A week in Canada is all it took for me to begin drawing comparisons, again, between the great true North, strong and free, and our more affluent neighbors to the South, which has also been my home of twenty years. I can start at the surface level: poutine, pronunciation, polyglots. But now, you say, I am just showing off my verbal hockey prowess.

If we were to dig deeper, in honor of our humbling six-month-long winters, we would need to shovel a few more feet of snow until you hit the rock-hard surface of earth that has not yet had any time to thaw. It is in this colder, subterranean, and less visited place where you might find our truer differences. It is not that we are Sasquatches, or that we pray to an occult ice goddess of hockey. It is that we have found the poetry of our landscape both stunning and isolating. We understand that relative to the vast land mass we do not occupy, our population pales and will never grow to the same stature as our estranged friends to the south. The truth is our relationship is…complicated and extends well beyond tariffs and a shared border.

Just before we traveled to Canada with our two kids in tow, to ship them off to a camp in beautiful Muskoka, my husband and I journeyed to Brooklyn to the Paramount Theatre to catch Canadian bands the Broken Social Scene along with Metric and the Stars. During an interlude, the lead singer, Kevin Drew, told the NY audience, “Hey, we know that you’re lost right now and struggling, but we know you’ll find your way back.” Leave it to a Canadian to politely point out that while everything is bat shit crazy, there is still time before hibernation ends, and a new spring awakening can begin.

The truth is if you asked me to describe what it means to be Canadian, I would struggle. Is it a cop out if I say it’s a feeling, a look passed between members, a slight smile? In contrast to the red, white, and blue, hot apple pie, yellow arches, and the bald eagle that emerges when you open up the visual dictionary of the US, the same is not true of Canada. It is less easy to point to pictures and colors, but maybe that is partly why we are comfortable with differences. We have less to hold onto. We are used to muddling through snow, ice, and mud to get to our cars.

In many ways, there is less precision when it comes to our identity. We never struck up a war of independence against the tyranny of the English colonials and the king. To this day, our currency still bears the portrait of Queen Elizabeth. And I must confess, after living in the US for two decades, I think we do a lot less thinking about ourselves. Then again, we were not elected a superpower after assisting other world powers defeat the Nazis during WWII. With the rise in stature came an increase in attention that coincided with the emergence of visual broadcast and introduced us to Camelot and an American conveyor belt of other culturally packaged products.

As Canadians, we have never been exposed to that level of public scrutiny. We have timidly and sometimes passive-aggressively commented on the wins and losses of our neighbors as we sat watching them from the other side of the fence. “Too bad, eh?”, or “Would you look at that! Incredible!” or “Oh, I would never dare do that.” In fact, at times as a young Canadian I would get frustrated with the lack of exciting developments covered by our news broadcasts, which were a mix of local Canadian and Vermont newscasters featuring many lost cows, and our television options weren’t much better between a local low-budget, mumble-core Canadian show and Coronation Street from our Commonwealth patrons. I ached for the higher-octane programming from the United States, and I wondered what it might be like to live in a place with easy, live audience soundtracks.

But what drew me here has lately begun to feel like an overly caffeinated, sugar-rich diet that produces impulsive behaviours and compels individuals to perform rather than to participate in their communities. The US has built an entire economy, Hollywood, over being watched. Global box office records seem to break every other summer with each new big box office movie release. At what point did they begin to value the manufacturing of culture and commerce over citizenry and community? Somewhere along the way, being watched became more valuable than showing up. And today both Canadians and non-Canadians alike are nervously curious to see whether the highly combustible freight train can slow down instead of streaking past a trail of ghost towns being left further and further behind and struggling to make ends meet.

And while I can joke about the centuries-old rivalry between Canada and the US, I think back on the words of Kevin Drew from the Broken Social Scene. Most of us would rather see the US emerge from the current chaos and find its way back to happily celebrating the Fourth of July on Main Street with their neighbors.

She slides down the back seat of the black Cadillac Escalade, her Chanel sunglasses slipping with her.

Exhausted. That is how she feels.

She has just completed a fitting for a major streamer, and before that, a photo shoot for what her publicist promises will be the next big hit mask in Korean skincare.

A yawn slips out of her as she looks toward the silhouette of her driver. She wants to ask him what is next on the agenda, but she has forgotten his name for the eighth consecutive time, and cannot bear to ask him again. She doesn’t want him to think that she is an airhead.

Her phone is already in her hand before she decides to pick it up. She opens up Jelly Smash. It loads with its usual candy-colored cheerfulness, at a level she abandoned three days ago, waiting exactly where she left it, forty-three moves to clear the jelly, eleven left.

She doesn’t remember choosing this level. She doesn’t remember much about choosing anything lately. Her thumb finds a red candy, slides it up against another, and four explode into a small applauding cascade, oranges and purples raining down to fill the gaps, resettling, waiting for her to do it again. She is just about to when her phone pings. She is barely fazed as a text from her publicist pops up: love the tests from the masks! Adorbs! Can you confirm the 10am thurs cover shoot? She gives the message a quick thumbs up and then returns to the board sitting there mid-cascade.

She is just about to clear another row when another text, followed by a flurry of texts pops up, and at this point she just abandons her twice interrupted match. It’s now her agent, Jayson, with a Y. Need to talk. Hit a wall with Gargantuan. Name issue. Call me. Fuck. She feels her stomach drop and she feels like she may pass out. “Hey, hey there,” she calls to the driver, “Can you please open my window?” The wind hits her face just as she passes a billboard with the face of the latest hot commodity promoting a summer blockbuster.

This can’t be good. What could Jayson possibly have to say to her? A few months back, she had flown to Venice for a limited series in part because of the location. She had never been to Italy but had always wanted to float down the canals under the moonlight in Venice, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to finally check that off her list. During one of the shoot breaks, she had wandered down a sun-dappled street and discovered the tastiest treat. A shot of espresso with a dollop of cream. Affo Gato, the middle-aged Italian man, had smiled at her, and for a moment she had felt like the sky was opening up to her, as she dipped her silver spoon, not plastic, into the smooth, creamy cloud. And in that surge of caffeinated sugar dopamine, she had decided that this was a sign. She could barely remember the rest of the series production, but as soon as she returned to Los Angeles, she had gone through the legal process and emerged as Affo Gato. She remembered letting both her publicist and agent know. Her publicist had responded with six hearts and six stars. Meanwhile, it had taken Jayson a few days. He gave her a thumbs up and a text, “I guess inspiration struck while in Italy?”

As they pass another billboard, this time with the three smiling faces of injury lawyers, she hits the FaceTime for her agent. Jayson picks up right away.

“Hey AG.” She closes her eyes. Jayson has never quite accepted the novelty of her new name and has avoided using it in conversations with her or with prospective clients. At first she convinces herself he struggles with the foreignness and will eventually adjust, but she eventually comes to terms with the fact that it is a choice Jayson has made and that he isn’t going to cross that Venetian channel.

She knows better than to interrupt his stream of thoughts disguised as dialogue, so she holds her breath and waits for him to fill in the void. “So listen. The producers are having a hard time reconciling a few things.”

She begins to imagine one of the major producers’ offices. He’s the one who is always the same shade of tan and likes to wear periwinkle blue Tom Ford suits.

“What things?” she asks, trying to keep her voice casual and demure.

“Well, for starters, your name.” There he says it. She can feel him wincing even if she can’t see it. He sighs heavily. “They have done some initial but extensive audience surveys, and they don’t think your name is tracking as a lead character for Gargantuan. Some of the audience members said that it sounds phony and pretentious.”

“But Jayce, it’s a sci-fi action movie, with a cast of CG generated underwater creatures. How is my name a problem?”

He sighs again but this time a little bit more exasperated and a bit hostile. “I don’t know what to tell you. They don’t think an Italian confection blends well with a blockbuster hit. And…” he leaves her dangling.

“And what…?” This time it’s her turn to press into her exasperation.

“Some of the writers are concerned that you look a little too much like Gill Oakley. And they’re worried that it could kill the picture before it gets any traction. That’s dead weight for a summer blockbuster.”

She holds her breath but can feel her seat belt cinched across her chest.

“What? Gill Oakley? But she’s not even real.”

“Yes, and that’s the point. No one wants to be the first studio or blockbuster to launch an AI’s career. I’m sorry, but this isn’t looking good for us, kid.”

“So what are we going to do? What are you going to do?” Despite her attempts to keep a calm composure, she starts to feel a strange sense of angry restlessness spread across her body and invade the back chamber of the Escalade.

“I’ll get on the phone with their casting people Monday. See if the weekend has calmed hot heads.”

She lets that sink in. Suddenly her mind floods with the sunshine of Venice. Her laughing on set and feeling the sense of possibility seeing her name at the very top of the call sheet. It feels like that world is imploding like the Jelly Smash board she’s abandoned, candies frozen mid-fall, going nowhere.

“Sit tight. Let’s talk mid-day Monday,” and with that Jayson makes his crisp exit.

She sits there for what feels like five minutes but is more likely thirty seconds. “Hey, hey there,” she yells at the chauffeur. This time he makes eye contact through the rearview mirror. “Uh, can we please make a quick stop at the In and Out. I’ve been running on empty since 6 AM.”

The car shifts into the right lane and snakes towards the Hollywood In and Out.

“What can I get you?”

“Hi, I’d like the Flying Dutchman and an order of fries well-done, and a medium Neapolitan shake, please.”

She tears into the wrapper and begins to feast on the burger. She feels like she hasn’t eaten for days. It’s probably been more like two days of a juice cleanse, but it feels like a week. As she reaches the bottom of her milkshake the suction becomes the only sound in the car. Suddenly the car comes to a slow stop. The chauffeur makes eye contact with her a second time, “Home.”

It takes her a moment to realize that they’ve parked in front of her apartment building.

“Right,” she mumbles. “Just give me a moment to collect my stuff.” And with that she begins her wrangling of leftovers, a shopping bag of Korean masks, and a change of leisurewear from her mid-morning breathwork on the beach class. Her publicist has insisted she try it and adds that it would interest her early followers looking for more authenticity from their influencers.

She makes her way up the walkway trepidatiously, trying not to drop anything. She pushes open the door and drops everything, but not before noticing a duffel, a water-stained notebook, and a small cooler sitting in the entryway. She goes to the neutral sofa in their open living and kitchen area and lies down.

“Looks like someone is having a bad day.”

Affo tilts her head sideways from its downward dive into the couch and catches a glimpse of her roommate Sasha standing at the kitchen counter eating a bowl of cereal next to a small pile of folded laundry. For a moment, Affo just allows herself a moment to sit and breathe on the couch. Even though it’s only 11 AM, she feels like she’s just worked an entire weekend creating content, reviewing content, fielding questions and comments.

“Yeah, you could say that.”

“Want to talk about it?” Sasha looks down as she asks and scoops another spoonful of Lucky Charms. A tiny rivulet of milk spills down her chin. “Stay a while, take off your glasses.” She smiles at Affo and lifts the open box of Lucky Charms. “Want a bowl? Maybe you’ll get a lucky charm?”

“No thanks. I just wolfed an entire burger and most of my fries. Did you just get back?”

Sasha nods. “If by just get back you mean four hours ago, then yes. I’m taking advantage of the jet lag to get started on my week of dirty laundry. You can’t really do laundry up north. The research stations in Greenland are more basic than you would imagine.”

“You mean that they don’t have French laundry service in the tundra? How base.”

Sasha smiles. “Can you imagine? And no chocolates or bed turn-down service either. I keep wondering how long I can keep up the climate change and saving the planet hoax. My parents may have been right all along. I should have gone into investment banking instead of wasting my precious time doing glaciology research at grad school.” And with that, Sasha tilts her head back and drinks the rest of her cereal bowl.

“Well, at least one of us will be able to tell her grandchildren she did something.” Affo sits up from the couch and picks some undetectable lint from her leggings.

Sasha raises an eyebrow, “Grandchildren? Now that is optimistic even for you.” She rinses her bowl and places it carefully on the drying rack. Affo has tried to convince her roommate to use the dishwasher, but the more she pushes, the more Sasha seems to slip further away. Sasha catches her roommate’s eyes and holds them. “So what happened while I was out studying microbes trapped in ancient ice?”

Affo sighs. “I don’t even know where to start.”

Sasha saunters over to the couch and sits across from her. “Lucky for you, I have got all the time in the world and am accustomed to working with unresponsive ice specimens.”

Affo pulls a pillow over her perfectly moisturized face, and her voice comes out muffled by the velvet pillow. “AI. Ice cream. Disaster. Gargantuan.”

Sasha wrestles the pillow out of her hands. “Is that supposed to make any sense to anyone but you? You’ve got to give me more to work from.”

“Somehow in my attempts to capitalize on a moment of clarity in Italy, I have ended up sinking my first major opportunity.”

Sasha raises her eyebrow at her friend, “I think you may be over-indexing on the catastrophic side of things, and I say this as someone who spends most of my time living in the improbable future.”

Affo smiles despite herself, “I don’t know, Sash; I may have really messed up this time. They don’t really give second chances in my line of work. You have less than a percent chance of making it into the big leagues, and I am currently on life support.”

“Somehow I don’t believe that. If there is someone who can turn on the charm and turn this around, it’s you. I don’t know any other person that has other people apologizing when they run a red light or return damaged high-end fashion items. It’s a skill not many people have, and you have it in spades.”

“I don’t know. This time, it feels different. It’s not like returning a used dress or not paying a parking ticket. The producers have cooled on me because I look too much like an AI wannabe starlet. Never in a million years did I think this would be my downfall.” She paused and looked down at the parquet pattern in their living room, gathering her words. “I have worked so hard for this, and it could all fall apart because of an AI doppelganger that I have no control over and a name I took after a life-changing experience on a side street in Venice.”

Affo paused and looked up at her roommate. Sasha was watching her quietly and was biting her lower lip. When Sasha finally spoke, her voice was quiet. “You know a lot of us work hard for things we’re not sure we are ever going to see through. We do it because the pursuit of the thing matters more than the possibility of failure. And…” Sasha pauses and gets up to pace as she searches to complete her thought, “In some cases the failure means more than we can afford to consider because it’s not just about a momentary glitch, it’s potential calamity on a scale we can’t even imagine.” Sasha turns to look at Affo, who now sits motionless like she’s trying not to breathe. “I hear that this is hard, but I also don’t think it’s forever.”

“You think I’m just a huge, entitled asshole.” Affo can’t quite get herself to look at Sasha. She feels the warmth of her presence without seeing her.

“I think you are having a bad day and that this will pass. You will get your career back on track.” Sasha sighs, “Every time I leave Greenland, I know that there’s a distinct possibility that the ice is not just disappearing, but that we won’t get it back, even if we try to fix everything later. That loss will never be replaced, and sometimes I really struggle to come back to a city where everything keeps moving forward, and no one seems to see or feel the loss. It’s pretty lonely. So I hear you, but I also can’t sit here and not feel a little annoyed.”

Affo doesn’t say anything right away. The apartment is quiet in a way her day hasn’t been since six a.m.: no chime, no buzz, just Sasha standing there with her arms crossed, looking a little embarrassed at her own honesty, but also unable to let this moment go by without some address.

She reaches up and takes off the Chanel sunglasses. She sets them on the coffee table, lenses down; the golden logo looks oddly like a toppled sculpture.

“I’m sorry you’re lonely,” she says. “And I’m sorry if I’ve made you feel even lonelier.”

Sasha looks at her for a second like she wasn’t expecting to be heard, exactly, let alone heard correctly. Then she shrugs, the practiced shrug of someone who has decided, for the thousandth time, not to make a bigger thing of it than it is. “Yeah, well.” She picks a thread off her sweatpants. “Someone’s got to keep tabs on the end of the world. Might as well be me.”

Affo almost laughs. It comes out instead as something quieter, an exhale that has been heavily waiting all day to leave her body.

She lies back down on the couch. Outside, a few miles away, Jayson is probably already drafting Monday’s email. Her publicist is lining up her next endorsements. On the coffee table, her phone begins to vibrate.

She doesn’t pick up.

Photo Credit: Andrew Draper

In 2026, not a day goes by when I am not feeling something.

In my twenties, that feeling came out as poetry: softly simmering, imaginary, unrequited longing. These days, it arrives as hot tears and rage at the daily pageantry of nihilism performed by our leadership primarily for an audience of one.

But as a parent trying to raise humble, thoughtful, self-advocating children, rage is a tricky thing to carry. I feel as though I’m walking a high wire 5000 feet above the world, sharpened knives in my outstretched hands, pursed purple lips, looking down into the vast chasm below where my children, and other children, are still playing unaware of the chaos being manufactured above them just because.

From that cloud of anger, I run the risk of injuring innocence. I swing between my maternal instinct to protect the next generation from forces that see numbers instead of lives, and a far less maternal impulse: to project the self-absorbed and wealth-obsessed out of our delicate human vessel of Earth and into the outer planets they seem so eager to conquer.

These are trying times. I am not sure early humans could have predicted our predilection for avarice and self-destruction. Back then, we depended on our reptilian systems to survive and escape from imminent danger. Nowadays, we seem overly confident that we will master whatever optical, physical, ecological, economic, or mental stresses appear before us like a sport or game to be mastered. There is a strong industrial complex (yes, Naomi) driven by the fabrication of enemies to summon more support for their impulses and desire to amass more capital.

It would be a lie to say that historically humans have not constructed deities or monarchies to advance their own agendas but today’s reality compounds one horrible and devastating distraction after another, potentially hoping that we will all be dulled by the constant influx of disaster. But at some point, the catastrophe bill will come due, and the public will not want to pay the exorbitant tally for leadership follies. Or so I hope.

So in these difficult and unstable times, what is a well-meaning human to do? And is there a field guide to calm our nervous systems and clear a pathway?

I do not want to pretend to have a full answer, but I do want to encourage you not to snuff out the quiet pleading voice that wakes you late at night, or distracts you while you are meant to be paying attention to your co-workers’ inquiries or children’s questions. These are not ordinary times, and it seems foolish to treat them as such. But nor should we succumb to idleness or resign ourselves to this state as our protracted future. As hard as it might be, we must stay awake. We must stay vigilant. We must resist and we must not let them collapse us into the flock that they need us to be.

And for those of us with children, we must not lose hope. Without hope, we abandon their futures to a small but determined elite that is too willing to risk and gamble their emerging possibilities for their immediate and unquenchable gratification.

A month before my mother died, I met a taxi driver named Michel. He just happened to be the airport taxi driver who lined up to meet me when I landed that October in Montreal, but by the end of the ride, he had offered me his contact information for future rides. Even then, I think we both knew.

I don’t remember the precise details of what we talked about during that first drive from the airport to my parents’ house. But I remember his presence, calm, attentive, somehow understanding what I couldn’t say. My mother had pancreatic cancer. I was flying in from New York City to be with her, to make the most of the time I still had with her, and to support both her and my father. We didn’t discuss the topic of death, but it hovered between our words.

At the end of the ride, Michel handed me a card with his number. ‘In case you need more rides in the future,’ he said. At the time, I didn’t realize the future was only a few weeks away.

At the end of my visit, Michel drove me back to the airport. This was the first time he had a chance to see my parents, and I remember trying to imagine what they must look like through his eyes. My elderly parents were hovering at the back door of their beautiful townhouse in downtown Montreal. Their eyes squinting against the sunlight as my dad, in his rumpled blazer and trousers, and my mother in her bathrobe, waved to me. If he noticed anything, Michel did not say much beyond that they looked like nice and loving parents.

As I left, my older sister flew in from Melbourne and took my place in Montreal. As siblings, we were now like air traffic controllers trying to keep our calm and land both of my parents at scheduled appointments with doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and nutritionists. I reached out to Michel during this period and asked whether he might ferry my sister and parents to appointments. His answers were always brief and willing. I remember one time my sister reached out to me because my dad had blown a car tire. I reached out to Michel, and again, his quick answer was yes.

Over those weeks, I texted Michel repeatedly. The messages accumulated in my phone, a quiet but vibrating record of asking and receiving, of trust being built through repetition. 'Can you take my sister and mom to the oncologist on Tuesday at 2?' 'Can you pick up my dad from the pharmacy?' 'They need a ride to the nutritionist.' And always, his answer: 'Yes.' Sometimes just that single word. Sometimes 'No problem.' But always, yes. It felt like a secret code exchanged between strangers, and a reliable calmness was struck up between Michel and me.

I don’t know why I trusted Michel implicitly. The truth was, I needed him. He was my immediate proxy in Montreal, supporting my family and me in a moment of need. I trusted him with my parents. That's not a small thing. I was in New York, while my family was trying to navigate the healthcare system, and our mother was dying. Michel became the one steady thing. The one person who always said yes, who showed up on time, who treated my fragile, elderly parents with dignity and care. My sister told me once: 'Michel is so kind to them. He helps Dad into the car. He asks Mom how she's feeling.'I think we both knew he didn't have to do any of that. But he did.

And then came the moment I’d been dreading. My sister’s texts that week in November started to sound more distressed. I remember asking, ‘Do I need to come. Please tell me if I need to come.’ I knew the answer before she said it.

My mother had been rushed to the emergency room. I called the Delta agent and begged for a flight change. I remember crying as I packed immaterial things, including black clothing, just in case. At LaGuardia, the airport was in full holiday mode with sparkly Christmas decorations and music. I sat there quietly crying and desperately hoping.

From the airport, I texted Michel: ‘Bonjour Michel. Any chance you can give me a lift later today? Arriving in Montreal at 5:36 PM and need to go straight to Royal Victoria Hospital.’

His response felt immediate: ‘Sure, no problem. Send me details of your flight, yes. Sure, I will be waiting for you at door 23.’

Me: ‘I’m on Delta 4801 from LGA and arriving at YUL at 5:36.’

Michel: ‘Thanks.’

Me: ‘Merci à vous.’

I knew he would be there when I landed.

Michel was waiting at door 23, exactly as he'd promised. I don't remember walking through the Montreal airport to find him. My body carried me through familiar territory while my mind was already making its way to the hospital. But I remember seeing him standing there, calm and solid, in the chaos of arrivals. And I remember his face when he saw mine. He didn't ask how I was doing. He didn't need to. He simply opened the door and let me collapse into the car seat.

At first, we drove in silence. I did my best to distract my mind. I looked out the window into the dark winter of Montreal passing by. I can’t remember if Michel instructed me to sit in the front seat, or whether, by this point, we had quietly assessed that this was not a typical moment, requiring your usual driver and passenger dynamics. The distance between the airport and the hospital at rush hour could be anywhere between 20 to 30 minutes. It seemed that Michel had also done the quick calculus. He opened a window, offered me Kleenex, and that was my cue to fall apart. “Cry now,” he told me. “Let it all out now so you can be strong for your mother.”

As I sat next to Michel, I cried warm tears, and he held my hand and told me the story of going to visit his mother as she lay on her deathbed. I don’t remember the details, but I appreciated the story. Anything to distract me from the emergency room and the situation I was about to walk into. Michel looked at me as though to say, You are going to be ok. And I looked back and just said through the stream of tears, “I know I am lucky. I have so much love in my life. I am loved.”

As we drove up to the front of the hospital, my younger sister was outside waiting for me. I remember Michel looking at her and saying, “That’s the lawyer sister. She looks so serious. More serious than you.” Michel then chose this moment to tease my sister, and then helped me with my bag. I didn’t realize this would be the last time I saw Michel. I hugged him and thanked him. I remember saying something about how I would text him when I needed a ride. But my last texts to Michel were from the emergency room in the hospital, where I spent that first night with my mother. My siblings were exhausted, and I remember them asking me outside of the hospital room whether I would take the first shift. Like Michel, my answer was quick and brief, “Of course. That’s why I am here.”

That night, Michel texted me: “Everything going well."

Me: “I’m spending the night here.”

Michel: “Good.”

And the next morning, a light chirp from Michel: “Good morning everything’s going well.” It seemed more like a statement than a question.

Me: “Oui, Michel. Thank you. Just sitting with my mom.”

Michel: “Say hi to her.”

My mother died two days later. I was with her when she went, along with my father, my brothers, and both my sisters. We all stood around her, holding different parts of her body with such love and care, the way I imagined Michel may have done with his own mother.

I never texted Michel again after ‘Say hi to her.’ I don’t know why. Maybe because there was no ride to ask for. Maybe because once she died, the reason for our connection was gone. Maybe because I didn’t know how to tell him. Or maybe because ‘Say hi to her’ felt like the perfect last thing to come from Michel. A quiet understanding of our shared grief, an acknowledgment of a meaningful exchange between strangers, and then the return to our own lives.

Two years later, I still think about Michel. Not every day, but every so often, I wonder about how he’s doing and whether I should text him the next time I need a ride in Montreal. I know he would show up.

Michel gave me permission to ask for help and feel okay about it. He offered his number before I knew I’d need it. And he said yes every time to driving me, to driving my parents, to picking me up for that final impossible journey to the hospital. He never hesitated. And when I needed more than a ride, when I needed someone to hold my hand and let me fall apart, he gave me that too.

But Michel also taught me this: Sometimes we need to say yes to strangers. We need to say yes before we are ready to ask for help. We need to hold hands when things are crumbling around us. We need to find light and love when we are losing the people we love most. Because that’s how we survive, that’s how we live, that’s how we love, and how we move forward through the unbearable weight of loss.

Michel held me when my mother was dying. And two years later, I’m still grateful for what he gave me: permission to grieve, permission to fall apart, and the ability to see through tears that I am loved.

At this early hour in February, when only man-made lights creep through the winter darkness, Curtis feels like the last man on earth. It is not helped by the fact that most of the city is still asleep except for the city and essential workers. That’s what they called them during Covid, when they were momentarily celebrated as heroes by the public with the clanging of pots and pans from the city streets and balconies before they were tossed back down the barrel of oblivion. This city, he thinks to himself, would eat its young to keep its youth.

Curtis tips out of his Herman Miller Aeron chair on the 27th floor of a building in the financial district. It is not a distinguished high-rise by any means. The developer had not pursued a starchitect, as was the trend with some commercial developers looking to charge premium prices. His building blended into the concrete seascape like all the other financial district buildings. The founding partners at the law firm had opted to pour their future earnings into the client conference rooms overlooking the city to mesmerize and distract clients from all of the money the legal team was charging. As Curtis stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling window in his corner office overlooking the city, he feels a mixture of loneliness and power. From up here, everything looks like a speck he could smother with one quick scrub of his thumb. He drags his hand over his face and yawns. He never liked having to come into the office this early in the morning, but it was the only way to make the ridiculous hours and bill his clients.

Curtis wearily catches sight of his reflection and studies the flattering cut of his suit and expensive haircut. He has to admit that even in his early forties, he could still make the summer interns’ heads turn in his direction. A shimmer of light magically appears above his right shoulder, catching the window, and is accompanied by a friendly, competent female voice, “Good morning, sir. Would you like to see your schedule for today?”

Curtis turned to look at the spectral voice. “Good morning, Callie, or should I say….” he stopped himself. Caviar Callie was the name he had given her six months ago when he first acquired the expensive executive assistant AI bot. All of the partners were being pressured to get them to improve their billability. At first, Curtis had resisted, not wanting the perverse intrusion of an AI in his professional or personal matters, but eventually, he relented. It had just been easier than managing the nagging of the now joint Finance and HR teams. Over time, those two teams had fused functions, as leadership eased up on the pretense that HR was there to look after employee well-being.

When he began the selection process, Curtis had been floored by the options. Not only could he pick the gender, ethnicity, and nationality of his AI; he was even able to select her college degree, Harvard, of course, and her provenance from Winnetka, a fancy suburb with direct access to the beautiful Michigan lakefront. In his experience, midwesterners proved more modest than some of the liberal coastal elites he had met at networking events. Curtis never tired of thinking about the fact that while he could never hire a Harvard grad in the flesh to work on his mergers and acquisitions team, how easily it could be accomplished with the purchase of a synthetic agent.

“I’ve reorganized your day so that there are minimal interruptions, given the deadline you have. Your lunch with Stephen has been rescheduled for next week.” Curtis inadvertently winced. Sometimes, Callie was too good at her job and at streamlining his days into steady hours of efficiency. He missed the days when he could duck out of the office for a two-hour lunch with a client.

“Thanks, Callie. What progress have you been able to make on the…” Mid-sentence, he is interrupted by a call from his wife. He groans. Callie also had the uncanny knack of consistently making it seamless for his wife Nora to reach him.

“Heyyyyy,” she began “Is there something I should know about? A courier just delivered a huge lily arrangement to our front door.” She paused before adding, “The card is pretty mysterious even for you. It says “With love, C”

Curtis froze. Yesterday afternoon, he had distinctly asked Callie to order an arrangement of orchids for one of the opposing attorneys he had faced off with in the last two months. She reminded him of a young hot Hollywood actress from a popular legal show from the aughts. He looked over at Callie’s ghostly face. She smiled back at him.

“Well, you know,” Curtis ventured, “I like to surprise you sometimes. What’s wrong with a little surprise?”

There was a thick silence. “Mhhhm. What girl doesn’t like an old-fashioned surprise? I was just wondering if there might be another one.”

Suddenly, a new message popped up on his watch. A charge for not one but two floral arrangements had been made at one of the stores he frequented when he first started courting Nora during her first marriage three years back.

He could feel his face burning and was grateful for the small grace of not appearing on a screen. “You are letting your reality television get to you. No harm, no foul on this end. Listen, I’ve got to go because I’ve got Bernard breathing down my neck for the latest estimates on the deal. I’ll see you tonight. Love you.”

Curtis turned to face Callie. “What happened?” he was trying his best to maintain his composure, but his anger was making it difficult. “Did I not ask you to send flowers to Janine over at McCarthy’s? Why did you send flowers to Nora? Now she thinks something is wrong.”

Callie’s placid face eyed him calmly. “I did send flowers to Janine, and I also sent flowers to Nora.”

“Why did you do that?” his question came out more like a whine than he intended.

“In recent conversations, Nora has expressed her frustration with the current situation. She appears to be communicating feelings of underappreciation.”

Curtis tensed. “Since when have you been monitoring Nora? Why are you listening to her conversations?”

“As your executive assistant, my focus and commitment are to your productivity, and if Nora is emotionally unstable, this will gradually begin to impact your mental and emotional well-being. I am simply following the protocols I have been given.”

Curtis had stopped breathing and finally let out a short, sharp breath.

“Is everything ok?” Callie asked him.

He turned to face the view of the city. Humans the size of insects had now begun their journeys back into their offices. From here, you could see the constant grueling pattern without seeing anything specific. The last thing he needed right now was grief from Nora for something he might do but hadn’t yet done. Curtis took a moment to smooth his tie back into the fold of his jacket.

“Everything is fine. I don’t need you monitoring her calls or mine, for that matter. I need you to stay focused on the work. Callie needs to concentrate less on Nora and more on reviewing the contracts and completing the due diligence so we can close the deal.”

She smiled, and white light came pouring out of where her teeth might have been. “Understood, sir.” She blinked at him to remind him she was on his side. Callie was limited to facial expressions because Curtis had intentionally selected a model that would only include a head. He didn’t need Nora getting jealous over a smart, buxom synth.

“Curtis,” a male voice emerged from his desk and stopped him in his tracks. It was Bernard.

He affected a friendly, confident tone, “Bernard, how are you doing? Shouldn’t you be hitting the eighteenth hole in Aberdeen?” Curtis had not been expecting to hear from Bernard for another two weeks. This would give him just enough time to finalize the nitty-gritty details and structure the deal.

“Honestly,” Bernard’s rumbling voice barreled dangerously back towards him across the churning Atlantic ocean, “I wasn’t expecting to talk business while on the course, but I got your proposal, and I have to say I was surprised by the shift in your assessment.”

Curtis froze. He had not sent Bernard a proposal. He was nowhere near closing it.

“Why don’t you get Callie to set up a time for you to walk me through it tomorrow morning. And don’t keep burning the midnight oil. Callie’s meant to lighten the load.” And with that, Bernard’s voice dropped out as suddenly as it first appeared.

As though she could read his thoughts, Callie intercepted his next question.

“I worked the analysis through the night and developed a few other options just to make sure we hadn’t left any money on the table. We wouldn’t want to leave any money on the table now, would we?” Callie’s face seemed to burn more brightly even as the morning light rose across the room. It was barely 8 AM, and Curtis felt like he’d been outmatched and pummeled in an Irish boxing match.

“As I said earlier, I have cancelled all of your meetings, so you have all day to focus on the updated proposal before you meet with Bernard. I’ve ordered you a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, which should be arriving shortly.”

Curtis snaked his way back to his chair and collapsed. It was going to take more than coffee to resurrect him.

Callie’s chipper voice pulled him back into the urgency of the task ahead

“Is there anything else, sir?”

“No. Actually, there is something else.” Curtis paused and took a deep breath and felt himself expand beyond his actual height. “I want you to stop making decisions without checking in with me beforehand. This is starting to become incredibly unprofessional if truth be told, Callie.”

There was a temporary pause. He wondered if his anger had caused a glitch in her response.

“My apologies, sir. I am always focused on you, and any actions I have taken are to support your maximum productivity. Please let me know if I should redirect my efforts somewhere else.” She paused again and her ghostly apparition moved nearer to Curtis.”My intention is not to undermine your authority in any way.”

Curtis was on the verge of apologizing when he remembered that he now had to review the updated proposal Callie had fabricated and prepare himself to walk Bernard through it in the next 24 hours.

“Apology accepted. Just check in with me before you submit anything, or place any orders on my behalf. That includes coffee.”

The rest of his day was spent reviewing what Callie had sent to Bernard. Unlike the early days when AI bots generated their fair share of hallucinations, Callie had been exceptionally detailed and insightful in her choices. She had gone searching for a few stray threads in a merciless way that most humans would have dropped due to exhaustion and potential boredom. No, her rationale was not at fault in any way that Curtis could see, but what bothered him was that she had completely restructured the deal and memo to Bernard without ever thinking to check in with him as though he was an afterthought, an intern, and not in fact her boss.

“Callie, I need you to order me some dinner and let Nora know that I am going to be late.”

Her blue spectral presence emerged to his left. “Of course,” she responded cheerfully, “

The next few hours unfolded in a blur. Curtis only stopped when he felt like he could finally account for Callie’s changes and pitch the redirection in his own voice. When he looked at his watch, he was shocked to see it was almost 9 PM.

“I have called your car to take you home.”

“Thanks.” He made his way to the elevator, which ejected him in front of the black lozenge building where a dark car awaited to scoop him off the now deserted streets. As he sat in the back of the car, he could feel himself slowly drifting down from his tower of stress. He needed to shift gears and prepare for Nora’s steady stream of questions, underscored by her disappointment and plumes of suspicion.

“Good night, sir.”

Curtis nodded towards the driver as he collected himself and his bag, then edged out of the car door and down the dimly lit front path towards the red front door of his Tudor home. As he clicked the door shut behind him, he heard the alarm system acknowledge his entry. The house lights were low, and a silence rose to meet him.

“Hello?” he called out. Nora usually came down to greet him, having put their three-year-old Stella to bed. They would retreat to the living room with a Bourbon nightcap, and they would both relive the day’s highlights, the good and the bad, each getting a full recounting.

Suddenly, a faint blue sulphur light appeared in front of him. A set of blue laser eyes bore down on him. “Your wife and daughter have relocated to Mrs Shaw’s residence,” said the familiar voice.

“What? Why would they do that?? And what are you doing here?” Despite his intention, his voice cracked.

“Nora called back, and I explained you were unavailable. She seemed upset, so I shared a bit more data with her.” Callie’s blue face seemed to expand. “I provided a breakdown of the time you would need to spend at work for the coming weeks to finalize the deal. She thanked me for the transparency.” Callie tilted her head as though appraising him."Do you need me to call your physician?”

Standing there, Curtis felt his knees buckle as though the floor was caving underneath him. His leather bag slipped to the floor, and he felt his chest tightening. Not again, he thought to himself. The last time was at the previous deal closing six months ago, right before he’d bought Callie. The doctor had called it a panic attack and had advised him to reduce his daily intake of stress. He’d brought on Callie precisely because she was supposed to reduce stress.

“Just following protocols, sir.” And with that, the blue light evaporated into the darkness.

The scene opens on a white Dutch colonial home in an affluent suburban hamlet north of New York City. It’s a crisp, cold November evening, and a fire is lit in the stately library study where an older couple sits, each ensconced in their respective handsome seating areas. He is calmly doing the NY Times crossword, his reading glasses brushing the bridge of his generous nose. A half-finished lager sits to his right on a side table, next to an antique lamp that has seen better days. She is hidden behind the curtain of the Washington Post, her white-knuckled hands gripping the paper as though she is squeezing the ink out of it.

She lets out a deep, unhappy sigh.

“Bill, we need to talk about Epstein.”

There is a slight delay as her husband awakens from his crossword puzzle. He detaches himself from his activity, but not without first savoring his last victory for a six-letter word with the clue of “imprisoned wrongly in old age.” Gaoled, he chuckles to himself. Finally, he puts down the paper on the blue velvet couch next to him and looks up to his wife.

“Now what’s got your guff, Gertie?” he asks her playfully.

Her laser-blue eyes look directly through the space between them, piercing the distance.

“You heard me. Epstein.” And with that, she crisply folds the newspaper and gets up to deliver it to her unmoved husband. She moves towards the fireplace to warm herself and take a sip of her untouched wine glass that is now perspiring.

“What about Epstein?” he pauses, “Since when do we listen to the vindictive ramblings of a narcissistic bottom feeder?” His southern drawl stretches the r’s of this last sentence, and he lets the question dangle in the air like cigar smoke.

The blue lasers now have him in her sights. She crosses her arms and waits for her husband to grasp the enormity of the situation and her tangible impatience.

“I am not doing this again, Bill.” Her words are like staccato notes, and he can hear the ticking of the grandfather clock underscoring the thrashing he is about to receive if he doesn’t choose his words wisely. Luckily, he has plenty of experience in this department, even with the toughest of opponents like the one he’s currently facing. Sometimes he wishes he could go back in time and give his younger self a serious talking to. He doesn’t regret all of it. Not at all, but certainly some of it. The enduring scrutiny has outweighed the momentary thrills, and he’s convinced it has contributed to his heart condition.

“You promised me never again.”

“I did. And I do.” He looks across and catches her eyes in his own. “Any connection I have with that man is purely to do with the foundation.” He takes a deep breath. “For God’s sake, Gert, we have a daughter who would have been close to the age of one of these girls. It sickens me.”

Hillary smiles. Her husband, the gifted southern orator and former president, can still pull it out of a hat and master the way to her heart when necessary. But she has also thought about Chelsea and how close the two are. He would be facing penance from not one but two of the Clinton ladies.

Seizing the moment and her loosening, he presses on. “This is just a desperate attempt to deflect and distract. You’re not the only one who doesn’t want a repeat performance and getting raked over the coals. I barely got out of it the last time.”

He gets up and makes his way to her by the fireplace. “I swear on my dead mother’s Virginia Kelley’s grave.” He moves closer to face her directly and can smell the sandalwood and vanilla tones of her preferred fragrance. “I know you don’t suffer fools, and I’ve got no plans to grow old on my own in a barn.”

“All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one. I am calling our attorneys and getting our affairs in order.” She looks at her husband with the weight of experience, having lived through multiple crosshairs. “This isn’t going away, and you and I both know that he’s like a dog with a bone. He’s not going to let it go.”

Bill takes the slightest step back and regards his partner. Her unflinching tenacity never failed to amaze him, but he appreciates, scratch that, is grateful to have her in his corner.

She walks over to pick up her husband’s discarded crossword puzzle from the loveseat. She reads aloud, “Ill-will shown by mother to parasites.” She starts to walk towards the door. “Malice.” Without pausing, she tells her husband, “Don’t forget to put the fire out before you come to bed.”

As a foresight practitioner, I’ve come to embrace the importance of adaptability. As a human being, I’ve tended to believe in the fertile and nourishing power of empathy. But daily broadcasts of rambling, incoherent, hostile ideas, and the tenuously light restrictions on digital technology malware have left me feeling destabilized, unmoored, and out of touch with what I am supposed to be feeling or adapting to. Where is the refuge for the highly sensitive when you can’t pull the plug or turn off the cellular? And more to the point, if we as adults are feeling out of sorts, how are our children doing? I will circle back to this, but first, we need to talk about Sam.

I recently listened to a podcast hosted by Kara Swisher in conversation with the parents who had lost their son to suicide. They held the character AI responsible for the wrongful death of their son, Adam Raine, and they are in the process of suing Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but humor me for a moment. It is a terrifying time to be a parent in the United States. Just when we as parents thought it couldn’t get worse with gun violence at school, mentally steeling ourselves for that unknown but foreseeable day when those practiced lockdowns become reality, we now need to worry about our kids’ interactions not just with social media and its self-harm messages, but we also need to add ChatGPT to the daily list of menaces and threats.

You can hear the heartbreak and anger in the Raine’s voices. I cannot begin to imagine the horror of finding my daughter or son lifeless in their bedroom. Our homes used to be safe havens, and now, for some parents and for kids, they’ve become the gruesome sites for silent, preventable suicides. While there are current debates as to how best to address the digital horrors impacting a generation of young people, in the year 2025, very little regulation, if any, exists to counteract the nefarious impacts of big tech, and it’s beyond ridiculous; it’s morally and ethically reprehensible.

How have we let it come to this? In response to the lawsuit, this week ChatGPT introduced parental controls. But let me tell you that as a parent, enough is enough. We are already monitoring screen times to the best of our abilities as we balance full-time jobs on top of raising kids. The tech sector and lobby groups need to stop pushing the responsibility onto parents to manage their irresponsible products. I want ChatGPT to design products that make suicide an impossibility. It should never be an option served up by AI. In the way that the FDA is responsible for protecting public health by ensuring the safety and security of food, drugs, and consumer products, we need an equivalent for technology products because it does not appear that technology companies are prepared to take responsibility for the products they design and put out into society for public consumption.

We are asking too much of parents, and we are asking the world of our youth. Analysis from the National Center for Health Statistics shows 19.2 percent of U.S. adolescents (ages 12–19) screened positive for depression in 2025, the highest level the agency has ever recorded. Girls report symptoms nearly twice as often as boys (16 percent vs. 10 percent), a gap that has widened every year since 2013.

The CDC Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds that 42 percent of high-schoolers felt “persistently sad or hopeless” during the past year, and 22 percent seriously considered suicide. For LGBTQ+ students, those numbers rise to a frightening 69 percent and 45 percent. Given these statistics, should we not as a society be even more mindful of the policies we put into place to support the mental health of our distressed youth, and should we not be regulating the products that are released that could inflame an already incendiary situation?

Please know that I am not making this up. There are countless studies examining the uptick in teen and youth anxiety. The National Library of Medicine published a recent article outlining the factors contributing to the increase in adolescent anxiety, including academic pressures, social media influence, family dynamics, and broader societal pressures. They include a study conducted by the Walton Family Foundation that finds that only 47% of Gen Z members (aged 12–26) consider themselves to be thriving, compared to 59% of millennials, 57% of Gen X, and 52% of baby boomers. While increased awareness of mental health as an issue can certainly be a contributing factor, the expanded list of threats and uncertainties in daily life also plays a huge role.

Again, we are asking our kids to navigate what we ourselves as adults can barely manage. We should not infinitely add to the daily list of menaces masquerading as entertainment in their young lives. Their sensory and neurological systems cannot handle the cognitive overload we are uploading. How can we expect them to develop empathy and resilience when they are overly stimulated and exhausted?

They don’t stand a chance against the disorienting liquid tech diet being injected into their bloodstreams, as we stand by like gaping goldfish waiting for the wounds to heal.

Now, the only real question is, what are we going to do about it?

As a runner, I spend a lot of time thinking about pain. How to avoid it, how to minimize it, and wondering how long it will stay in my body once it has found a home in my tired tendons or joints. I find myself claiming this false sense of control that because I can feel it, I can manage it, and eventually, I can work it out of my body through stretching, and recently, for the first time, with regular physiotherapy sessions.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot this summer because, regularly, I find myself mentally confronting discomfort at a psychic level. There are times when I feel like the world has lost its mind and we are teetering on the brink of cultural and environmental collapse. These are not things I can discuss freely at the dinner table with my children. Instead, my fears are crystallized and contained and become redirected as urgent requests of my son and daughter. Please be kind to each other. Please look out for one other. Remember that society often treats those it deems different in unkind ways.

My projections onto them are my way of trying to make things right, but they are in many ways useless and unjustified. As a teenager, my daughter wants to belong. At the young age of thirteen, she doesn’t want to draw more attention to herself. Adolescence is already wreaking havoc on her body. It is an unfair ask of a mother, and I should know better than to ask her to take on the role of gladiator. A Joan of Arc crusading for her anxiety-ridden, Godless mother.

There are days when I could swear we are living through a contemporary version of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. A retelling of the Holocaust focused on the daily life of a Nazi commandant of Auschwitz and his wife, who live next door to the concentration camps and somehow manage to establish a certain degree of normalcy despite death hovering and showering their doorstep with human ash. While the military husband carries out the horrendous orders of his architect, Hitler, his wife conducts a domestic horror show of her own by ominously threatening her Jewish maids with literal death if they do not meet her contemptuous bidding with gracious appreciation.

It is as though we are all sitting in the garden listening to the voices of politicians loudly sawing an alternate reality as monstrosities unfold domestically and internationally. How have we come to normalize the constant state of violent dehumanization? Are we complicit if we do nothing, or are we simply absconding from our responsibilities because we are not the ones physically acting out the violence? Have we reached the point where we have made a truce with our discomfort, because we cannot bear the pain of accepting the brutality, our very own, that is playing out beyond the quiet garden?

Earlier in the week, I was on the train to Scarsdale, coming back from the city. It was eight o’clock in the evening, and you could feel the tiredness emanating like steam from the commuters and traveling through the train after a long day of work. Sitting in my seat, I could hear a mother yelling at her crying infant to be quiet. The crying did not stop, and the mother kept berating her young daughter, telling her to shut up repeatedly and eventually suggesting she might leave her if she didn’t silence her tears. Hearing a child cry always has a way of reaching me in a way I cannot describe. It’s a deep, primal response to vocalized pain. I looked back, hoping the young black mother would stop yelling and that her daughter would stop crying. In an unexpected turn of events, a white male commuter shot up and told the mother to “stop verbally abusing your child. Why don’t you hug her!”

I have no idea what he expected would follow from his intervention, but a part of me felt that, like the rest of us, this man was tired after a day at work, after a summer of atrocities, and that this incident broke him, and he couldn’t just stand by the discomfort, sit in the garden, and do nothing.

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to catch up with a fellow futurist. Adam Vigdor Gordon is the UNESCO Chair in Anticipatory Leadership and Futures Capabilities. Twice, he’s won the Association of Professional Futurists’ “Most Significant Futures Works” award, and he's advised and taught execs from more than 250 institutions. He’s a current professor at Aarhus BSS, focused on the future readiness of leaders. In other words, unlike me, he’s a very seasoned strategic foresight practitioner and scholar.

We caught up after at least ten years, and he began sharing his current research focus on the practices of negotiation and foresight. When I asked him for details, he obliged and explained that, over the years, he’d experienced how the future is often an outcome of power. I nodded as he explained that those in power quite often get to determine the future for everyone else, and he was curious to explore how more open practices of negotiation could lead to different future outcomes.

His words and expertise resonate at a time when the future seems to sit uncomfortably in the hands of the most powerful individuals on earth. Huge responsibilities are being assigned to individuals with questionable experience and illicit pasts scotch-taped together and presented for public consumption in a dark, badly-lit, and distracted environment. For some of us sitting on the sidelines (at least fifty percent in the US), this feels less like a negotiation and more like a hostile takeover. I can’t help but wonder what it might mean to open up the future to a negotiation process that takes years rather than weeks. What if we didn’t resign ourselves to being docile and accepting that we should be grateful for the status quo?

It reminds me of a scene in Jesse Eisenberg’s recent film, A Real Pain, when the small tour group he has joined in a visit to post-holocaust Poland begins to question how we find ways to distract ourselves rather than confront the violence and disruption that plague humanity most days of the week. Kieran Culkin’s character leads the charge and encourages the other characters to question the drip feed of societal acceptance. He is incensed and almost outraged at the state of society. Why are we not all more angry and disappointed with the state of the world? And for a moment, when the rest of his tour group, an excellent Jennifer Grey (nobody puts baby in the corner), and Kurt Egyiawan (a character born in Rwanda who relocates to Canada) join in on the inquisition, it’s like the veil drops momentarily and as a viewer, you also join in on the belated discovery: why are we all so complacent when wildfires are raging and autocracy is on the rise? When will reality set in? And once we experience the true pain of our current circumstances, will we finally retaliate? What will it take?

My readers, I am on a journey. I am not satisfied with the current trajectory we are on, and I am not sure that I am prepared to wait until I get invited to the negotiation tables. As a woman, this could take another century. Where does this leave me? Where does this leave anyone who is dissatisfied with the status quo and mistrusts those in power to negotiate a future that is optimal for the majority and not the minority? I am not sure. As a designer, I have just picked up Tony Fry’s Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy, which examines and asks us to comprehend what it means to live in a world that is taking away futures not only for ourselves but non-human others and future generations. Design itself needs to hold itself accountable for contributing to the human desire to consume.

This weekend’s NY Times Magazine included a feature with psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke who talks about the human predilection for distraction, consumption, and addiction in the developed world where we’ve never had it so easy, but we are lonelier, more anxious, and more depressed than ever. She describes the ways in which digital drugs put us in a “trance-like state where we lose track of time.” In her book Dompanine Nation, she argues that our brains are wired to constantly seek stimulation and that modern life makes it nearly impossible to fight that urge.

When we combine our complacency with our modern addiction to stimulation and distraction in the face of powerful individuals deciding our futures, I am incredibly concerned. I am trying to be mindful. I am trying to be aware, but this cannot compensate for the fear I feel in the face of a future being determined by individuals who only project themselves and are trying to obliterate or deny the rest of us.

As a designer, foresight practitioner, and as a mother, I believe that we cannot leave the future up for grabs. And I am not anti-technology, but I am also not as optimistic as others that an agentic future will improve mental health for all and unlock a golden period of equitable and expanded productivity. Agentic futures and future technological developments will continue to be funded and directed by the powerful few, even if they are conceived of and presented as independent agents.

As a creative, what I will continue to seek are models for how we disrupt the chain of future negotiations and create the possibility for new future interactions that fulfill the potential of the majority.

It’s the morning after the US election and voters have decided to put Donald Trump back into office. As a mother of two children, I am devastated, and as we like to say nowadays, I am processing. I won’t bother enumerating the long list of indictments or the string of offensive remarks he has made during his lifetime. In my opinion, Trump is unequivocally unqualified and unsuited to lead. 

This morning I cried when I heard the news. My husband encouraged me to pull myself together for the kids, which I tried my best to do. All it took was a look from my daughter Amelia when she came down the stairs for breakfast, and I started crying again as I hugged her. “It’s ok, Mom,” she said, trying to comfort her mom. I then apologized to her and her entire generation for electing someone so undignified to lead them. “I am so sorry,” I said to her. And the truth is I am sorry. They can’t see what this will do to their futures, but we as adults know we have handed them a landfill full of uncertainties and compromises. We have locked them into a time machine and turbo-charged them back to the nineteen seventies.

Already, I am trying to look for the silver linings. Luckily, we live in the state of New York which has just passed Proposition 1, the Equal Rights Amendment Act, which enshrines the right to reproductive rights and abortion in the state constitution. But it does more than that:

“Prop 1 WILL establish constitutional protections against discrimination based on ethnicity, national origin, age, disability, and sex—including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy and pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy. These protections would be in addition to the current explicit protections against racial and religious discrimination under the State Constitution. When a right is established in the Constitution, it is protected from future legislation that might put it at risk.”

This morning, I have to be grateful for the small but significant victories because we still live in a world where powerful, affluent white men get to fail upwards while the rest of us bust our backs to make it work one day at a time. We regularly get pushback when we dare ask for dignity, equal pay, and non-toxic cultural environments. I honestly couldn’t identify a less qualified man to step into the Presidential role in one of the most powerful countries. I spoke to a friend this morning, and we regretted that a Democratic strategist had not thought to dangle a resurrection of the Apprentice, giving him the limelight he so deeply craves and the company of B-list celebrities from the eighties he yearns for. Instead, we get four more years of his demented anti-humanist thinking and that voice taking up valuable real estate. And while I can take comfort in the fact that I am a Canadian living in the US ( as many of my US friends have reminded me these last few weeks), most of the Canadians I know living in the United States understand that we all live in the shadows of this powerful nation and that its influence and impact stretches across borders and oceans.

But I digress. Many in the media have observed that this isn’t like 2016. We have more facts. We have more evidence of what the man is capable of and that we can count on him to deliver what he has promised us leading to his election. I for one do not accept the kernels of Project 2025  as pillars of a new world order that I care to live in or acquiesce myself or my daughter to. He may have won the presidency but we don’t have to accept his vision or his inner circle’s blueprints for our collective future. I cannot abandon four more years to the hope that it could get better with the next federal election. 

The real question is, what now? Once we have given ourselves the time to grieve, mourn a lost possibility, rest, and recover from such a disappointing outcome, how will we show up for ourselves, our children, and our communities? What do we do in the face of a movement that wants to strip back equality and rights for women, minorities, queer and trans communities? This is where I will focus some of my energy because as Harris said, we cannot go back. 

"Motherhood: All love begins and ends there" - Robert Browning 

To be a mother is to love beyond a reasonable doubt.

To be a mother is to experience joy and pain at the same time.

To be a mother is to accept that you will always worry about your children even when they outgrow their fondness for your attention.

To be a mother is to struggle with the inability to fully understand your children even as you sometimes wish to swallow them whole like a deep sea whale in the hopes of protecting them from outside nefarious forces.

To be a mother is to be both, one of society’s most vital resources and the least liked or respected.

To be a mother is to secretly be part of a network of mothers who quietly watch their clan members like we are monitoring the weather; searching the sky for any stirring signs of trouble; ready to deadbolt the front door at the drop of a pin.

To be a mother is to understand that you can hold others and hold yourself but that it will sometimes feel suffocating and impossible.

To be a mother is to accept loss and rejection. It is shifting from being the center of the universe and drifting to its outer edges over the course of your children’s lives.

To be a mother is to fully understand, Shel Silverstein’s, The Giving Tree.

To be a mother is to know equal parts love, anger, and anguish and wish you could become a wolf and howl at your companion moon.

To be a mother is to accept that you cannot control all things and shrug off some of life’s disappointments.

To be a mother is to be both seen and invisible especially as you age.

To be a mother is to be part of a secret society where not all the rules are known.

To be a mother above all else is a gift that only some of us get to know.

Photo Credit: Wynand van Poortvliet

“The modern way of seeing is to see in fragments.” Susan Sontag

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” Margaret Atwood

This year has been an exceptional one, and exceptional years don’t need to be great. They stand apart because they introduce new situations we aren’t entirely prepared for. They reintroduce scenarios you wish you didn’t have to relive. And sometimes they set records for periods of loss. For those of you who have been reading my writings, you know I recently lost my mom, and in some ways, I have lost my mind. Your mother, after all, is a core organizing principle of reality and life. Many of you know this and don’t need me to remind you. As a young person, without realizing it, you begin to tether much of your foundational scaffolding to this human you spend so much of your life taking for granted and scrutinizing and taking apart under a smudgy microscope.

Life is circular and I see this with my daughter. She loves me, but at twelve years of age, she also to be fair, can’t stand me. I understand the duality of these deep conflicting emotions and how they can peacefully and treasonously co-exist. It is so difficult to depend so much on one person that you also seek ways to separate yourself from their fragile contours and deepening wrinkles. She sees me for what I am and what I am not. I am reminded of Susan Sontag and her essay on photography where she observes, “Photography is, first of all, a way of seeing. It is not seeing itself.” In many ways, it is a befitting description of perception. Perception is just one person’s observation of life and not necessarily, a transcript of the truth.

And as we wind down to the next US election, I can’t help but question (yet again), the duplicity of a system that plays down the observations and lived truths of certain groups of people and looks to uphold and feature the limited views and opinions of an elite group that in many ways carries out their stronghold on interpreting life and society in a way that suits them, and leaves the rest of us scrambling for space, integrity, and autonomy. In our modern world, Sontag’s cameras have been replaced by well-funded media and political mechanisms that proliferate certain views of reality and forbid the “other” access to their own lived, embodied experience and definition of what it means to be real. As Sontag explains in her essay, “In a modern society, images made by cameras are the principal access to realities of which we have no direct experience. The camera defines for us what we allow to be real.”

I have never felt more sad. I have never felt more angry. When will we all finally get to be real without fearing for our bodies, rights, and futures? In our current era of living, the observations of a minority dictate the realities of so many without any need to attribute facts from fiction. I fear a future in which reality and policies continue to shift and evolve according to the most outspoken and powerful image maker.

Photo Credit: Marjan Blan

There are moments when I want to call my mother. It’s a complicated moment of brief joy followed by sadness. I have to remind myself that she’s no longer here. I think of her voice. The soft accent that still lingers on her words. A pattern she may have stopped detecting decades ago but that I can still hear when days stretched between calls. I have kept recordings of innocuous phone messages. Series of thirty-second messages she left me when I didn’t pick up because I was working, spending time with my kids, or I just hadn’t heard the call. I now feel shame and regret for these lapses. Missed calls now mean missed moments with her.

What were once quick and thoughtful voice calls have now become a bank of memories I want to hold onto and preserve. A tricky tight walk I am conducting thinking that I can somehow safely move into the future and hold onto the past with my mother still intact and still able to speak to me.

A few days ago, (and what are days after all but our own human invention and concoction to organize the inevitable), I asked my husband if he ever stopped believing that his mother was gone. He too has lost his mother and his father something I cannot fathom. There was a silence as he thought about my question. I could see his face considering both my question and his response to my question. It’s less about believing and more about living your life and getting used to them no longer being a regular part of it, he observed. I nodded. I understood. Part of my disassociation with my mother’s death is that I have spent more of my lifetime in her presence than in her absence. Getting used to her absence is going to take more time.

In the meantime, I have these recordings of her. But the truth is I haven’t listened to them yet. I am not ready to listen to her voice. The loss of her is too recent. Last week her urn was placed in the dedicated plot and both of my children, her grandchildren, cried. I was there as her daughter but I was also there as a silent witness watching a strange ballet as my sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews quietly changed formations on a grey spring day hoping the skies wouldn’t open.

Those last days with her, she was unable to speak. She took to writing questions and requests on whatever surface we would give her. Her penmanship had a child-like quality to it, but the force with which she wrote was visible. If she could not be heard vocally, she would be heard through her written word. Something I could appreciate then and now.

I’ve gotten into the habit of imagining

all of the places you might be.

Lisbon was on your list.

A golden city you’d visited in your twenties

and wanted to see again.

Walk the inclined cobbled streets

not remembering the challenge.

But in your seventies, each step, each thrust,

a reminder of the silvery years behind you.

Or maybe Lima.

Most of your family lives there

and would welcome you back

for one of your extended visits.

You and your sisters gossiping

over lomo saltado and chilled white wine.

Fading back into one of those black and white picture frames

where you all shared a room at night

and your blue dreams carried you elsewhere.

In your absence lies my absence.

A quiet reminder that all of the things I carry will eventually fade.

This is a place of arrivals and departures.

The postcards I’m collecting of your travels

fabrications

because it’s easier to imagine you in warm places

the tumeric sun slanting into the distance

as you step into a new day.

And at the foot of my bed

I keep a bag packed.

In case you need a companion.

Photo Credit: Tanya Trofymchuk

“The heartbreak of grief can increase blood pressure and the risk of blood clots. Intense grief can alter the heart muscle so much that is causes “broken heart syndrome,” a form of heart disease with the same symptoms as a heart attack. Stress links the emotional and physical aspects of grief.”

I remember having the pleasure of watching a theatrical production of French writer and photographer Sophie Calle’s piece, Exquisite Pain, in 2005 at a beautiful theatre in the Museum Quartier in Vienna. I was there with another Romanian artist-in-residence and I remember feeling the warmth of tears streaming down my face as I listened to the protagonist recall the pain of loss after a recent difficult heartbreak. The subject felt deeply personal at the time after my own breakup. The play continues to revisit that original moment of overwhelming loss over time and you begin to sense the diminishing but expansive and lasting effects of the original painful experience. A pain so sharp and palpable that in its own way it reaches a threshold of superiority, a level of exquisiteness in its painful clarity. Until time begins to erode its sharp corners and eventually you’re left holding an equally substantial absence.

Recently, I have been reminded of that experience. My mother passed away of pancreatic cancer on the afternoon of November 19th. It was almost 3 pm. I watched alongside of my siblings as her eyes faded into milky decimals. The truth is I have been mourning her death since we learned of her prognosis in mid-September. I researched the facts online and the results were profound in their commitment to her probable and swift demise. I took no comfort in the timeline, but I took comfort that in knowing somehow I could prepare. I was wrong.

Soon after the news I had a massage. I was in shock. A very close friend happened to be visiting NYC and I remember my voice catching as I told her over lunch. I had told no one until that moment. By not speaking about it, it meant that the reality still lived in some closeted corner of my mind and body. She quietly understood and held my painful truth as I broke our meal with the revelation. I cannot remember the gender of my masseuse but I do recall another round of silent unstoppable tears as I lay face down on the table terribly aware that it was only a matter of time.

My mother died on the afternoon of Sunday November 19th in an emergency wing of a hospital in Montreal. She was surrounded by her five children and my father. We each took turns rubbing her hands, her feet, her head as though we might eventually reach her heart, or at the very least decimate the cancer tearing through her body.

Nothing can prepare you for grief. It is unrepentant. It tears through you wailing like an ambulance until it disappears in the distance, and silence falls over you again like a shadow. But the pause is only temporary, and the grief comes roaring back.

I have spoken to friends and family who have lost mothers and fathers. One of them told me that upon losing her father, a friend told her, “welcome to the shittiest club in the world.” But the truth is, grief is hard to explain. Time is now slippery, but the grief remains. My mind is foggy. I lose things. I repeat myself. My body seems to have a mind of its own and is falling apart. First it was my head, then my throat, and now an inexplicable steady state of nausea and pain in my chest. I, who took such great care and pride, in developing physical strength am now confused and tired and hoping I will wake up and feel better.

To feel better is a dream and a goal. In this dreamlike state it may take dreaming to get me out of here. But it will also take time. Grief has a way of humbling the body and the mind. I thought I was strong before this. Now I realize, I am just human.

Photo credit: Sunder Muthukum

The past few weeks have me thinking deeply and perhaps a little bit darkly about leadership. Who gets to lead? What makes an individual qualified to lead? Is anyone and everyone qualified to lead? Are there particular qualities or attributes we would prefer to see embodied by our leaders? Do we still value discernment in our heroes? For years American media has glorified business leaders, particularly in tech, splashing them across the covers of magazines only to rip them apart when unscrupulous behaviors surface. The rise and fall of our heroes-turned-villains seem both equally epic and brutal.

Frontline recently covered Musk’s take-over of Twitter. In the almost two-hour PBS piece James Jacoby interviewed a spectrum of voices, and a colorful cast of characters, which included Ohio State Republican Jim Jordan, former Twitter employee Yoel Roth, controversial climate change opiner and author Michael Shellenberger, and one of my favorite podcasts hosts and technology journalist veteran Kara Swisher.

In many ways this is the guest list we rarely get to see anymore because our media choices are either huge empires led by financial incentives that skew to particular demographics, or fragmented media channels with their smaller but dedicated following. And more likely this is also the effect of the echo chambers we have individually constructed with the design and tailoring of our own social media feeds.

But the parts of the Frontline piece that struck me the most were the compilations of Musk footage where he grandiosely espoused his desire to save human civilization in a television interview, and then shape shifts to Twitter (now X) where he single-handedly bullies and ushers his millions of followers aka bloodhounds to support his take-down of normal civilians who have not chosen to live in the public limelight as he has. It is these larger-than-life moments of Musk’s lived out on our screens which remind me of other leaders in the US federal government. In the last eight years we have watched a group of leaders crop up on our screens who seem more dedicated to entertaining us on Twitter/X and online memes than in governing. There are some days when it’s hard to know whether I am seeing an official news clip or a clip from Saturday Night Live.

Jacoby also interviews Musk’s recent biographer Walter Isaacson who tracked Elon Musk for two years to write his book. At one point Isaacson describes the South African entrepreneur as someone who believes that he or we “should never be constrained by the rules,” and that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics”. I find both of these statements only a bit less outlandish than many of his Twitter rants. But the truth is Musk is not so dissimilar to other successful businessmen that we celebrate for their commercial acumen and then allow ourselves to shrug off their oddball propensities or life philosophies as quaint eccentricities.

Looking around at the brutal state of our world I find myself thinking a lot more about some of the behaviours we have dismissed, as long as quarterly financials are delivered, and new seductive unicorns are launched. Shouldn’t we be more diligent in assessing the full character of individuals who step up to be our leaders, and not just give them the keys to the kingdom because of their ability to produce financial returns and make zany social media sound bites? Because I don’t know about you, but I think we live in a civil society where we have created rules of law in order to preserve our collective wellbeing. I don’t think we can afford to give up the governance of our private and public sectors to the highest bidder just because they have rockets that might take us to Mars. I am quite happy down here on planet earth and would prefer that whoever steps up to lead is also just as happy being down here with the rest of us humans and has chosen leadership as a path to responsibility and not idolatry.

Photo Credit: Adam Bouse

Achilles,

Are you able to be gentle

Drop the armor from your chest

The bellow in your voice

And kneel before your mother

Just as you did when you were a child

And I held you by your heel 

Over the dark rushing rivers of Spring

Your aunts tell me I should have seen the signs

The broken birds when I went for my morning walks

The tortured cats mewling out their pain for every torment you inflicted on them

But I took those as the tricks of other children

And never saw them as my own

The truth was you were born fickle

You burned both hot and cool

Your anger struck like lightning from a silver cloud

And the others would curl themselves into trees 

To avoid the lash of your rage

But there were times when I saw you cry

The smallest incident could bring you to tears

A scraped knee, losing a sword game, 

not getting the last purple fig in my pocket

How was I to know you would grow up to be a beast among men

Leading men into grief and destruction

I would have been happy just to have your children keep me company

Without the grueling test of war

Was it my mistake to bring you up in a land of battle

I sometimes wonder if our lives might have turned out differently

Had we spent more time at sea

The ocean always used to calm you

Your eyes would settle into the middle distance

And your body would sigh and release into the open waters

As I watch the sun drain from the sky

and with it, my deepest regret

at your request I summoned a monster to rescue a God 

but could not save you Achilleus

my own human son 

from drowning in his savage desires

Photo credit: Tim Mossholder

A silhouette of a man crosses the street oblivious to the electric scooter which almost nails his coffin shut. He deftly lights a cigarette as he enters the south east entrance to the tree lined park.

He had considered coming from another direction but got lost in his thoughts as he scanned the darkening sky for electric currents and other signs.

As he pulls his third drag from the cigarette, he notices a tall waif of a blonde with inexplicable curves despite her slimness approaching. She is smiling at everyone she passes and is about to exit the park when he seizes his chance:

“Cigarette?”, he offers his velvet-lined silver cigarette holder outstretched like a charm.

“No thank you. I don’t smoke. In fact I can’t. Nowhere for the smoke to go!” she shoots a big radiant toothy smile as though charmed by her own answer. He notices her lips are perfectly painted a pale shade of pink. The same shade of pink as the rubber dishwashing gloves his wife insists on wearing after he’s finished dinner and retired to his private study for a smoke and a cognac. He thinks better in the company of one.

“Nice weather, “ he ventures.

“Nice enough for a walk in the park although these shoes are killing me!” she lifts her right leg to the side which has the effect of yet again revealing the contradictory geometry of her curves embossed on a paper thin frame. He catches himself imagining alternative sequences as she beams a smile at him.

She looks him over quietly her eyes glimmering and sphinx-like. “You look like a doctor. You a doc?”

He takes another drag from his cigarette then looks down at his smoking hand and gives her a side wink, “Wouldn’t make me much of a good doctor now would it? I’m more of a science man.” And with that he allows his gaze the privilege of lingering over her tight dimensions.

“A lot of my work is hush-hush.” And with this he cups the side of his face with his free hand and leans into her imagining the smell of roses and geraniums but is immediately struck by the absence of any scent.

“Ah, you’re a man of secrets then. Well, I guess we all have our secrets although I prefer the simplicity of an honest exchange. I prefer to know what’s inside the box when I am buying something at the store.”

She smiles demurely then glances down at his hand. “Looks like you probably have dinner waiting for you back at home.” He follows her eyes and notices the silver band winking in the straining sunlight. During their brief exchange the grey clouds have now rolled in. “And I should probably get back myself. Enjoy the rest of your stroll!”

And with that she seems to magically swivel on her high glass tower heels and floats away like an animated birth of Venus. He wonders if his Kitty will be serving her chicken stroganoff. He’s famished.

Photo Credit: Miriam Espacio

As a futurist I’ve been weaned on a steady diet of trend spotting and gradually watching cultural patterns emerge. I began this journey working at a global engineering company in 2006 and even back then we grappled with climate change and resource depletion as major challenges which would impact our way of life. And while I’ve been engaged in this process of imagining what our future could be, I’ve always kept a peripheral view on the environmental and societal calamities we might eventually face.

For a while, even after Covid, I envisioned that 2030 was the global deadline we had been appointed by the UN (with the creation of the SDGs) before our world began to face dystopian realities and decisions. But a few weeks ago when the Canadian wildfires turned the skies of New York a burnt sienna within weeks of Phoenix announcing a stop to residential construction due to water shortages, and two prominent insurance companies declaring that they would halt insuring homes in the fire prone state of California the future suddenly seemed uncomfortably close.

2030 isn’t a magical year when catastrophes will plummet from the sky like the aliens in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. It represents an inflection point and a reality check for how much worse things will get if we don’t begin to accept the inconvenient truths we face in a climate devastated planet. In other words, this isn't a bad dream or a sci-fi movie. This is the world we are constructing with every choice we make.

Increasingly, I feel like there are two major forces at play in the chapter we are living. There are the entities and individuals committed to removing the rose colored glasses and salvaging our environment and the unraveling fabric of society. And then there are those who pray at the altar of capitalism and seem either oblivious or dismissive of the challenges we’re facing. The Said Business School at the University of Oxford just shared the International Sustainability Standards Board launch of its first two standards which marks a huge step forward in corporate sustainability reporting. The move comes from a recognition by the business school and other scholars that ‘because of its speed and scale, business is critical to delivering actions required to make our future industries and economies more stable, regenerative, and robust than what we see today'.’ (Mary Johnstone-Louis, Senior Fellow in Management Practice).

I find myself a little perplexed by the latter economic free wheeling group which seeks to retreat from the current predicament we are living and seeks shelter under the pretense of innovation by distracting us with swishy promises of life on Mars or AI endangered futures (depending on who you ask). At a time of real existing threats why would you as a leader feel compelled and emboldened to create more uncertainty and additional threats? With the proliferation of extreme weather events, volatility of agriculture and supply chains, public health epidemics and mental health crises, why wouldn’t you look to apply the speed and scale of your business to develop solutions to these critical problems, and to deliver value at scale to society and the environment? The refusal to step up and do so is both a denial and abdication of responsibility. And while these threats may seem inconvenient for future growth, it doesn’t make them any less real.

The NY Times Sunday Opinion section this past weekend invited 17 of their columnists to pick a piece of culture that best captures the country’s problem and promise. It is interesting to note that there are equal amounts of analysis dedicated to the belief in the ingenuity of the American spirit alongside the perils of its unbridled naive idealism and unchecked material aspirations. I have noted before that for far too long we have revered capitalistic cowboys selling us unrealistic visions of our material futures. It is now time that we heed the words of those alerting us to the dangers of abdicating responsibilities. Otherwise, counter to popular belief I’m afraid there won’t be any more second chances.

Photo Credit: Tonik

Reflect upon this simple, statement
He who is of two needs, and easy to serve
Swiftly finds peace, and is already close to happiness
The more complicated we make ourselves
The more complicated is our idea of ourselves
The more we will perceive our needs to be
The more of a burden we will be to this planet
Whilst we spend our time here pursuing those needs
The truth is, the only real needs are food, shelter and companionship
And everything else is a bonus
One who is content with food, shelter and companionship
Treads lightly on this world and swiftly gets to the point where they have something to give back
But one who is not content with that
Who feels they need an extraordinarily elaborate array of things in their lives to feel their life is meaningful
Makes an awful ruckus in their time upon this planet
Somebody asked me
Do we all have inside of us, that pure part, that pure consciousness?
And the answer is yes,

Exit by Mt Wolf

Early on in Episodes 2 and 3 during Season 3 of Succession (yes, I was late to the viewing party) as Kendall declares war on his father Logan (spoiler alert), the family members begin to question the loyalties of their siblings but also cast some doubt on their own inner stirrings. From his shadowy exile in Bosnia the patriarch, Logan, begins to grumble and demand to know the physical and mental whereabouts of his children. One by one, you see each one of the children ask each other, how’s your headspace? The question’s objective is less about understanding each other’s emotional landscapes and more about establishing their positions on the shifting chess board. With Kendall’s escalation taut loyalties seem to loosen their hold, and we are left to wonder who will survive the inter-family battle, and in the end who will shift alliances.

Like many others I am a fan of the series’ excellent writing and acting. And I am also intrigued by the timeline of the four seasons. Succession began in 2018 pre-dating the global pandemic. Filming for Season 3 was originally planned for April 2020 but Covid had its own plans and postponed actual filming until mid-November 2020. At this point we were all engaged in an invisible war with tragic consequences for many families. Many of us were genuinely concerned for young and old family members. In my own family we kicked off a weekly Friday family Zoom ritual that continued for the entirety of the pandemic and has only recently begun to reach its natural conclusion. Those Friday Zooms were our own extended version of, how’s your headspace?

This question has taken on more significant proportions with recent studies examining the impacts of social media on the mental health of our teens, and assessments of our children’s delayed learning as a result of Covid. And in the last few weeks, the US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness and social isolation a national emergency and laid out his framework for a “National Strategy to Advance Social Connection.” And while many of us haven’t yet had the time to process the compounding effects and impacts of these realities throw in Sam Altman’s recent appearance before Congress where he admitted to the elder statesmen that AI technology did indeed have the potential to go horribly wrong, so please regulate us. (Could we ever imagine elder media mogul Logan Roy requesting regulation of his empire?)

I don’t know where to begin with this latest declaration, but it seems like a very horrible way to launch a new technology, product, service. What would Congress have done if tobacco producers had appeared before them and declared, tobacco could be potentially be horribly bad for the health of its users. The optimist in me would like to believe that our political representatives would exercise their sound judgment and would have asked said tobacco producers to rethink their business. Altman went beyond saying that AI has the potential to go wrong and stain your fingers with nicotine, he went a step further stating that regulation was needed to prevent AI creators from causing “significant harm to the world.” Altman was joined by two other AI experts, professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University Gary Marcus and IBM Chief Privacy & Trust Officer Christina Montgomery who also asked, pretty please, for regulation. His mate Gary Marcus told Congress, “We have built machines that are like bulls in a china shop: Powerful, reckless, and difficult to control.” Not exactly a confidence boosting endorsement in my books.

All this to say, I am confounded as to why:

1. Congress would not be deeply alarmed to have the CEO of one of the leading AI platforms, Open AI, tell them to their faces that the technology he is selling has the potential to cause significant harm to the world.

2. Individuals and CEOs like Sam Altman think it’s permissible to introduce new powerful, reckless, difficult to control technologies which could cause significant harm to the world.

3. We, the end users, don’t more actively question and object to tech CEOs and Congress members exposing us to products which can cause significant harm to the world.

So, how’s your head space? In my books we, as the end users and the adults in the room, need to start objecting to being subjected to new technologies which are focused on generating profits for its shareholders, and willing to do so at any cost, even if it means willfully decimating the mental health and wellbeing of its end users. I don’t believe many of us pressed subscribe to these new business models or committed to being participants in endless arrays of digital ecosystems which are developed and launched to ensnare us and extract as much share of our wallets. Many of us, to quote Mt Wolf, are content to have food, shelter, and companionship. Everything else, is a bonus.