‘How Do I Learn to Love Work Again?’

Be more Zambonian, not more Franzonian!

Promontory Palace (1931), Yves Tanguy

This very long column is free because I’m in the mood to share and I think there’s a lot here for all 130,000 of you. My dream is to hit 4,000 paid subscribers. Is it achievable? Probably not, but let’s dream big for a change. I need more ZAMBONI and less FRANZONI around here. Read on to find out wtf that means!

Dear Polly

I hope this message finds you well. I’ve found your work to be a balm and so helpful since coming across it roughly a decade ago. I’ve submitted a few requests for advice to you before, and have been grateful enough to have one of my comments on a piece of yours addressed in another piece (In “Ambition vs. Ambivalence,” from September 2025, I was the person who wrote the comment you quoted that starts with “I work in an industry where…”). This time, I’m sending this inquiry not necessarily anticipating a response — you have a lot of followers who need help far more urgently than me, and truly I’m just enjoying the exercise of writing to you. Plus, I feel like I’m going to write too much for you to read, nothing like the concise and devastatingly familiar-but-also-direct letters that you typically publish, so I’m not expecting you to do all that. But since I plan to discuss my relationship to work and artificial intelligence (something that, if I recall what you’d written before correctly, you said you were interested in hearing from readers about their own relationships with it), perhaps you’ll find this relevant, interesting, and demonstrative for your other readers.

Essentially, I’m in my late 30s, lucky to be employed, married to someone I love and admire a lot, and think way too much about work. I feel like my relationship with work is poisoned, and I don’t know how to rebuild it. I’ve read columns of yours like “I Hate Work!” and “I Hate All Jobs!” and “AI Took My Career and Now I Feel like a Failure!” repeatedly, trying to remind myself that hard work is hard but necessary and actually can feed us if we find the right way to make it work for us. But for some reason, it hasn’t been working out for me to find ways to actually enjoy or get any feeling of beneficence out of the work.

This shouldn’t be an issue for me. I’m a cishet man, a person of color but from a community that I think benefits from whiteness-adjacent racism in professional settings, grew up well-off with a really loving family, and can often muster the kind of self-presentation that reads to people as “charming,” “intelligent,” “insightful,” and “nice” in a way that has helped me get jobs that I was deliriously unqualified for before. Every day, I see black women and other women and queer people of color I work with get treated like shit despite their qualifications and competence, and somehow don’t receive the same kind of pressure or backlash from higher-ups. I should probably be grateful for all the chances I’ve gotten over the years, and the ability to move in the world in a way where I don’t have to worry about personal safety, institutional hardship, real proximity to life-crushing poverty, or supporting children. Occasionally, I’ve been able to use my position to support and uplift women and others who I thought wouldn’t get the same chances but were otherwise super qualified, and I feel good about those times I’ve gotten to do that.

But it feels like it’s not enough to get me to actually enjoy the process of waking up; moving my body, getting to the office or the coffee table or wherever work is, doing the work, feeling beneficence in good and bad days alike, getting out, and having a fulfilling life after work. I have diagnosed depression, anxiety, and ADHD; I’ve been in therapy and on different medications for a good chunk of my adulthood, after having been a studious and driven and hard-working student who struggled with certain things that then became real blockers to my success in college and my first few years in the workforce (all at really good jobs and internships and institutions that would be enough to set someone up on a solid path if they were driven enough). I used to be way more physically fit and am in fits and spurts trying to get back to that stage by taking walks as often as possible and even starting to ride a bike to work, once I get it repaired and ready for the road. I am involved in a community group and have great friendships and community through that. I’ve got some great friendships that I probably take for granted but would be way worse off for if I didn’t have them, and loose plans to pursue an artistic endeavor that’s loosely related to that group.

But even when things were working the way I’d wanted them to, it was never enough to make me feel great about anything. And work/career stuff feels like the biggest problem to solve of all, the one from which everything else might trickle down.

I used to work in a field that was very demanding, subject to the whims of a bad job market and shitty executives, and constantly under pressure to innovate, adapt to times, be responsive to “the moment,” and filled with other pressures that would make a sensitive person hate their days. But I wanted to be in it badly when I started, because it relied on skills — writing and editing — that more often than not fit my disposition (the bad grammar and syntax of this email notwithstanding). I don’t know that I ever “enjoyed” the work more than a handful of times, but I felt beneficence in what I could do, and appreciated this field’s ostensible institutional commitment to values and ethics that felt impossible to find in a lot of other fields (even if the business around it is maybe less ethical than other fields’). In any case, when I left amid a reorg at my employer about a year ago, and then left a pretty senior job at a respected establishment after a month of corporate bullshit and overwhelming responsibilities made me feel like I’d never be successful without losing myself to workaholism, I vowed to take a break from the field and try something else. I don’t think I want to go back, but I also feel unmoored from what that job did for my identity and some relationships that were truly very fulfilling.

I’ve also never had a real working-class, fuck-up-your-sleep-and-sense-of-self kind of job, and kind of want the experience, but know that it’d never pay what I need to make the moves I need to make at this time of my life. My wife has had those jobs and struggles and has learned to deal with the shittiness of white-collar existence because it enables the life she actually wants, which is why she has less than infinite patience with my attitudes towards work. We want to buy a house soon, and it’s going to be very difficult if I take a huge hit in my income. Plus, I have a lot of credit card debt, largely owing to inopportune spending on DoorDash and Grubhub because neither of us comes back from our in-person jobs wanting to cook, and I don’t think I’d be able to clear it while working a job that had me lifting heavy boxes on a third shift, worsening back and shoulder issues that I have a hard time exercising through, which definitely affects my mood.

For the past few months, I’ve worked in marketing for a fairly prestigious organization I knew about through my prior life. In short, it sucks. The people I work with are largely brilliant and super insightful, but there’s no real organizational structure and our leadership (for all the things they do well) seem 100% disinterested in creating it. I’m split between teams led by a really nice but ultimately contextually ineffectual person who doesn’t want to navigate the minefield between his boss’s expectations and his reports’ cries for more structure, more support (I’m sympathetic but also resolutely feel: If you can’t lead at the level that your direct reports demand of you, STEP AWAY FROM THE JOB. NOBODY SHOULD BE IN A DIRECTOR-OR-HIGHER-LEVEL POSITION IF THEY AREN’T ABLE TO MANAGE WELL) and a tech CEO type who’s occasionally kind but more often out of pocket, devaluing the work of others and forcing direct reports to read tea leaves and moods with more mental energy than I feel he ever puts towards anybody who works for him. The ADHD means that I’m putting a lot of effort into trying to make work work in these settings, but more often than not, I’m just overwhelmed, my mind going blank in meetings and emails piling up in my inbox while I promise deliverables in shorter windows than I can deliver them.

AI, which I used to abhor and still don’t love for its impact on our environment and economy, has unfortunately become my lifeline in this job, helping me do the work better and more quickly than I could by just staring at my computer screen before. a deadline motivated me to action (it can do SO MUCH if you’re able to prompt it right). I’m not thrilled with it, and feel like I’ve lost my own competence at things I was good at, to the point that if all the LLMs shut down, I wouldn’t be able to get back to what I was doing without it (and bogged in administrative bullshit that it can handle well at times). Plus, since my therapist can’t respond right away to any intrusive or repetitive bad thought I have, and my wife and friends can’t always be the repository for my negative or toxic attitudes, I’ve turned Claude into a sort of emotional support tool, and it’s been useful for telling me that I’m not at fault, that my work environment is toxic, and that I can take some concrete steps and offload some administrative bullshit to it to survive another day of disappointment before I can leave the office for something I hopefully like more.

Something I think about a lot now is how nice it must be to feel like you can live your life without the help of AI. I honestly resent the AI backlash almost as much as I resent the tech titans, politicians, and opportunistic fucks who shoved it down our throats in the first place. It calls to mind the backlash to social media, all the proof points we had about how it worsens our lives and makes us less connected and facilitates genocide and body dysmorphia and cyberbullying — and still, it’s just around, doing the thing it always did. If those Anthropic researchers who (I think) cynically called out the mass extinction potential last week to burnish their careers as middle-of-the-road anodyne AI accountability advocates are actually right, I truly hope that this apocalypse comes — I’m sick of people warning about an end of times that never really comes, snake oil salesmen who think the sudden end of our world is somehow worse than the slow trudge towards its demise in climate catastrophe that we’re *actually* having to live through now. That my career has involved close relationships with people in tech doesn’t actually help me feel better. Plus, if I can find a good startup to invest a few bucks in and get rich, like all these other people who figured out that hard work actually doesn’t guarantee you material success, maybe that’d be cool, though it’s of course a pipe dream that would put me in touch with the kinds of tech scene head honchos that I hate.

But I’m well aware that this is all about my shame, my insecurities, my intellectual responses to an aversion to my own emotions, and all these things you write about so much so presciently.

Wow, I’ve already written so much. But if you’ve come this far, here’s the point I’m trying to get at: It feels impossible to live my life slowly, deliberately, and empathetically while trying to rebuild my connection to myself...AND also do all that’s expected of me, in and outside of work. Recently, with AI’s help, it took me a whole workday to do a third of the tasks I needed to do that day, and I see myself losing stamina every day I come back to a to-do list that never shrinks. And I don’t know a single person who makes the kind of salary I feel I need to sustain the life my wife and I want (I’m in the mid-Atlantic US, so I currently make $80K, and would like to sustain that salary) — one with fun trips abroad, nice food from cool restaurants at all price points, going to concerts (the thing that I actually love the most, so long as drunk 20-somethings don’t crash into me when I’m not even in the moshpit) and the occassional chic cocktail — in a job that’s just simple, where the to-do list can get cleared in a day, where you don’t have annoying office politics, backstabbing coworkers, or moody disorganized bosses fucking up your shit. I can’t think clearly about what would make me happy when I’ve got reports due that I have no interest in, but need to get done to placate someone who probably won’t look at them. I can’t budget exercise in the day if I get to the office at 9, have three hours of meetings, need to stay on until 7, and then get back just in time to have dinner with my wife before she goes to bed because she has to wake up early to make it to work on time. Maybe someone can’t do all this and still move deliberately, but tons of therapy, drugs, and ADHD podcasts haven’t really made me into that kind of person. Plus, even when I’ve gotten great opportunities in the past to do work I thought I wanted to do, I just hated it. It’s all too hard, all too directed toward ends that don’t feel fulfilling, all just noise in a world full of noise and few really great ideas that actually make the world better.

Truly, I don’t have much hope for myself, and only semi-jokingly tell people that more than a dream job, I’d just like for an Amazon van to hit me so I can sue for enough to not work for a few years (probably driven by someone with no workforce protections, pissing in bottles, doing this to support a family that could get deported by the same administration that’s making the economy worse for us). I briefly wanted to be a great writer, but writing sometimes made me unhappy. I wanted to make other kinds of art, but I’ve seen and talked to enough people who do those things to know that it’s more work for less money than I actually want.

Truly, I actually miss being unemployed. I was sad but days spent smoking weed and watching TV were way more fun than what I’m doing now. But the financial hit it’s taken, and the career hit I’d take if I left ANOTHER job (in a city where a lot of people know each other, so it’s hard to burn people or disappoint them and hope for the best) after less than a year for nothing that I’ve planned out. Writing cover letters and resumes makes me depressed, since I’m pretending I want a job for any reason other than “they don’t pay you well for not working and smoking weed and listening to shoegaze.” LinkedIn has become the most toxic social media outlet, filled with craven morons willing to throw their opinions out there to justify their place in an economy they won’t understand in a decade. And the gatling gun of dumb social media influencers, people younger and hotter and harder-working than me with bullshit advice for how to lead a great life, makes me depressed about any prospects I could have making money as a podcaster or content creator, or something adjacent.

I know that’s a lot, and a lot that doesn’t have to do with work, and you probably stopped reading five paragraphs ago, but I still feel compelled to ask the question: How do I learn to love work again, knowing that I can’t change my circumstances right away and that the roots of what I need to tackle will take so long to tackle that I’ll still have to work while I’m trying to understand how to live with it better?

Sincerely,

Can AI Just Take Me Already?

Dear CAIJTMA,

Your letter made me push aside my novel this morning. I’m not supposed to do that. I’m supposed to work on my novel first thing, then squeeze everything else into the rest of my day however I can. Sometimes I work on the novel for six hours straight. It’s slow work and once I’m completely focused on it, I’m surprised and alarmed that it’s already the afternoon and I haven’t accomplished much.

I’m a good writer because I’ve been writing every day for thirty motherfucking years now. That said, this experiment with fiction always feels haphazard and ridiculous. I’m proud of my work but it is painstaking. Ask Polly is fun and fast and automatic. My brain knows the dance, enjoys it, improvises easily, falls off the stage but then fakes it like it was all a part of the plan. I learn things from the improvisation, from the clumsy fall, which is in some ways a motherfucking TRUST FALL. I trust the process. I feel good that no robots are watching or helping.

I find it impressive that someone who uses robot assistants all day wrote the letter that you sent to me without any robot assistance. Yes, I know the difference and so do many other people. You know the difference, too, but you probably don’t use robots to write important letters.

Knowing the difference. Having fun and falling and learning from the fall. Discernment and discovery. Experimentation and joy. These are all elements someone as smart and emotional as you are will need in his future work. I mean, look at how you live now: You took an aggravating job and automated it. There are a few bad things in that move, but it’s also remarkable how you’ve adapted. So I think you need to stay very clear about one important thing right now:

You can adapt. You are adaptive. You enjoy the adapting phase. But you’re also easily bored, because you’re so smart. You need a lot of variety, and you need big challenges.

It’s very difficult for depressed, overworked, highly emotional people to recognize their love of HUGE challenges, because it just sounds like MORE, like too much, like Jesus Christ, just let me rest.

But that’s not you, man. You are not about that life at all. I know you daydream about getting stoned and hanging out, but that’s just a false flag for the actual FUN you want to be having from solving problems, making new things, organizing talented people, improvising, and giving your all to some project or position that actually earns your favorite word: BENEFICENCE.

You want beneficence and novelty and fun. It might take three different projects or pursuits to cover everything you need. Or you might discover one thing that will fulfill you and earn you enough money to live.

I interrupt now with one important piece of advice: Never, ever confuse a pursuit with the people who do it. Never look online at people who do something and say “This is who I will become if I do this thing. I will look like them and sound like them.” No. You have principles and ideas so you will create your own category. You do not need to be dragged down by the ways that other people do a thing. Ignore them in order to grow your own weird garden in peace.

You also mention just wanting to get hit by an Amazon van so you can collect the disability and be let off the hook from working. I know that’s sort of a joke, but I think you want to communicate to me that you don’t want to struggle every single day with the torment of trying and failing to figure out how to move forward. You want me to know that this isn’t a casual thing like “Oh my job sucks!” or “Gee, my tentative job search is going badly!” You feel desperate and lonely, and you don’t know how to express to your wife that you can’t just trudge along and do what’s required to make a certain amount per year. You have to feel like you have free will or everything else crumbles around you.

There’s a lot of guilt and obligation in this picture. It’s so fucking hard to feel capable of improvising and taking on big challenges, which I think are two CORE NEEDS of yours, when guilt, shame, and high expectations are in the mix. Here’s a (sexist, sure) corollary: Imagine that your wife had a baby and she came to you and said, “I know I was supposed to watch the baby for five hours a day but as it turns out, I am not cut out for that, I am feeling like I’d rather walk into the sea, and that makes me feel like a big disappointment as a mother, woman, and human being.”

You are an evolved and egalitarian man who’s guided by compassion and firm principles. Therefore, I know you would tell her something like: “My love, don’t think for a second that this moment is a verdict on your value. You are luminous and you will be an incredible mother no matter what. Let’s rearrange some things and figure this out.”

This is a little bit of a swerve, and maybe I’m just falling off the goddamn stage at this point, but I need to say something important directly to you:

My love, don’t think for a second that this moment is a verdict on your value. You are luminous and you will have an incredible life no matter what. Let’s rearrange some things and figure this out.

I really want you to take those words to heart. You’re special. I am a little anti-SPECIAL at this moment, because I think we’re ALL special and this world makes life hard on most of us. But I also want you to understand that I really see you. I started reading your letter quickly, half-hoping I would lose interest immediately so I could tackle my novel like I’m supposed to. But I kept reading. And towards the end of your letter, I started to feel this quite honestly gutting wave of emotion for you and everyone like you. A voice inside my head said to me:

YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!!! YOU HAVE TO BUILD THIS MOTHERFUCKER A TEMPLE USING ONLY YOUR WORDS!!!!!

If I didn’t believe in falling right off the stage like a clown, I would back up now and say to myself, “No no no nonononono niet nein NEVER. Stop. Start over. Be reasonable.” But that’s not how temples get built, bitch. You build a temple because you’re overwhelmed, you’re passionate, you feel everything. You also have a method of managing those feelings, hence the temple. You want to share your method and your madness, even if it means picking up an old cliché and throwing it into the mix.

By the way, my husband told me that Jonathan Franzen stops reading a new novel after the second cliché. That makes perfect sense, but also, that’s how you become Jonathan Franzen. That’s the beauty and the terror of being Jonathan Franzen right there: The rigidity! The drawing of firm lines in the cement! The ripping up of cement with an expensive jackhammer, so you can redraw the goddamn line because your very important and rigid standards have recently become EVEN MORE RIGID AND SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER!

We can’t live like that, you and me. We have too many goddamn principles already. I see anyone making good money and I think, “Not like that, though. Never like that.” I have debts to handle! I have guilt around my husband needing to work too hard! And sometimes I feel like I reject particular options simply because they involve money. Money would mean I’m selling out. Expansion would steal the improvisation and fun out of my hands and it would never return. I’m too ugly to be famous. I’m too weird to have a real business to run.

Do you hear all of the voices of discouragement that rise up out of that FRANZONIAN RIGIDITY? (I know Franzen would prefer FRANZENIAN but I like FRANZONIAN for its similarity to AMAZONIAN [exotic, sexy, and also just a deadly dumb empire of terrible vans designed to run you over!] and also ZAMBONIAN [smoothing the ice, making it nice!])

See how I’m putting more parentheticals inside my parentheticals? (Even my goons got goons vibes.) That’s the energy you need in your life. But you’re not going to get it from an occasional walk. You’re depressed. You must do workout routines and maybe also run. Start with a free app but commit to a path. While we’re talking about concretes, buying a house is a good idea. It’s forced savings. It’s movement in the right direction. But you can’t work as much as you’re working. It sounds to me like you’re delivering a ton and now everyone expects too much from you. Fuck that. Ease off the peddle but don’t announce it. Leave earlier in the day or go in late and use that hour to exercise, then use the energy from the exercise to find something else — another job, yes, and a project that feeds your soul, too.

The biggest problem you have is that you currently see REST as what you want the most. In your case, considering your specific letter, this is a manifestation of the fact that even though you’re using AI to make your job more efficient, you have way too much computation going on in your head around the clock. You think you can’t think straight because the AI is working for you. This is understandable and will be the case for many people eventually. But I think a big piece of this for you, at this moment, is the unbearable guilt and despair that’s eating away at you. You feel you’re already letting your wife and yourself and the world down, simply by subsisting with the shitty job you have, simply by half-assing things and feeling lost and not wanting to commit to continuing on this shitty path but not having an alternative in mind.

This is when I remind you that I should be writing my novel right now. Here’s something I recently figured out: When I put Ask Polly in the “A” position (my first priority), it suffers. This is my DEEPLY FRANZONIAN brain, which is rigid and exacting and says DO YOUR ACTUAL JOB, YOU FRIVOLOUS HUNK OF BACK FAT! My FRANZONIAN brain tricks me into thinking that I make widgets for a living and also my widgets better be the best widgets in the universe or I’m a fucking failure.

But here’s the truth: When I put my novel in the “A” position and Ask Polly in the “B” position, my novel isn’t neglected for months on end, I gain momentum, and I have something new (see also: easily bored, impatient, restless mind requires novelty) to believe in. And guess what? Ask Polly has always thrived in the “B” position. Back when I had freelance book reviews and essays to juggle, Polly was my lively and weird break from careful, slow crafting. Polly was my flow, my getting in the zone. Also, Polly hates pressure and too much attention. As long as Polly can pretend that she’s just a fun experiment, Polly is fully ALIVE.

You need something else in your A position. It can’t be your fucking stupid job. Once you work out every other day (vigorously motherfucker, without injuring yourself) and you have something in the A position (It can be an experiment! You don’t have to commit just yet! It’s a trust fall. It’s fun. Improvise, bitch!), then you’ll start to have the energy to imagine a full life that includes whatever job will pay the bills.

But you can’t become FRANZONIAN about your job or your A project or your life or even your marriage, for that matter. You can’t get rigid and expect the best from yourself in all things. Dude, you need to sit down with your wife and say, “I need to feel like I have choices. I promise I will not choose to become a stoner. But help me trick myself into feeling more free! I am trying to choose AMBITION ITSELF, but I’m realizing that I can’t even make a choice at all at the moment because I’m so afraid of letting you and myself and the world down along the way!”

Then your wife gets to tell you all of the things she’s feeling FRANZONIAN about and all the things she dreams of doing. She will also probably tell you that she’s afraid you’ll end up like Grant, that motherfucker who hasn’t worked for two years and Kyra is about to fucking leave him for some hot weirdo she met in Al Anon.

Now that we’ve reached 4813 words (I blame at least 2757 words of this on your exceedingly long letter!), I should mention that I just canceled my lane reservation at the lap pool. Why did I do this? Why did I shove aside my novel and my swim for you? Isn’t this the opposite of what I’m telling you to do?

No. I’m demonstrating the highly non-Franzonian method of following intensity wherever it leads. I’m showing you that life can be entertaining and weird and extremely hopeful, as long as you have the guts to show up for it and expose your entire fragile, scared, intense heart and brain and spirit to its vicious, unpredictable maw, which will either lick you affectionately or bite you in half on any given day. That’s reality.

I love Jonathan Franzen so much, but I can tell you right now, that man doesn’t spend enough time in reality. Or maybe that’s the Franzen of 20 years ago. I’ll read his new book and give you an update. In the meantime, I want you to read two books: Already Free by Bruce Tift and Black Bag by Luke Kennard.

I know you’re too busy and reading sounds exhausting at the moment. But I want you to replace a chunk of your fretting and puzzling hours, which only make you hate life, with just reading these two books. Read them without guilt. Read them with an open mind and an open heart.

Both books are just for you. Remember that as you read them. The only reason I found the time to read them myself was that I put my novel in the A position and then I said, “Novelists read more than you do, you foolish twat!” So now I get to read during my A-position novel-writing hours, because it’s essential. My brain has been so underfed.

Neurosis is a substitute for experiential intensity.

This is Bruce Tift’s variation on Jung’s “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” That’s so fucking Franzonian of Jung, honestly, but remember that Jung was buddies with Freud before they parted ways, so he has that punishing mentality in his DNA, even when he’s working so hard to bliss out on Eastern alternatives.

Tift’s variation is even better, particularly in this era of blaming ourselves for all of the world’s ills, then blaming ourselves for NOT SUFFERING LEGITIMATELY on top of that. I would argue that our phones inflict legitimate suffering on each of us every single fucking day.

What Tift is saying is this: We are always working very hard to circumnavigate experiential intensity. That avoidant work takes countless forms. We can get into difficult relationships in order to have a big emotional puzzle that needs to be solved before we do anything else. I have done this dozens of times. We can also take on jobs we hate, and pretend that life can’t change until we quit the hated job, but when we do quit, we are hit in the head with the frying pan of reality and EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY and we become very afraid and then we crawl back to some other shitty job. We can also pick up difficult friends, struggle with old troubles from the distant past even though they are long buried, pick weird fights with imaginary foes inside our heads, torture ourselves with the lives of strangers online, drink too much, or smoke too much pot, thereby delaying the present moment and its INTENSITY indefinitely.

We have millions of avenues for feeling neurotic instead of feeling the blunt force of reality, which for sensitive people is so overwhelming that it crushes us into dust very quickly.

Yet when we simply feel that blunt force, face reality, endure that pain and fear, invite EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY into our lives, and DARE to stand our ground as we scream, cry, and feel way too much, something strange happens: We actually expand, grow, and catch a clear view past our immediate troubles. We suddenly stop seeing ourselves as POISONOUS and weak and damaged and we stop seeing the world as uniformly corrupt. We can take a deep breath and let the world be what it is.

I know that feels exceedingly difficult right now, but it is still possible for you.

That’s why we all (everyone reading this, and everyone you know) need to walk straight into the violent storm of EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY and let it transform us into people who can exist on this planet and build good things and fight for what we believe in.

Here’s what EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY requires from us:

• Flexibility

• Self-forgiveness

• Curiosity

• Principles

• An Appreciation For Raw Sadness

• Improvisation

• Patience

Here’s what EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY offers us:

• Passion

• Commitment

• Connection

• An understanding that “To walk the earth is a miracle” (Thich Nhat Hanh)

This is what I want for you. I want you to be able to dream again — I mean in the “Embrace your biggest dreams” sense, but also in the “I had the craziest dream last night” sense.

Speaking of which, I had the craziest dream last night. I was walking around San Francisco, and all of these steep roads were blocked off by piles of crumbled wreckage. There had been a huge earthquake. People’s furniture and mirrors and clothes and books were scattered across the roads, along with the splintered remains of their Victorian houses. Finally I made my way down to the harbor. A huge gray battleship was there, carrying people in white hazmat suits with weird black symbols on them. They were all holding assault rifles.

I had a small dog with me, brown and floppy, maybe a King Charles Spaniel or similar. It’s not the type of dog I personally favor, and this one was very needy. It needed me to protect it from whatever the fuck was going down in the city. A few minutes later, I found another King Charles Spaniel, but this one was white with weird black marks on it. This new dog was also not to my taste, but it also needed my protection.

When I woke up (2 am, ouch!) I thought immediately of my father, who died from a heart attack 31 years ago this month. When he died, he was my age right now. I thought about how I have been running and swimming a lot, just like he did the year he died. I thought about how I’m reading his copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness right now. And then I had this visceral, deep understanding of how much painful work my dad to do just to stay afloat as a human being. He was a flawed person, but he was vibrant, thrilling, oversensitive, intense, and wide open in ways that were a true miracle.

I knew I needed to go back to sleep. But I lay there in bed and instead of thinking, “This sucks!” I welcomed the flash of understanding that had arrived at such an inconvenient moment. This wasn’t about feeling my feelings (like I often tell people to do), because I wouldn’t have been able to name my feelings at all. This was about welcoming experiential intensity instead of pushing it away. It was about choosing the sensation over the thought.

I lay there knowing how it must’ve felt to be my father. That’s all. I wish I could tell him that I understand, I thought. But then I thought: He knows. And also: I need to feel this way about my mother before she’s dead and gone. I need to be more understanding of how hard she has to work to stay afloat.

Then I had this strong feeling that my dad was saying to me: Your mom exercises constantly. The pickleball, Christ. The gardening. I’m honestly impressed. And she’s so cheerful. Tell her I’m impressed with her.

Now listen to me: My parents got divorced long before my dad died. He was not in the habit of saying nice things about her. And if I called my mom to tell her this, she might just tell me to fuck off. So this was absurd. I’m also not saying my dad was talking to me from beyond the grave. I’m not saying he wasn’t, but I’m definitely not saying he was, either. What I’m saying is that EXPERIENTIAL INTENSITY takes some wild and savage forms, so wild and savage that you might just suspect that they are NOT reality.

Embracing experiential intensity means refusing to judge and label. We have to say to ourselves, “Whatever this is, I will accept its gifts. I won’t fixate or name.”

So now I think you understand why I pushed aside my novel and canceled my swim. My very firm conviction is that I thrive when I follow my gut, improvise, and allow intensity to guide me. I’m here to let the world in, whether it shows up at 2 am and involves assault rifles, hazmat suits, my dead father, and two dogs that need me way too much, or it shows up at 9 am and involves a guy who fucking hates his shitty job.

This requires balance. I need to work out but never optimize. I need to follow a schedule but also follow my muse. I need to remember how fucking broke I am but also respect my principles.

This column is 6457 words long, and I don’t give a fuck, because today I have some shit to say to you. I need to build you a temple. You need to understand, deeply, that I see you and I feel you and I am with you. The world is fucked and it’s terrifying. We don’t get to stand in the path of a fucking AMAZONIAN van. We cannot become FRANZONIAN and rigidly reject anything that is not pure and brilliant and perfect. We must allow our overworked brains a rest, to become ZAMBONIAN and smooth the scratched-up ice until it’s real nice. We do this, paradoxically, by letting the world in more. Not through our phones, but through our senses, through our faces, through our bodies.

We smooth the ice real nice by cruising around in the world like a motherfucker riding a Zamboni does. Those guys are always so fucking chill, have you noticed? They love their jobs so much. You know why? Because they just get on the goddamn machine and go. They cruise. They don’t overthink it. They feel the moment. They drink in the electricity. Winning or losing, they love those very scarce moments on the ice.

This life is so brief. I fucking hate how brief it is! That’s reality. That’s experiential intensity. You are a brilliant freak and you need to honor what you are at any cost. You must build a life that works for you. Stay awake and alive and lean into the terror of where you are. I can see that you’re already feeling too much for your taste and you want a break. I would argue that what you call “feeling” is just thinking, and that’s the part you need less of. The feeling is not the enemy. The intensity is not the enemy. The reality of this rough world is not the enemy.

Your busy mind can slow down. You will still be just as smart. Turn away from your brain’s puzzles. But don’t distance yourself from the intensity of what you’re feeling. Don’t be afraid to feel more. Stop stabbing your feelings with the sharpened stick of neurosis. BE THE SOFT, INTENSE, BRAVE HUMAN YOU ARE OUT IN THE OPEN.

Your temple is already right here. You made it with words, with art, with music, with jokes, with your marriage, with your friends, even with your current job. Maybe you’re also supposed to write a novel. Maybe you’re also supposed to create a community arts foundation. Maybe you will eventually start a new company that supports people in their efforts to reshape this fucked up world into something more livable. You can live inside a big question mark right now and also choose some random way of honoring your ideals, your body, your intelligence, and your imagination.

But most of all, I need for you to honor your love of huge challenges. You need to own your passionate, larger-than-life call to build big things. It’s all there in your letter. Every time you tell me how fucked up things are, how impossible and sick and corrupt, that’s what I hear. I hear the truth of how invested you are in this world, how much responsibility you take for it, how vivid your ideals are. That’s why I love your letter so much, and that’s why I built you this 6958-word temple. I built you something way too long and way too big in honor of the way-too-big stuff you want to build.

You don’t have to do it all in one day. You don’t have to do it AT ALL, in fact. You just have to admit to yourself that you are much more intense and fragile and also ambitious than you pretend to be. And instead of protecting yourself and the world from that person, it’s time to let that person breathe freely.

It’s not about making everything positive. It’s about letting everything be what it already is. It’s about letting go of control.

Letting go of control will make you more practical, too. Take a year off from getting food delivered. Learn to make beans and rice. I miss expensive food and lazy living, too, but I can’t afford it. Eat more potatoes. Austerity measures can be invigorating.

Guilt is your enemy. Guilt is a big piece of your depression. You don’t want to fail anyone. Talk to your wife about this. Look for a sliding-scale therapist who sounds smart. Travel less for a while. Look at small houses that need love. Yes, I’m implying that you might not hit your income goals, and you need to adjust your lifestyle to accommodate that. You two have to build a shared vision of the future together. You each have to make a living obviously. You each need a job. But you also need to build a combination of job, projects, and hobbies that feels like a full life and not a fucking miserable, exhausting slog.

Treat yourself with care. Care includes understanding and honoring your nature. You’re going to be fine, more than fine, absolutely joyful. But you will also suffer sometimes. That’s the reality of being sensitive. We aren’t trying to steer you away from pain. We want you to feel the pain so that you’re less depressed. Depression leads to workaholism and also stoned video games. Joy and pain lead to experiential intensity, the temple, vibrant dreams, big challenges, exercise, and deep, honest, intense love and connection.

Write down earnest, embarrassing ideas and thoughts more often. Make that your A project for now. Eventually, your A project will become something big and beautiful that grows out of those thoughts and ideas and feelings. And every day you pull it off, every single day you put your big, ambitious project (that is embarrassing, that maybe pays nothing, that makes no sense, that doesn’t matter and never will) in the A position, I want you to say to yourself what my dad told me to tell my mom:

Quite honestly, I’m impressed.

You have the right to honor your genius so much more than you do. You have the right to marvel at your fortitude. But you also have a right to work less hard at your job. I mean, for fuck’s sake! Draw firmer boundaries! But most of all, THINK LESS ABOUT WORK. Your day job is your B position, always. Remember, I love Ask Polly, but it can’t be in the A position or it suffers. I can’t overthink it. You’re like me. You need something wild and free in your A position — your top priority, your experiment, a way to challenge your big brain. You can fail at this thing over and over and it’s still going to save your ass, because it’s too hard and too important to bear.

Having fun and falling and learning from the fall. Discernment and discovery. Experimentation and joy.

Don’t give up on yourself. Stop soaking in how bad everything is and instead, imagine that things could get even worse. Let that in. Feel the pain of it. Feel the terror of strangers in hazmat suits, carrying automatic rifles. Feel irrational love for a weird, floppy dog that is not your favorite breed. Say to the dog: I will take care of you. But we won’t be too pure about this. We’ll get scrappy. We’ll build a little shack from these splintery boards. We’ll gather wildflowers from abandoned lots. I’ll make it nice for both of us. It will be beautiful. Don’t be scared. Things will get scary, but I am here.

Polly

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Thanks for reading. I’m going to make t-shirts that say “LESS FRANZONI, MORE ZAMBONI.” If you want one, email me and I might actually do it: askpolly@protonmail.com. Either way, I’m going to keep building us a temple from splintery boards. Things will get scary, but I am here.