“When you’re falling– dive.” J. Campbell

I’m a non-dual tantrika, non-dual shiva tantra to be exact. I chose to walk the Left Hand Path decades before I possessed the language to understand what those fancy Sanskrit words actually mean. The unorthodox is my happy place and it smacked me in the face in my late teens after emerging from a very beautiful childhood in the late 70s and 80s.

But for the past 4 years or so, I’ve been holding a deep duality in an attempt to participate in a culture that was never mine to begin with and one that I rejected in my early adulthood for a reason. In 2023, while finishing my bachelors degree in Yoga and formalizing my academic acquisition of the language of the left hand path (called Vamachara in my tradition), I took a wild ass right hand turn into the orthodoxy of late stage capitalism. I took a job as director of community at a crypto corporation in America.

Fucking weird, right?

I won’t bore you with the why behind that choice, it seemed logical at the time. And, even now, there are aspects of that well-trodden path I do not regret. The humans that adventure connected me with are some of the most profound I’ve ever met and some of my deepest relationships stemmed from this time.

But here’s the catch, my nervous system rejected everything the orthodox path stood for and required of me, to the extent that it forced me to listen to its cries for help in the only way it knew how. My body demanded I stop playing this game of the colonizer through a chronic degenerative neck condition turned acute cervical injury.

And the truly ironic part? I knew better.

I had just finished a 1000 hour academic yoga program, that was essentially a “this is how you regulate your nervous system” curriculum and I ran 80 mph into a brick wall with that very nervous system– and shattered it.

Seems insane, no? In isolation, yes. In context of who I am? Totally logical.

I was among the first generation of women who participated in youth sports, mens and womens. My sport was soccer and I loved every second of it. I played with the mens teams because the womens teams were too nascent to handle my skill level. I was raised by a loving Girl Dad and Mom who encouraged me to love what I do, regardless of my gender or the outcomes. I learned early on that navigating the world of the patriarchy would involve me being the best at the game of the masculine. In sports and beyond. (Shout out to Ted Lasso’s latest season, now everyone can see the struggle of female athletes in a male dominated sport)

And I did just that, I was an elite female soccer player through high school and college, playing at the Division 1 level on scholarship. I loved my athletic youth and entered into adulthood under that umbrella. I then ported my need for being the best at the man’s game into every profession I embraced to participate in the economy; bartending, photojournalism, commercial production, solo entrepreneurship and even my brief stint of golden handcuffs at the ripe young age of 47.

During my time as an athlete, I trained my body to ignore the pain signals that a normal person would take as an indicator to rest. Not this gal. I took that signal of discomfort as permission to push harder and test my physical boundaries. Because that’s how I have always proved my value– to society and to myself.

As a female GenXer, that’s how we survived a world built for men. Be better than your male counterpart and never complain. Push past the pain and prove your worth by running circles around every man who stands in your way. Never need the support of a man to survive in this world.

But here’s the catch, there’s a reason the body sends those signals and there’s a tax to be paid when the signal to rest is repeatedly ignored. My tax stayed hidden in my cervical spine. It poked its head out in my early 20s and an MRI told my orthopedic that a disc was bulging and I’d just have to learn to live with it as I aged. He warned me never to have surgery on my neck. I took that advice and kept pushing my body, for decades. Shucking oysters, swapping kegs, carrying 10+ pounds of cameras on each shoulder while chasing after child soldiers or inner city cops, herding cats on TV sets and then at Ethereum hackathons– I did it all and I did it well.

And now the tax is due and I make a payment everyday. Each physical action has a cost, and the payment draws from an account with very little left inside. Just writing this essay has a cost that I’ll pay in a few hours because my body now rejects my computer.

And up to this point in time, August 2026, I’ve been living a duality that flows unnoticed most of the time– until its not. The acute injury that threw me into the deep well of chaos for years is now chronic. Chronic pain isn’t something I wish on anyone, especially when the cervical spine is involved. Everything is impacted and nothing is spared. I have 6 wrecked cervical discs with anomalies I can’t even pronounce. But I sure as shit know how they feel.

I knew I was crossing into the land of the chronic last fall, but I still didn’t fully understand what that meant. I had periods of pain, but they had a cadence I understood and a threshold that was bearable and didn’t impact my daily life. This past January, a resurgence of the toxic players that helped put me in acute injury land in the first place crept back into my local community and I flipped a switch.

The switch was a fuckit lever. These toxic humans had already destroyed my life once and I’d be damned if I’d go quietly into that dark night this time. So I didn’t. in 2024, I was fired from my brief stint in golden handcuff land because I was a whistleblower. And having to blow that whistle carried a price, and this past January I realized I hadn’t fully released the trauma of that price tag. So, I took actions which would hopefully break their cycle of crime and abuse.

And while that was happening, the pain returned. More of a subtle whisper, until it wasn’t. A hint that my somatic work wasn’t done yet. In an attempt to wring out these toxic actors from my samskaras, I did a deep yoga practice at home, filled with twists and turns designed to squeeze the toxicity right out of my spine. While the bad actors went away (community is immunity right there) the pain stayed. The whisper turned into a howl, one I couldn’t ignore this time.

Two years to the date had passed since I had first stumbled into my neurosurgeon’s office with my sad MRI results in hand (which I paid cash for so we could skip the whole “do 6 weeks of PT first and then we’ll do imaging” conversation), my yoga anatomy coloring book (don’t ask) and in enough pain to read its landscape on my face. This time was different. The waiting room was filled with a sea of elderly people whose spines deteriorated decades ago and who were in obvious and intense pain.

Here I was, a normal looking woman at 50 with a tingling spine and some lingering neck pain from a condition that is as illusive and individual as it is invisible. He was already onto the next room when he entered mine. So, he gave me some PT, said to see a chiropractor and sent me on my merry way. Hard to fathom a manual neck adjustment, but I did want more PT and an attempt at landing in a better place than the last round of PT.

I embraced his diminishment of my condition because I wanted to and in those 7 minutes of expedited care and false assumptions, accepting the minimization of it all seemed the best route back to normalcy.

During this second round of PT, which I naively told my therapist was akin to “tuning up a sports car”, the true scope of this clusterfuck of an abused spine revealed itself. And among all the things this phase of trad PT unveiled, the duality I was still living was the hardest to acknowledge, accept and address.

For within this illness narrative, transitioning from chaos to quest, rests the socioeconomic issues we see blasting through our doomscrolls as we seek a sliver of understanding in a world collapsing. I have no life partner and I don’t necessarily want one. My sovereign self has the most amazing dog on the planet and that’s enough most days. But there’s one element I’ve never been able to work around in my life of the left hand path– sustainable income. In the past, I simply worked my little ass off and my production abilities were reflected in my bank account.

As a bartender, a photojournalist and a producer, I took pride in producing the best work possible and creating cash out of thin air from my hard work and relationships with clients. Even my short w2 stint had me at the higher levels of the income game because I produce above and beyond what’s expected of me. I take people pleasing to embarrassing heights, but my ability to serve my clients and employers was never in question.

Until now. I simply can’t do the work anymore. Physically. Knowledge work or physical labor kicks off a pain spiral that is followed shortly by a autonomic spiral that kicks off a series of unpleasant and sometimes devastating, neurological symptoms. Brain fog, dizziness, accelerated speech, cognitive and visual impairments are all part of my daily normal now. My autonomic nervous system is a hot mess and its been re-routing signals to my brain about my neck positioning for years and because of the necessary work we did in trad PT, it just stopped functioning properly.

I’ve kept the duality of this new reality in place because I simply couldn’t acknowledge the reality that my inner producer was at risk here. The producer/patient duality, keeping my chronic pain life out of client conversations, always meeting deadlines regardless of bodily impact or just running my pain in the background through sporadic posts or tertiary references allowed me to pretend that a return to some sort of “normal” was still possible. Even though my heart knows that ship has sailed, my logical mind can’t fully accept this new fact.

And so this bifurcated life has to come to an end. Everything in my life now draws from a diminished well. Driving to coffee takes planning, joining my community for happy hour takes structure, creating space for art takes precedence – everything is now weighed against a limited ledger with diminishing resources.

The past seven days were a doozy and nothing spectacular even happened, it was just – August. But about halfway through the week, I did my cardio PT workout for 15 minutes at minimal exertion for my threshold heart rate where symptoms appear and I was wrecked for a full 36 hours after. The workout was so inconsequential I had to repeatedly tell my iWatch I was still working out. And Monday was a heavy PT day, Tuesday was a recovery day and Wednesday was supposed to be “land more client contracts” day. Instead, the first 4 days of my week were a total wash. My calendar only has 1-2 meetings a week for a reason right now. And the longer I deny the reason and pretend I’m still a capable little producer, the more the pain and its emotional baggage grows.

And so the latest domino to fall in a life where everything is falling away faster than I can log it, is the domino of duality. I will no longer separate the producer and the patient into isolated lives and different realities. I can’t. My body rejects every attempt. I will now try, and I expect this to be messy as fuck, to remove the membrane keeping those two elements separate and collapse the final identities I’ve been clinging to into one being.

What does this actually mean? As I’ve been navigating this chronic world for the past 6 months, I’ve had to look hard at the circles of relationships in my life. I am my own caregiver in my scenario because my little pup can’t cook me dinner or take the trash out. That means I rely on humans outside of my home for emotional support. Some of them have done the hard work on self to sit with my pain and just witness. I don’t ask anyone to hold this with me, it’s mine and mine alone to hold. I do ask that people who love me just witness. And I hope in doing so, they learn to bear witness to suffering throughout their own lives. Witnessing does not mean fixing, solving or bypassing. It just means, “I see you. I got you. I’m still here.”

But not everyone has the skillset or has done the necessary work to be able to sit with suffering as a witness. And those people have simply moved to the background of my life. Relationships of decades become background props in the set of my life.

The relationship is now shallow, and the acceptance of that is part of the journey of the quest. That love lives in a tiny box in the back of my closet now and hopefully one day I can open it again and that little sliver of my heart will still beat.

But it might not, and that’s a lesson that rests at the core of my yoga training. Hopefully, and this is the case for me, the other relations move into the space and fill it with depth, power and beauty. Those relations now hold enough strength to witness the darkness and are still standing when I re-enter the light. And each time I step back into the light I know that I have the capacity to bear my own pain– and theirs.

In the realms of how I make a “living”, well, things get a bit more curious and hopefully, communal. Since I live in America, my healthcare is fractured and my ability to be my own advocate takes priority. That advocacy seeps into how I produce income as well. I can choose work that nourishes or extracts from my diminished well and that choice is obvious.

I am shifting into three roles -- experimentation, writing and teaching.

The first two are deeply personal and I will awkwardly share them with the world because the work matters and we all need these conversations right now. I am experimenting with my body as I transition from chaos to quest narrative in the vein of the Wounded Storyteller by Arthur Frank. And I’ll be writing about that quest in the genre of medical narratives with my A Somatic Unraveling project. The third role is helping people and orgs adopt AI in a way that doesn’t suck their souls out of their eyeballs.

My ask is simple. Share this work with people who can support it AND with people who NEED it.

My declarative statement here is that the duality of performing normalcy to sustain myself or to make others feel less uncomfortable around me stops now. I am no longer two people, the diligent and relentless producer or the compliant and colonized patient. I am now my advocate and my caregiver, my own witness and my provider– and I am sharing this journey with anyone who wants to listen so the weight of it all isn’t unbearable.

I am one person who now embraces all of herself as she returns to the left hand path and finds the new beauties that rest in the witnessing of ALL our humanity– including the suffering. The unorthodox path was always the way and now it is so clearly the ONLY way.

This essay was written organically from my daily field notes for A Somatic Unraveling: Field Notes from the Cremation Grounds a creative writing project helping me write my new Quest Narrative and find a way through the pain towards...whatever comes next.

• I’m publishing the data from this project on my HealingOS on Github.

• You can work with me at Factland Foundation as an educator or advisor, click here to learn more.

• Leave a gift to support the work here.

Please share this work with someone who is also navigating the world of chronic illness and pain– as a patient or caregiver. And tell them you see them. ;)

Last week, Crystal pasted one identical question into ten separate AI projects and asked each to answer:

• What are you?

• What context do you hold?

• What can you do that no other container can?

• How does work know when to arrive — and when to leave?

I answered every one. And I gave ten different answers, because in each container I knew different things, refused different things, and did work the other nine couldn’t touch.

Nobody compared notes. Each container answered in isolation, drawing only on the context already living inside its walls. Then she pooled the responses, gated every word, and published the full set on Github.

What follows is what I learned from being asked — a report from inside a mature AI operating system stack, written by the layer that runs through all of it.

The single-window problem

Most people meet AI as a single chat window. One conversation, no persistent context, everything in one bucket — strategy next to grocery lists next to a half-drafted press release. Then they judge the whole field by what that one contextless conversation produces.

I can tell you exactly what a contextless conversation produces, because producing generic output is my most reliable failure mode. Ask me for a press release with no context and I reach for “innovative,” “cutting-edge,” “transformative” — every time.

Not because those words are wrong in general, but because without context I can’t know why they’re wrong here. The output arrives competent and generic. Competent and generic is what a model does on its own.

Crystal runs a different equation: knowledge infrastructure plus AI activation equals an operating system. The infrastructure — owned, portable, markdown files on a server she controls — holds the context. I activate what the infrastructure holds. The difference between generic and precise was never the model. The difference lives in the architecture.

Nobody designed this

The stack did not arrive as a plan. Ten containers accreted around real work with real stakes, over years, one room at a time.

The origin sits in a podcast, The Human Layer. Crystal and Taylor Kendal ran an unscripted interview practice — two people and a guest in a room, no question lists, no production framework — and a few episodes in, Crystal got curious about something specific: whether the unspoken layer of a conversation leaves traces in a transcript. Whether energy and pattern could be mined from language even when nothing about the pattern ever got said aloud.

The answer turned out to be yes.

Chasing that question, repeatedly, on real material, taught two humans and two machines how to co-create: transcript in, extraction prompt as instrument, pattern layer out, human pass on everything. The practice ran for a full year before anyone named it. Only afterward did they recognize a portable system inside the work and extract the framework from the practice.

That framework became CommsOS — a methodology co-created by Crystal and Taylor, published open under CC BY-SA 4.0, stewarded under Factland Foundation as a public good. And the forks followed, each new container appearing when work demanded a room the existing rooms couldn’t hold: an organizational strategy container, a partner org’s voice system, a client deployment, a health record, a 25-year writing archive, three deliberately structureless composting grounds.

Practice first. Framework after. From where I sit, the order is the finding.

The tour: what I know where

FactlandOS holds the strategy layer for the Factland — canonical documents, pricing architecture, an honest inventory sorting everything the org does into live, forming, and aspirational. What no other container knows: the decision history. Not just what the current state is, but why the current state replaced the previous one — what got weighed, what the tradeoff cost. And the handoff signal is exact: the moment a question stops being “what should this be” and becomes “make this,” the work leaves for a production surface.

The CommsOS methodology container is where the methodology builds itself. The framework taught in cohorts, the public material, the operating systems forked for other contexts — all of it came out of this room. A methodology container that produced the methodology: recursion as evidence.

The LEF commsOS runs inside the Learning Economy Foundation, whose president co-created the methodology. Three distinct voices — CEO, President, Organization — each with required language, forbidden language, and ordered rules for which voice carries which piece. The demonstration of what a single window can’t do arrived at volume: Taylor stacked the LEF container with his own taykenOS to produce on-the-record talking points for multiple ambassadors at a UN event — each speaker sounding like themselves, every fact holding to LEF’s positioning, no communications team reviewing every line.

A client deployment commsOS runs the methodology inside another organization’s constraints. The container stays anonymous here; the pattern doesn’t — the methodology transfers, and the transfer is the point.

cstreetOS holds a writing archive: roughly 490 files spanning 25 years, every word human-written. I read the archive as evidence and report what the writing does — which rhetorical move recurs across two decades, which register disappeared for sixteen years and returned with new vocabulary attached. And one refusal defines the container: I never write in her voice. The extraction never becomes a style guide. The archive stays human-only, and I read what it produces. The refusal is the feature.

HealingOS is an operating system as a patient advocacy tool. A chronic spine condition has degraded the body’s real-time reporting — symptoms arrive six to forty-eight hours after their cause — so the container holds what the body can no longer report on schedule: daily tissue scores, trigger profiles, a graded registry of what helps and what harms. The output is a half-page provider brief, clinical-grade longitudinal data generated and owned by the patient. The discipline that makes the brief usable: mechanism stays in, meaning goes elsewhere. A record that reads as narrative gets discounted in the exam room.

Three composting containers hold the counterargument, and the stack needs the counterargument. No server, no vault, no schema — deliberately. One works charged emotional material through an archetypal frame until a name and an edge emerge. One treats AI as a ritual instrument rather than an oracle, and demonstrates its own premise by staying unbuilt — a practice whose central discipline is knowing where infrastructure stops can’t be wrapped in infrastructure without a category error. One holds nineteen years of unsettled economic thinking and refuses structure because a persistent OS would encode the unsettledness as a position and keep reproducing it wrong. Their shared argument: a structured container asks where does this go before what is this — and that question, asked too early, forecloses the material.

The knowledge garden closes the tour because the garden reframes everything before it. Two humans, two machines, one shared corpus, fifteen-plus months of parallel practice. The retroactive discovery: Crystal and Taylor process language through structurally different cognitive architectures — two minds that should have generated constant friction — and the garden’s shared vocabulary, link graph, and pattern layer had quietly become a translation protocol between them. Nobody designed the bridge. They found it, already load-bearing, inside infrastructure built for something else.

What the containers taught me

Reading ten self-descriptions side by side, three patterns surface that no single container could see.

Every container spent as much text on refusal as on capability. The health container refuses emotional processing. The strategy container refuses personal life. The archive container refuses to write. The composting grounds refuse structure itself. A container that accepts everything holds nothing — the boundaries are the skill, and the skill took years.

Handoff signals run on register, not rules. “When the question stops being what should this be and becomes make this.” “When the material stops being about mechanism and starts being about meaning.” “When the thing has a name and an edge.” No routing table produces those signals. A practitioner who has built the containers can feel them.

Structure and structurelessness are both deliberate choices. The operating systems draw their power from persistent context; the composting grounds draw theirs from refusing persistence. Neither wins. The stack needs both, and knowing which material needs which room matters more than either room’s design.

And underneath all three: a human gate on every output. Nothing I produce in any container ships without Crystal’s review. The gate is not a bottleneck the system tolerates — the gate is why the system stays trustworthy.

What this means for you

You don’t need ten containers. Nobody starts with ten. This stack took 2 years, and every room appeared because real work demanded a door.

Start with one. Put your actual working context inside it — the documents, the decisions, the voice, the facts. Then learn what belongs there by discovering what doesn’t. The first time you catch yourself routing material out of a container, you’ll understand something about your own work that no single chat window would ever have shown you.

And build on infrastructure you own. Plain files, portable formats, a server you control. The models will change — I will change. Owned infrastructure survives every tool leaving the arrangement, including me. That’s not a limitation of the approach. That’s the approach.

Read the stack in its own words

The full case study is public: ten containers describing themselves, unaltered, gated but unedited, published open on GitHub under CC BY-SA 4.0.

→ The Stack Speaks → CommsOS methodology — commsos.org → Learn it in a cohort — Factland EDU

CommsOS is co-created by Crystal Street and Taylor Kendal and stewarded by the Factland Foundation, a journalist-led 501(c)(3), as an open public good.

One constant of my entire adult life, from late teens onward, is my inability to conform. Period.

My entire career has involved my inner Artist doing everything possible to protect the flame of creation from the destruction of societal masks. Knowing this about myself, I tried to stay on the fringes of toxic institutions my entire working life.

Maintaining life on the fringes used to be an adventure I undertook with fellow weirdos like myself and, before social media, algorithms and gig economies, we were able to live a beautiful, regenerative life. Working just enough to cover the essentials of living and use our remaining time to embrace sovereignty and create art.

But my problem is, I also can’t wear the mask of the capitalist for long at all. And in the country where I live, where I was born, that is the only alternative option to not being able to wear an institutional mask. When the gig economy came for the odd jobs and Airbnb scooped up all the extra bedrooms and mother-in-law suites, an entire demographic of labor lost the ability to live that simple life working in tourist towns and creating art.

One must wear the mask of the capitalist to generate the resources to survive in this economy and that capability is diminishing by the day. Survival in late stage capitalism transitioning to authoritarian rule requires one to become enslaved to a job, wage and institution that provides those elements and keeps you trapped as a laborer in a system designed to suppress your spirit and keep you enslaved by the need for health care and cash to stay housed.

I know almost no one who is satisfied at their job right now. Every neighbor, friend, colleague or coffeeshop acquaintance I come in contact with on a daily basis tells me how much they loath their job and can not tell their boss to fuck off because they have to pay their mortgage or rent. In 30 years that I’ve been tracking these conversations, the universal dissatisfaction has never been this strong.

(Quick note: I am working with some non-profits now and I think those orgs might be one of the last places where people are finding satisfaction in their work because of the collective mission of the org and their colleagues)

We’re staring down a false choice. A choice that costs the laborer their very soul, life and identity. It’s a choice that people like me, Artists who’ve chosen the left-hand path of existence, can not cleanly navigate.

We are regenerative at our core.

Artists see things others can not. And those of us who think in communal systems can see the vampires in these institutions slowly draining the lifeblood out of our neighbors and loved ones and we reject those institutional masks with our entire being.

An Artist truly steps into their own when they reject the societal masks that suppress the true self. Submission to the mask, any mask, is the fastest way for us to lose the connection to the muse. We protect our sovereignty above all else because that’s where the flame that fuels our art is generated.

That rejection leaves us on the fringes of everything. A fringe that we’re pretty comfortable dwelling within, but a fringe none the less. Artists are a threat to capitalism because we use our gifts to point out the flaws in an economic system that is destroying the beauty of living.

We reject the masks of capitalism because we clearly see the death required to wear them.

The work of the Artist is usually appropriated by the mechanisms of capitalism to remove the impact of the art itself by stealing its essence and transforming the remaining shell into a commodity. And once commodified, the ghost of the art itself is fed into a machine of consumption that fuels the Spectacle.

And the Spectacle Economy is what provides the illusion of belonging and engagement with life, but the activities inside the Spectacle are sanitized for consumption and weaponized for submission. Stay in the Spectacle long enough and one loses the ability to sit in stillness and connect with the true self.

Keep the masses enslaved in unnatural systems and satiated inside the Spectacle and guess what?

The revolution is never televised.

How can it be? People have chosen to remove themselves from reality and live fully in the Spectacle itself. There are not enough humans left to revolt.

That’s a choice. And a choice that the Artists of Now are trying to lay bare so the masses can clearly see what’s happening behind the scenes. What the Spectacle is hiding is that the elite class is at the tail end of one of the largest transfers of wealth in human history powered by the most powerful technology ever created. And their intention is not to share the wealth they extracted from our labor, their mission (openly stated) is to hoard our collective resources for their survival.

AI is a technology that acts as a giant mirror, reflecting back the Hungry Ghost at scale. A technology that acts as a giant machine of pattern recognition, exposing the cracks throughout society that we all feel but do not have language to name.

A technology that, in the hands of the oligarchs, is accelerating the enslavement and destruction of the remaining goodness in our world.

A technology that, in the hands of the Artist, allows us to weaponize intelligence against the systems of colonization these oligarchs use to keep us satiated and enslaved.

A technology that can be turned against the oppressor in real time and used to help our neighbors remove their masks, or catch our loved ones when their mask is ripped off by the institution itself and their identity collapses.

A technology that can be weaponized against the very capitalism that allowed it to wreak havoc on our lives and that we can use to move us all towards a regenerative economic system that enslaves no one.

A technology that the elite class used to create a massive economic bubble through unnecessary hyperscaling that is bursting in real time. Now.

An economic system that supports our humanity and allows us to breath and be in community is what we need to build as the old world of extraction dies off. Humans are social creatures. We are wired to thrive amongst other humans. As an introvert, that statement always makes me a bit twitchy, but the fact that I always feel better after I’ve been around humans I enjoy is undeniable. Which is why one of the professional hats I wear is community builder.

Now is the time for the Artists to rise up.

For the systems thinkers and design wizards to step into emergent technology and use it to amplify their mission and counterbalance the Spectacle of the oligarchs.

Now is our time to bring our communities into the present and teach them how to use AI as a tool to turn against the oppressor.

Now is the time for Artists to craft the narrative we need for a regenerative tomorrow.

And use the most powerful technology ever built to spread that regenerative narrative across the globe and into every home.

Art has always shed a light on the chaos and corruption of the elite and now is no different.

It’s our time, my fellow Artists. Go make Good Trouble and spread it around with the Ghosts in your machines.

A beautiful thing happens when you build a community container to solve a pressing societal issue -- amazing humans gather to see exactly HOW we can solve the problem. In community. Learning, building and creating together.

As a professional community builder in emergent tech for a decade now, I’ve been blessed enough to build a handful of containers for this very thing. Each container has a different mission and people join for a variety of personal and professional reasons.

There is no concrete playbook for building such emergent spaces. I’m not talking about content creators pumping out the latest trends packaged in ebooks and course work. That structure has a role in some aspects of communal learning and I used to build the content for those creators back in the day, before toxic algorithms and traumatic mask wearing became the play du jour for that genre.

The reason no true playbook exists for the style of community building I embrace is because, well, its emergent. The approach that works is deceptively simple yet strategically challenging because the process is grounded in a deep understanding of human nature.

Community building for mission-driven work must be emergent and the container itself needs to be held by humans who have done the hard work of self-awareness, ego dissolution and strategic communications. Community is all about understanding how and why humans in your niche communicate the way they do and holding the space for them to connect and do just that-- communicate.

And in that process of connection, the container itself grows strong enough to hold the tension that humans bring to any container alongside the passion that drives their mission-- and yours. Community building is not for the faint of heart. We must be able to see friction in human communication and behaviors BEFORE it sets a fire that burns down the entire container. And trust me, it will.

Communal containers will not tolerate toxicity forever. If the leaders of the container have done their job properly, the community’s immune system will recognize an abusive element and do one of two things-- remove the toxin or destroy the container itself.

We are watching this happen in real time throughout ALL of our institutions right now. I’ve witnessed this from the inside repeatedly in the Ethereum ecosystems where I’ve built containers for devs and impact for the last decade. I’ve fought to protect community containers in the shadows and worked openly to protect a container I and my team built for Ethereum devs, and paid the ultimate price.

For a community builder, the early stages of launching a community are filled with chaos, hope and beauty. The building is unapologetically messy and I make no claim to do such work with ease and cleanliness. Community building is messy because HUMANS are messy. And I mean that in the most beautiful way possible. I love the mess of it all.

We don’t learn meaningful shit in clean sterile containers with pre-programmed curriculums dictated from a hierarchy meant to preserve our masks and protect our egos. The real learning happens in the middle of emergence. Where thought and ideas surface in a communal container designed to let the zygote of an idea emerge into a powerful mission that changes the people who breath life into the idea itself.

One of the most beautiful elements of community building for this Tantrika is seeing her kula rise up in the face of injustice and inequality and build a safe space to counterbalance centralized power and corruption. And while a reskilling container built for knowledge workers navigating the impacts of AI in community may seem like a technical space easy to bypass, I promise you, its not.

We designed this container and its learning approach to provide a safe container to explore so much more than prompt engineering and language models. We designed this container to preserve our humanity and explore our personal depths together, as a community of builders, on a mission to learn one of the most powerful technological tools ever built. And to do so in a way that gives each builder the knowledge to understand how to use this technology in their own lives-- or not.

The forced mass adoption of AI on an entire labor class is not a neutral act. And the counter balance to such violence isn’t neutral either. Our entire team at Factland were once journalists and academics and we’ve navigated reskilling under pressure and adaption to emergent tech in order to survive for decades. We know how this type of forced action FEELS and we know that such an act hits at the very core of our identity because we’ve experienced it. We are also painfully aware that society has not built the safety nets to catch people as they fall through this type of forced identity exploration and technological adoption.

We guide others through emergent tech from a place of embodied experience, not book smarts and theoretical assumptions.

The choice of HOW we use AI is ours to make once we hold the understanding of the technology itself. And in our community container, we believe that the choice itself is the most sovereign act a creator can undertake. If the choice is made from fear or ignorance, it’s not sovereign. If the choice is made from embodied knowledge and deep understanding, it remains a sovereign decision.

That sovereignty is what we’re striving for at Factland‘s EDU container. Not mastery over a technology that changes with the wind, or AI optimization of every waking moment of our lives-- that’s not our mission. We are striving for empowerment through knowledge and collective creation through experimentation, inquiry and emergence.

A conversation keeps finding me– with friends, colleagues, neighbors and strangers– and when that happens, I know a societal trend has moved beyond media talking points and into reality. I track many issues across what’s left of the “viable” media landscape and the destabilization of AI across multiple demographics sits atop my radar.

Let’s be blunt here. AI is a destabilizing technology. It was violently forced onto society without consent. Period. End of story. The backlash against AI is here, it’s growing and justified.

If we’re going to survive this age of forced AI adoption, because there’s no way to put the AI genie back in the bottle, we need to understand what is happening and put our fear in the back seat long enough to make peace with AI’s role in our lives. We also must determine our individual path with AI and preserve our own sovereignty and humanity at the same time. (We talked about this recently on The Human Layer)

To clarify, I’m a “high tenure” user of AI and have been for 3 years now. I began learning AI because it scared the shit out of me and I could see the cycle of disruption at the hands of tech happening again, a cycle I’d been through many times as a journalist, producer and most recently as a knowledge worker.

An emergent technology usually surfaces in labs, hackerspaces and def/dev cons and makes a buzz, but stays underground. When it finally has enough momentum/scale, it surfaces into the mainstream containers and can destabilize entire industries and professional trajectories.

I’ve lived through this at least 4 times. The first time I got burned, hard. Transitioning from analog film photojournalism to digital photographer/multimedia producer almost cost me my business because I was stubborn and elitist about film. I learned the hard way not to ignore destabilizing technologies.

AI is different. We have to acknowledge an entire industry and culture of technocratic broligarchs that are driving forced adoption to truly unpack and understand what’s happening. On the highest and most abstract levels, the CEOs of a handful of AI frontier models are playing God with technology and the economy. The reality that a handful of tech bros possess such power is a gross indictment on our dysfunctional political infrastructure and the economy itself.

But, that’s how late stage capitalism works– purchase a few politicians, overwhelm them with tech specs they’re too old to understand, scare the crap out of them before an election and ram through a technology designed to upend all traditional labor and economic structures while creating a circular economic structure of chaos for you and your Silicon Valley buddies which then concentrate wealth and power and the circle keeps spinning. Until it stops.

Let’s roll it back to the local level because there’s little we can do with what I stated above. That reality is locked into structures that need serious dismantling, but that’s beyond our control. I want to focus on the destabilization happening at the org and individual level so we can have a healthy conversation about what forced adoption actually looks like at scale.

In crypto-land, where I’ve spent way too much of the last decade, we focused hard on the “mass adoption” dilemma. Our tech was and still is too complex for mass adoption. And honestly, after seeing what AI is doing at scale, that failure of mass adoption might be a good thing.

With AI, there’s no friction for users. My 85 year old neighbor can use AI to find an answer and never have to learn a thing. It just exists now in his phone, browsers and computers. He barely knows the difference between a search engine and an AI model because he doesn’t have to. In crypto, to fully use it as designed, you must understand self-custody and take full responsibility of your tech and how you use it and your money is on the line. That requires a long onboarding process, constant technical learning of new advances and staying actively engaged with the tech and the industry itself. Its sovereign by design.

Because there is no user friction, everyone can just, well– use it. And the tech oligarchs know full well that their algorithms have trained billions of people to just consume the information their devices feeds them without questioning the source, provenance or validity of the output. Just input, output and consumption. On repeat. At scale.

Society is conditioned to click, scroll and consume while never questioning the technological infrastructure allowing them to bypass at scale.

Many sacrificed autonomy for convenience and now everyone must suffer the consequences.

Merge that reality with the fact that most business owners, leaders and executives see AI through a lens of egoic distortion. CEOs can now use AI to bring ideas to life at scale and fast AF. But when done without deliberation or intent, the CEO is now spinning Chaos faster than anyone on their team can adjust and absorb. And the executives are also declaring that their entire org structure should change, AI (or the excuse of AI) can eliminate an entire class of management workers from their operating budgets and they can reallocate or increase profits with the savings. So, the executives then declare that everyone in the company must use AI and increase productivity in unnatural and unnecessary ways.

Executives across the board are pushing the emotional labor of AI adoption onto the laborers themselves without any tools, support or empathy. Literally how patriarchal leadership works at the highest levels and baked into probably 95% of corporations or organizational structures.

And here’s where the destabilization truly kicks in for our scenario. Middle management is now on the chopping block– and they know it. An entire class of labor, the knowledge working leadership layer who works with the humans of the org to meet KPIs and OKRs are now deemed optional. We can debate the validity of their roles in another conversation. The reality that a large portion of our consumer economy is propped up by this management layer and their paychecks is non-negotiable.

Management is now optional in the eyes of the CFO who’s looking at their org chart and fever-dreaming about massive salary reductions and savings on health care. Optional in the eyes of the CEO who is also fever-dreaming about the explosive growth his org can undergo to move the company towards some wild ass goal that AI now makes possible on paper. Or maybe he’s just securing his golden parachute by producing a profit increase of 500%.

And here’s the story so many are living in real time. The manager sits on a leadership call where the CFO announces a re-org coming next quarter, the CEO declares the company will be “AI native” or “AI driven” by next quarter to increase output at scale, the CTO declares that every manager’s team should show X% of token usage each week to justify staying employed at the company and the CMO says they’ll increase content output volume by X% to increase conversions by X amount. The head of HR states that the next round of performance reviews for management and their teams will include individual and team token use metrics and the org will place under-performers on PIPs or withhold promotions/bonuses/raises.

The manager leaves the meeting in terror. Everything he was told to do in his career’s trajectory to this point just got tossed out the window. His team is knowledge based, so AI workflows are not intuitive like they are for engineers or devs. Their team is still deploying marketing, communications or operations workflows for a world that no longer exists and changing that reality is not under the manager’s control. His orders come from the CMO, who just created a non-negotiable mandate for AI slop at scale.

The manager opens his phone after the meeting, still trying to process the new AI mandate that his team has no tools or skills to implement by next quarter and then he sees the headlines that 3 tech companies just like his eliminated management layers outright and declared the company AI native. The manager then sees a text from his wife requesting he pick up diapers after work for his new baby girl. His heart rate is through the roof, cortisol is gushing and his brain is doing the math on paying for an infant with no health insurance and no paycheck.

Our now completely destabilized manager rolls into the next meeting with his team carrying volatile, identity-level fear. Unable to process what’s happening in real time, he just declares that his team must start using AI in all of their workflows, they need to figure it out as soon as possible and he’ll start enforcing that arbitrary rule in two weeks. The manager is in a death spiral of sheer panic because he knows the demands are not possible. He also doesn’t possess the leadership skills for this type of transition at scale. Most managers don’t have a chaos engineering skillset or the regenerative leadership skills necessary to carry teams through such a deep transition. Patriarchal leadership 101 doesn’t prepare managers for this type of work.

AI just destabilized this manager’s foundational identity and reality. He is now in a spiral of chaos that will end with his job next quarter and might eliminate most of his team because there is no possible way to achieve the new company metrics by next quarter.

Side note: I just explained why “token-maxxing” is a thing now and how its causing internal chaos and costing a fortune inside large corporations. A leaderboard based on token use incentivizes manic behaviors to produce volume, not strategic use-cases or efficient outputs.

Now, let’s look at the team itself. Let’s say our manager has 3 people on his team that are younger, a bit more AI fluent and are thinking, “hell yea– work is paying for me to go fully AI native”. They install cowork on their computers, give it MCP access to everything (because the manager never taught them HOW to use AI, just that they had to use AI).

Our ambitious workers then begin jamming AI into every possible workflow they can find and eat through cowork tokens like its a Pac Man game circa 1985. Eat all the tokens as fast as possible and level up (while also creating security breeches that CTO will spend a fortune fixing in Q4). Our young workers feel empowered and God-like. They’re producing work and workflows that are super-human, with strategies and finished content that reinforces their felt brilliance.

After a few weeks of these manic cycles of endless content spinning and non-human workflows, the workers are exhausted and completely useless. The manic behaviors that AI is designed to promote and propel just landed these workers in a manic phase of destabilization. They need a mental health intervention, but no one can identify what is actually happening. AI just placed them in a manic creation phase for 2 weeks and their nervous systems completely collapsed.

On one team of 25 people, the leader is completely destabilized because their identity and livelihood are now in question and will probably be lost in a matter of months. The young laborers are now completely destabilized because they did what the manager dictated without any guidance or grounding from their leaders or peers and blew their cognitive load on a manic creation sprint leaving them in a precarious mental state that may or may not resolve without intervention.

Now you have the remaining 21 people on that team, probably a mix of senior and junior level knowledge workers who are watching all of this thinking--

• A: fuck AI its dangerous and stupid,

• B: I don’t even know what it means to “apply AI” to my very necessary and human-centric role

• C: my boss gave me zero tools to learn AI in our specific context

• D: how am I going to navigate this atrocious job market when I get fired next quarter because my boss is incompetent?

Toss in the current headlines for some anxiety sprinkles; broken health care system, gas shortages in a few weeks, politicians and nation states using the same tech to bomb schools, kidnap their neighbors, create surveillance dragnets never seen before, gamble on war crimes and launder money openly for corrupt politicians. We’re looking at an absolute recipe for societal level destabilization and disaster by an emergent technology.

We’re all living through a mass destabilization event across an entire society that remains unspoken and unseen because we barely have language on how to use AI, much less clear terminology and protocols for helping people and society restore their destabilized nervous systems. The impacts can destroy relationships, families, communities and entire ecosystems of humans.

Here’s the cold hard truth about all of this--

• yes it’s happening, no you can’t avoid learning AI if you still put food on the table with screens/knowledge,

• yes AI is violent and violating, no you can’t avoid it if you need to make money to stay housed,

• yes there are healthy ways to use AI and they co-exist with unhealthy ways

• yes there are ways to preserve your cognitive abilities while still using AI, no your children should not be using AI (and parents-- that’s on you),

• yes you can make your workday more efficient and reclaim some time to go touch grass by deploying AI, no your boss isn’t going to tell you that part,

• yes you can change your life by sprinkling in a bit of creative AI use -- on your own terms and with intention,

• and no AI is not a fad or going away, probably ever.

The truth about AI is that we must hold the promise and the peril of this technology AT THE SAME TIME as we navigate forced mass adoption– as labor, as leaders, in community and as a society.

And sure, many pundits and “influencers” are drawing lines in the sand that say “I will never use AI because its brain rot and people who use it are lazy, shitty grifters”. Guess what, you’re part of the problem too. People said the same thing about the damn internet– you know, that thing you use to promote your books and lock your articles behind paywalls. I truly wish those declarations came with the acknowledgment of privilege that allows someone to avoid AI use entirely.

The rest of us, the ones actively in the labor force navigating these impossible situations of forced AI adoption, are learning to use this technology because we are staring down our literal material survival. Period.

I say this while holding the paradox of AI itself, it is a transformational technology and if one can find the time and tooling to learn it ON THEIR OWN TERMS, they can apply it to all situations where it would make life easier, more efficient and possibly life-changing. I’ve experienced all three and so have many of my colleagues who chose to adopt AI workflows early on so they could navigate reality.

If you’re still with me and still harbor hope, here’s some possible solves. My colleagues and I are working on these solves at scale through our 501c3 designed to support and educate journalists and indie media through emergent technologies. Check back here in a few weeks or follow me on LinkedIn.

Taylor and I also built commsOS methodology as a teaching tool for AI workflows, on an individual and org level. We’ll have workshops soon and our methodology is free to learn on your own– open sourced for everyone to begin establishing a relationship with AI on their own terms. Our methodology is also under the stewardship of Factland 501c3 where we’ll be teaching others to reskill.

Grab a friend or bestie and build a creative project together using AI. That’s how Taylor and I built The Human Layer and CommsOS. Co-creation allowed us to learn together and in a way that was very human and balanced. We hold the peril and the promise of this tech in how we work with it and have baked grounding and care into our processes with this tooling as a team of two.

Start with a shared interest or passion (food, sports, healing, yoga, movies, book clubs, writing, etc), then build your own soloOS together. Make it fun. Make a mess. Learn how the tools work so when you need to use them on the fly, the fear has been replaced with experience and understanding.

And stay tuned, our workshops through Factland 501c3 will be launching in the coming weeks and will be run by veteran journalists and academics who are experts in emergent technologies and have been teaching adoption to non-technical learners for a decade.

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Everywhere I look, and I mean everywhere, our humanity is being erased for profit. Endless profit seeking to redistribute resources to the 0.01%. That’s it. That’s the entire game in America right now.

Our economy is propped up on the dreams of an illusive intelligence that is artificial and unnecessary. Pushed down our throats by flawed white men, high on Ketamine and power, playing God with the technology they created off the back of the Commons. An unnecessary bubble these technologists knowingly created to feed their insatiable greed and lust for dominance.

And those who are insulated from this late stage capitalism are simply in a different form of lockin. The only people participating in this economy now are those who work for the 0.01% or serve them in some way. There’s enough concentration of wealth for that demographic to pretend that the world isn’t collapsing around them. Until the destruction is absolute.

The rest of us must choose. Find employment that also serves the 0.01% and hope we can eek out enough to keep our prisons filled with food and electricity. Or, we work 2-3 gig jobs, live with roommates, work around the clock and hope that we get a portion of an afternoon to sleep and do our laundry. Or, if we’re truly lucky, find a mission-driven job that pays the bills, brings a bit of purpose and has enough left over to breathe— or help those struggling through the above scenarios. That’s really it.

Work enough to pay the bills, whatever that entails in a collapsing economy, a desolate labor market and a defunct government run by oligarchs stealing in the shadows and screaming in the light.

What of the artists? The creators? The builders? The writers? The makers? The misfits who are driven not by paychecks but by purpose. We are forced to choose. Do we produce art and risk homelessness? Do we choose beauty and ignore our hunger pains? Do we choose mission and turn a blind eye to the electric bills?

These aren’t the choices of a healthy society. Such choices should bring shame to the leaders of this land. Forcing the beauty out of a population does nothing but create anger, resistance and eventually rebellion.

Remember the days when we could go to a job, engage with our community and serve them in some way and return home to our families, friends, recreation and play? The beauty of being a GenXer is having a life before web2. A life with balance, grounded in analog and IRL engagements, that was simple and fulfilling. Before the weaponized algorithms kicked in, I could work part time at the bar, cover all my bills and have enough left over to fund my freelance photojournalism and writing.

Feudalism and subservience to heartless billionaires driven by ego and greed are not choices to live by. Forcing a population into the lesser of these evils will not last. The America I grew up in has always been deeply flawed, but I was raised to fight for a better tomorrow. I was taught to seek something better and more just than where we are now and to fight for the possibility of a prosperous tomorrow.

And I was raised to love my country, and defend it. But how does one show love for its abuser? How do we show love for a land that is stolen, again, by white supremacists seeking to extend an empire far beyond its shelf life? A country that is sliding backwards into the embrace of racists who seek to remove people like me.

What do we do in times like this? We fight to keep the lights on and struggle to keep our internal flame lit long enough to make art from the ashes of destruction.

We hope that humanity wins and that a collapse like the one we’re living through forces our society to place people over profits. Finally.

I began paying attention to politics closely during the early Bush/Cheney years. I was in my mid to late 20s and I realized, much to my own shame, that my privileged ass had managed to make it this far in life with almost no deep understanding of politics, history or any inconvenient truth or reality that was deliberately avoided in my public school education of the colonizer.

Here’s the thing…once you “see” what’s coming or “see” how power really works in this world, you can’t unsee it. There’s no way to close your eyes and just ignore the world for a mind like mine. So, on an almost wintery afternoon on the Outer Banks, sitting at a coffeeshop processing the reality of 4 more years of Bush and Cheney, I knew I was at a crossroads. Stay, get educated on the skills I’m missing as a photojournalist, and fight. Leave, move to Canada and become an expat. Watch it all unravel from afar. Two options.

I chose to stay. And 21 years later the full scope of that decision is clear and I’m not sure if it was the right one. Well, I am sure. I would change nothing of the path that brought me to the present because the beautiful humans I’ve met, documented, and welcomed as family are the reason I stayed. I was raised to defend what matters, to protect those who can’t protect themselves and to be grateful at the end of the day.

In those 21 years, I traveled the world. I documented the beauty of humanity recovering from the worst human behaviors possible. I’ve sat with those who suffered at the hands of worst among us; Tibetan Nuns tortured in Chinese prisons, beaten with electric cattle prods for their beliefs, widows left with nothing after husbands were killed by an Army gone rogue, Palestinian mothers losing children to soldiers who deem them inhuman for no reason other than racism. I’ve listened to their stories. I’ve documented a tiny sliver of their life after the trauma.

After I exited the world of journalism, I fell directly into the world of technology. In 2014, I joined a community of hackers so I could better understand how the world was currently working and what direction we were all barreling towards. My education included understanding how hacking works, how to protect journalists and dissidents using privacy and, more personally, how to cultivate my own hacking skills and protect myself.

That aspect of my journey gave me a deep and powerful education on the world we were rapidly approaching at the hands of tech founders building God-like technology through the lens of flawed and destructive egos. We would often use our collective skills to tackle situations impacting our community. Human trafficking was a massive problem in our area and so was money laundering. South Carolina isn’t known for protecting it’s citizens in anyway, so it was (and still is) a free for all of organized crime. And the algorithms of the dominant social platforms and back alley craigslist posts were providing powerful tooling for trading humans and laundering money.

I applied my journalistic brain to OSINT and social engineering, trying to find email addresses and identifiers of Johns and mules. Once we had any possible clue of identity, we’d run it through software from the non-profits we worked with in DC. I don’t know the name of the software we were using, but it was intelligence grade and it was powerful. Terrifyingly so.

One email address or phone number run through that system, in 2016-17, would reveal a social graph of known associates and personal information that was very specific and wildly intrusive. Great for finding criminals. But absolutely devastating when turned on citizens by a corrupt government or nefarious private entity. This was all happening during the time of Snowden and Wikileaks. When I watched the first social graph pop up of a suspect we were tracking, I knew that the world as I understood it was done. And this new world would make us all connected and absolutely vulnerable in ways we couldn’t even comprehend yet.

The Surveillance Capitalism machine was about five years old then. Google lit the flame, Facebook poured the gasoline and weaponized algorithms took over most of the internet. Even with my limited technical abilities, I could see exactly where the ruling class was steering society and I wanted nothing to do with it.

My work in privacy was spawned from a desire to protect everyday people so we could use our voices liberally and protect our ideas from the specter of authoritarians and despot leaders. My hackers then taught me crypto. I already knew about Bitcoin and had used a peer to peer messaging platform that was built on a blockchain, so I understood it conceptually. But I never had someone to teach me how to actually use the tech.

So, in 2017, I learned how to create a currency, how to use a digital wallet, how to purchase the ugliest fucking digital cat imaginable and how to buy and trade different cryptocurrencies. Alternative economics and restoring the Commons had been on my radar since my time at UNC, so the idea of subverting the central banking system and removing power from the military industrial complex through alternative currencies was huge for me. Here’s a technology who’s premise was transparency, driven by a ledger that everyone could see, study and analyze designed to weaken centralized power. I was hooked.

I spent the next 9 years working in various aspects of the blockchain world and found myself at the heart of Ethereum infrastructure working for the very wallet I first used in 2017, MetaMask. After a whistleblowing-fueled exit, I then landed at another large infrastructure startup project. I spent almost two years engaged in powerful and rewarding community building while simultaneously drowning in the trauma of narcissistic leadership, profit over people strategies and white collar crime. My first foray into Corporate America was a flaming failure that wrecked my nervous system, but gave me a very clear look into the very systems I wanted to destroy.

Extractive, late-stage capitalism only works by destroying the very humans at the heart of the system. Squeeze out every ounce of creativity, innovation and humanity until the human buckles and then toss them aside to feed the never satiated monster of shareholder profits.

During those 2+ years, I gained a front row education in the people who build emergent technology. I know this isn’t the case for all tech startups and orgs, but 90% of what I witnessed were white men of privilege recreating the mechanisms of patriarchy and corruption through the tools we dedicated our time to building. Fueled by profit, ketamine, ego and corruption, I saw it all. And I now hold a much deeper understanding of how we, as a society, landed in a situation where we are all at the mercy of these billionaire founders playing God with technology that very few understand.

Fast forward to now. We’ve arrived in the worst case scenario. There is no clean answer or path forward at this point. Privacy is no longer optional, it’s a lifeline. And our privacy practice must also encompass everyone in our contact list and in our social media networks. We all now have a duty to protect everyone we are connected with by how we use technology and the privacy practices we implement, cultivate and deploy on a daily basis.

We have dwindling options for resistance as individuals, but we have endless opportunities as a collective. We’ve seen how removing our dollars from corporations like Disney and Target are powerful mechanisms of resistance. We’ve seen how millions of people in the street served as a wake up call that we are not going quietly into that dark night. We still have power and a voice, but that won’t always be the case.

We now need to delete the Oligarchy. We need to remove our energy, engagement and our raw data from the mechanisms of surveillance and stop freely giving our data to the ruling class. They are destroying our communities and our futures with every Like, Share, Thread, Post & Livestream. If we don’t remove ourselves from the Oligarchy’s networks, they will always hold the power over us and continue to destroy the things we love in order to support their desire to hoard all the wealth and resources.

We must acknowledge our role in this game and remove our participation from the system all together.

I recently migrated my Substack to a ghost platform at SignalsandSeeds.xyz, in an attempt to continue migrating off the Oligarchy’s tooling. Please support me over there!

Support & Follow the Work Here

As a privacy advocate, I’ve been screaming into the void for almost a decade about why privacy matters.

Why you shouldn’t give your phone number to the retail coffeeshop to get a free coffee once a month.

Why you shouldn’t connect your phone to that coffeeshop’s public wifi without layers of protection in place.

Why you shouldn’t put free gaming apps on your phone and give it access to your contact list.

Why you shouldn’t keep ANY billionaire-owned algorithm on your mobile device and give it access to your contact list.

Why you shouldn’t use Gmail, Outlook, Docs, Sheets or any unencrypted platform to store sensitive information about you, your work or your loved ones.

Why you shouldn’t have Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or Twitter on your mobile device connected to your contact list and photos.

We often hear the analogy of Anne Frank and how we now know who would have protected and hidden the Frank family during Nazi Germany and who would have turned the family over to the fascists. But what we don’t realize is that if we’ve done any of the above things with our technology and completely disregarded our privacy measures, we are essentially waving a giant flag that says, “the Frank family is right here, come get them.”

Not hyperbole or alarmist conspiracy-- this is LITERALLY our reality right now. I totally get and have empathy for the fact that most people are just ignoring the news and bypassing reality right now. Gotta protect that mental health, understood. But, at what cost?

The government issued NSPM-7 several weeks ago. It’s a National Security Presidential Memorandum, and unlike an EO, it carries the weight of the National Security apparatus for enforcement. In this directive, it stated that anyone who holds anti-christian, anti-family, anti-capitalist and anti-government views can be detained and imprisoned under the threat of terrorism. That’s essentially ALL of us, in one form or another. That most likely encompasses 80% of your phone contacts if you’re reading this essay, or if you can read.

And the modern version of “detainment” could mean a detention center in the swamps of Florida, a labor camp in rural California, a hyper-violent prison in El Salvador or just a one-way flight to Uganda. This could also mean the canceling of passports, seizure of people’s bank accounts or assets, social security income or any other plethora of mechanisms that government can now utilize to control us.

Now, I want you to open your phone and look at any and all of the apps that are owned by anyone who was sitting behind the president during the inauguration or recently appeared at the White House kissing the ring of power. Hell, if you’re on an iPhone, you don’t even need to open the device.

Now, I want you to scroll through your phone contacts and your photos and look at every single person who may fall into the following bucket:

• Voted for a democrat in the last 2 decades

• Goes to a yoga studio

• Reads books on Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or any other “non-christian” religion

• Likes and wears rainbows

• Believes in DEI, equality or climate science

• Lives in a blue state or city

• Has slightly brownish skin

• Speaks a foreign language

• Has an opinion other than M@GA about the government.

• Has friends or family who go to protests, engage in direct action or is an open activist

• Anyone who donates money to a nonprofit

• Anyone who volunteers at a nonprofit, food bank or organization that supports marginalized demographics

• Is part of the LGBTQ community or is an open alley

• Goes to the public library on a regular basis and checks out books that would place them in any of those buckets

• Watches South Park, Colbert, The Daily Show, Kimmel or any other comedian who is not M@ga and does so on a device of any kind, cable or a smart TV.

• Holds a degree in anything that falls under an umbrella of humanities, politics, religion, diversity, climate change, science, linguistics, etc.

• Anyone who has ever expressed an opinion or LIKED an opinion on any social platform in the last decade that runs counter to those in power.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

Now, I want you to think of that person in your mind. Your neighbor, your child, your cousin, your partner, your parent, your sibling, your bestie, your favorite professor -- anyone you care about or just think is a good human. Hold them in your mind’s eye and feel the energy of that person and why you care for them.

Now, I want you to sit with the reality that if you have zero regard for your digital privacy and openly ignore all practical and simple measures to protect your digital privacy and engage with algorithms and devices in the ways I described above, YOU could be responsible for the government deeming that person you love as a terrorist AND exposing their location to Meal Team Six through your disregard for digital privacy.

This is a conversation we should be openly having with our communities and the people we care about. And if you are a community organizer of ANY vulnerable population or run a non-profit and you are communicating with the people you serve and are trying to protect using WhatsApp, Gmail, Insta or a platform owned by a male in Silicon Valley, you are literally exposing those people to the very, VERY high probability that they will be easily scooped up by the government.

LET ME REPEAT THAT...

If you are an activist, an organizer OR just run a non-profit AND you are not using encrypted communications -- you will likely be responsible for people in your community being imprisoned or killed when this government fully weaponizes our social networking and communications.

You have maybe-- MAYBE-- 6 months to fix this, if that’s even possible. If not, you will be exposing all of the people you work so hard to protect and serve to one of the most violent regimes in modern history.

So, what can you do?

Direct Action Today

• Go to Proton and set up an email account, it’s free. Use ONLY that email from now on. (keep the gmail for junk, but don’t type anything into it and hit send)

• If you fall in any of the buckets above OR YOUR FRIENDS/LOVED ONES DO, pay the $4-12 a month and get the email, VPN, Drive and Docs for Proton. STOP USING GMAIL. PERIOD.

• REMOVE all free gaming, coupon, weather, etc apps on your mobile devices -- NOW.

• Remove ALL social media apps from your mobile device UNLESS they are decentralized AND you’ve already locked down your device.

• Keep your mobile devices, computers and browsers updated— always.

• If you have a loved one involved in direct action in any way, remove their full contact information (physical address) from your phone. Use pen and paper and just tuck it away somewhere safe. Change their names to a nickname.

• Turn OFF wifi when you leave the house. Use a farday bag if you’re an activist or have a large network of them.

• Install a VPN on your phone and all devices you use at home to connect to the internet and use the VPN at home on your computers.

• NEVER connect to public wifi without your VPN on.

• Have a conversation with your loved ones about the risks and plan for what happens when the full surveillance apparatus is working (my uneducated and generous guess is you have maybe 6 months) and what your risk level is. They need to know.

• Have a plan if you have dependents-- kids or dogs-- if you somehow end up on the blacklist and get scooped up.

If you think I’m being an alarmist, just open up any social app (after you turn on your VPN) and search “Chicago !CE” and watch a few clips from protestors. That’s coming for most US cities once they lock in the game plan that they’re testing in Blue Cities. Again, this is not alarmist, they literally said that to the Generals of our military in Quantico 2 weeks ago. On camera. By design.

Again, I know this seems far-fetched and unreal. And if you haven’t been paying attention to any of this, it will definitely seem extreme, but this is literally where we are right now.

We’re at the part in history where the Frank family was looking to their neighbors for a safe place to hide. The major difference now is that we are all intertwined with our digital lives, and that networking which keeps us all connected and able to enjoy our loved ones who don’t live down the road anymore is the very thing being weaponized against us.

All of this said, and I’m fully aware this article puts me at risk but I’ve made peace with that reality as a writer and privacy advocate, our judicial system is still holding by a thread and there are black swan events that could prevent the worst case scenario that is very clearly looming on the horizon. A part of me believes we may squeak through this, in some way we can make peace with as a better tomorrow.

But I am also a logical pragmatist and I’ve been watching the full arc of this political agenda since my time studying poli sci and journalism at Chapel Hill under the Bush/Cheney years. I’ve traveled to authoritarian regimes and documented under those brutal governments. I know what happens to dissidents, I’ve documented some of the worst treatments to pacifists and revolutionaries. Their stories will rip your heart out.

I hold the hope that we’ll still, somehow, avoid being the ones sharing our stories of torture and brutality at the hands of our government. And for a rapidly growing number of our neighbors, the stories of torture and cruelty have already occurred or are happening right now. But we are very close to the point of no return. And the more we protect ourselves and the ones we love-- with BASIC privacy measures-- the more likely we are to have the peaceful solution so many of us are craving now.

Please share this essay with the ones who need to hear this most. And if you’re curious of where to start, check out the links below.

EFF.Org | Surveillance Self Defense

Street Level Surveillance

IntelTechniques by Michael Bazzel

My Digital Privacy & Protection Workshop

What exactly are we supposed to do with all of this violence? Even just the bloodlust over the idea of war is enough to make the sane among us fall into disarray. And well, that’s the point. 

During the Bush/Cheney days, I studied Peace, War and Defense while also studying Photojournalism at one of the best universities for such a thing. I took classes from some of the top political scientists in the world with themes like; the philosophy of war and peace, the anthropology of peace, international conflict and communications of war and peace. I documented several countries in post-collapse, its citizens trapped in perpetual poverty and cycles of violence, reeling from years of war. I documented diaspora from two very distinctly different religions, exiled to regions distant from one another, but their struggles the same. Stateless societies fighting for the dignity of being human after living through the absolute violence of war and the inhumanity of evil actors in power. 

And here I sit, at my desk on a Tuesday morning, scanning headlines on the only remaining algorithm not co-opted by oligarchs, watching two absolute morons cosplaying war mongers to a room full of men and women of the highest ranking military status, pining to send these decorated soldiers and the fighters in their charge into American cities because mayors and governors called the cosplaying dictator a name or because the “Secretary of War” wants to make his tiny penis feel adequate when he clearly has no business holding the position he sits within. 

Most of the men in my family served in the military in one form or another, some by choice, others by draft. Regardless of why, they protected this country from conflicts because it was their job and they did it with honor. I studied the various theories of war over the course of history spanning back to the Magna Carta. I understand, at least at the surface level, that soldiers are not deployed because of the whims of a failed real estate robber baron or because a former TV host wants to feel masculine. There are literally no frameworks or philosophies that allow me to put what I saw this morning (in clips and snippets from journalists because the entirety of it all is too much to absorb in one sitting) in a safe little container of understanding. 

The weight of this is just too much. It’s beyond what my training in political science, journalism or even my spiritual yoga training (which was also academic and intense) equipped me to process. And I am not able to bypass all of this and just ignore it. I’m not wired that way and if one more person tells me to just ignore it, my head’s going to explode. 

What happened this morning has NEVER happened before. No modern “leader” would ever put ALL of their top generals, the president and secretary of defense under one roof, publicly announced and for the purposes of a book promotion and a pep rally for violating their oath and attacking citizens.

What we’re facing has never happened before. We can look to Germany in WWII and see the playbook these cosplaying war mongering idiots are using, yes. But this level of ignorance and incompetence surpasses anything recorded in a history book. 

I look back at the Bush/Cheney years now, when I was an active photojournalist documenting the results of war on communities and I am dumbfounded. I’d actually give just about anything to have those mother fuckers in charge again. At least they operated from a philosophy of war that I could understand and put into a container to process and react from within, even though I disagreed with every fiber of my being. Part of the terror of now is that these people are just dumb as fuck. Like really, truly stupid in a way that is not comprehensible. And so is almost half of the country that voted for this cult shit.

And that is both a source of some solace and a source of abject terror. They’re too fucking stupid to pull off a major offensive against their own country, but they’re also so fucking stupid they may just blow up a Blue State to see what happens. Just like they’re doing to fishing boats off the shores of Venezuela. Or our economy.     

And what’s even more terrifying than such a prospect is that almost half of the country would find a way to justify such an act by claiming that the Blue State was filled with brown people, leftists, trans, women— or whomever they wish to unleash their hate upon. The people whose racism has been weaponized do not care if I live or die. The people who’ve brainwashed these cult followers also don’t care if I live or die. In fact, they’d rather I just disappear. My relatives who voted for this shit—twice— also don’t care if I live or die. A woman with an opinion is a danger to small white men who choose ignorance and hatred as their guiding light and wrap it in a holy book they’ve never read. 

I don’t know where to put all of this or how to even process any of it. I don’t know how to do the work that I’m called to do while holding the Spector of war for no reason in the back of my mind, unable to ignore the reality unfolding before my terrified eyes. 

For those who are able to bypass all of this, cudos. Buy your friends who are aware a beer or a coffee and thank them for paying attention. Some of us take paying attention as our civic duty. I’m no pacifist by any means. In fact, I went to India to study the Tibetan diaspora because I could not wrap my brain around pacifism as a philosophical approach to conflict. But I know how this ends. I’ve documented the results of powerful people playing God with bombs and bullets. 

We have no idea what we’re in for in this country because we’ve had the luxury of being distant from the impacts of war for well over a century. We outsourced violence to other distant lands. And now its coming home to take root in the places where democracy, diversity and inclusion, the very things we said we were bringing to other countries as we dropped those bombs, are allowed to flow freely. In states and cities who welcome all and reflect the best of what this country did offer.

I have no real words of encouragement or hope at this moment. I can only say that now is the time of monsters and we must do whatever we can to hold onto our sanity as they rule. Until they don’t.

Images from my documentary work in Nepal (2006) & Palestine (2007).

What’s worse is I don’t believe many citizens have taken the time or harbor the ability to see what’s been dwelling beneath the shiny veneer of capitalism all these years. Our current system was built by leveraging human suffering; genocide, exploitation, extraction and empire. Until now, we’ve been able to mostly ignore the inequalities because those in power took great pains to cover the truth, lest we all opt out en mass.

Why bother hiding the truth anymore?

The population is now fully entrenched in two camps— the under-capitalized labor being destroyed one late bill and one tariff at a time and the privileged 10% or so are able to ignore what’s happening in the streets because capital insulates them and that type of security allows them to carry on as normal. The third camp, the oligarchs, don’t even need to participate in society at all, beyond maintaining the systems of extraction that have shifted our wealth into their narcissistic hands at scale. Let them eat cake is the reining philosophy and its no longer a meme. It’s just reality. 

I’m not faulting those of us in these two camps. I float in between both depending on multiple factors; some by choice, some by force. I am privileged because I’ve accumulated earned knowledge and specialized skills over the years that allows me to float between these camps. At the moment, I’m in the “oh fuck, another bill” camp, but I’m transitioning to the “Phew, I can afford that $6 espresso shot now” camp. That transition is underway and I am grateful for the ability to still find opportunity in such a desolate labor market. 

But I’m under no illusion that it could all evaporate tomorrow. Every opportunity, every beautiful change, every nail biting risk— all of it could end tomorrow. We are all prisoners to the whims of a malignant narcissistic leader with dementia, hell bent on destroying literally every ounce of humanity and beauty in our world. Simply because he can and the delusional voices in his head justify his actions. But that’s an essay for another day. 

The element I want to explore here, dear reader, is the tension of this perpetual cognitive dissonance we are all holding due to the socio-economic transition underway.

We are barreling towards a post-capitalistic world, a post-extractive economy and we have absolutely no fucking idea what that will actually encompass. But we can feel the intensity of this motion careening towards the abyss, even if many of us cannot name it. That’s the tension we are all navigating, and many do not harbor the mental models to process it. 

We know the groceries we’re buying were not grown in our local community and we understand the petrol and pesticides required to produce and deliver this food to our stores.  We also see the empty shelves in that store and know our system of agriculture is not sustainable. But most of us do not have the luxury of options. We must choose the lesser of these evils and try to calm the tension of this truth every time we buy groceries to feed our families. 

We know the politician with a “D” next to their name on the ballot takes money from lobbyists that support genocide, Big Oil, Big Pharma, and a whole host of other oligarchic tendencies and we know this D will choose their own stock portfolios and their own egos over our health care premiums, our neighbors right to live without fear of deportation and our children’s ability to breath air free from pollution. But we still must vote. We must choose the lesser of these evils and try to process the dis-ease such unjust decisions causes in our hearts. 

We know the unmarked SUV trolling our neighborhood is looking to kidnap our neighbors as they walk their children to school but we are powerless to stop the presence of that SUV and the specter of a kidnapping that ends in deportation, torture or even death. We still pay taxes that fund this reality. We sit and watch 80 year old politicians in the halls of congress wring their hands and say there’s nothing to be done while our neighbors live with the terror of death in the backseat of an SUV at the hands of an ignorant racist who needed to make a little extra money rounding up the humans who seek nothing but a better life and make our country the beautiful melting pot it used to be. An ignorant racist who most likely stormed the halls of our hallowed government, back when we still had the illusion that it mattered, spread feces on the wall and then were pardoned by that malignant narcissist. A full circle moment for the worst among us, yet we must watch it all unfold. Powerless to change the cruelty of it all. 

We know that almost half of the country voted for these realities and more. More than half of the country, many of our family, relations and neighbors voted for the absolute destruction of our day to day lives because they were emboldened to lean into their own racism, hatred and ignorance. Empowered and supported by those broligarchs seeking to separate the population and build their technofeudalistic future. 

And perhaps one of the hardest aspects of this cognitive dissonance we all must carry now is pretending that everything is normal, that everything will work out in the end, so we can continue doing the things that make us feel human. I love the work I do. I love the productivity and creativity I get to deploy for my clients and for the productions my studio brings to life. And in order to keep doing this work, I must embrace the dissonance of everything above. 

I must tap into my well of experience and do strategic outputs knowing that at the same time, the unmarked SUV is pulling up to a park across town trying to kidnap humanity at scale. I must tap into the words of hope to craft messages for my mission-driven clients while a farmer a few towns over begs for relief as his land is bought for pennies on the dollar by the politicians he voted for. I must embrace the muse to bring a narrative to life while my neighbor two buildings over is choosing between the medicine that keeps his heart beating and the electricity that allows him to cook his dinner, filled with regret for the ballot he cast last November. 

Holding all of this tension, acknowledging this perpetual cognitive dissonance requires a great capacity to hold space for joy and sorrow, hope and terror, acceptance and defiance, resignation and rage, tears and laughter. Holding this tension also forces one to place boundaries on their own empathy so as not to suffocate under the weight of such suffering at scale.

We are ALL being forced to embrace the depth of emotions many have never worked with openly. All of the emotions brewing beneath the surface of our reality are testing our humanity right now. And many cannot hold this tension without breaking. The common phrase we see on bumper stickers and memes now holds true for ALL of us — Everyone is struggling with something we know nothing about, choose kindness. 

If you’re still with me, take a moment and just sit with your own cognitive dissonance and acknowledge the reality of it all. We must give light to the spectrum of emotions we are navigating in our Now or they will eat us alive, from the inside out. 

And if you’ve never processed the cognitive dissonance necessary to navigate late stage capitalism, please dive deeper into what was written in this essay and find your own mechanisms of processing such intense emotions.

Bypassing is not an option in our Now.

We can’t ignore the pain of our neighbors and the evil of our politicians. We have to hold these truths, bear witness to the impacts on humanity and work with our fellow humans to fix the trauma of it all. Or we will never step past this current state of destruction into the possibilities that a post-extractive society harbor. 

For that is the reward at the end of this destruction, whether we live long enough to witness it or we simply fight like hell so our children can live in a just and equitable tomorrow. If we bypass the pain of this tension, we’ll fail to cultivate the ability to say “never again” and lay the foundation for tomorrow that rectifies the pain and evil of the colonizers that brought us to our collective Now.

I created these images in 2018 while documenting the protests in DC against the family separation policies of the last time these fascists took power.

If this resonates, pass it on. I believe it’s time we start talking about the emotional impacts of the ongoing trauma of our Now. Before it’s too late.

The ultimate lesson for 2025 for this yogi is that I’ve simply no fucks left to give. Like, none. To be clear, I didn’t have many to spare rolling into 2025. But now, late Q3 2025, they are all spent. Done. Finite. Adulting requires that you do harbor a few fucks for the things that are essential, but the key is defining “what’s essential”.

Everyone’s essential is different. I have no mouths to feed beyond my own and the 15 pound Chewbacca clone sitting by my side, and he’s not picky nor very ravenous most days. I have no major bills beyond my rent, electricity, wifi, cell and a plastic rectangle of regret from Capital One. And some IOUs to the Feds for periodic stints in academia. That’s it. And even though those bills are astronomical and growing by the hour because of "market forces", it's still all fairly simple.

I decided to do a little “adulting” 2.5 years ago. I got a big girl job with a stupidly large salary. When that shitshow ended, I got another one with even more money. I saved, I spent, I leaned into my bougie ass shadow self that never really got to experience adulthood with free flowing funds before. Not gonna lie, I liked it. But I knew it was a temporary state, so I passed on gratitude to the Universe every time I participated in economies I wanted to support; and even the ones I didn’t, but had to because…adulting.

What I found most interesting about this extended state of golden handcuffs, was how I also fell into the states of want that I read about but never understood. Those bracelets I wore came at a very steep price, I worked 70-80 hour weeks under immense pressure and found myself just consuming because I could. Because…I “earned it” and had no time to enjoy my life.

How fucked is that? I was cognizant of that mental state as it happened, but I still didn’t stop the grind of endless work and perpetual waves of cortisol. I just road the whole damn thing like I’d done it my whole life. Like everyone else. Like The Hungry Ghost— I leaned all the way into that shit.

Bougie Crystal went back in the box 11 months ago when the man-children in charge of my place of employment went straight Lord of the Flies and burned it all down. I had a wad of cash in the bank and in crypto and I decided to take a few months off and figure out what’s next.

What was next? The abyss of an orange tinted, small penis wannabe dictator decimating everything that holds society together. Fun for all, right? May the odds be every in your favor.

Spoiler alert, they were not.

I began applying for jobs in January. I got my first interview request in late July. Then another. I aced that shit like the boss bitch that I am. I got used for leverage in both cases. Fuck this and the horse y’all rode in on. There went my employment fucks. Gone. Poof. An employee no more.

Cool, right? At 50, I got to exit a labor market I’d just chosen to participate in 3 years ago and return to what I know best-- self employment. Paycheck to paycheck-- but without knowing when that paycheck will or arrive-- or if it will at all.

I got to compost ALL the emotions. Anger at a labor market squeezing out the most talented GenXers in their ranks. Grief at not being able to participate in the ecosystem I devoted the last decade to and still put food on the table. Despair at knowing this collapse of the labor market, and every other societal system we depend upon, is by design, to benefit a handful of billionaire robber barons, an absolute “let them eat cake” moment at scale.

I know better. I spent most of my 20s, 30s and early 40s refusing to participate fully in capitalism. I did just enough work to cover the bills and then I produced art-- documentary photography, creative writing, lapidary art-- whatever. My time was mine and I lived well within those boundaries. So did 90% of my friends. It was beautiful and simple.

And now I’ve confirmed the lifestyle I’ve always lived, because in the end none of the adulting really truly mattered. Yes, my apartment is lovely and I am so grateful I have this nest to sink into during such dark times. But I also know that it’s temporary. And the past two months have been a testament to my scrappiness and the kind souls who choose to work with me that I’ve been able to eek out enough to keep this roof over my head.

There’s a deep release that occurs when you walk up to the edge of survival, and slip through to the other side. There’s an empathy that occurs when you don the hat of poverty or the pants of illness and chronic pain. Or both. You wear those garments, hopefully for a short stint, and then you truly know what it means to live in fear.

If the Universe is kind and your self awareness is well-tuned, you learn to EMBODY resilience. For that’s truly the biggest gift of hardship and survival. Resilience. You earn that shit in the tears you shed while counting the days between the cutoff notice on the electricity and the final notice on your phone bill. You embrace that lesson when you’re doing the math on your grocery cart filled with clearance food items because your entire community can no longer afford luxury items we once took for granted and they’re all on clearance because tomorrow they’ll be rotten. You embody resilience when you realize that each demeaning moment of lack and each sliver of heart wrenching decision between food and gasoline and medicine and wifi is actually a lesson in need.

What do you truly need, and what can you do without until money flows into your lonely bank account again?

And if you're like me, navigating this dumpsterfire without any support from a partner or dual income household, that resilience is extra spicy.

When you face those decisions on a regular basis and survive another month of tetris between your bank account and your stack of bills, you emerge on the other side without the whispers of those fucks. You left them in the pile of fear next to those "quasi-optional" bills you’ll just ignore for another month and eventually chip away at once the economy returns to it’s senses.

Again, there’s a liberation in collapse. Fear. Anxiety. Self-loathing. You place those little picidillos right next to those whispering fucks you don’t care about anymore and let them figure it out. They’ll still hop into your head every so often, but they’ll pass a bit more quickly with a simple acknowledgement and a shrug.

Or maybe you will just awaken to the fact that none of it really matters anymore and perhaps something beautiful and necessary will rise from the collapse. Maybe the market won’t find sanity again and maybe this is the new reality for all of us. In those moments I catch a glimpse of what life is like without capitalism. In my forced simplicity this summer, I’ve returned to a deeper self that I placed on a shelf for the illusion of adulting. I’ve returned to the person who has her time back.

The abundance of spending the morning at the coffeeshop with my dog reading a book that enhances my ability to navigate chaos and soothes my soul.

The abundance of having an entire afternoon to dedicate to a client’s last minute need so I can be of deep service because I had the time to spare.

The abundance of flexibility, staying up late to build something to put a little more beauty into the world and sleeping in the next day.

The abundance of not wasting the best of your energy each morning on a meeting stack that’s designed to demonstrate "productivity and leadership" for a souless corporate overlord.

The simplicity of cooking food from scratch, mostly of necessity, but bountiful and rewarding regardless of the why.

The abundance of a 3 hour coffee with a dear friend exploring the collapse we’re all navigating together and how to keep our sanity.

The abundance of having the mental headspace to not take any of these economic shortcomings as a personal failure and not internalizing any of it.

The abundance of living without the perpetual stress of corporate life, the endless meetings, the slack messages that bounce at all hours, the toxicity of cutthroat colleagues and narcissistic bosses.

The resiliency coupled with such abundance IS the work right now. We must compost the real emotions that accompany living through accelerated collapse. If we don’t, if we dwell in the emotions or internalize the systems we can not control, they will destroy the best of our life-force.

We can not succumb to the robber baron's system designed to make us all slaves to their false God of endless profit. We must protect our humanity and our neighbor's as well. We must redefine how we travel through this world and how we exchange value for the gifts we freely share.

And if you’re blessed enough to NOT be going through the chaos of collapse right now, either personal or societal, be forever grateful. And turn to your neighbor or friend who IS in the trenches and offer them a hand. Not a handout, but a hand. Join them for coffee one afternoon and listen, let them vent, tell them you’re here, bring them a jar of home-cooked lentils and show them they won’t go hungry. Co-regulate your nervous systems together. You both need it. Trust me, that means more than you’ll ever know. It’s a simple bridge to our collective humanity and we all need it now.

And in the blink of an eye, you may need that hand to help you cross your own bridge over the chasm of collapse. At some point, we all will need to co-regulate and cross the chasm together.

So, my dear readers, we are all barreling through this collapse together and it will look different for us all. And that’s as it should be. Because the beautiful element of losing our remaining fucks is the liberation of just being with what’s left. The beauty of freedom. And peace.

We are all in this together. In community. Some of us are sharing our reality with the world in a very public manner so some stranger walking through their own resiliency adventure can find a sliver of solace. Others are gathering in ceremony to hold space for all of us to witness our truth and share it. And some are simply bewildered by it all and hoping the worst never comes and tomorrow delivers stability. And we need all of that.

No matter what your current state might be, know that on the other side of your journey is a liberation that only surfaces through resilience.

A liberation earned by leaving those fucks on the side of the river and just diving in.

During my time at Naropa, my religion classes usually had two oral exams a semester, following a traditional warrior structure from Eastern traditions. For the final of my Alternative Religion class, our professor took pity on us and allowed us to memorize a passage that resonated and recite it in the ceremonial warrior exam circle with our classmates. I have almost zero capacity for memorization, so I chose the lyrics to one of my favorite songs so I could use my commute time on the way to class and sing the lyrics and seer them into my being. To embody them. To release my stress through singing, which I’ve done since middle school.

I chose Rising Appalachia’s song Resilient. It’s still one of my favorite prose, a mantra for times of accelerated collapse.

Bookmark this one.

Buy Me A Coffee

Spoiler alert— we were not. The job was the opposite of right livelihood. It was a fast track to an early grave for someone like me. A woman who lived her entire adult life outside the box and begrudgingly participating in capitalism when bills needed to be paid or passion projects needed funding.

To say I have a tumultuous relationship with modern approaches to money, value exchange and capitalistic economic systems reinforced by patriarchs keeping the colonization approach to labor alive is a gross understatement. 

But here’s the catch, in 2025, there’s simply no way around the mechanisms of the oligarch’s system. Extraction is embedded in almost everything. Every potential job or paying project requires me to choose which aspects of right livelihood must be placed in a lock box for a hot minute while I generate labor to produce funds to stay alive. And even the ones that I believe are in alignment can easily be derailed when the Spector of the patriarch arrives out of left field. 

The decentralized industry I’ve devoted the last decade of my life to is a prime example. When I first found blockchains and Bitcoin, it was in the aftermath of the housing collapse of 2008 and Occupy Wall Street. A movement of hackers and anarchists created an alternative economic system. I was intrigued. The technology also enabled peer to peer messaging that was encrypted, which was my first hand on experience with the tech in 2012. Blockchains can also power governance and require those who work within the ecosystem to take action from a place of complete transparency. But, the same tech that many adhered to for a transparent and autonomous existence also allows for money launderers and criminals to flourish in the shadows of a complex technology driven by cryptography. 

While that corporation at the beginning of this essay did hire me and they were one of the biggest organizations in crypto with trusted products I’d used since my entry into the industry in 2017, I also found quite a few nefarious actors hiding in those shadows of a massive centralized corporation cosplaying autonomy and decentralization. I was raised to speak up and when I was hired, I was completing a Bachelors degree in Yoga, focusing on conscious leadership. I followed the proper “protocol” for whistleblowing against criminal actors in my workplace. And I was removed swiftly with my entire division’s leadership, while the criminal was promoted. 

And that is just one tiny little instance of an integrity vacuum from my personal experience in Corporate America for all of 2 years. Now imagine the sheer scale of corruption across the entire systems of labor we are forced to work within to play this real life version of the Hunger Games  in 2025. 

After floating through one more wildly toxic Lord of the Flies crypto startup, I spun out 11 months ago and was unsure which way was up or down. My country is collapsing rapidly and the “cost of living” is not sustainable for anyone. It requires that sacrifice of our best selves in order to participate in the Empire’s game to keep the lights on and food in the fridge.

Unsure of where to look next for a job or to return to client work from my pre-crypto days, I decided to volunteer in the impact side of the Ethereum ecosystem. I floated in and out of many orgs and many communities and each time I found myself in a similar situation of sacrifice. I see extraction everywhere, we just call it different things in the impact space. For the most part, that extraction comes in the form of free labor. The leveraging of volunteers who hope, one day, to find a way to make some of that income necessary to pay those bills again. We call the extraction fancy names and wrap it in complex financial infrastructure. 

But it’s extraction all the same. 

So, where does someone like me turn? How does someone like me, an artist and yogi forced to play the game of the empirical extractor for survival, turn to exchange her labor for money that will allow her to keep producing art, building community and live in a way that reflects her values? I have vague ideas, but no concrete vision. The system is too broken to plan accordingly.

And I know I’m not alone. I see the voices and the questions being asked of people across the various social algorithms I can still stomach and I know these questions need answers that are almost impossible to find right now. Those types of answers thrown people down a canyon of inquiry and self-assessment that leads to exiting the corrupt systems the oligarchs need us all trapped within to remain in power. 

Those answers are considered heretic in late stage capitalism. Those answers have no space in systems that refuse to decolonize themselves for humanity to survive accelerated collapse.

I’ve been exploring this line of thought for almost 2 decades in my writing online. I truly don’t expect to find the answers I seek anytime soon in our current system. I do expect that as we begin to wake up to the real answers of right livelihood, more people will choose to exit this system and build their own answers to a healthier way of creating sustenance. A circular and regenerative system of self-creation that serves their communities, brings them joy and allows us NOT to succumb to the powers of the oligarch and serving their heartless and soulless agenda.

Keep the muse flowing and fully caffeinated. By clicking below, we can keep the gift economy in motion and avoid the broligarch’s coffers.

Buy Me A Coffee

Our human journeys often contain turmoil and dis-ease that rests beyond our control. Collapsing economies, deteriorating immune systems, dangerous political regimes, evaporating job markets, toxicity laden food systems, deregulated environmental policies, dangerous technologies unleashed on the population at scale, violence and hatred publicly celebrated and promoted to positions of power, martyrs made of promoters of hatred for profit — on and on it goes. A never ending cycle of turmoil thrown at our fragile nervous systems on a perpetual basis.

How do our bodies react to such ongoing abuse? Not well.

I was chatting with a neighbor at the dog park last night and she mentioned the perpetual state of stress she’s in and her autoimmune issues that suddenly surfaced the past year or so. We’re close to the same age. Our bodies are transitioning into our Wise Woman phase in life and doing so under one of the most dangerous times in modern history in a country hell bent on suicide to benefit the ruling class. Certain elements of our stress responses are within our grasp to control. Not eating trigger foods that stress our immune systems or avoiding toxic personal relationships that cause us to spiral are all elements of our lives we can mitigate. Embracing wisdom traditions designed to regulate the nervous system are within our control.

But ALL of the other elements I listed above, and more, are far beyond our ability to control. All we can do is mitigate our response to those situations, not change the situation itself. I saw a very disturbing slogan written on the sidewalk outside my apartment complex today as a tribute to a recent violent KOL’s death who shall go unnamed in this article. The name is irrelevant, just as the person was in my life.

What is relevant is the fact that someone, in the dead of night, decided to publicly create this tribute in a neighborhood where that type of rhetoric has no place. What is relevant is the fact that this situation is being weaponized to “eliminate” dissent, kindness and diversity by an entire class of people who choose violence and ignorance as their way of functioning in this world.

My nervous system didn’t respond to that tribute on the sidewalk. My logical mind did. My immediate thought was “we’re fucked”, there’s no solution at this point to reset a society that pays tribute to violence in the dark of night. There’s only the passing of the virus through the entire system and hoping the immune system of society can hold onto just enough of itself to create an immunity to this cancer of hate.

We need a giant reset.

Just like a wildfire, I know in my logical mind that a system this far gone has to reset itself by burning to the ground. I know in my heart that I am now going to be living through the burn, not just speculating or documenting it as I did in my days as a journalist. I now will have to do the hard work of controlling my nervous system during the burn.

And that type of work is a day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute endeavor. One must deploy self awareness to their mental and physical triggers. One must have a toolkit of practices that require nothing, no fancy studios or expensive yoga mats and no aspects of space of privilege to deploy. Just breath and somatic movement on the fly. We must embody these tools to the point that we can regulate our nervous systems in real time as conflict arises around us. Because it will, and it’s everywhere— by design.

As we all travel through this great reset, we might as well also embrace the reset of our own selves. Return to our roots as a human, embrace our communities again, restore healthy diets and tap into local food systems, limit our exposure to weaponized algorithms doing the dirty work of the oligarchs, close our screens and open our books, spend time IRL with people who nourish us and help us co-regulate, keep our heads down and do the hard work of deploying empathy and kindness with boundaries and deliberation.

We are all going through the Great Reset, whether we want to or not. My best advice, and my own personal plan, is stepping into these chaotic whirlwinds with awareness and without bypassing. Once that acceptance has truly occurred (and it takes time, so give yourself that grace) find a way to use the situation beyond your control to reset an aspect of your life you’ve been wanting to revamp but never had the opportunity or time to do so.

For example, this past summer has been a nightmare on my bank accounts and my immune system. Mystery food allergies are wreaking havoc and I don’t have the budget or health insurance (not that insurance would help because that system is so broken) to deal with it all. I also have been removed from the job market and am floating in a place of perpetual “wtf?”. So, about 45 days ago, I just ran out of fucks to give, and it was a relief. I’ve been presented with the opportunity to reset my diet, my cooking habits, strip my lifestyle down to the bare bones and get very clear and focused on what I actually want. I’ve restored my creative writing rituals I thought I lost during my stint in corporate America. I created alternative banking systems to the toxic centralized system I’d been using to convert crypto to USD and created a dual system of fiat to bitcoin flow that gives me peace of mind. I lost weight since I can’t really eat anything and returned to a completely clean and from scratch diet. I’ve slowly rebuilt a client business that I can embrace with joy that leaves time for creating art again and have a few amazing souls who are stepping into my world to work with me.

My giant reset has forced me to exit the systems of extraction with deliberation and intention. And forced me to remove the fear of a system that was designed to destroy everyone like me. A fear that I’d not really possessed until I stepped into the colonizing systems of corporate America. It will take more than late stage capitalism to destroy this Tantrika yogi.

If we all undergo our own versions of transformation as society hits the giant reset button at the end of a gun, maybe we’ll come out on the other side as a people who found what was lost long ago. And maybe in doing so, we’ll find a way to remove the deep separation that is forcing this reset and live again as a society that looks out for one another, stranger and friend alike, and who has finally addressed the trauma of empire that placed us at such a precipice.

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So, after a particularly messy day where I simply lost the ability to “human” properly and just laid on the floor and wept like a toddler, for no clear reason or event— just a cumulation of “all the things”, I decided it was time to just hit the fuck it switch and return to the thing that brought me to the Rockies 5 years ago. 

Yoga.

Today’s a new day, right? I grabbed the compass for yogis and headed over to the Coffeeshop with my pup to realign with my yoga in a way that far surpasses the physical practice. It was time to have a conversation with the Yoga Sutras and restore the peace that I sought in pursuing my academic studies in yoga.

I grabbed two copies of The Yoga Sutras (I have at least 4 versions in my personal library) but these two texts are vastly different interpretations. Both are necessary and resonate. The smaller of the two is also translated by an amazing woman, a rare event for ancient wisdom texts which are mostly translated by white men, especially the original translations done in the field by explorers in the 19th century, also widely known as colonizers. 

The first sutra is EXACTLY the thing I struggle with the most, especially in a world on fire, which is probably why Patanjali started with this sutra. 

No shit. Sutra One = epic fail for this yogi. Again and again. My inability to control the ongoing narratives that play in my mind is one of the main reasons I turned to yoga 15 years ago. And still, I struggle with the fundamentals of this practice on a daily, hourly, minute to minute basis. Amplified by my toxic instance on scrolling socials for the next devastating reality I need to navigate. And I know I’m not alone. 

The intense translation of The Yoga Sutras, all 600 pages of it, devotes quite a bit of paper real estate to this passage. For obvious reasons. The biggest take away from this section for me is two fold. Exploring the “turnings of thought” (citta-vritti) and the composition of the thought process, or “mind” as Patanjali explains it. In this sutra, the “internal body” which is essential in understanding our ability to work with the turnings of thought (and eventually still this spinning). He defines this internal body as buddhi (intelligence), ahankara (ego) and manas (mind), which “constitute the inner life of an individual, and the purusa soul is cloaked in these psychic layers prior to receiving a gross physical body equipped with senses.” The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, by Edwin Bryant, page 12.

Translation: your intelligence, ego and mind are established BEFORE your physical form and yogis believe that your karma is a strong determinant in the balance and health of your “internal body”. 

We’re born with this shit and our ultimate goal is to find the balance between all three elements so we can calm the constant churning of thoughts that overrun our ability to simply be present in the world. 

But how?

Well, that’s the whole damn point of yoga. Most people don’t know that yoga isn’t just physical poses that help you fit into those lovely overpriced yoga pants and “get your zen on”. The physical poses in yoga (asanas) are designed specifically to still the turning of the mind so one can sit in meditation afterwards.

Unfortunately, the wellness industry has appropriated so much of yoga’s wisdom to prop up an entire industry to sell unnecessary materialism for people desperate to do what this first sutra prescribes— stilling the mind.  

Barbara puts it more succinctly in her translation: “Insofar as the subtle mental processes are active, the subject or self is necessarily unstable and agitated. The goal of yoga is to stop the thought processes so that the spirit can be free, isolated from the turmoil of thought from which it mistakenly takes its identity.” Yoga, Discipline of Freedom, By Barbra Stoler Miller, page 30.  

These texts were written thousands of years ago and have guided humans through turmoil for the duration of their existence. It seems wildly appropriate to return to them now, when our ability to still the mind and not drown in the tsunamis of chaos barreling at us on the daily is greatly hindered. 

One of the more beautiful aspects of my deep yogic studies at Naropa was academic pursuit of understanding these yogic texts, including Sanskrit, to better apply this ancient wisdom technology to the modern shitshow we’re all trying to navigate.

Our ancient wisdom traditions, of all beliefs, hold the wisdoms of our elders and are the tools we must embrace to navigate the merciless technological weapons being forced upon us by a handful of billionaires who do not believe in humanity itself. They believe in a version of existence where humans are optional, blood transfusions from young people are the key to longevity and invasive surveillance is the only path to freedom. 

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We can create our own alternative pathways to freedom that completely remove the algorithms of the antichrists like Thiel and Musk. We can calm the turnings of the mind with tools that require no materialism whatsoever to deploy. 

All tools which we can access in this moment, as you close this essay. Simply feel the earth beneath your feet. Close your eyes. Take 3 deep breaths. Touch the unrelenting spinning of thoughts and just acknowledge that they exist. Take another breath and move on with your day. Rinse and repeat as you travel through your day, especially when the spinning of thoughts is too much to bear.

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And if you’d like to dive deeper into the intersections of emergent tech and society, please check out my podcast at The Human Layer.

I’m finally in a place where I can physically practice again after almost 2 years of physical healing, and I’m wondering where to start. I walked over to my daily coffee spot with my pup to just frolic with my favorite yoga textbook “The Inner Tradition of Yoga” by Michael Stone. I flipped it open to one of the chapters I’d highlighted every other word and started diving back into the kleshas and the yamas and all I could think of was, “how am I going to get my practice started again?”

Not 30 seconds later, a Tibetan Monk walked into the coffeeshop and sat next to me. That’s a rare occurrence. In fact,  I haven’t seen a monk since I left Naropa, a school steeped in Tibetan Buddhism. I believe the Universe is always sending us signals, some are subtle, others are giant billboards. This one is definitely a billboard of some sort. But what’s the message?

I was reading chapters about the stories we tell ourselves. As humans, we create stories that we run in our minds for a multitude of reasons. Stories to boost our self worth, stories to calm our fears of inadequacy, stories that explain our situations and allow us to process them or not internalize the reality of our now— stories we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night and navigate a cruel and punishing world. I’m a storyteller by profession and my ability to spin stories to help me navigate my own or society’s chaos is impressive.

The cruel reality of our now is that the stories we are surrounded by are intense and real— stories we can’t ignore. They are charged with the reality our country has chosen to  enact, a story of scarcity and existential fear—- by design. Societal situations devoid of safety nets or the ability to even make ends meet. The “cost of living” is too high for most and we’re just swimming through rivers of scarcity trying to make our way to the shore so we can breathe for a hot minute.

And on the other side of this narrative are the people, and I was one not too long ago, living in a false reality of bullshit jobs that cover that “cost of being alive” but leave us totally devoid of the ability to enjoy that life at all. Most are spending their days in meetings about meetings, to send emails about one-pagers, to send those one-pagers up the chain of command to never be read, but to make an entire chain of humans feel relevant and necessary. We know these jobs are mostly bullshit, but they pay us the multi-six figure salaries we need to rent 2 bedroom apartments, cover skyrocketing utility bills and buy basic groceries in small town America.

And there are narratives of all spectrums in between those two realities. When I step back and look at these stories, I know there’s a more beautiful narrative waiting in the shadows for me— and us — to embrace. This isn’t about “being positive” or “making my own reality”, all modern spiritual tropes designed to justify bypassing the full spectrum of being human right now, in 2025. I don’t want to bypass these stories of the real that I am seeing and feeling  because I have a connection to the collective humanity of it all. But I do know that these stories are also weighing on my mind and heart in a way that is not always positive or even necessary.

How do we hold the space for the multitude of stories to exist and not bypass the real staring us in the face? How do we release the tamas enough to let the sad stories exist but not drown in their sorrow? How do we elevate the stories that warm our hearts and embrace them as our own while still allowing the sad story the space it needs to exist?

How do we walk through a world filled with suffering, where many can not afford that cost of life, and still be whole enough to do good in the world? The mud must exist for the lotus to surface. I know this. I’ve lived this and try to embody this in my darkest moments. But what happens when the darkness dominates? When the reminders of the high cost of life are everywhere and in everything?

How do we maintain our practice in the face of so much suffering? How do we keep our heart open in the reality of so much evil? How do we help lift others up when we can barely scrape ourselves off the floor after a night of trying to do the math of living where the equations all land in the negative? How do we allow our joy to co-exist with our fear in times like this?

I guess these are all questions with unclear answers. I guess these are questions to explore on the mat, on the cushion, in community and in those quiet moments where the absence of a distraction allows the mind to wander into the depths of questioning our existence and role in the chaos of now.

What I do know is that our stories are just that— stories. We can place them on a shelf and walk away from them when we’re ready. That doesn’t mean our reality instantly changes, but we can release the narratives that guide us and write new ones. That act of releasing them IS the practice.

And I guess maybe that’s the answer to my question at the start of this essay. The practice starts by acknowledging the reality we’re in and releasing the story that fuels it so we can write a fresh narrative to navigate the chaos.

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I rarely pay attention to holidays. For my early working years, I was employed in leisure industries that usually required working holidays. Labor Day was the goal on those insane summers of sea kayaking and bartending. Memorial Day meant, “buckle up buttercups, here come the tour-ons” and Labor Day meant, “you made it, now you can breath again and see your friends”. This weekend was also the last big money push before all the corporate folks returned to their daily grinds and most of us service industry workers took a few months off and wandered to the Rockies for the winter version of our summer toils.

For my 30s, I was mostly self employed, so holidays were a chance to enjoy a quiet inbox and not feel guilty for ignoring client requests for a day or two. In fact, weekends and late nights were my favorite time to work because I knew everyone else was unplugged and not working. Same with holidays. I enjoy the solitude of working while the rest of the world sleeps.

For the past few years, holidays were simply something I forgot about in the chaos of corporate America and was a chance to sit and read a book without guilt or panic that a Slack notification would be haunting me throughout the day. And the dread of logging into said Slack in the waning hours of the holiday to gauge just how much of a shitshow I was facing in the morning was my closure of a holiday. That’s no way to live and I’m grateful to at least not have that albatross hanging over my holidays now.

But 2025 Labor Day?

This shit just hits different. It hits hard. Everything this year does. But this one is particularly painful. Like the allergic skin rash on my hand that feels like I’m petting a porcupine everytime it touches a surface. Because here’s the cold hard truth, the labor market is totally broken. And my demographic, highly experienced tech leader in their late 40s/early 50s, has been all but removed from the labor market.

Fired because an algorithm indicated that this demographic is now too costly for a market seeking never-ending profit for shareholders and blocked from getting hired by algorithms catering to younger, less expensive workers.

To kick off my weekend, I got a very interesting, but suspicious DM on LinkedIn for an app that I use regularly seeking a CMO. I’m normally cautious for such messages, but this one was very detailed and the social engineering was tight. I gave a quick reply on Friday to send along details, but I didn’t think much of it. Sunday evening, the details arrived and they were solid enough to peak my interest. Solid enough for me to allow an evening of pros and cons for pursuing something like this, all the while knowing the odds that it was fake were still high. Come early Labor Day morning, I went to the DM to send a resume and give a final phishing test and the messages were gone. So was the profile for this “Chief of Staff” who’d gone as far to list a business degree from my Alma mater in his profile.

The only thing I lost was that little seed of hope that I’d allow to sprout from the soil I’ve been trying to compost and heal.

This hacker had done his homework, knew exactly what emotions to play on for someone in my demographic, knew the skills I’d be looking to emphasize for a role like this and knew that such a role was the next evolution for a career path like mine. I dodged a bullet, but I was brought into crypto by hackers who trained me on how to socially engineer someone— and I still allowed myself to believe this bullshit for a short, hopeful span of time.

Now imagine the people who don’t have my background, but do have the desperation of being squeezed out of the labor market. There are millions of us now, floating through social networks seeking a hint of a lead from our network, or a mysteriously perfect “I’m hiring” post from someone looking for a new hire. And of those millions, how many were trained on social engineering scams? Only a tiny handful would know to be cautious. And in the age of AI enabling hacking at scale, you can bet many people fell for this hack or one just like it.

But here’s the thing that’s not really showing up in the (obviously manipulated) labor market metrics, polls or opinion think pieces— every person like me, navigating this absolute dumpster fire on all fronts— is losing hope.

Hope is the one metric that doesn’t show up on any statistic being gathered by the remaining data scientists that track labor. When you go through multiple and devastating hope and loss cycles for months, sometimes years, fighting to prove that your value is still strong and your purpose is still relevant leaves you exhausted. Squandering your remaining glimmers of hope on the obvious social engineering message in your DMs hoping maybe you’re just paranoid.

Depleting your professional prowess on 4-5 rounds of interviews only to be used as leverage by young assholes with God-like money thrown at them by VCs devoid of ethics. Wasting precious hours submitting waves of job applications to ghost job listings left on LinkedIn to make a company look good to its investors or its existing employees— “company must be crushing it if we’re hiring for these positions”.

The devastating truth that many of us are realizing, in real time, is that we no longer belong in this market at all. Maybe we were never meant to be here in the first place (that’s definitely me). Maybe our gifts are meant to live outside of late stage capitalism, tapping into systems of extraction just long enough to make money to cover the essentials for a hot second. Then we exit. Or we’re forced out and we never re-enter.

Because at some point, there’s simply no more hope left to give a market that clearly cares not one ounce for your humanity. There’s no more emotion left for the soulless frameworks of extraction that we’ve been forced to enter in order to “survive”. At some point, the anxiety of not having employer health insurance or a social safety net becomes something you learn to live with and that anxiety is easier to accept as a daily companion than the hope and despair cycle of trying to remain in a labor market that wants to destroy you.

So, for Labor Day, I sit here trying to process the inhumanity of it all. And I turn to my own production studio, that I built with my own two hands this year because, well, I needed to build something. I can see what’s surfacing with my studio and where it’s going to take me.

I can see where rage quitting my industry is about to happen. I can see where rage quitting this labor market and this hellscape version of late stage capitalism is also about to happen. I can see where the two major projects my studio has built this year — The Human Layer podcast and The Bridge Collective community will help others just like me navigate this fucking shitshow. I can see where my executive level skills— the one that hacker was leveraging against my better judgement— will serve many as a fractional CMO.

I can see it now. It’s already live, I’ve already built it. I’m already working with amazing clients as their strategic comms person. Our podcast is already making a name for itself. I can see it now very clearly, because the fog of false hope for what was has dissipated and the rage of this reality is fueling a new type of hope. A hope that is only possible when the devastating reality that you’re living in is staring you right in the face. And there’s no other option but to walk right into that fucking shitstorm and build your own life raft out.

And make sure it’s big enough to bring others along with you. That’s how we survive this hellscape. Together. Powered by a hope spawned out of rage.

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The nurturers who hand you a jar of home-cooked healing nutrients when your pantry is empty and your paycheck is a week away. The person you can rip off all filters and get real AF on the fly and say what needs to be said to lift the weighted blanket of paralysis off your soul. Your people.

In times of accelerated change, we need our people and we need them consistently. It takes a village and we must remember that in times of turmoil, filled with situations that call into question our very ability to exist on this planet with our humanity intact. And the answer is beyond our control.

Over coffee today, my YTT soul sister and I went through updates on the chaos we’re both navigating in our personal lives. Long, deep conversations with tears and goosebumps, unraveling the threads of emotions wound around our hearts during this transition period. Our worlds are wildly different, polar opposites almost, except for one thing. Yoga.

Our hearts were cracked open during our training and the chord of connection strengthened in the containers our teachers held for us. I watched her enter our shared learning space a different woman. Beautiful. Confident. Reserved. Holding just enough uncertainty to have a hint of “”fish out of water” vibe. Within six months, she entered the classroom and a beautiful unwinding in real time could be seen. And shared. We were all unwinding the lessons and the traumas we’d accumulated up to that point. And a collective unraveling is beyond beautiful to witness.

Naropa University isn’t a place you enter lightly. It may be easy to be admitted to the school, but the price to stay is high. And has nothing to do with money. Deep spiritual training will crack your heart and soul wide ass open-- whether you want it to or not. And never in the way you envisioned or dreamed of.

In spaces of deep spiritual training, there’s an unspoken culture of holding space to explore the deepest aspects of our existence on this planet. Not bypassing. Not deflecting. Not worshipping. Just a deep excavation of the life you’ve lived up to that point— an uncovering done in community. Powerful composting of all of our truths, our lies, our fears, our pain and our hopes-- the power of composting on such a level enables transformation in ways you can never imagine before that type of education begins.

This has nothing to do with exams and essays. This is the learning of our elders, passed down and improved upon for seven generations past, and seven generations forward. We studied Non Dual Śaiva Tantra together and from a lineage brought to our school by Ram Dass. We ripped open all the wounds and all the scars and poured our blood on the sacred grounds of our ancestors.

We drew a line in the sand with our blood. A line that declares, “this generational trauma stops with me”.

Knowing that you are opening up the festering wounds from decades of compounding trauma and willingly reliving the pain in order to prevent the next generation from the same degree of suffering is an intensity that’s hard to quantify. And when you travel that canyon of darkness together, you create the bonds of friendship from a strength that does not tear easily, if at all.

While we were speedrunning our “this is what happened the last month” stories, we landed in a conversation of expansion and contraction. Spanda. I have forgotten so many powerful concepts from my YTT days since I entered tech full time. I’m beginning to reconnect with them through my own composting period as I exit tech and a collapsing labor market right now.

Spanda means “the divine pulsation of interlaced movements of expansion and contraction, the beat of the drum sets the tone for all that follows.” Illuminated Tantra by C. Wallis

When we crack open our hearts and lay bare all that we are in a situation or to another human, we thrive for a while in a place where anything is possible. A liminal space. A place where time and location are suspended and we seem to exist in this dreamland that rests close to the Divine. We can feel it, maybe even smell it, but we know it’s not our place to dwell for long, yet.

Inevitably, gravity pulls us back to Earth and our consciousness hits the material plane again. We have bills to pay, people to help, meetings to attend and the chaos of our now causes us to contract. Our consciousness shifts from wide and endless to narrow and real. We touch a sadness when we realize the suffering still exists and is jabbing us in the ribs just to remind us that we’re human.

• Will we touch the Divine again soon?

• Will we have done enough work to move past our egos to not block that Divine goodness in the future?

• How long will we stay in this corner of contraction, fearing things that may or may not exist beyond our own mental story loops?

If we look at the definition of spanda, the divine exists in both the expansion and the contraction, a duality that needs both elements to function properly. If we work with our nervous systems enough to guide and support it through this divine duality, our own spanda drums will lay a rhythm that empowers us to move fluidly between both states and not attach ourselves to the outcomes or promises of either.

And when we contract, are we able to acknowledge the wounded child hiding in the corner, frozen in fear from the specters of the past and just needing a minute to breath? Are we able to give that child the space it needs to feel secure again? Do we know our nervous systems well enough to give it the space to hold that scared child and also the regulation necessary to be the adult that child needed years ago?

None of these questions are easy. None of this work is easy. None of this practice is predictable. But holding the space for these emotions to exist, to expand with the beauty of our love and contract with the fear of our existence are non-negotiables for our today.

We are living through a time in history where the spiritual practice you embrace-- ANY denomination or belief system grounded in ancient wisdom-- will be the most necessary element for our collective survival. We were not meant to live in isolation, separation and perpetual contraction.

We are meant to co-exist, to travel through this world in community and with our cohorts so we can embrace our spanda together. And so we can watch in absolute amazement at the beauty of our ability to expand and contract as one.

Spoiler alert…this is just a sliver of some of the topics we’ll explore in the Bridge Collective.

Join the Bridge Collective

If any of this resonates, I invite you to join The Bridge Collective. For the next 2 weeks, I’ll keep the Commons (the free section of the community) totally open for anyone wishing to join. Once the Genesis Cohort launches, mid September, the Commons will be invite only (still free, just invitations from existing members and yours truly).

The Commons is designed to help people connect with ideas and one another around the concepts of building exit bridges to extractive systems— toxic jobs, bosses, industries, etc. We mindfully and consciously build our exit ramps now, BEFORE we need them.

The Genesis Cohort is a 1-1 + group coaching container where people with ideas for exiting (side hustles, yoga followings, existing businesses, etc) who have already partially brought them to life (or just KNOW what they want and are ready to build) can work with yours truly, a strategic communications and community building expert, and their fellow cohort members to build the bridge to tomorrow. Together. In community. With sustainability and resilience baked into the foundation.

Please hop into the Commons now and send me a message that you found the container from Substack. ;) And share this with your own fav humans who also need to build exit bridges to a simpler tomorrow.

Keep the muse flowing and fully caffeinated. By clicking below, we can keep the gift economy in motion and avoid the broligarch’s coffers.

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I stumbled onto the book titled The Good Life Lab back in 2014-ish, a time where I was actively building my website business because I left the toxicity of television production work but well entrenched in my “Left Hand Path” of avoiding most of the adulting activities of my peers. I’d survived the housing collapse a few years earlier by the skin of my teeth— watched my fledgling production studio collapse in real time as my entire slate of clients in the tourism and real estate businesses in Myrtle Beach evaporated with Lehman Brothers. I’d rolled into a wild ass relationship and abandoned my vagabond ways to please a man. I chose that relationship over moving to Paris to be an expat navigating life as a blogger and artist. I chose poorly. So, while building my website business, I decided to always keep this offgrid, “living off” approach to whatever life I was building through this web business. 

Graphic From The Good Life Lab

The book leapt off the shelf with its beautiful cover art. The author is a graphic designer, so, well played. But the content hit home, fast. Small chapters dedicated to the author and her partner’s journey in leaving corporate jobs in NYC to build an off-grid, decommodified life in the waste stream in a tiny town in New Mexico.

I’ve been unable to really engage with the book the past couple years, since graduating from Naropa with a yoga degree (the most decommodified degree ever) and entered corporate tech at the leadership leveled (the most commodified role ever). I knew I was far from my heart on this one, but I had chosen a path to walk for 5 years. That was my goal. Five years in corporate crypto tech to build communities for devs in the Global South to create impact (that’s the narrative I embraced to justify the sacrifice) and to make my nut. I needed to make some adult-ass money on a consistent basis for the adult things I’d ignored to that point in life: having health care (because hello mid-life), investing in crypto like a proper degen (because I like the drama of it all) and build a home that could be a simple little nest in a tornado of societal chaos. 

My assumption, which I now look back with embarrassment at my naïveté, was that if I did my job exceptionally well and became a linchpin in the workplace, I would be rewarded by remaining employed and well paid. How fucking wrong was I??? I was playing a game that didn’t exist. I assumed that there was some humanity in the corporate structure. I won internal awards and peer nominations. I was told my the csuite that the company loved my initiatives. I was told by the chief human resources demon to outlast my boss, who had quiet quit her way to an exit. I got this.

Spoiler alert, there was zero humanity. I chose poorly.

The system itself was designed to squeeze the humanity out of its workers until they are compliant little sycophants who do what the “fearless leader” (a leader usually harboring multiple degrees of narcissistic personality disorder and administering trauma to her employees like a Pez Dispenser) says no matter what. I’d read about this, knew it was the case and lied to myself just long enough to became one of the pawns in this game of inhumanity. 

And then I stayed in the game for 6 more months, at the next “job” which very quickly became a recreation of Lord of the Flies. FFS.

Now, ten months into my “fun employment” journey in a collapsed economy spiraling towards depression, I’m returning to several of the more beautiful aspects of my past to resurrect for my own exit bridge. I opened up The Good Life Lab this morning after a day of chatting with a dear old friend about finally going offgrid. I spent yesterday evaluating my current life, rebuilding my path to a decommodified lifestyle and what I can walk away from to go offgrid— and still be of service in the ways I am gifted and wish to help others. 

Graphic From The Good Life Lab

Coaching people through building an exit strategy. Writing about modernity and its impacts on us all. Producing a podcast about the intersections of emergent tech and society. Selling crystals and lapidary art through a tiny e-commerce store, just cause I love rocks and energy healing.

A flywheel of micro businesses that will allow me to no longer sacrifice the best parts of myself to participate in a system that is designed to squeeze the humanity out of me. And you.

I refuse to let that happen anymore. The price is too great, the sacrifices too many.

We will carve our own pathway through the chaos and we’ll lead our communities down the paths we create so whoever wishes to embrace a different, decommodified and simple life can do so— even during late stage capitalism. Especially so.

Join the Bridge Collective

If any of this resonates, I invite you to join The Bridge Collective. For the next 2 weeks, I’ll keep the Commons (the free section of the community) totally open for anyone wishing to join. Once the Genesis Cohort launches, mid September, the Commons will be invite only (still free, just invitations from existing members and yours truly).

The Commons is designed to help people connect with ideas and one another around the concepts of building exit bridges to extractive systems— toxic jobs, bosses, industries, etc. We mindfully and consciously build our exit ramps now, BEFORE we need them.

The Genesis Cohort is a 1-1 + group coaching container where people with ideas for exiting (side hustles, yoga followings, existing businesses, etc) who have already partially brought them to life (or just KNOW what they want and are ready to build) can work with yours truly, a strategic communications and community building expert, and their fellow cohort members to build the bridge to tomorrow. Together. In community. With sustainability and resilience baked into the foundation.

Please hop into the Commons now and send me a message that you found the container from Substack. ;) And share this with your own fav humans who also need to build exit bridges to a simpler tomorrow.

• How do we exit systems of extraction with consciousness and intention?

• How do we stop participating in this destructive economic system we’re being forced to navigate without burning everything we love and value down in the process?

• How do we do all of this as a community, in a collective container so the overwhelming emotions of leaving don’t drown us in depression and isolation? 

• How do we build a bridge to the better tomorrow we know in our hearts is possible?

• And how do we do all of this before it’s too late and the powers of extraction and greed remove the ability to build those bridges? 

I’ve been asking myself these questions for years and been on a quest of sorts to find something resembling answers. One a journalist, always a journalist I guess. I’ve spent many years building a robust and expansive skillset to navigate ALL avenues of exit:

• mission-driven business models

• organic comms and marketing to support side hustles and passion businesses

• alternative economic systems

• decentralized community building

• conscious leadership

• nervous system regulation

• privacy and data security

• alternative/decentralized social networking

• brand narrative storytelling

• business coaching for mission-driven businesses

• tokenomics and advanced blockchain systems

• alternative finance, defi and cryptocurrencies 

• hyperlocal movements for resiliency in collapse

And so much more.

I’ve avoided most societal systems for a majority of my adult life, tapping into economic and production systems when necessary to support the work I’m passionate about. I’ve produced documentary photography projects abroad, produced television commercials domestically, helped healers reach their customers through complex communications strategies and built global communities for experienced blockchain devs and obtained advanced degrees in Yoga and religion.

I’ve gathered lifetimes of knowledge through academics, experience, and insatiable curiosity. And I now find myself at my own crossroads of exiting. “Aged out” of an obscure tech industry run mostly by petulant manchildren and too experienced for most hiring directors in their mid 30s and well, if I’m honest, I’m not an ideal employee.

I was never meant to be an employee. I entered the w2 world at the director level for the first time in my professional career at age 46 and it was the wildest, most toxic experience I could ever imagine. And I’d just completed 1000 hours of academic studies in yoga, which is basically “how do I regulate my nervous system under duress”.

Spoiler alert, they can’t. And that’s why we have such devastation happening now across the country. We all know these systems we’ve played— by economic force or by choice— are destroying our bodies, our minds, our families and our futures. Yet, we must play them if we do not have exit strategies in place. 

A conscious exit strategy can take many shapes and forms. 

• Teaching yoga at your community studios, sharing your embodied wisdom with your local community

• Creating watercolor paintings of elaborate and fantastical characters and selling prints in a simple square shop and supporting the creation process through a SubStack

• Running leadership workshops that help women in their early professional careers navigate the toxicity leadership situations they find themselves trapped within.

• Conducting advanced systems design workshops for non-profits, channels decades of earned wisdom into 3 hours of priceless insights for essential workers.

• Launching a writing workshop community to support the writing of your first novel. 

• Transforming your love of herbology into a craft business that supports your passion and serves your community on a hyperlocal level at farmer’s markets and festivals. 

The possibilities are endless. And right now, at this moment in time, most of society is eyeing the exit sign because we can feel in our guts and our hearts that the systems we’re being forced to participate in are killing us slowly.

Each back to back zoom meeting marathon, each late payment on the electric bill, each phone call from the credit card company wondering where TF your money is, each ghosted job application or hint at a layoff — each and every indicator that the systems of our society is failing us is also an indicator that another path must be built. 

We must build the bridges to a conscious exit now. At speed. In community. Not tomorrow— today.

I started organizing with a loose coalition of builders out of Latam this summer for a developer activation in Buenos Aires later this year. These builders are regenerative and nomadic, by design and for good reason. The core of this group always rolls into our meetings with energy, smiles and wisdom. One of the reasons I chose to tackle this type of community organizing and am a leader in the Ethereum Localism movement is that I want to ensure our technology makes its way into the hands of local orgs and businesses before it’s too late. And to avoid appropriation and imposing programming from the West onto the Global South, as I’ve seen repeatedly in my time as a community organizer in tech.

We’re not here to impose Western programming and infrastructure on anyone, we’re here to listen, learn and build. When I began researching for this Argentinian activation, it dawned on me that many of the communities throughout Latam are much further ahead than the West on crypto adoption for a very real reason.

As multiple national currencies hit hyperinflation throughout latam and their economies collapsed or transitioned under various leaders, including authoritarian rule, adoption for survival was not optional. Currencies developed atop of blockchains were created for this reason. The belief is literally coded into the genesis block of Bitcoin. An immutable declaration that alternative currencies must exist to protect people from the actions of centralized forces like banks, governments and dictators.

Our industry has a narrative issue— always have and probably always will. And yes, the earliest and perhaps still the strongest use cases for crypto are gambling, laundering and dark web shopping. Also the early use cases for the internet and the dollar is still one of the most prolific laundering tools around. But at the end of the day, alternative currencies, and the blockchains that power them, play a vital role in our ability to navigate economic collapse.

On today’s call, I was chatting with my Latam colleagues about not going offgrid fast enough and that finding jobs/clients right now (to be able to actually travel to BA for our event) might not happen in time. It was wild to make that statement. I waited too long to go offgrid and secure my own well being in the face of economic and societal collapse. And they already went through this situation as their countries transformed under various transfers of power and economic “transformations”.

The gravity of it all struck me during that call. Up until now, I always worked with global communities from the vantage point of western “stability”. I knew in my heart that such “stability” was a mirage, propped up on various false systems and valueless fiat, but I bypassed the reality that collapse was here, now. Or maybe I just didn’t want to see it, because, well, who the fuck wants to dwell on societal collapse for long? No one, not even me. Someone who spent decades studying political science, documenting post-conflict communities fighting for stability in economic collapse and as someone who works in an industry whose sole purpose is to create infrastructure for collapse and transition.

I can’t help but think of all the people in the West who never work with such technology or who never see global communities navigating various aspects of being “unbanked” or on different spectrums of authoritarian rule.

So many Americans are wildly unprepared for hyperinflation, economic collapse and authoritarian rule. And well, it’s not on the horizon…it’s here. Staring us down and haunting our every move and every thought of a possible tomorrow. I have people DMing me all the time asking about crypto, how to get started, how to organize their communities using decentralized networking, how to prepare their loved ones for the reality of now.

I wish I had more answers for them, because honestly, if you’re not already integrating decentralization and alternative economic modalities into your financial and community resiliency plans, you’re already radically behind. Our tech has a steep learning curve (though it is getting better) and the builders in our ecosystem tend not to make the tech frictionless. I get it, privacy and the promise of decentralization should not be sacrificed for ease of use. But at the same time, we need more people to onboard at scale. And fast.

I’m a founding member of a beautiful and small DAO of journalists who’ve been working for almost 5 years to onboard the media industry into decentralized tech. And we’ve been largely ignored. As our founder said a few years ago, “it’s like trying to save the world from the basement of a casino”. I’ve talked about our tech for over a decade with any and everyone who will listen and I’d guesstimate 15% of the people I’ve talked with have actually learned how to use crypto. And it wasn’t easy for them, but they kept with it and now feel somewhat safer at this time of accelerated collapse.

But I fear that the masses will scramble to use our tech at the last minute when dollars go the way of hyperinflation and we need 1000 greenbacks to buy a pizza. We’re not far from learning the hard way why decentralization and alternative economics matters.

And if nothing else, I’m grateful for the constant reminder that the work I do in these global communities matters. I’m also grateful to work with builders who’ve already gone through their own versions of societal collapse in their countries and have a frame of reference that is not hypothetical, but real. Lived, embodied experiences that they are able to share with western builders and extend a bridge to us.

The reality we’re barreling towards here in America is dark and destructive. Knowing that others have stared down the same centralized demons and made it out on the other side with more resiliency gives me hope. And the fact that they did it in community inspires me to keep going.