Here’s a little Thanksgiving post I was able to whip up this afternoon because I’m not cooking anything! I’m grateful every day for your support of my work. And today even more so.

Two years ago I wrote a post about the surprising comforts, even pleasures, of spending the holidays without family or even alone entirely. (I even did an audio version.) It resonated with more people than I expected it to, even (and maybe even especially) those knee-deep in negotiations with parents, in-laws, close and distant cousins, and various other configurations of blood, blood-adjacent, or blood-curdling relations.

Though I sometimes attend a Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s place, (I am, in fact, doing that today, and happily so) I’ve also been known to sit out the day altogether. For years, I kept quiet about this or even resorted to vague fibs about “going to my aunt’s place,” though I have never had such an aunt. There is a reflexive human impulse to take pity on those who spend holidays alone. The prototypical image of it (picture someone gazing sadly out her window at the jovial scene on the other side of her neighbor’s window) is more or less the illustration accompanying the dictionary definition of loneliness. Or something that would be used in an advertisement for antidepressants.

But to me, solitary holidays are the definition of peace. And with every passing year, I feel more inclined to spread the gospel of this peace. It’s not right for everyone. (And whatever you do, don’t ask your doctor if it’s right for you. He or she will almost certainly say no.) But I daresay it’s right for more of us than is commonly realized. To put it bluntly, every year, I feel like I’m getting away with, if not murder, some kind of simple yet exceedingly high crime.

Whereas most people are fighting traffic and miserably congested airports (manned by miserable airline personnel who drew the short stick and didn’t get the day off) I’m taking a leisurely hike with my dog. Whereas most people will spend the weekend nursing tryptophan hangovers (and regular hangovers) and gritting their teeth through maddening political conversations and rehashings of old family grudges, I’ll be grazing from my tidy box of Friendsgiving leftovers and laughing at anonymous idiots on Twitter. And because I stopped drinking a few years ago, I won’t be hungover from anything.

Why am I telling you this? It’s not to gloat. It’s to remind anyone who might be teetering on the edge of pity—either for themselves or someone else—that one person’s ideal life can be another’s . . . well, if not nightmare, let’s say, object of least interest. When I walk through the park with my dog and see families with young children (or older children), I feel both glad for them and very glad not to be them. I know not all solo life travelers feel this way. There are plenty for whom this path is unchosen, uncomfortable, and a primary source of existential despair. I’m also painfully aware of the degree to which family estrangement is becoming increasingly common and, worse, perversely and infantilely reframed as a form of self-care.

But I’m not talking about that. To all for whom this applies, I’m talking about the great luck of being able to enjoy your own company. I’m talking about remembering to feel gratitude for that luck and, above all, permitting others to access that same gratitude if they’re so inclined.

How is this achieved? For starters, do not lie about your fake aunt. When someone asks you what you’re doing today, hold your head high and say “I’m doing absolutely nothing.” That look in the other person’s eye might be envy.

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Now try it this way.

It is literally impossible to be a man. You are so strong and so capable, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough. Like, we always have to be extraordinary, but somehow we’re always doing it wrong. 

You have to be ripped but not too ripped. And you can never say you want to be ripped. You have to say you want to be fit, but also you have to be ripped—though nothing’s more important than being tall.

You have to have money, but you can’t ask for money because you shouldn’t have to ask. You should just earn it and keep earning it.

You have to be a boss, but you can’t be an asshole. You have to lead, but you can’t be seen as a bully or as insensitive or old-fashioned or “just not getting it.”

You’re supposed to love being a dad, but god help you if you want to stay home with your kids, or take paternity leave.

You have to be in touch with your feminine side but also be the protector.

You have to answer for women’s bad behavior, which is insane—like sometimes literally insane—but if you point that out, you’re accused of not listening, not caring enough, of gaslighting.

You’re supposed to be good-looking for women but not so good-looking that you seem unserious or vain or like you’re overcompensating for something else.

You have to distinguish yourself without seeming like you’re trying too hard. You have to make your accomplishments known without bragging or coming across as desperate.

You have to win at the game while making sure to say that you know the system is rigged in your favor. You have to say this even if it’s not rigged anymore, or at least doesn’t feel that way. Or maybe it is rigged, which means you don’t actually deserve anything you’ve ever gotten. But you got it anyway. Or maybe you didn’t, But in either case, you have to be grateful.

You have to understand that for all this power you supposedly have, you don’t actually have much power when you’re young. You have to grow into your power, and until then, you endure years of humiliation. And still, you have to time things just right because “older” is not the same as “old.” Older can work for a while, but once you hit old, you go back to being humiliated and stay that way until the end.

You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never cross a boundary without permission. It’s too dangerous! It’s too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says thank you!

And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong but also everything is your fault.

(End of speech.)

More thoughts below.

I wrote this yesterday after seeing the Barbie movie. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered to see a new release in the theater, but so many people wanted me to talk

about Barbie on my podcast with Sarah Haider that I knew I had to take one for the team and get myself out to see it. (Sarah’s tradwife/edgelord/motherhood duties keep her homebound and glued to her cognitive-evolution books.) 

I expected to hate Barbie, but I actually kind of loved it. (Except for the parts I hated.) The first act is a tour de force; the filmmakers perform the meta equivalent of a triple axel, presenting Barbie Land as a utopia, a joke, and a joke about utopia all at the same time. The rest of the movie is a mess of contradictions and incongruities, loosely tied together with boilerplate feminist pabulum. As such, it’s a perfect reflection of the state of the women’s equality movement. Brava, Greta Gerwig!

Gerwig directed the film and co-wrote the script with Noah Baumbach, the auteur of some truly great films, including the masterful The Squid and the Whale. I also loved Gerwig’s solo directorial debut, Ladybird, which was nominated for five Oscars and should have won all of them. In other words, the writing team behind Barbie is a powerhouse of sophistication, which makes it all the more ridiculous that the scene that’s getting the most attention is a string of platitudes that the characters in their other movies would roll their eyes at. (There’s a transcript here.)

Actually, “getting the most attention” doesn’t begin to cover it.

As I watched the scene, I found myself playing a silent game of Mad Libs. With just a few words and concepts substituted here and there, a man could deliver nearly the same speech and it would make perfect sense—at least to those who sympathize with men’s struggles. Driving home, I thought about how that speech might go, and then I went straight to my desk and wrote it down. There were at least a dozen other things I should have been doing, but it struck me as both a useful writing exercise and a potentially enlightening social experiment.

Undoubtedly, my version will make plenty of people roll their eyes. But part of me wants to believe that Gerwig is so canny that she deliberately made the monologue as generic as possible so that it could be seen through as wide a lens as possible. After all, the ultimate message of the film is that life isn’t fair for anyone. Actually, that’s not quite right. The ultimate message is that you can choose your own message. And I choose to believe that I wasn’t the only one listening to that bromidic oration and silently rewriting it in my head. The movie deserves so much better than that monologue. Thank goodness for the dance sequences. 

Do you have your own version of the speech? Share it in the comments!

I’m re-sharing this post from a few years ago, as it took me by surprise and resonated with many of you. There’s even an audio version. I remain so thankful to all of you for continuing to read and listen and support what I do. Happy Thanksgiving.

I know what I’m about to say sounds insane and, to a vast majority of you, will come across as almost alarmingly sad, but trust me on this: the holiday season makes me feel lucky not to have much family. Thanksgiving Day is among my favorite occasions for staying home by myself and eating a normal meal as if it were any other Thursday. It feels like being given the ultimate hall pass. Actually, it’s even better than that. It feels like getting away with a victimless yet slightly wicked crime. 

Before I go any further, let’s get a few things out of the way. 

First, I did not spend this Thanksgiving alone. I went to the home of a friend who prepared a feast for dozens of guests. It was a lovely and delicious time, perfect in its own way. Let the record show that I am in fact an extremely social person. It’s not like I sit out Thanksgiving every year. I’d say I sit it out every other year. 

Second, the number of blood relatives I have is not zero. I have a brother, who I see somewhat regularly (though not generally on Thanksgiving). I have a smattering of cousins, who I see almost never. More significantly, I have a handful of friends with whom I am close enough to consider them family. But I have neither children of my own nor any nieces or nephews. My parents have both passed away, as have all of their siblings. Even if those aunts and uncles weren’t deceased, it wouldn’t matter much because my brother and I grew up barely knowing them and, as a result, would be hard-pressed to have recognized them on the street at any given point in our childhoods, much less adulthoods. 

Let me also make this clear: none of this estrangement was the result of any abuse, neglect, or malfeasance. For reasons I’ll never fully understand, my parents, especially my mother, wanted little if anything to do with their families of origin, especially once they had their own kids. (If you’re interested in my attempts to untangle my mother’s psychology, you can read the first essay of this book.) But the technicalities of my family dynamic are not the point of what I am saying to you right now. I only mean that it’s not like I’m an orphan or some kind of casualty of a massively toxic upbringing. It’s more like I’m a piece of ice that’s broken off a slightly larger piece of ice that was floating alone in the sea. 

I’m not sure what it says about me that my reaction to this upbringing was to avoid making a family of my own. I can see someone just as easily having the opposite reaction. If you grew up as one of four passengers on an ice floe to nowhere, I can imagine wanting to create a huge family, if for no other reason than to build a bridge back to the shore. But I went the other direction (as did my brother, though I won’t speak to his motivation), and not only do my circumstances elicit no regret, they occasionally induce a perverse euphoria. I know JOMO, or “joy of missing out,” is all the rage these days, but I was into it before it was cool. In fact, if JOMO were a sport I’d be a world-class endurance athlete.   

Admittedly, I have genetics to thank, since the other members of my frozen island family were or are largely the same way. But maybe there’s a mystical element somewhere in the mix, too. Not infrequently, while sitting alone with my thoughts, a feeling of peace will descend upon me that I can only describe as an almost divine awareness of the great luck of my own solitude. That is not to say the solitude itself is lucky (though maybe it is) but that having the ability to experience it as such is a stupendous stroke of fortune. Never is this luck more deeply felt than the Thanksgivings I spend alone.

In New York City, where I still keep a foothold despite keeping the other foot three time zones away, Thanksgiving Day swirls through the streets like the last of the leaves. I take special pleasure in walking through my neighborhood in the late afternoon of that day, when dinner guests carrying covered dishes begin emerging from subway stations and stepping out of Ubers. In the span of just a few blocks, you can witness a thousand celebrations in the making, each with its own set of Gordian family ties and unmeetable expectations. I see the same types time and again: the young man carrying supermarket flowers purchased en route; the gray-haired couple just in from the suburbs, bickering about where it’s safe to park the car; the harried families whose small children drop their stuffed toys on the sidewalk as their parents pull them along.

There’s a particular kind of young couple I see every year. They stand in building entries and scrunch their faces as they study the buzzer directory. They carry Mylar-wrapped bottles of wine and a dessert. One of them is slightly overdressed, as if nervous to impress. The other is looking at his phone. I’ve seen a dozen versions of this couple—they could be a same-sex couple or an opposite-sex couple; it doesn’t matter—and what I think to myself every time is that this is probably their first Thanksgiving together. I’ve imagined that one of them is meeting the other’s friends or family for the first time, and it is perhaps too early in their relationship for this kind of thing but what else can they do? I imagine they are staring straight into the barrel of the holidays and wondering whether they should be with this person at all. Or maybe they’re already wondering how they’ll ever live without this person.

I am cautiously happy for this couple. I am also profoundly happy not to be them. This is also what I feel about family life. I celebrate it in others, but personally I’m fine taking a pass. I recognize that this is a pretty bleak psychological map I’m laying out here. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s a fundamentally fucked-up way to see yourself in relation to the world. But for whatever reason, this is the map upon which I’ve been able to chart a course for the most honest and valuable version of myself.

I’ve been wanting to write about this subject for a a long time, but I’ve always talked myself out if. For all my willingness to “confront” readers with “challenging” ideas, extolling the virtues of family-free living and solitary holidays always seemed like a bridge too far. I also know I’m practically begging for accusations of protesting too much. If she were really so happy not to have a family, she wouldn’t have to write 1,300 words telling us about it. 

But I’m writing about it now because I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. I may be one of the few who admits as much, but believe me when I say that there are countless people out there who treasure their autonomy in ways they feel are practically illegal to say out loud. I know this because they tell me. And the reason they tell me is because I’m willing to tell you.  

On a Thanksgiving night about five years ago, I took my dog Phoebe out for her pre-bedtime walk around 10 p.m. We’d spent the day alone together, which chokes me up a little now to think about, since I would have to put her down a few years later (not long after my father died, no less). Rounding the corner, I saw a man standing on the sidewalk near the one building in our little enclave that has a doorman and might therefore count as “fancy.” He looked to be in his 40s and was wearing an expensive-looking overcoat and nice leather shoes. He was vomiting into the bushes. 

I turned my head out of respect, which I guess is another way of saying I hid my eyes out of embarrassment. I could only guess he was throwing up after drinking too much pinot noir in some well-appointed Beaux-Arts apartment. I imagined him self-medicating his way through the evening as everyone talked about what shows they were watching on Netflix. I wondered how he was going to get home. Would he throw up in a taxi? Would he pass out on the subway? I imagined how awful he was going to feel in the morning, how much he was going to wish he’d stayed home and done nothing. Of course, it’s possible I’d read the situation all wrong— maybe he had food poisoning or cancer—but I’m pretty sure I was right.

I think about that guy every year. The memory of that moment reminds me how grateful I am for the things I have. And how lucky I feel for the things I don’t.