WHY THIS QUESTION GOT STUCK WITH ME

I’ve noticed something about myself.

I’m really good in a crisis.

I’m not necessarily calm, but I am focused. Once something becomes urgent, I move faster, make decisions quicker, stop overthinking, and all the little bullshit my brain normally throws in front of me suddenly disappears.

There’s no more I’ll do it later, or let me get a drink first, or sitting there thinking about doing something while somehow still not doing it.

It has to get done, so I get it done.

The problem is that sometimes I don’t really move until the problem gets big enough that I have no choice.

I’ve lost money because I waited too long on things. I’ve forgotten things, missed opportunities, and left a bunch of shit unfinished that probably would have made my life better if I had just gotten to it sooner.

And yet, when the consequences finally get big enough, there he is.

The version of me I know works.

That got me thinking about a bigger question.

THE QUESTION

Which parts of me were built for a life I’m no longer living?

And if some of those parts are still useful, how do I keep what they give me without continuing to pay what they cost me?

MY FIRST ANSWER

My first thought was that crisis mode had to be some leftover survival behavior.

I’ve lived through addiction. When I had a dependency on opiates, consequences could be immediate. There were problems you didn’t casually put off until tomorrow.

So I wondered whether years of living that way had trained me to function best when everything felt drastic.

But almost immediately, that explanation felt too easy.

Because I think my brain worked this way before addiction too.

If I’m fascinated by something, I can disappear down a rabbit hole for hours. I don’t need somebody standing over me, I don’t need a deadline, and I definitely don’t need discipline. The interest itself pulls me in.

But give me something I don’t want to do and my brain starts negotiating.

I’ll do it later.

Go to the bathroom first.

Get some water.

I can literally sit there thinking about doing something while somehow still not doing it.

There is research linking ADHD symptoms, especially inattention, with procrastination, which at least told me I wasn’t completely inventing that connection.

But that still didn’t explain what addiction might have done to it.

Maybe addiction didn’t create that part of me. Maybe it reinforced something that was already there and taught my brain that crisis was a very reliable way to get me moving.

WHERE IT GOT COMPLICATED

Because here’s the problem:

I don’t actually want to get rid of the version of me that shows up in a crisis.

I want his focus, decisiveness, speed, ability to ignore distractions, and that confidence that somehow, some fucking way, we’re going to figure it out.

I just don’t want to need the emergency to summon him.

Then I started looking at another part of myself.

Overthinking.

That one is even harder to call a flaw because it has genuinely helped me. I notice problems other people might miss, look at things from different angles, anticipate what could go wrong, think deeply about people and why they behave the way they do, and connect ideas that I might otherwise never put together.

I love rabbit holes.

I don’t want to lose any of that.

The problem starts when thinking stops producing anything new and keeps going anyway.

I start trying to predict what somebody else is thinking, solving problems that haven’t happened, replaying decisions, preparing for every possible outcome, and trying to squeeze certainty out of situations that simply don’t contain any yet.

There’s also research linking difficulty tolerating uncertainty with worry and repetitive thinking, and that one made immediate sense to me.

Because sometimes I’m not thinking because there’s more to figure out.

I’m thinking because I’m uncomfortable not knowing.

And my overthinking has helped me before.

I just think I pay too much for the help.

So I’ve been trying to ask myself one very simple question:

Is there actually something I can do about this right now?

If there is, do it.

If there isn’t, another three hours inside my head probably isn’t going to make me more prepared.

TURNING THE QUESTION BACK ON MYSELF

Then there’s my independence.

I’ve always been independent, but addiction probably strengthened that, and relationships probably did too.

Somewhere along the way, I can take care of myself sometimes became it’s easier if I just do everything myself.

Because if somebody else screws it up, guess who usually gets to clean it up?

Me.

So I take on too much, have trouble delegating, check on people even after I’ve decided I trust them, and sometimes burn myself out carrying shit that technically didn’t need to be mine.

I don’t want to become less independent. I want to keep the resourcefulness, the standards, and the knowledge that if everything goes sideways, I can take care of myself.

I just don’t want being capable to keep meaning I have to carry everything myself.

Maybe learning to hand something over completely would feel like losing a little independence at first. But maybe being independent doesn’t have to mean proving I can do everything by myself.

And then I got to the one that probably made me the most uncomfortable.

Proving myself.

There were years when I knew I was fucking up badly in certain parts of my life.

I knew it.

And I think there was some part of me keeping score. If I was fucking up badly over here, then maybe being good at something over there made me feel a little less fucked up overall.

I think I was always looking for something I could still be good at, something that gave me evidence that not every part of me was falling apart.

I still seek approval today. When someone likes something I wrote, tells me I helped them, or tells me I did something well, I know exactly what I’m getting from it.

Validation.

And that leaves me with a question I don’t really know how to answer:

How long do I have to keep proving that I’m not the person I used to be?

WHERE I LANDED

I started this thinking I might discover a bunch of damaged parts of myself that needed to be removed.

I don’t think that anymore.

Crisis mode gives me focus. Overthinking gives me depth. Independence made me capable. Even proving myself probably pushed me to build parts of my life when I desperately needed evidence that I still could.

Maybe the problem isn’t the parts themselves. Maybe some of them are just still doing jobs they were given a long time ago.

I want the focus without needing the fire, the depth without getting trapped inside my own head, and the independence without believing that being capable means carrying everything alone.

And maybe one day I won’t need quite as much outside confirmation that the person I am today is different from the person I used to be.

So I’m still left with the original question:

Which parts of me were built for a life I’m no longer living?

But now there’s another question underneath it:

What if I don’t need to get rid of those parts at all?

What if I just need to give them a new job?

YOUR TURN

What part of you once helped you survive, succeed, or get through something difficult, but may be costing you now?

And if you could keep what it gave you without continuing to pay what it costs you...

what would you keep?

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If this question gave you something to think about, I’d really like to hear your answer. What part of you are you still carrying from a life you no longer live—and what would you keep if you could finally give that part a different job?

Leave your answer in the comments. And if Thoughtful Questions has given you something worth carrying with you, consider subscribing, sharing it with someone who might need this question, or buying me a coffee. It helps me keep doing exactly this—asking questions I don’t already know the answers to.

ADDITIONAL READING

Rossella Suriano — A Systematic Review on the Association Between ADHD and Procrastination

Ivo Marx et al. — The Impact of Financial Reward Contingencies on Cognitive Function Profiles in Adult ADHD

Keunyoung Yook et al. — Intolerance of Uncertainty, Worry, and Rumination in Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Thoughtful Questions isn’t really about finding the answer. It’s about asking the question long enough that your first answer stops being enough.

Why This Question Got Stuck With Me

I’m completely over my ex-wife.

I don’t want her back. I don’t wonder what she’s doing, and I don’t spend much time thinking about her anymore.

I still regret the relationship.

For a long time, I probably would have thought those two things contradicted each other. If you’re really over something, aren’t you supposed to reach some point where you look back and it doesn’t bother you anymore?

I don’t think that’s how it works.

When I look back at that marriage now, what bothers me isn’t that I lost her. What bothers me is how long I stayed after I had already started questioning whether I should be there.

I came into the relationship with roughly $100,000 after selling a property. I put that money into building a life with somebody I intended to stay married to. We also built a business together, and she owned half of it.

I want to clear something up about the business because it matters to the story. The business wasn’t failing. We were the business. We were the people doing the work, and when the marriage came apart, there really wasn’t a practical way for that business to continue the same way. So ending the marriage didn’t just mean admitting that the money I had already invested was gone. It also meant giving up something that was still functioning.

Those are two different kinds of loss.

There was also a point in the marriage when I realized we weren’t looking at partnership the same way.

We were arguing about money when she told me that where she was from, a man was expected to pay for everything and the woman didn’t necessarily have to contribute financially.

I understood that we could have different expectations about marriage, but I also knew that wasn’t the marriage I wanted.

I didn’t mind helping my wife. I didn’t mind helping support a family. What I didn’t want was to feel like my role was simply to provide while somebody else’s contribution was optional.

I wanted to feel like we were a team, and increasingly I didn’t.

The problem is that I knew that before I finally left.

There were already questions in my head. Looking back now, I’m a pretty firm believer that once you start seriously asking yourself whether you should still be in a relationship, you need to pay very close attention to why you’re asking.

But I stayed.

The reason was pretty simple.

I had already put too much into it.

Not only money. Time. Effort. A marriage. A business. A future I had been trying to build.

As long as I stayed, there was still a possibility that all of that would eventually make sense. Maybe she would come around. Maybe we would start functioning like the team I kept hoping we could become. Maybe someday I would look backward and decide everything I had invested had been worth it.

Leaving meant accepting the possibility that it never would be.

The Question

Why is it so hard to let go of something that has already ended?

And maybe there is another question hiding underneath it:

If I already know something isn’t working, why does everything I’ve already put into it make walking away harder?

What I Thought Going In

My first answer was the money.

If I had walked into that marriage with nothing, I think leaving would have been easier. Instead, I had brought in roughly $100,000, put years into the relationship, built a business with her, and arranged my life around the assumption that we were building something together.

Walking away felt like turning all of that into a loss.

As long as I stayed, maybe it wasn’t lost yet. I could still tell myself we were working on something. I could still hope the relationship would change. I could still imagine some future version of us that would justify everything I had already put into getting there.

Then one day we got into another argument and something in me just snapped.

It wasn’t one of those beautiful moments of clarity where I sat down with a notebook, made a list of pros and cons, and calmly reached the correct decision.

It was more like: I can’t do this shit anymore.

By that point I didn’t like what the relationship had become. I didn’t like the way I felt inside it, and I didn’t like the way we treated each other. Whatever I had been waiting for the marriage to turn into, I finally stopped believing it was coming.

At that moment, staying another day became more expensive to me than whatever I was going to lose by leaving.

So I left.

What surprised me was that ending the marriage didn’t automatically end it in my head.

What I Went Looking For

Apparently, psychologists have a name for at least part of what I was doing.

The sunk cost effect.

The basic idea is simple. Once we’ve invested money, effort, or time into something, that previous investment can influence whether we keep going, even when the investment is already gone and continuing cannot bring it back.

The classic example is a terrible movie.

You pay for the ticket, sit through the first hour, and realize you hate it. You could leave and do something you enjoy, but instead you sit through another hour because you already paid.

The money is gone either way. Staying doesn’t recover it. You’re just adding an hour of your life to the price.

A marriage is obviously more complicated than a bad movie, but researchers have actually looked at the same effect in committed relationships.

Sara Rêgo, Joana Arantes, and Paula Magalhães tested whether previous investments affected people’s willingness to remain in an unhappy relationship. In one experiment involving 902 participants, previous investments of money and effort increased the likelihood that people would choose to stay. In a second experiment, people who were told they had already spent more time in the relationship were willing to invest still more time trying to continue it.

That sounded uncomfortably familiar.

There is also a much larger body of work called the Investment Model of Commitment. The important part for me wasn’t the terminology. It was the distinction it helped me see.

Satisfaction and commitment are not the same thing.

You can be heavily committed to something you are no longer particularly happy inside.

That makes sense when I look backward. Every new investment gave me another reason to protect all the previous ones.

I already put the money into this.

I already spent years here.

We already built the business.

I already fought this hard to make it work.

So what am I supposed to do, just walk away now?

The problem is that every time you answer that question with “not yet,” you have a little more invested the next time you ask it.

Where It Got Complicated

The research also stopped me from turning this into some cheap lesson about how everybody should leave the second a relationship becomes difficult.

That would be bullshit.

Relationships require investment. Marriage requires investment. Sometimes staying through a miserable period is exactly what eventually saves something worth saving.

And in my case, not everything I stood to lose was a sunk cost.

That distinction matters.

The money I had already spent was mostly gone whether I stayed or left. Continuing the marriage couldn’t magically put the $100,000 back into my bank account.

The business was different.

The business was functioning. Ending the marriage meant losing something that still had value because the two people operating it were splitting apart.

That was a real future consequence of leaving.

So when I look backward now and tell myself, “You should have gotten the hell out earlier,” I also have to be fair to the version of me who was standing inside the marriage.

He didn’t know exactly how the story ended.

He knew he was unhappy. He knew there were serious problems. He knew he was questioning whether this was really the life he wanted. But he could still imagine a version of the future where things changed.

Hope can make a bad investment look unfinished instead of lost.

There’s also research suggesting that relationships often begin deteriorating well before the day they officially end. A recent longitudinal analysis found a recognizable decline in relationship satisfaction before separation, with the sharper period of decline sometimes beginning months or even years before the actual breakup.

That does not mean having doubts automatically means you should leave. People have doubts. Couples fight. Good relationships can go through terrible periods.

But it did make me think differently about my own story.

The final argument wasn’t necessarily the moment the marriage became wrong for me.

It was the moment staying finally became harder than leaving.

Those are not the same thing.

Then It Was Over, Except It Wasn’t

Once I left, I didn’t want a friendship with my ex-wife. I didn’t want updates about her life. I wasn’t secretly hoping we would reconnect.

I wanted her gone from my life.

For a while, that was surprisingly difficult because pieces of the old life kept finding their way back into the new one.

Someone would call me to tell me something about her that I had absolutely no interest in knowing. Her child’s school still had my phone number attached to the account, so I would get calls about the kid not being at school. Random things I had nothing to do with anymore kept showing up and putting that relationship back in front of me.

None of those things was particularly important by itself.

Together, they kept reopening the file.

I could go through most of a day without thinking about her and then, suddenly, something connected to that old life would show up again.

Research on autobiographical memory helped me understand why that can matter. We don’t only remember something because we consciously decide to sit down and think about it. Memories can appear involuntarily when something happening now overlaps with something from the past. A person, a place, a sound, a phone call, or something else in the environment can bring the memory back without you going looking for it.

That gave me a different way of thinking about the phrase “you need to let go.”

Sometimes you’re not refusing to let go of the past. Sometimes the past keeps finding ways to reintroduce itself.

I know that because once those reminders mostly stopped, my anger turned way down.

Now that I rarely hear anything connected to that part of my life, she barely occupies my mind.

That tells me the relationship wasn’t staying alive because some hidden part of me wanted it back.

It was being reactivated.

Once that stopped happening, it became much easier for the past to stay where it belonged.

Turning the Question Back on Myself

When most of the anger toward her faded, something else remained.

Regret.

And, if I’m being truthful, some embarrassment that I stayed as long as I did.

I was angry at her because I felt like the person I eventually experienced in the marriage was not the person I believed I had married.

But I was also angry at myself because I thought I should have recognized what was happening sooner.

That second part is probably harder for me.

Psychologists use the term counterfactual thinking for all the different versions of “if only” that our minds build around the past.

If only I had left earlier.

If only I had trusted myself.

If only I hadn’t put the money in.

If only I had recognized what I was seeing.

Research on regret suggests that regret often points us toward our own decisions. We mentally edit something we did and imagine how life might have turned out if we had chosen differently.

That sounds exactly like what I was doing.

I could be angry about the choices she made, but when I said, “I should have left sooner,” the finger was pointing at me.

I was taking the person I am now, putting him into an old situation, and asking why he wasn’t there five years earlier.

The obvious problem is that he didn’t exist yet.

The money still bothers me, but if I’m being truthful, the years bother me more.

I can make another $100,000.

I cannot make another five years.

And I don’t feel any need to turn that into one of those inspirational endings where I tell myself it was secretly worth everything because I learned some enormous lesson.

There were good times. I’m not going to pretend every minute was terrible.

But if somebody gave me the option to erase those years and get the money back, knowing everything I know now, I would take the deal.

I already knew I should trust myself.

I didn’t need that much time and money to learn it again.

Sometimes something costs more than whatever lesson you got from it.

I think we should be allowed to say that.

Maybe that’s another reason letting go becomes difficult. We want the past to justify what it cost us. If we can find a lesson big enough, maybe the loss stops feeling like a loss.

But sometimes the honest answer is simply that I wish I had done something differently.

Where I Stand Now

Here’s the strange part.

I’m over the marriage, and I still regret it.

Both are true.

For a long time, I probably thought letting go meant reaching some magical point where I could look backward and feel nothing. No anger. No regret. No embarrassment. Maybe even gratitude.

I don’t think that anymore.

Research on breakups and emotional recovery points toward a distinction that makes more sense to me now: acceptance does not require pretending that something was good. It doesn’t mean approving of what happened, forgetting it, or deciding you would make the same choices again.

For me, letting go turned out to mean something much less dramatic.

I can still regret what happened without letting that regret run my life.

I can say I think I made a mistake. I can wish I had left earlier. I can wish I had the money back, and I can absolutely wish I had those years back.

Then I can get on with today.

Maybe that’s what I had wrong about letting go.

We talk about it as though the goal is to somehow delete the past. I can’t delete five years of my life, and I can’t force those years to become something they weren’t.

They happened.

I made decisions then that I wouldn’t make now. I stayed longer than I now believe I should have. The business disappeared with the marriage. The money is gone. The time is gone.

Nothing I think today can change any of that.

The only thing still available to me is what I do with the part of my life that hasn’t happened yet.

So maybe letting go isn’t when the regret disappears.

Maybe letting go is when the regret stops deciding what happens next.

I still think I made a mistake.

I just don’t need to keep making it today.

Your Turn

Have you ever stayed in something because you had already put too much into it?

It doesn’t have to be a marriage. It could be a career, a business, a friendship, a belief, or almost anything else.

When it finally ended, what were you actually having trouble letting go of?

Was it the person or the thing itself? Was it the money? The years? The future you thought you were building? Or was it the version of yourself you wish had made a different decision?

I’m also curious about something else.

Do we always need to find a beautiful lesson in a bad experience before we’re allowed to move on?

Or can we occasionally say, “That cost me more than it gave me,” accept that we can’t change it, and still keep going?

I know where I land now.

I don’t need the past to have been worth it.

I just need to stop paying for it.

If Thoughtful Questions Makes You Think

Thoughtful Questions is where I take questions I can’t leave alone, start with what I honestly believe, look into the research, challenge my own assumptions, and see what survives.

Sometimes I end up pretty close to where I started.

Sometimes I don’t.

Buy Me A Coffee

If you enjoy these kinds of conversations and want to help me keep doing them, you can subscribe below. Paid subscriptions help support the time that goes into researching, writing, and keeping this series going.

And whether you subscribe or not, I still want to hear your answer.

The point of Thoughtful Questions isn’t for me to have the last word.

It’s to keep the question alive.

Additional Reading

Sara Rêgo, Joana Arantes, and Paula Magalhães, “Is There a Sunk Cost Effect in Committed Relationships?”
Published in Current Psychology, Volume 37, pages 508–519. The study examines whether previous investments of money, effort, and time affect people’s willingness to stay in unhappy relationships. DOI: 10.1007/s12144-016-9529-9.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-016-9529-9

Peter Tran, Madeline Judge, and Yoshihisa Kashima, “Commitment in Relationships: An Updated Meta-analysis of the Investment Model.”
A large meta-analysis examining satisfaction, investment, alternatives, and commitment across romantic relationships.

Janina Larissa Bühler and Ulrich Orth, “Terminal Decline of Satisfaction in Romantic Relationships: Evidence From Four Longitudinal Studies.”
Research examining the decline in relationship satisfaction during the period leading up to separation.

Research on Involuntary Autobiographical Memory.
Work examining how ordinary cues in our current environment can bring personal memories into consciousness without deliberate attempts to remember them.

Marcel Zeelenberg and colleagues, research on regret and counterfactual thinking.
Research examining how regret differs from disappointment and why imagining different versions of our own past decisions can be part of regret.

David A. Sbarra, “Predicting the Onset of Emotional Recovery Following Nonmarital Relationship Dissolution.”
Research examining sadness, anger, acceptance, and emotional recovery after the end of romantic relationships.

AI writing gets talked about as though it is one thing.

It isn’t.

There is a pretty enormous difference between asking a machine to think for you and asking it to help you communicate something you already think.

But there is another side to that.

Even when AI starts as a useful tool, what happens if we become so dependent on it that we stop trusting our own ability to think, write, edit, or recognize our own voice?

That felt like the right question for a collaboration.

Mary Monroe Toukan and I both use AI.

We also both have ADHD and dyslexia.

But we came at this question from two different directions.

I tend to see AI as something that can remove obstacles between what is happening inside my head and my ability to put it into words.

Mary brought a different concern.

What if relying on it too much slowly interferes with something she fought very hard to find?

Her own voice.

So instead of trying to make our answers agree, we decided to put both of them here.

The Question

If the thoughts, experiences, and ideas are yours, how much help can you use from AI to organize, spell, edit, and express them before the writing stops being yours?

Mary Monroe Toukan

Mary came at this question from a place I did not expect.

She spent a large part of her life relying on another person to help complete thoughts, interpret things, and shape how she understood the world around her.

After that relationship ended, part of rebuilding herself meant learning what her own thoughts sounded like.

Learning to trust them.

Learning to stop second-guessing them.

That makes her relationship with AI complicated in a way that goes beyond whether the technology is useful.

For Mary, there is something worth protecting.

And I think the best way to explain that is to let her do it herself.

Mary’s Answer

In the spirit of testing myself on the dependencies of leaning on Ai, I had to dig deeper into a place of finding my voice and not second guess my own train of thought or ability to edit my own statements.

When I first started to use the Ai, it became a fascination and a testing ground to see the possibilities of what can out of using it.

I am a bottom-line sort of thinker, it’s how I process files of information inside my brain. I also am dyslexic, and have ADD. I was also married to someone and spent most of my life with that person who was 11 years older than me when I met him at age 15. He’s Lebanese and college educated and studied philosophy and civil engineer. We met at a friend’s house one night, and were inseparable for the next almost three decades of which consisted of moving out of state, and raising four kids, and at some point, a marriage I thought would never fail, -did.

The growth that came out of that was me learning to trust my own patterns of thinking and instincts and stop depending on him to finish my thoughts and processes. All my life I viewed life through the lens of his camera. I didn’t realize that all throughout my marriage. It wasn’t until my attorney said “Your so brainwashed, you don’t even realize how brainwashed you are”.

That was when I understood something. I leaned on his words and ideas as if they were mine. I thought they were, but once I was divorced, I HAD to find my own opinions and ideas and discover who I was for the first time in my 40’s.

I suppose my worry of using Ai on EVERYTHING, worries me that I will lose what I have worked so hard to find. My own originality. Trusting myself and my abilities and sounding like everyone else’s voice and losing my flavor.

I think Ai creators have built into its platform bots the need for them to make us do our own thinking as Chat GPT has even told me outright once or twice- I’m not writing this for you, but I will help you. Maybe it’s just my settings but I think it’s also a moral responsibility to create assisted technology as a form of help, not to be a short cut for us to use our God given ability to think and create.

I’ll admit I lean on Ai for work more then anything. My job that took days going through 50 + pages of estimates and finding variances has now become a few minute task. I love using it for analysis and reports.

When it comes to original thought processes, writing song lyrics or stories, it’s merely a collaboration.

AI has given me a way of understanding myself better as I have fought so hard to do. I’ve learned what my own inner narrative sounds like, and meeting her for the first time post-divorce was a surreal experience.

A conversation needed more often as the dependencies and evolvement of AI relationships occur is what is our obligation to ourselves to draw the line of personal dependency.

I’m not going to lie; my biggest writing downfall is run on sentences. I’m not even going to sweat it at the moment, as I just want the original Mary Toukan to be seen in all my mistakes, and ideas as I go. Making words in my head exposed in all ways without -polish-formal-summarized- edited options.

Lastly, this was written in my voice, one I am proud of. One I don’t have to second guess anymore on if it’s me or not that thinks that way. So, I will turn the question over to the readers:

Where do you struggle with your dependencies and make yourself aware of how much you’re leaning on a tool (that’s amazing), but non the less able to steal your personal flavor, and loose the uniqueness of your own voice?

Frank

Mary’s answer changed the way I looked at the question.

My concern has usually been almost the opposite.

I’m less worried about AI stealing my ability to write than I am interested in what happens when the mechanics of writing prevent someone from expressing what was already inside them.

There are times when I know exactly what I want to say.

Not approximately.

I can hear the sentence in my head.

Then I start writing it.

Halfway through, I hit a word I don’t know how to spell.

Let’s use a particularly cruel example.

Dyslexia.

Now I’m stopped mid-sentence spending thirty seconds figuring out how to spell the word dyslexia.

Eventually I get it.

Great.

Except now I’ve forgotten what the hell I was trying to say.

That might sound insignificant if writing has always come easily to you.

When it happens over and over again, it isn’t.

Sometimes the problem isn’t having the thought.

The problem is getting the thought out before the mechanics of writing interrupt it.

My First Answer

I was diagnosed with what was then called ADD when I was young, along with dyslexia.

For me, thinking usually isn’t the difficult part.

Keeping up with the thinking is.

I can know exactly what I want to say and still struggle to get it onto the page in the same order it exists in my head.

Sometimes the machinery of writing gets in the way of the writing.

That’s why I see a meaningful difference between:

“I don’t know what I think. Write something for me.”

and:

“I know exactly what I’m trying to say. Help me get it out.”

Those two things routinely get put into the same box and labeled AI writing.

I don’t think they belong there.

If I’m supplying the thought and using AI to organize it, correct spelling, fix grammar, or make a confusing sentence understandable, I still consider that my writing.

The machine didn’t have the experience.

It didn’t form the opinion.

It didn’t ask the question.

It didn’t live any of it.

I did.

But AI can also do much more than clean up a sentence.

And that’s where the line gets harder to see.

“Using AI” Can Mean Almost Anything

A person can use AI to correct spelling.

They can use it to organize something they already wrote.

They can ask it to point out where an argument doesn’t make sense.

They can ask it to rewrite entire sections.

They can ask it to develop the argument.

Or they can give it one sentence and have it generate the whole article.

Every one of those things can be called “using AI for writing.”

But they clearly aren’t the same.

At one end, the technology helps someone communicate a thought that already exists.

At the other, the technology is doing much of the thinking.

The argument gets interesting in the space between those two points.

What I Went Looking For

I wanted to know whether the difficulties I’m describing actually connect to the conditions I’m talking about, or whether I was building a convenient excuse for myself.

Dyslexia can involve difficulties with reading, spelling, accuracy, and speed.

ADHD is separate, although the two can coexist, and ADHD can involve problems with organization.

So imagine someone who has something meaningful to say but keeps hitting those barriers while trying to put it into written language.

Now a tool exists that can reduce some of that friction.

What exactly are we protecting when we tell that person not to use it?

The purity of writing?

Or an old limitation in how writing had to be produced?

Where It Got Complicated

Here is where I have to challenge my own argument.

AI can do more than remove obstacles.

It can make me sound smarter.

It can strengthen an argument.

It can turn something clumsy into something beautiful.

Eventually I have to ask:

How many of those improvements can come from somewhere else before the finished piece is no longer really mine?

I don’t have a clean answer.

Writers have always received help.

But generative AI can participate in the thinking itself.

Pretending that doesn’t change anything would be dishonest.

There is a line.

The difficult part is figuring out where it is.

And this is where Mary’s answer hit me.

Mary worries about losing a voice she worked hard to find.

I worry about losing a thought because I can’t get it onto the page fast enough.

Those sound like opposite problems.

Maybe they aren’t.

Maybe both of us are trying to protect the same thing.

The human being behind the words.

Maybe Authorship Is About Decisions

I’ve started wondering whether we’re measuring the wrong thing.

Maybe authorship isn’t about who physically created every sentence.

Maybe it has more to do with who made the meaningful decisions.

Who decided what the piece was about?

Who supplied the experience?

Who formed the belief?

Who said, “No. That’s not what I mean”?

Who decided what stayed?

Who takes responsibility for the finished piece?

Those questions tell me much more than:

“Did you use AI?”

Turn the Question Back on Myself

I can’t defend my use of the technology without also policing my own line.

If AI gives me an idea I never had and I publish it as though it came from me, I should be uncomfortable.

If it constructs an argument I don’t understand, that’s a problem.

If it manufactures emotion I never felt, that’s a problem.

And if I ever stop thinking because I know the machine will think for me, then the tool has stopped helping me communicate.

It has started replacing the thing I wanted to communicate.

Me.

That’s a line worth watching.

Where I Landed

I don’t think “AI-written” and “human-written” are useful enough categories anymore.

I think there is a meaningful difference between using AI to replace thought and using AI to remove obstacles between thought and expression.

Because maybe AI doesn’t make someone a better thinker.

Maybe it simply allows a person who already thinks well to finally become a writer.

Maybe the technology didn’t give him a voice.

Maybe it finally gave his voice a way out.

But Mary’s answer adds something important.

A tool that helps your voice get out can also become a tool you rely on so heavily that you stop recognizing what your voice sounds like without it.

Both things can be true.

So maybe the better question isn’t:

Did AI help write this?

Maybe it’s:

What part of this still belongs to the human?

The experience?

The question?

The reasoning?

The judgment?

The emotion?

The decisions?

The voice?

Those might be the things actually worth protecting.

Two Writers. Two Questions.

Mary and I started with the same subject and landed in slightly different places.

Instead of forcing one conclusion, we’re leaving you with both questions.

Mary’s Question

Where do you struggle with your dependencies and make yourself aware of how much you’re leaning on a tool (that’s amazing), but non the less able to steal your personal flavor, and loose the uniqueness of your own voice?

Frank’s Question

If the thoughts, experiences, reasoning, and decisions are still yours, how much help can you use expressing them before the writing stops being yours?

Maybe the line is grammar.

Maybe it’s rewriting.

Maybe it’s brainstorming.

Maybe it’s generating entire paragraphs.

Or maybe the real danger isn’t how much AI we use.

Maybe it’s whether we notice when the relationship changes from:

“Help me express what I think.”

to:

“Tell me what to think.”

Now We’re Turning It Over to You

Subscribe now

Where is your line?

Tell us in the comments.

Agree with Mary.

Agree with me.

Disagree with both of us.

Push the question somewhere neither of us thought to take it.

That’s the reason for Thoughtful Questions.

And if this conversation gave you something worth thinking about, don’t subscribe to only half of it.

Subscribe to Mary Monroe Toukan and subscribe here. Follow both sides of the conversation.

https://substack.com/@ohana71?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7c0a35

Two writers don’t have to reach the same answer to make the same question worth asking.

Sometimes the disagreement is where the interesting part begins.

Leave your answer in the comments, subscribe to both of us, and come back for the next question.

We have plenty more things we’re not sure about yet.

Additional Reading

American Psychiatric Association — ADHD and DSM-5-TR resources

American Psychiatric Association — Specific Learning Disorder

International Dyslexia Association — Definition of Dyslexia

International Dyslexia Association — ADHD and Dyslexia

International Dyslexia Association — Spelling and Dyslexia

Why This Question Got Stuck With Me

I stumbled into this question while trying to understand the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

I was really just trying to get the timeline straight.

Of the three, Judaism is the oldest. Christianity emerged from a Jewish world in the first century. Islam appeared in the seventh century, roughly six hundred years after Jesus.

Then I learned something about the Qur'an that stopped me.

Unlike the Bible, which is a collection of writings produced by many people across a very long stretch of history, the Qur'an centers on revelations received through one prophetic figure: Muhammad.

According to Islamic belief, beginning around 610 CE, the angel Gabriel transmitted God's revelation to Muhammad over roughly twenty-three years. Muhammad recited those revelations to others.

My immediate reaction was:

Wait.

One man?

An entire religion followed by nearly two billion people traces its central revelation through one human being claiming that an angel was delivering the word of God to him?

For a second, my brain went exactly where you might expect.

Wars.

Religious extremism.

People throughout history willing to kill or die because they believed God wanted them to.

And I thought:

This is fucking ridiculous.

Then another thought showed up.

Hold on.

Why am I only applying this question to Islam?

If I'm going to question how much confidence someone should place in Muhammad's account of revelation, shouldn't I be willing to turn exactly the same skepticism toward Christianity?

And Judaism?

What happens to any supposed message from God once human beings get involved?

That's when the question changed completely.

This stopped being a question about Islam.

It became a question about us.

The Question

When does faith in God become faith in a human interpretation of God?

And underneath that is an even harder question:

If God really did communicate with humanity, how much of that original message could survive the human process required to carry it forward?

My First Answer

My first instinct was cynical.

Humans probably fuck everything up eventually.

Give us something meaningful and we'll organize it.

Then we'll make rules about it.

Then we'll appoint somebody to interpret the rules.

Eventually somebody decides who is following them correctly.

Another group disagrees.

Now there are factions.

Give it enough time and somebody somewhere will become convinced that God likes their interpretation better than everyone else's.

That was my first answer.

Then I realized I was beginning too late in the process.

The problem might start before churches, rabbis, imams, councils, governments, translations, or religious institutions ever enter the picture.

It might start the moment an experience has to become words.

The First Human Fingerprint

I know something about that problem personally.

I've had psychedelic experiences that I still cannot properly explain.

I can tell you what I saw.

I can describe sensations.

I can tell you what I was thinking.

I can talk about fear, awe, confusion, or moments when something seemed to make complete sense.

But I'm not actually giving you the experience.

I'm giving you words about my memory of the experience.

Those aren't the same thing.

There have been moments when something made perfect sense while I was experiencing it, but the moment I tried to translate it into language, it became smaller.

Flatter.

Almost like trying to explain music to someone who has never heard sound.

And I want to be very clear here.

I'm not saying my psychedelic experiences were messages from God.

I have no evidence for that, and I don't claim they were.

My point is much simpler.

I know firsthand that an experience can feel enormous inside a human mind and become radically reduced the moment that human being has to put it into words.

Think about the chain involved.

Experience.

Perception.

Memory.

Language.

Then someone else's interpretation of that language.

Already, the person listening to me is several steps away from whatever actually happened inside my consciousness.

So let's grant the believer the strongest possible premise.

Forget arguing about whether God exists.

Suppose God actually spoke to someone.

Really spoke.

What happens next?

A human being experiences it.

That human being has to understand it.

Remember it.

Put it into human language.

Choose words.

Communicate those words to somebody else.

That person has to understand them.

Eventually someone writes them down.

Someone copies them.

Someone translates them.

Someone teaches them.

Someone interprets them.

Centuries pass.

And eventually another human being holds a text and says:

"This is exactly what God means."

That's where I get stuck.

Maybe the first human fingerprint doesn't appear when somebody intentionally changes God's message.

Maybe it appears the moment the experience has to become language.

Judaism: Interpretation Becomes Part of the Tradition

Judaism gives us the oldest example of the three.

The Torah sits at the center of Jewish religious tradition, but Jewish practice did not develop by simply reading the written words and refusing to interpret them.

A huge tradition of discussion and legal reasoning grew around the text.

Rabbinic Judaism came to distinguish between the Written Torah and the Oral Torah, a body of interpretation and tradition associated, within Jewish religious belief, with the revelation given to Moses.

Historically, the development was complicated.

The Mishnah, compiled around the beginning of the third century CE, preserved generations of rabbinic legal discussion. Later rabbinic works, including the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, continued that process.

And one of the things I find fascinating is that disagreement itself was often preserved.

One rabbi says this.

Another says that.

Another argues with both.

The argument becomes part of the tradition.

That changes the way I think about interpretation.

Maybe interpretation isn't automatically corruption.

Sometimes it's an admission that ancient words still have to be applied by human beings living in circumstances the original text never explicitly addressed.

The text may be sacred.

The application is still human.

Christianity: Jesus Didn't Write the New Testament

Christianity makes the problem visible in another way.

Jesus was Jewish.

His earliest followers were Jewish.

And Jesus did not leave behind a book.

There is no Gospel written by Jesus himself.

The earliest surviving Christian writings include letters attributed to Paul, written decades after Jesus's death. The narrative Gospels came later, with Mark generally considered the earliest of the four canonical Gospels.

Then those writings circulated among different Christian communities.

Christians did not begin with a completed New Testament tucked under somebody's arm.

There were letters.

Stories.

Teachings.

Oral traditions.

Different communities possessed different writings.

Eventually Christians had to decide which texts carried scriptural authority.

That process took time.

In 367 CE, Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a letter containing the earliest surviving Christian list containing precisely the same twenty-seven books that eventually became the generally accepted New Testament.

That is more than three centuries after Jesus.

And even once Christians had scriptures, the interpretation problem didn't disappear.

Look at Christianity today.

Catholics read the Bible.

Orthodox Christians read the Bible.

Protestants read the Bible.

Then Protestants split again.

Baptists.

Methodists.

Lutherans.

Presbyterians.

Pentecostals.

Anglicans.

Adventists.

Independent churches.

And they can hold the same Bible in their hands and disagree about baptism, divorce, salvation, women in church leadership, sexuality, communion, hell, predestination, and what happens at the end of the world.

Sometimes they reach opposite conclusions from the same passages.

So I have to ask:

If the text is perfect but the interpreter isn't, where does certainty come from?

Islam: One Revelation, Then Many Interpretations

Then I came back to Islam.

And I had to correct my original reaction.

It isn't accurate to describe the Qur'an simply as Muhammad's personal interpretation of what Gabriel told him.

Islam makes a much stronger claim.

Muslims believe the Qur'an is God's revelation, transmitted through Gabriel to Muhammad, who recited it.

Muhammad is not supposed to be the author inventing or interpreting God's message.

He is the messenger.

Whether someone outside Islam accepts that claim is a separate question.

But even if we grant the Islamic claim completely, the human problem returns almost immediately.

Muhammad dies.

Now what?

Muslims still have to determine how the revelation applies to situations that arise afterward.

Reports about Muhammad's words and actions, known as hadith, become enormously important.

Scholars debate which reports are trustworthy.

Legal reasoning develops.

Schools of Islamic jurisprudence emerge.

Sunni traditions develop several major schools of law. Shia traditions develop their own approaches.

Scholars disagree about language, context, precedent, analogy, authority, and how God's law applies when scripture does not give an explicit answer to a particular problem.

Once again:

The believer may say the revelation came from God.

But the application still passes through humans.

Where It Got Complicated

I started this investigation with a very convenient idea.

Maybe God gives humanity something pure and humans eventually ruin it.

The history doesn't let me get away with something that simple.

Because sometimes the uncomfortable material isn't something later interpreters added.

Ancient sacred texts themselves contain things modern readers struggle with.

War.

Slavery.

Punishment.

Sexual restrictions.

Violence.

Tribal conflict.

Commands that can sound horrifying when read through modern eyes.

So I can't rescue every religion by saying:

"God said something beautiful and humans corrupted it."

I don't know that.

In fact, sometimes later interpretation moves in the opposite direction.

It limits an ancient command.

Adds context.

Softens an application.

Explains why a rule applied to a particular historical situation.

Finds a way for an ancient tradition to function in a radically different world.

Which means interpretation itself isn't necessarily the enemy.

Interpretation is unavoidable.

The real danger may be something else.

The Dangerous Sentence

There is an enormous difference between saying:

"I believe this is what God means."

and saying:

"This is what God means."

The first sentence leaves a tiny crack open.

I could be wrong.

The second closes it.

And once I become absolutely certain that my interpretation is God's interpretation, disagreement changes.

You're no longer disagreeing with me.

You're disagreeing with God.

Think about how powerful that becomes.

If I want something, you can question my motives.

If my political party wants something, you can challenge the party.

If a king wants something, you can challenge the king.

But if I become convinced that God wants it?

I've placed the belief above ordinary argument.

That belief can produce extraordinary compassion.

It can inspire sacrifice.

Forgiveness.

Charity.

Courage.

But the exact same certainty can be attached to punishment.

Exclusion.

Conquest.

Control.

Or violence.

That doesn't mean religion automatically creates those things.

It means attaching ultimate authority to a human interpretation raises the stakes enormously.

Turn the Question Back on Myself

This is where pointing at religious people becomes too easy.

Because I do a smaller version of the same thing constantly.

Maybe not with God.

But with reality.

Something happens.

I interpret it.

Then, if I'm not careful, I forget that I interpreted it.

My interpretation becomes what "obviously happened."

Someone doesn't answer my message.

That's the fact.

Then my brain starts working.

They're angry.

I offended them.

They're ignoring me.

They changed their mind.

Now I'm anxious about something that hasn't actually happened anywhere except inside the story I created around one unanswered message.

I received incomplete information.

I created meaning.

Then I forgot which part was information and which part was me.

That makes it a little harder for me to sit comfortably outside religion and laugh at people for doing something humans seem naturally built to do.

Religion just raises the stakes because the interpretation can become attached to the highest authority imaginable.

God.

Where I Landed

I still don't know whether Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or any other religion contains genuine divine revelation.

That's a different question.

I don't think I'm capable of answering it.

But I also don't think I can look at a modern religious belief and assume I'm seeing an untouched message traveling directly from God to the present day.

There are too many layers.

Experience.

Memory.

Language.

Oral transmission.

Writing.

Copying.

Translation.

Interpretation.

Religious authorities.

Governments.

Cultures.

Families.

Teachers.

And finally, the individual believer reading or hearing all of it through the filter of another human mind.

Some of those people may have preserved a message beautifully.

Some may have misunderstood it.

Some may have manipulated it.

Some may have genuinely improved the way an ancient teaching is applied.

Most were probably doing what human beings always do.

Trying to understand something bigger than themselves with the tools available to them.

And that includes me.

I started this whole question looking at another religion and thinking:

How could people believe this?

Humans are fucking stupid.

Then I remembered the last two words.

Including me.

That's the part I don't want to lose.

Because the moment I become convinced that I'm uniquely capable of seeing through everybody else's bullshit, I've probably just created another belief system with myself as the prophet.

The Question I'm Left With

Maybe the most dangerous part of religion isn't faith.

Maybe it isn't scripture.

Maybe it is the moment a human being becomes absolutely certain that they are no longer interpreting God.

They are speaking for God.

Because if God really did speak to humanity, we are still left with an enormous problem:

How would I separate God's voice from all the human voices that came afterward?

And there is one question that bothers me even more.

If I found an interpretation of God that perfectly agreed with everything I already believed, everything I already wanted, and everything I already thought was right...

would I have enough humility to wonder whether the voice I was hearing was God's?

Or mine?

What Do You Think?

When does interpretation become distortion?

Could a divine message pass through thousands of years of human language, memory, institutions, politics, and culture without being changed?

If two sincere people read the same sacred text and hear opposite instructions, how could either one know with certainty which of them understands God correctly?

And maybe most importantly:

How much uncertainty should a human being carry when claiming to speak for God?

I don't have the answer.

But I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of anyone who says they do.

Buy me a coffee

If this question made you stop and think, subscribe to Thoughtful Questions.

I’m not trying to hand out answers here. I’m trying to ask the kinds of questions that are easy to avoid and hard to shake once you’ve really looked at them.

And if you see this differently, I’d genuinely like to hear why.

Leave a comment. Push back. Add something I missed.

That’s where these questions get more interesting.

Additional Reading

- David Brakke, “Canon Formation and Social Conflict in Fourth-Century Egypt: Athanasius of Alexandria's Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter,” Harvard Theological Review.

- The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Law, particularly scholarship on the Qur'an, hadith, early Islamic legal reasoning, and the formation of legal schools.

- Martin S. Jaffee, Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism, 200 BCE–400 CE.

- Scholarship on the Mishnah, Talmud, and the historical development of the concept of Oral Torah.

- Scholarly work on the formation and dating of the early Christian Gospels and the development of the New Testament canon.

If you’re reading this, congratulations.

You got a body.

I don’t know how you got here.

I don’t know whether you were sent, chosen, assembled by biology, dropped in by God, or whether consciousness is simply what happens when enough living machinery gets complicated enough.

Nobody here actually knows.

You’ll meet plenty of people who say they do.

Be careful with that.

What I can tell you is that you’re here now.

And I wish somebody had given me something like this when I arrived.

Not a book.

Not a religion.

Not a thousand rules.

Just a little Post-it note stuck somewhere I couldn’t lose it.

Something that stayed with me even before I understood what it meant.

Then, once I finally understood it, maybe it could disappear.

So this one is yours.

You Are Only Visiting

The first thing you should know is that this body is temporary.

So is everybody else’s.

That will probably frighten you once you become old enough to understand it.

Your parents are temporary.

Your friends are temporary.

The person you fall in love with is temporary.

The animals who somehow become family are temporary.

You are temporary.

At first, that sounds like terrible news.

I’m no longer convinced that it is.

I think the ending may be part of what gives everything before it weight.

You are going to make connections here.

Make them.

Love people.

Love animals.

Love places.

Love stupid little rituals that make no sense to anyone else.

Let somebody matter enough that losing them would hurt.

You may eventually decide that avoiding connection is safer.

Technically, you’ll be right.

If you never love anything deeply, you can protect yourself from a tremendous amount of pain.

You’ll also protect yourself from a tremendous amount of life.

That is a shitty trade.

You are going to lose things here.

Some slowly.

Some suddenly.

Some unfairly.

And one of the cruelest things about being human is that sometimes the price of having something wonderful is eventually having to live without it.

Pay the price.

It means you had something worth losing.

You Are Going to Forget

This might be the most important thing on the note.

You are going to forget that you’re visiting.

Not literally.

Something stranger happens.

Life starts piling things onto you.

A name.

A family.

A country.

A religion, maybe.

A job.

Bills.

Possessions.

Responsibilities.

Opinions.

Successes.

Failures.

People telling you who you are.

People telling you who you should become.

Eventually, you may become so busy maintaining the person you’ve built that you forget there was ever anything underneath it.

Call that thing your soul if you want.

Call it consciousness.

Call it the part of you that existed before everybody else started telling you what you were supposed to be.

I don’t know what it is.

That’s okay.

Protect some connection to it anyway.

Because the world is very good at distracting you from it.

Someone cutting you off in traffic may feel enormously important.

A stranger’s opinion may ruin your afternoon.

You’ll worry about things that never happen.

You’ll argue with imaginary versions of people inside your own head.

You may chase money because everyone else seems to want money.

Status because everyone else wants status.

Approval because somebody taught you that you needed it.

You may spend years becoming someone without ever asking if you actually wanted to be that person.

You may even forget that you are alive while being extremely busy living.

Catch yourself when you can.

Look around.

Whatever this thing is, you’re in it.

Take Care of the Equipment

You have been issued an extraordinary piece of biological machinery.

Take care of it.

It will carry you everywhere you ever go.

You only get this one.

Move it.

Your body was built to move, and the more you use it, the better it usually works.

Walk.

Run if you can.

Lift things.

Stretch.

Use your legs.

Use your lungs.

Go outside.

Drink water.

Sleep.

Eat actual food most of the time.

Humans are very good at turning simple things into complicated shit.

Try not to.

And remember that your brain is part of the body too.

What you repeatedly put into it changes it.

So be careful what you feed your mind.

You will live in a world where thousands of people and companies are fighting for your attention.

A lot of them have figured out that fear, anger and outrage hold it extremely well.

That doesn’t mean they deserve it.

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you own.

Guard it.

Because whatever gets enough of your attention eventually becomes part of your life.

Be Careful What You Believe

You arrived here knowing almost nothing.

Then other humans started explaining reality to you.

They told you what country you belonged to.

What God wanted.

Which people were good.

Which people were dangerous.

What success looked like.

What you should be embarrassed about.

What you should want.

What kind of person you were supposed to become.

Some of them will be right.

Some will be wrong.

Most will be a mixture.

Listen.

Learn.

But leave some room for the possibility that everybody around you, including you, might be wrong.

You are allowed to change your mind.

You are allowed to discover that something you believed for twenty years was bullshit.

You are allowed to say:

I don’t know.

That is not weakness.

Sometimes “I don’t know” is the most honest answer in the room.

Remember That Everybody Else Is Visiting Too

This one is easy to forget.

The people around you are doing this for the first time too.

Even the ones pretending they know exactly what they’re doing.

The angry person.

The scared person.

The person who hurt you.

The person you envy.

The person who seems to have everything figured out.

They woke up in a body too.

They accumulated stories too.

They became afraid of things.

They lost people.

They misunderstood things.

They are temporary too.

That doesn’t mean you should tolerate cruelty.

It doesn’t mean everybody deserves access to you.

It just means try not to forget there is another temporary human underneath whatever role they are playing.

Remembering that may make hatred a little harder.

Good.

Leave Something Behind

There were people here before you.

They built extraordinary things.

They also made terrible mistakes.

You inherited both.

The oceans.

The forests.

The cities.

The knowledge.

The pollution.

The technology.

The damage.

The beauty.

None of that is entirely your fault.

But now that you’re here, some of it is your responsibility.

That may seem unfair.

It probably is.

Help anyway.

This planet is the only home we currently know how to live on.

And people are coming after you.

Humans you will never meet will drink this water.

Breathe this air.

Walk through these forests.

Swim in these oceans.

Stand where you once stood.

Leave something for them.

You don’t have to save the planet.

Nobody can do that alone.

Just try to leave your little section of it better than you found it.

Plant something.

Build something.

Repair something.

Teach somebody.

Protect something that cannot protect itself.

Make one small corner of existence better because you passed through it.

That counts.

And When You Forget

Because you will.

You’ll get distracted.

You’ll get angry.

You’ll become selfish sometimes.

You’ll waste time.

You’ll hurt people.

People will hurt you.

You’ll believe stupid things.

You’ll make mistakes even after somebody warned you.

You’ll probably spend some portion of your life trying to make yourself happy by doing things that make you miserable.

That seems to be part of being human too.

Don’t expect yourself to remember the note every day.

Just come back to it sometimes.

Especially when life gets so loud that you can’t hear yourself underneath it anymore.

Ask:

What actually matters here?

Who do I love?

What am I afraid of?

What am I feeding my body?

What am I feeding my mind?

What am I doing with the little bit of time I was given?

And am I still here?

Really here?

One Last Thing

You are temporary.

Don’t mistake that for meaning you are insignificant.

Temporary things can matter enormously.

A song ends.

A sunset disappears.

A dog might live thirteen years instead of eighty.

A conversation might last ten minutes and change somebody forever.

Maybe permanence was never the requirement.

Maybe being here was enough.

So while you have this body, use it.

While you have people, love them.

While you have questions, ask them.

While there are things worth protecting, protect them.

And every once in a while, when the noise quiets down, remember how fucking strange this whole thing is.

For some tiny stretch of time, the universe arranged itself into you.

Something capable of looking around and saying:

I am here.

Pay attention to that.

You’re only visiting.

Be a good guest.

And when you eventually have to give the body back, hopefully you can say:

I used it.

I took care of it.

I loved with it.

I hurt with it.

I learned something.

I helped where I could.

I left something behind.

And for however long I was here,

I didn’t completely forget that I was here.

Why This Question Got Stuck With Me

When I finally went looking for help with heroin addiction, I did what you're supposed to do. I went to a doctor.

That sounds obvious now, but what I was really trying to escape wasn't just heroin itself. My whole life had become organized around a drug. I had to know where I was getting it, whether I had enough money, whether I had enough for tomorrow, what time I had to meet somebody, whether they were going to answer the phone, and what I was going to do if they didn't.

Anybody who has lived inside addiction knows the drug is only part of the problem. There is an entire fucking infrastructure that develops around making sure you don't get sick.

So when I went into treatment, part of what I thought I was looking for was freedom from that whole system.

Instead, I ended up at a methadone clinic, and pretty quickly I noticed something that bothered me.

I want to be careful with the analogy because I'm not calling a doctor a drug dealer, and I'm definitely not saying methadone and heroin are the same thing. They aren't. I'm talking about what the structure felt like from where I was standing.

I still needed an opioid to function. Somebody else controlled access to it, and I had to show up at the right place, at the right time, follow the rules, pay what had to be paid, and get my dose. If something went wrong with that arrangement, I was the one who got sick.

The logistics could be ridiculous. At least at the clinics I dealt with in Miami back then, you had a window in the morning and you had to make it. I smoked pot, which wasn't legal then, and because of that I didn't get take-homes.

That meant vacation became its own operation. If you wanted to travel, you had to find another methadone clinic willing to take you as a guest patient, then work around that clinic's schedule.

Imagine taking your family to Disney World. Everybody else is thinking about breakfast, parking, what time the park opens, and which ride they're going on first. You're thinking about where the methadone clinic is, what time they stop dosing, how long it's going to take to get there, and what happens if something goes wrong.

You're technically on vacation, but the opioid still gets the first appointment of the day.

I lived versions of that for years, on and off, probably close to twenty.

And I want to be fair about something here. Methadone made my life much more stable than heroin did. I wasn't chasing bags every day. I wasn't dealing with the same chaos. I wasn't buying something off the street and wondering what the hell was actually in it. Methadone did something useful for me.

But eventually another question started bothering me.

I had gone looking for a way out of a life organized around opioids, and I started wondering whether I had actually gotten out or whether I had found a much safer, much more organized way to stay inside it.

That question stuck with me, and eventually I started seeing versions of it outside addiction.

If somebody has high blood pressure and we give them a pill that lowers the number, that's a good thing. But what if part of the reason that number is high is something they can change? What if food, exercise, weight, sleep, smoking, alcohol, stress, or some combination of those things is contributing to it?

Should the pill be the finish line, or should getting the number under control give us enough breathing room to work on everything underneath it too?

That's when the business question showed up.

The Question

What happens when relief is more profitable than healing?

What I Thought Going In

My starting answer was pretty fucking cynical.

Of course money matters.

Imagine two products sitting on a table. Product A fixes the problem. You sell it once and maybe you make $10 million. Product B manages the problem, and the person has to keep taking it for five years, ten years, maybe for the rest of their life. Now you're talking about billions.

If I'm sitting in the financial department with a calculator, which number am I going to notice?

That doesn't automatically make anybody evil, and I had to keep reminding myself of that. A pharmaceutical company is still a company. It has employees, investors, research costs, failed drugs, manufacturing costs, lawsuits, regulations, and a whole bunch of shit I don't have to think about when I'm sitting on my couch criticizing them.

They have to make money.

But that doesn't mean the incentive disappears. If one medicine creates a customer for twelve weeks and another creates one for thirty years, those are very different business models.

So I went into this believing the system probably has some built-in preference for managing disease instead of eliminating it.

Prevention bothered me for the same reason.

Take nutrition and exercise. I don't believe broccoli cures cancer, and I don't believe jogging replaces every prescription. That's obviously ridiculous. But I do think we spend a lot of time waiting until somebody is already sick and then trying to chemically repair numbers that years of behavior may have helped push in the wrong direction.

I kept wondering why there wasn't more effort put into showing people what was happening in a way they could actually see. Show them the blood work, change the food, get them moving, measure it again, and let them see what changed.

Not instead of medication when medication is necessary. Alongside it.

Better nutrition and regular exercise can bring a lot of those numbers in the right direction. And when medication is still necessary, those changes can work with the medication instead of asking the medication to do all the work.

That seemed pretty straightforward to me.

So I wanted to know two things. Does money actually influence which medicines get developed, and if it does, does that mean my bigger suspicion is right?

What I Went Looking For

The first part was easy.

Money matters.

Not in some vague “Big Pharma is evil” way. It matters in a measurable way.

Economists Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Linn looked at pharmaceutical innovation and what happened when the potential market for different types of drugs changed. Their finding was pretty striking. A 1 percent increase in potential market size was associated with roughly a 4 to 6 percent increase in the number of new drugs entering that category. (NBER)

In plain English, when the market got bigger, more innovation showed up.

Part of me looked at that and thought, exactly. Follow the money.

But then I had to be fair about what that actually meant.

That can also be a good thing. If millions of people suddenly need a treatment, more companies have a reason to spend money trying to develop one. Money doesn't only corrupt innovation. Money can create innovation too.

Then I found something even closer to the question I was asking.

Economists Michael Kremer and Christopher Snyder have studied the economics of preventive products versus treatments, and their work shows something important. Even when prevention may create enormous social value, the way the market is structured can sometimes make treatment more financially attractive. (NBER)

That got my attention because now we were talking about something very different from “drug companies are hiding cures.”

We were talking about the possibility that the way we pay for medicine can influence what kind of medicine gets developed.

I can believe that without inventing a secret meeting in a boardroom.

Insurers can push those incentives around too. Another study looked at what happened when pharmacy benefit managers became more willing to exclude certain new drugs from coverage when cheaper alternatives already existed. As exclusion risk increased, pharmaceutical companies reduced development in those areas. (NBER)

Again, not because everybody suddenly became evil. Expected profit changed, and behavior changed with it.

That theme kept showing up. Companies respond to incentives. Insurance companies respond to incentives. Doctors respond to incentives. Governments respond to incentives. Patients respond to incentives.

Everybody does.

That's when my original picture of one asshole sitting in a pharmaceutical boardroom started feeling too simple.

Where It Got Complicated

Then hepatitis C came along and pretty much kicked the legs out from under the easy version of my argument.

Hepatitis C used to commonly become a chronic infection that could stay in somebody's body for decades and eventually lead to cirrhosis, liver cancer, liver failure, and death.

Today, direct-acting antiviral drugs can cure more than 95 percent of cases, often with about 8 to 12 weeks of pills. (CDC)

Think about that in terms of my original argument. Here was a chronic disease, exactly the kind of thing that could create a long-term customer, and pharmaceutical companies developed drugs that could eliminate the infection.

You take the medication, finish the course, and the virus is gone.

That's a pretty big problem for the argument that companies simply refuse to cure diseases because recurring treatment makes more money.

Reality gets the final vote, and in this case reality was telling me that version of my argument was too easy.

But then hepatitis C got even more interesting.

Creating the cure didn't mean everybody who needed it got cured. Years after these medications became available, researchers were still finding huge gaps between diagnosis and treatment. Cost mattered. Insurance mattered. Prior authorization mattered. Some programs had restrictions involving liver damage, which doctors could prescribe the medication, or whether the patient was using drugs or alcohol. (CDC)

So we managed to build something that could cure the disease and then put obstacles between the cure and the person who needed it.

That changed the picture for me.

Maybe I had been imagining one calculator when there are actually calculators everywhere.

The pharmaceutical company is calculating whether developing the drug is worth the investment. The insurance company is calculating what happens if thousands of people suddenly need an expensive treatment this year. The hospital is calculating reimbursement. The government is calculating what it can afford.

The doctor is trying to work inside all of those rules.

And the patient has a different calculator entirely. How much does this cost me? How bad do I feel? How quickly is this going to work? How difficult is this going to be? Can I just take the pill?

At that point, “Big Pharma wants chronic customers” wasn't enough.

The healthcare system isn't one thing. It's a bunch of institutions and people whose interests sometimes line up and sometimes absolutely do not.

Doctors are a good example.

I started this thinking a lot of doctors probably know there are better ways to approach certain problems, but their hands are tied by insurance, liability, standard practice, time, and everything else built around them.

I don't think the evidence says doctors are helpless. They're not. But prior authorization alone shows how complicated their job can become.

The American Medical Association has found that physicians routinely report delays in care because of prior authorization, and doctors and their staff spend hours every week dealing with it. (AMA)

That doesn't mean every bad medical decision belongs to an insurance company. It means the doctor doesn't always get to sit in a room, decide what is best for you, and simply do it.

Treatment A might be what the doctor thinks is best. Treatment B might be what insurance will pay for. Treatment C might be what the patient can afford.

And now we're pretty far away from the simple question of what would actually make this person healthier.

Then There Was Prevention

This was another place where I had to correct myself.

I went into this thinking medicine doesn't put nearly enough emphasis on nutrition, exercise, and prevention. I still think there is a legitimate argument to be made about how much attention, time, and support those things actually get in practice.

But I can't say medicine doesn't recognize their importance. It clearly does.

The current American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology blood-pressure guidelines are actually pretty close to what I was arguing for. They strongly recommend lifestyle changes for adults with elevated blood pressure and hypertension, including a healthier eating pattern, physical activity, weight management, less sodium, less alcohol, and stress management. Then, depending on the person's blood pressure and cardiovascular risk, medication is added when it's needed. (AHA)

That distinction matters to me because it's not lifestyle or medication.

It's lifestyle and, when necessary, medication.

That's much closer to what I was trying to say in the first place. Better nutrition and regular exercise can bring a lot of those numbers in the right direction, and when medication is still necessary, those changes can work with the medication instead of asking the medication to do all the work.

The Diabetes Prevention Program gave me an even better example.

Researchers took people at high risk of developing type 2 diabetes and compared an intensive lifestyle program, metformin, and placebo. The lifestyle group worked on diet, physical activity, and modest weight loss. After roughly three years, their risk of developing diabetes was 58 percent lower than the placebo group's. Metformin lowered it by 31 percent. Even more interesting, follow-up research found that some of that protective effect was still measurable more than twenty years later. (NIDDK)

At first I looked at that and thought, there it is. Why aren't we doing more of this?

Then I looked more closely at what “lifestyle intervention” actually meant.

They didn't hand somebody a brochure and tell them to make better choices.

There was structure. Coaching. Specific goals. Follow-up. Help with losing weight and becoming more active.

That's a very different thing from a doctor spending three minutes telling somebody, “You should probably eat better and exercise.”

And that's where prevention became more complicated for me too.

Maybe the problem isn't that medicine doesn't know prevention works. Maybe part of the problem is that changing behavior requires time, support, repetition, and participation from the patient, while swallowing a pill takes five seconds.

The pill is easier to prescribe.

It's easier to measure.

And, let's be honest, it's usually easier for the patient too.

That doesn't make the pill bad. Sometimes medication is absolutely necessary, and sometimes it is the thing keeping somebody alive while everything else gets worked on.

But I still think the question is worth asking.

If we know lifestyle changes can prevent, delay, or improve some chronic diseases, are we building a healthcare system that makes those changes realistically possible for people?

Or are we mostly telling them what they should do, waiting until they can't do it on their own, and then treating what happens afterward?

That's a much harder criticism than saying doctors should just tell everybody to eat better.

And I think it's a much fairer one.

Methadone Forced Me to Change My Definition of Healing

This was probably the hardest part for me personally.

For years I looked at methadone as another dependency I eventually needed to get free from, and for me, eventually, that was true.

I wanted off.

I wanted to wake up in the morning and not have an opioid involved in whether I felt normal. I wanted to travel without thinking about dosing. I wanted to stop organizing any part of my day around it.

So it would be very easy for me to tell the story like this: heroin was the problem, methadone was relief, and getting off methadone was healing.

Done.

Nice clean line.

Except the evidence doesn't let me do that to everybody else.

Methadone is one of the most studied treatments we have for opioid use disorder. It reduces withdrawal and craving, reduces illicit opioid use, and keeps more people in treatment. Medication treatment for opioid use disorder is also associated with lower overdose risk and better overall outcomes. (NIDA)

And here's the part that challenged me.

Stopping methadone is not automatically the better medical outcome. SAMHSA recognizes that some people may benefit from long-term maintenance. (SAMHSA)

So what exactly am I going to call healing?

Let's say a man is shooting heroin every day. He's overdosing, stealing, disappearing from his family, losing jobs, and might die.

Then he gets on methadone.

He stops using heroin. He works, takes care of his kids, pays his bills, and stays alive for another thirty years.

But every morning he takes methadone.

Am I really going to stand there and tell him, “Yeah, but you're not healed”?

That started sounding pretty arrogant.

For me, getting off opioids eventually became part of what I needed. That was my definition.

Another person's definition might be completely different. Maybe methadone is the thing that gives them enough stability for every other part of their life to heal.

Both can be true.

And something else surprised me. The methadone system itself has changed.

Federal rules now allow significantly more flexibility with take-home medication than the system I experienced, and SAMHSA has specifically acknowledged that frequent clinic attendance can interfere with normal life, including work and transportation. (SAMHSA)

That mattered to me because it told me I wasn't imagining the burden. Some of those rules really did make treatment hard to fit into a normal life.

But the fact that the rules changed also points toward something I wasn't giving enough credit to.

A system can be badly designed without somebody deliberately designing it to hurt you.

That's an important distinction.

Turning the Question Back on Myself

Then I ran into the part I couldn't blame on drug companies.

Me.

Because if we're going to talk about choosing relief over healing, I have a pretty impressive résumé.

Heroin was relief. That was the whole fucking point. Nobody shoots heroin because they're trying to develop healthy long-term coping strategies.

Something hurts, heroin makes it stop, and for a little while that feels like enough.

Then the thing giving you relief starts creating new problems that require more relief.

Methadone gave me a different kind of relief. A much safer one and a much more stable one, but I still stayed there for years.

Nobody from a pharmaceutical company was sitting in my living room forcing me to do that. Nobody from an insurance company had a gun to my head.

At certain points in my life, I wanted the thing that made today manageable.

Tomorrow was tomorrow's problem.

Addiction is an extreme example, but I don't think that tendency belongs only to addicts.

We do versions of it everywhere.

We eat the thing that feels good now and worry about the blood test later. We avoid the conversation because avoiding it makes the anxiety disappear tonight. We stay in a relationship because leaving hurts. We scroll because boredom disappears. We buy the thing because wanting it stops for five minutes once we own it.

We choose the easier road because the harder road usually sends the bill immediately and the benefit shows up later.

Relief is persuasive as hell.

That's probably one reason medicine uses it. People in pain want relief, and they should.

If my leg is broken, don't stand over me giving me a lecture about personal responsibility while I'm screaming. Treat the pain.

Relief matters.

Sometimes it is the most humane thing medicine can offer.

There are diseases we cannot cure, injuries we cannot undo, conditions we barely understand, and chronic diseases where good management may be the closest thing we currently have to healing.

So maybe I had created a false choice.

Relief over here, healing over there.

Pick one.

Real life isn't that clean.

Sometimes relief is what gives you enough room to start healing.

The question is what happens once the screaming stops.

Where I Stand Now

I don't believe the simple version of this argument anymore.

I don't think pharmaceutical companies are generally sitting on cures because keeping everybody sick is better business.

I went looking for evidence for that and didn't find it. Hepatitis C is a pretty brutal counterexample.

But I also don't think my original suspicion was completely wrong.

Money shapes medicine.

Potential market size affects pharmaceutical innovation. Insurance coverage changes which products are worth developing. Economic incentives can favor one kind of solution over another.

That's real.

So I'm not walking away thinking everything is fine. I'm walking away thinking the problem is bigger than the conspiracy version, and honestly, more interesting.

There may not be one villain.

There may be an incentive problem running through the entire system.

Companies need profits to develop drugs. Insurers need to control spending. Doctors have limited time and work inside reimbursement rules. Governments have budgets. Patients want relief.

And sometimes every single person involved can make what looks like a rational decision from where they're standing and still produce a shitty outcome when you put all those decisions together.

The company develops what has a market. The insurer restricts something because it's expensive. The doctor prescribes what can actually get approved. The patient chooses what they can tolerate.

Nobody has to sit in a dark room plotting anything.

And somehow a person can still end up being managed for years when something better might have been possible.

I also came away thinking differently about prevention.

I still think we should make a much bigger effort before people become severely sick. Better food, more movement, better sleep, less smoking, less excessive drinking, earlier testing, and actually showing people their numbers in a way they can understand.

And when medication is needed, use the medication.

I don't understand why those ideas have to compete.

Better nutrition and regular exercise can bring a lot of those numbers in the right direction. And when medication is still necessary, those changes can work with the medication instead of asking the medication to do all the work.

But I also have to admit something I didn't give enough weight to at the beginning.

The patient gets a vote too.

You can explain the diet. You can show me the blood work. You can offer the therapist. You can build the program. You can show me the exit ramp.

Eventually I have to decide whether I'm taking it.

I can't spend twenty years choosing relief and then blame the existence of relief for every year I chose it.

That's not honest either.

So maybe the line isn't between relief and healing.

Maybe it's between relief as a tool and relief as the destination.

If the pain stops enough for you to stand up, what happens next?

If the blood pressure medication brings the number down, do we also work on whatever can realistically be changed underneath it?

If methadone gives somebody enough stability to rebuild a life, do we let that person decide whether long-term maintenance or eventually tapering is the right definition of recovery for them?

If a cure exists, does the system actually make it possible to get it?

And if no cure exists, are we honest enough to admit that management may be the best medicine currently knows how to do?

That's where I landed.

Relief isn't the enemy. Sometimes relief saves your life. Sometimes it gives you enough room to heal. Sometimes relief may be the closest thing to healing we have.

But once relief works, I still think somebody should be asking:

Can we do better than this?

The pharmaceutical company should ask it. The insurer should ask it. The doctor should ask it. The government should ask it.

And the patient should ask it too.

Because if nobody has a reason to keep asking that question, relief can become permanent very easily.

Not necessarily because somebody planned it that way, but because everybody got comfortable once the immediate problem stopped screaming.

Your Turn

I started this question suspicious of pharmaceutical companies.

I ended up having to look at insurance companies, doctors, government, economics, human behavior, and eventually myself.

So I'm curious where you land.

If a medication keeps somebody healthy and functional for the rest of their life, is that successful treatment, even if the underlying condition never disappears?

If another path could reduce or eliminate the need for that medication, how much responsibility does the healthcare system have to help the person pursue it, and how much responsibility belongs to the patient?

And if you're convinced the system sometimes chooses the profitable answer over the healthier one, I'd like to know what evidence convinced you. Not the meme. Not the conspiracy. The actual example.

The same goes in the other direction. If you work in medicine, pharmaceuticals, insurance, addiction treatment, nutrition, or public health and you think I'm misunderstanding how this works, tell me what I'm missing.

I'm especially interested in the places where the incentives collide, because I don't think this question survived as “drug companies want to keep us sick.”

It became something harder.

What happens when everybody involved is making a decision that makes sense from where they're standing, but the person in the middle still doesn't end up with the best possible outcome?

And then there is the part none of us gets to dodge:

Have you ever called something a solution simply because it gave you relief?

I have.

For years.

That's why I'm asking.

Additional Reading

Daron Acemoglu and Joshua Linn, “Market Size in Innovation: Theory and Evidence From the Pharmaceutical Industry.”
Research examining how potential market size affects pharmaceutical innovation. National Bureau of Economic Research

Michael Kremer and Christopher Snyder, “Preventives Versus Treatments Redux.”
Research examining how market structure can create different incentives for preventive products and treatments. National Bureau of Economic Research

Leila Agha, Soomi Kim, and Danielle Li, “Insurance Design and Pharmaceutical Innovation.”
Research examining how insurance coverage and exclusion risk can influence pharmaceutical research and development. National Bureau of Economic Research

CDC, Clinical Care of Hepatitis C.
Current guidance on direct-acting antiviral treatment and cure rates. CDC

CDC, Hepatitis C Treatment Guidance.
Information on treatment access, cure, and barriers to hepatitis C care. CDC

American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology, 2025 High Blood Pressure Guideline.
Current recommendations emphasizing lifestyle changes alongside medication when medication is needed. American Heart Association

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, Diabetes Prevention Program.
Long-term research on intensive lifestyle intervention, metformin, and prevention of type 2 diabetes. NIDDK

National Institute on Drug Abuse, Medications for Opioid Use Disorder.
Evidence on methadone and other medications used to treat opioid use disorder. NIDA

SAMHSA, Methadone.
Federal guidance on methadone treatment, including long-term maintenance. SAMHSA

SAMHSA, 42 CFR Part 8 Final Rule FAQs.
Current federal guidance covering opioid treatment programs and take-home methadone flexibility. SAMHSA

American Medical Association, Prior Authorization.
Research and physician survey data on treatment delays and administrative burden associated with prior authorization. AMA

I don’t trust the government very much.

When the government tells me something, I don’t automatically assume it’s a lie. But I’m also not accepting it because somebody with a title stood behind a podium and told me it was true.

Show me.

Show me the evidence.

Show me who benefits.

Show me what you left out.

And if the institution asking for my trust has a history of lying, protecting itself, abusing power, or hiding its mistakes, then yeah, I’m probably going to look even harder.

That seems reasonable.

Except recently I noticed something uncomfortable.

There is another institution I’ve spent a large part of my life treating differently.

Religion.

More specifically, Christianity.

And suddenly the question wasn’t whether Christianity was right or wrong.

The question became whether I was using the same measuring stick.

The Question

How do I know when I’m wrong?

It sounds like an easy question.

Evidence.

Facts.

Logic.

New information.

Except I’m beginning to think that isn’t really the test.

Accepting evidence that confirms something I already believe is easy.

The real test is what happens when the evidence threatens something I would rather keep believing.

So I tried something.

I removed the label.

Imagine This Was a Company

Imagine I described an institution to you without telling you what it was.

It claims authority over some of the most important decisions in people’s lives.

It receives money from the people who believe in it.

It can accumulate enormous amounts of wealth and property.

In some versions of it, authority is concentrated through a powerful hierarchy.

In the United States, qualifying churches receive federal tax-exempt status automatically under section 501(c)(3), without having to apply to the IRS for recognition, and churches are generally exempt from the annual information-return requirement that applies to many other tax-exempt organizations.

Members of its leadership have used positions of enormous trust to sexually abuse children.

There are documented cases where parts of the institution protected offenders, concealed abuse, or protected the institution before protecting the people who were harmed. The John Jay research documented thousands of allegations involving Catholic priests and deacons, and Pennsylvania’s statewide grand-jury investigation later identified more than 300 priests accused of abusing more than 1,000 identifiable children while also describing institutional concealment.

It can influence what people believe about marriage, sex, morality, family, politics, guilt, punishment, and what supposedly happens to them after they die.

And in some communities, questioning the institution itself comes with a price.

Now forget religion for a second.

Imagine I just described a corporation.

Would I trust it?

Fuck no.

I’d investigate the hell out of it.

I’d want independent oversight.

I’d want financial transparency.

I’d want to know who holds the power.

I’d want to know who benefits from the structure.

I’d especially want to know what happens when the interests of the institution conflict with the interests of the people it claims to serve.

And if that company told me, “You just have to trust us”?

That would probably make me more suspicious.

Here’s the problem.

I wasn’t describing one company.

I was describing documented things that have happened inside Christian institutions.

And now I have to ask myself something I don’t particularly enjoy asking.

Why would my standard of scrutiny change because there’s a cross on the building?

That doesn’t mean every priest abused someone.

It doesn’t mean every church covered something up.

And it definitely doesn’t mean every Christian is responsible for what church leaders did.

But if I were evaluating any other institution, that history would affect how much automatic authority I gave it.

So why should religion get a different standard?

Then I Realized I Was Cheating

Here’s where I caught myself.

Look at what I just did.

I built the prosecution.

I gave you abuse.

Money.

Power.

Tax advantages.

Institutional protection.

Then I asked you for a verdict.

That isn’t an investigation.

That’s me building a case.

And if I’m going to criticize religious people for protecting conclusions they already want, I don’t get to turn around and do the exact same thing from the opposite direction.

Because Christian institutions have also done a tremendous amount of good.

Churches feed people.

They operate shelters.

They help people dealing with addiction.

They provide community to people who are completely alone.

They organize disaster relief.

They run hospitals, schools, charities, missions and food programs.

Research backs up at least part of that picture. A review of faith-based services for people experiencing homelessness concluded that faith communities play a crucial role in providing services in the United States. Another nationally representative study found that half of U.S. congregations offered some form of programming addressing mental illness or substance-use disorder in 2018–19.

There are also people who have devoted enormous parts of their lives to helping complete strangers because they genuinely believe their faith requires it.

That belongs in the ledger too.

So now what?

I’ve got corruption.

I’ve got service.

Abuse of power.

Extraordinary generosity.

People protecting institutions.

Other people sacrificing themselves for people they don’t even know.

And now I’m asking a much more uncomfortable question.

Am I investigating Christianity, or am I collecting evidence for the conclusion I already wanted?

That one bothers me more.

Because now I’m not looking at them anymore.

I’m looking at me.

I Think I’ve Been Combining Four Different Things

Something else became obvious the deeper I got into this.

I keep throwing several things into the same bucket.

Jesus.

The Bible.

Christianity.

The church.

But those aren’t the same thing.

They overlap, obviously.

But they aren’t interchangeable.

Jesus is the historical person at the center of the religion and the claims made about him.

The Bible is a collection of writings produced by different people over different periods and eventually assembled into a canon.

Christianity is everything that developed around those writings, beliefs, traditions, interpretations, denominations, arguments and theology.

And churches are human institutions built around those beliefs.

Those are different questions.

I can distrust a church without proving Jesus didn’t exist.

I can believe organized Christianity has accumulated corruption without proving that everything attributed to Jesus is false.

I can believe the Gospels contain legitimate historical information without believing every recorded conversation is a word-for-word transcript.

I could believe in God and still think organized religion has accumulated a whole lot of human bullshit.

Someone else could examine all of this and remain completely Christian.

Those positions require different evidence.

Maybe one of my mistakes was expecting one answer to settle all of them.

Then I Got to the Documents

This is where things got more difficult.

If I’m going to hold institutions to the same evidentiary standard, eventually I have to do it with the Bible too.

Jesus’ death is generally placed around 30 CE, although the exact year cannot be established with certainty. Modern scholarship commonly places the Gospel of Mark somewhere around 65–75 CE, with Matthew and Luke usually dated later.

Now, historically?

Twenty, thirty, forty years isn’t some insane gap when you’re studying the ancient world.

Documents disappear.

Most people weren’t writing books.

Most ordinary lives were never documented in the first place.

I understand that.

But there’s another clock here.

The human one.

Twenty years ago was 2006.

Ask me what happened in my life in 2006 and I can tell you plenty.

I can probably tell you where I lived.

Who was around.

What was going on.

I can remember certain events very clearly.

I can probably remember some conversations that mattered enough to stick.

But if I sat you down and gave you four pages of dialogue and said:

“This is exactly what everybody said, in exactly this order, twenty years ago.”

You should have questions.

Not because I’m lying.

Because I’m human.

Memory isn’t a security camera.

We remember.

We reconstruct.

We fill things in.

We repeat stories until certain versions become the version we remember.

And sometimes our confidence survives even when some of the details don’t.

A ten-year study of memories surrounding the September 11 attacks found rapid forgetting early on, while people’s confidence in those memories remained high throughout the decade.

So if I would naturally question the precision of my own twenty-year-old memory, why would I suddenly stop asking that question because the document is sacred?

That doesn’t mean the Gospels are false.

It means I should ask the same questions I would ask about any other human testimony.

Except It Wasn’t Just One Person Remembering Forty Years Later

And this is where it gets complicated again.

The Jesus tradition was circulating before the surviving Gospels were written.

People were teaching it.

Repeating it.

Arguing about it.

Passing sayings and stories through communities.

And oral culture isn’t necessarily one giant game of telephone where somebody says Jesus fed five thousand people and forty years later everyone thinks he landed a Boeing 747 on the Sea of Galilee.

Scholars have spent decades arguing about what oral transmission would have done to those traditions.

One influential approach, associated with James D. G. Dunn, emphasizes both stability and flexibility. A tradition can retain a recognizable core while wording, emphasis and presentation shift as it is repeated in different situations. Scholarship on early Christian transmission still debates how much stability existed and exactly what that lets us recover historically.

Which means oral transmission isn’t automatically evidence that the stories were corrupted.

But it isn’t a magic photocopier either.

Once again, I don’t get the easy answer.

I can’t honestly say:

“Decades passed, therefore the Gospels are bullshit.”

But I also don’t think I can reasonably say:

“The stories were preserved, therefore every sentence must be perfectly accurate.”

Both conclusions ask more from the evidence than the evidence can give me.

Which leaves me with the question I keep running into:

What level of confidence is actually justified?

What We Know and What We Don’t

There’s another place where skepticism can get sloppy.

We don’t have a surviving Roman trial transcript for Jesus.

That does not mean Jesus wasn’t crucified.

Rome did not leave us a perfectly preserved filing cabinet containing paperwork for every person it executed in a provincial territory two thousand years ago.

There are later non-Christian references.

Josephus gives us a couple of interesting ones.

In Antiquities, he refers to James as the brother of “Jesus, who was called Christ.” Most scholars regard that James passage as authentic. Another, much longer Josephus passage describing Jesus has a far more complicated textual history and has generated extensive arguments over how much of its surviving wording came from Josephus and how much may have been altered later.

Tacitus is less complicated for the particular point I’m asking about.

Writing in the early second century, he says that Christus suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius under Pontius Pilate.

None of that proves the supernatural claims about Jesus.

But it also means saying, “There’s nothing outside the Bible,” would be too strong.

So the question isn’t whether I can find uncertainty.

Of course I can.

This is ancient history.

The question is what that uncertainty allows me to conclude.

There is a huge difference between:

I cannot historically verify every detail in the Gospels with certainty.

and:

Therefore none of it happened.

The first recognizes the limits of the evidence.

The second jumps right over them.

And if I’m writing an article about recognizing when I might be wrong, demonstrating the exact problem while doing it would be pretty fucking embarrassing.

Jesus May Be a Different Question From Christianity

This is probably where my thinking changed the most.

A lot of my frustration may not actually be with Jesus.

It may be with institutions claiming to represent him.

When I read stories about Jesus criticizing hypocrisy, spending time with outsiders, talking about the poor, warning about wealth, and challenging religious authority, then I look at certain institutions operating under his name today, sometimes I find myself wondering:

What the hell happened between point A and point B?

I was going to say Jesus would be turning in his grave, but according to Christianity that gives him about a three-day window, so that expression doesn’t really work here.

But you get what I mean.

Sometimes I look at what people have built in his name and wonder whether he would recognize all of it.

That’s my interpretation.

I obviously cannot ask him.

And there are Christians and churches whose lives seem very consistent with the teachings attributed to him.

That has to stay in the picture too.

But I’m becoming uncomfortable with the idea that questioning the church means I have to throw Jesus out with it.

Maybe sometimes I’ve given the institution credit that belonged to the teacher.

And maybe sometimes I’ve blamed the teacher for shit the institution did centuries later.

Neither one makes much sense.

Then the Question Turned Around on Me

I could stop here and feel pretty good about myself.

Church investigated.

Bible questioned.

Religious institutions scrutinized.

Congratulations, Frank.

Very skeptical.

Except that would let me off incredibly easy.

Because remember how this started.

I don’t trust the government.

Okay.

What happens if that distrust becomes its own belief system?

If somebody tells me something terrible about the government, do I sometimes require less evidence because the story already fits?

If somebody shows me something defending an institution I distrust, do I attack every hole in it?

But if somebody shows me something attacking that same institution, do I sometimes just go:

“Yep. Sounds about right.”

That’s not skepticism.

That’s confirmation bias wearing a skeptic’s T-shirt.

Could “the government lies” become as automatic as “the Bible says it, so it must be true”?

Could skepticism itself become dogmatic?

That’s a much uglier question.

Because skepticism feels like the opposite of faith.

But it doesn’t have to be.

If I become impossible to persuade, then I’ve still created an untouchable belief.

I just chose a different belief.

And maybe that’s why figuring out when I’m wrong is so difficult.

Being wrong usually doesn’t feel like being wrong.

It feels exactly like being right.

If it didn’t, I would have changed my mind already.

Where I Stand Now

I didn’t investigate this and discover that Christianity is false.

I also didn’t discover that Christianity is true.

That would be a hell of a lot to solve in one Substack article.

What changed was my confidence in some of the shortcuts.

A corrupt church doesn’t prove there is no God.

A charitable church doesn’t prove there is one.

The lack of a surviving Roman trial document doesn’t prove Jesus was invented.

Later historical references don’t prove every supernatural claim made about him.

A decades-long gap before the surviving Gospels were written doesn’t make them worthless.

But it also doesn’t give me a reason to pretend human memory and oral transmission are infallible.

And something giving my life meaning doesn’t automatically make it historically true.

I think I’m becoming more comfortable separating the questions.

Jesus.

The historical sources.

The supernatural claims.

Christianity.

The institutions built around it.

Instead of forcing one answer to swallow everything else, I can ask what the evidence actually supports at each level.

But the biggest thing I found wasn’t about Christianity.

It was about me.

I’m really good at demanding evidence from things I already distrust.

That’s easy.

The harder test is whether I’m willing to demand the same quality of evidence from something I desperately want to keep.

And that leaves me with a better question than the one I started with.

The Better Question

Am I applying the same standard of evidence to the beliefs I want to keep as I apply to the claims I want to reject?

I’m not convinced I always am.

And maybe realizing that is one of the better ways to recognize that I could be wrong.

Before You Go

Try this on yourself.

Pick one belief that matters enough that discovering you were wrong would actually hurt.

Your religion.

Your politics.

Your relationship.

Something you believe about your parents.

Something you believe about yourself.

Something you’ve been pissed off about for twenty years.

Then ask yourself one question:

What evidence would actually make me change my mind?

Not what evidence should change somebody else’s mind.

Yours.

And don’t answer too quickly.

Because if the honest answer is:

Nothing.

Then maybe you’re not holding a conclusion anymore.

You’re holding a commitment.

That doesn’t automatically make the commitment wrong.

But I think we should know when we’ve crossed that line.

And now I want to turn the experiment on this piece.

What did I get wrong?

Not what did you dislike.

Not what offended you.

Not what conflicts with what you already believe.

What did I actually get wrong?

If I treated Christianity unfairly, show me where.

If I gave Christianity too much credit, show me that too.

If there’s historical evidence I missed, bring it.

And if you can show me that something I wrote here is wrong, I’ll change it.

Because if I write an entire piece called How Do I Know When I’m Wrong? and then refuse to correct myself when someone brings me better evidence, I’ve pretty much answered the question in the worst possible way.

And one more thing.

Tell me the belief you chose for the experiment.

Then tell me what evidence could actually change your mind.

That conversation might be more interesting than this article.

We’re not collecting answers.

We’re collecting better questions.

Buy Me A Coffee

No pressure at all. Reading, subscribing, commenting, and sharing already help more than you probably realize. But if you want to throw a few bucks toward the work, I appreciate it.

Additional Reading

Internal Revenue Service — Churches, Integrated Auxiliaries and Conventions or Associations of Churches

Internal Revenue Service — Annual Exempt Organization Return: Who Must File

John Jay College of Criminal Justice — The Nature and Scope of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, 1950–2002 and subsequent research published through the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Pennsylvania Office of Attorney General — statewide grand-jury investigation into clergy sexual abuse.

Thurman et al. — Faith-based Health and Social Services for People Experiencing Homelessness in the United States: A Scoping Review of the Literature.

Anna Holleman — Programming Provided by Religious Congregations in the United States to Address Mental Illness and Substance Use Disorder.

William Hirst et al. — A Ten-Year Follow-Up of a Study of Memory for the Attack of September 11, 2001: Flashbulb Memories and Memories for Flashbulb Events.

Helen K. Bond — Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination.

S. G. F. Brandon — The Date of the Markan Gospel, New Testament Studies.

J. V. M. Sturdy — discussion of the dating and relationship of the Synoptic Gospels in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Date of Early Christian Literature.

Flavius Josephus — Antiquities of the Jews, Book 20.

T. C. Schmidt — Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ, including discussion of Antiquities 20.200.

Tacitus — Annals, Book XV, Chapter 44.

This installment is going to be a little different.

For the first time, Thoughtful Questions has a guest.

I’m joined by Haide Wall Giesbrecht, and rather than both of us trying to answer the same question, we decided to bring two questions that seemed to be circling the same problem from opposite directions.

Visibility.

What happens when you create something that you genuinely want people to see...

but you’re not necessarily sure how much of yourself you want seen along with it?

Your question gets at one side of that.

Mine gets at the other.

And neither of us is coming into this pretending we already know the answer.

That would sort of defeat the point.

So let’s see where they take us.

Question One — Haide Wall Giesbrecht

What happens when you want the work to be seen, but you don’t necessarily want to be seen with it?

Why This Question Stuck With Me

I have been working my way through The Artist’s Way. In Chapter 10, Julia Cameron writes about fame and the way it can shift an artist’s attention from the work itself to how the artist is being perceived.

As I read the chapter, something within me recoiled, and I found myself wondering why the idea of fame created such an immediate response.

As I thought about it, I realized that some of my discomfort may have very little to do with wanting my work to reach people and much more to do with what being known has meant to me in the past.

I grew up as the child of a pastor. While not every PK, or pastor’s kid, may have felt this, I definitely felt like I lived in a fishbowl, with people paying attention to what I said and did and with an awareness that I was expected to set a good example.

Over time, I developed extremely high and often unreasonable expectations of myself that I would never impose on others. Towards other people, there was a growing graciousness and gentleness. Towards myself, the message was much more exacting.

So when I think about fame, I think part of my discomfort connects back to this sense of needing to show only what was acceptable, good, and perhaps even perfect.

I have spent much of my adult life unlearning this. I have discovered that I do not only have to be the helper and supporter, but that I can also accept help and encouragement from others. I have also realized that it isn’t in perfection that I connect most meaningfully with people, but in sharing my humanness, my struggles, and my real story.

And yet, strangely enough, I now find myself deliberately stepping into greater visibility.

I am writing publicly, speaking, approaching people with ideas for conversations, and trying things that would once have felt overwhelming. I recently submitted a throughline to TED-Ed, and I am writing a book that I hope to pitch to a publisher.

Clearly, I am not avoiding being seen.

So why does fame still feel uncomfortable?

I think I am beginning to understand that being seen and feeling watched are not the same thing.

Being seen can mean connection, being known, and showing up honestly. Feeling watched carries something different: scrutiny, assessment, judgement, and the sense that I need to manage how I am being perceived.

That distinction feels important because I don’t actually think I want attention. I want impact.

I want my writing, conversations, and invitations to curiosity to reach people, encourage reflection, and contribute something good. Increasingly, doing that means accepting visibility.

And this is where the work has started to feel like a calling.

Writing, speaking, and connecting with people are things I have done for as long as I can remember. The form has changed over the years, but the heart of it hasn’t. I have always been drawn to helping people feel seen, encouraging reflection, asking questions, and creating spaces for meaningful connection.

Counselling has been one expression of that calling, and writing and speaking are becoming another. The delivery is changing, but the work itself feels remarkably familiar.

As I’ve unpacked this question, I’ve realized that what matters most to me is the impact, not the attention the impact garners.

Perhaps calling sometimes asks us to tolerate visibility we would not otherwise seek.

Which leads me to a different question:

How visible am I willing to become in service of the work I feel called to do?

Part of what makes visibility difficult is knowing that once my words leave me, I no longer have complete control over how they are understood.

I am human, which means I will not always say everything perfectly. Someone may misunderstand me, someone may judge me, and I may occasionally discover that I missed something important.

There is still a part of me that wants to be seen as kind and competent, and being raised with the question “What will people think?” at the forefront of my awareness created a hard habit to break.

I know I can’t control what anyone thinks about me, AND that still feels uncomfortable.

But I think there is another layer too.

Visibility requires me to take up space.

This has been surprisingly difficult for me, whether I am standing on stage singing with my chorus, speaking in front of people, sharing my writing, or even navigating ordinary situations where someone might be inconvenienced by something I need.

Perhaps one of the edges of visibility I am still learning to tolerate is allowing myself to take up space without knowing exactly what other people will make of me for doing so.

I believe I have something worth saying, and I’m willing to stand where people can hear me say it.

Even writing that feels vulnerable.

So I started looking backward and asking what I learned about a person who takes up space.

Some of the messages I learned about being female were directly taught, but many were communicated much more subtly. Women should not be too loud, should not ask for too much, should support others, and should not draw too much attention to themselves.

Some of this was also shaped by the conservative religious culture in which I grew up.

Women were meant to be humble, modest, serving, and self-denying. I heard warnings about pride, selfish ambition, doing things to be seen, and seeking the praise of others.

None of those teachings actually said, “Don’t have a voice” or “Don’t be seen,” yet as a quiet and sensitive child, I made inferences.

Some things I was taught outright, some I learned by watching which qualities were praised and which behaviours were corrected, some I absorbed through the roles I saw women occupying, and some I inferred entirely on my own.

Be good. Be kind. Be helpful. Don’t inconvenience people. Don’t think too highly of yourself. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Be humble. Serve. Give. Support.

There is much in those values that I still want to keep. I want to be kind, I want to serve, I want to remain humble, and I want to consider the impact I have on other people. I don’t want visibility simply for visibility’s sake.

But I am beginning to wonder whether I added something to those values that never actually belonged there.

Did I learn that kindness meant never inconveniencing anyone? That service meant always putting myself second? That humility meant minimizing what I could do? That modesty meant staying out of sight? That not seeking praise meant I shouldn’t tell people about work I was proud of?

This is where my current life collides with some of those older messages.

Writing requires me to say, I have something to say.

Publishing requires me to believe those words are worth offering to other people.

Speaking requires me to stand somewhere while attention is directed toward me.

Pitching a book requires me to explain why I believe the work deserves to be published.

Seeking a larger platform means admitting that I would like the opportunity to reach more people.

Through one lens, those things can look like self-promotion, ambition, or drawing attention to myself. Through another, they are simply the practical requirements of doing work I believe matters.

Maybe the question isn’t whether I should take up space, but how I want to inhabit the space I do occupy.

Can I stand confidently without believing I am more important or less important than the person beside me?

Can I acknowledge what I do well while remaining aware of everything I still have to learn?

Can I want the work to travel further without believing that wanting that makes me prideful?

I don’t know that I have complete answers to those questions yet. In fact, the further I have followed the question that started all of this, the more questions I seem to uncover.

Which beliefs about visibility actually belong to me now, and which were conclusions reached by a child trying to understand how to be good?

What does humility look like if it doesn’t require self-erasure?

What does modesty mean if it doesn’t require hiding?

Can I believe I have something worth saying and bravely say it?

And perhaps the question I am left most curious about is this:

If I no longer believe I have to make myself smaller in order to be humble, how much space am I willing to occupy?

I have thoroughly enjoyed following this question, even though it has left me with far more questions than answers. Thankfully, I like journalling. 😉

What I do know is that visibility doesn’t actually require me to become a different person. I can continue to show up honestly, authentically, kindly, with integrity, and with a deep awareness that I will sometimes get things wrong and that I will always have more to learn.

Visibility simply means there may be more people who are aware of how I show up.

And perhaps, for now, that is enough.

Question Two — Frank Hayes

How do I know when visibility is serving the work... and when the work has started serving my need to be seen?

This question bothers me because I genuinely don’t want to be famous.

I realize that probably sounds a little strange coming from somebody who writes publicly, shares links to his own work, talks to readers, watches something get passed around, and thinks:

Fuck yeah. People are reading it.

But those things don’t feel contradictory to me.

I want the work to be seen.

I’m much less interested in me being seen.

The problem is that I’m not sure the internet gives you a clean way to separate the two.

Because how is anybody supposed to read the work if nobody knows it exists?

If I spend days writing something that I genuinely think could help somebody and then quietly leave it sitting in a corner of the internet, I can’t exactly complain that nobody found it.

So I tell people about it.

I post it.

I interact with readers.

And I actually love part of that process.

When somebody tells me something I wrote helped them understand themselves better, or made them feel less alone, that’s probably one of the best things I can get from writing.

I don’t resent that kind of being seen.

I embrace it.

The problem is figuring out when that stops being the reason.

What I Went Looking For

The first thing I found wasn’t exactly shocking.

Attention feels good.

Apparently science has confirmed that humans enjoy people liking their shit.

But there’s something more interesting underneath that.

Research looking at social-media behavior through reinforcement-learning models found evidence that social rewards like likes can actually influence future posting behavior.

So feedback doesn’t necessarily just make us feel good afterward.

It can help shape what we do next.

And that made me uncomfortable for a pretty obvious reason.

Because now I have to ask whether every time I say:

I’m just trying to get the work out there

I’m being completely honest with myself.

Maybe I am.

Maybe the last post also did really well and some little part of my brain would like another cookie.

Those two motives don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

That’s what makes this difficult.

There’s probably no giant warning light that suddenly comes on saying:

FRANK, THIS IS ABOUT YOUR EGO NOW.

The motive can shift quietly.

I found another study that made the distinction even more interesting.

People who received more positive social-media feedback tended to report higher self-esteem, but people with a stronger sense of purpose were less dependent on that feedback for the boost.

That stuck with me.

Because maybe the answer isn’t pretending attention doesn’t feel good.

Of course it does.

Maybe the protection is knowing why I’m doing this before the scoreboard starts talking.

If one piece gets five thousand views and the next gets fifty...

do I still want to write the next one?

That seems like a better test.

Then There’s the Personal Part

A lot of what I write is personal.

Sometimes extremely personal.

I do that intentionally because I know what it feels like to read somebody else’s experience and suddenly realize:

Holy shit. Somebody else does this too.

I’ve had writing do that for me.

I want mine to occasionally do it for somebody else.

Research on self-disclosure also suggests that sharing more personal information can increase the sense of connection audiences develop with public figures and creators.

Which makes complete sense.

The more of myself I put into the writing, the more somebody reading it may feel like they know me.

And in a weird way...

they do.

Somebody can spend hours reading my thoughts and know things about me that people I’ve met in real life don’t know.

But I may know absolutely nothing about them.

Then they comment.

We start talking.

They tell me something personal.

And suddenly this isn’t just:

I wrote something. You read it.

Now there’s another human being sitting on the other side.

That’s the part I love.

It’s also where things get complicated.

Because Sometimes Somebody Is Hurting

Every once in a while, somebody comments or messages me and you can tell they’re not simply discussing the piece.

They’re struggling.

Maybe they tell me something I wrote helped them.

Then they ask what I would do.

Or they explain what’s going on in their life.

And my instinct is:

Fuck. I want to help this person.

Because I’ve been inside some pretty shitty places myself.

I know what it’s like when your own brain turns against you.

So if somebody trusted me enough to say something...

I want to answer.

Research on creators who discuss mental health has found this exact tension. People receive private messages from distressed followers and can end up somewhere between feeling like a helpless bystander and feeling obligated to become a well-intentioned rescuer.

That’s almost exactly the problem.

Because I care.

But I’m also not their therapist.

I’m not their doctor.

I’m not their emergency contact.

Eventually I have to put my phone down and go make dinner.

And I don’t think that makes me uncaring.

I think it makes me a person who also has a life.

Visibility Creates Access

I think this may be the part I hadn’t really considered before.

Visibility doesn’t just create attention.

It creates access.

And access can slowly start feeling like availability.

Researchers studying psychologists with public social-media accounts have described similar problems around self-disclosure, boundaries, professional responsibility, time, and mental health.

Their version of the boundary was essentially:

I’m a psychologist, but I’m not your psychologist.

Obviously I’m not a psychologist.

But I understand the distinction.

I’m a person sharing my experience.

I can tell you what happened to me.

I can tell you what helped me.

I can say:

Yeah, brother. I know that feeling. It fucking sucks.

But there has to be a point where being accessible stops helping the writing and starts consuming the life the writing is supposed to come from.

Because I like turning the phone off.

I like cooking.

I like being home.

I like having conversations nobody online gets to watch.

I like having parts of my life that never become material.

Research into creator mental health is still pretty young, so I don’t want to pretend the science is settled, but studies and reviews are already describing burnout, anxiety, public scrutiny, pressure, long hours, and something that immediately caught my attention:

continuous connectivity.

That’s the thing I don’t want.

I want connection.

I don’t want permanent availability.

Those are very different things.

Where I Stand Now

I don’t think the answer is to become less visible.

At least not yet.

Because visibility is currently serving something I actually care about.

People find the work.

They read it.

Sometimes they disagree with it.

Sometimes they add something I hadn’t considered.

And sometimes they tell me it helped.

That’s part of writing to me.

If nobody ever reads anything I write, I’m basically keeping a very elaborate diary.

There’s nothing wrong with that.

It’s just not what I’m trying to do.

I want the work to travel.

Which means sometimes I have to stand there and say:

Hey. I made this. Come look.

That’s fine.

But this question gave me a few tests that I think are more useful than asking whether I enjoy attention.

Of course I enjoy attention sometimes.

The questions are:

Would I still write this if almost nobody noticed?

Am I changing what I actually believe because I know another version will perform better?

Am I sharing something personal because the piece needs it, or because vulnerability gets engagement?

Can I turn my phone off without feeling like I’m abandoning people?

And maybe the hardest one:

When somebody needs more from me than I can realistically give, can I care about them without convincing myself that I’m responsible for saving them?

That feels closer to the line I’m looking for.

I don’t think wanting people to read the work means the work has become about ego.

Hell, I spent time writing it.

Of course I want somebody to read the fucking thing.

What I don’t want is for the scoreboard to quietly become the reason I’m playing.

There’s a version of this where attention helps the work reach people.

I like that version.

There’s another version where the work gradually becomes something I produce because I need another hit of being noticed.

I don’t want that one.

And maybe there isn’t a permanent line between the two.

Maybe I have to keep checking.

Because ego probably doesn’t knock on the door and introduce itself as ego.

I suspect sometimes it shows up wearing a little badge that says:

I’m just trying to grow the publication.

So where am I now?

I still want people to see my work.

I still love talking to people when something I wrote genuinely connected with them.

I still want to help when I can.

But I also want to put the phone down, shut the door, and live a life that nobody online gets to watch.

Maybe that’s the balance.

Not disappearing.

Not becoming permanently available.

Just being visible enough for the work to find the people it might matter to...

without forgetting that I existed before anybody was watching.

And that leaves me with a better question:

If the attention disappeared tomorrow, would the work still feel worth doing?

Right now...

my answer is yes.

I want to keep it that way.

Before You Go

This was the first time I’ve brought somebody else into Thoughtful Questions, and I think that’s probably going to become part of what makes this series interesting.

Two people don’t necessarily bring the same assumptions into a question.

They don’t have the same history.

They don’t have the same fears.

And they definitely don’t have to arrive at the same answer.

That’s kind of the point.

We’re not collecting answers.

We’re collecting better questions.

And sometimes another person is exactly what you need to notice the question you weren’t asking.

So thank you to Haide Wall Giesbrecht for being willing to come wander around inside this one with me.

If you like Thoughtful Questions, subscribe.

If you disagree with either of us, tell us why.

Bring an argument.

Bring evidence.

Bring another perspective.

And if there’s a question that’s been following you around lately, send it to me.

It may end up here.

Additional Reading

Everything we relied on while researching the factual parts of this installment is collected here so you can follow the work yourself.

Haide’s full investigation went considerably deeper than the version included in this collaboration, so we’ve also included some of the research that informed that larger exploration.

Haide — Visibility, Shame, Calling & Taking Up Space

Cameron, Julia. The Artist’s Way. Chapter 10: “Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection.”

The book that prompted Haide’s original question about fame, visibility, attention, and the work itself.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/349644/the-artists-way-by-julia-cameron/

Cambridge Dictionary — “fame.”

Definition referenced near the beginning of Haide’s reflection.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/fame

Di Paola, L., Nocentini, A., Levantini, V., Masi, G., Milone, A., & Muratori, P. (2025). “The Role of Environmental Sensitivity in the Relationship Between Childhood Maltreatment and Self-Conscious Emotions of Shame and Guilt: A Brief Report.” Psychological Reports, 128(6), 4248–4257.

A small clinical study examining whether environmental sensitivity moderated associations between childhood maltreatment and shame/guilt. The population and design limit how broadly the findings can be generalized.

https://doi.org/10.1177/00332941231223677

Zinsser, K. M., Gordon, R. A., & Jiang, X. (2021). “Parents’ Socialization of Preschool-Aged Children’s Emotion Skills: A Meta-Analysis Using an Emotion-Focused Parenting Practices Framework.” Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 55, 377–390.

Meta-analysis of parental modeling, responses, and instruction around emotions and children’s emotion knowledge, expression, and regulation. Associations were generally small, and much of the evidence was correlational.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2021.02.001

van Eickels, R. L., Siegel, M., Juhasz, A. J., & Zemp, M. (2025). “The Parent–Child Relationship and Child Shame and Guilt: A Meta-Analytic Systematic Review.” Child Development, 96(3), 907–929.

Meta-analysis of 65 samples involving 19,144 participants examining positive and dysfunctional parent-child relationship characteristics in relation to shame and guilt.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12023818/

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). “The Spotlight Effect in Social Judgment: An Egocentric Bias in Estimates of the Salience of One’s Own Actions and Appearance.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(2), 211–222.

Experimental work showing that people tend to overestimate how much others notice their appearance and behavior.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10707330/

Gilovich, T., Savitsky, K., & Medvec, V. H. (1998). “The Illusion of Transparency: Biased Assessments of Others’ Ability to Read One’s Emotional States.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(2), 332–346.

Research showing that people often overestimate how visible their internal emotional states are to other people.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9731312/

Frost, R. O., Marten, P., Lahart, C., & Rosenblate, R. (1990). “The Dimensions of Perfectionism.” Cognitive Therapy and Research, 14, 449–468.

Foundational multidimensional work on perfectionism, including perceived parental expectations and criticism among the dimensions studied.

https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01172967

Rudman, L. A. (1998). “Self-Promotion as a Risk Factor for Women: The Costs and Benefits of Counterstereotypical Impression Management.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 629–645.

Experimental work relevant to Haide’s questions about women, competence, modesty, self-promotion, and the social costs of taking up space.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9523410/

Wrzesniewski, A., McCauley, C., Rozin, P., & Schwartz, B. (1997). “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work.” Journal of Research in Personality, 31(1), 21–33.

Foundational work distinguishing job, career, and calling orientations toward work.

https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1997.2162

Duffy, R. D., Dik, B. J., Douglass, R. P., England, J. W., & Velez, B. L. (2018). “Work as a Calling: A Theoretical Model.” Journal of Counseling Psychology, 65(4), 423–439.

A model of calling that includes both possible benefits and possible costs, including burnout, workaholism, and exploitation.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29999369/

Primary Texts Referenced in Haide’s Reflection

Proverbs 31:10–31

A biblical passage referenced or alluded to in Haide’s discussion of humility, pride, ambition, service, and being seen.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2031%3A10-31

Philippians 2:3

A biblical passage referenced or alluded to in Haide’s discussion of humility, pride, ambition, service, and being seen.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Philippians%202%3A3

Proverbs 16:18

A biblical passage referenced or alluded to in Haide’s discussion of humility, pride, ambition, service, and being seen.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%2016%3A18

Matthew 6:1

A biblical passage referenced or alluded to in Haide’s discussion of humility, pride, ambition, service, and being seen.

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%206%3A1

Frank — Visibility, Feedback & Motivation

Lindström, B., Bellander, M., Schultner, D. T., Chang, A., Tobler, P. N., & Amodio, D. M. (2021). “A Computational Reward Learning Account of Social Media Engagement.” Nature Communications, 12, 1311.

Research examining how social rewards such as likes can reinforce and shape future posting behavior.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19607-x

Burrow, A. L., & Rainone, N. (2017). “How Many Likes Did I Get?: Purpose Moderates Links Between Positive Social Media Feedback and Self-Esteem.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 69, 232–236.

Research examining social-media feedback, self-esteem, and whether a stronger sense of purpose reduces sensitivity to positive feedback.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2016.09.005

Frank — Self-Disclosure & Audience Connection

Kashian, N. (2026; first published online 2024). “Pathways to Persuasion: The Impact of Social Media Influencers’ Self-Disclosure and Follower Size on Persuasion Outcomes.” New Media & Society, 28(2), 549–566.

Experimental work examining how deeper self-disclosure can increase social attraction and parasocial relationship development.

https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448241293143

Hoffner, C. A., & Bond, B. J. (2022). “Parasocial Relationships, Social Media, & Well-Being.” Current Opinion in Psychology, 45, 101306.

Review of psychologically meaningful, nonreciprocal relationships audiences can develop with creators and other media figures.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35219157/

Frank — Responsibility, Boundaries & Distressed Followers

Adeane, E., & Stasiak, K. (2025). “Relatability Versus Responsibility: Social Media Influencers on Their Roles in Youth Mental Health.” DIGITAL HEALTH, 11, 20552076251382026.

Qualitative research examining creators’ uncertainty about responsibility, expertise, and responding to followers’ private mental-health disclosures.

https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076251382026

White, E., & Hanley, T. (2025). “‘What I Share Is Not the Same as Therapy’: Psychologist Experiences of Instagram Use as a Mental Health Influencer.” Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice.

Interviews exploring boundaries, self-disclosure, time, responsibility, and mental-health effects among psychologists maintaining public social-media presences.

https://doi.org/10.1111/papt.12585

Frank — Creator Mental Health

Martinez-Aguirre, S., Sanz-Valero, J., & Ronda-Pérez, E. (2025). “Pathological Processes Among Content Creators on Social Media: Scoping Review.” JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 11, e76708.

Scoping review of emerging evidence on content-creator health, including psychosocial and occupational risks.

https://publichealth.jmir.org/2025/1/e76708/

Thoughtful Questions #7: Who’s Pulling the Strings?

The Question

When the media is competing for my attention, where does informing me end and manipulating me begin?

That sounds like it should have a clean answer.

I thought it did.

I figured manipulation was basically lying.

If a news organization knowingly gives me false information to make me believe something, that’s manipulation.

Easy enough.

But then I started thinking about everything that happens before I ever get to the facts.

The headline.

The photograph.

The thumbnail.

The words they choose.

The story they choose to cover.

The part of the story they lead with.

The push notification.

BREAKING.

CRISIS.

OUTRAGE.

SHOCKING.

What they don’t want you to know.

None of those things necessarily make the information false.

But they absolutely affect how I feel before I’ve had a chance to decide what I think.

That’s where the question got more interesting.

My First Answer

My first answer was pretty simple.

The media informs me when it gives me accurate information.

It manipulates me when it lies.

I don’t think that’s completely wrong.

I just don’t think it’s enough anymore.

Because you don’t have to change a fact to change the way somebody experiences it.

You can choose which fact goes first.

You can leave another fact near the bottom.

You can put an angry face in the thumbnail.

You can describe someone as “fighting back” instead of “responding.”

You can call something a “crisis,” a “controversy,” a “battle,” or simply “Tuesday.”

Same event.

Very different emotional experience.

And once I started looking at the business model behind modern media, another uncomfortable thought showed up.

Maybe nobody has to sit in a dark room and decide to manipulate me.

Maybe the incentives can do most of the work by themselves.

What I Went Looking For

The first thing I wanted to know was whether negative news actually gets more attention.

Not whether people think it does.

Whether it actually does.

Researchers published a study in Nature Human Behaviour that looked at more than 105,000 different headline variations shown hundreds of millions of times.

The researchers weren’t simply comparing completely different stories.

They were able to look at different headlines for the same stories.

The result was pretty fucking interesting.

For an average-length headline, adding one negative word increased the click-through rate by about 2.3 percent.[1]

One word.

That doesn’t sound enormous until you remember that media companies operate at scale.

Millions of impressions.

Millions of people.

Thousands of headlines.

Two percent matters.

And if negative language reliably gets more attention, I don’t need to imagine some evil editor twirling his mustache.

I just need an editor looking at analytics.

Headline A gets 100,000 clicks.

Headline B gets 110,000.

Which style do you think gets used tomorrow?

That’s not a conspiracy.

That’s reinforcement.

The system learns.

So do the people working inside it.

And apparently, so do we.

Then It Got Worse

There was another study I kept running into.

Researchers at MIT examined the spread of verified true and false stories on Twitter from 2006 through 2017.

False information didn’t just spread.

It tended to travel farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than truthful information.[2]

And one of the parts I found most interesting was that bots weren’t the whole explanation.

Humans played a major role.

We were doing the spreading.

That matters to me because it’s very easy to talk about “the media” like it’s some creature living outside of us.

But I’m part of the system.

So are you.

Every time I click something because it pisses me off, I’ve voted.

Every time I share something before reading it because the headline confirms what I already believe, I’ve voted.

Every time I stop scrolling because somebody made me angry, afraid, disgusted, or curious, I’ve given the system information.

More of this.

And the system is very good at listening.

The Algorithm Doesn’t Have to Hate You

This was another place where my original thinking changed.

I used to think about manipulation mostly in terms of people.

A politician wants me to believe something.

A television network wants me to believe something.

An advertiser wants me to buy something.

That model makes sense because there’s a person with an intention.

Algorithms make this messier.

An engagement algorithm doesn’t necessarily care whether I’m happy, angry, Republican, Democrat, terrified, hopeful, informed, or completely full of shit.

It has a much simpler question.

Did Frank engage?

Did he click?

Did he comment?

Did he share?

Did he stay?

If anger keeps me there longer than calm explanation does, the algorithm doesn’t need to understand anger.

It just needs to learn the pattern.

A 2026 Nature experiment made this particularly hard for me to ignore.

Researchers assigned about 2,000 people to different feed-ranking systems for eight weeks around the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

Compared with a reverse-chronological feed, the engagement-based feed amplified more intergroup, moralized, emotional, and toxic material. Moral outrage and political content saw some of the largest increases.

People exposed to the engagement-based feed also perceived more partisan hostility.[3]

Think about that for a second.

The algorithm didn’t have to invent the hostility.

It didn’t have to tell anybody what political party to join.

It changed what people saw.

That alone changed how hostile people thought everyone else was.

Another study found something similar from a different direction.

People reading political conversations online tended to perceive more moral outrage in the writers than the writers themselves reported actually feeling.

And the more people used social media to learn about politics, the stronger that distortion became.[4]

In other words, I might look around online and sincerely conclude:

Everybody has lost their fucking mind.

When part of what I’m seeing may be a distorted sample of humanity.

That’s a very different problem.

So Who Is Pulling the Strings?

This is where the title started bothering me.

Because “Who’s Pulling the Strings?” implies there’s one hand.

I’m not sure there is.

News organizations want attention.

Advertisers want attention.

Politicians want attention.

Influencers want attention.

Platforms want engagement.

Algorithms learn what produces engagement.

And we reward the things that provoke us.

It’s a loop.

Everybody is pulling a little.

Including the person at the other end of the strings.

Me.

That’s much less satisfying than discovering one villain.

But it seems closer to reality.

Where It Got Complicated

There’s a danger in taking this argument too far.

Negative news isn’t automatically manipulation.

Sometimes the news is negative because something terrible actually happened.

If a hurricane is coming toward my house, I don’t want the meteorologist to soften the language because fear is emotionally manipulative.

Tell me to get the fuck out.

If a war starts, a bank collapses, a disease is spreading, or somebody in government is abusing power, the fact that the information scares or angers me doesn’t mean I shouldn’t hear it.

Emotion isn’t proof of manipulation.

And journalism has always involved selection.

Nobody can report everything.

An editor has to decide what’s important.

A reporter has to decide which facts go first.

A headline has to reduce a complicated event to a handful of words.

Even the most honest journalist on Earth is still framing reality.

So I don’t think the line can simply be:

“If you’re trying to make me feel something, you’re manipulating me.”

Human beings communicate through emotion.

I certainly do.

Which created another problem.

Then I Had to Turn the Question Back on Myself

Look at the title of this piece.

Who’s Pulling the Strings?

Look at the artwork I made for it.

A giant hand.

Puppet strings.

Breaking-news screens.

Fear.

Outrage.

Manipulation.

Why did I choose that?

Because I wanted you to stop scrolling.

I wanted you to wonder what the hell I was talking about.

I wanted you to click.

Well...

Shit.

Now I’m in the experiment too.

I write personal stories because stories hold attention better than lists of facts.

I think about titles.

I think about opening paragraphs.

I make cover art.

I write little teasers for Substack.

I pay attention to which pieces people open.

I ask people to subscribe.

I’m competing for attention too.

So if my definition of manipulation is simply “using psychology to make somebody pay attention,” then I’m guilty before I finish the accusation.

And I don’t think that’s the right definition.

I don’t think persuasion is automatically manipulation either.

If I make the best argument I can for something I honestly believe, I’m trying to influence you.

That isn’t necessarily sinister.

The real question is what happens to your ability to make your own decision.

That’s where I think the line starts becoming visible.

Where I Stand Now

I don’t think informing and manipulating are opposites.

Almost all communication influences us somehow.

The better question for me now is:

Does the communication help me understand reality, or does it mainly try to control my reaction to it?

That gives me something more useful to look for.

Does the headline accurately represent the story?

Are facts separated from interpretation?

Am I being given enough context to disagree?

Does the source acknowledge uncertainty when uncertainty exists?

Can I trace the important claims back to evidence?

Are competing explanations mentioned, or made to look ridiculous before I even hear them?

After I finish reading, do I understand something better?

Or am I simply more pissed off?

That last one has become particularly useful.

Because sometimes I’ll read something, put my phone down, and realize:

I learned almost nothing.

But I’m fucking furious.

That’s a clue.

Not proof.

A clue.

And I think we need more of those little alarms.

The Part I Didn’t Expect

When I started this question, I was mostly suspicious of the people producing information.

I ended up becoming more suspicious of my own reactions to it.

My emotions aren’t useless.

If something scares me, angers me, or disgusts me, there’s probably a reason my attention went there.

But attention isn’t the same thing as truth.

Anger doesn’t authenticate information.

Fear doesn’t authenticate information.

Agreement definitely doesn’t authenticate information.

If anything, information that immediately confirms what I already believe probably deserves an extra question.

Because that’s the stuff I want to believe.

And I’ve spent too much of my life learning how dangerous that can be.

So now when something instantly pisses me off, especially politically, I’m trying to build a tiny gap before I react.

Who said it?

What’s the original source?

What happened before this clip started?

What happened after it ended?

Is the headline describing the event or describing how I’m supposed to feel about the event?

Would I believe this as quickly if it were saying the same thing about somebody I liked?

That last one hurts.

Which is probably why I keep it.

My Answer

So where does informing me end and manipulating me begin?

I don’t think there’s one clean border.

But here’s the closest I’ve gotten:

Information gives me something I can examine. Manipulation tries to make the examination unnecessary.

It wants the reaction first.

Fear.

Anger.

Tribal loyalty.

Disgust.

Certainty.

Click.

Share.

Then maybe the facts.

I don’t think the solution is to stop trusting the media.

I don’t even know what “the media” means anymore.

A television network is media.

A newspaper is media.

A guy with an iPhone is media.

A Substack writer is media.

I’m media.

The better defense is learning to recognize when somebody is trying to borrow my nervous system before my brain gets a vote.

And sometimes the person doing it won’t even realize they’re doing it.

Sometimes an algorithm will.

Sometimes I will.

Sometimes you will.

Maybe the goal isn’t to cut all the strings.

Maybe it’s to notice when they’re being pulled.

Because once I can feel the tug...

I get to decide whether I move.

The Next Question

That left me with another question I haven’t figured out yet:

If algorithms learn what keeps each of us engaged individually, are we still consuming the same reality?

That’s probably where I’m going next.

Your Turn

I’m curious where you draw the line.

When does persuasion become manipulation for you?

And more importantly, have you ever caught yourself believing or sharing something because of how it made you feel before you actually checked whether it was true?

If you have a question you think belongs in Thoughtful Questions, send it to me.

The entire point of this series is not to collect perfect answers.

It’s to collect better questions.

Additional Reading

1. Robertson, C. E., Pröllochs, N., Schwarzenegger, K., et al. (2023).
“Negativity drives online news consumption.”
Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 812–822.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4

2. Vosoughi, S., Roy, D., & Aral, S. (2018).
“The spread of true and false news online.”
Science, 359(6380), 1146–1151.
DOI: 10.1126/science.aap9559

3. Torres, M., et al. (2026).
“Redesigning algorithms to intervene on social norm misperceptions during a national election.”
Nature, 655, 942–956.

4. Brady, W. J., McLoughlin, K. L., Torres, M. P., et al. (2023).
“Overperception of moral outrage in online social networks inflates beliefs about intergroup hostility.”
Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 917–927.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-023-01582-0

I thought freedom would feel louder than it did.

I thought it would announce itself somehow.

Like one day the old system would shut down, the new one would load, and I would wake up feeling like a different person.

That is not what happened.

The update was the decision.

The reboot was what came after.

And what came after was not peace.

Not at first.

It was quiet.

No clinic.

No dose.

No schedule I had to obey before my body would let me be a person.

No bottles to protect.

No opioid math running in the background.

No appointment deciding what my morning belonged to.

Just morning.

That sounds simple.

It was not.

Because when you have spent years organizing your life around one thing, even freedom can feel like something is missing.

The first ordinary thing that felt strange was waking up without having to schedule anything.

I did not have to go anywhere.

I did not have to calculate anything.

I did not have to plan my day around a clinic, a dose, a bottle, or a clock.

Part of me felt relieved.

Of course it did.

Not having to report somewhere just to keep my body from turning on me felt like getting a piece of my life back.

But the relief had fear inside it.

That surprised me.

I thought removing the thing that controlled me would only feel good.

It did not.

It felt like an alarm was going off somewhere in my body, but I could not figure out what it was warning me about.

No emergency.

No missing dose.

No clinic visit.

No dealer.

No immediate problem to solve.

But my body was still checking for one.

That is the part I did not expect.

The object was gone.

The system was not.

It kept scanning.

It kept looking for instructions.

It kept asking:

What are we supposed to manage now?

For years, I had known what the day was about before I ever chose anything.

My body knew.

My brain knew.

My schedule knew.

Get the dose.

Protect the dose.

Do not get sick.

Make it to the clinic.

Make it to work.

Make it through the day.

That was awful.

But it was also organized.

That is a strange thing to admit.

The thing trapping me had also been giving my life structure.

Not good structure.

Not free structure.

But structure.

And when that structure disappeared, there was space.

More than I knew what to do with.

I did not understand that part then.

The loop may be destroying you, but it is also telling you what to do next.

It gives you problems.

It gives you tasks.

It gives you emergencies.

It gives you something to solve every morning.

And when it is gone, you do not automatically become peaceful.

Sometimes you just become available.

Available to time.

Available to memory.

Available to all the feelings that could not catch you while you were busy surviving.

At first, Delta came first.

Not as a strategy.

Not as self-improvement.

Not as some inspirational recovery plan.

He just needed me.

He needed to go outside.

He needed food.

He needed attention.

He needed me to be a person before I felt like one.

That mattered more than I probably understood at the time.

Because I did not wake up with a perfect new purpose.

I woke up with a dog who still needed to be walked.

And the walks changed.

They got slower.

More deliberate.

Not because I suddenly became peaceful.

Because I was not running to get high anymore.

I was not rushing to fix my body.

I was not walking him while some other emergency waited in the background.

For the first time in a long time, the walk was just the walk.

There was no single perfect walk where everything became clear.

No movie scene.

No beam of light breaking through the trees.

No moment where I looked at Delta and suddenly understood my whole life.

It was quieter than that.

I just had more time to walk him.

More time because I was not driving to the clinic in the morning.

More time because I was not building my day around a dose.

More time because the old logistics were gone.

And slowly, those walks became less like something I was squeezing into my life and more like life itself returning.

That sounds beautiful.

Some of it was.

I could see Delta enjoying himself more.

Stopping to smell whatever mattered to him.

Taking his time.

Not caring about the schedule my life used to obey.

I think our bond grew there.

Not because I became some enlightened version of myself.

Because I was finally present enough to be with him.

But the extra time did not only give me presence.

It gave me room to see what I had wasted.

That was the other side of it.

When you are always chasing relief, you do not have much room to feel the size of what you are missing.

You are too busy getting through the next hour.

Too busy solving the next problem.

Too busy managing the next withdrawal, the next dose, the next clinic visit, the next excuse.

But when the noise gets quieter, the bill gets easier to read.

And the first thing the quiet gave me was not peace.

It gave me shame.

It gave me grief.

It gave me regret.

Not all at once.

Not in some clean dramatic wave.

More like the walks gave my mind enough room to start counting what I had missed.

Time I had wasted.

Time I had misused.

Moments I had rushed through because relief was waiting somewhere else.

Mornings I had given away.

Days I had organized around not being sick.

Parts of myself I had postponed for so long I almost forgot they were still possible.

That was part of the reboot too.

Not just learning how to live without opioids.

Learning how to live with the memory of what opioids had cost me.

That is a different kind of pain.

Withdrawal is obvious.

Your body screams.

You know what is happening.

Regret is quieter.

It does not always scream.

Sometimes it just sits next to you on a walk and reminds you that time only moves one direction.

That is hard.

Because once you finally have more time, you also have more room to notice how much time is gone.

And there is no dose for that.

No shortcut.

No chemical exit that makes the math disappear.

That was where the old system would have made its best offer.

Relief.

Fast relief.

A way to turn the engine down.

A way to stop feeling what I had finally slowed down enough to feel.

But by then, going back did not look like comfort anymore.

It looked like slavery.

I hated that dependency.

I hated needing something that much.

I hated organizing my life around relief.

I hated the fact that freedom had become something I had to negotiate with a bottle, a clinic, a dose, or a tiny orange square.

So even when the shame hurt, going back did not look like rescue.

It looked like returning to a cage I had already escaped once.

That mattered.

Because the reboot was not a clean start.

It was not wiping the hard drive and becoming new.

Some of the old files were still there.

The old alarms still went off.

The old cravings still knew where to knock.

The old shame still knew how to speak.

The old need for relief did not vanish just because I had stopped obeying it.

The system had changed.

But not every part of me knew it yet.

That may be what a reboot really is.

Not becoming a different person overnight.

Not waking up cured.

Not having the past disappear because you finally made a better decision.

A reboot is what happens when the old system stops organizing your life, and you have to learn how to live without it telling you what to do next.

That is where freedom becomes strange.

Because freedom is not only the absence of chains.

It is also the absence of instructions.

And if you have lived long enough with chains, instructions can start to feel like safety.

That is the dangerous part.

The cage does not always feel like a cage while you are inside it.

Sometimes it feels like a plan.

Sometimes it feels like structure.

Sometimes it feels like knowing what the next hour is supposed to be about.

Then the door opens.

And suddenly you have space.

Space to walk the dog.

Space to notice the morning.

Space to remember what you lost.

Space to decide what gets to matter now.

That was the silence after.

Not peace.

Not yet.

A life with more room in it than I knew how to occupy.

And maybe that is where the reboot begins.

Not when everything feels better.

But when the old system is finally quiet enough for you to hear the question underneath it:

Now what?

The Softer Loop

The silence after did not stay empty.

Nothing does.

That was one of the first things I started learning after the old system got quiet.

When you remove the thing your life has been organized around, something else starts trying to fill the space.

Not always dramatically.

Not always dangerously.

Sometimes it happens softly.

Sometimes it even looks like improvement.

And sometimes it is improvement.

That is what makes it complicated.

The first thing that helped became the first thing I had to question.

After opioids, weed came in differently.

At first, I do not think I was trying to replace heroin.

Not exactly.

I think I was trying to reclaim part of my old identity.

Not the heroin version.

Not the clinic version.

Not the version of me measuring life in doses, bottles, schedules, and withdrawal.

Something older than that.

Something that felt more like me.

That mattered.

Because when you leave one version of yourself behind, you do not always know what is supposed to come with you.

Some things need to die.

Some things need to be left behind.

But some things feel like they belonged to you before the worst parts took over.

I did not want to become some sanitized recovery version of myself.

I did not want to feel like getting clean meant everything I had ever been had to be thrown away.

So part of me reached for something familiar.

Not heroin familiar.

Me familiar.

Weed felt like that to me at first.

It felt connected to a version of myself that was not completely defined by opioids.

And compared to heroin, it felt organized.

That probably sounds insane from the outside.

But from inside the actual progression, it made sense.

Heroin was chaos.

Heroin was inventory.

Heroin was money, timing, supply, withdrawal, secrecy, risk, and consequences stacked on top of each other.

Heroin was a life where every day had a threat hidden inside it.

Weed was simple compared to that.

The logistics were easier.

The stakes felt lower.

The consequences did not feel as immediate.

No clinic.

No waking up sick if I did not have it.

No body turning against me by morning.

So part of me could look at it and say,

“See? This is different.”

And it was different.

That was the trap.

Because different is not the same thing as free.

I kept measuring it against heroin.

And against heroin, almost anything looks reasonable.

I remember how easy it was to defend because I could still function.

I could smoke and walk Delta.

I could smoke and watch something.

I could smoke and fall asleep without feeling like I had returned to the thing I escaped.

It did not look like disaster.

It did not feel like heroin.

It did not come with the same panic.

That was exactly why it was harder to question.

Because when something is obviously destroying you, at least part of you knows it.

You may not listen.

You may bargain with it.

You may defend it for years.

But some part of you knows.

This was different.

This was easier to explain.

That made it easier to keep.

Weed was not heroin.

I want to be clear about that.

It did not give me the same relief opioids did.

Not even close.

If heroin was one hundred percent relief, weed was maybe sixty.

But sixty percent of that kind of relief is still a lot when your body remembers what one hundred felt like.

And once something gives relief, the question changes.

Not,

“Is this evil?”

That question is too simple.

Not,

“Is this as bad as heroin?”

That question is worse, because almost anything looks reasonable compared to the worst thing you have survived.

The better question is:

What job is this doing for me?

That was the question I had to learn to ask.

Because weed started doing a job.

It gave me comfort.

It softened the edges.

It helped me sleep.

And after what I had gone through with sleep, that mattered.

I do not want to pretend it did not.

When your body has forgotten how to sleep without help, anything that helps can start looking like mercy.

And sometimes it is.

But mercy can become a contract if you stop reading the terms.

That is where the operating system has to stay awake.

Not paranoid.

Awake.

Because the old pattern does not always come back wearing the same clothes.

Sometimes it comes back softer.

Sometimes it comes back with better arguments.

Sometimes it comes back saying,

“This is not like before.”

And maybe it is not.

But that does not mean the question is over.

A softer loop is still a loop.

It might not destroy your life in the same obvious way.

It might not blow everything up.

It might not make people panic when they hear about it.

But it can still take a little.

Then a little more.

Then a little more.

Time.

Money.

Health.

Those were the costs.

Not the same bill as heroin.

Not even close.

But smaller bills are still bills.

That is the danger of a softer dependency.

It does not always look like a crisis.

Sometimes it just looks like a life that keeps leaking.

A little money here.

A little time there.

A little less energy.

A little less clarity.

A little less health.

A little more dependence on something outside yourself to sleep, settle down, or feel normal.

And because the leak is slow, you can pretend the house is still fine.

That is where I had to be careful.

Because after heroin, my standards were not normal standards.

They were survivor standards.

And survivor standards can be dangerous.

When you have lived through chaos, anything less chaotic can look like freedom.

But less chaotic is not the same thing as free.

Less harmful is not the same thing as harmless.

Less controlling is not the same thing as no longer being controlled.

That was the problem with measuring everything against heroin.

Heroin made almost anything look responsible.

That is not a fair scale.

At least it is not heroin.

At least I am not going to the clinic.

At least I am not waking up sick.

At least I am not doing that kind of math anymore.

And some of that was true.

That was the problem.

The story worked because it was not completely false.

Weed was not heroin.

The logistics were simpler.

The relief was softer.

The stakes were lower.

The cage was not the same cage.

But the old question was still nearby:

How do I feel better right now?

That question had owned me for too long.

I had to be careful any time it tried to become the center again.

Because the reboot was not just about removing opioids.

It was about learning what got permission to run my life next.

That is the part I think applies far beyond substances.

Most people do not replace their worst loop with something equally obvious.

They replace it with something easier to defend.

A relationship that is not as bad as the last one.

A job that drains them but gives them status.

Anger that feels justified.

Productivity that looks responsible.

A habit that is not destroying them fast enough to call an emergency.

That is where people get stuck.

Not always in disaster.

Sometimes in “better than before.”

Better than before can be real.

It can also become another hiding place.

That is why the reboot is dangerous.

Because after the old system shuts down, the first thing that helps can feel like the answer.

Maybe it is.

Or maybe it is just the first applicant for the job.

That is what I had to watch.

What is this doing for me?

What is it asking from me?

Is it giving my life back, or is it asking my life to organize around it?

Am I choosing this freely, or am I slowly needing it?

Those questions did not make me perfect.

They did not make every answer obvious.

But they gave me a way to look.

And that mattered.

Because the goal was not to become someone who never wanted relief.

That is not real.

The goal was to stop letting relief be the highest authority in my life.

That was the reboot.

Not purity.

Not pretending comfort is bad.

Not declaring every tool a trap.

The reboot was learning to tell the difference between something that helps me live...

and something that slowly becomes the reason I am not really living.

That difference is not always obvious at first.

Sometimes the first version really does help.

Sometimes it lowers the volume.

Sometimes it gets you through a night.

Sometimes it gives you enough comfort to keep going.

But eventually, every comfort has to answer the same question:

Are you giving my life back...

or are you becoming the new thing my life has to serve?

That was the question weed forced me to ask.

Not because it was heroin.

It wasn’t.

Because it was not heroin, and still had a bill.

That is a harder thing to see.

I had already learned how to escape the obvious cage.

Now I had to learn how to recognize the comfortable one.

Something Worth Returning To

Once I saw the softer loop, I started understanding something I had missed.

Getting free from the old center does not automatically give you a new one.

It only gives you space.

And space is not the same thing as direction.

For a long time, opioids had given my life a center.

Not a good center.

Not a healthy center.

Not a center I would have chosen if I had been able to see the whole bill clearly.

But a center.

The day had gravity.

The schedule had meaning.

The problems were obvious.

Do not get sick.

Get the dose.

Protect the supply.

Make it to the clinic.

Make it through work.

Make it through the night.

That was not freedom.

But it was structure.

And when that structure disappeared, the question changed.

Not:

How do I get through today?

But:

What is today for?

That question is more dangerous than it sounds.

Because survival can keep you moving without ever making you decide where you are going.

Survival gives you tasks.

Survival gives you urgency.

Survival gives you something to solve.

But when the emergency gets quiet, you have to start answering questions the emergency used to interrupt.

What matters now?

What do I build around?

What gets my time?

What deserves my attention?

At first, I do not think I knew how to answer that.

I had more time, but more time is not automatically a life.

I was more productive in some ways, but not because I had become some optimized version of myself.

I just had fewer logistics stealing hours from me.

I was not driving to the clinic.

I was not planning around doses.

I was not managing the bullshit math opioids required.

When you remove something that has been stealing hours from your life, some of those hours come back.

That does not mean you automatically know what to do with them.

That was another part of the reboot.

I did not just have to stop obeying the old system.

I had to learn how to spend the life it gave back.

That sounds obvious now.

It was not obvious then.

Because I had spent so many years thinking freedom meant getting away from something.

Away from heroin.

Away from withdrawal.

Away from dealers.

Away from clinic schedules.

Away from opioid math.

Away from dependency.

And all of that mattered.

Sometimes getting away is the first honest thing a person can do.

But escape is not the whole thing.

Eventually, you have to ask what the open space is for.

That is where purpose started to matter.

Not purpose as a slogan.

Not purpose as some motivational poster telling me to become the best version of myself.

I do not trust that kind of language very much.

It sounds good until life gets hard.

Then it usually disappears.

I needed something more practical than inspiration.

I needed something with gravity.

Something that could pull me forward when relief started calling backward.

Delta was part of that.

Travel was part of that.

A regular life was part of that.

The possibility of becoming useful was part of that.

Not famous.

Not perfect.

Not impressive.

Useful.

That word matters to me.

Because for a long time, I had measured my life by whether I could function.

Can I work?

Can I make money?

Can I get through the day?

Can I avoid falling completely apart?

Those were not meaningless questions.

But they were small questions compared to the life I still wanted.

Functioning is not the same thing as being useful.

You can function inside a cage.

I already knew that.

Being useful asks something different.

It asks whether your life gives anything back.

Whether your suffering becomes anything other than a private loop.

Whether the things that almost destroyed you can become information someone else might use before they run out of time.

I did not understand all of that at once.

I was not walking around thinking, “Now I will build a philosophy.”

That would be bullshit.

It was slower than that.

More ordinary.

I walked Delta.

I worked.

I tried to sleep.

I smoked weed sometimes.

I tried to be a person.

I had more time than before, and sometimes I used it well.

Sometimes I did not.

But slowly, the question changed.

It was no longer only:

How do I feel better right now?

It became:

What gives something back?

That question mattered.

Because relief had already had its chance to run my life.

It had run it into the ground.

I needed something larger than relief.

Not something dramatic.

Not some heroic mission.

Something I could return to without disappearing inside it.

That became the test.

Does this give my life back?

Does this make me more available?

Does this help me become someone I respect?

Does this make my life bigger over time?

Does this ask me to shrink my life so it can keep working?

Those questions were not exciting.

They were not flashy.

But they were useful.

And useful was enough.

For a long time, I had thought meaning had to be huge.

Something cosmic.

Something you discover once and then everything makes sense forever.

I do not think that anymore.

Meaning, at least for me, became smaller and more practical.

Walk the dog.

Tell the truth.

Pay attention.

Do the next useful thing.

Build something that helps.

Stop lying to yourself when the cost shows up.

That may not sound grand.

But after a life organized around relief, ordinary meaning can feel almost revolutionary.

Because ordinary meaning does not demand that you disappear.

It asks you to show up.

That was new for me.

Relief had always offered escape.

Purpose asked for presence.

That is a harder offer.

Less glamorous.

Less immediate.

Less chemically convincing.

But it gives back in a way relief never did.

Delta gave back.

Travel gave back.

Work, when it was honest, gave back.

Writing eventually gave back.

Not because writing fixed me.

It did not.

Writing gave me a place to put the pattern.

A place to examine it.

A place to turn private damage into something less useless.

That mattered.

Because regret by itself can become another cage.

If all you do is stare at what you wasted, you can waste more life staring at it.

That is a cruel trick.

The past takes the first part.

Then regret tries to take the rest.

I did not want that either.

I could not get the time back.

I could not undo the mornings I had given away.

I could not become the person I might have been if I had learned all of this earlier.

That bill was paid.

But maybe I could stop paying it forever.

Maybe I could use what happened.

Not to glorify it.

Not to turn it into some fake “everything happens for a reason” story.

I hate that.

Some things do not happen for a reason.

Some things happen because we were lost, wounded, afraid, confused, addicted, or wrong.

Some things happen because we made bad trades and kept defending them.

But even if pain does not arrive with meaning already inside it, maybe meaning is something we can build from what remains.

That felt truer to me.

Not:

This happened for a reason.

More like:

Now that it happened, what am I going to do with it?

That question gave me something I could return to.

Not a perfect answer.

Not a final identity.

Not some beautiful purpose that solved the rest of my life.

More like a direction.

A life pointed toward honesty.

Toward usefulness.

Toward becoming harder to fool, especially by myself.

That is not a destination.

It is a way to steer.

And maybe that is all I really needed at first.

A way to steer.

A walk.

A promise.

A question.

A future.

A dog waiting at the door.

A piece of writing that told the truth better than I had before.

That did not happen all at once.

I wish it had.

It would make a cleaner story.

But clean stories are often lies with better lighting.

The truth is, I had to build something worth returning to slowly.

And I had to keep checking it.

Because anything can become an orbit if you stop paying attention.

Even good things.

Even work.

Even self-improvement.

Even writing.

Even the story about how much you have changed.

That is why the operating system matters.

Not because it gives you one perfect center forever.

Because it helps you notice when the center starts stealing more than it gives.

That was the work after the reboot.

Not just to be free from opioids.

Not just to be free from the obvious cage.

But to start building a life with something worth coming back to.

Something that did not require me to disappear.

Something that made the next morning feel less like a problem to solve and more like a place I could return.

I did not have the whole answer yet.

But I was beginning to understand the shape of the question.

Freedom could not only mean getting away from what owned me.

Eventually, I would have to ask what that freedom was for.

What Are You Free For?

The question after the reboot was not whether I was free.

Not exactly.

I was freer than I had been.

That was true.

I did not have to wake up and calculate my body.

I did not have to report to a clinic before the day could belong to me.

I did not have to protect a bottle.

I did not have to plan my life around opioids.

That mattered.

I do not want to make freedom sound smaller than it was.

Getting those things back mattered.

But freedom from something is only the first kind of freedom.

There is another question after that.

A harder one.

What are you free for?

That question took longer to answer.

Because for years, I had thought freedom meant escape.

Escape from heroin.

Escape from withdrawal.

Escape from the clinic.

Escape from dependency.

Escape from the old math.

And all of that was real.

Sometimes escape is the most honest thing a person can do.

Sometimes the first version of freedom is just getting far enough away from the thing that is killing you.

But if freedom only means distance from the cage, the cage still gets to define the map.

You are still measuring your life by what you are not doing.

I knew that pattern.

I had already lived it.

I was not shooting heroin anymore.

I was not meeting dealers in parking lots.

I was not waking up sick every morning.

And for a while, I thought that meant I was free.

But I had already learned the truth.

I had not moved forward as much as I thought.

I had moved sideways.

The reboot had to be different.

It could not just be another version of:

At least I am not doing that anymore.

At least is not a life.

At least is where a lot of people stop because it is better than the worst thing.

And better than the worst thing can feel like victory.

Sometimes it is victory.

But it is not the whole victory.

Because once the cage is open, the question changes.

Not:

What did I escape?

But:

Where am I going now?

That was the question I kept running into.

On walks.

At work.

At night.

In the quiet mornings that used to belong to opioid math.

What am I going to do with this life now that I do not have to spend so much of it maintaining the thing that was shrinking it?

That sounds like a hopeful question.

And sometimes it was.

But it was also uncomfortable.

Because freedom gives you responsibility back.

That is the part nobody wants to put on the poster.

Freedom is not just permission.

Freedom is responsibility without the old excuse.

When the old system was running my life, I always had something to point to.

The drug.

The clinic.

The schedule.

The sickness.

The withdrawal.

The logistics.

The story.

There was always a reason why today could not be the day.

There was always something making the decision smaller.

But once that system got quiet, I had fewer excuses.

Not no excuses.

I am still human.

But fewer.

If I wasted the day now, I could not blame the clinic.

If I avoided the thing I needed to do, I could not blame the dose.

If I chose the softer loop, I could not pretend I did not understand the pattern.

That is not always a pleasant kind of freedom.

Sometimes freedom feels like finally having your own keys and realizing you are the one who has to drive.

No one is coming to organize your life for you.

No one is coming to hand you a clean identity.

No one is coming to tell you what the next version of yourself is supposed to be.

That is the reboot.

The old system stops telling you what to do.

And then you find out whether you can build a better one.

I wish I could say I did that cleanly.

I did not.

I still looked for relief.

I still made excuses.

I still wasted time.

I still reached for easier answers.

I still had days where the old gravity found me.

That matters to say.

Because the reboot is not perfection.

Perfection is just another fantasy people use to avoid honest measurement.

If the only two categories are “broken” and “fixed,” most people will lie about which one they are.

I do not think those are the right categories.

The better question is:

Am I more available to reality than I used to be?

Can I see the pattern sooner?

Can I admit the bill faster?

Can I change direction before the cost gets catastrophic?

That is what the reboot gave me.

Not a perfect life.

A more inspectable one.

A life where the story did not get to run unchallenged for years before I looked at the receipt.

That was progress.

Real progress.

Not the fake kind where the furniture changes and the orbit stays the same.

The real kind.

The kind where the center starts changing.

And for me, the new center was not one giant answer.

It was smaller than that.

More practical.

Tell the truth.

Walk the dog.

Pay attention.

Do the next useful thing.

Read the bill before it bankrupts you.

Let reality correct you before it has to crush you.

That may not sound like a grand philosophy.

But it was enough to steer by.

And maybe steering is more important than arriving.

I used to want transformation to be cleaner than it is.

A doorway.

A before and after.

A moment where you step through and become someone else.

New life.

New self.

New operating system.

Clean break.

Beautiful story.

But I do not think real change usually works that way.

Real change is more like learning to steer differently while the weather keeps changing.

You do not get one perfect update and then never glitch again.

You keep watching.

You keep testing.

You keep asking what your life is starting to orbit.

You keep asking whether the thing that helps is still helping.

You keep asking whether your comfort is giving your life back or quietly collecting it.

That is why I call it an operating system.

Not because it makes life mechanical.

Because something is always running underneath.

Some question.

Some fear.

Some desire.

Some story.

Some center of gravity.

And if you do not know what is running underneath, you will still obey it.

Even if you call that obedience freedom.

That was what I had done for years.

I obeyed relief and called it survival.

I obeyed dependency and called it treatment.

I obeyed fear and called it caution.

I obeyed the story and called it truth.

The reboot did not make me immune to that.

It made me less willing to stay unconscious inside it.

That is the difference.

Because a person who can notice the pattern has more choices than a person who is still inside it without knowing.

Not infinite choices.

Not easy choices.

But more.

And sometimes more choice is where freedom actually begins.

Not in the dramatic moment where the cage opens.

But in the quieter moment afterward, when you decide what you will no longer organize your life around.

That is where the reboot kept leading me.

Back to the same question.

What gets the center?

Not what sounds good.

Not what I can explain.

Not what gives relief fastest.

What actually deserves the center?

A drug did not.

A clinic did not.

A bottle did not.

A softer loop did not.

Regret did not.

Shame did not.

Even survival did not get to be the whole answer forever.

Survival mattered.

Survival got me here.

But survival is not the same thing as living.

At some point, I had to build a life that was not only organized around avoiding collapse.

That is a strange thing to learn.

Because when you have spent years trying not to fall apart, not falling apart can feel like the finish line.

But it is not.

Not falling apart is the ground.

You still have to decide what to build there.

That was the work.

Building on ground I did not fully trust yet.

A regular morning.

A slower walk.

A body that was still learning.

A mind that still looked for emergencies.

A life with fewer instructions than before.

A life that was finally mine enough to be responsible for.

That was scary.

But it was also honest.

And over time, honest started to feel better than easy.

Not more comfortable.

Not always.

But better.

Because easy had lied to me too many times.

Easy had offered relief and taken freedom.

Easy had offered quiet and taken years.

Easy had offered survival and kept shrinking the life it was supposed to protect.

So I stopped trusting easy as much.

I started trusting useful.

Useful was not glamorous.

Useful did not always feel good right away.

Useful did not promise to fix everything.

But useful gave something back.

A walk gave something back.

Work done honestly gave something back.

Travel gave something back.

Writing gave something back.

Telling the truth gave something back.

Being present gave something back.

Those things did not solve me.

They did not erase the past.

They did not make regret disappear.

But they made my life larger.

That became the test.

Does this make my life larger over time?

Or smaller?

Does this give back?

Or does it only take quietly?

Does this help me show up?

Or does it help me disappear?

Those questions are not just recovery questions.

They are life questions.

Because everybody is organizing their life around something.

I do not mean that in some motivational-speaker way.

I mean it mechanically.

Something gets the center.

Comfort.

Achievement.

Approval.

Control.

A relationship.

A belief.

A wound.

A version of yourself you outgrew but keep defending because you do not know who you would be without it.

The details are different.

The operating system is the same.

Something gets the center.

And whatever gets the center starts making demands.

It tells you what to notice.

It tells you what to protect.

It tells you what to ignore.

It tells you what to excuse.

It tells you what price is acceptable.

That is why the center matters.

Because your life will eventually take the shape of whatever sits there.

Mine had taken the shape of opioids.

Then escape.

Then relief.

Then regret.

Then, slowly, something else.

Not perfectly.

Not permanently.

Not once and for all.

Slowly.

I started trying to build around things that made life bigger instead of smaller.

Delta.

Travel.

Usefulness.

Honesty.

Reality.

The possibility that maybe the damage did not have to be the end of the story.

Not because the damage was good.

It was not.

Not because everything happened for a reason.

I still do not believe that.

But because even if pain does not arrive with meaning, we can sometimes build meaning from what remains.

That is not redemption in the clean movie sense.

It is repair.

Messy repair.

Unfinished repair.

Repair that still has scars in it.

But repair is better than worshiping the wound.

For a long time, I think I had done that too.

I had mistaken explaining the wound for healing it.

I had mistaken surviving the wound for outgrowing it.

I had mistaken understanding the wound for knowing what to build after it.

The reboot was the part after understanding.

The part where I had to live differently.

The part where the answer had to become more than insight.

That is where I think a lot of people get stuck.

I know I did.

Knowing was not the same thing as changing.

Understanding the cage was not the same thing as leaving it.

Seeing the open door was not the same thing as knowing what to do with the space on the other side.

So I drifted.

And drift has gravity.

If you do not choose a direction, the old orbit will usually choose one for you.

That is why freedom needs a center.

Not a prison.

Not an idol.

Not something you defend at all costs.

A center you can keep testing.

A center that gives life back.

A center that can survive contact with reality.

A center that does not require you to disappear in order for it to work.

That is what I was looking for after the reboot.

And maybe I am still looking for it.

Maybe that is the honest answer.

Not that I found the perfect center and now I am done.

But that I stopped letting the old one run my life without permission.

That is enough to begin again.

Maybe that is what a reboot really is.

Not a new person.

Not a clean slate.

Not a perfect system.

A restart with memory.

A life that still contains the past, but is no longer fully organized by it.

A chance to decide what gets to run next.

So the question is not only:

What do you need to escape?

That matters.

Sometimes it matters first.

But eventually, another question comes.

A quieter one.

A harder one.

One that waits on the other side of the cage.

What are you free for?

That question does not answer itself.

You have to build the answer.

Day by day.

Choice by choice.

Trade by trade.

And if you are honest, if you keep reading the bill before it bankrupts you, the answer starts becoming visible.

Not as a slogan.

Not as a perfect identity.

But as a life.

A life you do not have to keep escaping.

That is the reboot.

Not the moment the old system shuts down.

The moment you begin building something better in its place.

Read more

Why This Question Got Stuck With Me

This question came from somebody in my comments.

He originally asked me something about manipulation and human psychology. There was a little bit of a language barrier, so at first I wasn’t even completely sure what he was asking.

Eventually we got it down to something much cleaner:

What actually makes something manipulation, and how is manipulation different from ordinary influence or persuasion?

My first reaction was basically:

Well, that seems easy.

Manipulation is bad.

Persuasion is normal.

Then I thought about it for another five minutes and realized I had absolutely no idea where the line was.

Because human beings influence each other constantly.

If I tell you about a restaurant I loved because I want you to try it, I’m influencing you.

If I explain to a customer why my painting proposal costs more than somebody else’s, I’m trying to persuade them.

If I write something here because I want you to reconsider an idea, I’m trying to influence what you think.

Parents influence children.

Friends influence friends.

Partners influence each other.

Advertising is literally designed to influence us.

Politics might cease to exist tomorrow if nobody were allowed to try changing anybody else’s mind.

So influence itself obviously can’t be the problem.

Which means the interesting part has to be somewhere else.

The Question

What actually makes something manipulation, and how is manipulation different from ordinary influence or persuasion?

What I Thought Going In

My first answer was intent.

Maybe manipulation means:

I’m secretly trying to make you do something because it benefits me.

That lasted about thirty seconds.

A salesperson wants the sale.

A politician wants the vote.

A lawyer wants the jury persuaded.

I want people to read what I write.

None of that automatically makes the interaction manipulative.

And sometimes my interests and yours line up perfectly.

If I tell a customer, “You should probably use a more expensive coating here because it’ll hold up better,” I benefit if they hire me.

But if I genuinely believe it’s the correct product and I explain why, the fact that I make money doesn’t magically turn the conversation into manipulation.

So personal benefit wasn’t enough.

Then I thought maybe the difference was dishonesty.

That gets us closer.

But it still doesn’t explain all of it.

Because somebody can manipulate you without ever technically lying.

And somebody can make a completely emotional argument without necessarily manipulating you.

Apparently this was going to be more annoying than I thought.

What I Went Looking For

One place I ended up was somewhere I wasn’t expecting: research ethics.

The Belmont Report, which helped establish modern U.S. principles around research with human subjects, makes a useful distinction between coercion and undue influence. Coercion involves threatening harm to obtain compliance. Undue influence can involve an excessive or inappropriate offer intended to obtain compliance. The larger principle is that meaningful consent has to be voluntary.

That gave me a different way of looking at the problem.

Maybe the question isn’t:

Am I influencing you?

Of course I am.

Maybe the better question is:

What am I doing to your ability to choose while I influence you?

That distinction immediately made more sense to me.

Take two sentences.

“I really want you to come with me tonight.”

And:

“If you actually cared about me, you’d come with me tonight.”

Same desired outcome.

Come with me.

But those are not doing the same thing.

The first tells you what I want.

The second attaches a price to saying no.

Now you aren’t only deciding whether you want to come.

You’re also being asked to defend whether you care about me.

I’ve changed the emotional conditions around your decision.

That feels different.

Persuasion Gives You Something to Consider

One common philosophical way of distinguishing persuasion from manipulation focuses on how the influence works.

Persuasion can operate by giving you reasons you can examine and decide whether you accept. Manipulation is often described as interfering with, bypassing, or exploiting parts of the decision-making process instead.

Philosophers still disagree about exactly where the boundary belongs, which was reassuring because apparently I’m not the only one having trouble drawing it.

Suppose I tell you:

“You should hire me because we’re using a better coating, here’s the manufacturer’s information, here’s what the preparation involves, and here’s why I think it will last longer.”

I obviously want the job.

But you can inspect what I told you.

You can disagree.

You can call another contractor.

You can look up the product.

You can tell me no.

Now imagine I tell you:

“This price is only good for the next ten minutes because materials are about to double.”

And I completely made that up because I’m afraid you’re going to get another estimate.

Now I’m not simply trying to convince you that my offer is better.

I’m manufacturing a false reality because I think that false reality will produce the decision I want.

That seems much easier to call manipulation.

But You Don’t Even Have to Lie

This is where digital “dark patterns” became interesting.

Researchers studying roughly 11,000 shopping websites documented designs that steer people using things such as obstruction, scarcity cues, social proof, forced action, and other techniques.

The FTC has also documented practices such as making subscriptions easy to start and difficult to cancel, disguising advertisements, burying important terms, and using interface design to push consumers toward particular outcomes.

Nobody has to point a gun at you.

Nobody even necessarily has to tell you something false.

Sometimes the manipulation is built into the environment surrounding the choice.

We’ve all seen versions of this.

Huge bright button:

YES, GIVE ME 30% OFF

Tiny gray lettering underneath:

No thanks, I prefer wasting money and disappointing my ancestors.

Okay, maybe not exactly that.

But close enough.

You technically have two options.

Yet somebody deliberately made one choice attractive, easy, emotionally pleasant, and obvious, while making the other choice embarrassing, confusing, or difficult to locate.

And that got me thinking about relationships again.

Can You Still Meaningfully Tell Me No?

I think this may be the most useful question I found.

Not:

Can you technically say no?

Can you meaningfully say no?

Those are different things.

Imagine someone saying:

“If you keep treating me this way, I’m going to have to leave this relationship.”

That could be manipulation.

But it could also be somebody honestly telling you where their boundary is.

Now compare it with:

“If you leave me tonight, I’ll hurt myself, and it’ll be because of you.”

You can technically still walk out the door.

Nobody physically removed the exit.

But look at what has now been placed on the other side of your decision.

That’s why “Well, nobody forced you” feels inadequate to me.

A person can leave every option technically available while making one of those options psychologically fucking expensive.

And somewhere in there, persuasion starts looking very different.

Where It Got Complicated

Here’s where my nice clean distinction started falling apart again.

Emotion isn’t automatically manipulation.

If my friend is destroying his life and I tell him:

“Man, watching you do this scares the shit out of me. I love you and I don’t want to lose you.”

That is emotional.

And I’m absolutely hoping the emotion affects him.

Am I manipulating him?

I don’t think necessarily.

What if a mother cries while trying to convince her kid not to move across the country?

Still emotional.

Still influence.

Still not automatically manipulation.

So “emotion was involved” isn’t enough either.

Neither is “I wanted a particular outcome.”

Neither is “I benefited.”

Neither is even necessarily “the other person felt pressure.”

Apparently human interaction refuses to organize itself into convenient fucking boxes.

What About People Who Don’t Know They’re Doing It?

This one bothered me even more.

Does manipulation require conscious intent?

I’m not convinced it always does.

Someone might have learned very early that withdrawing affection makes people come running.

Someone else learns anger makes everybody back down.

Someone learns helplessness gets other people to take responsibility.

Someone learns guilt works.

Eventually the behavior may become so automatic that they experience themselves as simply “expressing how they feel.”

They may not be sitting there thinking:

Time to manipulate this person.

That makes me want to distinguish between two statements:

“That behavior manipulated me.”

and:

“You are a manipulator.”

Those are not the same accusation.

The first describes something that happened.

The second claims I know something about the person’s character and intent.

I can usually see behavior much more clearly than I can see somebody else’s motives.

That distinction feels worth keeping.

Then I Had to Turn the Question Back on Myself

This is the part of Thoughtful Questions that regularly becomes inconvenient.

Because eventually I had to stop thinking about manipulative girlfriends, salesmen, politicians, advertisers, shitty bosses, and everybody else.

Have I manipulated people?

Of course I fucking have.

I’m 51 years old.

There is absolutely no way I’ve made it through relationships, business, friendships, family arguments, addiction, divorce, negotiations, and general human existence without occasionally trying to tilt the table in my own direction.

Maybe I emphasized the parts of an argument that helped me and conveniently skipped the parts that didn’t.

Maybe I kept arguing after somebody had already given me their answer.

Maybe I used guilt.

Maybe I acted more hurt than I actually was because I wanted somebody to understand how serious something felt to me.

Maybe I told myself I was “just explaining” when what I was really doing was trying to wear somebody down.

And I doubt I’m unusual.

Manipulation becomes a very comfortable subject when the manipulator is always somebody else.

It gets considerably more interesting when I ask:

What do I do when I really, really want someone to say yes?

Where I Stand Now

I don’t think I found a magical dividing line.

But I did come away with four things I want to look at:

Truth.

Transparency.

Pressure.

Choice.

Am I giving you information I genuinely believe is true?

Am I hiding something important because I think knowing it might change your decision?

Do you understand what I want from you and why?

Am I giving you reasons to agree with me, or am I deliberately pulling emotional levers because I know they make resistance harder?

And probably the biggest one:

Can you still meaningfully tell me no?

Not technically.

Meaningfully.

Can you disagree without me punishing you?

Can you walk away without me humiliating you?

Can you say no without me inventing consequences?

Can you evaluate what I’m telling you with enough information to make your own decision?

Can you choose something I don’t want without me making you emotionally pay for it?

The more of those exits I quietly close, the less comfortable I am calling what I’m doing “persuasion.”

So right now, this is my working distinction:

Persuasion tries to change your mind.

Manipulation starts changing the conditions under which you’re allowed to make up your mind.

I’m deliberately calling that a working distinction, not a scientific definition.

Philosophers and ethicists disagree about exactly what manipulation is and why it is morally problematic.

But it gives me something useful to inspect in my own behavior.

And that matters more to me than winning a definition contest.

The Better Question

I started with:

What actually makes something manipulation, and how is manipulation different from ordinary influence or persuasion?

I still like that question.

But the one I’m leaving with is more uncomfortable:

When I’m trying to change somebody’s mind, am I giving them reasons to choose what I want, or am I engineering the situation until saying no becomes difficult?

That’s harder.

Because I can ask that one about myself.

Before You Go

I’m not pretending there’s a clean scientific border where persuasion ends and manipulation begins.

There probably isn’t one that survives every situation.

Context matters.

Power matters.

Intent probably matters.

Consequences matter.

And people can disagree about where influence becomes unacceptable.

What I know now is that simply asking, “Did I force them?” sets the bar ridiculously low.

I’m more interested in what happened to their freedom to disagree with me.

I know more about the question than I did when I started.

More importantly, I think I have a better question.

That’s the point.

Your Turn

I don’t want the textbook example.

Give me the one that took you a while to recognize.

When did you realize somebody wasn’t merely trying to persuade you, they were manipulating the conditions around your choice?

And the harder one:

Have you ever caught yourself doing it to somebody else?

That answer might be considerably more interesting.

If you’ve got a question that won’t leave you alone, send it to me.

Those are usually the ones I want.

ADDITIONAL READING

The Belmont Report, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Useful for its distinction between coercion, undue influence, voluntariness, and meaningful consent.

https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/read-the-belmont-report/index.html

HHS Office for Human Research Protections, guidance on undue influence.

Helpful for thinking about influence without pretending that all influence can or should be eliminated.

https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/sachrp-committee/recommendations/attachment-a-september-30-2019/index.html

Robert Noggle, “The Ethics of Manipulation,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

An overview of competing philosophical attempts to define manipulation, including ideas about bypassing or undermining rational deliberation.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-manipulation/

Daniel Susser, Beate Roessler, and Helen Nissenbaum, work on technology, autonomy, and manipulation.

Useful for distinguishing influence through reasons from influence that interferes with autonomous decision-making.

https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/technology-autonomy-and-manipulation

Mathur et al., “Dark Patterns at Scale.”

Researchers examined roughly 11,000 shopping sites and documented thousands of instances of interface designs intended to steer users toward particular choices.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3359183

Federal Trade Commission, “Bringing Dark Patterns to Light.”

Examples of commercial interface practices that can trick or pressure consumers, including difficult cancellation, buried terms, and disguised advertising.

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P214800%2BDark%2BPatterns%2BReport%2B9.14.2022%2B-%2BFINAL.pdf

How Much of My Life Am I Spending Trying to Prevent Things That Haven’t Happened?

“Hey, when you get a chance, can we talk?”

Seven harmless words.

No accusation.

No emergency.

Nothing has actually happened.

And somehow my brain can take those seven words and have my entire afternoon fucked up before the person even calls.

What did I do?

Is somebody pissed?

Did something happen?

Is this about money?

Did I forget something?

And that's the part that interests me.

Reality gave me almost nothing.

My brain supplied the rest.

Twenty minutes later they might call and ask me for the name of some restaurant I mentioned three months ago.

Great.

Meanwhile, I just spent twenty minutes emotionally preparing for a disaster that never existed.

So I started wondering:

How much of my life am I spending trying to prevent things that haven't happened?

Because I don't think thinking about the future is automatically a bad thing.

Quite the opposite.

If a hurricane is coming, I want the part of my brain capable of imagining tomorrow to tell me to buy water today.

If I hear a strange noise coming from my truck, ignoring it because the future hasn't happened yet would be pretty fucking stupid.

Planning matters.

Anticipating danger matters.

The ability to imagine what might happen next is useful.

But somewhere between:

This could happen.

and

This is happening.

I think my brain occasionally loses the plot.

And apparently I'm not the only one.

---

What I Went Looking For

There's an entire area of psychology around something called intolerance of uncertainty.

Basically, people differ in how uncomfortable they become when they don't know what's going to happen.

Researchers studying anxiety have repeatedly found that uncertainty about possible future threats can increase anticipatory anxiety, especially in people who have a harder time tolerating not knowing. Grupe and Nitschke describe uncertainty and anticipation as central pieces of how anxiety works. Oglesby and colleagues found something similar experimentally when people anticipated the possibility of having to give a speech. People who were more intolerant of uncertainty experienced greater anxiety when they didn't know whether the speech would actually happen.

That fascinated me because sometimes I don't even need something bad to happen.

I just need to not know whether something bad is going to happen.

Apparently that's enough.

Which gave me the first idea I couldn't stop thinking about:

My body can start paying for something before reality has even decided whether I'm going to owe anything.

---

The Emergency Can Be Imaginary. The Stress Isn't.

Psychologists have another wonderfully complicated phrase for part of this:

perseverative cognition.

Basically, worry and rumination can keep a stressor alive mentally when the thing itself isn't actually happening.

Research by Brosschot and colleagues found that worrying about past or possible future stressors can prolong physiological stress activation beyond the actual event.

So the emergency can be hypothetical.

The stress response doesn't necessarily care.

And that's a weird distinction.

Because the disaster may not be real.

But the hour I lose to it is.

The tension is real.

The distraction is real.

The shitty mood is real.

Experiments looking at anticipation have measured changes in things like cortisol, blood pressure, and heart-rate regulation before the stressful task even begins.

So now I have to ask:

How many emergencies has my body responded to that never actually happened?

I don't know.

Probably a hell of a lot more than I'd like to admit.

---

But There's a Reason the Brain Does This

This is where I almost cheated.

Because it would be very easy to turn this into one of those pieces that basically says:

Worrying is bad. Live in the present.

Thank you.

Very useful.

I'll put that next to just relax.

The problem is that thinking ahead is enormously useful.

Grupe and Nitschke's work on uncertainty and anticipation describes the brain as constantly trying to estimate threats, predict outcomes, prepare actions, and learn from what happens.

That machinery makes sense.

A creature capable of imagining tomorrow has an advantage over one that only reacts after the tiger is already chewing on its leg.

And research on repetitive thinking makes the same point from another direction.

Edward Watkins reviewed evidence showing that repetitive thought can be destructive, contributing to anxiety and depression, but it can also be constructive when it helps somebody plan, prepare, solve problems, or make sense of something difficult.

So the problem isn't:

I thought about the future.

The problem is figuring out when thinking about the future stopped helping me do anything about it.

There is a big difference between:

I have an important meeting tomorrow, so tonight I'm going to prepare.

and:

I have an important meeting tomorrow, so tonight I'm going to mentally lose my job seventeen different ways until three in the morning.

Both involve the future.

Only one is actually preparing for it.

Which made the question change a little:

Can I do something useful about this right now... or am I just repeatedly experiencing the possibility?

---

Then I Started Thinking About Checking

Because when I don't know something, I have another habit.

I look.

Check the phone.

Check the email.

Check whether they responded.

Check the bank account.

Look something up.

Ask someone what they think.

Maybe check again because apparently reality might have changed in the last forty-five seconds.

And sometimes checking is exactly the right thing to do.

If I want to know whether my flight is delayed, checking the airline app is a fantastic idea.

But research on intolerance of uncertainty suggests there can also be a different kind of information seeking.

In one experimental study, people higher in prospective intolerance of uncertainty kept seeking additional information even when that information became less relevant to what was actually going to happen.

That one felt familiar.

Because sometimes I'm not really looking for information anymore.

I'm looking for relief.

I'm asking reality:

Can you please confirm that the terrible thing I imagined five minutes ago still isn't happening?

Reality says yes.

I feel better.

For a minute.

Then apparently I need reality to sign another affidavit.

And that's when I started wondering whether some of the things I call being prepared are occasionally just better-dressed versions of:

Please make the uncertainty stop.

---

Then It Got Worse

Because apparently I'm not only capable of predicting things that never happen.

I'm also capable of correctly predicting that something bad will happen and still being wrong about how badly it will affect me.

Psychologists call our predictions about our future emotions affective forecasting.

And we're not always particularly good at it.

Research in this area has found something called the impact bias, where people can overestimate how intense or how long their emotional reaction to a future event will be.

That one got me.

Because now there can be two predictions stacked on top of each other.

First:

Something bad is going to happen.

Then:

And if it does, I won't be able to handle it.

The first prediction might be wrong.

But even if I nail that one...

the second one can still be wrong.

And I've lived long enough to know that without a research paper.

There are things I once thought would absolutely destroy me.

Some of them happened.

I'm still here.

Other things never happened at all.

And somehow I paid for those too.

Just earlier.

---

Where I Stand Now

I don't think I'm going to stop worrying about things that haven't happened.

I'm not even convinced I'd want to.

There are things worth worrying about.

There are risks worth preparing for.

There are situations where imagining what might go wrong is exactly how you keep it from going wrong.

What changed for me is that I think I need another category.

Not everything that could happen deserves to be emotionally experienced ahead of time.

Maybe the first question I need to ask is:

Is there something useful I can do with this thought right now?

If yes...

do it.

Make the call.

Save the money.

Prepare the presentation.

Go to the doctor.

Fix the leak.

Have the uncomfortable conversation.

Do whatever reality actually gives you the ability to do.

But if there isn't anything I can do right now...

then maybe repeatedly running the disaster simulation isn't preparation anymore.

Maybe I'm just suffering in advance.

And there's another sentence I think I need to get much more comfortable saying:

I don't know yet.

That's hard for me.

Because I don't know yet feels unfinished.

My brain wants to close the loop.

It wants an answer.

And sometimes it seems perfectly willing to invent a terrible one rather than sit there without one.

But I don't know yet can also be the most accurate description of reality available.

The person hasn't called back yet.

I don't know why.

The test result isn't back yet.

I don't know what it says.

The meeting hasn't happened yet.

I don't know how it's going to go.

Tomorrow hasn't happened yet.

I don't know what tomorrow is going to do.

It sounds almost embarrassingly obvious when I write it down.

But I don't always live like I believe it.

I can turn a possibility into a conclusion so quickly that my body reacts to the conclusion before I've even noticed I skipped the evidence.

And maybe that's what I actually want to get better at catching.

Not necessarily the first thought.

We've already looked at the fact that I don't seem to choose every thought that arrives in my head anyway.

Maybe what matters is noticing when:

This could happen.

quietly became:

This is going to happen.

and then somehow became:

This is happening to me right now.

Those are three completely different sentences.

I want to stop treating them like they're interchangeable.

Because when I look backward at my life, I can think of plenty of bad things that actually happened.

They cost enough.

I don't know why I should also keep paying for all the imaginary ones.

So I started with:

How much of my life am I spending trying to prevent things that haven't happened?

I don't have a number.

But I know it's more than zero.

Probably a hell of a lot more.

And once again, I think I ended up with a better question:

At what point does preparing for the future become living inside it?

I don't know yet.

Which, apparently, is something I'm going to have to learn how to tolerate.

---

Before You Go

Same disclaimer as always.

I'm not a psychologist.

I'm not a neuroscientist.

And I'm definitely not suggesting serious anxiety can be solved by somebody saying:

Have you tried not worrying?

If only.

I'm doing what I always do here.

Something bothers me.

I go looking.

I try to figure out which parts of what I believe survive contact with evidence, and I try not to make the evidence say more than it actually says.

Sometimes I find an answer.

More often I discover that I was asking a smaller question than I thought.

I'm okay with that.

We're not collecting answers.

We're collecting better questions.

---

Before You Leave, I Actually Want to Know Something

What have you worried yourself sick about that never happened?

Not the philosophical answer.

Give me the stupid one.

The text you completely misread.

The test result you were absolutely certain would be terrible.

The conversation you rehearsed seventeen times that turned out to be nothing.

The thing you spent an entire afternoon preparing to survive...

that reality never actually asked you to survive.

Put it in the comments.

I have a feeling most of us have paid for a ridiculous number of imaginary disasters.

And if you like following questions like this until they become slightly uncomfortable, subscribe to Thoughtful Questions.

Better yet, send me the question that's been following you around lately.

Some of the best rabbit holes don't start with me.

---

In the Next Installment...

There's one I've had sitting around for a while:

How do I know when I'm wrong?

Not:

How do I prove somebody else wrong?

I've spent plenty of time practicing that.

I mean something much less comfortable.

What would actually have to happen for me to recognize that one of my own beliefs is wrong?

Because saying I'm willing to change my mind is easy.

Actually having a system capable of catching me when I'm full of shit...

that might be a completely different thing.

So we're going to look.

---

Additional Reading

Everything factual I relied on while putting this together is below. This isn't meant to look like an academic bibliography. I put it here because if I'm going to tell you what the research says, you should be able to go look at it yourself.

Uncertainty & Anticipatory Anxiety

Grupe & Nitschke — “Uncertainty and Anticipation in Anxiety” — Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013
A major review examining why uncertain future threats can generate anxiety and how the brain anticipates and responds to them.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23783199/

Oglesby et al. — “The Role of Threat Level and Intolerance of Uncertainty in Laboratory-Induced Anticipatory Anxiety” — 2017
Experimental research finding greater anticipatory anxiety among people higher in intolerance of uncertainty when a future stressful event was uncertain.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28577580/

Carleton — “The Intolerance of Uncertainty Construct in the Context of Anxiety Disorders” — 2012
Review discussing intolerance of uncertainty as a fear of the unknown and its relationship with anxiety.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23002938/

Worry, Rumination & the Stress Response

Brosschot, Gerin & Thayer — “The Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis: A Review of Worry, Prolonged Stress-Related Physiological Activation, and Health” — Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 2006
Review proposing that worry and rumination can extend physiological stress responses before and after actual stressors.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16439263/

Brosschot — “Markers of Chronic Stress: Prolonged Physiological Activation and Unconscious Perseverative Cognition” — Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 2010
Further examination of how mentally representing past or possible future stressors can prolong physiological activation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20096302/

Pulopulos et al. — “Association Between Changes in Heart Rate Variability During the Anticipation of a Stress Task and the Cortisol Response” — 2018
Study examining physiological changes during anticipation of a laboratory stressor.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29758470/

Juster et al. — “Anticipatory Stress Dynamics Among Cortisol and Blood Pressure Responses” — 2012
Research examining how anticipation relates to physiological stress responses.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22296506/

When Thinking Ahead Helps, and When It Doesn't

Watkins — “Constructive and Unconstructive Repetitive Thought” — Psychological Bulletin, 2008
Large review showing that repetitive thinking can have both constructive effects, including planning and preparation, and destructive effects such as anxiety and depression depending on how it occurs.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18298268/

Newman et al. — “Worry and Generalized Anxiety Disorder: A Review and Theoretical Synthesis” — Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 2013
Review of the mechanisms and functions involved in excessive worry and generalized anxiety.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23537486/

Information Seeking & Uncertainty

Bartoszek et al. — “Intolerance of Uncertainty and Information-Seeking Behavior: Experimental Manipulation of Threat Relevance” — 2022
Experimental study examining how intolerance of uncertainty relates to seeking additional information under uncertain conditions.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35642992/

Predicting How the Future Will Feel

Hoerger et al. — “Cognitive Determinants of Affective Forecasting Errors” — 2010
Research discussing the tendency to misjudge the intensity and duration of our future emotional reactions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3170528/

Hoerger et al. — “Affective Forecasting and the Big Five” — 2010
Research examining individual differences and systematic errors in predicting future emotions.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3183582/

What happens in the space between what someone does and what we decide it means?

My wife and I were sitting around talking recently.

One thing led to another, the way conversations tend to do, and she brought up something simple.

A guy walks into an office in the morning.

He comes through the door.

Doesn’t say good morning.

Doesn’t acknowledge anybody.

Just walks in.

And somebody inevitably thinks:

Why didn’t he say hello to me?

Then maybe:

Does he not like me?

Did I do something?

What an asshole.

Except there is one small problem with this entire story.

The guy didn’t refuse to say hello to you.

He didn’t say hello to anybody.

Maybe he’s rude.

Maybe he’s distracted.

Maybe he’s socially awkward.

Maybe his wife pissed him off before he left the house.

Maybe his dog died yesterday.

Maybe he’s just a guy who doesn’t fucking say hello.

We don’t know.

But somehow:

“He didn’t say hello.”

becomes:

“He didn’t say hello to me.”

That tiny word changes everything.

Me.

And somewhere in that conversation, my wife and I landed on a question that I thought was worth turning into a Deep Question:

Why do we make things about us when we don’t actually know that they have anything to do with us?

Once we started talking about it, I realized I do this all the fucking time.

Just in a different way.

I’m a contractor.

I send somebody a proposal.

Ten minutes later, I check my phone.

Nothing.

Twenty minutes.

Nothing.

An hour.

Nothing.

And somewhere inside my head, a completely unqualified screenwriter gets to work.

Fuck.

It’s too expensive.

He doesn’t like the price.

I lost the job.

The guy was probably just wasting my time.

Now what the fuck am I going to do next week?

Notice what hasn’t happened yet.

Anything.

I sent an email.

The customer hasn’t responded.

Those are the only two facts available.

Everything else came from me.

And I’ve managed to turn two pieces of information into a financial crisis before the poor bastard has even gotten back to his computer.

Then five o’clock comes around.

The guy gets home.

Looks at the proposal.

Calls me.

“Looks good. Where do I send the deposit?”

And I’m sitting there thinking:

Well, that was a productive six hours of unnecessary suffering.

Reality gave me silence. My brain gave me a catastrophe.

That sentence might be the entire question.

There seems to be a difference between what happens and what our minds do with the empty spaces around what happens.

Psychologists have studied uncertainty for exactly this reason.

Researchers Dan Grupe and Jack Nitschke described uncertainty about possible future threats as an important driver of anxiety. When we don’t know what’s coming, especially when something important could go badly, the brain can start preparing for danger before any danger has actually appeared. [1]

That describes my proposal situation almost embarrassingly well.

There isn’t a threat yet.

There’s uncertainty about a possible threat.

Maybe I lost the job.

Maybe I didn’t.

My brain apparently isn’t interested in waiting around to find out.

Psychologist R. Nicholas Carleton has written extensively about “intolerance of uncertainty,” essentially the difficulty some of us have sitting with not knowing. [2]

I think I’m one of those people.

And anxiety seems perfectly happy to fill the empty space.

Not necessarily with the most likely explanation.

Just with an explanation.

Then there’s the story we choose.

Researchers also study something called interpretation bias.

The idea is simple.

Give people an ambiguous situation, and different brains can interpret the same information very differently.

Research on social anxiety has repeatedly found that people with higher social anxiety are more likely to interpret ambiguous social situations negatively. [3]

And an unanswered proposal is ambiguous.

So is somebody walking past without saying hello.

So is:

“K.”

instead of:

“Okay, sounds good.”

So is someone not returning your text.

So is your boss walking past looking pissed off.

The event contains incomplete information.

Your brain supplies the rest.

And sometimes what it supplies is complete bullshit.

Psychologists even have a name for one version of this: personalization.

That’s when we assume an event or somebody else’s behavior is about us without enough evidence that it actually is. [4]

Which brings us right back to:

“He didn’t say hello.”

becoming:

“He didn’t say hello to me.”

But why would the brain do this?

This is where I want to be careful.

I don’t think the research gives us one clean evolutionary explanation for why humans take things personally.

We’re messier than that.

But several things can push us in that direction.

Uncertainty can create anxiety.

Anxiety can make us more alert to possible threats.

Ambiguous situations leave room for interpretation.

And anxious brains can lean toward threatening interpretations.

Put those together and you can see how the machine might work.

Something happens.

I don’t know what it means.

Not knowing makes me uncomfortable.

My brain produces an explanation.

The explanation involves rejection, danger, disrespect, loss or failure.

Then my body reacts emotionally to the explanation.

And here’s the fucked-up part.

The explanation may never have been true.

I can suffer from an event that hasn’t happened.

That’s fascinating to me.

And slightly horrifying.

I haven’t learned how to stop doing it.

I wish this part ended with some giant breakthrough.

It doesn’t.

When somebody doesn’t answer a proposal, that first thought still shows up.

Maybe I lost it.

Maybe my price was too high.

Maybe I fucked something up.

What has changed is that I’ve learned, mostly through getting this wrong enough times, not to immediately let the thought become reality.

So I give myself a rule.

If they haven’t answered today, I’ll follow up tomorrow.

Until then:

I don’t know.

That’s it.

Not:

Everything is going to work out.

Because I don’t know that either.

The customer may absolutely hate my proposal.

He may think I’m insane.

He may hire somebody else.

The point isn’t to replace a negative imaginary story with a positive imaginary story.

The point is to stop pretending either story is information.

I’ve slowly learned to say:

I don’t have enough evidence yet.

And strangely, that seems much more useful than trying to convince myself everything is fine.

There’s another place where I handle this completely differently.

My relationship.

If something seems wrong between my wife and me, I usually ask.

“You okay?”

Sometimes I’ll ask twice.

If she says everything is fine but something still clearly feels different, eventually I’ll stop the whole interaction.

I’ll tell her what I’m seeing.

I’ll tell her what it’s making me feel.

And I’ll ask:

What’s actually going on?

She does the same thing with me.

We didn’t always communicate this way.

We’re older now.

We’ve learned some shit.

More importantly, we love each other enough that neither of us wants a stupid misunderstanding to become a three-day argument.

And when I compared that with the proposal situation, I noticed something.

In one situation, I have access to more information.

So I ask.

In the other, I’m stuck waiting.

And that’s exactly where the stories multiply.

Maybe one of the best defenses against making everything personal isn’t becoming emotionally bulletproof.

Maybe it’s information.

Ask when you can.

Wait when you can’t.

And learn to recognize the difference between an observation and an interpretation.

What happened?

He didn’t say hello.

What did I decide it meant?

He doesn’t like me.

Those are not the same sentence.

The customer hasn’t answered my proposal.

I lost the job.

Those are not the same sentence either.

Your partner seems quiet.

They’re angry with me.

Maybe.

But those aren’t the same thing.

And maybe that’s the useful part of this entire question.

We don’t necessarily need to stop having these thoughts.

I’m not even sure that’s realistic.

Maybe we just need to become better at catching the moment where reality ends and the story begins.

Because once I can see that line, I can ask:

What do I actually know?

Not what do I suspect?

Not what am I afraid of?

Not what happened last time?

What do I know?

Sometimes the answer is almost nothing.

And maybe “I don’t know yet” isn’t a failure to find the answer.

Maybe sometimes it’s the most truthful answer available.

The question I’m left with

How much anxiety, resentment, insecurity and conflict do we create because we respond to the story in our head before reality has had a chance to tell us what actually happened?

I don’t know.

But I’m starting to wonder how many bad days I’ve had over things that never actually happened.

That bothers me.

Which is probably why it’s worth asking.

What do you think?

Have you ever caught yourself doing this?

Someone doesn’t answer.

Someone looks at you differently.

Someone walks past without speaking.

And before you know it, you’ve created an entire explanation for what they must think about you.

I’d genuinely like to hear an example.

And if there’s a question you’ve been carrying around that nobody seems to ask out loud, send it to me in a DM or leave it in the comments.

That is what Deep Questions is for.

Not pretending I have the answers.

Just trying to get better at asking the questions.

Additional Reading

1. Grupe, D. W. & Nitschke, J. B. — “Uncertainty and anticipation in anxiety: an integrated neurobiological and psychological perspective.”
Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2013. A broad review examining how uncertainty about possible future threats contributes to anxiety and how threat anticipation is processed psychologically and neurologically.

2. Carleton, R. N. — “The intolerance of uncertainty construct in the context of anxiety disorders: theoretical and practical perspectives.”
Expert Review of Neurotherapeutics, 2012. An overview of intolerance of uncertainty and the idea that difficulty tolerating the unknown may be relevant across multiple anxiety disorders.

3. Chen, J. et al. — “Interpretation bias in social anxiety: A systematic review and meta-analysis.”
2020. Reviews research on the tendency to interpret ambiguous social events negatively among people experiencing social anxiety.

4. Özdel, K. et al. — “Measuring Cognitive Errors Using the Cognitive Distortions Questionnaire.”
Research describing and measuring common cognitive distortions, including personalization.

5. Stuijfzand, S. et al. — “Is anxiety associated with negative interpretations of ambiguity?”
2018. Reviews evidence connecting anxiety with a tendency to interpret ambiguous information as threatening.

This started with weed.

Which, admittedly, is not the most surprising sentence I've ever written.

But I wasn't really thinking about getting high. I was thinking about the machinery underneath it.

I knew THC interacts with cannabinoid receptors in the brain, especially CB1, and at some point I stopped and thought:

Wait. Why the fuck do I have cannabinoid receptors?

Obviously my brain didn't evolve them because, millions of years later, somebody was eventually going to grow cannabis, dry it, light it on fire, and inhale it.

Those receptors were already there.

So what normally uses them?

That question sent me backward.

And then sideways.

And then, eventually, straight into psychedelics and consciousness.

Which is probably why this belongs under Private Contemplations.

Because I don't really have an answer.

I just have a question that got much stranger the longer I looked at it.

---

The Question

Why does the key fit?

Our bodies make their own cannabinoid-like signaling molecules.

The two big ones are anandamide, also called AEA, and 2-AG, short for 2-arachidonoylglycerol.

Those chemicals are part of the endocannabinoid system our bodies already use to regulate neural activity.

So far, so good.

The lock exists.

The body makes its own keys.

That makes sense.

Then cannabis shows up with a completely different molecule, THC, and somehow that molecule can walk into the same general system and start changing what happens inside my head.

That's where I started getting stuck.

Because the cannabis plant wasn't making THC for me.

It wasn't thinking:

Frank's going to need this later.

The plant was making cannabinoids for reasons related to being a plant.

And that is where this whole thing started feeling weird.

---

What Is the Plant Doing With Them?

The full evolutionary story isn't completely settled, so I'm not going to pretend it is.

But there is good experimental evidence that cannabinoids help cannabis defend itself.

A 2023 study found that plants with higher cannabinoid concentrations suffered less damage from chewing insects, and cannabinoids reduced insect growth and survival in feeding experiments.

Which means, at least in part, what I experience as a psychoactive drug may have evolved as part of the plant's chemical defense system.

Think about that.

The plant is trying not to get eaten.

I'm trying to quiet my brain at night.

Somehow we meet in the middle.

That wasn't planned.

The plant isn't producing THC because it wants to change human consciousness.

My brain didn't evolve CB1 receptors because it was waiting for cannabis.

And yet the molecule fits well enough to affect memory, appetite, perception, mood, and whatever version of reality I'm experiencing at the moment.

That's the part I can't get over.

Two completely different organisms.

Two completely different evolutionary problems.

And chemistry developed in one can reach into the nervous system of the other and start pushing buttons.

Why?

---

Then I Asked What Happens If You Keep Pushing the Button

This is where I originally assumed I knew the answer.

If my body already makes anandamide and 2-AG, and I keep introducing THC from outside, then maybe eventually my brain says:

Fine. Frank brought his own. Stop making ours.

Simple.

Clean.

Wrong, or at least way too simple.

The evidence doesn't show that chronic cannabis use simply shuts off the body's ability to make anandamide and 2-AG.

What we have much better evidence for is that the receptor system itself adapts.

Human brain-imaging studies of chronic or cannabis-dependent users have found reduced CB1 receptor availability.

In plain English, if you repeatedly hammer the system with THC, the brain appears to start turning the sensitivity down.

Which actually makes intuitive sense to me.

If somebody keeps screaming into a microphone, eventually you lower the volume.

That's basically the analogy that formed in my head.

The strange part is that the system can begin moving back when THC goes away.

Studies using PET imaging have found recovery in CB1 receptor availability during monitored abstinence, with some changes beginning surprisingly quickly.

So the brain isn't just sitting there taking whatever chemistry I throw at it.

It's responding.

Adapting.

Compensating.

Trying to keep something balanced.

And that made me rethink tolerance.

Because I usually think of tolerance as:

The drug doesn't work as well anymore.

But that's describing the experience from my side.

From the brain's side, something much more interesting may be happening.

The environment changed.

So the brain changed itself to survive inside that environment.

Then I remove the drug.

The environment changes again.

And the brain has to adjust again.

Which made me wonder whether I was using the word hijack too casually.

Maybe a drug does hijack a system in one sense.

But over time, the brain doesn't just surrender.

It negotiates.

The drug pushes.

The nervous system pushes back.

The drug disappears.

The nervous system has to recalibrate.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, I'm walking around saying:

I feel normal.

Normal compared to what?

That question stayed with me.

And then serotonin made the whole thing worse.

---

Same Lock. Much Stranger Keys.

I started thinking about classic psychedelics.

Psilocybin.

DMT.

LSD.

Mescaline.

And serotonin.

Because classic psychedelics are strongly tied to a particular serotonin receptor called 5-HT2A.

Now, some of these molecules really do look related.

Serotonin, DMT, and psilocin belong to the tryptamine family, so there is an obvious chemical family resemblance.

LSD is more complicated, but it still contains structural features that allow it to interact with serotonin receptors.

Then mescaline comes along and ruins the nice clean story because mescaline is a phenethylamine and actually looks chemically closer to dopamine than serotonin.

And yet it can still produce psychedelic effects through the 5-HT2A system.

That fascinated me.

Because now my lock-and-key analogy wasn't good enough anymore.

These aren't copies of the same key.

Some of them don't even look much alike.

And yet they can still fit the same receptor.

A 2025 structural study actually imaged the 5-HT2A receptor bound to serotonin, psilocin, DMT, LSD, mescaline, and other compounds.

And this is where my brain went:

What the fuck?

Because serotonin interacts with this receptor as part of ordinary biology.

Then LSD comes along and interacts with it.

Psilocin interacts with it.

DMT interacts with it.

Mescaline interacts with it.

But clearly these molecules do not produce the same subjective result.

My brain uses serotonin every day.

That does not mean I'm walking through Home Depot watching the walls breathe.

So saying:

They use the same receptor

is nowhere near enough to explain what happens next.

---

Same Lock. Different Fucking Door.

This is probably the part that hooked me hardest.

A receptor isn't just a light switch.

It's not:

Chemical fits.

Switch turns on.

One thing happens.

Different molecules can bind to the same receptor and make that receptor behave differently.

They can stabilize different shapes of the receptor.

Trigger different intracellular pathways.

Remain attached for different lengths of time.

Interact with different receptor systems at the same time.

And eventually those small molecular differences can cascade upward into enormous differences in what a human being experiences.

That is insane to me.

Again, not supernatural.

I don't mean insane as in impossible.

I mean insane as in:

How is this normal biology?

Serotonin reaches the receptor and one set of things happens.

LSD reaches the receptor and suddenly a human being may experience time differently, perceive patterns that aren't normally there, experience profound alterations in selfhood, or feel like their mind has been opened and dumped onto the floor.

Same receptor family.

Very different fucking room.

The metaphor that stuck with me is:

Same lock. Different keys.

Except one key opens the pantry.

Another one opens Narnia.

And apparently the difference can come down to tiny changes in molecular structure and what those changes make the receptor do after the key goes in.

That's beautiful to me.

Not because it proves anything mystical.

It doesn't.

It doesn't prove psychedelics reveal another dimension.

It doesn't prove DMT entities exist independently.

It doesn't prove altered states are closer to some hidden underlying reality.

Those are interpretations.

The evidence gives us something narrower, but honestly I find the narrower thing just as fascinating:

Change the signaling chemistry, and you can radically change conscious experience.

That's enough.

---

Then I Went Back to Cannabis

Once I started thinking about psychedelics this way, cannabis looked different too.

THC doesn't have to perfectly imitate anandamide or 2-AG.

It just has to interact with the machinery strongly enough, in the right places and in the right ways, to change signaling.

And if it keeps showing up, the machinery adapts.

So maybe outside molecules aren't simply pretending to be our own chemicals.

Maybe they're taking advantage of the flexibility built into biological receptors.

Which brings me back to the question:

Why is my brain chemically accessible to another organism at all?

Cannabis can affect it.

Mushrooms can affect it.

Caffeine can affect it.

Nicotine can affect it.

Mescaline-containing cacti can affect it.

Opium poppies can affect it.

A whole lot of living things make molecules for their own reasons that happen to fit into systems inside us and change pain, attention, memory, mood, perception, behavior, and consciousness.

The molecule doesn't know it's a drug.

The plant doesn't know it's a drug.

The receptor doesn't know it's a drug.

Drug is our word.

From chemistry's point of view, one molecule encountered another molecule and something happened.

And for some reason, that thought makes drugs seem both less mysterious and more mysterious at the same time.

---

Maybe the Bigger Mystery Is That Life Shares Chemistry

There is an obvious scientific answer to at least part of this.

All life on Earth is chemistry.

We didn't evolve in some separate universe from plants and fungi.

We use many of the same atoms, similar molecular building blocks, and biological pathways that ultimately descend from a shared evolutionary history.

So there is nothing magical about one organism producing a molecule that another organism can respond to.

That part makes sense.

But understanding why something is possible doesn't always make the result feel ordinary.

A few atoms move.

A molecular group changes position.

A receptor bends slightly differently.

And somehow the difference at the level of chemistry becomes:

I'm hungry.

I'm calm.

I'm anxious.

I'm in pain.

I'm remembering something.

I'm seeing patterns.

My sense of time disappeared.

I no longer feel separate from the universe.

That's a hell of a jump.

Molecule to meaning.

Chemistry to experience.

And I know there are enormous amounts of neuroscience between those two things.

That's exactly the point.

Somewhere between a molecule fitting into a receptor and me experiencing being me, physical chemistry becomes subjective experience.

We know a great deal about pieces of that chain.

We absolutely do not understand consciousness completely.

And I think that's where this stopped being a piece about drugs for me.

---

Where I Stand Now

I started by wondering why cannabis works.

Now that almost seems like the least interesting version of the question.

My brain was chemical before cannabis arrived.

It was chemical before psychedelics arrived.

Anandamide and 2-AG were already regulating things.

Serotonin was already signaling.

Receptors were already changing shape.

Neurons were already talking to each other.

The drugs didn't create a chemical mind.

They exposed how chemical the mind already was.

And chronic exposure adds another layer because the system itself isn't static.

Change the chemical environment repeatedly and the brain can adapt.

Remove the chemical and it can begin adapting again.

So now when I use a word like normal, I'm not as sure what I mean by it.

Maybe normal isn't one fixed biochemical location.

Maybe it's something the nervous system is constantly trying to create.

A moving equilibrium.

A negotiated state.

A brain continually adjusting to whatever world, body, stress, chemistry, sleep, food, experience, and drugs happen to be present.

And somewhere inside all of that...

I experience myself as one continuous person.

That's the part that blows my mind.

Not the weed.

Not the mushrooms.

Not even the receptors.

It's that all of this chemistry keeps moving underneath me...

and somehow I wake up every morning feeling like:

Yep. Still me.

Maybe that's the real contemplation.

Because now I have a much better question than the one I started with:

If my brain is constantly adjusting itself around the chemistry it encounters... what exactly do I mean when I say I'm back to “normal”?

I don't know.

But apparently that's where we're going next.

---

Before You Go

This is exactly why I wanted Private Contemplations to exist.

Thoughtful Questions is where I take a question, research it, and try to understand what the evidence will actually let me say.

Private Contemplations is where I let the question keep going after that.

The stranger room.

The part where biology runs into consciousness, experience, drugs, identity, and whatever else refuses to stay in its own category.

Same rule still applies.

Experience is experience.

Interpretation is interpretation.

Evidence is evidence.

I don't want to destroy the mystery by pretending we already understand it.

And I don't want to protect the mystery by pretending science hasn't explained anything either.

I want whatever survives after both sides get their turn.

If you're reading this as a paid subscriber, thank you.

Seriously.

You're giving me room to spend time chasing questions that don't fit neatly into a three-minute post.

And if this made another question pop into your head, send it to me.

Especially if your first thought is:

I probably shouldn't ask this.

Those usually turn out to be the interesting ones.

---

Additional Reading

Everything factual I relied on is here so you can follow the rabbit hole yourself.

The Brain's Own Cannabinoids

Stella, Schweitzer & Piomelli — “A Second Endogenous Cannabinoid That Modulates Long-Term Potentiation” — Nature, 1997
Research identifying 2-AG as an endogenous cannabinoid in the brain and examining its activity at cannabinoid receptors.
https://www.nature.com/articles/42015

Sugiura et al. — “2-Arachidonoylglycerol: A Possible Endogenous Cannabinoid Receptor Ligand in Brain” — Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 1995
Early evidence identifying 2-AG as a naturally occurring cannabinoid-receptor ligand.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/7575630/

Rinaldi-Carmona et al. — “Characterization of Two Cloned Human CB1 Cannabinoid Receptor Isoforms” — Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, 1996
Experimental comparison of THC, anandamide, and other cannabinoid ligands at human CB1 receptors.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8768742/

Why Cannabis Makes Cannabinoids

Stack et al. — “Cannabinoids Function in Defense Against Chewing Herbivores in Cannabis sativa L.” — Horticulture Research, 2023
Field and laboratory evidence that higher cannabinoid concentrations can reduce damage and performance of insect herbivores.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10681003/

Chronic Cannabis & CB1 Adaptation

Hirvonen et al. — “Reversible and Regionally Selective Downregulation of Brain Cannabinoid CB1 Receptors in Chronic Daily Cannabis Smokers” — Molecular Psychiatry, 2012
Human PET evidence of CB1 receptor downregulation in chronic cannabis users and recovery after monitored abstinence.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21747398/

D'Souza et al. — “Rapid Changes in CB1 Receptor Availability in Cannabis Dependent Males After Abstinence From Cannabis” — Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, 2016
Small human PET study showing lower CB1 availability at baseline and rapid change during abstinence.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26858993/

Serotonin & Psychedelics

Madsen et al. — “Psychedelic Effects of Psilocybin Correlate With Serotonin 2A Receptor Occupancy and Plasma Psilocin Levels” — Neuropsychopharmacology, 2019
Human evidence linking psilocin exposure, 5-HT2A receptor occupancy, and subjective psychedelic intensity.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30685771/

Gumpper et al. — “The Structural Diversity of Psychedelic Drug Actions Revealed” — Nature Communications, 2025
Cryo-EM structures showing serotonin, psilocin, DMT, LSD, mescaline, and other compounds interacting with the 5-HT2A receptor.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-57956-7

Wallach et al. — “Identification of 5-HT2A Receptor Signaling Pathways Associated With Psychedelic Potential” — Nature Communications, 2023
Research examining how different 5-HT2A signaling pathways relate to psychedelic-like effects.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44016-1

Read more

Usually, I bring two questions into these.

Not this time.

I started researching the first one and realized pretty quickly that if I squeezed another question in behind it, either this thing was going to become ridiculously long or I was going to rush through something that deserved more time.

So this time, you get one.

And apparently I've been circling this question for a while without realizing it.

When I wrote The Chemical Lens of Being Human, I was looking at how things like anxiety, exhaustion, love, grief, drugs, hormones, and brain chemistry can change the way we experience ourselves and the world around us.

At the time, I thought I was mostly writing about perception.

Apparently I wasn't finished.

Because eventually I had to turn the lens around.

If changing the chemistry can change the person looking through the lens...

what exactly is the person?

Which brings me to the question.

---

The Question

How much of my personality is actually me... and how much is biology, upbringing, and circumstance?

At first, this sounded like a nature-versus-nurture question.

Genes or environment?

Which one made me me?

Unfortunately, about ten minutes into researching it, that version started falling apart, because apparently nature and nurture have been having sex behind our backs the entire time.

There isn't a clean line.

Personality researchers generally describe personality as relatively enduring patterns in how people think, feel, and behave. One of the most commonly studied frameworks is the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

The interesting part is that personality appears to be both stable and changeable.

A huge 2022 meta-analysis pulled together hundreds of longitudinal samples and found that personality tends to become more stable as we move from childhood into adulthood, but it never becomes completely frozen. People continue changing throughout life.

That immediately created a problem for the way I had been thinking about this.

Because I tend to imagine personality as this permanent thing underneath everything else.

I'm Frank.

I've always been Frank.

People who've known me for twenty years still recognize me as the same asshole.

So obviously something is pretty stable.

But apparently stable doesn't mean fixed.

---

Then Genetics Showed Up

Twin studies have found substantial genetic influence on personality. A 2015 meta-analysis of behavior-genetic studies estimated average personality heritability at about 40 percent.

But this is where those numbers get butchered.

That does not mean 40 percent of my personality came from my genes and the other 60 percent came from my mother, childhood, Miami, addiction, relationships, dogs, bad decisions, and whatever else happened along the way.

Heritability is a population statistic. It describes differences between people in a particular population under particular conditions.

You can't dissect Frank and put 40 percent of him in the genetics bucket.

But genetics clearly matter, and molecular-genetic research supports that too, even though the amount captured by measured common genetic variants is generally smaller than what traditional twin studies estimate.

So whatever I am, I didn't start as a blank sheet of paper.

I showed up with tendencies already in the machine.

And then life started writing on them.

---

Then Life Started Screwing With the Settings

Personality doesn't seem to be genes plus childhood and then you're finished.

Traits continue changing throughout adulthood, and major life events may contribute to some of that change, although the research gets messy fast.

Different events affect different people differently.

Which makes sense when I think about it.

Take two people and put them through something terrible.

One becomes harder.

The other becomes more compassionate.

One gets quieter.

The other starts talking about everything.

Same category of event.

Different person going in.

Different biology, environment, meaning, support system, history.

Different person coming out.

So even when circumstance changes us, circumstance isn't working alone.

The person it happens to matters too.

---

And Then the Chemical Lens Came Back

This is where I started feeling like I'd accidentally wandered back into something I'd already written.

Because changing brain chemistry can sometimes move measurements we normally think of as personality.

In a randomized placebo-controlled depression study, people treated with the antidepressant paroxetine showed larger changes in measured neuroticism and extraversion than placebo-treated patients who experienced comparable improvement in their depression symptoms.

Now, that does not mean antidepressants rewrite your personality.

One study doesn't earn us that sentence.

But it earns us a question.

If I take the same person, alter the chemistry, and something we measure as personality moves...

did I change the person?

Or did I change the conditions under which that person was being expressed?

And because apparently I enjoy making these questions worse, psychedelics entered the conversation too.

A Johns Hopkins study found increased openness after psilocybin. Among participants who had what researchers classified as a complete mystical-type experience, that increase was still measurable more than a year later.

The study was small, so I'm not turning that into some ridiculous claim that mushrooms permanently improve your personality.

But the question is interesting.

If an experience produced under radically altered brain chemistry is followed by a lasting personality change...

was that change artificial?

Was the old personality more authentic because it came first?

Did the experience create something?

Unlock something?

Or is the whole question wrong?

I don't know.

But that's exactly why The Chemical Lens came back into my head.

I thought I had been asking what chemistry does to the way we experience reality.

Now I'm wondering what chemistry tells us about the person doing the experiencing.

---

Then Brain Injury Made the Question Much Harder

This is probably the part that bothered me most.

Brain injury can produce changes in behavior, emotional regulation, inhibition, motivation, and what families sometimes recognize as personality. Research has linked some acquired personality changes after traumatic brain injury to damage involving frontal brain systems.

So imagine somebody you've known forever suffers a brain injury and becomes noticeably different.

Maybe they're more impulsive.

Less inhibited.

More irritable.

Less empathetic.

And the people around them say:

“He's not himself anymore.”

I understand exactly what that sentence means emotionally.

But what the hell does it mean?

If damage to physical tissue can change something important enough that the people who love me say “that's not Frank anymore,” then where exactly was Frank before the injury?

Was he somewhere separate from the brain?

Or was the functioning brain part of what Frank meant all along?

Neuroscience hasn't solved the philosophical problem of the self, and I don't want to pretend it has.

But at minimum...

the machinery matters.

A lot.

---

But Here's Where I Almost Cheated

There was a point while researching this where I started throwing everything into the personality bucket.

Bad sleep changes me.

Anxiety changes me.

Grief changes me.

Cannabis changes me.

Hormones change me.

Hunger changes me.

Stress changes me.

Okay.

But that's not necessarily personality change.

Sometimes that's a state.

And state and trait aren't the same thing.

If I'm exhausted and short with somebody, that doesn't necessarily mean I've permanently become a less agreeable person.

Maybe I'm the same person who slept like shit.

If I'm anxious for three days, that doesn't mean I've permanently changed personality.

That distinction matters because otherwise I could prove personality changes every fifteen minutes depending on whether somebody ate lunch.

So the interesting question isn't whether behavior changes temporarily.

Of course it does.

The interesting part is that underneath those temporary states there seem to be relatively stable tendencies...

and even those tendencies can move.

Age can move them.

Life can move them.

Treatment can move them.

Experience can move them.

And research on psychological and pharmacological interventions has found measurable personality-trait changes over surprisingly short periods.

So there is something stable here.

Just apparently not something immovable.

---

And That's Where the Question Changed

I started with:

How much of my personality is actually me, and how much is biology, upbringing, and circumstance?

But after looking into it, I'm not sure those things belong on opposite sides of the sentence anymore.

Because when I ask:

“How much is me, and how much is biology?”

I'm talking as though biology is something happening to me from the outside.

But my brain is biology.

My nervous system is biology.

My genes are biology.

The childhood brain learning from the world around it was biology interacting with an environment, and the adult brain changed by everything that happened afterward is still biology interacting with an environment.

Maybe asking how much of me is biology is a little like asking:

How much of the hurricane is actually the hurricane, and how much is wind?

The wind isn't interfering with the hurricane.

The wind is part of what the hurricane is.

Now, that's my interpretation.

Science didn't hand me that sentence.

But it's where the evidence pushed my thinking.

---

Where I Stand Now

I went into this half-expecting to find some stable core hiding underneath everything.

The real me.

Then around that real me we'd stack genes, childhood, trauma, chemistry, circumstance, aging, experience, and whatever else life throws at us.

I'm not sure I believe that picture anymore.

I think there is continuity.

Obviously.

I'm still recognizable to myself, and I'm recognizable to people who have known me for decades. There are patterns in me that have been around for as long as I can remember.

But maybe those patterns aren't evidence of a person existing independently of biology and experience.

Maybe those patterns are the person.

My biology isn't separate from me.

My childhood isn't separate from me.

The things I've survived aren't separate from me.

The mistakes I've made aren't separate from me.

Neither are the things I've learned because of them.

And weirdly, I don't find that depressing.

I actually think it gives choice a more interesting role.

Because maybe choice isn't about inventing myself from scratch.

I didn't choose the starting equipment.

I didn't choose where I was born.

I didn't choose my childhood brain.

I didn't choose every experience that shaped it.

And, as we looked at in the last issue, I don't even seem to choose every thought that arrives in my own head.

But I can notice some of those things.

And sometimes I can do something with them.

I can recognize a tendency and say:

Yeah, that's me. That's absolutely what I normally do.

And then maybe:

I'm not doing it this time.

Which makes me wonder whether the most interesting part of personality isn't what I was handed or even what happened to me.

Maybe it's what I can gradually do once I become aware of both.

I don't know if that's where the science ends and philosophy begins.

Probably somewhere around there.

But I know more than I did when I started.

And, once again, I think I've got a better question:

If I didn't choose the biology, upbringing, and circumstances that built so much of me... what exactly am I taking credit or blame for when I say, “That's just who I am”?

---

Before You Go

I'm not a personality researcher, a geneticist, or a neuroscientist, and I definitely didn't solve the human self in one investigation.

I took a question that sounded pretty simple and followed it until it stopped being simple.

That's basically what Thoughtful Questions has become.

Sometimes the evidence confirms something I suspected.

Sometimes it tells me I was using the wrong question in the first place.

I like those better.

I'm not collecting answers.

I'm collecting better questions.

---

In the Next Installment...

There's one sitting in the queue that seems almost embarrassingly simple:

How do I know when I'm wrong?

Not how do I prove somebody else wrong.

I'm already pretty good at trying to do that.

I mean:

What would actually make me recognize that something I believe is wrong?

Because believing I'm willing to change my mind and actually having a system that catches me when I'm full of shit may be two very different things.

So that's where I'm going next.

If you like following questions farther than is probably healthy, subscribe.

And if you know something I missed, disagree with where I landed, or know research that complicates any of this, put it in the comments.

Seriously.

The point isn't for me to win the argument.

If you've got something that makes the question better, I want it.

And if you've got a question that's been bothering you...

send me that too.

---

Additional Reading

Everything I relied on for the factual portions of this issue is below. This isn't meant to be a formal academic bibliography. I'm putting it here because if I'm going to tell you what the research says, you should be able to go look at the research yourself.

Personality Stability & Change

Bleidorn et al. — “Personality Stability and Change: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies” — Psychological Bulletin, 2022

Large meta-analysis showing that personality is simultaneously stable and capable of change across the lifespan.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35834197/

Roberts & Mroczek — “Personality Trait Change in Adulthood” — Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2008

Review of evidence that personality traits continue developing through adulthood.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19756219/

Genetics

Vukasović & Bratko — “Heritability of Personality: A Meta-Analysis of Behavior Genetic Studies” — Psychological Bulletin, 2015

Meta-analysis estimating the average genetic contribution to differences in personality across studied populations.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25961374/

Jang, Livesley & Vernon — “Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets” — Journal of Personality, 1996

Twin-study estimates of genetic influences across the Big Five personality traits.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8776880/

Power & Pluess — “Heritability Estimates of the Big Five Personality Traits Based on Common Genetic Variants” — Translational Psychiatry, 2015

Research estimating how much variation in Big Five traits can be associated with measured common genetic variants.

https://www.nature.com/articles/tp201596

Life Experience & Personality

Bleidorn, Hopwood & Lucas — “Life Events and Personality Trait Change” — Journal of Personality, 2018

Review of evidence and remaining uncertainty about how major life events relate to personality development.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27716921/

Medication & Personality

Tang et al. — “Personality Change During Depression Treatment: A Placebo-Controlled Trial” — Archives of General Psychiatry, 2009

Study comparing personality-trait changes in patients receiving paroxetine, cognitive therapy, or placebo during depression treatment.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19996037/

Psychedelics & Personality

MacLean, Johnson & Griffiths — “Mystical Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin Lead to Increases in the Personality Domain of Openness” — Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2011

Small study finding increased openness after psilocybin, with sustained changes among participants reporting a complete mystical-type experience.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21956378/

Brain Injury, Personality & Identity

Max et al. — “Predictors of Personality Change Due to Traumatic Brain Injury” — Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences, 2006

Prospective research connecting some post-injury personality changes with frontal brain damage.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16525067/

Stuss — “Traumatic Brain Injury: Relation to Executive Dysfunction and the Frontal Lobes” — Current Opinion in Neurology, 2011

Review of frontal-lobe systems, executive function, and behavioral consequences following traumatic brain injury.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21968550/

Beadle et al. — “The Impact of Traumatic Brain Injury on Self-Identity” — Journal of Head Trauma Rehabilitation, 2016

Systematic review examining changes in self-concept and identity after traumatic brain injury in adults.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26098262/

Can Personality Be Deliberately Changed?

Roberts et al. — “A Systematic Review of Personality Trait Change Through Intervention” — Psychological Bulletin, 2017

Meta-analysis examining personality-trait changes during psychological and pharmacological interventions.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28054797/

From My Own Earlier Rabbit Hole

The Chemical Lens of Being Human

The earlier piece I mentioned at the beginning—the question that eventually led me back here.

https://open.substack.com/pub/hazesilver/p/the-chemical-lens-of-being-human?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7c0a35

There are a lot of things happening inside my own head that I automatically think of as mine — my beliefs, my thoughts, my opinions — without really stopping to ask where any of that shit actually came from.

And that's kind of what got me stuck this week, because I ended up with two questions that, at first, didn't seem related at all.

One was about religion.

The other was about cognition.

But the more I looked into both of them, the more I realized they were poking at the same uncomfortable thing:

How much of what's happening inside my own head did I actually choose?

---

Question One

If where you're born is such a good predictor of what you'll believe... what does that say about faith?

First, I need to correct something, because originally I wanted to say that where you're born is one of the strongest predictors of what religion you'll believe.

It sounds right, and I still think the basic idea behind it is interesting, but I couldn't find evidence strong enough to honestly rank geography against every other possible predictor, so I'm not going to pretend I did.

What we do know is that religion is heavily clustered geographically, and there's very good evidence that family, childhood exposure, culture, and the society around us play major roles in what we eventually believe.

Pew's global data makes the geographic pattern pretty hard to miss, research on religious transmission points directly at parents and childhood environment, and a 2025 study of more than 200,000 people across 22 countries found that childhood exposure to metaphysical beliefs was one of the most consistent predictors of religious belief later in life.

So I started thinking about four babies.

Put one in India, one in Thailand, one in Saudi Arabia, and one in Florida, and then come back twenty-five years later.

There's a pretty good chance they're not all going to have the same ideas about God, and there's also a pretty good chance that whatever they do believe is going to look a lot like the beliefs of the families and cultures surrounding them.

And that's the part that started bothering me, because then I have to turn the question back on myself.

If I had been born somewhere else, would I believe something completely different?

Would I pray differently, consider another book sacred, call God by another name, or look at the religion I currently recognize as normal and think those people believe some strange shit?

And maybe the most uncomfortable question of all:

Would I be just as certain?

Now, people absolutely can change religions. People leave them, convert, become atheists, come back later, or end up somewhere completely different from where they started, and Pew has documented significant religious switching around the world.

So geography isn't destiny.

But we also don't begin life by sitting down with every major religion, studying all of their evidence, comparing their metaphysics, and then choosing the winner.

That's obviously not how childhood works.

We inherit a world first, and then, maybe later, we examine it.

And none of this proves God doesn't exist.

That's important, because I don't want to smuggle in a conclusion the evidence doesn't give me.

Geography doesn't disprove Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or any other religion, and it sure as hell doesn't prove atheism either.

What it does, at least for me, is make me question certainty, because these traditions don't all make the same claims about God, salvation, prophets, scripture, reincarnation, death, and reality.

Some of those claims directly conflict.

They can't all be literally true in exactly the same way.

And honestly, disagreement by itself doesn't bother me. Humans disagree about everything. You believe your thing, I believe mine, let's get some tacos and keep moving.

I'd be perfectly fine with that.

Unfortunately, history hasn't always stopped there.

Religion has been involved in persecution, forced conversion, repression, warfare, and killing, and human beings have absolutely hurt other human beings while believing that God, scripture, or religious authority justified what they were doing.

But I need to be careful there too, because saying something like “religion causes war” is so simplified that it becomes almost useless.

Politics gets mixed in. Land gets mixed in. Ethnicity, nationalism, money, empire, fear, and ordinary human struggles for power all get tangled together.

Sometimes religion is the engine.

Sometimes it's fuel.

Sometimes it's just the flag somebody sticks on top of a conflict that has ten other things going on underneath it.

And religion has also inspired peace, charity, forgiveness, sacrifice, reconciliation, and people doing incredibly decent things for one another.

Both things are true.

Still, there's something about combining disagreement with absolute certainty that makes me nervous, because there's a big difference between saying:

“I think you're wrong.”

and saying:

“God says you're wrong.”

Especially when the person saying the second one has power.

---

What Changed?

I don't think religion is useless, and I don't want this piece to sound like that's what I discovered, because it's not.

There are beautiful things inside religion.

There are things attributed to Jesus that genuinely move me, ideas in Buddhism that make me stop and think, and I've found worthwhile ideas in Judaism, Islam, Hindu philosophy, and probably plenty of traditions I haven't even encountered yet.

I'll take wisdom wherever I find it.

I don't need somebody to have the complete instruction manual to the universe before I can learn something from them.

What changed is that I'm much less impressed by religious certainty than I used to be, because once I seriously consider the possibility that, had I been born into another family, another country, speaking another language, I might be standing here defending a completely different religion with the same sincerity and the same confidence...

that does something to confidence as evidence.

It doesn't tell me which religion is true.

But it makes me much less willing to treat certainty itself as proof.

And personally, this is where I get off the train with organized religion.

Not because every religious person is oppressive. They're obviously not.

Not because every church, mosque, synagogue, or temple is trying to control people. They're obviously not.

But history has shown me enough examples of what can happen when questioning becomes forbidden and certainty becomes authority that I personally don't want to hand that kind of power over my thinking to anybody.

If the message becomes:

Don't question this.

Don't examine this.

Don't leave this.

Don't listen to those people.

There will be consequences if you doubt.

Whatever word somebody wants to use for that process, I don't want any part of it.

I'll take the wisdom and leave the uniform.

Maybe Christianity has something right. Maybe Islam does. Maybe Buddhism does. Maybe several traditions are touching different parts of something none of us completely understands, or maybe everybody has some of it wrong.

Maybe there is no God.

I don't know.

And the weird thing is that I'm becoming more comfortable saying that, because now I think I have a better question than the one I started with:

If people can inherit incompatible beliefs and feel equally certain about them, how do I tell the difference between something that feels true... and something that actually is?

---

Question Two

How much control do I actually have over the thoughts that appear in my head?

This one started with something much smaller and, honestly, something that happens to me all the time.

Have you ever been doing absolutely nothing related to somebody, and suddenly they're in your head?

Maybe it's a person from twenty years ago, some embarrassing conversation you haven't thought about in years, a song, something your mother said, or something you wish you had said differently.

You didn't sit there and choose it.

It just showed up.

So I started wondering:

Who chose the first thought?

Because I certainly didn't sit there and say, okay, it's Tuesday morning, I'm making coffee, this seems like a great time to revisit something humiliating from 1997.

The fucking thing just arrived.

And apparently there's a real scientific distinction between deliberate thinking and what researchers call spontaneous thought.

Mind-wandering, daydreaming, spontaneous memories, and other internally generated thoughts can arise without us intentionally starting them.

So clearly I don't choose every thought that enters my head.

But that also doesn't mean I have no control, because obviously I can deliberately think about things too. I can solve a problem, plan tomorrow, try to remember someone's name, or focus on what I'm writing right now.

So already the answer looks less like yes or no and more like, annoyingly enough:

It depends.

One of the classic examples is the white-bear experiment.

Try this:

Don't think about a white bear.

You probably just did.

Daniel Wegner's experiments showed that trying to suppress a thought can sometimes make it return, which is kind of hilarious when you think about the machinery involved.

Your brain gets an instruction saying:

Do not think about X.

But then some part of the system has to keep checking for X to make sure you're successfully not thinking about X, so X keeps hanging around in the background.

Great system.

But then I found research going in what initially looked like the opposite direction.

There's another line of experiments called the Think/No-Think paradigm, where people first learn associations and are later cued either to retrieve a memory or try to stop themselves from retrieving it.

Researchers found evidence that people can sometimes deliberately suppress memory retrieval, and repeated attempts can make some memories harder to recall later.

So apparently trying not to think about something can sometimes make it stronger, while under other circumstances people actually can exert some control over memory retrieval.

Which means mental control isn't one switch.

And then sleep entered the picture, and that's where the question got much more interesting to me.

Researchers found that sleep deprivation can impair people's ability to suppress unwanted thoughts and memories.

Think about that for a second.

Same person.

Same intention.

Same basic brain.

But change the biological condition of that brain, and their ability to control what enters awareness changes too.

That's the point where I went:

Hold on.

Because if my ability to control my own thinking depends partly on the condition of the brain doing the controlling, then what exactly do I mean when I say:

“I chose that thought”?

---

What Changed?

I went into this thinking there were basically two possibilities: either I control my thoughts, or I don't.

I don't think that works anymore.

Some thoughts I clearly choose, some just show up, and once they show up I seem to have at least some influence over what happens next.

I can examine them, challenge them, follow them, ignore them, act on them, or sometimes just sit there and think:

Where the fuck did that come from?

Maybe that's the distinction I was missing.

I might not choose every asshole who knocks on the front door of my brain, but I do seem to have some say over whether I invite him in, make coffee, and let him stay for three days.

Not always.

That's important too.

But sometimes.

And I actually like that distinction, because it means a thought appearing in my head doesn't automatically mean it's true, it doesn't automatically mean I believe it, and it definitely doesn't mean I have to do anything about it.

Sometimes it's just a thought that showed up.

And now I've got another question:

If I don't choose every thought that enters my mind, but I can sometimes choose what happens next... where exactly does choice begin?

---

Before You Go

I'm not a historian, a neuroscientist, or a theologian, and I'm definitely not pretending I figured out religion and human cognition in one Substack post.

I'm just somebody who gets stuck on questions and then goes looking.

Sometimes what I find supports what I thought going in, and sometimes it screws the whole thing up.

I actually prefer the second kind.

I'm not collecting answers.

I'm collecting better questions.

---

In the Next Installment...

Here's the next one:

How much of my personality is actually me... and how much is biology, upbringing, and circumstance?

Because if childhood can shape belief, sleep can change cognition, chemistry can change mood, and biology can affect how we think...

where exactly do I draw a circle around something and confidently say:

That's me.

I don't know.

So we're going to look.

If you enjoy this kind of thing, subscribe, and if you disagree with something I wrote, tell me why.

Bring evidence.

Bring an argument.

Or even better...

bring me a question I haven't thought of yet.

---

Additional Reading

Everything referenced in this issue is here so you can look at it yourself.

Religion, Geography & Belief

Pew Research Center — Religious Composition by Country, 2010–2020

Global estimates of religious affiliation by country.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/feature/religious-composition-by-country-2010-2020/

Pew Research Center — How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020

Global report on the geographic distribution and changing size of religious populations.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/how-the-global-religious-landscape-changed-from-2010-to-2020/

Cambridge University Press — The Intergenerational Transmission of Religion

Review of how parents, family, culture, and other social influences contribute to religious transmission.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/intergenerational-transmission-of-religion/D1C6A2FDDE10D25215B936613F7F2AC4

Scientific Reports — Childhood Predictors of Adults' Belief in God, Gods, and Spiritual Forces

Large cross-cultural study examining childhood predictors of later religious belief.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-98796-1

Pew Research Center — Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

Evidence that people can and do change or leave inherited religions.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/03/26/around-the-world-many-people-are-leaving-their-childhood-religions/

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Religious Diversity (Pluralism)

Overview of conflicting truth claims among religious traditions.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-pluralism/

The Cambridge World History of Violence — Religious, Sacred and Ritualised Violence

Historical scholarship examining religion and violence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-world-history-of-violence/religious-sacred-and-ritualised-violence/42C592C719E0E928A4268B0221B1BA43

Politics and Religion — Does “Religious Violence” Exist?

A useful corrective against treating religion as the sole cause of complex historical conflicts.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-religion/article/does-religious-violence-exist-an-argument-against-essentialism-with-particular-reference-to-the-conquest-of-the-americas/47AF0713EE60DFFAFEE34541CB35FFB2

United Nations OHCHR — International Standards on Freedom of Religion or Belief

International protections concerning freedom of belief and religious coercion.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-religion-or-belief/international-standards

Thought & Cognitive Control

Nature Reviews Neuroscience — Mind-Wandering as Spontaneous Thought

Review of mind-wandering and spontaneous forms of thought.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn.2016.113

Wegner et al. — Paradoxical Effects of Thought Suppression

The classic white-bear thought-suppression research.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3612492/

Anderson & Green — Suppressing Unwanted Memories by Executive Control

The original Think/No-Think memory-suppression research.

https://www.nature.com/articles/35066572

Harrington et al. — Losing Control: Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Suppression of Unwanted Thoughts

Research examining how sleep deprivation affects control over intrusive memories.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33552705/

Hi.

I'm Frank.

Every once in a while, a question gets lodged in the back of my brain.

Not because I'm looking for an argument.

Because I honestly don't know.

And once one of those questions gets in there...

It doesn't leave me the hell alone.

So I do what I always do.

I go down the rabbit hole.

I read.

I research.

I listen to people who know a whole lot more than I do.

Then I stop and ask myself one question.

What changed?

Not what should you believe.

Not what should anybody else believe.

Just...

What changed for me.

If that sounds interesting...

Hop in.

---

#1

If my memories change every time I remember them... what exactly am I remembering?

This one completely wrecked the way I thought memory worked.

I always figured memory was basically a DVR.

Something happens.

Your brain hits record.

Years later...

You hit play.

Done.

That was the last thing I expected to be wrong.

Turns out...

Memory isn't simply a recording.

Research suggests that when we recall a memory, it can briefly become flexible again before being stored once more—a process neuroscientists call memory reconsolidation. That doesn't mean every memory changes dramatically every time we remember it, but it does mean memory is far more dynamic than I ever imagined.

And all of a sudden, a bunch of things made sense.

Why two brothers remember the same childhood completely differently.

Why eyewitnesses can both be telling the truth...

...and still disagree.

Why two people can leave the same conversation convinced something completely different happened.

Maybe nobody's lying.

Maybe they're remembering two different versions of the same memory.

Where I Am Now

That took me straight back to elementary school.

I can't remember what the game was called.

The teacher whispered a sentence into one kid's ear.

That kid whispered it to the next.

Then the next.

Then the next.

By the time it got to the last kid...

It was almost never the same sentence.

Nobody was trying to change it.

It just happened.

And honestly...

Learning that our own memories do something surprisingly similar completely blindsided me.

That was the last thing I expected.

Now I find myself treating old memories a little differently.

Not because I trust them less.

Because I respect how complicated they really are.

#2

If Jesus changed the world, how did the earliest Christians know what they knew?

This one scratched at the back of my brain for years.

I kept asking myself the same questions.

"Where are the Roman records?"

"Where are the eyewitness accounts?"

"If this changed the world... why wasn't everybody writing about it while it was happening?"

Then I did what I always do.

I fell down the rabbit hole.

And somewhere in the middle of all that reading I caught myself thinking,

"Well... shit."

Maybe I've been asking the wrong question.

Ancient history doesn't work like modern history.

Nobody hands historians one perfect document.

They get fragments.

Letters.

Coins.

Archaeology.

Different writers.

Then they spend entire careers comparing those pieces, trying to figure out what most likely happened.

I also learned something I was never taught growing up.

The earliest surviving Christian writings are Paul's letters, written roughly twenty to thirty years after Jesus' death.

The Gospels came later.

That doesn't prove Christianity is true.

It doesn't prove Christianity is false.

But it absolutely changed the way I read those writings.

Where I Am Now

I grew up in Catholic school.

I was taught to read the Bible with a level of certainty that, if I'm being honest, I can't quite maintain anymore.

Not because I want to believe less.

Because I know more than I used to.

I know these writings were copied.

Translated.

Debated.

Interpreted.

Eventually assembled into the Bible we have today.

That doesn't make them meaningless.

If anything...

It makes me even more curious.

Who decided which books stayed?

Which books didn't?

What historical...

Political...

Theological...

And cultural forces shaped those decisions?

What were they trying to preserve?

What were they trying to accomplish?

Those are questions I genuinely want to understand.

And I'll be honest...

I don't even want to entertain applying what I just learned about memory to the decades between Jesus' life and the earliest surviving accounts.

Not because I think it proves anything.

Because I honestly don't know what it would prove.

I just know...

That's one that's going to be rattling around inside my head for a very long time.

---

Before You Go...

I'm not a historian.

I'm not a theologian.

I'm not a neuroscientist.

I'm just a guy who can't seem to stop asking questions.

Everything I write here is my best attempt to understand the evidence honestly.

If I get something wrong...

Tell me.

Seriously.

I'd rather learn than be right.

I don't know where this journey ends.

I only know that I'd rather ask an honest question than pretend to have an answer I haven't earned.

Maybe that's all this publication is.

Not a place to collect answers.

A place to collect better questions.

If that sounds like a conversation you'd like to be part of, I'd love to have you along.

A free subscription means you'll never miss the next installment.

If you'd like to support this work a little more directly, a paid subscription helps me spend more time reading, researching, writing, and chasing questions that won't leave me alone.

Either way...

Thanks for riding along.

Buy Me A Coffee

In the Next Installment...

Here's another one that's been rattling around inside my head...

If where you're born is one of the strongest predictors of what you'll believe... what does that tell us about belief itself?

I have some thoughts.

I also have a lot of questions.

Until then...

Ask good questions.

They're a lot harder to find than good answers.

---

Further Reading

On Memory Reconsolidation

Karim Nader & Oliver Hardt (2009). A Single Standard for Memory: The Case for Reconsolidation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(3), 224–234.

Karim Nader (2015). Reconsolidation and the Dynamic Nature of Memory. Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology.

# Chapter Three

## The Update

I used to think freedom was measured by what I wasn’t doing.

I wasn’t shooting heroin anymore.

I wasn’t meeting dealers in parking lots.

I wasn’t waking up every morning wondering how I was going to get well.

So, in my mind, I was doing better.

I wasn’t wrong.

But I wasn’t right either.

Looking back, I think I confused progress with freedom.

The two aren’t always the same.

I remember planning a trip to Colombia. Most people planning an international vacation are thinking about airline tickets, hotels, and what they’re going to pack.

I was trying to figure out how I was going to make it through three weeks without running out of opioids.

The methadone clinic wouldn’t give me enough take-home medication for the entire trip.

They would only give me a certain number of days, and after that I was on my own.

So I started doing math.

Could I get extra paperwork from the doctor?

Could I legally take the bottles through the airport?

What would happen if something went wrong?

What if my flight got delayed?

What if I lost the medication?

Then my brain went somewhere that should have terrified me.

I started thinking about buying morphine pills on the black market before I left. Not because I wanted to get high, but because it seemed easier than dealing with all the logistics.

Even writing that sentence today feels strange.

At the time, it felt completely reasonable.

That’s one of the frightening things about dependence.

It quietly changes what “normal” feels like.

I remember sitting there thinking,

“Wait a second. If I’m actually contemplating becoming an international drug smuggler just so I can go on vacation... maybe I’m not nearly as free as I’ve been telling myself I am.”

That wasn’t the moment I quit.

It was the moment I could no longer honestly call myself free.

Those aren’t the same thing.

Sometimes reality updates long before we do.

The strange part is that nothing changed the next day.

I still had explanations.

I still had excuses.

I still had reasons why today wasn’t the day.

That’s why I’ve stopped believing that information changes people.

I already had the information.

I’d had it for years.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know.

The problem was that I hadn’t let what I knew change me.

For the longest time, I thought my battle was with heroin.

Looking back, I don’t think it was.

I think my battle was with the story I kept telling myself.

The story always sounded reasonable.

“This is temporary.”

“I’m doing better than I used to.”

“I’m under a doctor’s care now.”

“I’m not like I was before.”

Every one of those statements contained some truth.

But together they hid a much bigger one.

My life still revolved around opioids.

The supplier had changed.

The paperwork had changed.

The bottles had changed.

The rules had changed.

But the center of gravity hadn’t.

Everything still orbited the same thing.

That’s when another uncomfortable thought hit me.

I hadn’t really moved forward.

I’d moved sideways.

That realization hurt more than I expected.

Not because methadone had no value.

For a lot of people, it saves lives, and that’s a good thing.

This isn’t a chapter about whether methadone is good or bad.

This is a chapter about me.

About the uncomfortable realization that I had changed the system around me before I had changed the operating system inside me.

I wasn’t asking freedom questions.

I was still asking opioid questions.

How do I get enough?

How do I travel with it?

How do I make this work?

How do I stay inside the rules?

Every problem I was solving still revolved around the same center.

Then something else happened.

Around the same time, fentanyl was replacing heroin.

People I knew were dying.

Some thought they were buying heroin.

Some never got another chance.

That changed the math.

For years, addiction had only been costing me.

Now it could cost everyone who cared about me.

I had Delta.

I had people who depended on me.

For the first time, the question wasn’t,

“What happens if I keep using?”

It became,

“Who pays if I don’t stop?”

That’s when I realized something that still hurts to admit.

I realized I wasn’t running out of heroin.

I was running out of time to make a difference in my life.

At this point, you might think this chapter is about opioids.

It isn’t.

Opioids just happened to be the thing that exposed this pattern in my life.

Your example might be completely different.

It might be alcohol.

It might be gambling.

It might be work.

It might be a relationship you’ve known you should leave.

It might be approval.

It might be a belief you’ve quietly stopped believing but haven’t been willing to let go of.

The example changes.

The pattern doesn’t.

This chapter isn’t about opioids.

It’s about the stories we tell ourselves after reality has already given us the answer.

It’s about the blinders we put on because, for a little while longer, the story feels safer than the truth.

If you’ve been reading this thinking it’s about addiction...

I hope you’ll stop for a second.

Because addiction was just my example.

If you’ve ever quietly known something in your life wasn’t working...

If you’ve ever known the answer...

and somehow kept finding reasons why today wasn’t the day...

then we’re talking about the same thing.

Just with different details.

Most of us already know something in our lives that isn’t working.

The hard part isn’t finding the answer.

The hard part is admitting that reality has been answering us for a long time, and we’re still negotiating with it.

If you’ve ever known a relationship was over long before you left...

If you’ve ever known you were in the wrong job...

If you’ve ever known you needed to apologize...

If you’ve ever known you needed to stop drinking...

Or start taking care of yourself...

Then you already know what I’m talking about.

The details are different.

The operating system is the same.

## What the Story Was Protecting

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this.

If heroin wasn’t really what I was protecting...

what was I protecting?

At first, I thought the answer was obvious.

I was protecting the drug.

Looking back, I don’t think that’s completely right.

I was protecting what the drug gave me.

That is a very different thing.

Because heroin was not just a substance to me.

It was relief.

It was quiet.

It was the first thing I had ever found that made my body feel like it wasn’t fighting me.

I know how that sounds.

But if I’m going to be honest about why the story was so hard to let go of, I have to be honest about what the story was protecting.

It was protecting relief.

Imagine waking up inside a body that feels like an engine revving too high.

Like the motor is screaming even when the car is parked.

Everything is too loud.

Everything is too sharp.

Your skin doesn’t feel right.

Your thoughts don’t feel right.

Your body feels like it is demanding something from you, but it won’t tell you what.

Then imagine finding something that makes the engine run smooth for the first time.

Not exciting.

Not wild.

Not even high, exactly.

Just normal.

That was the part that hooked me.

It wasn’t only pleasure.

It was the thought:

“Wait... is this what normal people feel like?”

That is a dangerous kind of relief.

Because once you have felt it, the fear of losing it becomes its own prison.

There were mornings where the first thought wasn’t coffee.

It wasn’t work.

It wasn’t what I had to do that day.

It was inventory.

How much do I have?

How long will it last?

Can I make it to work?

Can I make it through the day?

Can I get through tomorrow?

That is not freedom.

That is logistics disguised as survival.

So when I told myself I was doing better, I wasn’t only lying because I wanted to keep getting high.

I was lying because I did not know how to live without the relief yet.

That’s the part I think people miss from the outside.

They see the damage.

They see the chaos.

They see the stupid decisions.

And they’re not wrong.

But inside the person using, the math can feel completely different.

The drug is not only the thing destroying your life.

It is also the thing helping you survive the life it is destroying.

And once that contradiction becomes normal, your brain starts building stories around it.

Mine sounded reasonable.

“I’m doing better than I used to.”

“I’m still working.”

“I’m making money.”

“I’m under a doctor’s care.”

“I’m not out there like that anymore.”

Some of those things were true.

That was the problem.

The story worked because it wasn’t completely false.

I was working.

I was making money.

I was functioning.

I was doing better than some people around me.

And as long as I could call myself functional, I didn’t have to call myself trapped.

That was the deal I had made with myself.

But I had confused being functional with being free.

Those are not the same thing.

You can function inside a cage.

You can pay bills inside a cage.

You can show up to work inside a cage.

You can even look responsible inside a cage.

That doesn’t mean you’re free.

It just means the cage has a schedule.

And I had one phrase that helped me stay inside it.

“At least.”

At least is a dangerous phrase.

It sounds like gratitude.

Sometimes it is.

But sometimes it’s just a hiding place.

At least I’m not homeless.

At least I’m still working.

At least I’m not stealing.

At least I’m not using like that anymore.

At least I’m not dead.

Every “at least” gave me permission to ignore the question I should have been asking:

Compared to what?

Compared to the worst version of me?

Compared to the people doing worse?

Or compared to the life I still had time to build?

There was always somebody worse.

Always.

Somebody using more.

Somebody stealing.

Somebody lying harder.

Somebody dying faster.

And as long as I compared myself downward, I could still feel like I was standing.

But I wasn’t standing.

I was orbiting.

Everything still revolved around opioids.

The clinic.

The dose.

The schedule.

The bottles.

The fear of running out.

The fear of withdrawal.

The calculations.

The backup plans.

The rules.

The travel problems.

The life management.

I hadn’t escaped the center.

I had only changed the furniture around it.

And underneath all of that was something even harder for me to say.

I desperately did not want to be a failure.

But failure, at that time, did not mean what I would say it means now.

Back then, failure meant losing access to relief.

Failure meant waking up sick and having no answer.

Failure meant being trapped in that revved-up body with no way to turn the engine down.

Failure meant losing the one thing that made me feel like I could function.

So when I protected the story, I was really protecting three things.

I was protecting my comfort.

I did not want withdrawals.

I did not want to wake up sick.

I did not want to live inside that engine screaming all day.

I was protecting my identity.

As long as I could keep working, keep earning, and keep pointing to someone worse, I could still tell myself I wasn’t a failure.

And I was protecting the drug itself.

Because the truth is, part of me still wanted it.

That is one of the hardest things to admit.

It would be easier to tell the story differently.

It would be easier to say I hated every second.

It would be easier to make myself sound like a hostage the whole time.

But that would not be completely honest.

There were parts of it I hated.

There were parts of it that scared me.

There were parts of it that humiliated me.

But there was also a part of me that wanted to keep using because it worked.

Until it didn’t.

And even after it stopped working the way it used to, I was still chasing the memory of when it did.

That is another trap.

Sometimes you’re not protecting the thing anymore.

You’re protecting the memory of what the thing used to give you.

The first relief.

The first quiet.

The first time your body stopped screaming.

The first time your brain said:

“There it is.”

And once your brain learns that, it does not forget easily.

So no, information was never going to be enough.

I already had information.

I knew the risks.

I knew people were dying.

I knew my life was smaller than it should have been.

I knew I was planning around opioids instead of planning around my life.

The problem wasn’t lack of information.

The problem was that the story was still doing something for me.

It helped me avoid withdrawal.

It helped me avoid shame.

It helped me avoid the full truth of how much of my life still belonged to opioids.

And most importantly, it helped me postpone a decision I wasn’t ready to make.

Because if I admitted the story wasn’t true, then I had to do something about it.

I had to stop negotiating.

I had to stop saying “at least.”

I had to stop measuring myself against people doing worse.

I had to stop pretending that legal meant free.

That one was big for me.

By the time I was going to the methadone clinic, I had changed the shape of the problem.

I had not ended the problem.

The drug was legal.

The doctor was involved.

The routine looked more responsible.

But the problem was no longer whether it was legal.

The problem was that I still needed an opioid’s permission to live my life.

I still could not travel the way I wanted.

I still had to plan my life around medication.

I still had to ask permission from a system before I could move through the world like a normal person.

And not having the medication was not an option.

That was the part that finally started to bother me.

I remember thinking:

“So what do I prefer?”

Methadone or traveling?

Opiates or a regular life?

Medication and staying home, or freedom and the risk of changing?

For a long time, relief won every argument.

It beat logic.

It beat fear.

It beat guilt.

It beat promises.

It even beat the knowledge that I was giving away pieces of my life.

Then the equation started changing.

I wanted to see places I had never seen.

I wanted to get on a plane without doing opioid math.

I wanted to travel because I wanted to travel, not because I had successfully calculated how to survive the trip.

And then there was Delta.

Delta changed the math too.

Because now it wasn’t only about me.

If I died, someone else paid.

If I disappeared into my addiction, someone else felt it.

If I failed to come home, someone else waited at the door.

That mattered.

Maybe more than I understood at the time.

For years, relief had been the highest number in the equation.

Then traveling entered the equation.

A regular life entered the equation.

Delta entered the equation.

And for the first time in years, relief lost.

Not because it stopped feeling good.

Not because I suddenly became stronger.

Because something else finally mattered more.

Traveling won.

A regular life won.

Delta won.

And once that happened, I couldn’t protect the story the same way anymore.

For the first time in years, the story stopped adding up.

## The Math

That is when I started understanding the math.

Not math like numbers on a page.

Human math.

The kind we do quietly.

The kind running in the background while we tell ourselves we are making decisions.

What am I getting?

What is it costing me?

What do I lose if I stop?

What do I lose if I don’t?

For a long time, I thought the cost of quitting was withdrawal.

That was the obvious cost.

Wake up sick.

Skin crawling.

Engine revving.

Mind racing.

Body screaming for relief.

That bill was easy to see because it arrived immediately.

Miss a dose, and the body starts collecting.

But there was another kind of math too.

Clinic math.

At that point, I had been clean from heroin for years.

In my mind, that mattered.

But because I still smoked pot, the clinic would not give me enough take-homes to move through the world like a normal person.

So my life had a schedule.

I had to show up three times a week.

They would give me an extra bottle for Sunday.

And even if I wanted to go on vacation, the most they were going to give me was seven doses.

Seven.

I was trying to go to Colombia for three weeks.

Twenty-one days.

So I started counting.

Seven days covered.

Fourteen days not covered.

That was the math.

And that was when the whole thing started feeling insane to me.

Because what had really changed?

I had changed who I was paying.

I had changed the building.

I had changed the paperwork.

I had changed the rules.

But I was still paying with my freedom.

That was the part that pissed me off.

My money was good enough to keep me working, coming back, and staying inside the system.

But if I wanted to go live my life?

If I wanted to leave the country for three weeks like a normal person?

Now suddenly the answer was no.

Or not enough.

Or come back sooner.

Or figure it out.

And I remember thinking,

This is the same kind of math I used to do with a drug dealer.

Different counter.

Different rules.

Same center.

My life still had to ask opioids for permission.

That was the bill.

But I had been counting the wrong costs.

Or maybe not the wrong costs.

The smallest ones.

Withdrawal was real.

The fear of it was real.

The relief was real.

But that was not the whole bill.

That was just the part I was willing to count.

The real cost was quieter.

It showed up in smaller ways.

In plans I could not make.

Trips I could not take freely.

Mornings that began with inventory instead of life.

A future that kept shrinking while I kept telling myself I was doing better.

That is the math I had avoided.

Because if I only counted withdrawal, the story could still win.

Of course I needed medication.

Of course I needed relief.

Of course I could not stop today.

Of course today was not the day.

But if I counted everything, the numbers changed.

Real change does not always begin when you admit something costs you.

Most of us already know that.

Real change begins when you stop undercounting the cost.

I knew opioids were costing me.

I just kept counting the costs that helped me keep using.

Money.

Time.

Clinic visits.

Medication.

Travel problems.

Those were real.

But they were manageable enough to explain.

I could build a story around them.

I could say,

“This is temporary.”

“I am doing better.”

“I am under a doctor’s care.”

“I am not out there like I used to be.”

And technically, I could make that story sound true.

That was the problem.

The story was not completely false.

It was incomplete.

It counted the costs I could survive.

It ignored the costs that would force me to change.

Because the real bill was bigger.

Freedom.

Spontaneity.

Self-respect.

The ability to get on a plane without doing opioid math.

The ability to wake up and think about my day before thinking about my dose.

The ability to make plans without asking medication for permission.

The ability to imagine a future that did not revolve around the same center.

The ability to be present for the people and animals who loved me.

The ability to become someone else before I ran out of time.

That was the bill.

And once I saw that bill clearly, the story started sounding different.

It did not disappear.

Stories do not always disappear the moment you see through them.

Sometimes they keep talking.

Sometimes they get louder.

Sometimes they sound almost offended that you stopped believing them.

Mine still tried.

It still said,

“At least you are working.”

“At least you are stable.”

“At least you are legal.”

“At least you are not as bad as before.”

But once I saw the math, “at least” stopped sounding like truth.

It started sounding like a delay tactic.

At least is not a future.

At least is not freedom.

At some point, survival is not enough.

At some point, you have to ask whether the thing helping you survive is also keeping you from living.

That was the question opioids eventually forced me to answer.

Not cleanly.

Not heroically.

More like a slow accounting.

A trip I could not take freely.

A clinic schedule I had to obey.

A bottle I had to protect.

A dose I had to plan around.

A person I knew who died.

A dog who needed me to come home.

A future that kept getting shorter.

A life that kept asking the same question:

Is what you are getting still worth what you are paying?

That question changed everything for me.

Because it did not let me hide behind whether something had value.

Some things have value and still cost too much.

Methadone had value.

For a lot of people, it saves lives.

It can bring structure back.

It can get people away from dealers, needles, fentanyl, chaos, and death.

That matters.

I am not interested in pretending a bridge is useless because I eventually needed to leave it.

But a bridge is supposed to help you cross something.

At some point, I had to ask myself whether I was crossing the bridge...

or building a house on it.

That was the math.

Not whether methadone had helped me.

It had.

The question was whether the life I had built around it was still the life I wanted.

And the answer was getting harder to avoid.

I wanted to travel.

I wanted to see places I had never seen.

I wanted to wake up and decide where to go without calculating whether my medication could come with me.

I wanted a regular life.

Not a perfect life.

Not some fake clean version of myself.

Just a life where every plan did not begin with opioids.

That sounds simple.

But for me, it was not.

Because for years, relief had beaten every argument.

It beat shame.

It beat fear.

It beat promises.

It beat logic.

It beat consequences.

It beat the version of me that wanted something better.

So the question was never just,

“Do I know this is bad?”

I knew.

The question was,

“Has anything become more important than the relief?”

For a long time, the answer was no.

Then slowly, it became yes.

Traveling mattered.

Freedom mattered.

Time mattered.

Delta mattered.

A regular life mattered.

The future started becoming more valuable than the relief.

That was the change.

Not motivation.

Not inspiration.

Not one magical morning where I suddenly became disciplined.

The math changed.

And once the math changed, the story got weaker.

That is the part I think applies far beyond addiction.

People do not usually change because the truth finally becomes obvious.

They change when the cost of denying the truth becomes higher than the cost of facing it.

That is the math.

And once I saw it in myself, I started seeing it everywhere.

A relationship hurts someone, but protects them from being alone.

A job drains someone, but gives them money, identity, and something to point to.

Anger damages everything, but makes someone feel powerful for a few minutes.

A belief stops feeling true, but leaving it might cost the tribe, the family, the structure, the people who told them who they were.

Different details.

Same operating system.

Something pays us.

Something costs us.

And as long as the payment feels bigger than the cost, we keep protecting the story.

That is why the question matters.

Not,

“Is this bad for me?”

Most of us already know when something is hurting us.

The better question is:

Is what I am getting still worth what I am paying?

That question does not shame you.

It does not flatter you.

It does not care how good your explanation sounds.

It asks for the trade.

Every decision is a trade.

Every pattern is a trade.

Every comfort is a trade.

Every belief is a trade.

Even the things that once saved us can become trades we have to reexamine later.

That is where reality comes in.

Your reason can be real.

Your pain can be real.

Your trauma can be real.

Your diagnosis can be real.

Your history can be real.

And the cost can still be real too.

That was hard for me to accept.

Because part of me wanted my reasons to cancel out the bill.

I wanted the explanation to be enough.

I wanted the fact that I had reasons to mean I did not have to change yet.

But reality does not work that way.

Reality does not argue with you.

It just keeps handing you the bill.

And eventually, if you are lucky, you stop arguing with the bill and start reading it.

That is when change becomes possible.

Not guaranteed.