All The Feelings • Still Adulting

Season 11 may be on hiatus, but Pete and Tommy have the audacity to show up anyway — because something happened at Denver International Airport that absolutely cannot wait until fall. Tommy arrived in New York City with everything he needed for a great trip, and then he didn't. The story involves a maintenance worker with a unique communication style, a rubber glove, and a level of IP water resist...

Season 11 closes with what Pete and Tommy insist is a whimper, which is how you know it is absolutely not a whimper. They handed each other their worst possible topics — trash and recycling for Tommy, seasonal stuff for Pete — and accidentally made an episode about deception, ancient biology, and a rhinoceros named Cacareco who won a 1959 São Paulo city council seat in a landslide. Tommy did, in h...

Tommy opens with a conversation that didn't start as a therapy pitch — and became exactly that. Someone in his life has been white-knuckling a worsening anxiety spiral, armed with nothing but the very adult conviction that they should probably just handle it. Sound familiar? Tommy walks through what he told them: the case for therapy, the case for medication, and the analogy that reframes everythi...

If you have ever stood in a store paralyzed over whether the candle is enough, whether the wine communicates something terrible about how little you care, whether showing up without something is worse than showing up with the wrong thing: there is a name for that. Tommy found it. Dr. Melissa Colt calls it trauma-based giving, which is the clinical way of saying you are not choosing a gift so much...

Pete was a true believer. ICQ. AIM. Friendster. MySpace. A Twitter ID below four thousand. He didn't just use the early social web — he helped build it, one weird forum and one enthusiastic post at a time. And then, somewhere between the algorithmic timeline and the fourteenth terms-of-service update, something got taken. Cory Doctorow has a word for what happened. Pete has feelings about it. This...

Here is something that should make you briefly furious: the reason so many adults stop trying new things — stop picking up instruments and languages and crafts, stop putting themselves in positions of gorgeous, humbling incompetence — is not laziness, and it is not age. It is a scientific consensus that was overturned decades ago and somehow never sent you notice. Pete brings some brain stuff. Tom...

At some point in your adult life — somewhere between your first real prescription and the moment you quietly acquired a weekly pill organizer — you became a person with opinions about pharmacies. Strong ones. Opinions forged in the specific purgatory of an insurance pre-authorization, a fax machine that exists for reasons no one can explain, and a pharmacist who is simultaneously the most importan...

Nobody told you that your job title was quietly becoming your personality. Or that the moment you started thinking about leaving, you weren't just weighing pros and cons — you were grieving. This week, Pete and Tommy tackle the twin anxieties of work-life balance and quitting your job: two topics that sound like HR seminar titles but turn out to be about identity, mortality, and the specific pain...

Here's something nobody puts in the adulting manual: lending money to a friend and writing them a thank you note are the same problem wearing different pants. Both require something real from you. Both get catastrophically weird the longer you wait. And both have been quietly torching relationships since before your grandparents were born. Tommy has a story about a cousin, a con as old as the 19th...

Here's something nobody tells you about adulthood: at some point, you will be expected to both host people in your home and maintain meaningful friendships with those people over decades, with no training, no manual, and no one checking in to see how it's going. This is, it turns out, a lot to ask. Pete and Tommy are asking it anyway. This week the guys dig into the deeply relatable anxiety of bei...

Pete has replaced three toilets, ripped out three sinks, and installed a deadbolt — and he still approaches every new project like a man who has never held a wrench. This is the competence paradox at its most domestic, and it lives underneath your bathroom floor in something called a wax ring that you absolutely did not know existed until right now. Then Tommy takes Pete on a world tour of tipping...

There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from having never, not once, understood how a car works. Tommy Metz III has that confidence in spades. In this episode, he reveals that his first car — a used Jeep Cherokee he lovingly named "Peace" (short for "piece of," well, you can fill in the rest) — featured a steering wheel so structurally compromised that he'd been casually jamming it bac...

Welcome to Season 11 of All The Feelings: Still Adulting, where Pete and Tommy prove that being a grown-up is just an elaborate prank we're all somehow still falling for. This week: The culinary industrial complex. Pete wages a one-man war against grocery store architecture while searching for a discontinued cookie with the fervor of someone who's lost far more than a snack. Tommy confronts his ma...

Remember when you thought being an adult meant you'd finally have your act together? That one day you'd wake up and just... know how to do taxes, maintain friendships, and keep a plant alive for more than three weeks? Yeah. Us too. Welcome back to All the Feelings: Still Adulting—proof that getting older doesn't mean getting better at any of this.

In the final members-only break, Pete and Tommy cover the big stuff: birthday cards that forget the birthday, handwritten letters that hit harder than expected, and two baby goats who briefly solve the problem of human interaction. Along the way, they take Thanksgiving from Oregon to East Texas, tour a town shaped by oil booms and beauty salons, and debate the hygiene implications of goat yoga. Th...

In this mid-season members-only installment, Pete and Tommy trade Halloween stories, debate the ethics of haunted-house waivers, revisit emotionally scarring escape-room adventures, and brainstorm how a man in his 50s should celebrate his birthday (spoiler: laser tag turns him into a war criminal). There’s also pirate television, Dan Brown shade, and the ongoing mystery of why holiday pine-cone sc...

You know that moment when you realize civilization might have peaked at “salt, oil, and potato”? That’s where we begin this bonus episode. Pete, Tommy, and returning culinary chaos agent Mandy Kaplan gather around a table piled high with some of the strangest snack inventions ever unleashed on the palate—because if adulthood is about making terrible decisions and pretending they’re research, then...

In our first members-only check-in of the season, Tommy celebrates turning 50 by becoming a human pincushion, Pete fights raccoons for dominion over his crawlspace, and we both spiral about doctors, insurance, and glasses that make us look like malfunctioning robots. There’s also a detour through indie films, legacy podcasts, and the unsettling realization that ChatGPT knows way too much about our...

You know that moment when you find out your “contact us” form has been quietly dumping listener questions into a black hole for months? No? Well, Pete and Tommy do, and it’s exactly as humbling, awkward, and hilarious as you’d imagine. In this bonus-but-also-a-bit-of-a-mistake 13th episode of All The Feelings: Adulting, our hosts finally open the floodgates to the backlog of listener questions, co...

Ah, adulthood—the never-ending escape room with no clues, no key, and someone yelling “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” in the background. In this season finale of All the Feelings: Adulting, Pete and Tommy break down one of the biggest lies we’ve ever told ourselves: that one day, magically, we would become Real Adults™. Spoiler: we do not. As far as our research has demonstrated, no...

Death! That thing we pretend we’ll deal with later, even though “later” is very much someone else’s problem. This week, Pete and Tommy dive headfirst into the gloriously unsexy topic of postmortem administration. Not grief. Not funeral playlists. The actual hellscape of what happens when you suddenly have to explain to Costco that your dad no longer needs a membership because, well, he’s gone to t...

Welcome to a very special episode of All the Feelings, brought to you by REM sleep, tennis elbow, and the visceral horror of trying to put on socks like you’re still in your 30s. This week, Pete and Tommy are pulling a two-for-one special: first, they dive into the dreamscape of adult anxiety—why our nighttime brains love to drop us in college final exams we never studied for and why Tommy keeps l...

There comes a time in every adult’s life when you look at your parents and think, “Wait, are you… dating?” And suddenly, the woman who once grounded you for not using a coaster is fielding calls from a man probably named Art who knew her in the sixth grade and now rides a bicycle suspiciously close to her begonias. In this week’s episode of All the Feelings, Pete watches in emotional 4K as his rec...

Welcome back to All The Feelings, the podcast where adulthood means pretending you know how to say sorry and hoping lasagna can fix emotional devastation. This week, Pete and Tommy dissect the modern apology: why “I’m sorry if you were offended” is a disaster, and how real apologies require actual specificity, remorse, and the superhuman courage to say, “Yeah, I messed up.”Then, Pete shares what h...

This week on All the Feelings, Pete and Tommy explore the emotional aftershocks of being needed… and then suddenly not. Pete reflects on launching two adult kids into the world and discovering that successful parenting feels a bit like getting laid off from a beloved job—complete with pride, grief, and way too much free time. One minute you’re managing snacks and carpool, the next you’re wondering...