Set Up to Fail

How the World Makes Us Unwell

Let’s be honest: the world we live in is not organized around well-being. It’s a system that, quite frankly, doesn’t care about your emotional or relational health. We can post about it, write essays and poems about it, but at the end of the day, we’re all fighting an uphill battle.

Our culture runs on power, control, money, and performance—not emotional attunement. Red flags are actually irrelevant. In fact, the very behaviors we now label as “red flags” are often celebrated and rewarded. It’s a twisted setup, but we still run around pretending otherwise.

We go to work to get paid, not to be emotionally validated. Most environments—online and offline—are toxic. Almost everyone carries trauma. Most people have never received real care or repair, and we’re all walking around with invisible wounds, mild to severe, doing our best to function: showing up to work, brushing our teeth, pretending everything’s fine when it’s not.

We Have No Real Space to Be Ourselves

I’ve been a therapist for nearly 15 years, and almost every client I’ve ever had has said some version of:
“You know more about me than anyone.”

It’s an honor—but also a reflection of something broken in this world. People tell me things they’ve never shared with their mother, partner, or best friend. That’s not the problem—it’s the symptom.