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4 days ago
13
Estimated reading time: 15 minutes
Dear Dr. NerdLove: I don’t know if this is a question as much as my not knowing how to feel or what to do but here goes:
I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel motivated to date or meet people or do anything right now. On TV, I’m watching the fires in Los Angeles and hearing from friends of mine who’ve had to evacuate and won’t know if they have a place to live when they get back or how they’ll pay for anything if they have to replace it. I live in a city that’s a blue dot in a big red state and my LGBTQIA2S+ are fleeing for safer places to live. It’s hard to feel like there’s a point to anything when it seems like the worst people are in charge and all the good people are getting ground under the boot. Jobs are hard to find and the ones that exist are all app gig crap that pay nothing and offer no security or benefits, nobody can afford medical care or find a place to live that’s even halfway affordable.
To make matters worse, I’m actually doing well. I just got a promotion at work that came with a nice raise that means I may actually pay off my college loans a lot sooner than I thought, my side hustle seems to be on the verge of taking off and I’m in the best shape of my life. 2025 honestly looks like it’s going to be one of my best years ever. But if I stop and think about it for a minute I feel bad because… I feel good? It feels like I’m doing something wrong when my life is OK, even doing well while everyone else is suffering.
I feel guilty about my good luck, like it comes from other people having to be miserable and I don’t know what to do with this. Now I feel like there’s no point to trying to meet someone because the world’s ending but also like I’m in a better position to meet my future spouse but it’s wrong for me to be happy at the expense for everyone else so my being happy makes me a bad person.
I don’t know what to do here. And before you ask, yes, I’m in therapy.
What do I do?
Best of Times, Worst of Times
You’re not the only person who feels this way, BTWT. In fact, there’re a lot of folks – not just chuds and Nazi-wannabes that think they’re in ascendence, but everyday normal people – who feel conflicted because… well, life’s a little better for them than they expected. Not that they don’t face the same challenges everyone is experiencing, but in general their life is doing ok despite it all. And that’s an important distinction: despite it, not because of it. The cognitive dissonance of it all means that they’re honestly unsure how to feel and many of them are feeling guilty because they’re not suffering.
And honestly, this isn’t exactly surprising. People often discover, even in the depths of grief and mourning, that they feel… ok. In fact, there’re days where they feel surprisingly good, even while they’re grieving the loss of someone they loved. It’s incredibly common and incredibly human; we simply don’t have the capacity to be miserable forever. But we often feel weird when this happens, like it means that our grief isn’t real enough or that our not being sad means that we don’t care as much as we should. In reality, it’s simply a matter of how humans are almost infinitely adaptable to circumstance.
Life stubbornly insists on continuing, regardless of what else is going on. I’m reminded of a quote from Leverage creator John Rogers: “Yet another evening I close my eyes, pinch the bridge of my nose, take two short sharp breaths and remind myself millions of people led satisfying, meaningful lives during the fall of the Roman Empire.” It may not be comfortable, it may not be the life we hoped for but life, as it always does, finds a way.
I have a personal theory that a lot of this ties back to the fundamentally Calvinist beliefs that the US was founded on; the idea that suffering is inherently noble, and joy is an indulgent luxury when it’s not an actual sin and turning away from or trying to mitigate misery is somehow weakness and a betrayal. In fact, as I write this, I’ve been seeing a member of The Lincoln Project excoriating progressives who’ve chosen to ignore Trump’s inauguration as cowards and that “bearing witness to history” is a requirement because… reasons. It’s not exactly clear.
Neither, for that matter, how this sort of performative self-flagellation is supposed to help or make a meaningful difference to the people who are going to be harmed by the policies the incoming administration has been pushing. At best, it feels like a way of dismissing feelings of responsibility to do something by making “I feel bad about it” equivalent to political organizing or volunteering to help the people who are currently under threat. And this ultimately does nothing to help anyone. It’s misery for misery’s sake.
There’re two things that I think will be important for you and folks who feel the way you do.
The first is simple: the cure for feeling helpless and despair is action. Despair holds you in place. It leaves you paralyzed, unable to move or take decisive action because what’s the point? It’s all over before it began and any attempt to do anything about it has all the efficacy of spitting into a hurricane or yelling at the tides to stop. Action is the antithesis of despair; it is staring despair directly in the face and spitting in its eye. It may be an act of futile defiance but it’s still an act. It says that everything may be hopeless, and the best you can do is hold back the dark for a little bit longer… but sometimes holding back the dark just a little longer is precisely what makes a difference. Sometimes it really is a matter of resisting the siege until the dawn – not when forces come riding over the hill to our rescue, but holding back the tide until we all regroup and push the dark back again.
It may feel like a Sisyphean task, but sometimes the act of rolling that rock up the hill is more important than debating whether you’ll ever reach the top. Even if you know the result is failure, there’s value in staring those forces down, bruised, bloody and broken and declaring “I can do this all day”.
If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.
This is also part of the cure for the guilt you’re feeling. Think of this as the Tao of Peter Parker: with great power comes great responsibility. If life is going well for you and you’re in a better position than you expected, then one of the best things you can do is use your fortune to help others who are less fortunate. Rather than lamenting your success and feeling like it comes at the expense of others, reach out and put some of that largess into pulling others out of the depths. You know how Mr. Rogers famously said “look for the helpers?” He was talking about people like you: you’re the helper and your time is now.
There’s always a way to help and to take action, in ways both large and small, directly and indirectly. Make a recurring monthly donation to the aid agencies on the ground who are helping the people who are being hurt. Pick a cause and volunteer your time and resources. There are almost certainly organizations in your area helping immigrants under threat of deportation, LGBTQ people who need support or aid, reproductive health care, feeding and sheltering the homeless, taking care of the pets that’ve been abandoned or separated from their owners by the LA wildfires.
You can also find political organizations and causes too. We tend to get so hyper focused on state and national political races that we forget just how important city, county and municipal races can be. Join your local schoolboard and resist the forces demanding censorship and terrorizing queer, trans and gender non-conforming children. Volunteer at your local library and help keep those invaluable resources up and running. Hell, coaching Little League or kids sports teams and being a mentor to kids – especially ones who are under threat – can mean the world.
You can help individuals as well; if you have contacts in the states where your queer and trans friends are going who can help them find jobs or housing, give them a heads up and share that information with your friends. If you’ve got cash to spare, helping them defray the inevitable costs and emergencies can be a godsend. Even if all you manage is to help one person, you’ve made a much bigger difference. There’s a reason why the Talmud states “whomever saves one life, saves the world entire”.
But the other thing you have to realize is that joy isn’t a luxury, it’s part of what gives us the strength to keep going. There is always a need for the things that lift our spirits, that bring even a moment of relief or eases our burdens for a short period of time. Finding those little nuggets of joy give us things to live for and reminds us that there is light, even in the worst days. Even at the height of the Nazi’s power, people found community and happiness, celebrated together, danced and sang and reminded themselves that there was still good in the world. Even under the worst oppression of the Khmer Rogue, the Stasi or any force you care to think of, there were still songs, there was still music, there were still stories and love.
These may be very small things, but the biggest things are made of small ones. Even a blade of grass in the wasteland can give hope; a flower in the rubble reminds us that life finds a way and goes on. Every person who find the strength to keep going is helping to keep the darkness from engulfing everything.
Similarly, harming yourself or making yourself feel miserable for misery’s sake doesn’t benefit anyone; it only saps your strength and resolve and makes it that much harder to get back up when you’ve been knocked down.
If reading about people’s misery on social media becomes too much, you can take a break. You can give yourself permission to stop doomscrolling or to not pay constant attention to the news; perpetually sandpapering your soul only serves to leave you exhausted and weak. You are allowed – some would say required – to not waste your strength and well-being on pointless misery, especially performative misery.
We’re entering an incredibly turbulent period of history, and it’s impossible to know how it’s going to shake out. We know it’s going to be rough and it’s going to be roughest on the most vulnerable among us. That makes that that much more important to not give into despair, to reach out with aid and shelter and to not just find joy but to share it so that others can find strength and solace in it as well.
When we’re facing the darkest night, that’s the time for us to remember that hope shines bright.
All will be well.
Hello DNL,
With the new year dawning on us I’d like to really push through the chest beating and knee shaking that comes with approaching women. I’ve become FAR better at it but now I’m trying to graduate from “being good at conversation and connecting” to “actually flirting and being sexual.”
Progress has been slow. It’s that damned approach anxiety, mainly in new spaces or semi-public ones like bars, conventions, events etc. Don’t get me wrong, I think I’ve become rather good at connecting with people and can genuinely charm people when I’m putting all my effort into it.
BUT…. Now I need to advance beyond “cool stranger” and into “I wanna fuck/date this guy.”
I did some practice at a party over New Year’s, and bumbled my way into making some chick think I pissed in her pool. I was the first one in, so I jokingly said I “christened it” completely oblivious to the implications. After seeing the reactions of “uhhh, what did he just say” on their faces I ran away, not wanting to correct myself or clarify out of sheer embarrassment. This was after forcing myself to change walking direction towards her and another girl without any plan of action. I was feeling the chest beats and knee shakes and thought “alright time to work through it.”
I guess my question is if there is any easier way to fight through those chest beating and knee shaky feelings on the approach. And if I should just keep doing it until the feeling goes away or I can deal with it better. I’m gonna feel this at every step of the dating/sex process, so I want some help with better navigating it.
Panic Attack! At The Disco!
One of the issues that people often misunderstand or don’t fully get is how much of approach anxiety and fear of flirting or talking to people is that it’s not actually fear, so much as unfamiliarity. It’s the discomfort of doing something different or unusual and the worry of social opprobrium and inherent embarrassment for making a mistake out of ignorance.
If you get right down to it, it’s honestly the same feeling of not knowing the proper etiquette at a fancy party and that you’re going to mark yourself off as an ignorant, classless boor because you don’t know which fork to use or brought the wrong gift to the host and hostess and now you can expect to be in exile for the rest of the social season.
This is part of why your heart pounds and your knees get weak; you are painfully aware of what you don’t know, and the anxiety is more about the feeling of shame that could result. Intellectually, you know that you can survive embarrassment… but emotionally, the potential of it can be terrifying. You’re ultimately afraid of how you might feel.
The problem is that this feeling gets in the way of the very thing that makes the feeling go away. The cure to unfamiliarity is experience – doing the thing, risking making mistakes, learning from those mistakes and gaining a deeper understanding of how it all works. This is true for everything from being the new kid in school to approaching that sexy somebody at the party: the more you do it, the more confident you become, in no small part because you’ve been here before and you know the territory.
But those physical symptoms – the sweaty palms, the dry mouth, the racing heartbeat and adrenaline dumped into your system – are so incredibly uncomfortable that we often end up avoiding anything that might make us feel that way. And if we let that avoidance continue, it grows; soon we start to avoid things that make us even think of the things that cause those feelings. Do this for long enough and the world you allow yourself to live in gets smaller and smaller.
Now, there’re a lot of ways to try to manage those feelings; controlling your breathing, for example, forces your heart rate to slow, which calms you down. But at the end of the day, the only true cure for that feeling is experience, and that means that everything comes down to the mantra of “be afraid… but do it anyway.”
Now here’s the thing: we’re bad at understanding how we feel or why. We feel the physical sensations and then decide what they mean based on context clues around us. So when we feel physical sensations of excitement – and fear is a form of excitement – our brain casts around for reasons. This is why, for example, we talk about the Three Second Rule – you have three seconds after seeing someone before you have to go over and start talking to them. The point is to push past the physical sensations and not give your brain time to decide that you’re afraid; by the time it’s had the chance to say “oh no, you’re anxious”, you’re already in the mix and saying hello. So now your brain has to decide whether you’re afraid… or excited. This, in turn, builds up familiarity and experience and makes the entire process far less terrifying.
The same goes for making mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone, at some point, shoves their foot so deeply in their mouth that their shoelaces start tickling their intestines. The key isn’t to not make mistakes but to be able to recover from them. This, too, is a matter of practice and experience. Comedians like Conan O’Brian and others famously would go out and deliberately bomb on stage, precisely so that they could learn how to recover from it. Without experience, dying on stage can feel a lot like, well, actually dying. But when you know you can pull out of that particular nose-dive and have, in fact, done so, that feeling loses its power over you. Yeah, it can still suck… but you know damn good and well that not only is recovery possible, but you’ve done it.
I mean, I’ve had times where I have literally choked – as in, I aspirated on my own saliva – when trying to approach some attractive women. The key is that when this happened, instead of panicking, I took a second, said “hold on, let me do that again”, backed up and then approached them again like I hadn’t just sputtered and hacked like a cat with a hairball in front of them. And it worked. But this wouldn’t have been as possible if I hadn’t forced myself to not run away when I’d made other mistakes previously. Knowing through experience that I could do this, that mistakes weren’t fatal and that embarrassment is temporary at best meant that I knew I could manage things here too.
This is why the ultimate answer is to just push past the panic, to resist the urge to flee and proceed. Let your knees shake. Let your heart race. But keep at it. In time, with experience, you’ll learn that even some of the most incredibly awkward or embarrassing moments can become things that are funny or even endearing, becoming stories you tell about yourself instead of things you try to shove down a memory hole that end up haunting you at 4 AM.
And as a side-note: many times the answer to “they think I’ve done this incredibly embarrassing thing” is agree-and-amplify, turning it into something absurd that nobody would seriously believe. “I’m sorry, in my culture, being the first one to piss in the pool is a great honor, one that people fight for the right to do…” If you can get a laugh, then that moment ceases to be awkward and becomes one where you’re all laughing at the ridiculousness of thinking that’s what you meant… and they’ll be laughing with you, rather than at you.
Good luck.
