Ask anyone in Dubai how they are, and they will tell you they are fine. Always fine. Great, busy, smashing it, blessed. You could meet them at 7 am in a spin class or 11 pm at an afterparty — still fine. Meanwhile, everyone has one missed paycheck, one burnout episode, or one silent night away from emotional collapse.

No one moves to Dubai to slow down. People come here to build, to glow, to start over — to become the 2.0 version of whoever they were before. You can feel it everywhere: ambition is oxygen. The city doesn’t sell sand and sun; it sells momentum.

So when someone asks, How are you?, you can’t exactly say anxious, lonely, and slowly disintegrating under the pressure of looking successful. You say fine. Because anything else sounds like failure.

In a place where self-worth is indexed by productivity, admitting fragility feels like a software bug. Dubai is a city where everyone is running a private startup — called themselves.

Dubai’s skyline is the perfect metaphor for its psychology: shiny, vertical, no shadows until sunset. The glass hides the chaos inside. We work out instead of breaking down. We travel instead of talking. We post affirmations instead of asking for help.

Therapists here say most clients start with career stress, then slowly unravel toward loneliness. One psychotherapist told me: “In Dubai, loneliness comes with ocean views.”

We all look stable because the floor is marble. But marble cracks too.

Being “fine” is a survival strategy. The city’s tempo doesn’t allow emotional lag. You can’t cry through your morning commute because your commute is a podcast and a green juice. You can’t pause because there is always another dinner, another deal, another desert retreat you already paid for.

We replace feelings with schedules. Burnout disguised as purpose. Loneliness disguised as independence. Anxiety disguised as fitness. And the irony? We actually start believing the disguise.

There is research showing that when you repeatedly fake positive emotion, your brain starts confusing performance with experience. The smile becomes muscle memory. We are emotionally method acting in our own lives.

Dubai is full of people — yet no one is really from here. That is its charm and its curse: a place built for reinvention, but not always for roots.

We meet dozens of people every week — gym friends, colleagues, mutual followers — but few of them actually know us. Relationships here are optimised like everything else: quick to start, easy to replace, never too deep to complicate a visa renewal.

The city is transient by design, which means so are we. You start packing emotionally the moment you unpack physically. So we develop an emotional accent — friendly, upbeat, non-committal. “Fine.” Always fine.

Dubai loves wellness — infrared saunas, sound baths, float tanks. It is a whole industry of calm. But sometimes wellness becomes another way to stay busy. Healing retreats are booked through travel agencies. Meditation apps send push notifications reminding you to be present. It is productivity in a robe.

A friend told me: “I’m so tired of optimising my peace.” We treat mindfulness like a subscription plan — another metric to measure. It isn't serenity we are chasing; its control.

Psychologists call it emotional suppression. When you suppress negative emotion, the physiological response doesn’t disappear — it intensifies. Heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol — all spike higher when you fake composure.

That is why so many of us wake up at 3 am with racing hearts, or feel anxious on vacation. Our bodies remember what our feeds forget. We are too fine for too long. And then suddenly, we are not.

There is an unspoken heartbreak about being far from home. Even if you don’t miss the weather or politics, you miss the context — the people who knew you before you became “your best self.”

Dubai friendships can be intense and fleeting, like holiday romances: bonded by shared novelty, dissolved by relocation. You can have 50 contacts for coffee and still no one to call when something breaks inside you.

It isn't because people don’t care. It is because everyone is running on low emotional battery. Everyone is starting over. Again and again.

So we put on our social SPF: a polished smile that keeps out the burn.

In Dubai, “fine” is a placeholder. It can mean:

“Fine” is elegant despair with good lighting.

The first real act of rebellion here isn’t quitting your job or deleting Instagram — it is answering honestly when someone asks how you are. Try saying: “Not great, actually.” You will be shocked how many people exhale in relief and whisper, “Same.”

Because beneath all the gloss, everyone is craving permission to be human again. We just need someone else to go first.

There is something shifting in the air lately. More people are talking about burnout. Companies are hiring wellness officers. Men are showing up in therapy. It is small, but it is a start.

Maybe the next era of Dubai won’t be about tallest towers and fastest cars, but longest exhale. Maybe emotional intelligence will become the new luxury — the one thing you can’t import.

So if you are reading this in your office, or your overpriced minimalist living room — take a breath. You don’t have to be fine all the time.

You can be confused, tired, homesick, hopeful, all at once. You can be human in a city built for performance. And sometimes the bravest sentence you will say all week is simply: “Actually, I’m not fine.”

That is where real connection starts — not in perfection, but in confession.