Tiny Revolutions №114: F*ck Happiness
feel bad to get good
Is it the stars, the internet’s obsession with a murderer, or the naming of a federal agency after a memecoin? Maybe it’s the singularity creeping ever closer? My late 40s body reconfiguring itself and fucking with my head? Something else entirely? Whatever the cause, I’ve been in a jagged mood all week.
Every time I’ve sat down to do something constructive, I find I'm so agitated I'm ready to give up before I even start. But as I sit with this restlessness, turning it over and trying to find something redeemable about it, I’ve had a revelation: This is a good thing! Because this state of supreme irritation has helped me get crystal clear about something vital: we need to talk about our culture’s obsession with feeling good all the time.
This state of agitation isn't new to me, and after years of fighting it, I've come to a counterintuitive realization: maybe it's not something to be fixed. Maybe these uncomfortable states — which lead me to affectionately refer to myself as a head case — are actually trying to tell me something important.
I've lost countless hours to this squirrelly feeling — days when I wake up uncertain, disconnected from my sense of purpose, struggling to remember what I’m doing here. And while I'd call myself happy overall, getting there is a daily practice, not a default state. But here's the thing: some of my best ideas, my most necessary changes, have come from exactly these periods of unbearable agitation. It's like my system knows something needs to shift before my conscious mind catches up, and all I can do is try to listen until the next right thing to do becomes clear. Yet in our “optimize everything” culture, this truth rarely gets told.
I've been here enough times to recognize the pattern. Hell, I wrote about it in 2021 in a piece called “Diary of a Meltdown,” breaking down exactly what happens when I get into one of these spirals. What's changed since then isn't the spiral itself — it's my understanding of what it's good for, and why these states might be exactly what we need to experience.
Take this very newsletter. It was born of a particularly dark period of both personal and professional frustration and disorientation. I'd walked away from a startup I'd poured a lot of time and energy into, and I felt like absolute garbage. Yet those feelings weren't obstacles to creation — they were fuel. That crushing sense of failure after leaving the startup didn't just make me feel bad — it pulverized everything I thought I knew about success and fulfillment. The resulting reckoning and restlessness pushed me to create something entirely new, something that felt far more alive and true to who I really was.
This process of creative destruction isn't unique to my story. Contrary to what the wellness industrial complex would have you believe, the real work isn't what you see on social media. It's in the messy, unglamorous business of wrestling with inner demons, forcing yourself to move when you feel paralyzed, and sometimes just white-knuckling it until bedtime. These days I feel like my main job is maintaining my mental state so I can actually show up for my obligations and push myself to try the new shit I want to do. Which, in my case, takes a lot of work.
What I've come to understand is that “negative” states aren't the enemy. As awful as they feel, they're not something to be eliminated or optimized away. They're signals. Navigation points. When I'm in a heightened state of anxiety, it's not a character defect — it's a compass. And if anxiety can be a compass, maybe it’s time to completely reframe how we think about feeling bad.
Let's suppose for a moment that other ways of being are not just OK, but DESIRABLE. What if instead of waking up refreshed and starting every day with perfectly curated mornings and spotless emotional clarity, there's benefit to being an anxious, cranky, fearful, jittery wreck some days? What if we start recognizing that the jagged edges and rough mornings aren’t signs of failure, but essential features of fully lived life? After all, isn't it our discontent with the absolute state of things that drives us to make the changes we need to make in our own lives?
As far as I can tell, this pattern repeats throughout history. The suffragettes’ fury at systemic injustice, MLK’s relentless dissatisfaction with the status quo, the outrage of factory workers risking their lives in unsafe conditions — these emotions weren’t distractions to be soothed with meditation apps or dietary changes. They were born from the raw, combustible energy of dissatisfaction, that uncomfortable but essential force that powers transformation, both personal and collective.
Here is the hill I am prepared to die on: we as a culture have to stop believing that the goal is to eliminate discomfort. It’s time to dig deeper and learn to use these states rather than be used by them. To recognize that sometimes, feeling like shit isn't a bug in the system — it's a feature.
Is it so bad to feel the weight of the world? Is it so bad to let it get to you sometimes? Is it so bad to get off track and feel like retreating to a salt cave indefinitely? Don't all these things just help propel us and/or get back on track?
Let me be clear: I've been exercising regularly my entire adult life. I've logged hundreds if not thousands of hours on the meditation cushion and counting. I am incredibly well hydrated! I'm not writing this from some place of resistance to developing healthy habits. I’m writing this as someone who’s done the work and still wakes up some days feeling like I want to burn this motherfucker down. And honestly, I think part of that is because we’re living in a time between worlds. The old systems that have held us for so long are in a slow process of disintegration, and the new ones haven’t fully emerged yet. It’s scary, heartbreaking, infuriating, and so many other things.
But I feel this way because I’m so deeply invested in this place. I haven’t told myself some story that we can just, say, move to Mars when it gets too hot. I’m not here to give up on this world or its people, flawed as they are. These jagged, restless feelings aren’t just mine — they’re the growing pains of something bigger, the friction of an old world giving way to something new. And I don’t think the weight of all that is something we’re supposed to eliminate. I think it’s something we’re supposed to bear, to hold, and to transform.
True wellness isn't about feeling good all the time. It's about having the capacity to feel everything and still show up. It's about recognizing that our darkest moods, our most difficult states, our moments of pure frustration — these aren't failures of self-care. They're part of the full spectrum of human experience, and sometimes they're exactly what we need to move forward. I'm not suggesting we should wallow in every dark mood or ignore the warning signs of genuine mental illness — there's a difference between productive discomfort and destructive patterns. But it seems we’ve gotten to a point where we err too far in the other direction, treating every negative emotion like a problem to be solved rather than a message to be heard.
If you're one of those naturally sunny people reading this who wake up every day happy and excited about life, zippedy-fucking-doo-dah and good for you. I imagine you're either puzzled or concerned right now. I used to envy you. I used to think you were so lucky, just sailing the seas of life with so little friction! I don’t anymore. I just think you are one type of person and I am another. And for those of us who are more like me, who don't always wake up ready to seize the day, who have to fight for our equilibrium, who sometimes feel everything too much — I want you to know that you're not broken. You're not failing. You're just experiencing the full complexity of being human. Consider this: your uncomfortable feelings aren't obstacles to overcome; they’re the very energy we need to create the change we're all desperately seeking. For you, and for everyone.
Because right now, that is exactly what the world needs.
Speaking of feeling everything and showing up anyway – this is exactly what we practice at
. Next spring, I'll be starting my training as a lay teacher, learning to help others navigate their own complicated relationships with... well, everything.If this piece resonated with you and you're in a position to support this kind of work, please consider donating to ACZC's annual fundraiser. Your contribution will help fund not just my training, but all the ways we make space for people to experience their full humanity – no toxic positivity required.
Hey, thanks for being here, as ever. In this attention economy, it means everything!
😘
Sara
p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free but not cheap. If you’d like to support my work, please share this post with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!
This is terrific and needed, Sara. Last year I read The Comfort Crisis by Michael Easter. He makes a similar point: we are comforting ourselves to death. Oh, it's 71, I'm cold, please turn it to 72. I don't want to see a Picasso as I walk down the hall, I want to see a Monet.
If Steph Curry doesn't get his exact 143.5 minutes of warmup before a game, with an agenda nailed down to the half minute, he can't function and be a superstar. https://www.nba.com/watch/video/stephen-curry-warmup-routine-exclusive-look-nbatv
Of course I'm exaggerating, but your and Easter's point is well-taken: perhaps wee better off confronting what is, even if it's suboptimal, hard, scary, or cringe-worthy. Even if that describes our mental or physical state some mornings. Maybe we better, as my rucking friends urge, embrace the suck. Maybe the effort to tackle the suck head on leads to the breakthroughs.
Maybe it's what leads to the beauty.
Thank you, Sara. I needed this.
I’m reminded of something I heard was true about developing children when my kids were small, and sure seemed to be true, which was this: when a kid is on the cusp of a developmental leap of some kind and they can sense or see that thing they want to be able to do but they just can’t yet they can tend toward a lot of tantrums. Those tantrums are an understandable expression of extreme frustration at wanting to be somewhere over *there* but being inexorably temporarily stuck *here*. As adults, we learn that tantrums are bad, but that itchy frustration under our skin when we can imagine what we want or what might be possible, should be possible, but isn’t yet still exists.
I think the whole world is there right now, and it makes sense that many of us feel that itchy discomfort. As you say, it’s a feature not a bug, and just like my kids when they were little, we all just have to survive it and try not to do too much damage to ourselves and others until we get to the other side.