Hustle

Keep them chasing until you're lost.

The Pursuit (1770-1772), Jean-Honoré Fragonard

Now that everyone striving for anything is also a lifestyle influencer, also a podcast producer, also a newsletter writer, also a public speaker, the hustle invades every corner of a life, every inch of the body’s virgin land, every bend in the nervous system’s circuitry. Social media platforms are homes, homes are movie sets, spouses are extras, tweets are scripts, children are luxury accessories, luxury accessories are cradled like children, books are love letters, love letters are billboards. Something very big is on the way, I can’t wait to tell you what’s coming next, I can’t wait to share what I’ve been cooking up. Products are babies and babies are props.

Bachelorette parties are photo shoots, photo shoots are networking events, weddings are international corporate conferences. Podcasts are doing lunch, but no one actually does lunch, no one will ever eat lunch in this town again. Each intimate moment is performative and each performance must be intimate. Every public figure is a public square, a way to discuss how a person should be, the choices a person should make, a democratic forum. Today we’re voting on the mistakes she has made and keeps making, every perceived false move isolated and repeated like a mantra, every uncertain word and blunder and miscalculation repeated and repeated, bad sales numbers attributed to bad style choices, bad promotional angles attributed to bad relationships, private and public and market data interchangeable, the same living organism failing to thrive, the same universe failing to expand to infinity and beyond.

This is our imaginary bipartisan system. We fall in love with imaginary besties and then betray them. We raise our voices in reviews, on Reddit, in the comments. Loving them is just waiting to hate them. Hating them is just waiting for the comeback. We are the market’s marks, perpetual suckers, believing that we’re a part of the action when we were just led here to keep us from lighting things on fire somewhere else, setting fire to something real, watching real smoke rise, saying in our real voices in real time: This is wrong and it must stop.

Forget all of that, let them rip you to pieces, it’s good for moving units, as long as the numbers are still good, let them eat TikTok, apologize for your indiscretions, cry about the hate, write a song about how much it hurt you, gather a crew of sympathizers, fandoms like warring factions, hitting the imaginary streets because this is important, this affects everyone, we won’t stand for it.

Fabulousness is fabricated, disseminated, appropriated. Natural beauty looks ugly after a while, fix it, make it more perfect, more and more perfect, now perfect is widespread and rampant, perfect is a virus, perfect is the ugliest thing in any room, like a monster, a curse, an omen of the end of the world.

Don’t get morbid. Depilate this landscape permanently, put up a luxury kiosk, grab and go word salad, a quick shot of promotional wisdom delivered in a 200-word invitation to buy ten copies of her new book. I’ve worked so hard on this baby and I can’t wait for you to adopt it forever, give one to every friend you have left, do you have any collabs in the works, I will get you back, girl, I stan, no cap, go Team YOU.

Even despair can be commodified as long as it signals an on-message vibe shift, as long as it presages a rebranding. Addiction is sometimes a necessary plot twist, to keep them guessing, facilitating important pap walk outbursts, headlines are salvation. Rehab is a prefab collab.

Just don’t make any choices without consulting your marketing team. Remember that the short hair was a terrible move. Recall that the extensions were short-sighted. Those boots did you in. That one false note is playing on a loop on social media, fifty million retweets. Never improvise, never shoot from the hip, shake that ass and zip that lip, let our people handle that, you don’t have to do anything, relax and leave it to the experts. Every inch of your body is conquered, the angry indigenous tribes of your bloodstream are being decimated with weighted blankets and red light masks, the poison darts of your stray thoughts immobilized by high-end laser treatments, the pointed spears of your desire blown to smithereens by serum-infused gunpowders, your soul is almost gone now, you’re blowing up, you’re in the stratosphere.

Hustle is surrender. They keep your body in constant motion, wave your hands like a puppet, write captions that sound like heartfelt love notes or confessions, hammer out talking points that smack of political speeches, explain your past present and future: you kissed a girl and you liked it, you inhaled and you liked it, you went to space and you liked it, the end, nothing extraneous, all good, look at this Australian animal, look at this dead smile, at least my glutes were on point, dead ass.

Only those who were raised to be an extension of their parents could ever yield to such conditions. Only those who experienced themselves as deeply corrupt, deeply unlovable, could ever confuse self-abandonment with love, deliver intimacy with performative gusto, tolerate transactional everything everywhere all the time, oh baby now we got bad blood, every betrayal moves more units, but you will have to talk about it until you’re dead, because you are a public square and the public never forgets.

Just don’t disappear. Silence is stagflation. Privacy is toxic. Personhood is nothingness. Independent thought is death. Are you a nihilist? They still want to know about your divorce. They still care about the shoplifting thing. They still want you to explain why your kids changed their last name, why your collabs fell through, what that trip to rehab was for, why you wore that one thing to that one place, why you are the way you are. Tell us you’re not terrible and why. Tell us what you think you are and then we’ll correct the record permanently.

Everything you ever do will go on your permanent record, a skipping record, an indestructible artifact, you can’t grow past anything, you can’t remake yourself, your imagination is a parking lot in Panama, paved over the bones of the Guna, who sang their sacred histories to each other, repeating and repeating and repeating so no one would ever forget.

Your desire is a song that you can’t remember, you forgot the words years ago, you hum a tune now and but it’s wrong, all wrong, you can’t remember how it went, you lost it and you’ll never get it back.

I got your swag bag. I gave your trinkets to my kids and I said, “This is how you lose the thread, how you lose yourself, how you lose everything: one trinket at a time.”

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Thanks for reading Ask Molly! I can’t wait to share the secret thing I’m not working on! Your swag bag is already in the mail! Your pre-orders of my never-finished projects alter the shape of time and space!