Frustration Still needs couple edits

 

Welcome to Frustration Nation—you don’t need a psychology degree to see it. Just watch someone try to board a plane, parallel park, or remember a forgotten password. We’re all a little frazzled these days: customer-service button-pushing hell (just let me speak to someone), Ticketmaster concert-buying purgatory only to be shut out, software updates that hijack your computer mid-email, autocorrect that could use a little more correcting. 

The great modern works of comedy—Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Office—are really just statements on existential frustration: the missed connection, the petty misunderstanding, the bureaucratic absurdity of our organizations. We laugh because we recognize ourselves in George Costanza melting down in a parking garage, or Michael Scott turning a simple task into a catastrophe. And somewhere beneath the humor sits a universal truth: frustration is everywhere we turn in modern life—in our commutes, our conversations, our ambitions, and our to-do lists that never get done, often from being left on the counter.

Frustration embodies everything—the political outrage cycles on cable news and late-night satire, the stalled social movements, the climate marches, the protests that promise change but rarely deliver it on our preferred timeline. It’s Walter White staring at a life too small for his imagination. It’s the Arab Spring's longing for freedom, BLM's demand for dignity. And on a smaller scale—yet no less real—it’s the spinning rainbow wheel on your laptop before a deadline. It’s the email you send that vanishes into the void. 

It’s wanting something too much, too soon, too ideally, only to watch reality have a different agenda. At its core, frustration is a head-on collision between expectations and reality—and in a society built on striving, optimization, and the belief that everything should be seamless and instant (from relationships to Uber pickups), reality rarely cooperates for long.

And if anyone is listening, I accept all the cookies!!! 

A lot of frustration starts at home. Adults, with all their unfulfilled business, pass down expectations like heirlooms: be successful, be impressive, don’t embarrass us, be better than we were. Parents want “the best,” but “the best” often comes laced with their own unresolved regrets—careers that stalled, dreams they never got to chase, emotions they never learned to process. Kids absorb that energy long before they can name it. They grow up in kitchens and living rooms loaded with lofty expectations that are near impossible to meet, and by the teen years, frustration is already riding shotgun.

Then ability collides with aspiration. We picture ourselves as competent, capable adults, and then life does what life does. We misplace our keys. We blow the presentation. We burn dinner. We fumble the moment we were sure we had down. There’s a special sting in not being able to do the thing you’re convinced you should be able to do. Its all so darn frustrating.

Modern culture never misses a moment to pile on, either. Scroll long enough, and you’ll find someone younger, fitter, calmer, richer, more “evolved,” somehow hitting all their marks ahead of schedule. Why is she so put together? Why is he excelling while I’m still struggling? Comparing the universal angst of our innermost thoughts to someone else’s perfectly curated highlight reel—fertile soil for frustration to thrive.

Expectations shape frustration more than circumstances do. Two people can live through the same setback; one shrugs, the other implodes. The difference is the script they’re running. We seek guarantees in a world of probabilities, and when life doesn’t deliver on fairness, timing, recognition, justice—and it doesn’t deliver often—frustration races in to fill the space. So it leaks everywhere: into workplaces where people feel underpaid, undervalued, over-managed, under-seen; into politics and protest, where stalled progress and systemic injustice ferment into marches and strikes; into families where teenagers and parents live under the same roof but in entirely different galaxies, both sides convinced the other side just doesn’t get it. 

Frustration, though, isn’t always a villain. It’s also a signal. It tells us something isn’t lining up: expectations and reality, effort and outcome, values and environment. It’s the emotional red flag that says, pay attention here. Properly understood, frustration becomes feedback—uncomfortable, yes, but incredibly useful. The danger isn’t feeling frustration; it’s pretending we don’t, or letting it take permanent residence inside us. 

From an emotional-intelligence standpoint, frustration is the on-ramp to choice. It sits just down the road from anger, disappointment, impatience, resentment. If we don’t catch it early, we end up in those neighborhoods, lights flashing, no exits in sight. If we do catch it, we get a different option: a chance to reset expectations and not get too far off course.

If frustration had a home sport, it would be tennis. No game demands more precision while offering less margin for error. Play aggressively, and you invite mayhem. Play safe, and you’re at the mercy of your opponent. Either way, it so often doesn’t work out, turning a match into an ongoing exercise in frustration management. And for the most part, you’re on your own. No play calls are coming in from the sideline, no caddie walking you through the next shot. You step up to serve calm, organized, intentional—and within seconds it can all fall apart, ending in chaos and another miss. Why is this so hard we may mutter to ourselves? Because you’re playing tennis, a sport that doesn’t just invite frustration; it specializes in it.

Learning the game can be torturous. Kids pick up a racquet and think they’re at the batting cages. What are these lines for? How do I control my swing? Instantly, they discover their bodies have their own game plan. They can see what they should do, but there’s a Grand Canyon between intention and execution. The swing, the bounce, the timing—it all feels wrong. Every miss feels personal, like tennis is mocking you. The people on TV make it look easy; why am I spazzing out so much? And because tennis is learned through endless repetition, the early stage is a loop of embarrassing failure. The real challenge isn’t making shots; it’s surviving the emotional turmoil long enough to reach competence, where you’re not making an ass of yourself out there.

For juniors, frustration fuses with identity. Errors aren’t being processed technically but emotionally. They fear the verdict: Do I suck? Why am I stuck? Am I worth my coach’s time? My parents’ investment? The sport compresses self-worth into brutal little sequences—two errors, a double fault, a missed sitter—and it’s pretty much meltdown time. Kids judge themselves long before they understand themselves. Tennis asks them to handle adult-level disappointment with child-level emotional software—one of tennis’ many cruel jokes.

Then the game adds its own special flavors. You do everything “right,” and the ball clips the tape or floats inches wide. You outplay your opponent for twenty minutes and still lose the set. You out-train your whole peer group, crush them in practice, yet your ranking barely budges. There are styles designed to frustrate: the moonballer who refuses to miss, the junk-baller who turns every point into a physics experiment, the pusher who beats you without hitting an actual shot. Add wind, sun, courts that play like parking lots. Bad calls, bad bounces, bad luck—tennis death by a thousand frustrating cuts.

Parents live their own version. Watching your kid compete is like riding shotgun in a car with no steering wheel or brakes. You can see what they’re capable of. You can see what’s getting in the way. And yet you watch them unravel over one call, one comment, one missed sitter, and you can’t do anything about it without making it worse. That powerless feeling mutates into frustration—at the kid, at the coach, at the officials, at the sport itself. The kid, being emotionally porous, feels it all. Many a junior tantrum is just a parent’s frustration coming out in a different body.

At higher levels, frustration gets more sophisticated, but it doesn’t go away. You’d think being wildly athletic and having complete control of the ball would solve it. It doesn’t. It just mutates. Now it’s frustration at a body that won’t cooperate, a ranking that won’t move, an injury that won’t heal, a mind that tightens at the exact same scoreline time and time again. The tour is full of quiet, professional frustration—unfulfilled potential, underachieving careers, players knocking on the door of the big time, a lifetime of work a break away from fruition, and yet the breakthrough never comes. You continue to grind through qualifying while wildcards go to younger, shinier prospects. The gap between effort and desired outcome can begin to feel insurmountable.

Coaches drive in a different lane. You see the long arc: a player’s potential hidden under a pile of chaos, the player they could be if they’d get out of their own way. And you watch them self-sabotage their development over and over. You repeat the same fundamentals, the same EQ lessons, the same speech—yet the same mistakes get made. It can all be so frustrating. If only tennis could be a list of dos and don’ts. No. Coaching tennis well requires a monk-level tolerance for watching people step on the same emotional rake over and over until they finally get it right.

From an EQ lens, frustration on court is simply a signal. It tells you you’re out of alignment: expectations and level, game plan and execution, conditions and attitude. Left unmanaged, it hijacks your tennis experience, eroding enjoyment of the game you so love. But if you catch it early, you get a chance to reframe: errors are a huge part of the game, we must treat them as data and nothing more for you to have any chance. The real separators aren’t the ones who never feel frustration—those people don’t exist, tennis Big Foots if I may—but the ones who can feel it fully and still compete clean. They build  release routines: exhale, look at the strings, take their time, go to the towel, always walk with purpose. And channel your inner Elsa from Frozen and learn to Let it go. Not everything we release needs claw marks. Be Teflon. 

And don’t train in a zoo if you’re going to compete in a jungle—train in adversity: midday heat, high wind, match up with the guy whose style drives you nuts. Familiarity mitigates surprise; familiarity is an excellent buffer against frustration. And remember: frustration is the toll you pay for caring about a brutally demanding sport. Learn to acknowledge it without letting it run the show, and you don’t just become a better player—you become a steadier human who can handle all life’s bad bounces with class and grace.

PERSONAL 

Frustration has been a through-line in my life for as long as I can remember, as familiar as my own reflection. And it all started with perfectionism. The messaging was simple: there was a tiny, unreasonable sliver of reality that constituted “success,” with everything else automatically filed under “failure.” Real or imagined, I ran with it. If I wasn’t flawless, I wasn’t worthy. If I wasn’t disciplined every second, I was weak. If I wasn’t the guy who never missed, never wavered, never needed reassurance, then I didn’t deserve the one thing I was always chasing—the atta boy, the pat on the back, the feeling that I was enough and accepted and loved.

The problem, of course, was that perfection is a mirage way off in the distance. It’s a moving target. It never sits still long enough to be achieved. And the sport I played—tennis, that beautiful truth serum—exposed all of it. Tennis is a game of misses, bad bounces, wind, nerves, timing, and a thousand micro-imperfections you can’t control. So being wired like I was—running a perfectionist operating system while competing in a sport built on imperfection—was always going to be a challenge. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought my frustration was motivation. I thought staying hard on myself was the fuel for greater achievement. Try harder, care more—that’s all I needed to be content. What a ruse.

For years, I lived like that, micromanaging my every move. I thought if I could just be perfect—99.9% wouldn’t do—then the world would finally reward me with approval. But that atta boy wasn’t coming. Not from the outside. Not from the people I wanted it from. And certainly not from the voice in my own head, the one that kept channeling my dad even years after being on my own and my own person. He ran the first leg in the race of impossible standards, but once he passed the baton to me,  I ran with it hard, becoming my own ass-kicking machine, cranked to Supermax.

That’s the hidden misery of perfectionism: it turns life into a constant state of evaluation. You’re never just living. You’re never just learning. You’re always grading—red pencil marks all over your day. And the more I tried to meet those irrational standards, the more frustrated I got—not just because I couldn’t hit them, but because some part of me believed I should be able to. In my mind, I had the passion to live an extraordinary life; I just didn’t have the ability to do it perfectly, which meant I didn’t have the ability at all. That’s how perfectionism shrinks your world. It makes the game of life unwinnable.

Eventually, reality entered the chat. There’s too much in life to do to be perfect at all of it—perfect fitness, perfect health, perfect work, perfect relationships, perfect parenting, perfect recovery, perfect everything. The math doesn’t math. Something had to give. And for me, the turning point wasn’t lowering standards into some lazy “go screw off” permission slip. It was widening the margins of what constituted success. It was learning—slowly, painfully—that “good” is not a consolation prize. “Good” is often the best one can do. “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good” finally began to sound like wisdom instead of surrender.

My life in Recovery drove the point home with a hammer. I hated myself for years for not being able to control my using. Then I got sober once for almost five years and thought, if a screw-up like me can do it, how hard could it be? Oh, I found out. Real hard. And nothing triggers frustration like thinking something “should” be easy, then discovering—again and again—that it is so not. The old perfectionist brain was black-and-white: either you’re crushing it, or you’re failing. But life, and recovery, and tennis, and love all live in the messy middle. The goal must always be progress and not perfection.

The fundamental shift came when I finally accepted myself. Not as a cop-out, but as a fallible person doing the best I could with the wiring I had at that particular time. That sentence changes everything. Because once you stop treating yourself like a project that’s always behind schedule, you get breathing room. Frustration stops taking up so much square footage in your head. You can still strive, still work, still care—without living in constant self-condemnation. And in some strange, beautiful twist, when I stopped berating myself for not being perfect, I started noticing something else: it was amazing I was doing as well as I was, considering all I was dealing with. Imagine that—giving myself a pat on the back.

These days, frustration still visits—it’s part of the human package—but it doesn’t run the show like it used to. When it rises, I can see what’s underneath it: unrealistic expectations, old approval hunger, fear dressed up as standards, that ancient demand to be flawless. But now, instead of taking the baton and sprinting into self-punishment, I can set it down. I can let “good” actually be good. I can let imperfection be human. And for someone wired like me, that’s what finally started to feel like freedom.