So Much to Feel, So Little Time: Please Put Your Poker Face Back On

Are you exhausted? Emotionally strung out? Is it just me, or is everyone feeling everything everywhere all at once? Forget COVID. Over the last few years, we’ve become victims of a different virus — emotional burnout. Honestly, it’s a therapist’s nirvana. The mantra used to be “so much to do, so little time”. Now it’s more like, “too much to feel, so little time”.

I read the expression the “Age of All the Feels” somewhere recently and it came back to me this morning as I tried to manage my “author platform” (aka social channels) — the hair shirt all writers wear as a penance for wanting anyone at all to read what we do. Time was when publishers saw this as their job.

The ennui of eternal empathy

Anyway, we’re in an era where we’re expected to care about, react to, and process every global and local event simultaneously. To respond and contribute to online conversations just to stay visible. It’s an era where the new gods — the social media algorithms — actively reward content that triggers high emotional responses like outrage, extreme sadness, or intense joy. Basically, we’re experiencing at least one or more of the “feels” every time we open an app.

The rise of performative caring

Social media has without doubt turned up the volume on our emotions. In the modern economy, emoting and explaining your victimisation has more currency than quietly and competently getting on with it. We’re optimised for emotion and wallowing in it. Stoicism quietly left the stage some time ago. Imagine telling someone to “brace up”, like we used to. You’d be pilloried.

If you don’t post a black square, a flag filter, or a 10-paragraph essay about a geopolitical event happening 8,000 kilometres away within twenty minutes of it breaking, you risk becoming an unfeeling monster. We are expected to have a passionate opinion on topics we didn’t know existed an hour ago.

The death of the “work persona”

What about bringing your whole self to work instead of your professional face? Please don’t! I don’t want your whole self in my face for 8–10 hours of every day of my life. Show some control. There was a time when we put on a literal suit and a poker face. Now, corporate HR types actively encourage us to unpack our deepest childhood hangups during a Tuesday morning Teams standup.

I’m as empathetic and sympathetic as the next person but I recommend applying the late American architect Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s famous crie du coeur “Less is more”. Remember that old trope, “emotional baggage”? Leave it at your front door before you head to work for the day.

As for “your truth” and “your lived experience” — oh puhleeze. Give me The Truth — one we can all agree on and live by. Truth being the collective agreement that used to hold societies together and seems to have exited the stage in lockstep with Stoicism.

The performative care cycle

When a relationship went west or someone died (they always died, they didn’t “pass”, “pass on” or “pass away”) we mourned, even went through the grief cycle. We’d never have considered posting an abandonment reel on TikTok. Why does it all have to be so performative?

So many of us have become the tragic hero or heroine of our own movies. You can’t just experience a breakup or a minor failure and cry into your pretzels with your friends. It’s vital to package it up, complete with special effects, and broadcast it to an audience of strangers… for validation.

It must be said that singers have been emoting their hearts out since for ever so we can cry along with their sad songs, but the crying bit was generally a private experience, not a public ritual. For sure, cry your heart out when you need to, but for heaven’s sake, don’t record it. The mawkish Feelings form Morris Albert would fit right in now.

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Then there’s the lovely contemporary habit of “airing the dirty laundry” online. What does that say about anyone? Not much except having the utter bad taste to let rip in a public forum, knowing what you say or the images you post will likely be online for all eternity. You have to be a special kind of miserable to do that.

The linguistic inflation of trauma

We’ve shifted from being a society spot-welded to maintaining a stiff upper lip to one that celebrates radical vulnerability. We’ve traded stoicism for victim mentality. We used to have origin stories. Now we have “poor-me-how-I-suffer” stories that are vented without reserve anywhere there’s a platform for it.

How did it happen that everyday inconveniences have been upscaled into clinical mental health terms. A bad day is now “chronic burnout,” a disagreement is “gaslighting,” and an awkward interaction means someone is “toxic.” We don’t just have moods anymore; we have diagnoses.

The un-bubble-wrapped reality

Remember the old taboos? One of them was never showing public displays of affection (PDAs). It became a standing joke, but that didn’t erase the taboo. There were so many of them, not least of which was mandating the good manners, common courtesy and respect that kept us safe from the pagan hoards. People are so quick to get on the “disrespect” bandwagon. Wouldn’t we all be happier if we focused on the respecting bit and less on the “dissing”?

What world can function effectively on “vibes” rather than reality, harsh as reality can be. Nothing’s safe. No one promised us a rose garden. Life is an extreme sport—there’s no bubble-wrapping the human reality. Leave the cotton wool roll in the medicine cabinet where it belongs.

There’s a supreme irony here. The more we talk about boundaries, self-care, and safety, the more fragile and anxious everyone seems to become. Snowflakes, it’s time to melt!

Seriously, I wouldn’t want to go back to the rigidities and prejudices of the world as it was but surely, we aren’t doing ourselves any favours the way things are.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to log off before I accidentally empathise myself into an early grave. Feel free to leave your outrage in the comments.

P.S. My algorithm promises to ignore it with the utmost sensitivity.