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LM: #358: The lost art of keeping your sh*t together

March 09 2026 – 10:00am

“Pull your shit together,” these days has a kind of toxic tenor.

I’ve in my lifetime witnessed a big cultural shift from emotional and mental struggles being taboo topics, to a part of everyday vocabulary.

People take mental-health days, talk openly about anxiety, depression, addiction etc., and more people are medicated for these than is probably necessary.

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On the whole this shift has been good for me. When I moved from Nebraska to California twenty years ago, a source of culture shock was how openly people talked about such struggles. And over the years I discovered just how much severe mental illness was brushed under the rug on both sides of my family, and in milder forms in my relationship with my own psyche.

Throughout my own journey there have certainly been times I’ve felt unmoored, and it’s been liberating to let go of any cultural shame about asking for help, but on the whole I’ve found that the best way to the light at the end of the tunnel is through the darkness.

By now the vocabulary of this “therapy culture” feels as if it’s become its own pathology. Sometimes it feels like a source of identity for in-tribal signaling, other times a replacement for religion, other times a permission-slip to be irresponsible or incompetent.

You’d think the pendulum would swing back in the other direction. That eventually people would say, “Oh, everyone feels this way sometimes. I guess that’s life.”

Because between the extremes of severe issues and no issues is just the state of being human. That inherently will have its ups and downs, and so naturally holding your shit together is just a matter of the apparently dying art of getting a grip.

Book: Beyond Belief (Amazon) is Nir Eyal’s latest, on how to have beliefs that benefit you.

Cool: To be or not to be, explained is a great explanatory video for newcomers to Shakespeare.