In Praise of the B+/A- Life

On Wednesday, I got home from the office a little before 6 p.m. and immediately set to making dinner: I set water on to boil for pasta, defrosted loose Italian sausage, browned it in olive oil, added diced onion and minced garlic, then a can of Vantia crushed tomatoes, which I like because its only ingredients are tomatoes and salt. While that simmered, I made a salad dressing with a base of Dijon mustard and microplaned garlic, plus the usual red-wine vinegar and decent EVOO that I buy in five-liter canisters. I pulled the pasta—Flour + Water penne rigate, which I got free because it was almost expired—from the water a minute before the prescribed cooking time and added it to the sauce along with two ladles of the starchy cooking liquid, and stirred it all vigorously until the liquid was absorbed and the sauce was silky and sticky. Another squirt of olive oil, a cup of freshly grated pecorino Romano from the increasingly rock-like chunk that’s been in my fridge for months, and a scatter of the surviving basil leaves from the dying plant in my garden—and it was done. I tossed romaine and red-leaf lettuce in the dressing, and set everything out on the table, along with the remains of a bottle of Barbera d’Alba. The time was 6:39 p.m.

This was a pretty good meal. The girls liked it, including Jean, who sometimes has philosophical issues with carbohydrates, and by the end nothing was left. I’d give it an A-. If there had been leftovers, a B+.

To earn an A, the meal would really have needed something more. Fennel in the base of the sauce, maybe, plus white wine and a longer simmer, and certainly higher-quality, or fresher, pasta. The salad was fine, but it’s harder to get fantastic greens these days, so that’s a limiting factor. For a better grade, I would’ve wanted to add another dish: trout fillets crisped skin-side down in butter, with chopped parsley and a squirt of lemon, would have worked. Or a nice cheese—I haven’t had a brebirousse d’argental in a while… But then I would’ve needed to get a good baguette, and the place that has the excellent ones for just $2 was already closed, so I would’ve had to spend $6 and run around Brooklyn just for that purpose, and I was definitely not going to do that. I was not going to do any of that!

This is how I usually cook, aiming for efficiency and a moderate level of quality and flavor over, well, anything else¹. There are definitely times when I go over the top—if you’ve ever been to one of my pig roasts, you know what I mean—but in my day-to-day life I am not a perfectionist. I do not go the extra mile. I don’t need 💯.

This is not just about food—this is everything. I’m content with a 90, for which there is no emoji. I don’t need the newest, fanciest, bestest anything—clothes, devices, cars, experiences. Reasonably high-quality is good enough for me, as you can certainly tell from this newsletter.

In today’s America, I know, this puts me outside the mainstream. Our culture loves the best and the biggest and the latest: winners, champions, iPhones and SUVs, fashion labels and publicly traded stocks. Superlatives rule. The word perfect dominates. We want vacations to be exemplary, insta-worthy, transcendent. One may be the loneliest number, but that’s because we refuse to acknowledge any other numbers, and besides, 1 needs no company on its pedestal.

To be fair, we do have an appreciation for losers and underdogs, but mostly because we feel they’ve been robbed of their rightful place on the podium. And newness isn’t always everything: We like antiques and vintage… as long as they’re bathed in the aura of a high valuation.

If I’m going to be truthful, I like those things, too! Very, very nice objects and experiences are indeed very, very nice (if never quite—blecch—perfect). Occasionally, I’ll even indulge.

The problem is that perfection just takes so much effort to attain. The lengths you have to go through, the expense, the time, the strain, the stress, the always looming possibility, or likelihood, of failure—whether it’s your own or someone or something else’s, and therefore beyond your control—why bother²?

And if you want perfection on a regular basis? If you crave that 4.0 GPA for life? It’s exhausting even to contemplate. Unless you’re one of those magical success stories, effortlessly skillful and wealthy without trying (and if you are, why are you wasting your time reading this newsletter?), you’re setting yourself up for disappointment at best, insanity at worst.

So, please, join me a notch or three down. Here, we value satisfaction above all—the pleasures of a decent life, achieved through a decent amount of effort. We don’t worry about our potential, about what everyone else is striving to achieve, because the things we have, or are willing to do some work (but not too much!) for, are already enough. I’m not talking about drastic cutbacks in our ambitions—this isn’t goddamn Scandinavia, people! I just want a level-setting: Are what you want and what you expect from life worth what it will take to achieve them every day? And how, if you can be brave enough to answer no, do you readjust your expectations with balance in mind?

Let’s make this a movement! Let’s stop living up to our potential. Let’s stop climbing the ladder. Let’s shrug and admit: We’re no. 4. Let’s give ourselves a name: Generation B+. Let’s be happy when—or if, I guess—things turn out halfway decent. Let’s fucking settle³.

You know what? That’s good enough for now. I’ll stop right here. 🪨🪨🪨

Notes

1. Jean might argue I go over the top all the damn time.

2. At the same time, life in this country often feels like you have to overperform just to stay in place and not fall behind. I hate that. Maybe I’ll write about it!

3. Obviously, none of this applies to my kids.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt