Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome

I would like to take this opportunity to officially coin the term “Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome.”

Or, rather, to re-coin it. Apparently, according to The Hitched Chick’s Guide to Modern Marriage, a 2001 Oppenheimer Funds survey found that 54 percent of Generation X women “say they’re more likely to acquire thirty pairs of shoes before saving $30,000 in retirement assets.” The press release for the survey announced that “Young Women Show Signs of Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome.” My definition has nothing to do with shoes.

My “Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome,” rather, describes an epidemic of members of my generation to dramatize the goings-on in their lives more than is necessary. Carrie Bradshaw, protagonist of the genius HBO show Sex and the City, was a relationship columnist and shoe addict who famously posed a question in each episode—ostensibly the topic of her current column. “I couldn’t help but wonder...” she’d say, “do we need distance to get close?” or “are men just women with balls?” Or, my personal favorite: “Why is it always something?”

Why is it always something, indeed? Well, on Sex and the City it was always something because every episode needed a theme, an arc—a storyline. My peers aren’t living in a television show, and yet we all, to some degree, make mountains out of the molehills of random hook-ups, upcoming papers, extracurricular conflicts, and the ever-present existential angst of the overactive mind. Why?

In the early 1920s, the economist and social philosopher Frank Knight offered an easy answer (though admittedly with reference to market participation, not the problems of college life): “Man’s chief interest in life is after all to find life interesting.” An interesting life is an entertaining life, and no self-respecting audience is likely to want to watch any of ours.

But we, having to live them, make them interesting for ourselves. So instead of sharing our problems over cosmopolitans—like Carrie and the girls—we share ours over molten chocolate cake at Finale. (Unless our particular problem is how to lose ten pounds before the first 70 degree day.) Instead of conversations at “the coffee shop,” ours happen in “the dining hall.”

This is not to say that we’ve caught this virus from our obsessive Sex and the City-watching. Carrie Bradshaw is not the “patient zero” of her eponymous syndrome. Teenagers (and perpetual adolescents like us, living in what David Brooks last October called the “Odyssey Years”) have been suffering it for ages. Probably since the existence of adolescence itself—an era with the awareness of adulthood but without any of the problems of marriage, careers, or real responsibility.

What’s the cure for Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome? Ironically, it may be in a show considered by some to be the inheritor of Sex and the City’s place in our zeitgeist: Gossip Girl. The CW show returned to the air on Monday after a painfully long hiatus due to the writer’s strike. The return was celebrated by New York Magazine, whose cover this week features a picture of the cast overlaid with the words “Best. Show. Ever.”

The show, which follows the lives of Manhattan’s richest (and most attractive) teenagers, does not aspire to realism. It joyously revels in its surreality, while still grounding its characters in truthful desires and doubts. But enough gushing. The point is that we watch for pure entertainment—not because we can relate to jetting to France on a moment’s notice or seeing our ex at a masquerade ball. We, the viewers, know that our lives should not look like the ones we see onscreen.

The lesson has even been made explicit by the show’s protagonist, Serena Van Der Woodsen, to her sometime best friend, sometime mortal enemy Blair Waldorf. Blair suffers from Carrie Bradshaw Syndrome, and Serena’s had enough: “You act like you’re in this movie about your perfect life but then I have to remind you the only one watching that movie is you.” (Well, and all of us.)

We’d all do well to heed Serena’s lesson. You might like to make your life like a TV show, or movie, imagining that your daily problems require untold deconstruction and discussion. But, keep in mind: the only person watching is you.

Ultimately, this is a comforting reminder. Let’s leave the drama to the professionals, and enjoy the relative calm of our daily, uninteresting lives. Let’s make our dinner conversations less about our problems and more about our passions—less about irritants and more about ideas. And if we get bored, we can always talk about Carrie Bradshaw and her problematic obsession with shoes.


Ryder B. Kessler ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Wednesdays.