Written on 2022-09-12

For my male friends, who struggle with not feeling good enough.

I was going through a touch patch at work during the first half of 2022. We had a large, important deadline to deliver by May 29th, but we didn’t have enough engineers to do the work because we hadn’t realized how important (and slow!) hiring is. As a result, I was either working or sleeping with all my waking hours. During peak madness, I remember calculating that I’d been working all day, every day for 5 weeks. This obviously wasn’t healthy, but it felt necessary and I started to spiral into a frustrated state. The things that made me happy - working out, dating, socializing, relaxing - had all been sacrificed, and I felt like Kurtosis was taking more from me than I wanted to give but I was powerless to stop it.

I know I have a tendency to ruminate, so rather than running to angry music I tried to put on something that would calm me down. Jack Johnson’s “In Between Dreams” album had what I needed, and dozens of repeats got me through the grind. We made our deadline, and in the Pyrrhic victory learned the lesson that the company needed - we would never do a death march like that again, which meant we must hire and delegate.

The company grew, yes, but those hours of music might have sparked a personal insight as well. See, the world makes sense when I listen to Jack Johnson: though we may argue, compassion and empathy are the answer. Though the world is flooded with influencers and glamour and flash, peace is found in simplicity. Though being a corporate hotshot is all the rage, true joy comes from being a father to your children.

When Johnson sings about his wife, or is interviewed with her, he comes across as content. This surprised me. She was his college girlfriend whom he married at 25, and his stardom came after. She’s pretty, but no Victoria’s Secret model; he must have felt the temptation of groupies and fame, no? Yet he seems to regard her highly, and she him. It’s not for lack of friction - his songs make it clear that they have challenges like any other couple. What’s his secret?

I came to believe that Johnson’s secret is “enough-ness”. Rather than focusing on what he doesn’t have, he seems to direct his attention to the things in his life that he does have. I once heard a podcast about how perception shapes our reality. In one study, subjects who focus on negative aspects of life tend to believe the world is scary and dangerous, while subjects who focus on the positive aspects of life believe the world is inviting and full of opportunity. Likewise, the elderly who focused on the bygone past tended to live shorter lives than those who focused on the future still available to them. This stuck out to me: merely by shifting focus, one could reshape the entire nature of reality. Put another way, the world doesn’t exist somewhere in objective space, with objective characteristics of goodness or badness. Its very nature is dependant upon subjective interpretation.

I’ve struggled with shame and self-doubt for my entire life. During childhood I was among the last picks for sports teams, and I was ridiculed for my big ears, glasses, buck teeth, and skinniness. We didn’t have TV growing up, so I couldn’t connect with the pop culture that other kids knew. After I started to notice girls, the first five girls I liked didn’t like me back. I felt unlovable and disgusting, and during high school contemplated suicide as a means to stop hurting. Instead, I buried myself in reading and video games.

Those years imbued me with a strong desire to feel powerful, respected, and loved. If only I could date someone attractive, be successful, be popular… then I’d be cured. I got my wish the sophomore year of college: I’d quit World of Warcraft and was the tall, athletic kid on the floor of my nerdy engineering dorm, dating the cute girl on the floor, joining a fraternity, sneaking in alcohol for the other kids. I was good at computer science, and could do coding problems in half the time of my roommates. My grades were up, and I was winning. I felt good, almost arrogant.

The fantasy shattered when I broke up with her after graduation. The depression and feelings of worthlessness came roaring back, and thoughts of suicide resurfaced. Fortunately, I had a moment of clarity while on a run one afternoon: I was mentally flagellating myself for “motivation” to the tune of “You better not stop you fucking bitch, you pathetic piece of shit,” and became appalled, “This really isn’t healthy; I need help.”

Thus began the beginning of recovery. With the help of two good therapists, I’ve realized that I have an intense Critical Voice in my head that’s creating my feelings of shame and doubt and worthlessness. When I try and don’t succeed, that voice will pile on: “You’re not strong enough, you’re not good enough, you were awkward or embarrassing or annoying.” It’s particularly active when it comes to women: if a girl isn’t interested, the Critical Voice will try to tell me I’m unattractive or weird or scary. In retrospect, it’s no wonder that I’ve struggled with self-confidence: whenever I made an effort and failed, I’d attack myself so much that it seemed better to not try at all.

With the negative self-loop in full force, I had tried to win at everything I did. I applied to Palantir because it was known to be hard and all my CS student friends wanted in. I pushed myself through coding all-nighters in Palo Alto so that my dedication could never be questioned. I travelled manically to be able to say I’d been to X many countries, and seem impressive. I saved money so I could feel rich. I got drunk and did drugs to be able to say I had wild and crazy adventures. I lifted weights to be attractive. I trained jiu jitsu and MMA to feel dangerous. I studied seduction so I could feel desirable.

In 2022 America, these pursuits are generally lauded. We celebrate the ambitious go-getter, and to the outside world I seemed like one. And yet… even though I was achieving all these things, I wasn’t happy. Whenever people talked about, “He’s trying to fill the hole inside of him with X” (where “X” is usually alcohol, drugs, gambling, women, etc.), it seemed poetic rather than a practical description. Now I understand: the lack in me created by the Critical Voice is a hole. I kept shoving More at it, always More, but nothing changed; I was never Enough.

I’ve come to call this “magic bullet thinking”. The Critical Voice told me, “She doesn’t like you because you’re not muscular enough,” and “These people think you’re awkward because you’re not wild enough,” and so on. Naturally I thought, “Once I have more X then Y”. X would be my magic bullet that would fix my Y problem. It took a decade of fruitless chasing for me to finally step back and realize that there are no magic bullets because the Y problems are created internally.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious: if money and parties and fame and respect and power bring fulfillment, we wouldn’t see actors and athletes and CEOs and bodybuilders recounting the same struggles with worthiness. In an alternate universe where money bought happiness, the question “Does money buy happiness?” would be as uninteresting as “Does air cause sound?” for its obviousness. Rich people would be happy, and poor people would be unhappy. But we live in a world where both rich and poor can be happy or unhappy.

I now believe that the key to happiness lies somewhere other than trying to appease the Critical Voice in the game of “You are not enough”. Within the confines of the game, I will never achieve enough money, or have a beautiful and loving enough wife, or travel to enough countries because the problem is the Critical Voice itself. I need to turn down the volume on the Critical Voice, and construct what I’ve never had in my mind: the Positive Voice.

The Positive Voice is my cheerleader and my optimist. It says, “You know, you have been working out hard, and your arms are looking big” and “You did a great job back there” and “I’m proud of you” and “Why shouldn’t she be interested in you?” and “This is going to be exciting, even if it is daunting”. It feels foreign to exercise, but it also comforts me when I’m feeling down. Perception shapes reality: focusing on the good stuff actually makes the world a better place.

Still, there are no magic bullets; turning down the volume on the Critical Voice and booting up the Positive Voice is hard. I only realized the full strength of the Critical Voice this past July, which means that I’ve dealt with it unconsciously for decades. During those decades, whenever I felt lonely or unwanted or weak or ashamed, I knew only that I didn’t want to feel so hurt and vulnerable and exposed. I’d seek out something to lose myself in, to numb myself, which led me first to books, then video games, then later Youtube and the internet. I used them as analgesics, and the latter two became proper addictions complete with negative side effects: I got put on academic probation my freshman year of college because I missed too much class playing World of Warcraft, and I’ve had countless nights in my adult life where I stayed up until 5am watching stupid Youtube videos I don’t actually care about. Hundreds of hours wasted in a semi-catatonic, sleep-deprived state, but which felt better than thinking about the hurt I’d felt.

Now, at the urging of my therapist, I’m trying to “sit with the emotions” - fully experience the bad feelings rather than flinching away from them into Youtube. In practice, it means that when I feel the urge to flop on the couch and do Youtube I instead reach for my journal to write about how I’m feeling. After years of confusion around why I was so drawn to video games and Youtube, this has been shockingly effective: my desire for Youtube has a 1:1 correlation with an internal and not-always-conscious bundle of negative emotions.

Expressing those thoughts (on physical paper, deliberately with a pen) has been like massaging a muscle knot - painful at first, but relieving once done. What’s more, I find that journalling has me working through the Critical Voice’s influence now: I’ll detail out the negative thoughts I’m having, acknowledge them (simply denying them doesn’t seem to work for me), and then move on to a desire to boot up the Positive Voice. Usually, I’ll have forgotten several positive things that I only remember because I’m consciously looking for them. More often than not, I’ll end the journal entry talking about the things that went right in my day, feeling good about myself and better than when I started.

But, there are no magic bullets: I still sometimes get lost in the Critical Voice without realizing, and feel frustration wondering if I’ll ever be free from the Critical Voice’s overwhelming influence. Even today I needed to journal out some reactionary self-anger from feelings of inferiority. But my Positive Voice now calls for me to point out that I am showing up, putting in the work, consistently choosing journalling over internet addiction: I blocked my most addicting sites weeks ago, haven’t been on them since, and don’t feel a huge need to return. That’s progress.

And this is how I plan to do it, in the years to come: step by step, moment by moment, catching self-flagellation and grinding it into self-regard. The journey seems impossibly long and I’m tempted to fret over when I’ll arrive, but I’m wiser now and can recognize “When I arrive…” for the magic bullet thinking that it is. I’ve heard from two separate Special Forces soldiers that passing training is about turning your mind off, putting one foot in front of the other, without thinking about the future and its weight of uncertainty. This sounds very much like what mindfulness practitioners regard as the apotheosis of living: being completely present in the moment. It sounds suspiciously similar to Jack Johnson’s mindset as well. It seems that enough-ness and finding happiness along the way are intrinsically tied: it’s about the journey, not the destination.

Twice now I’ve been told, “I hope you find what you’re looking for” by girlfriends as we’re breaking up. I never knew how to respond except, “I hope so too.” Could the Positive Voice - the manifestation of self-love - be what I’ve needed all along?