when an immovable fact meets an unstoppable feeling

When my husband and I were invited to join Slate’s Dear Prudence podcast, I was thrilled to be tasked with sharing one piece of unsolicited advice at the top of the show. I immediately came up with eighteen, of course, but ultimately decided to go with one that changed everything for me:

You cannot change a feeling with a fact.

You really can’t, and neither can I. Not our own and not anyone else’s either - and this is as true in science communication as it is in personal relationships.

I spent years wishing this wasn’t the case, years in which I kept losing fights and mourning bad outcomes in the ocean policy spaces I cared about. It left me feeling disgusted by how selfish and irrational people are. How could they be so shortsighted? Why didn’t they care about data? I wanted to slash through snarls of wishful thinking and obstinacy, using my logic like an exquisite knife. And if imagining yourself as the hero of a metaphysical knife fight isn’t proof of perfectly rational thinking, I don’t know what is.

Fortunately, I hate losing even more than I love being right. So I went on the hunt for ways to make people listen to science (and if by “science”, that meant “me”, I was good with that too). I started by grabbing papers on irrationality, cognitive biases, and conspiracy theories. It felt important to find real-world examples of when our beliefs matter most, and I found myself drawn to case studies with life-and-death stakes. I worked my way from theories about decision-making and deliberation and into readings about emergency alerts  and disaster response. I read about fairness and democracy, and how communities heal after genocide. 

I read and read, thought and thought… and belatedly, begrudgingly realized that my premise was deeply flawed.

I had utterly conflated  ‘irrational’ and ‘emotional’.

Yet I could admit that panic, rage, and grief all made perfect sense in the extreme situations and disasters I was reading about: it would be inhuman to confront horrors and tragedies in any other way. And I could see that the environmental issues I was most upset about, like coral bleaching, sea level rise, and fisheries collapse, absolutely qualified as horrors and tragedies. So if emotions are a fundamental part of a human response to crises, then what was I trying to achieve by removing them from the equation?

My breakthrough wasn’t a considered thought. It was an inescapable feeling: a painful self-consciousness about my instinct to frame every environmental policy challenge as “stupid people making bad choices.” Thinking deeply about other people’s feelings forced me to confront my own. I’d been treating emotions as weaknesses and distractions, things to conquer or at least ignore. I thought this was a noble commitment. Whether science appealed to me because it neatly aligns with that worldview, or whether I thought that worldview was a requirement of doing good science, I’m not sure. 

Ignoring emotions is relatively easy; navigating them takes so much more work.

I was genuinely surprised at how much effort it required for me to get specific about what my feelings were, exactly, and how they related to the events in my life. But once I stopped avoiding my feelings, the consequences were clear. I found myself generally feeling better. Things started making more sense in my own life. From there, it was much easier to feel curious about other people’s feelings, or at least be less judgmental when they seemed to be swept away in them. And wonder of wonders, when I stopped vomiting facts at people and was a little more willing to listen to why they were mad, I started having more success in my science communication too. 

These days, I see emotions as a key part of our ability to imagine possible futures and make the best decisions for ourselves. We face a grim array of existential threats right now. We have to take risks, make difficult choices, and live up to our greatest ambitions. To survive, we need rigorous and rational thinking, yes. And science, of course. But also fierceness, bravery, conviction, camaraderie, joy, and hope. 

When I started taking feelings seriously, I finally stopped being a hostage to my own and helpless in the face of others’. When my feelings changed, it became possible for me to change too. I can work with that.

You can listen to Dear Prudence online or wherever you like your podcasts.