We deserve better than this $h*tshow

No matter what your politics are, it’s hard to deny that for anyone who cares about science — especially of the biomedical kind — things are looking a wee bit *tough* at the moment, what with NIH shutdowns, study sections cancelled, and we’re only a week into this new administration. In addition, if you’re LGBTQ, or BIPOC, or foreign-born, or... pretty much anyone with an open mind and an ounce of compassion, things may seem just a tad dystopian.

We’re not talking about tough as in, having to drive around for five minutes to find a parking spot before you can get your deca-shot mocha mega frappe supreme on your way to work. I mean tough like, what if suddenly there were no more coffee beans available? Or, worse — no job to go to after picking up that drink.

Gut-wrenching, life-changing hard times seem on the horizon for a lot of us.

Being a scientist is one of the toughest jobs there is. You spend years training, forestalling big paydays while earning a pittance in graduate school — or going deep into medical school debt — to eventually work your way into a position where you must scrape, claw, and beg for funding to keep doing the research that may actually help people live better lives.

And it seems right now like those people don’t give a sh$t, like they’re poised to tear it all down. We’re at a moment that feels depressing at best, existentially threatening at worst.

You deserve better. And I don’t say that in a hollow, coaching pep-talk kind of way. It is a foundational belief for me, and I’m here today to tell you why it’s time for you to embrace it too.

Those who currently hold the political power in the US deserved their way into it.

You’re probably wondering how this statement fits with the 1001 other theories of why the election went the way it did. Everybody’s got one (at least).

So around here, we don’t just look at the surface of things. After all, we’re researchers, and inquiry is in our nature. We like to look at the things beneath the surface, at the causes and mechanisms for what we’re seeing at the surface. We hope to explain things in a way that is more actionable, in terms of what you can DO if you want to change what’s happening on the surface — both for you, and for humanity in general.

To do so, you have to understand how we create reality. Unfortunately, most of us who are trained in science are quite poor at this, while our counterparts who’d like to tear it all down have become shockingly good at it.

It all starts with that word “deserve.” Our president truly believes he deserves the job. He believes it so deeply, so firmly and unwaveringly that he came back from seeming political oblivion to capture the presidency, this time with a plurality of the vote. You might be saying to yourself, “Whatever he did to get that power, it’s bad and wrong and I want to do the exact opposite.” But that’s like saying, “If he brushes his teeth, I’m not going to brush mine.”

Watching someone who feels they deserve what they want — and what a powerful effect that has in bending reality to their will — is extremely instructive. And I’d like to propose that learning something important about ourselves from this sh&%show is much more empowering than wallowing in dread as we watch it unfold.

For years, I’ve observed that those who truly feel they deserve funding are more likely to get it. This is not some kind of magical effect. People who feel they deserve something think more clearly about how to get it, and as a result act more decisively and communicate more convincingly about what they want. In grant-writing terms, those who feel they deserve it more readily grasp how to write a better proposal that’s more likely to be funded. And those who harbor doubts about deserving funding, even unconsciously, make more mistakes and iterate far more, often almost seeming to resist getting the clarity they would need to make a convincing case for funding.

It starts with that belief and feeling of deserving, which then drives the thinking and resulting actions. This may seem quite alien, because it’s fundamentally counter to the training most of us went through for PhDs and MDs, in one important way:

All of our scientific training centers on logic and reason. All that vague emotional stuff? Sweep it under the rug. We learn to treat feelings like a pile of stinky dog turd in the middle of the carpet, from a puppy that’s not yet housebroken. And even when we acknowledge that feelings aren’t a failing, they are still too often an unwelcome visitor to the party that is research, because we don’t know how to deal with them. It’s not our language. It’s not how we’re trained to think.

We are trained to be rational. Reasonable. “Objective.”

I put that last word in quotes because it’s one of my most hated words in the dictionary. It’s a sham, a farce. We are not objective. To be truly objective would mean to consider all possibilities from all angles in some kind of algorithmic way, assessing each one in turn by some perfect objective function. For those who sat through lectures on computability, this is what we term an NP Hard problem. In ordinary language: there’s not enough time in the lifespan of the universe to calculate all the possibilities.

Objectivity is like that. It sounds neat and noble to strive for it, but all that training in reason, logic, and objectivity ignores fundamentals like our motivations, desires, and goals. We may speak of these things occasionally, in a hushed kind of way, but it is considered unseemly to think about or talk about your desires, and what you feel you deserve. To do so would admit that rather than being objective, we are susceptible to messy, poorly defined emotions, desires, and needs. It would admit the truth that our logical ivory tower isn’t actually the seat of power or meaning in life.

Logic may be an evolutionary adaptation to help us look before we leap. While it can help us both avoid perceived danger and achieve what we want more efficiently, let’s consider the true motive force in both cases. When we avoid perceived danger, logic is not providing the motivation; rather it is fear, worry, or concern that drives us to act or to use logic to work through the problem. Likewise, if we want something, though logic may help us achieve that more effectively, it does not supply the basic motive force. That drive comes from the wanting of that experience or thing. This is important for a sense of deserving, because that sense is not logical, it is emotional at its core. It’s why so many of us who are steeped in scientific and technical training are so bad at it. We don’t feel deserving, because, well, we’re trained to not believe in the importance — the motive force — of feelings. Instead we are trained to be practical, logical, and objective.

One result of this disconnect with our feelings? We lack the belief that we deserve what we want, and on an epidemic scale. This suits our opponents perfectly. While we engage in logical dilemmas over whether our work has value or ask ourselves, “Does the human race even deserve to survive?” (come on, I know you’ve probably pondered this more than once), those who are NOT sitting around asking these questions consistently emerge victorious, driven by their powerful feelings of deservingness.

And I’m not just talking about the political sphere, though that’s at the forefront of all our minds right now. Ultimately, this notion of believing in what you deserve is important to the very fabric of your day-to-day life.

Here’s a real-world example. Let’s say you’re in the trans community, and the president has just declared that transwomen don’t exist. After swallowing down the upchuck-in-your-mouth moment of pure panic, it is easy to get tangled into loops and knots: how did the proclamation define gender? What are the ramifications of that on my ability to live, work, and avoid harm? It is natural to go down 30 different *what-if* rabbit holes. All of that anxiety-driven logical looping is amplified if there’s an absence of deservingness.

To restate that in the positive: if I truly, deeply feel that I deserve to exist — and on my own terms — will I even allow myself to get into those logical loops, to explore those deep dark, dens of dank rabbit homes?

No. If I FEEL like I deserve better than these bulls%$t policies, I won’t do that to myself. I won’t accept anything about the proclamation as being true for me. If I really feel I deserve better, I won’t ruminate or fret. I’ll simply get to work on thinking about how I can take care of myself as practically as possible, and then act and communicate based on that. The emotion of deserving drives where my logic takes me, not the other way around.

This is where it gets so tricky, and why in general those with higher academic training tend to be so bad at the deserving game. Logic will not give a clear answer as to whether you deserve better or not. It will only provide an endless calculus of “Did I do good or bad?” as you try to figure out the karmic effects of the mass of your actions and words over a lifetime. Even in that, we tend to use odd labels of “good” and “bad” which themselves can tie us into endless knots as to their true meaning and definition in any given situation. If you doubt this, then consider the classical dilemma: if you had a time machine and a gun, would it be good or bad to travel back in time to murder Hitler before he rose to power? If your answer is “yes, it’s good” in the abstract, would you actually do it if given the opportunity (perhaps at great risk to yourself in the name of the greater good)?

Logic can give us no definitive answers on such things. It also can’t find a calculation to explain why we deserve better. A feeling like deserving transcends logic, math, and reason, in the same way that our universe seemingly springing into being from an infinitesimal nothingness into a field of 10^23 stars transcends logic, math, and reason. Our belief that we can “logic” everything weakens us. It removes our ability tap into simple but powerful things like feeling deserving.

We need to tune into and harness a belief that we deserve better than this. We need that feeling to be our motive force to think, take action, and communicate in a way that conveys our convictions about what we deserve. In practice, that often boils down to another thing that so many who are mired in anxious, self-effacing logic and lack a sense of deserving often share: a failure to advocate for ourselves.

Anyone who feels truly deserving will advocate tirelessly for themselves, while those of us who doubt our own deserving will hesitate and avoid advocacy. Worse, we tend to label self-advocacy behaviors as “selfish.” Ironically, that doesn’t hold other people back from their own advocacy and sense of deserving one tiny bit. It only holds us back, opening the doors wider to their ascendancy in a bitter, self-reinforcing loop.

Though you can’t logic yourself suddenly into a sense of deserving, you can decide you want to feel it. And while logic is an exceedingly poor driver, it can be a great navigator, once you know the destination.

So, set your sights firmly and clearly on the destination of deserving, and apply logic and reason to help you build towards that — unwaveringly — and soon you’ll find more and more support for why you deserve better. You will, through the logical support you gain from that firm decision, gather thoughts, evidence, and even the fleeting moments of feeling deserving that build step by step towards a bigger feeling.

By holding back on your own deserving, you are not helping anyone. And if you allow your logical mind to take its old pathways of judging others who have wielded a sense of deserving to get what they want, you are not shaming them into improvement by your shining example of self-limiting behavior. Instead, you’re letting yourself be manipulated according to the following playbook: “All you have to do is say or do something the other side considers shameful or upsetting, and they’ll just circle the drain in hand-wringing righteousness about the shame we should be feeling for what we did! Look at how easy it is to get them stuck in ineffective cycles of guilt and worry about what we’re doing.”

Do you really want to play into that?

Don’t go for what you want. Just sit there instead, spinning in circles, worrying, feeling the shame of how flawed and undeserving we humans are. Decide that you should just shrink down, play small, have a minimal footprint, and survive for as long as you can.

That’s not living, that’s just the slow and hellish path to death. And that’s why I intentionally wrote in the imperative, so you would rebel against the words, for if someone else were giving you such outlandish instructions, you would never follow them. If that was your response, realize that you are unknowingly following a similar set of instructions every day if you let anxiety and shame-driven logic drive your life.

Instead, I invite you to embrace the goal of deserving. Believe that you deserve what you want — things like peace, stability, respect, and satisfaction in both career and life.

Because you do deserve those things, we all do. Yet we have abandoned the belief that we deserve them, all too many of us. We have been poor advocates for ourselves, playing right into the hands of those who would gleefully see us diminished. The perfect tool in their arsenal against us is our own belief we don’t deserve what we want, nudging us further into our own abyss of despair and feelings of diminishment.

Don’t let them do that to you. Don’t do that to yourself. Choose to find your sense of deserving and move towards its realization. This may take patience and deep persistence. But it is the only way to change things in the long term, for yourself and for the world. In this game of life, the long game is the only game, and it’s time to start playing to win all that you deserve, and more.