How Desperate Are You?

Desperate energy is said to lead to a vibration of powerlessness, give other people the ick and stop you from achieving your goals. But is it always all bad?

How badly do you want the things you want? When you look at the goals on your manifestation board, in your notes or scrutinise those desires that sit constantly front of mind, how much would you be prepared to sacrifice to achieve them? Would you literally give up everything? Outside of you know, kids, relationships and really really good shoes? Would you say you wanted certain things desperately?

Yet on reflection, how many occasions in life have you been told how incredibly unattractive desperation makes you? At job interviews we’re counselled to feign ‘other opportunities’ lest you ‘smell of desperation’. When it comes to romance, we’re told there is no greater turn off than being too into it. So, we play things cool, avoid coming on too strong, and try to hide how deeply and truly we’re seeking connection. If you want to be stylish, you’re counselled by the stylish to look like you just rolled out of bed. Otherwise, you’re a try-hard. Too much makeup or surgery = desperate. If you dress ‘too slutty’ you’re clearly desperado. Women of a certain age wearing certain clothes: desperate. If you’re too desperate for a baby you’re advised to ‘take the pressure off’ to make it happen, because heaven forbid you allow your hopes and dreams to harden your resolve. No matter what you’re desperate for—a partner, money, friends, children or career—revealing such extreme desire, even to yourself, apparently pushes your goal even further away. Desperation, it is said, leads you into making bad decisions. It means you come to any situation from a position of weakness and your myopia prevents you from seeing the true landscape. The message is: be motivated and have clarity on what you want in life, but don’t want it too badly or it won’t happen. Care less, lest you become repellent.

I recently went to an event where there was a clairvoyant on hand to do readings. If you read my take on lucky charms and superstition earlier this month, you’ll know that crystal balls aren’t my jam. But I played along and passed over my jewellery for her to extract my essence from. The very first thing she said was that my energy was coming from a place of desperation. Internally I rolled my eyes (as I’m obviously far too much of a desperate people pleaser to do that IRL), but also in the grand scheme of this life, I have absolutely nothing to be desperate about. She shared some other insights, correctly predicting that I would soon be travelling (I’m writing to you from LA rn), but that one opening word got stuck in my craw. Even for someone with a robust sense of esteem, no-one likes to be called desperate do they? My initial moment of dismissal gave way to a deeper consideration over the weeks since and I haven’t been able to shake it. I’ve found myself wondering if perhaps in some areas of my life I do operate from the despo zone. I’ve also found myself trying to work out if that really matters. 

Without a doubt, there have been times along this rocky road when I have wanted something desperately and during those moments, it’s true that I’ve been prepared to make mad compromises to get there. Weeks, months, years of eroding my mental and physical health through work to reach the next rung; staying in abusive and violent relationships for way, way too long; working for abusive and toxic people; trying to make damaged people like or love me. At times I’ve compromised my personal safety and there’s no doubt that my wellbeing was priced extremely cheaply. This all sounds terrible, but as a rejoinder, I also want to admit that sometimes despair has led to achieving what I desired so deeply. Sometimes I have been grateful to my desperation because it kept me on a track to achieving something which has made an immeasurably positive impact on my life. Of course, other times, years have passed and my goals have floated only further away. But because of these dual experiences, I cannot believe that simply wanting something too badly undermines your ability to realise it. I can absolutely believe that a level of desperation has the power to screw up your life, not least of all because it’s so fucking draining to be so desperate. But I can’t categorically say that desperation doesn’t pay off, because sometimes it does. 

Desperation comes from the Latin de-sperare meaning ‘to lose all hope’. It can, quite clearly, be a poison. But wanting something so badly and never wavering from the course, even when there seems to be literally zero hope could also be construed as hardcore tenacity, at least in hindsight. My question is: why is desperate so bad, but resilience so good? Aren’t they just two ways to tell the same story? Perhaps we’re only resilient after the fact, whereas while you’re in the melée you can’t help but start to reek of eau de desperado. People can love you when you’ve made it through the wilderness (so tenacious), but cringe from you while you’re barefoot in that desert (so desperate).

The creed of manifestation would say that even the faintest inkling of desperation stops the law of attraction from doing its job. Subconscious though your desperation may be, the argument is that wanting anything too badly can lead only to a ‘vibration’ of powerlessness. Manifesters would say the difference between tenacity and desperation are a question of psychic energy. To keep turning up to the plate and believing in yourself is tenacious, to keep turning up because you believe you have no other option is desperation. My argument is that at some point, just physically standing there will lead to some kind of run. One day, due to the law of averages, the ball will connect with the bat, no matter how you feel about yourself.  I also simply don’t buy the argument that you can’t create anything from a place of desperation – just think about the proverbial artist in their garret.  I truly believe that there are a lot of semantics in circulation right now - after all, the line between hunger (in its metaphorical sense) and desperation is also wafer thin. I’ve been hungry my whole life and lots of amazing things have happened to me. I’m not defending desperation; I just don’t think we should shit on it as quite as hard as we do.

Social media is at its core a pretty thirsty business. In order to be successful, you need to be professionally popular and as we were all schooled in school, to be popular you need to please a good number of people without looking like you tried at all. This kind of thing can be very bad for the soul as I’m constantly reminded through conversations with my peers. If you are desperate for love or connection or validation, social media is about the worst place to be in the world. But equally, desperation in the space can work really well if your only metric is driving eyes. Not really caring that much doesn’t really boost the algorithm, but going to ever-drastic lengths to attract the attention of your audience will get you clocking those numbers up. I do— of course—care how my content performs because it’s part of my business, but the key is to care just enough to keep working hard and feel inspired, but not enough to be emotionally flattened by the inevitable tumbleweed moments. This is a skill I’ve had to learn. I’ve definitely been desperate at times in my 10+ year career online and if I’ve got my period, it still has the power to set me off my axis. But then so does an Andrex ad, so that’s potentially not the best benchmark. What I’m really trying to say is that there is a lot of desperation which at least on the surface gets rewarded and having experienced desperate moments online (early motherhood being a palpable example), I can say for sure that it hasn’t stopped me from building a business on it which continues to keeps a roof over my head.

When I really drilled down, I can definitely acknowledge that there are some areas where I’m probably giving out some desperate energy. I know, for example, that I can go to a place of excessive generosity in friendships, especially new ones—both materially and in spirit. Going over and above the call of duty to help people who you don’t know very well or have never particularly done anything remotely generous for you can definitely come off as needy and people pleasing. It also often does the exact opposite to what you had intended, making others feel really uncomfortable and indebted and before long you generally end up realising that you’ve made yourself a mug. I do things along these lines all the time, it’s a hard-wired pattern which frustrates the people who love me. Stepping back from that is really fucking hard, because a) obviously, somewhere in my mind, I believe it’s how to make people like me and b) because generosity fires up all our dopamine receptors.

As mentioned before, because I have valued my energy and time cheaply, it has always seemed like nothing to give it away for free. But I am coming to realise it is never free. There is always some kind of cost or repercussion and I end up making compromises which aren’t positive for either myself or my family. Staying up late to proofread a friend’s CV means I’m tired and crochety with my kids in the morning. Putting together a full travel itinerary for someone in my DMs who I have literally never met takes my time and energy from achieving the still elusive goals on my board. Doing three other people’s GCSE coursework as a teenager was probably not beneficial to any party. The only person at fault here is me, because I often insist upon helping and will never take anything in exchange like Mrs Doyle in Father Ted. Go, on, go, go on, go on. Here the crystal ball might have had a point and I’ve come to think it’s time to address it.

After a short counselling session, I have come to the conclusion that I have to stop giving away my time, energy and expertise for free on every gradient. It feels sickening to even write those words, because I would hate to be seen as grasping, miserly or avaricious. But also, I’m getting too long in the tooth to be trying to curry favour in ways which compromise my own health and happiness as well as that of those around me. In my desperation to achieve things, I can be blind and selfish to the ways it impacts my family—and while we all have to compromise family life at times for our work, putting my mania on the people I love to provide free work for others is something which if not desperate, is definitely not good.

This is the reason I have decided that after a year of weekly newsletters and nearly 100k free words, I’m now going to be charging on a subscription basis for Every Shade of Grey from the beginning of November. There will be an additional post of recommendations every week to bolster the value of what I’m asking payment for, but I know this decision means that far, far fewer people will be engaging with my words and that is a conversation I’m going to have to have with my ego. It has been a massive privilege to speak to so many of you on a weekly basis, and I definitely don’t want to underestimate that or throw that support back in anyone’s face. I fully understand that attention is a commodity in our weird era and having yours has been a true honour. Moreover, I get that it is natural to feel annoyed when something which was once complimentary now comes with a price tag. In many contexts it would annoy the hell out of me too. Because we have become so used to content for free (something I’ve personally been complicit in), paying for words still feels punchy. But I hope that this piece in a little way explains why I’ve made this decision.

Acceptance is a massive part of the story of desperation, one which is often overlooked. I have desperately wanted a home and I now have one and though it’s not permanent, it is here for today and tomorrow and that is enough, because no one knows the future anyway. I desperately wanted a loving partner, yet mine doesn’t look or behave anywhere close to what I’d imagined. We have an amazing partnership, but it's not hearts and roses. Those fantasies have been put to bed, they were never real anyway. I’ve wanted a family, a career, health, wealth, experience, to squeeze every little joy out of these blink and you’ll miss them trips around the sun. None of any of it has gone to plan and yet I’m so intensely grateful for every positive moment I’ve had. If you feel desperate, I want you to know that this narrative of it only leading to more bad things is just not necessarily true.

Recent research has shown that it isn’t desperation that undermines happiness, but what you envisage happiness to look like. In the Journal of Experimental Psychology, General, author Brett Ford of the University of California shows that culture predicts whether or not the pursuit of happiness leads to reduced or improved wellbeing. In Japan for example, happiness is viewed as social endeavour and connection to friends and family. Conversely in the U.S. happiness is seen in individualist terms – the best career, the most successful children, the most widely read Substack (I might have added this one in). In cultures like these, desperately wanting to be happy is linked with lower psychological health, simply because the goals are so ridiculously high and rely on only one person to achieve them. Instead of appearing successful and getting the validation from speaking to thousands of people, I’m simply going to try and reflect my own value more generously, something which I hope can inspire you to do too.

Before I go, I want to add the valid point that these are very personal conclusions and I know for many other Substackers, operating a free subscription service is of huge value. It’s absolutely not a slight or judgement on anyone else’s circumstances except my own. What’s more, if this newsletter means something to you and you really can’t afford it, please email me and I’ll gift you a subscription (old habits will, thank goodness, always die hard). Finally, I’ll probs still be despo from time to time (aka every 28 days), tussle with regret over this decision and worry that perceived pride will come before a fall. That may all come to pass, but I need to at least see what life is like when I stop grinding for gratis, no matter how the chips fall.