 https://www.theatlantic.

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 Lily Meyer

 10 min read

What We Gain From a Good-Enough Life

In 1953, the British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott began writing about
the idea of “good-enough” parenting—a term he coined, and one he’s still famous for
today. According to Winnicott, after infancy, babies do not need tirelessly responsive or
self-sacrificing parents. In fact, he wrote, it is developmentally key for parents to lessen
their “active adaptation” to their children’s needs over time. In doing so, they teach their
kids to “account for failure” and “tolerate the results of frustration”—both necessary skills
at a very young age, as anyone who’s watched a baby learn to crawl knows.

In his recent book The Good-Enough Life, the scholar and writing lecturer Avram Alpert
radically broadens Winnicott’s idea of good-enoughness, transforming it into a sweeping
ideology. Alpert sees good-enoughness as a necessary alternative to “greatness thinking,”
or the twin beliefs that everybody has the right to embark on “personal quests for
greatness” and that the great few can uplift the mediocre many. Adam Smith’s invisible
hand of capital is an example of greatness thinking; so is its latter-day analogue, trickle-
down economics. So are many forms of ambition: wanting to win the National Book
Award, to start a revolution that turns your divided and unequal country into a Marxist
utopia, or to make a sex tape that catapults you to global fame.

Alpert does not ask his readers to abandon their goals completely, but he does ask us to
acknowledge the unlikelihood of becoming the next Kim Kardashian or creating a workers’
paradise. He also argues that clinging too tightly to such dreams, at the expense of
smaller or partial ones, sets us up for both practical and moral failure: To him, it’s selfish,
especially on the political level, to strive exclusively for changes so large that they may be
unattainable. Rather than aim for greatness, then, Alpert asks us to accept that frustration
and limitation are inescapable—and sometimes beneficial or beautiful—parts of human
life.
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Alpert splits his book into quarters, exploring ways we can seek good-enoughness in
ourselves, our relationships, our societies, and our efforts to mitigate climate change. His
vision of a good-enough world—one in which “all humans have both goodness (including
decency, meaning, and dignity) and enoughness (including high-quality food, clothing,
shelter, and medical care)”—is energizing, but beyond it, his ideas about politics and
global warming lean heavily toward summaries of or arguments with other people’s
analyses. This is fair, given that he’s a philosopher and not a political or environmental
scientist, but it’s also not especially interesting. His discussions of the good-enough self
and the good-enough relationship, though also in dialogue with other thinkers, are more
innovative and, as a result, more exciting. I also found them useful. His arguments for
holding ourselves not to the monolithic standard of greatness but to the seemingly looser
metrics of goodness and enoughness are, paradoxical though this may seem, guides
toward a more determined way of inhabiting the world.

Many of Alpert’s ideas about good-enough selves and good-enough relationships ask only
that his readers be more patient and less selfish. Greatness thinking, he argues, teaches
us to defend our own ideas, time, and convenience above all else; it suggests that anyone
who wishes to excel must hoard their time and energy, ignoring all the little tasks,
negotiations, and compromises that make up so much of daily life. (The writer Vladimir
Nabokov, supposedly, didn’t even lick his own stamps.) On an interpersonal level,
greatness thinking suggests that discord and friction are, like licking your own stamps and
running your own errands, needless time sucks—or, worse, signs that a relationship is on
the rocks. A great friendship, according to this line of thought, is one of unbroken
companionship and total harmony, a lifelong version of Broad City’s Abbi and Ilana at their
most intertwined. But even on Broad City, a show utterly devoted to the joys of friendship,
Abbi and Ilana are at odds, if only briefly, on nearly every episode. Alpert would say that
this is as it should be. Disagreement and compromise are crucial parts of friendship. They
teach us openness, acceptance, and resilience. If we let them, they make us more whole.

The Good-Enough Life often made me think about my friend Julia, the Abbi to my Ilana,
an English teacher with whom I frequently disagree. She and I are both city girls, neutral
about nature at best, and I have, for one, always been baffled by her love of the English
Romantic poet William Wordsworth, who extolled the merits of nature and solitude above
all else. His often-taught poem “The World Is Too Much With Us,” with its salty dismissal
of modern city life—“Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers”—irks me to no end.
When I asked Julia why she’s not similarly annoyed, she told me that she sees nature as
Wordsworth’s “material for thought”—what he happened to be working with, ruminating
on. “I don’t think the material for thought opens you up to or makes you like the thought,”
she said. “I think it works the other way around.” For Julia, it’s a pleasure to be invited to
“think along with someone.” Certainly that’s one of the pleasures of our friendship. We’re
always giving each other new material for thought.

We’re always arguing too. We’re natural bickerers and like to spar, but we also have a
number of deep-seated differences and disagreements. For a while, the fact that some of
our arguments are likely impossible to resolve frustrated me. Now it’s one of the parts of
our 24-year-old friendship that I value most. I love knowing that we can challenge each
other endlessly while remaining endlessly loyal to each other. Alpert devotes a lot of time
to this very knowledge, which, to him, displays “the truth of good-enoughness: there are
no perfect friends with whom you would have a stasis of agreement. There is the dynamic
joy of discovering, again and again, that your friend is good to you.” Of course, to make
that discovery with any other person, you have to be able to accept and value
imperfection and disjunction in your relationship. This ability is key to Alpert’s worldview,
which requires us to realize that “being the good-enough parent or friend or lover is
difficult and unparalleled in its offering.” It is achievable and sustainable—unlike being the
great or perfect parent, friend, or lover—and, therefore, requires determination and
commitment in the long term.

Read: The six forces that fuel friendship

Determination is the quiet underpinning, and the greatest contribution, of The Good-
Enough Life. It links the personal to the political in a way that Alpert otherwise does not
explicitly do. As he asks us to be determined in our intimate relationships, so he asks us
to be determined in our relationships with the political world—which, intriguingly, he writes
about at length in his chapter devoted to the good-enough self. Elsewhere in the book,
Alpert’s we is very broad, but in this chapter his we is an activist one. He often assumes
that readers are working in some way to improve their society, and asks them to accept
that, if their work is aimed only—or inflexibly—at the ideal, it is unlikely to lead to the
smaller, shorter-term changes we so often need; and to accept that, in his terms, striving
only for greatness can fail to lead to either goodness or enoughness. He also reminds us,
tipping his hat to W. E. B. Du Bois, that “the history of struggle [is] a path toward good-
enoughness,” not utopia; that, all too often, we must seek bits of “a good-enough life … in
the midst of a terrible world.”

Reading this in the context of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade felt,
to me, like a kick in the butt. I’d been feeling full despair about it, and frankly still am, but
Alpert’s argument against greatness is, at its core, an argument against giving up. Even
before Dobbs, far too many Americans couldn’t access good-enough abortion care—
which, in my interpretation of Alpert’s ideas, would mean dignified, sufficient, and quality
treatment for anyone who wants to prevent or end a pregnancy. Such care will
presumably be unattainable for many more in the coming years and decades. That our
country will not offer enough abortion care for the foreseeable future, even if we can offer
good abortion care in some places, is a difficult reality. Still, I appreciate Alpert’s reminder
that neither goodness nor enoughness is easy to attain—and that we need to be
adaptable and determined enough to fight for them both separately and together.
Kansas’s recent vote against a constitutional amendment that would have paved the way
for an abortion ban is an example of a step to protect enoughness. It has no effect on the
goodness of care there, but it was a vital decision nonetheless.

Progress happens slowly, and it rarely, if ever, goes in a straight line. Pushing for a better
society, therefore, requires not only patience and flexibility, but also a tolerance for
mismatches and contradictions. Alpert invites us to get comfortable with that fact. He also
invites us to welcome contradiction in our own efforts to live kindly and decently. You can
see this sort of consideration in the food writer Alicia Kennedy’s popular newsletter, in
which she repeatedly asks and helps her readers to be conscious of the ethics of what
they eat, but just as repeatedly acknowledges that it makes no sense to focus only on
“individual choice when it comes to the ‘morality’ of food instead of the whole system.” For
Kennedy, it’s important for food media to stop saying that it’s “self-care to eat a bag of
Lay’s when the labor conditions at their factories have been historically atrocious”; it’s also
important to not blame people for eating what’s affordable and accessible, whether or not
that means buying a bag of Ruffles. Holding both of those truths in your mind, and
proceeding according to both of them, is an excellent example of the complicated good-
enoughness that Alpert argues for.

Food writing, fittingly, lends itself to good-enoughness. In More Home Cooking, the
novelist and culinary essayist Laurie Colwin wrote that “cooking is like love. You don’t
have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting, to fall in love.
You just have to be interested in it. It’s the same thing with food.” The Good-Enough Life
makes precisely the same argument about the world itself. You don’t have to be great to
have a good life; you don’t have to be a moral genius to live well. All you have to do is be
interested, keep your eyes open, and not quit. Frankly, I can’t think of a harder way to
spend every day, but I’m ready to aspire to it nonetheless.

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