Life

It’s easy to beat yourself up. You compare yourself to friends or family members, even complete strangers. Your eyes will glance from your outfit to the next person’s ensemble, or you’ll compare your dinner with your Instagram feed’s never ending supply of food shots. Maybe you feel like you’re not moving up the ladder as quickly as you want, or that your love life could use some work.

We all do it. We all critique ourselves harshly, and with much more disdain than we’d ever consider judging another person with. We could tell you to just stop being so hard on yourself—and we are telling you to do that—but we also want to share this list with you.

It’s a list comprised of 20 reasons why you’re doing better than you think you are. On it: you question yourself, you can afford your morning cup of coffee, you have multiple outfits in your closet, and you’ve lost relationships.

• You paid the bills this month.
• You question yourself.
• You have a job.
• You have time to do something you enjoy.
• You are not worried about where your next meal is coming from.
• You can eat because you enjoy it.
• You have one or two truly close friends.
• You could afford a subway ride, cup of coffee, or the gas in your car this morning.
• You’re not the same person you were a year ago.
• You have the time and means to do things beyond the bare minimum.
• You have a selection of clothing at your disposal.
• You can sense what isn’t right in your life.
• If you could talk to your younger self, you would be able so say: “We did it, we made it out, we survived that terrible thing.”
• You have a space of your own.
• You’ve lost relationships.
• You’re interested in something.
• You know how to take care of yourself.
• You’re working toward a goal.
• But you’re not uncompromisingly set on anything for your future.
• You’ve been through some crap.

Read the full list here.

By Wendy Rose Gould

Image credit: Shutterstock.com

As anyone who’s ever watched an episode of The Rachel Zoe Show (or, god forbid, tried to call a fashion house themselves) knows, basic kindness is a hard thing to come by in the world of fashion. We can’t help but wonder why. Is the trend toward mean a reflection of how tough the business is or is it all about status?

On the one hand, it’s not hard to see why fashionistas have to develop a thick skin. The ratio of fashion jobs to fashion enthusiasts is skewed in a way that makes for a lot of competition. This means that, much like cliche reality show contestants, most fashion industry folks are not here to make friends. They’re here to get ahead, and sometimes the best way to do that is to keep those at your level or below down while desperately trying to get in with those ahead of you. A word of caution, though – someday, those people you trampled on will be the people whose favor you want to curry, and everyone remembers a slight.

There’s also a less generous hypothesis for the unkindness running rampant in the industry: fashion is a high-status industry, peddling expensive goods everyone wants. Just like restaurants, which are often dreadful if they don’t need to be good because of location, fashion folks don’t have to be nice. People will still buy a top-brand bag, even if their salespeople are rude.

Evidence suggests, however, that even when rudeness doesn’t hurt, being kind might get you even further. In their book The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval discuss how their own brand of friendliness helped them rise to the top of the advertising world. We know a few fashionistas who should strongly consider giving it a read.

Leila Cohan-Miccio

I recently got food poisoning and, in the throes of despair, I began to wonder if I needed to go to the hospital. So I did the first thing that popped into my head: I called my mom, told her what was going on, and asked her to tell me what to do. She calmed me down, but once I recovered, the whole incident had me thinking – at 27, shouldn’t I be old enough to stop calling my mom every time I have a problem?

And I don’t even live at home, as plenty of my friends do. At our age, most of our parents were married with children, working at the same careers they have now. They were independent adults, who probably just called their parents to say hi, not to unleash a litany of life problems and ask for advice and/or money. Are we just feckless? Sometimes it sure feels that way.

On the other hand, our parents had it a lot easier in some ways. No one, for example, was asking them to do skilled work for free under the guise of an “internship.” Housing prices hadn’t yet skyrocketed. The societal pressure to get married and start a family meant it was easier to find a life partner who was willing to commit. Come to think of it, all my friends who live at home aren’t doing it for funsies, but because the current economy is terrible, jobs are few and far between, and, somehow, living at home has become the responsible adult decision, even if responsible adulthood looks very different than once it did.

Maybe our thirties will be like our parents’ twenties.

Leila Cohan-Miccio