Just Found About "Eat Pray Love", That Shit Sucks

If you're lucky enough to not know what "Eat Pray Love" is, it's a book/movie about this incredibly successful woman who feels bored in life, so she divorces her husband and goes on a trip to "find herself". The first 4 months are spent in Italy eating, the next 3 months are spent at India praying in a Hindu monastery, and the rest of the year is spent in Bali, where she meets a Brazilian businessman that she goes on to marry. Right off the bat, you gotta feel bad for the dude that she divorced just so she can go on a massive vacation. Speaking of which, what exactly was the point here? If you're feeling in a rut at work, then yeah, a year long vacation is going to feel good, because YOU'RE NOT WORKING. Like, this vacation probably cost 200k, you better be having fun if you're spending that kind of money. The destinations don't really make much sense to me, either. Okay, if you're looking for good food, Italy is a natural choice, but I don't see why gorging yourself on pasta will help you on your journey to self-discovery. Living in a monastery sort of makes sense, considering this vacation started with her developing a vague but real belief in God, but why go to a Hindu monastery? I know that some Hindus are monotheistic, but most believe in multiple gods, not just one. Okay, I'm obviously nitpicking here. Sure, she might have started this journey by developing a belief in God, but like I said, it was more of a vague belief in some sort of higher power than a well-developed belief in a deity. It's possible that maybe she wanted to see if she believed in Hinduism, but it doesn't really seem like she actually converted at the end of her India section. That's fine, but she didn't really learn anything from her experience if she didn't convert. In fact, she didn't really learn anything if even if she did convert. Religion is really more about your belief in the world around you rather than learning about yourself (e.g. if you believe in a god that controls the world, if you believe in angels, etc, etc). All she did was pray, and while that can definitely be fulfilling, it doesn't help you learn about yourself.

For the rest of the year, the author goes to Bali with no real goal in mind. While there, she meets a man, falls in love, and then eventually gets married. Cool, but once again, she hasn't really discovered anything about herself, which was supposedly the whole point. The story ends without her really saying anything other than that she got to go on a really cool vacation, and that you, the person who probably could never afford to do something like this in your entire life, should feel inspired to do the same.

The problem, as is often the case with memoirs, is that the story continued after the memoir was published. After the publication of EPL, the author revealed that she was a self-described "seduction addict" who quickly lost interest in men once the honeymoon period was over, only to then cheat on them, break up, and then repeat. The man she met and married at the end of EPL was no different. They divorced in 2016, and so ends the romance that infatuated millions of women around the world. I think the reason I hate EPL so much is because it sells this feel-good idea that spending as much money as possible on luxuries isn't just a good idea, it's an idea that makes you better than others. The book would have you believe that people like the author are self-actualized by virtue of being rich while ordinary people are forced to live life as lower people who can never be liberated by the experience of eating pasta in Italy and praying in India. Of course, that isn't true. The author ended her vacation the exact same person that she was when she started it, and EPL began the exact same way that it ended, with a broken marriage. The truth is is that none of this stuff really matters. You can eat anywhere, pray anywhere, and love anywhere. Somebody who feels the need to travel to a different country for all 3 of these has missed the point of all of them.