We love watching hardworking people work in this country.

There is a particular American hunger for the sight of effort, sweat, someone giving everything they have to a job that will pay them less than what they gave. We build entire mythologies around it. The self-made man. The girlboss. The founder who slept four hours a night and calls it sacrifice instead of what it might also be, a kind of harm. Money becomes the proof that the sacrifice was worth it, the finish line that justifies everything given up to reach it. Loved ones, rest, your true calling…

And I have noticed something else, something that lands hard and I cannot ignore. When we describe people of color in this context, we reach for the word hardworking so often it stops sounding like a compliment and starts sounding like a condition of worth. As if a person’s value needs a modifier attached to it before it counts. As if rest, for some bodies, has to be earned twice.

A colleague of mine, Asian, once told me about a reference letter their supervisor wrote for them. It was meant as praise. It “praised” that they worked “like a beast”. Not a person who works hard, a beast that works hard. That sentence has stuck with me since, the distance between being seen as a good worker and being seen as a whole human being. No wonder we call it Human Resources. It is another extraction mechanism that we have bought into and can’t seem to escape.

In 2022, a billionaire born into family wealth and industry connections told women in business, bluntly, to work harder, adding, “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.” She said this from a life already stocked with money, a platform, and a name most people will never have, no matter how early they wake up.

You hear some version of that same sentence from actual working people all the time. Except when they say it, they usually mean something else entirely. Nobody wants to work for less than it costs to survive. Nobody wants to be exploited just to keep the lights on. No freedom for the poor to simply say no. No leisure, just bodies expected to be grateful just for the chance to work at all. When someone turns down a job that will not cover rent, we call it laziness. When an employer refuses to pay a wage a person can actually live on, we call it business as usual, and somehow that is the version nobody gets outraged about.

I say it the way you point at something in the road so the person walking beside you does not trip over it too.

None of this is the only way to live, though we treat it like gravity, like a law of nature instead of a choice a culture made and keeps remaking. Spain closes its shops in the afternoon so people can eat with their families and rest before the evening starts. Bhutan measures its progress with a Gross National Happiness index instead of only a GDP. Several countries across the Andes have written buen vivir, the idea of living well and in balance with each other and the land, directly into their constitutions. None of these places are perfect either. But they prove something worth saying out loud, that a country could organize itself around the wellbeing of its people instead of only their output, and it would not fall apart. It might hold together better.

Where does this come from, this idea that our worth is measured in output? I keep circling back to the Puritans, to the old idea that hard work was a sign you had been chosen by God, that idleness was closer to sin than to rest. Even the phrase “God helps those who help themselves,” which so many of us grew up believing was scripture, is not in the Bible at all. It shows up in Benjamin Franklin’s almanac, dressed up as wisdom, and we have been repeating it like gospel ever since.

Somewhere along the way, self-reliance turned into self-erasure. Bootstraps turned into a leash.

At some point we stopped asking who the hard work is actually for. The CEO who delegates the labor takes home the largest share. The person doing the backbreaking part of it, lifting, stocking, scrubbing, driving, wiring, goes home to a refrigerator they still cannot quite afford to fill. We call this the free market. Sure. It might also be a costume, capitalism dressed in the language of “progress”, so its results look earned instead of designed.

When someone points at that gap, though, we rarely blame the system that built it. We blame the person standing inside it. They should have gone to college. If they went to college, they should have picked a different degree. If they picked the right degree, they should have tried harder, networked more, wanted it more. More equals better. The individual becomes the explanation for everything the system was actually responsible for. We keep conspiring with it and calling the result progress.

The USA also has a talent for making all of this personal. An entire industry of self-help gurus has built empires convincing people that if they are struggling, the real problem is their mindset, their self-worth, their manifestation practice, not the wage, not the hours, not the four jobs it now takes to afford one apartment. Fix your inner beliefs and the outer world will follow, they promise, as if belief alone has ever covered a hospital bill. Plenty of cultures organize identity differently, more relationally, where who you are gets understood through your family and your community and what you owe each other, not through a solitary self you are supposed to optimize alone at midnight, journaling gratitude for a system that is exhausting you.

I will say this gently, because I mean it gently. I have never once felt like I was not enough. But I have grieved, more than once, watching someone underestimate my intelligence or my ability, and then look faintly surprised when I deliver exactly what I said I would. I have wondered, quietly, whether it was my accent. Whether it was English not being the language I grew up speaking. Whether it was how deeply my skin tans by July. I have come to understand that none of those things were ever really about me. They were about whatever story the other person had already decided to believe before I said a single word.

There is also the story of the parent or grandparent who arrived with nothing and built a life anyway, as if that settles the matter. It rarely does. It rarely asks when that was, what a border crossing or a visa required back then compared to now, what the cost of living was that year, whether that same person could do it again today, in this economy, without a single soul who spoke their language. We flatten decades into one word, grit, and skip everything else that made it possible.

And here is the part that unsettles me most. This country was born from a refusal, a refusal to be taxed without consent, a refusal to be indentured, bound to labor as punishment or debt. And yet here we are, generations later, having quietly rebuilt a version of the very thing the founding story claims to have escaped. We call in sick and feel guilty. We answer emails from bed with a fever. We measure our worth in how depleted we can appear while still delivering on time.

We are not machines. But we are asked to perform like we are, and worse, we are asked to be grateful for the opportunity.

This is where the mask really slips. We tell people without homes to get a job, then we design the city so they cannot receive basic human needs. Benches split into three separate seats so no one can lie across them to sleep. Spikes set into concrete under bridges. Bathrooms marked for customers only, as if using a toilet should require a receipt. When someone pitches a tent because there is nowhere else to be, we send someone to take the tent down, as if the tent were the problem and not the absence of anywhere else to go. Some part of us decides they must be lazy, or on something, because the alternative, that a person can work and still end up outside, or cannot work for reasons no one bothered to ask about, and still deserves a bench and a bathroom and a bed, is harder to sit with.

There is even a theory, contested but persistent, that American cities leaned toward planting male trees over female ones because female trees drop fruit and seed pods that need cleaning up, and that this quiet preference for less mess over free fruit is part of why allergy season has gotten so much worse. I cannot promise you that one is entirely settled science. But it rhymes closely enough with everything else here that I understand why people repeat it. Even the trees, in this telling, were not allowed to give something away for free. People are expected to work for what the land once provided at no cost. We call it the Land of the Free, yet nothing is free here.

Go back far enough and you find the same hunger in history books. Colonizers forced Indigenous nations across these islands and mainlands into systems like the encomienda, extracting gold and crops through labor that was never asked for and never repaid. When that labor was not enough to satisfy the demand, the hunger reached further, into the transatlantic slave trade, and it did not stop growing there either. The fascination with watching BIPOC bodies work runs centuries deep. We are still living inside a structure someone else built a long time ago, calling it culture instead of naming it for what it is.

Land that once belonged to one people, worked now by another’s descendants to make someone else rich, is not only a historical footnote. It happened across these hemispheres, and in one form or another, whether that is labor trafficking, domestic workers with their passports confiscated, or farmworkers who never see the full wage they were promised, it is still happening now, quite possibly closer to you than you think.

I do not think the answer is guilt. Guilt tends to freeze people instead of moving them.

But we could, if we wanted to, notice the pattern before we repeat it again without meaning to. We could, actually gather, and sit with each other and trade stories instead of only trading judgments. This is crucial, especially in a country so certain we are too divided to ever find each other again. Every culture that has survived something hard has had some version of this, a shared table, a shared fire, a reason to sit down together that has nothing to do with what anyone produced that day. We are not short on the tools for this. We have just stopped reaching for them.

I am not asking anyone to feel bad about working hard. I am asking us to notice who we expect to keep working while sick, who we call lazy for wanting rest, whose exhaustion we find inspiring instead of alarming, who we design entire cities to keep from sitting down. I am asking whether the world we are building actually needs all of this striving, or whether some of it is simply inherited noise, centuries old, playing on a loop we forgot to question. A hamster wheel, keeping us busy but leading nowhere.

Other parts of the world are already moving toward something gentler, more sustainable. Shorter work weeks are being tested and are working. People are naming burnout instead of wearing it as a badge. Disabled and chronically ill folks have been telling us for years that rest is not a reward, it is a right.

I keep thinking about Spain closing its shops for the afternoon, about a country that measures itself by how happy its people are instead of how much they produce, about places that simply organized life differently and did not fall apart because of it. Nobody had to time travel to find these examples. They exist on the same planet, in the same decade, while so many of us keep insisting rest has to be earned first and that some people deserve it more than others.

A quick note before you go. I used AI (Claude) to help proofread this piece, because English is not my first language. I am saying that plainly because there is a real cost to not saying it. Platforms are increasingly flagging writing as AI generated, and the tools doing the flagging are demonstrably worse at reading English written by people whose first language is not English. One widely cited study found these detectors mislabeled more than half of a set of real student essays as AI generated, essays written by non-native speakers using careful, correct sentence structure. Correctness read as suspicious. A second language, penalized for trying too hard to get it right.

That belongs in an essay about who gets believed, who gets the benefit of the doubt, and who has to prove themselves twice before anyone takes their work seriously.

Something similar is true of the fear that spreads through our information environment now. It doesn't stay contained to the people who started it, or the people it was aimed at. It moves through anyone with dry enough kindling, which, most days, is nearly everyone. If you've ever put your phone down after reading the news and noticed your jaw is tight, your shoulders are up by your ears, or your heart is going a little too fast for someone who just sat and read words on a screen, that's smoke inhalation. You're not imagining it, and you're not weak for feeling it. Your body is responding exactly the way it evolved to respond to fire.

The fire has a mechanism

It's easy to assume the anxiety that follows a scroll through the news is a personal failing, being too sensitive, not informed enough, not "strong" enough to handle it. But there's a real, measurable mechanism behind it, closer to physics than to personality, and once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Researchers at NYU and Princeton studied over 560,000 real social media posts about real, ongoing issues, gun control, same sex marriage, climate change, not misinformation, just real conversations about real things. They found that each additional moral or emotional word in a post increased how far it spread by roughly 20 percent. They called this effect moral contagion, because it behaves like an actual contagion model: it spreads fastest through people who already share the same group identity, and slower across group lines. A follow up study in 2025, using an even larger dataset of nearly 850,000 posts, found almost the same result, about 17 percent more spread per emotional word.

Source: PNAS, Emotion Shapes the Diffusion of Moralized Content in Social Networks Source: PNAS Nexus, Estimating the Effect Size of Moral Contagion

Here's the part worth sitting with: this has nothing to do with whether something is true. A completely accurate account of a real event, written in calm, factual language, will spread less than the exact same event written to inflame. The story doesn't need to be exaggerated or false to catch. Truth is not fire retardant. The words alone can turn dry information into dry brush.

This isn't a new fire, but the fuel load changed

It's tempting to think this is just how news has always been, a fire that's always burned this hot, but there's actual data showing otherwise. A study published this year analyzed nearly a million news segments from ABC, CBS, and NBC going back to 1969, and found that the share of airtime devoted to substantive political and issue coverage has declined for fifty years, while time spent on commercials and "soft" content has roughly doubled.

Source: PLOS One, No news is good news? The declining information value of broadcast news in America

The turning point researchers keep pointing back to is the arrival of 24 hour cable news in the 1980s. Before that, a nightly broadcast had maybe thirty minutes to fill, which forced editors to choose only what actually mattered. Once there were 24 hours to fill instead of 30 minutes, and not nearly enough real information to fill them, the incentive shifted from informing people to holding their attention by any means necessary. Algorithms later inherited that same incentive and applied it at a scale no cable executive could have imagined.

A separate, large study of real news headlines makes the mechanism painfully concrete. Researchers ran controlled experiments on over 105,000 real headlines, viewed nearly six million times, and found that each additional negative word increased the click rate, while each additional positive word decreased it, even when the underlying story was word for word identical.

Source: Nature Human Behaviour, Negativity Drives Online News Consumption

The algorithm and the brain are, in a sense, running the same old program. One evolved to notice predators and, once, real fire. The other was engineered, deliberately, to strike that same match continuously, at global scale, because a burning feed holds attention better than a calm one, and attention is the product being sold.

What this costs the body

This isn't just an unpleasant feeling that passes. Repeated exposure to distressing content activates the amygdala, the brain's threat detection system, triggering a cortisol release each time. Because a news feed delivers this in rapid, small, repeated doses instead of one distinct event, the body doesn't get its usual chance to fully recover in between.

Source: Medical Daily, Your Brain Was Never Designed for This Much Bad News

One lab study measured this directly with saliva cortisol samples: people who used social media after an acute stressor showed more sustained cortisol elevation during recovery than people who didn't use it, meaning the platform use itself delayed the body's return to baseline.

Source: Frontiers in Psychology, Facebook Use after Acute Stress Impairs Cortisol Recovery

Chronically elevated cortisol has its own downstream effects, worse sleep, which raises cortisol further, along with documented links to weight changes, cardiovascular strain, and immune suppression. It's a real physical cost, not just an emotional one, and it doesn't require someone to consciously feel stressed for the toll to be real.

Every ember we pass along is still an ember, however good our reasons

This is worth sitting with honestly. Sharing something because it's furious or frightening, even to warn people, even to raise an alarm, even with the best of intentions, still uses the exact mechanism the researchers measured. It isn't only information moving at that point, it's a feeling, and the feeling travels faster and further than the facts underneath it ever could carry on their own. A firebrand doesn't check the intentions of the hand that throws it before it lands somewhere dry.

That's not an argument for caring less, or staying silent about what matters. It's an argument for noticing what's actually being thrown. A team at Kellogg studying outrage and sharing found that people often justify passing along inflammatory content by telling themselves it's "outrageous if true," which skips the accuracy check entirely, and skips any thought about what that ember does to the next person's dry kindling.

Source: Kellogg Insight, Feeling Outraged? Think Twice Before Hitting Share

Building containment lines

None of this is an argument for disengaging, checking out, or deciding the world isn't worth paying attention to. Firefighters don't ignore wildfires, they build containment lines around them. It's an argument for a different relationship with the information, one where staying informed and protecting your own dry brush aren't in competition with each other.

A few containment lines that are actually backed by the research above, not just intuition:

Choose curated over open flame. A digest format, something written by an editor with a fixed word count, structurally can't play the same game a bottomless feed plays. There's no infinite scroll to optimize for, no headline A/B test running in the background (such as Facebook). This is the whole appeal of something like a morning newsletter over an app that never runs out of fuel.

Notice the wording, not just the topic. The moral contagion research means the same real story can be delivered as information or as a firebrand, and the difference is often just the adjectives. Getting used to noticing when a headline is trying to strike a match versus trying to tell you what happened is a skill, and it gets easier with practice.

Before sharing, ask what you're actually throwing. Not "is this true," although that matters too, but "am I passing along information, or am I passing along a spark." Both have their place. But it helps to know which one you're doing, on purpose, rather than by reflex.

Protect the edges of the day. Waking to check news in the middle of the night doesn't just cost that one night's sleep, research links the habit to worse sleep quality going forward, night after night. Whatever's burning when the alarm goes off will still be burning. It rarely needs anyone standing over it in the dark.

Let caring and calm coexist. The instinct to protect against a constant fear drip isn't the same as not caring about what's happening. A nervous system that isn't running on fumes has more actual capacity to think clearly, show up, and act, than one that's been in a low grade fight or flight state since breakfast. Firefighters work best rested, not exhausted.

The fire is real, and parts of it were built, on purpose, to spread indiscriminately, catching anyone with dry enough kindling regardless of what they believe or who they voted for. Knowing that doesn't put it out. But it does mean there's a real choice, more often than it feels like in the moment, in whether any one of us becomes the wind that carries it further, or the line that holds.

Inflammatory in so many ways.

I'm not writing this from the outside looking in or waving a judgmental finger from a higher place. But genuine concern about the vibration of fear for the collective. Cannot recommend watching Monsters, Inc. enough. Maybe you’ll see what I see.

After the 2016 election, I was throwing embers around nonstop, reacting to every report, arguing with strangers online late into the night. Between that and a stressful job, my body stayed in alarm mode with no real off switch.

A dormant case of lupus flared during that stretch, and my doctors were clear that the stress was a driver. The mechanism in this piece weren't abstract for me. They showed up in bloodwork.

I give them a place. An island. And I can almost see it happen, the eyes soften, the answer settling into them like a puzzle piece finally clicking into place. Now they have the whole picture, or so it seems. “Oh, my friend’s husband’s cousin’s daughter is dating a Puertorrican. Nice guy. His name is Hector, do you know him?” :)

Boxed in, gently, and without meaning to be unkind. But we humans are so much more than our location at birth. Sketched in these bones there’s so much history. Bigger than the tiny lovely island I get to call home.

As a Taino*¹ descendant from the island of Borikén, and Spaniard and African, my roots are complex.

"Latino/a/x" and "Hispanic" never felt like mine to wear. For one, I don't want to be anyone's panic (“his-panic”), especially not my own. To me, owning these labels is the equivalent of having the name "Offred"*² . To take the name of the colonizer is to participate in my own colonization. Assimilation has never suited me. It’s, as kids say nowadays, uncomfy.

This is a personal journey, and nothing wrong with anyone who feels at home in those words. I'm only naming why those words walk a little crooked on me.

So when people ask where you are from, but they are squinting in a way that says what are you, it's not an easy answer. Am I Spaniard? Taino? African? This is what I learned in school, that people born in Puerto Rico are. A lovely Neapolitan ice cream kind of people.

A few years ago I took two DNA tests, two different companies. CRI Genetics, more globally referenced, placed me at forty three percent European, mostly Iberian, and forty two percent AdMixed American, Peruvian and Puerto Rican leading the way, Mexican and Colombian close behind, seven percent African. One ancestor, the report said, was Peruvian, living around the year 1900, just four generations back, written into a single segment of chromosome fourteen. MyHeritage, gave me twenty eight percent Iberian, twenty four percent Mesoamerican and Andean, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh, Italian, Ashkenazi, Finnish, Sierra Leonean, all folded in. Even the science can't agree on what I am.

I am also in the Haplogroup C, shared with Native Americans, the maternal thread that ties me back through mother after mother, all the way to Mitochondrial Eve. Many ingredients in this casserole, in different amounts, depending on who's doing the measuring. Shall I honor the higher percentage ancestors more than the ones accounting for 0.3%?

What am I? Really?

I am stardust, mixed with carbon. Hydrogen and oxygen, nitrogen and sulfur, the same elements that glow at the center of the galaxy, the same ingredients shared by ninety seven percent with every burning star above me. Cells and tissue, muscle, blood, organs, soul, spirit, earth. Pachamama's vein, pulsating and extending life. Creator. Love. Soul. Music. Fire and sky, water and moss, forest, moth. Daughter. Sister. Mother. Portal. Life and death and all the dreams in between.

What am I? I am my neighbor. I am the people I love, and even the ones I hold grudges against. I am the fish and the fawn. The observant owl, quiet and swift. I am the mouse in the talons of the owl. I am the meal. The worm. The soil. The seed and the fruit. I am me and I am you. I “am”.

I wonder sometimes what it would feel like to ask a different question. Who do you carry? What dust, what root, what river runs through you?

Maybe the answer is not that complex after all, if framed differently. Because if I am stardust and soil and you are stardust and soil, then the only honest answer to "what are you" has always been the same as you.

¹ "Taino" is itself a complicated label, not necessarily how the Indigenous people of the Caribbean referred to themselves as one unified people. Some trace Taino roots to the Arawak peoples of South America. People travel, and identity moves with them.

² "Offred" is the name given to the narrator in Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale, later carried into the television adaptation. It is a patronymic, literally "Of Fred," denoting that she belongs to the household of a man named Fred. Her real name is never confirmed in the novel, only hinted at. The name itself erases her former identity and marks her as property.

Before fight or flight kicks in, before the alarm sounds and the walls go up, the human nervous system does something else first. It looks around for connection. It reaches for another face. It asks, without words, are you with me?

We are wired for each other before we are wired for war.

So how did it get this way?

Some will say it is human nature. They will point to history and say, look, this is what we are. But that argument has always asked us to look backward to excuse what we are building forward. It mistakes pattern for destiny.

Some will say we arrived here broken. That we were born with a stain, heirs to a debt we never agreed to carry. That unworthiness is our inheritance and suffering is what we deserve. I understand why that story exists. But I do not believe it is true. I think it is a man-made concept, and I think it has done tremendous damage.

If we come from a Creator that IS love, if that is the source, if that is the frequency at the origin of everything, then what are we, at our most essential, but love itself? How do we look at a newborn and see a sinner? How do we hand a child unworthiness before they can even speak and then wonder why they grow up afraid?

We are not born with fear. We learn it. We can all carry shadows, yes, but we arrived here open. We arrived here reaching. It is abandonment, whether by others or by ourselves, that teaches us to close. To grip. To strike.

Quantum physics has something to say about all of this. Observation shapes reality. What we focus on, we amplify. We are not passive witnesses to the world, we are co-creators of it, constantly in conversation with everything around us, whether we know it or not. We are amplifiers. Mirrors. Holograms of each other, carrying and reflecting frequencies we may have never consciously chosen.

When we focus on fear, we produce more of it. When we build systems around scarcity and threat, we get scarcity and threat. Not because that is human nature, but because that is how creation works at every scale, from the subatomic to the civilizational. We create by agreement.

There is a moment in Monsters, Inc. that I keep coming back to. An entire civilization has been running on the wrong power source for generations. They believed fear was the only fuel that worked. They built everything around harvesting it. And then a little girl laughs, and the grid lights up like it never has before.

That is not a children’s story. That is a mirror.

Fear is not something we are born with. It is something we learned, and we have been carrying it ever since, like a precious amulet in the pocket. Something to protect us. Something to keep us safe. But it is weight with no warmth. Power with no light.

Think about the animals. We take their forests. We pave over their paths. We leave our garbage in the spaces we have invaded, and then we call them dangerous when they appear in the wreckage of what used to be their home. We punish them for surviving us. Is that not the same logic that has driven every war? Take what you want. Call the ones who resist a threat. Eliminate the inconvenience and name it progress.

And hatred meeting hatred does not create understanding. It creates more hatred. Not because we are doomed, but because we are responsive. We reflect what we receive. We become what we are surrounded by. That is not a flaw in our design. It is actually the same quality that makes love so contagious, when we let it be.

Do we have to keep sending our children into the slaughter to move a line on a map? Does someone having something mean we must take it by force? Does it always have to be win or lose?

What if we got curious before we judged? What if we got curious before we sentenced, before we punished, before we decided that the thing we do not understand must be destroyed?

What if, in our hearts, we truly believed that every single one of us is sacred?

Not just the ones who look like us, think like us, pray like us. Every one. The child in the rubble. The animal in the burning forest. The stranger whose life makes no sense to you. The person you were taught to fear.

Sacred. All of them. All of us.

We are amplifiers, which means love focused with intention also multiplies. Joy also spreads. Connection also becomes the frequency everyone in the room starts to hum. We have this power, every single one of us, regardless of where we started or what we were handed.

We were never the monster.

We were always the laughter that could light the grid.

The frequency of love is always available. We just have to choose it, and then choose it again, and keep choosing it until it becomes the agreement we make with each other.

Fear less.

Love more.

That is the whole invitation.

I have been thinking about all of this a lot lately. I spend a good part of my days pulling weeds, which turns out to be one of the finest conditions for honest thought. There is something about working with your hands in the dirt, something unhurried and grounding, that loosens the things you have been too busy to examine. And then, right on cue, a book found its way into my hands: Discovering Fire by Roger Wayne Wolsey. I suspect it did not arrive by accident. I suspect creator, spirit, whatever name you give the force that nudges you when you are ready, looked at me and said: you missed a spot.

So here I am. Looking at the spot.

The Theater of Fear

Let me start somewhere that might seem small, because small things have a way of revealing the large ones underneath.

Recently, I heard about political rumor that has made its rounds suggesting that a certain candidate was, among other alarming things, a vegetarian. Gasp! This was presented as evidence of something sinister. If he does not eat meat, the logic went, he must be against ranchers. Against ranchers means against a way of life. Against a way of life means against you. Build the wall. Draw the line. Pick a side.

The same machinery gets aimed at LGBTQ2S+ people with consequences far more serious and rumors far more detached from reality. It has become so ordinary for politicians to weaponize this kind of fear in exchange for votes that we have stopped noticing how elaborate the construction is. We only notice what it does to people. Sometimes my knee jerk reaction is outrage.

And here is the thing I keep sitting with: in our very righteous response to this, we sometimes generate the same vibration we are fighting. Everything is energy. Everything moves in waves. I am not saying do not resist. I am saying let us be careful about what we are building while we resist, because hatred aimed at hatred does not dissolve it. It feeds it. I am including myself in this. We are all capable of it. That is not a comfortable sentence, and I mean it anyway.

Who Holds the Line to Heaven

What unsettles me most, underneath all of it, is the quiet claim that comes with mixing political power and religious authority. When those in power suggest they speak for God, they are reaching for two kinds of dominion at once: the power of the state and the power of the divine. That is a tremendous amount of weight to place on what are, at the end of the day, human hands.

I am not a theologian. I am just a person with two decent eyes, an open heart, and a relationship to the divine that has never required a middleman. I connect directly to the source. To love in its highest and purest form. And when you have a direct line (and we all do), you receive a cleaner signal.

Some people need an operator to connect the call, and that is genuinely okay. What I would ask us to remember is that operators are human. I know this from experience. I worked a busy switchboard at the beginning of my career, and by the hundredth call you begin to leak. Your mood, your stress, your assumptions, your bad morning, your accumulated grief, all of it starts to color the messages you pass along. Institutions are switchboards. They are made of people, and people have shadow, and shadow unexamined gets transmitted as truth.

When did God become so small that God needed a political party to speak on their behalf? And when did love, which every tradition I have ever encountered names as the core of the divine, become something used to exclude?

The Altar and the Price of It

My grandmother was a Taino descendant, and the history that lives in that sentence is not a gentle one.

The Taino people, my people, were given a choice that was never really a choice. Convert to Christianity or face death. Embrace the cross or be erased, not just as a body, but as a lineage, a language, a way of understanding the sacred. Genocide dressed as salvation. And so we learned, over generations, to hold two things at once. We went to mass and we kept the altar. We bent toward survival and carried our truth quietly, in the bedroom, between the dresser and the bed.

My grandmother rarely left the house. A priest would come to her, and she would receive communion there, while insisting all the grandchildren attend church every Sunday. Salvation, maybe. Protection, certainly. But also something I understand more fully now: assimilation as a shield.

Her altar, though. I think about it often. A three-foot statue of an Indian stood at the side of her bed. At its feet, offerings of tobacco, sometimes in the form of a cigar. Right beside it, a smaller statue of the Virgin Mary. As a child I would trace both of their faces for long stretches of time, the ancestor and the mother of God, side by side, neither displacing the other. I did not have words for it then. Now I think: this is what coexistence actually looks like. Two truths, resting together. Both tended. Neither one requiring the exile of the other.

My grandmother never explained the altar. She did not need to. It explained itself.

The Confession I Invented

I grew up in the Catholic church and I loved the ritual of it, genuinely. The light through stained glass, the candlelight, the music. The sense of belonging. Ritual is ancient. It feeds something real in us, something that reaches back long before any particular religion claimed it. I have no argument with beauty, or with the human need to gather and mark the sacred.

My trouble began with my first communion. The prerequisite was confession. I was in elementary school, sitting with the question of what sins I had committed, coming up mostly empty. The pressure was real and strange: confess in order to be confirmed, receive the voucher that declares you one of the good ones.

So I went through the menu, trying to find a sin that fit. I told him I had thrown a rock at a bird. I had never done anything of the sort. I spent my childhood rehabilitating birds, not throwing rocks at them. I lied, in a confessional, to receive forgiveness for wrongs I had not committed. Even then I felt the weight of that irony, sitting heavy and unspoken in that little wooden booth.

My relationship with the church has been less hatred and more suspicion. A quiet, persistent question: what are you trying to get me to do? What are you trying to silence? Wolsey draws a meaningful distinction between following the religion of Jesus versus the religion about him, which is exactly the thread I am pulling at. It is a pity Jesus did not write his own memoirs. The accounts we have were written by humans, and humans, even well-meaning ones, tend to protect their own interests while believing they are protecting something sacred.

What Mary Might Have Wanted

In our culture, Marianismo runs deep. Women, especially mothers, are expected to dissolve themselves entirely into service. No personal desires. No ambitions outside the home. No voice, no needs, no self that exists independent of husband and children. A walking yes. Quiet. Grateful. Invisible except in her usefulness.

And then there is Mary herself, the woman chosen by a celestial being to carry the savior of the world, who appears in the story almost exclusively in her role as mother. We do not know what she dreamed about. We do not know what she found funny, what she was curious about, what she longed for before the angel arrived. Maybe she had extraordinary gifts that had nothing to do with motherhood. Maybe she had her own questions, her own doubts, her own complicated feelings about the task assigned to her. We will never know, because those parts of her did not serve the story being told.

And so the template holds: be the mother. Be nothing else. Disappear into the role and call it grace.

My own biological mother was looking for something holy too. She found her way into a religious group whose leader claimed to be the Holy Spirit with a new name. She placed her faith there fully, over doctors, over medicine, over her own body’s urgent need for care.

She died at thirty-three. She left four children behind.

She was not weak or foolish. She was hungry for the divine, and someone handed her a very convincing imitation. I carry her story not with bitterness but with tenderness, and with the understanding of how much damage gets done when human shadow wears the costume of the sacred.

What We Were Before We Were Taught

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has spent years studying the moral life of babies, and what his research reveals is quietly radical: we do not arrive as blank slates. We arrive already carrying compassion. Already wired for empathy, for fairness, for the recognition that others feel pain the way we feel pain. Before a single lesson is taught or a single sermon is heard, something in us already knows.

The cruelty, the tribalism, the reflexive fear of someone who loves differently or prays differently or eats differently, that comes later. That gets handed to us, piece by piece, through the air we breathe and the rooms we grow up in. We absorb it before we have the language to question it, and we carry it forward without realizing we are carrying anything at all.

We also carry it into the places we go searching for healing.

I have sat in sacred circles and sweat lodges and gathered with people seeking exactly what I came seeking: connection, truth, the feeling of belonging to something larger than themselves. Sometimes it is luminous. And sometimes the shadow leaks in anyway. Hierarchies form. Cliques develop. People who were once exiled begin to exclude. A kind of performative transcendence takes shape that has the form of love but not the substance. These gatherings are often made of people who have been deeply hurt, who are starving to belong, and that hunger can be exploited in a circle as easily as in a pew.

I say this having caught my own judgment moving through me in these spaces. I loved the spirit of seeking, of openness, of the willingness to question. And then I noticed something shifting, or maybe I did, and I felt disappointed, and then I noticed that my disappointment was its own form of judgment. I had a picture of what the space should be. So do we all. That, too, is gum on the shoe.

The Invitation

When you strip away the team colors, the flags, the righteous certainty on all sides, what is left is the same ache in every person: the need to be loved and to belong. That need is the most human thing about us, and it is worth protecting.

And yet, if your sense of belonging depends on someone else’s exile, I want to ask you gently: where does that lead? One day the circle may turn, and you may find yourself on the other side of the logic that once made you feel safe.

We all carry prejudice. It is in the air. We breathed it in before we knew what breathing was. And sometimes it is true, what we feel and think. And sometimes it is not. The practice is not to punish yourself when you find the gum. The practice is to get curious. Where did I pick this up? How long have I been walking with it? What marks has it left in the rooms I have moved through?

And what a gift, truly, what an unexpected and ordinary gift, to be able to go back and clean up the gum marks.

On poverty tourism, the charity industrial complex, and the birthright we traded for a can of tomato soup

A note before we begin: this essay is not about any single organization, pantry, farm, or individual. The people who volunteer at food pantries, who donate their harvest, who show up on hard days to help strangers, are often doing the most they know how to do inside a system that asks too little of those with the most and too much of those with the least. This is not about them. This is about the culture and the structures that put all of us, helper and helped alike, in impossible positions. If something in here lands uncomfortably, I’d ask you to sit with that rather than dismiss it. Discomfort is usually where the truth lives.

Every November, something predictable happens across America. Families pile into their cars and drive to a shelter, a church basement, a community center. They put on aprons. They ladle soup. They smile at people they would never otherwise make eye contact with, and they drive home feeling full in a way that has nothing to do with food.

Some of them bring their teenagers. This is intentional. Nothing teaches gratitude, the thinking goes, like proximity to someone who has less. The teenager stands there, phone in pocket, maybe resentful, maybe genuinely moved, holding a serving spoon over a tray of mashed potatoes. They are receiving a lesson. The person on the other side of the table is delivering it, without having consented to being a teaching tool.

This is poverty tourism. And like all tourism, the primary beneficiary is the visitor.

We have built an entire industry, a culture, a self-congratulatory infrastructure, around the performance of helping people without ever meaningfully redistributing power, resources, or dignity to them. We call it charity. We call it service. We call it giving back. And we have become so committed to the aesthetics of helping that we have lost the thread of what help actually requires.

This is not an essay about bad intentions. Most people who show up on Thanksgiving mean well. Most people who donate to food drives, who write checks to nonprofits, who share fundraising posts, mean well. Good intentions are not the issue. The issue is what we are willing to examine about the systems we are sustaining with those good intentions, and what we are not.

The Pantry

Let me tell you what the food pantry actually looks like from the other side of the table, because the brochure version and the lived version are two entirely different documents. This is not a story about one pantry. It is a story about most of them, documented across communities all over this country by people who have stood in those lines.

The line forms long before the doors open. People arrive early because the produce goes fast, and produce is the thing most worth having. It is often gone within minutes of opening. What remains: canned tomato soup. Pinto beans. A plastic roll of ground beef that has made a long and uncertain journey before arriving here, its temperature history known to no one. Cabbage. Potatoes. Carrots. Week after week, the same rotation, edible in the way that technically meets the definition of the word without aspiring to more.

Many of the farms and individuals donating to these pantries are giving genuinely and generously, offering what they have. That generosity is real. The problem is not the donors. The problem is that the system funnels that generosity through structures that were not designed with the recipient’s dignity as a priority. Good food exists. Good intentions exist. And still, what arrives in the bag is often what nobody else wanted.

In some cases, before you can take any of it home, you answer questions. Where are you from...where are you really from? What is your household income? Who else lives with you? This is not unusual, and it is rarely malicious. It happens with a smile, sometimes with genuine warmth, and it happens nonetheless. The implicit logic is clear even when the words are not: help comes with surveillance. You must be legible to receive it. You must be verifiable. And if you are undocumented, or afraid of being asked, or simply unwilling to submit to an identity check in exchange for a can of beans, you leave empty handed. Some people do. Some people decide they would rather go without than be interrogated for the crime of needing food.

The volunteers staffing these pantries are, in many cases, people who care deeply. They are also people who were handed a protocol they did not write, working inside a system they did not design. The ask is not to blame them. The ask is to look at what we have collectively decided is an acceptable way to distribute basic human sustenance, and to ask whether we would accept it for ourselves.

This is what we are recommending when we say “have you tried the food pantry?”

We are recommending that a person trade their privacy, their dignity, and a significant portion of their morning for a bag of shelf-stable food that will quietly compromise their health over time. We are recommending a transaction dressed up as generosity. We are recommending a system that was built around the needs of donors and volunteers and organizational mission statements, and then retrofitted, imperfectly, around the people it claims to serve.

What Bad Food Does To A Body Over Time

There is a clear relationship between poverty, nutrition, and health. The food available to people without resources is not neutral. It is not simply less expensive food. It is food engineered to be shelf-stable and calorie-dense, which means it is, in many cases, high in sodium, refined carbohydrates, added sugar, and preservatives, and low in the fiber, micronutrients, and protein that a body needs to function well over time. Eaten consistently, because it is what is available consistently, this diet builds the physiological conditions for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and a long list of inflammatory conditions that accumulate quietly over years before they announce themselves as crises.

And then, when the crisis announces itself, we expect the same person who could not afford nutrient-dense food to afford healthcare. The copay. The specialist. The prescription. The follow-up. The sick day that doesn’t come with pay. The transportation to the appointment. The medication that must be taken with food that isn’t in the house.

The body that was fed processed food for twenty years because that was what was affordable becomes the body that cannot afford to be sick, which is the body that gets sicker and sicker until it cannot work, and then we debate whether people who cannot work deserve to eat at all.

Some politicians have decided that they do not, or at least that they should not be trusted to decide for themselves what to eat. There are ongoing efforts in various states to restrict what SNAP recipients are allowed to purchase, to place a bureaucratic hand between a hungry person and their groceries, to have someone in a boardroom or a legislature decide that a mother of three cannot be trusted to know what her family needs. The condescension in this is so profound it borders on ideological. The person who has been performing impossible financial calculations every single day of their life, who knows exactly how far a dollar does and does not stretch, who has developed a sophistication around resource management that most middle class people will never need, is the person we want to supervise at the checkout counter.

The Bootstraps

We need to talk about what we actually mean when we tell people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, because the metaphor has drifted so far from any physical reality that we have stopped noticing it describes an impossibility.

A bootstrap is a loop on the back of a boot, used to pull it on. You cannot lift yourself off the ground by pulling on your own boot. The phrase, when it was coined, was a joke. It described something absurd, an obvious physical impossibility used to illustrate the limits of self-reliance. Somewhere between then and now, we forgot it was a joke and made it a moral framework.

Consider the actual mechanics of poverty in rural America, where there are no jobs within reasonable distance, no public transportation to reach the jobs that exist further away, and no realistic way to participate in the economy without a vehicle. A car is not a luxury in this context. It is the infrastructure of survival. And yet: owning and operating a car requires insurance. Insurance rates in most states are legally tied to credit scores. Credit scores reflect the accumulated history of financial decisions made under financial duress, which means the worse your financial situation, the higher your insurance costs, which worsens your financial situation. The word for this is design.

And somewhere, someone is telling you to budget better.

The grocery store in your area closed several years ago because the profit margins in low-income rural areas do not justify maintaining them. The nearest one is far enough away that getting there requires the car, the gas, the time, all of which cost money. The food desert is not a natural phenomenon. It is the outcome of markets following wealth, leaving behind the people who could not come with it. Those people cannot relocate either, because relocation costs money, first and last month’s rent, a deposit, a moving truck, the gap between leaving one place and starting to earn in another. Poverty is, among other things, a trap with very specific geographic coordinates.

Meanwhile, grocery stores throw away tons of perfectly edible food every single day. The logistics of redistribution are inconvenient. The liability is unclear. The food goes into dumpsters while children in the same county sit in classrooms unable to concentrate because breakfast was not a thing that happened, and school lunch funding has been cut because someone decided that line item was expendable. A hungry child cannot learn. Every educator knows this. Every parent knows this. The research is not ambiguous. We defund the lunch program anyway, and then we debate why test scores are low in low-income districts, as if the answer requires further investigation.

A system produced this. A system sustains it. And a system can be changed, if enough people stop calling it fate.

The Nonprofit And The Brochure

Here is something the charity industrial complex does not put in the annual report.

The organizations that exist to serve poor people are frequently structured in ways that replicate the very hierarchies they claim to challenge. The directors are comfortable. The frontline workers, the ones who actually sit with people in crisis, navigate the bureaucracy on their behalf, absorb their pain and their stories and their worst days, are paid wages that often qualify them for the services their organization provides. They are the bridge between wealth and need, and they are compensated accordingly: not very much.

This pattern repeats with such consistency it is almost architectural. Leadership with resources and proximity to power. Frontline staff, disproportionately people of color hired to reflect the communities being served, absorbing the hardest work for the lowest pay, often at their own physical and logistical expense. The perks flow upward. The burden flows down.

Distance from the problem shapes the decisions. Leadership insulated from the daily reality of need tends to invest in visibility rather than capacity, in the story told about the work rather than the work itself. Tens of thousands of dollars get allocated to printed marketing materials promoting programs already at capacity, already full by word of mouth, already doing all the work they can do. Money that could have directly served people is allocated to brochures instead, beautifully designed ones, probably, with photographs of grateful-looking people on the cover, to be distributed at conferences where other nonprofit professionals would nod and take notes.

The pattern is sector-wide and it is not accidental. The funding follows the story, and the story is controlled by people who are not living it. Nonprofit staff are sometimes asked, explicitly or implicitly, to extract the saddest, most compelling narratives from the people they serve, because sad and compelling narratives open wallets. The person in crisis becomes content. Their worst moment becomes a fundraising asset. Their dignity is spent in the production of donor feelings.

The gala happens. The auction raises money. The keynote speaker talks about the importance of community. The people the money is supposed to help are not in the room, because tickets cost more than their weekly grocery budget, and also because their presence was never really the point.

What the organization needs is not for poor people to be in the room. It needs poor people to be legible, photographable, narratable. It needs them as subjects, not participants. The moment poor people are in the room with real decision-making power, the room has to change in ways that are uncomfortable for the people who have always been comfortable in it.

Who Works The Land

There is a class of worker this country depends on entirely and thanks almost not at all.

They grow our food. These workers are on their knees for hours. They do not always take breaks because breaks are sometimes deducted from their pay. They work when the weather permits. If they get sick, they do not get paid. If they break a bone, that is the end of a month’s income and the beginning of a debt spiral with no visible floor.

Consider the full journey of a meal. Someone plants it. Someone harvests it. Someone loads it onto a truck. Someone drives it across state lines. Someone unloads it at a warehouse. Someone stocks it on a shelf. Someone rings it up at a register. Someone cooks it in a restaurant kitchen. Someone carries it to a table. And someone, at the very end of that chain, eats it in comfort without a single thought about the hands it passed through to get there. Those hands, every single pair of them, statistically belong to people who cannot afford the thing they are growing, carrying, cooking, and serving. The food industry is one of the lowest paying sectors in the country. The people closest to the food are the furthest from being able to eat well.

For some, their ancestors farmed this continent and others under conditions that were not called slavery only when there was paperwork making the distinction technically legal. They died of exhaustion and anemia and the accumulated cost of bodies pushed past what bodies are meant to sustain. Generations of labor extracted from people who were never given enough to survive the extraction comfortably, who worked land that belonged to someone else, who grew food that fed someone else, whose productivity built wealth that settled somewhere else entirely.

The paperwork has changed. The arrangement has not.

The Birthright

Before colonization, before someone decided that land could be owned and that ownership could be monetized and that the monetization could be enforced by law and violence, people understood something simple.

Food is not a commodity. Shelter is not a prize. Land is not an asset class. These are the conditions of human life. They are what you need to exist, and the need for them does not have to be earned or justified or demonstrated to a government office. It precedes every economic system ever invented. It is older than money. It is older than the nation state. It is older than the concept of a cost of living, which is itself a colonial construction, the transformation of basic survival into a transaction that someone else can profit from.

The person who knows how to grow food, who carries that knowledge in their hands and their knees and their understanding of soil and season and seed, who has inherited it across generations through people who grew tobacco and cane and survived on what they could tend and harvest, that person should not go hungry. Not because they have earned food through their productivity, but because they are a living being.

We have built a world where that statement sounds radical. It is not radical. It is the oldest human understanding there is, held by cultures on every continent before the logic of extraction arrived and decided everything could be owned by someone.

The cost of living is high. The cost of living is, for many people, depression, anxiety, illness, exhaustion, and the grinding erosion of everything that makes a life feel like more than survival.

What We Actually Need From You

Pay people properly. A living wage is not a gift. It is not generosity. It is the baseline acknowledgment that the work a person does has value and that the person doing it deserves to survive it with something left over.

Do not make kindness transactional. Help without requiring the recipient to sit through your religious or political views or your explanations or your assessment of their life choices. Generosity with conditions is not generosity. It is leverage.

Donate real food. Not your pantry cleanout. Not what you would not eat. If you would not serve it at your own table, ask yourself what it says that you are comfortable serving it at someone else’s.

Stop asking people to justify their need. Stop interrogating people at the door. Stop sharing their stories without explicit, informed, uncoerced consent. Poverty does not waive a person’s right to privacy. Need does not make someone’s story yours to tell.

Put the people you claim to serve in the actual decision-making rooms. On the board. In the leadership. Not as a diversity metric, not as a feel-good addition, but with real power and real compensation and the real ability to change the way decisions are made.

And stop telling people that their suffering is a mindset problem. The ocean is polluted. No amount of positive thinking cleans it up.

A note before you close this tab: this piece was written from lived experience and from a long conversation about what it actually costs to be poor in America. The author is a farmworker, a former advocate for displaced victims of violence and human trafficking, and the descendant of people who worked the land until their bodies gave out. She has also worked inside nonprofit organizations, where part of the job was collecting traumatic stories from people in crisis to use in fundraising and advocacy materials. She did it with signed releases. She did it with good intentions. It felt wrong anyway, because a person who needs help and is asked by a caseworker whether their story can be shared is not in a position to say no freely. That is not consent. She left that work carrying what can only be described as moral harm, the specific weight of having participated in a system she knew was extracting something from people who had already given everything. She includes herself in the critique.

I use it as a tool, and it has genuinely opened things up for me. The ability to research deeply, to write more clearly, to build something that might one day become a real business, these are possibilities that used to live behind a wall of financial access. Ghost writers, consultants, editors, skilled collaborators. Those resources belonged to people who could already afford them. AI is changing that, and I don’t think that’s a small thing. For people like me, for first-generation creators, for thinkers without institutional backing, that shift in access is real and it matters.

And I hold that truth right next to another one that I can’t put down.

* * *

The infrastructure behind AI, the data centers, the cooling systems, the chemical-laden water, the strained power grids, is landing hardest on communities that already carry the most. People with the least political power. The least voice. The ones who were already dealing with contaminated water, with environmental neglect, with the weight of being last in line when resources are distributed and first in line when costs are assigned.

And because I genuinely believe we are connected the way mycelium connects a forest, quietly, completely, in ways that make your suffering mine whether I can see it from where I’m standing or not, I cannot treat that as someone else’s problem. What I participate in, I am part of. That’s not guilt talking. That’s just how I understand the world.

So I find myself sitting with a real question. Is what I’m doing in agreement with the seven generations principle?

* * *

The seven generations concept, rooted in Haudenosaunee and other Indigenous traditions, asks us to consider the impact of our decisions not just on ourselves, not just on people alive today, but on the seven generations that follow us. It asks: what will this choice leave behind? Who will be living inside the consequences of what I do right now?

When I ask that question honestly about AI, the answer isn’t clean. The tool itself has genuine potential to democratize access, to give voice to people who were structurally excluded from certain kinds of power. That part points forward in a good direction. But the current design of the infrastructure, who controls it, who profits from it, whose land and water absorbs its cost, that part does not hold up as well under a seven generations lens.

And I think that distinction is the whole conversation.

Because it means the problem isn’t the tool. It’s the design. And designs can be changed. Not easily, not without pressure, not without people who are paying attention and willing to say so out loud. But they are not fixed. They are choices. And choices made by people can be unmade, or remade, by people.

* * *

That’s what this piece is about.

Not certainty. Not a clean verdict on whether AI is good or bad, a gift or a trap. But the honest, open examination of how things connect. How the tool I’m using to build something for myself is linked to systems affecting people I’ll never meet. How ecological harm and technological promise and economic access and generational responsibility are not separate conversations. They are the same conversation.

I’m writing from inside the conflict, not from the other side of it. I haven’t resolved it. I’m not sure it fully resolves. But I think there’s more integrity in naming it clearly and thinking through it together than in pretending it isn’t there.

If you’ve ever felt the pull of something that opens doors for you while also making you ask what it costs the world, you already know what this is about.

You’re already thinking in seven generations.

Let’s keep going.

The Architecture as a choice

The biggest tech companies in the world are spending hundreds of billions of dollars building server farms the size of small cities, all in the name of bringing you AI. And when you ask why the infrastructure needs to be so enormous, the answer you get is that AI is incredibly complex, that the scale of demand is staggering, that there’s simply no other way.

But that answer quietly skips over something important. Something worth understanding, because once you see it, the whole picture changes.

* * *

There’s a difference between building AI and running it. A big one.

Stay with me here because this is where the nuance lives, and it’s exactly where the advantage gets taken.

Think of AI like a book. Writing a book takes an enormous amount of research, time, and effort. But once it’s printed, you can read it anywhere. On a plane. In a cabin with no signal. You don’t need to call the author every time you want to read a sentence. All that work is already baked into the pages.

AI works the same way. There are two completely separate phases.

The first is training. This is where the AI learns everything it knows, processing vast amounts of text, data, and information to build its understanding of the world. This phase genuinely does require enormous computing power and serious infrastructure. This is the legitimate part of the big data center argument, and it’s real.

The second is inference. This is what actually happens when you ask AI a question. The model, already trained, already finished, simply applies what it knows to your specific query. This is a much lighter process. And here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough: inference can happen entirely on your own device, without your question ever leaving your hands.

Once a model is trained, it’s essentially a sophisticated file. That file can be copied onto your phone or laptop the same way any app is downloaded. After that, it doesn’t need to connect to any server to answer you. Everything it knows is already there.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s already happening.

When your iPhone suggests the next word you’re typing, recognizes your face, or transcribes your voice, that’s a local AI model running entirely on your device with no internet involved. Apple has been doing this for years. Google has a model called Gemini Nano that runs directly on certain Android phones without connecting to any server. There’s even a free app called Ollama that lets regular people download capable AI models onto a home computer, no subscription, no data sent anywhere, just the model sitting on your machine answering questions.

So why can’t all AI work this way?

Right now the largest, most capable models are genuinely too big to fit comfortably on most consumer devices. Running the full version of a top-tier AI assistant would require more memory and processing power than a typical phone or laptop has today. That part of the industry argument is honest.

But, and this is the critical part, most of what people actually use AI for doesn’t require that level of capability. Answering everyday questions, summarizing text, helping with writing, brainstorming, these tasks can be handled by much smaller models that run just fine on local hardware, right now, today.

And the gap is closing fast. Chip manufacturers are designing processors specifically for local AI. Models are being compressed and made more efficient without losing much real-world usefulness. What required a data center five years ago runs on a phone today. Industry analysts are projecting that by 2027, small local AI models will be used three times more than the giant centralized ones.

So the technology for a more private, more distributed version of AI is not some distant future. It exists. It works. It’s being built.

Which makes the question of why the version requiring your data to travel to someone else’s server is the one receiving the trillion-dollar investment a question worth asking out loud.

Because the answer has nothing to do with technical necessity. And everything to do with what happens to your data while it’s making that trip.

* * *

Follow the data, not just the money

Here’s what changes when your query goes to a centralized server versus staying on your device.

When it stays local, you get your answer. Full stop.

When it travels to their server, you get your answer AND they get another data point. What you asked. How you asked it. What you asked before. What you’re likely to ask next. Multiplied across hundreds of millions of users, updated continuously, that’s not just useful data. That’s a living map of human thought and behavior that is worth more than most national economies.

This is the business model. It’s described, in somewhat softer language, in their own investor documents. The AI assistant is genuinely useful to you. But it’s also, structurally, a data collection mechanism. And the architecture that makes it most useful for collection happens to be the same one requiring massive centralized infrastructure.

That’s probably not a coincidence.

* * *

And then there’s the water

This is the part that brought it home for me in a different way.

Data centers use extraordinary amounts of water to keep their servers cool. Millions of gallons a day in some facilities. The chemicals used in that cooling water don’t just evaporate cleanly, they enter local soil and water systems. And the electricity demand from these facilities is pushing regional power grids, many of them built decades ago, past what they were designed to handle.

The communities closest to these facilities, often lower income, often with less political power, are absorbing those costs. The profits go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, in Europe, countries like Finland, Sweden, Ireland and Denmark figured out something practical. That waste heat from data centers, heat that gets vented into the atmosphere here, can be captured and piped directly into homes. One data center in Finland heats two thirds of an entire town. Microsoft is developing a system expected to warm 100,000 homes in the city of Espoo. In Ireland, an Amazon facility already supplies 100% of the heat to a local district heating network.

The technology to do this exists. It works. It just requires someone to insist on it.

Which raises the obvious question of why it isn’t standard practice everywhere.

* * *

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

I want to be careful here because this is where it’s easy to veer into territory that sounds paranoid. I’m not saying there’s a room somewhere where powerful people are scheming to keep you dependent on their servers.

What I am saying is simpler. The incentives all point in the same direction. Centralized AI generates behavioral data. Behavioral data is extraordinarily valuable. The infrastructure required for centralized AI concentrates energy demand, which benefits interconnected financial interests. The regulatory environment shaping all of this has been heavily influenced by the same industry it’s supposed to oversee. None of that requires a conspiracy. It just requires incentives going unchecked long enough.

The result is a system that could be more distributed, more private, less environmentally costly, and more accountable to the people living inside it. But isn’t. Not because the alternative is impossible. Because the alternative is less profitable for the people currently making the decisions.

* * *

So what do we do with that?

I think the first thing is just to name it clearly. Which is what this is.

The current architecture of AI was not inevitable. It was chosen. And the choices consistently favored data collection, infrastructure control, and profit concentration over privacy, efficiency, and community benefit. Knowing that changes how you look at the whole thing.

The second thing is to notice that alternatives exist and are being built. Local AI models. Encrypted processing. Federated systems that learn from your data without centralizing it. Researchers and smaller companies are working on all of this right now, mostly without the billions and the press coverage.

And the third thing, the thing that actually moves anything, is the connected awareness you’re already building by reading and thinking about this. The architecture only stays invisible as long as most people aren’t looking at it.

You’re looking at it.

That’s where everything starts.

* * *

All Related is about the connections hiding in plain sight. If this landed for you, pass it to someone already asking similar questions.

Want to go deeper?

• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

• IEA Global Energy Review: Data Centers and Energy

• Search: Edge AI, federated learning, district heating Europe

The Reprogramming

Watch children before formal education gets hold of them. They think in images, in wholes, in sensory floods. They make wild associative leaps. They ask why about things adults stopped questioning decades ago. They don’t naturally sit still for eight hours, processing standardized information in linear sequences. That behavior has to be trained into them.

And the training has a history. The modern school system wasn’t designed around how human brains naturally operate. It was designed around what the industrial economy needed: compliance, repetition, sequential processing, output on a schedule. The school bell is literally a factory bell. That’s not a metaphor. That’s its origin.

So the system didn’t discover that most brains are “neurotypical” and build education to match. It built education to produce a certain kind of brain, then called the result typical. The ones it couldn’t reshape, it diagnosed.

Quantum Minds in a Standardized World

Quantum systems exist in superposition, holding multiple states simultaneously until observation collapses them into one. The natural human mind may work more like this: holding multiple ways of knowing at once, intuitive and analytical, verbal and felt, linear and holistic, a full spectrum of cognitive possibility.

Education and socialization act as the observation that collapses all that possibility into a single fixed state: the productive, predictable, efficient processor.

The neurodivergent brain is the one that resisted the collapse. It’s still holding multiple states. Still making connections the standardized architecture wasn’t designed to permit. Still processing in ways the system didn’t authorize.

A neurotypical brain prunes aggressively for efficiency. It builds highways between the most commonly used cognitive routes. A neurodivergent brain prunes differently, keeping connections that a typical brain would discard, maintaining pathways between seemingly unrelated territories. It’s not a deficit in processing. It’s a different relationship with possibility, one that may be closer to how the mind was designed to operate before we were taught to narrow it.

The Matrix Connection

In The Matrix, the system didn’t break people. It standardized them. It created a shared reality that felt normal, and anyone who glitched — who couldn’t be fully integrated — was treated as a malfunction.

Neo wasn’t enhanced. He was unplugged.

What if that’s the most accurate metaphor we have? Most people have been reformatted to run an operating system that isn’t native to their hardware. And they defend that operating system because questioning it means confronting a terrifying possibility: that everything they were taught to value about their own minds was a limitation disguised as an achievement.

The concept of epistemological imperialism names this mechanism precisely. It’s the dominance of Western ways of knowing, positioned not as one framework among many, but as the framework. Anything that doesn’t fit gets reclassified. Indigenous knowledge becomes “mythology.” Oral tradition becomes “lore.” Neurodivergence becomes a “disorder.” Intuition becomes “woo.” The occult becomes entertainment. Each reclassification is a quiet act of erasure dressed up as categorization.

And the people who see through it , those who never fully accepted the installed programming aren’t broken. They’re uncolonized. Their cognitive architecture still holds what the system spent centuries trying to prune away: the capacity for holistic perception, pattern recognition across invisible networks, knowledge that arrives without citation.

The Gentle Glitch

This isn’t about claiming that neurodivergent minds are superior. That would just be flipping the hierarchy, and hierarchies of minds are the problem, not the solution.

This is a gentle nudge. An invitation to consider that if neurodivergent minds naturally detect patterns across domains, make associative leaps, and hold multiple ways of knowing at once, then maybe the 'disorder' label deserves a second look. Not because those minds are better, but because their existence hints at something that belongs to all of us. A fuller way of thinking that was deprioritized, not destroyed.

Every child who was told to stop daydreaming. Every person who knows things they can’t explain in a board meeting. Every gut feeling that was overruled by a spreadsheet. Those aren’t glitches. Those are remnants of the original architecture, asking to be remembered.

For Puerto Ricans and the broader diaspora, this performance was visceral — a courageous act of being seen on the world’s largest stage, in our language, with our symbols, our pain, our joy, and our unbreakable spirit. For those who didn’t understand Spanish, the visuals spoke a universal language: this is who we are, this is what we have survived, and this is what we refuse to lose.

THE OPENING: SUGAR CANE FIELDS AND THE WEIGHT OF HISTORY

WHAT YOU SAW:

Bad Bunny emerged from verdant sugar cane plantations, surrounded by jíbaros (rural farmers) wearing pavas — traditional woven straw hats that have come to symbolize Puerto Rican country life and resilience.

WHAT IT MEANS:

This was not pastoral decoration. The sugar cane plantations are ground zero of Puerto Rico’s colonial trauma. When Columbus arrived in 1493, the island of Borikén was home to the Taíno people — the Indigenous inhabitants who had lived on the island for centuries. Almost immediately, the Spanish began enslaving the Taíno, forcing them to work the gold mines and plantations. By 1511, the Taíno population — estimated between 30,000 to 600,000 before colonization — had been devastated by enslavement, massacre, and disease.

In 1512, Friar Bartolomé de las Casas protested at the Spanish court for Taíno freedom. The Spanish colonists complained that they needed labor for the mines and the growing sugar cane industry. As a compromise, Las Casas suggested importing enslaved Africans — beginning the transatlantic slave trade to Puerto Rico in the 1510s-1520s. The first recorded slave revolt in the Americas occurred in Puerto Rico in 1514, with Taíno and African enslaved people rising together against their oppressors.

For centuries afterward, enslaved Africans and exploited laborers — including the ancestors of many Boricuas — toiled, suffered, and died in these fields under brutal conditions. Heat exhaustion. Anemia from malnutrition. Bodies broken by colonization’s machinery. Many Taíno survivors fled to the mountains or intermarried with escaped African slaves, forming maroon communities. Though officially declared extinct by colonial authorities, Taíno descendants survived in these mountain refuges and through intermarriage. Recent DNA analysis shows that nearly 70% of Puerto Ricans have Taíno ancestry — we carry our Indigenous ancestors in our blood.

The jíbaro is the soul of Puerto Rico — the campesino who represents humility, dignity, and connection to the land. Many jíbaros are descendants of these mixed Taíno, African, and Spanish communities. Bad Bunny opened with this image to root the entire performance in the soil of Puerto Rico itself, acknowledging where we come from.

THE WHITE PLASTIC CHAIRS: HUMBLE SYMBOLS OF OUR GATHERINGS

WHAT YOU SAW:

Throughout the performance, simple white plastic chairs appeared — the same chairs featured on the cover of Bad Bunny’s album “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (I Should Have Taken More Photos). Ricky Martin sat in one beneath a plantain tree as he sang.

WHAT IT MEANS:

These ubiquitous plastic chairs are everywhere across Abya Yala (tierra viva) — at weddings, funerals, baptisms, block parties, family cookouts. They are humble, accessible, and classless. A millionaire and a street vendor might both sit in the same white plastic chair at a community gathering. They represent our communal culture, where celebration and connection matter more than material wealth. In a show filled with spectacle, these chairs grounded everything in the everyday reality of our lives — unpretentious, authentic, and unashamed of simplicity.

LA CASITA: THE THREATENED HOME

WHAT YOU SAW:

A pink concrete house — la casita — served as a central stage piece, just as it has in Bad Bunny’s concerts worldwide.

WHAT IT MEANS:

This is the typical Puerto Rican working-class home — concrete walls, modest but sturdy, often painted in vibrant colors. It represents a way of life under siege. Wealthy people from the mainland, drawn by aggressive tax incentives (Act 60/Act 22), are buying up property across Puerto Rico, driving up costs and displacing locals. Beaches that were once freely accessible are being privatized. La casita is a monument to what gentrification seeks to erase — the simple, authentic Puerto Rican life built on family, community, and connection to place.

THE WEDDING: INTERGENERATIONAL JOY AND CONTINUITY

WHAT YOU SAW:

An actual wedding took place on stage. A real couple, who had invited Bad Bunny to their wedding, was instead invited to get married during the halftime show. The scene included multigenerational family members dancing, a child asleep across chairs, cake cutting, and pure celebration.

WHAT IT MEANS:

Our culture is deeply intergenerational. Our parties include abuelos, parents, children, and babies all sharing the same dance floor. Life is unpredictable — hurricanes, economic crises, colonial exploitation — so we seize every opportunity to gather and celebrate. The sleeping child on the chairs is a universal memory: exhausted from the joy of the adults around them, cradled in the safety of family. This wedding wasn’t performed — it was lived. It was an assertion that our culture, our rituals, our way of loving and celebrating, are beautiful and worthy of the world’s biggest stage.

EL APAGÓN: THE BLACKOUT AND FAILING INFRASTRUCTURE

WHAT YOU SAW:

Bad Bunny climbed an electrical pole as sparks flew and lights flickered. He performed his song “El Apagón” (The Blackout).

WHAT IT MEANS:

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, and the island’s electrical grid essentially collapsed. Years later, blackouts remain a constant reality — sometimes lasting hours, sometimes days. The sparking power lines weren’t special effects; they were a visual representation of systemic neglect and colonial abandonment. Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, yet its people are treated as second-class — with failing infrastructure, inadequate disaster response, and chronic underinvestment. “El Apagón” is one of Bad Bunny’s most unflinching songs about the lived reality of Puerto Ricans, directly addressing the failures of both local and federal governments. Performing it here was truth-telling delivered to over 100 million viewers — a refusal to pretend everything is fine when our people live in darkness.

LO QUE LE PASÓ A HAWAII: GENTRIFICATION AND DISPLACEMENT

WHAT YOU SAW:

Ricky Martin, one of Puerto Rico’s greatest crossover artists, performed “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (What Happened to Hawaii), sitting in a white plastic chair beneath a plantain tree.

WHAT IT MEANS:

This song draws a direct parallel between the colonization and cultural displacement of Hawaii and what is currently happening in Puerto Rico. Wealthy folks from the mainland, lured by generous tax breaks, are buying up land, inflating housing costs, and pricing out locals. Beaches — once communal spaces — are being privatized. Communities are being pushed out. The song is a rallying cry against neocolonialism, a warning that what was done to Hawaii is being done to Puerto Rico.

DEBÍ TIRAR MÁS FOTOS: THE DIASPORA’S HEARTBREAK

WHAT YOU SAW:

The show closed with the title track from Bad Bunny’s Grammy-winning album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” (I Should Have Taken More Photos), accompanied by fireworks and a football emblazoned with the words “Together, we are America.”

WHAT IT MEANS:

This song is about regret, loss, and the painful necessity of leaving. For generations, Puerto Ricans have been forced to leave the island to seek better economic opportunities — driven away by poverty, lack of jobs, and colonial policies that enrich corporations while impoverishing locals. The title — I should have taken more photos — captures the bittersweet ache of migration: we leave to survive, but we lose the everyday moments with family, land, and culture that we can never get back. It speaks to anyone who has ever had to leave home, not because they wanted to, but because staying was no longer viable. The message “Together, we are America” was a deliberate expansion of what ‘American’ means — not just the United States, but the entire hemisphere, every country from Argentina to Canada.

THE PUERTO RICAN FLAG: A SYMBOL OF RESISTANCE

WHAT YOU SAW:

Bad Bunny held a Puerto Rican flag with a light blue triangle, rather than the darker blue of the official commonwealth flag.

WHAT IT MEANS:

The light blue flag represents the Puerto Rican independence movement and our desire for self-determination. Puerto Rico has been a U.S. territory for over 125 years, with no vote in Congress and no say in presidential elections, despite its people being U.S. citizens. The light blue flag is a symbol of those who believe Puerto Rico should be free to determine its own path. Displaying it on the world’s biggest stage was an unmistakable assertion of identity: Puerto Rico is colonized, and many of us dream of a different future — one where we control our own destiny.

WHAT YOU SAW:

Piragua stands (shaved ice vendors), food carts, barber shops, nail techs, people playing dominoes — the entire stage was a living, breathing Puerto Rican town square.

WHAT IT MEANS:

These are the textures of daily life. Piraguas on a hot day. Dominoes with the viejitos (old men) in the plaza. The neighborhood barber who knows everyone’s business. These details root the performance in the real, lived experience of Puerto Ricans — not a sanitized, marketable version of our culture, but the actual, messy, beautiful, communal life we live. It was an insistence that our everyday culture is worthy of celebration, not something to be hidden or assimilated away.

GUEST APPEARANCES: SOLIDARITY AND CROSSOVER

WHAT YOU SAW:

Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga joined Bad Bunny on stage. Gaga performed a salsa version of “Die With a Smile”, wearing a baby-blue flamenco dress with a flor de maga (Puerto Rico’s national flower) pinned to it.

WHAT IT MEANS:

Ricky Martin is the bridge between generations — the crossover star who paved the way for artists like Bad Bunny. His presence honored that legacy and showed continuity. Lady Gaga’s participation, singing in a salsa style and wearing Puerto Rican symbolism, was an act of solidarity and respect. She didn’t try to dominate the moment; she adapted to the cultural context Bad Bunny created. It was collaboration without colonization.

A MESSAGE BIGGER THAN MUSIC

After the performance, the NFL posted on Instagram in both Spanish and English: “Lo único más poderoso que el odio es el amor” (The only thing more powerful than hate is love). This was a direct reference to Bad Bunny’s words at the 2026 Grammy Awards, where he accepted Album of the Year for “Debí Tirar Más Fotos” — the first all-Spanish language album to win that award. He had also said “ICE out” on stage, speaking to the ongoing immigration enforcement targeting our communities.

Bad Bunny’s halftime show was performed against a backdrop of increasing hostility toward immigrant communities. His tour skipped the continental U.S. partly out of concern that his fans — many of them immigrants or children of immigrants — could be targeted. Yet here he was, on the biggest stage in the continent, performing almost entirely in Spanish, centering Puerto Rican and Caribbean culture, and refusing to apologize or assimilate.

This wasn’t about politics. This was about preserving identity. This was about authenticity. This was about refusing to disappear.

FOR THOSE WHO DIDN’T UNDERSTAND SPANISH: LOOK AND FEEL

Look at the sugar cane and remember that Indigenous people and enslaved Africans died there under colonial rule.

Look at the plastic chairs and recognize the humility of communities that gather without pretense.

Look at the wedding and see the intergenerational love that defines our culture.

Look at the sparking power lines and understand systemic neglect.

Look at the light blue flag and recognize that colonization is not ancient history — it is present and ongoing.

The visuals spoke for themselves. The emotion, the pride, the grief, the joy — all of it was there for anyone willing to see it.

COLONIALISM, CULTURAL ERASURE, AND RESISTANCE

For Puerto Ricans and other colonized peoples, this performance was visceral. We are used to being told that to succeed, we must assimilate — speak English, tone down our culture, make ourselves palatable. Bad Bunny did the opposite. He brought the full, unapologetic reality of Puerto Rican life to 135 million people and dared them to see us as we are.

We are not abstract. We are not a demographic. We are not a trend. We are real, palpable, visceral. We have history, pain, resilience, and beauty. We have survived centuries of colonialism, exploitation, and attempts to erase us. And we are still here.

This halftime show was not just entertainment. It was a refusal. A refusal to be erased. A refusal to be assimilated. A refusal to be anything other than exactly who we are.

A FINAL THOUGHT

Bad Bunny said at the Apple Music press conference before the show: “I wasn’t looking for album of the year. I wasn’t looking to perform at the Super Bowl halftime show… I was just trying to connect with my roots, connect with my people, connect with myself.”

He succeeded. For 13 minutes, Puerto Rico was the home team. Our language, our symbols, our struggles, and our joy took center stage. We were seen, not as a curiosity or a niche, but as powerful, undeniable, and worthy.

Lo único más poderoso que el odio es el amor. The only thing more powerful than hate is love.