It's not a marathon or a sprint. It's strength training.

The Question

I know you say motivation is not real and stuff. But I’m having a really hard time feeling like doing anything lately.

It sounds selfish to say, but the state of the world is really dragging on me, and I feel awful that it’s just one atrocity after another and I feel powerless to do anything. I know all the stuff I should be doing for my health, I’m not an idiot, but lately all I feel like is eating a pint of ice cream and going to sleep.

I know I can’t, and I know that feeling probably won’t even last. But it also does feel like sometimes it will, because every day just brings something new and even worse. I feel miserable and hopeless and everything feels pointless. I know you can’t change everything that’s going on and this is a lot to ask but… any advice? —Listless

The Answer

Well first, a story: In 1969, Black children in Oakland were hungry. They were falling asleep in class at school and complaining of stomach cramps. So the Black Panthers fed them. They set up the Free Breakfast for School Children Program, establishing a regular practice of sourcing food through donations and getting volunteers to cook and serve the breakfast free of charge.

It was an extremely tense time, politically and culturally. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in broad daylight only a year before. There was deserved urgency around getting more resources for Black people in the U.S., who had been systemically disenfranchised for centuries. Breakfast served to children at a single church was, obviously, was not going to move bills through Congress or curry votes for friendly politicians or stop police brutality.

And yet, the program quickly touched a nerve. The first breakfast was held at only a single Episcopal Church in Oakland, but the movement spread to 45 different locations nationwide in a few years. It exposed a very clear and yet unmet need, and was specifically embarrassing to the government, which had made a big show of its “War on Poverty.”

I know what you are thinking: I, too, long for the bygone days when it was possible to embarrass the government. I, too, long for the simple times when the government was not constantly embarrassing itself while making uninterrupted eye contact, and then doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on that embarrassment. We are being constantly embarrassed, and then praying not to be embarrassed any further, and then being disappointed with every passing five to ten minutes.

But let’s put that aside for now because—what a lovely and beautiful thing. Feeding kids breakfast. A need being met through collective action. Seemingly distant from the core demands of a movement, and yet it was so threatening that J. Edgar Hoover started ordering FBI agents to raid the uh [checks notes] children’s breakfast events. Amazing guy. America is nothing if not proud to carry on the “amazing guys in government” tradition.

I have thought a lot about the free breakfast program in the last few months. I bring it up in part because what you are asking is an existential question that workout advice is not equipped to deal with. I could just be like yeah you go girl, self care, fill your cup and secure your mask first, and so on, but I think you are probably already aware of that advice, and appreciate how empty that kind of stuff feels, especially now. So here is how I am thinking about things as a person also just trying to live, who is prone to that same kind of overwhelm.

If you are like me, you went into the start of the last seven-ish years so flat-footed that your toes were peeling up from the floor. I can hardly remember a time before I wasn’t hearing on almost a daily basis that “it’s a marathon, not a sprint.” Hearing about how it’s a marathon and not a sprint has truly been a marathon and not a sprint, regrettably.

But I feel that the marathon metaphor has never been that apt. Running a marathon is not something you can just pick up and do. You need to be really, really trained to be able to run a marathon at all. A marathon training program for someone who’s never run a marathon before takes something like five months.

You also don’t get up and run a little bit of marathon every day. You don’t run a marathon for days and weeks and months on end. You do have to keep going, in a marathon, for what feels like an endless, interminable amount of time. But calling anything a “marathon” makes it a slog, something that has to be endured and borne and survived, scraping and scratching while in unbearable pain we have to also fight to ignore, eyes forever trained on a finish line that, in reality, is not coming.[^1]

Why frame it like that, rather than as something that needs all of our active, strategic participation and growth, now more than ever? Something where validating our own experiences, staying in touch with ourselves is the point? Something where a little at a time, on a regular basis, is THE way to both create change and build a capacity for affecting change? What if it were not a slog with a grimly distant finish line like a marathon, but a sustained, steady, enriching progression, like strength training?

So now I’m going to say two different lessons drawn from strength training, that support both your literal strength training as well as the metaphorical strength training of redirecting your energy. They will sound like they are at odds at first, but give me a second.

First: Don’t be precious about getting started and using your time. No one knows better than me how easy it is to get caught up on where to start, to feel pulled urgently in so many directions that you end up just sitting there, paralyzed. More to the point, when you don’t even know where to start, you likely also are not situated to contribute much, which makes it feel extra pointless and worthless to even try figuring out where to start. What is the point of going to the gym when a 5-pound dumbbell feels perilously heavy to you, anyway? There are people putting finishing touches on a Habitat for Humanity house or proudly watching their nontraditional, at-risk students graduate community college—what good is your piddling contribution?

But here comes the strength training metaphor: We all know by now, hopefully, that in order to get strong, showing up and checking the box at a regular interval matters way, way more than almost anything else. It matters way more than any innate talent you are bringing to the table. It matters way more than whatever skills you have. It matters way more than even your sense of direction, even if your sense of direction is not all that great. You have to provide for the opportunity to get better at it, in order to get better at it. And to do that, you have to show up.

Times like this are perfectly designed for building empathy and reaching outward and locking arms, if we can get over the hump of individualism and self-preservation. There is a reason that it’s commonly recommended to depressed people to focus on establishing and sticking to a basic routine—showers, eating meals, getting outside, exercising—and to try out helping others.

The world needs you and you need you right now. It is beyond time to be real with yourself: Are you struggling from actual burnout and exhaustion? By all means, take a play or several off. But if what you are really struggling with is disconnection and disaffection, or just too much computer/phone, I’m sorry, but I’m clapping my hands in your face. I know people lie down and die (literally, metaphorically) in these kinds of scenarios all the time, but I’m not that kind of guy, and hopefully you didn’t come here for that kind of advice. I will be yanking on your arm to keep moving until the fireball is bearing down on us both.

Exercise and other ways of taking basic care of yourself may seem stupid right now. By all means, find every way to give them a purpose other than propping yourself up. Picking up trash is cardio, etc.

But you really can only spend so much time lifting weights every week anyway, a few hours tops unless you are some kind of Olympic athlete. If you don’t already intrinsically feel that, for instance, change is possible through one person’s sustained, incremental effort, I do really still believe after all this that something like lifting weights allows you to concretely see it, in a way that will translate outward. You need that lesson ingrained in you for everything else that is going on. The same is true of doing actual helpful things: You have to start, and small contributions can be incredibly meaningful. But they can’t end up incredibly meaningful in the grand scheme if you don’t give them room to be imperfect at first.

So, second: You need to be ruthlessly discerning with your time. I know, that sounds like the opposite of “just get started, doesn’t matter where.” But especially if you feel like the proverbial sweaty eyeball, stewing in the horrors of the world, you have to be your own parent and get up and move through it. If you feel overtaxed, you have to take an earnest inventory and discard everything that isn’t actually helpful. Regarding the metaphor, you have to differentiate between what is building toward something, and what is just wearing you out.

Per Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny (specifically, lesson 18), the goal of all of this is to exhaust and destabilize us:

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.

Snyder is mostly talking about The Hypothetical Big One of terrorist attacks (another 9/11, another Oklahoma City bombing). But when every day brings new unthinkable terrors, it’s our whole job to manage our feelings and attention.

Thus, it’s never been more important to be strategic. This is not “give endlessly”; it’s “be smart.” The task at hand is to be extremely discerning about what is challenging because it is worthwhile, rewarding and necessary, versus what is challenging because it is draining, time wasting, exhausting, distracting, destructive, meant to exhaust and divide our resources.

Just as an example: This absolute batshit crazy man keeps saying he wants the U.S. to forcibly take over Greenland. Calling your rep to say “hey: absolutely not on the Greenland thing”: takes 90 seconds. Consuming every pieces of news and analysis about why annexing Greenland shouldn’t be possible, or how Greenland feels about it, or how Greenland and the U.S.’s military measure up, or what every other country in the world thinks about Greenland, the U.S., and any potential future U.S./Greenland interactions: could take days, weeks, months. Literally every second you might spend doing some kind of real action, even picking up trash on the side of the road, would be more worthwhile than any second spent on trying to understand the deranged stuff going on that is designed to waste time and energy.

Let it be true that nothing you do as an individual is going to literally change the constant onslaught of bad national news. Good then: You are free, free to focus on what does have a direct impact near you. Maintaining your strength. Helping someone load groceries into their car. Cleaning up a park. You need to preserve that connection to the world around you more than you think, if for no other reason than we all need to be reminded of what we care about and are fighting for. I think your mindset would benefit from both literally building strength as well as carrying those lessons into the world.

Maybe it “doesn’t matter,” but nothing really matters. People die all of the time and have been suffering horrors all your life; you are just hearing about more of them all of a sudden. This has always been true and will be true. History is a series of repeated atrocities. But some wonderful things happen in between them. We are capable of wonderful things. We love wonderful things. We love gathering. We love breakfast (most of us, anyway). We love caring and being cared for. Give it to yourself to remind yourself of what is possible to give to other people.

So how did things end with the Black Panther breakfast program? In one way, it did end with FBI raids. But by the time Hoover got into their hair, the impact had been made: there were so many programs feeding so many children that no one wanted it to just end, and the Black Panthers had spurred the USDA into feeling competitive about the task of feeding children. By 1975, the USDA permanently authorized its own version of the free breakfast program. Now 14.5 million children eat free breakfast every day. (Or they did, at least, if that program hasn’t already been gutted.)

These are the simplest rules of physics: stagnation begets stagnation, but motion begets motion. Go. We need you.

[F1] Here I hold space for people who hear the word “marathon” and are flooded with delight and anticipation. You weirdos. Also I’ll just say this here: For real mental health challenges, if you just can’t pick yourself up, put whatever energy you have into getting help.