be a better person Archives - Page 2 of 10

The (Positive) Value of Anger

February 9, 2015 by Dr. NerdLove 92 Comments

Valentine’s Day (or as I like to call it, the Day of Lover’s Obligation) is coming up this week, and if you’re single or otherwise just wanting to go out to eat, odds are you’re pretty frustrated. In fact, with the world seemingly contriving to constantly rub your nose in your singleness, odds are high that you may be a bit angry.

Good.

See, normally, I’d give my usual rant about how Valentine’s is a completely invented holiday that ultimately is about horny werewolves rather than romantic love but instead, I want to do something different. You see, rather than encouraging people to swallow their resentment (or at least not write another hot take about the annoyance of being single on a day when all the happy couples are canoodling in your face), I want to teach you how to channel and use that anger. Because quite frankly, we’ve been sold a load of shit when it comes to anger. Yeah, we get told that anger is the path to the Dark Side, but that’s by the same people who insist that only Sith use absolutes which is in and of itself an absolute and let’s be honest: how well did that work for them?

And hey, while you're at it, make the emotionally stunted, socially awkward virgin live alone with the ONLY woman of his species he's ever met besides his mother in one of the most romantic places in the universe and forbid him from so much as jerking it. — Hey, you know what’s a great idea? Take a guy with a traumatic childhood that leaves him stunted emotionally and refuse to give him the tools to process his feelings because he shouldn’t be feeling them in the first place. And then give him a laser sword and telekinetic powers.

But the Sith aren’t any better about anger either. Giving into inchoate rage is even less productive than trying to choke it down.

Instead, I’m going to teach you how to use your anger… the right way.

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How To Improve Your Willpower

January 19, 2015 by Dr. NerdLove 32 Comments

Every year we go through a familiar ritual that culminates with a failure of willpower. Everyone makes promises about how they’re going to do something better in the new year and then promptly forgets all about it before the month is even over. In fact, right now, I’m watching the usual influx of New Years gym memberships filter out after clogging the treadmills and weight machines for three weeks. Similarly, people are giving up on their promises to quit smoking, to eat better, to flirt more, to learn a new language – all of those self-improvement regimens that were supposed to make them better people in 2015.

"DON'T YOU FUCKING JUDGE ME!" — “DON’T YOU FUCKING JUDGE ME!”

It’s not that they don’t sincerely intend to do better. It’s all because they lack the willpower.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that they’re weak or bad people. Most of us don’t realize that willpower is a finite resource. When you run out of willpower you fall into a state known as “ego-depletion” – it becomes incredibly difficult, almost impossible even, to control your impulses. This is why it’s so easy to let your resolution to hit the gym five times a week slip to three… then to two… then to “haven’t been in two months”. This is why when you’ve had a long day, all you want to do is collapse on the couch and zone out to a Castle marathon on Netflix. It’s why diets notoriously don’t work. You reach the limits of your willpower and your ability to resist the siren call of pizza evaporates into thin air like Green Lantern’s ring running out of power.

The secret weapon of the Sinestro Corps isn't fear, it's a large pepperoni with extra cheese and olives. — The secret weapon of the Sinestro Corps isn’t fear, it’s a large pepperoni with extra cheese and olives.

Any form of self-improvement is dependent on willpower… so how do you make your will stronger?

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What’s Really Wrong With Nice Guys – Entitlement, Nerds and Neanderthals

January 5, 2015 by Dr. NerdLove 1,784 Comments

One thing you learn quickly in the dating advice business: some topics are more or less evergreen. And with the recent explosion on social media, it’s a good time to talk about one of my favorite topics: Nice Guys. After all, what better way could we ring in a new year than by looking at some old issues?

But first, some context:

Over the last week or so, I had several people forward me links to this comment from MIT Professor Scott Aaronson’s blog about growing up as a nerd terrified of women and trying to be a Nice Guy and how this meant that nerds couldn’t be keeping women out of STEM¹ fields. As is the nature of the Internet, this immediately was an opportunity to comment on the topic. Many people had some interesting and thought-provoking comments to share; Laurie Penny focused on the tricky topics of intersectionality and privilege while Amanda Marcotte discussed the problematic subtext of his complaints. Of course, this too becomes its own invitation to comment as Scott Alexander rode to Professor Aaronson’s defense ((And believe me, Alexander’s got enough bullshit for me to handle in a future column. Also, bro do you even link?)) , criticizing Penny and Marcotte in turn.

So I thought, hey, why not join in the fun?

Dogpiling is the right of all sentient bloggers!

Flippancy aside, my purpose isn’t to add to the criticism per se; instead, I want to talk about some of the underlying attitudes at play here regarding nerds, entitlement and dating. Both Aaronson’s complaints are excellent examples of what I hear from nerds and self-described Nice Guys all the time. Critically, they’re held forth as reasons why Nice Guys deserve a break instead of the opprobrium they receive and why it’s unfair for women to treat them with disdain, with a dash of nerd victim culture and privilege for flavor.

So let’s dive back into the Nice Guy debate, shall we?

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Science, tech, engineering and math [↩]

Dump Your Toxic Friends

July 18, 2014 by Dr. NerdLove 133 Comments

There’s a quote attributed to Steven Winterburn that I like: “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” I find that many of the people I coach need to do this sort of examination, because we all tend to have a specific blindspot towards the people in our lives. You see, we spend a lot of time examining and looking out for toxic relationships but give very little consideration to the possibility that we have toxic friends.

"Hey, bro! Got any shreds of self-esteem I can destroy today?" — “Hey, bro! Got any shreds of self-esteem I can destroy today?”

We put a great deal of attention on avoiding unhealthy romantic relationships, but platonic friendships can be just as damaging, just as toxic, even as abusive. Toxic friends can actually be harder to recognize. We tend to be axiomatic – we’d never be friends with abusers, therefore our friends aren’t abusive. We may excuse their behavior as “that’s just how Adam/Marie/Dan/Steve/Andrea is…”. We may choose to overlook the fact that our friends are toxic because of the sunk cost fallacy – we’ve known them for so long that we can’t really let them go.

But those toxic friends are destroying your self-esteem, ruining your happiness and in many cases actively holding you back. If you’re miserable, it may be time to look around and make sure you haven’t surrounded yourself with toxic friends.

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The Surprising Need for Male Intimacy

May 5, 2014 by Dr. NerdLove 138 Comments

How many of you have a close friend? And I don’t mean someone you game with or go out on the town or the ever classic “help you move bodies”. How many of you have a friend – or several friends – who you can go to when you need help. When you need emotional support and intimacy. When you’re scared and need someone to help you. When you need to be comforted. When you need to vent. When you’re feeling like you need to offload something. Someone you can share deep and personal parts of your life with?

And of those: how many of them are men?

Probably very few. In fact, men – especially heterosexual white men – tend to have few deep, emotional connections with other men. Sure, we may have buddies. We may have folks we pal around with, who we hang out with at parties and go grab some beers with after work. But we have very few – or sometimes even any – close, emotional ties with them.

The strange thing is, it didn’t used to be this way. As we grew up, we had our best friends, other boys around our age who were as close with as brothers might ever be. And then at some point in time… we stopped being close to other boys. In fact, having an intimate friendship with another boy became undesirable, a mark of suspicion. Being seen as being too close with somebody meant that you weren’t friends, it meant that at least one of you was trying to bang the other.

"Sure, it's cute now, but in a couple years, we're going to pretend we never took this photo." — “Sure, it’s cute now, but in a couple years, we’re going to pretend we never took this photo.”

The friendships we do have with other guys tends to have much less emotional intimacy; there is less closeness, less willingness to share about ourselves, and far less trust. We may help each other move and wax rhapsodic about our favorite types of whiskey but we don’t let ourselves get any deeper than the surface level. And yet… that’s exactly what we crave. Women have – are encouraged to have – a wider network of more intimate friends. Men are not. And yet, if you ask men what they want from their friendships, it’s often the same thing that women do: intimacy, trust, emotional support. Despite the way we conduct ourselves, men have a very deep need for intimacy – one that we’re not meeting.

And that’s literally hurting us.

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