grew overwhelmed by emails, voice mails, and text messages and Marco Polo videos, Facebook, FaceTime, Instant Message, Instagram. Responding to every request for my attention became an exercise in futility.

I began snacking between meals, avoiding hard conversations, neglecting the garden. Sometimes I willingly walked past my dog's poop, even if I was carrying a bag. A yoga teacher tiptoed past my mat one day and said, "how you do anything is how you do everything." I remember lying there in savasana, exposed to the scrutiny of my twenty-something teacher wondering if there was something wrong with my resting pose. Now the clerk at Natural Grocers was disappointed in me.

When I left the grocery store, I drove to Target to pick up my daughter. She had asked me to drop her off there, which had seemed strange to me, but in an epoch of such strangeness, also understandable. Target was somewhere to go and be alone with ordinary people, surrounded by the comforting din of commerce. Target was exactly the kind of place a girl could still go to remember what it felt like to be concerned only with make-up, short-shorts, ear buds and decorative bed pillows. My sister reassured me later that taking her to Target to spend an hour alone was A-okay, normal, that I shouldn't sweat it.

I pulled my giant truck into the giant parking lot and called her cell phone to tell her I was waiting outside. The whole episode felt disgraceful. How did I end up driving a giant truck? And when did it become acceptable to call a fourteen-year-old on her very own pocket-sized distraction device? While I waited, my mind drifted back to the episode at the grocery store. I had been wearing faded black sundress that I’d bought over fifteen years ago. My teeth hadn’t been brushed or bleached. Nor the hair. I wore flip-flops, which happened to be the shoes nearest the door when I left the house that morning. No makeup, no earrings, no time. Do better, he said, suck less.

Cauliflower forests. Photo by VENUS MAJOR on Unsplash

I read something later about fractals and how they can be found not just in nature, but in complex organizations and in ourselves. The part reflects the whole. Sometimes I think my whole generation sucks. We know about climate change and fail to act on it. We see injustice and fail to correct it. We are so accustomed to hypocrisy and disillusioned by the possibility of change that we do things like drive a giant truck to an organic grocery store to buy free-range beef and organic cheddar bunnies. I say we. I mean me.

I know people who don't suck. I know people who decide, daily, to do better. They practice good hygiene and return phone calls and volunteer at homeless shelters and read the news and call their senators and sign petitions. They remember birthdays and wrap gifts in neat ribbons and make their beds in the morning.

I watched my daughter skip outside to the truck and hop in the passenger seat, happier for the time spent inside a giant box store with no windows.

Maybe I’m just getting older, I thought, flicking on the blinker. I’ve reached the age when no one is looking at me anymore. And rather than demanding the attention that is my due, that I have earned from a lifetime of dedicated introspection, society tells me I am no longer relevant, that I suck. And not just at some things, but at everything.

I got stuck on this thought, stuck on the premise that the entire complexity of my being could be reduced to an undeniable truth: I could suck less.

Brain scientists say that new neurons cluster around existing neurons. Our brains grow stronger in the places we are already successful. We get smarter in the areas we are already smart. Yet our culture behaves differently. We focus on weakness, the places where we are vulnerable and small and fearful, and demand growth from there.

This little guy will have a rough go of it. Photo by Corina Rainer on Unsplash

Our weaknesses have much to teach us. Sucky behavior almost always indicates a rich seam of unresolved (and sometimes irresolvable) internal conflict. We like discounts, but not capitalist surveillance; we want to be generous, but not foolish; we want to reduce fossil fuel consumption, but we have too much camping gear to fit in a hatchback. We hate Target but can’t resist the cheap housewares. Sometimes our suckiest actions reveal our unconscious dilemmas, the things that move us, the things we struggle to put into words, the things we know are wrong, but cannot quite face, the things that make us utterly and relate-ably human. Perhaps suckiness can be plucked out and removed like a gray pubic hair, and we can instantly “do better.” But more likely, Leonard Cohen had it right: cracks are how the light gets in.

The world feels broken again, and I am still driving that big truck, buying cheap housewares, and falling behind on thank you cards. I suck in all the ways I did a few years ago. But I’ve gotten better too. I’ve learned to identify a few birds, made time to connect with friends, and sought meaning in my life. I have proven, definitively, that I can extract a morsel of nutrition from even the most steaming pile of wanton and misleading advice.

It may be that we’re all here simply to experience the thrill of being alive.

But I never closed the loop on that interaction at Natural Grocers. If I could sit down with the checkout guy now, I would pat the chair next to me and reassure him that his boss had it all wrong. The purpose of life is not to suck less or do better. The purpose is way more perplexing, way more interesting. Believe me, I would continue, I have walked treadmill of self-improvement and found it boring. I have met the arbiter of suckiness and found him foolish. For dramatic effect, I would chomp on a carrot with its green stalks still attached, and widen my eyes.

It may be that all we’re here to do is to experience the thrill of being alive amongst other living beings on a planet that is unfathomably, improbably, and astonishingly habitable. Then I would take his chin in my right hand and look into his eyes and tell him the truth: anyway, I didn’t ask for your advice.