Everything is embarrassing. This is one of my guiding principles as a 40-year-old male content creator—though I prefer “entertainer,” mostly because “content creator” elicits a specific taste in people’s mouths akin to shit. To be great at anything, even interviewing people on trains and in taxis, you must be mid first. And to be mid is to be a total embarrassment to your friends, your family, and people you’d like to have sex with.

There is technically nothing wrong with being mid. But being mid in public—asserting your deep, unfounded belief in your own potential for an audience of random internet passersby—requires a high tolerance for pain. Therein lies the eternal struggle of trying to be cool, which is infinitely more humiliating than just being a loser. At least the latter comes naturally. I know from experience!

As Austin Butler said on my hit show Subway Takes, “Embarrassment is an underexplored emotion.” We fear being cringe, he explained, but “everything you want is on the other side of that.” Quoting my own show in an essay: How’s that for embarrassing? I know people will think it’s corny, yet I proceed. Public humiliation is all I truly know. Just open your Instagram app. There I am. Again, and again, and again. A man posting on Instagram. The most embarrassing thing a man can do.

Here’s the thing: No one thinks about Kareem Rahma as much as Kareem Rahma thinks about Kareem Rahma. Now remove my name and replace it with yours. It’s the closest thing to a cure for anxiety I can offer you. Nobody gives a shit about you. If you embrace this, you can endure the mid phase, and your life will get better.

I have been publicly humiliating myself for years. It is only very recently that it started working out in my favor. After I uploaded my first Instagram video in 2019, an impression of Elton John, I had to turn off the comments because people were being mean. Friends texted to ask if I was okay. My then partner suggested that I go to therapy again, and my mother told me to stop.

I don’t even remember the first time I felt true embarrassment. Do you? I remember the 700th time, which happened in 2013. I had recently moved to New York City from the Midwest and was working in marketing at Vice, a job I got by sending one of the most embarrassing emails ever. For about a month I had been dating a woman who was way out of my league. I was head over heels, though I had a feeling I was the most expendable player on her roster.

But, for some reason, when I went on vacation with friends to Puerto Rico and sublet my apartment for longer than I would be gone (the only way I could afford the trip), she agreed to let me stay at her place for a few days upon my return. It was pouring rain when I landed at JFK. I took the train to her garden apartment, knowing that in a few short hours I would be cuddled up next to a beautiful woman.

When she opened the door, I knew by the look on her face that something was wrong. I stood in the rain as she told me that she’d gotten back with her ex-boyfriend. Afterward, still outside with my luggage, I cried on the phone to my mom and then slept on the couch of a friend who felt bad for me. I was embarrassed that I had deluded myself about our relationship.

For a long time, it was embarrassing to care. It was much cooler to be detached. Cynical. Chill. But I owe a lot to being embarrassed. During the pandemic, like a lot of people, I entirely lost my mind. My partner and I separated. My income vanished. My brother got in a severe car accident and was supposed to die. I flew home and spent three months there, feeling like Zach Braff in Garden State. American society seemed to be falling apart so quickly and we were all, for once, trapped on the same miserable page.

This resulted in events that might actually be embarrassing forever (celebrities singing “Imagine”), but it gave people permission to try new things. Instead of making sourdough, I enrolled in every single improv comedy course the Upright Citizens Brigade offered, so I could do a better job making the videos that scared my loved ones. I wanted to be in a setting where everyone sheepishly believed that we were destined for greatness. From the outside, it looked like I didn’t know what I was doing. On the inside, I knew that I didn’t know.

But I was having fun. So much so that, in 2021, I went on a Hinge date wearing blue corduroy pants, an orange silk shirt, and a gold grill that covered my four front teeth. I introduced myself to a beautiful woman as an “aspiring comedian.” This was the most embarrassing thing a man could do, aside from posting on Instagram, but it worked. That beautiful woman is now my wife.

A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of GQ with the title “The Embarrassing Secret of My Success”