What happens to your self-confidence as a professional when you learn your work is being used to deceive people?

That's a question I've had to wrestle with the answer to since I left Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, a name that's become darkly ironic to a lot of people who worked there.

For most of my career I avoided going in-house because I know the ability to say no to work that conflicts with my own values is much harder to protect as an employee. When you are a communicator you are an amplifier, and once you hand the authority to decide what gets amplified over to an employer, you don’t have that ability in the same way.

This was the primary reason I worked for myself for so many years. But after a year and a half of weathering the pandemic alone in a very quiet farmhouse in the hills of North Carolina, I broke down and finally made an exception.

That exception cost me so much more than I ever could have imagined.

I joined Ultra Safe Nuclear as their first ever senior communications hire. I was actually excited to spend my working hours telling stories about revolutionary technology, ambitious projects, and the kind and caring people throughout the company who were working on solving some very real problems.

I poured my experience and my craft and my heart and soul into telling that story, and in the process I helped build the company’s credibility along with that of its executives. I even laughed off the reddit comments making fun of the company’s name because, like so many other rank and file employees who knew a lot more than I did, I’d been convinced that what the executives said we were going to do was the honest truth, and that the results would speak for themselves and give meaning to our “silly” name.

But over time, as I built relationships throughout the company, I learned which claims were and were not considered honest by the most knowledgeable and experienced people there. And as I did, the gap between what I was hearing the executives say behind closed doors and what I was being told to publish publicly was also widening in ways I couldn’t ignore.

The decisions being made at the top and the stories I was hearing in the halls directly contradicted what we were saying publicly, in so many ways that it became alarming. The technology had serious problems that weren’t being disclosed to anyone outside the company, while public claims and timelines that would be affected by them went unchanged. Leaders were retaliating against the people who tried to raise issues, and when those people filed complaints, HR looked the other way.

I discovered enough while I was still there, and even more has come out since, to make it obvious that what I had been helping the company construct wasn’t a true story of a company building something for the greater good, but a facade, smoke and mirrors arranged neatly enough to lend some measure of credibility to a company being run by some of the most incompetent and dishonest people I’d ever met.

The thing I had spent over a decade trying to prevent had happened anyway. The people running Ultra Safe Nuclear had used me to peddle convincing lies I didn’t know were lies yet. The polish and credibility I put into my work had been used as a conduit to reach and build trust with local governments, federal agencies, investors, indigenous communities, people all over the world staring down an impending energy crisis and looking for a real solution.

They gave their time, their labor, and their trust to a company that looked credible in part because I helped them look credible.

When I had finally learned enough to piece together what was real versus what were exaggerations, fabrications, and outright lies to our faces by the executive team about every aspect of the business... I dropped my things off at the office on the first workday of 2024 and resigned, effective immediately. That experience did something to my confidence as a professional that is hard for me to fully explain, and even harder for me to recover from.

When the company collapsed, $40,000 of bonuses they’d promised me disappeared; even though I filed a claim with the bankruptcy court almost two years ago and included detailed accounting of all of the executives’ claims, written and verbal, a few weeks ago I received a notice that my claim was being thrown out for not having standing, because the bonuses were “discretionary,” evidence be damned.

Some of my colleagues are still fighting similar decisions; I let the deadline to object come and go without filing anything, not because I don’t think they owe it to me, mind you -- the company used the promise of those bonuses as a tool to keep us quiet and working, and they were promised to all of us, verbally and in writing, multiple times, by the CEO and several other executives, contingent on performance reviews that they simply decided not to conduct; by U.S. Department of Labor definitions, that should have made them non-discretionary, and their decision to simply not do them to avoid dealing with them is probably not legal, either.

But I also realized that trying to put up that fight was influencing what I was and wasn’t willing to say publicly about my own experience with the company, and that doesn’t sit right with me. I can make money in plenty of ways, but there’s only one way for me to address the damage this company has done to my credibility, even if I’m the only person who notices the damage and the only one who cares.

The people who were misled deserve to know the truth too, and being able to talk and write publicly about what actually happened at USNC may not result in that truth reaching all of those people, but at least it creates possibilities where silence never would.

I didn’t expect to learn a lesson like this so far into my career. I thought having integrity meant I would always recognize dishonesty when it showed up and could protect myself from being part of it. That isn’t true. Integrity doesn’t make you immune to being used.

Someone willing to lie to me carefully and consistently can use me without ever giving me enough of the truth for me to know any better, and there’s nothing I can do about that.

The only thing I actually control is what I do with the truth once I uncover it.

There’s a trend online right now that I think is really interesting. A lot of people are doing it, but especially younger people. Some play Minecraft or another game in the background. Some are driving, walking somewhere, cleaning their apartment, working out, or just sitting in front of a camera with nothing going on behind them at all. The visual, whatever it is, is secondary. It’s a backdrop for them to just talk: to share their thoughts and feelings, to tell their stories, to document their hobbies, experiences, and challenges, and to do it in a way that feels unvarnished, with a strangely old-school internet feel to it.

I’ve seen creators refer to the format as “yap content,” shorthand for talking about something off the cuff, often over footage of something else entirely, or over nothing at all. Part of what’s made the label stick is that people already talk about it as ChatGPT-proof: the whole appeal is that it’s built out of specific, lived, messy detail that a script or a language model couldn’t have produced, because it couldn’t have been there.

A lot of it is about how different things in life have affected them personally, and how they’ve grown because of it. People putting their thoughts down in a way that reminds me a lot of early blogging. It’s interesting that this is becoming so much more common now, of all times.

There’s all this AI-generated text out there now that’s eaten up a huge share of the written content space. Social media cannibalized that space before AI did, but has now been cannibalized itself. Before that, it was the relentless commercialization of written content: blogging as a business, affiliate marketing, “buy my course,” writing 800-word “SEO-driven content” for five bucks an article, the list goes on and on.

Someone who wants to write or create “for the hell of it,” to express themselves, is usually doing it not just to scream into the void, but to create the possibility of connecting with other like-minded people.

The blogosphere that existed for that purpose has basically been comatose for the last decade. Most of the people I followed back then don’t do it at all anymore. There’s so much noise in the written content space now that there’s barely any room left for someone who just wants to share something authentic.

It’s not like they can’t, but the ability to connect with people through it has dried up. The likelihood of something you write on your blog leading to a meaningful connection with another human being that can relate to you is lower than it’s ever been, so many people have stopped doing it entirely.

At the same time, audio and video podcasts, live streams, and talking head short-form videos have all exploded, and people love these formats because you can hear somebody actually think. The pauses, the tangents, the “wait, no, here’s what I actually mean” moments. Somebody stumbles over a word. Somebody laughs at their own joke before they finish telling it.

The imperfections are proof that real people made these things. Watching someone figure out what they think in real time is more interesting than a perfectly finished thought. In a world overrun by confidently polished, finished work and the expectations that creates, human imperfection is a welcome change of pace.

People have pretty much wholesale rejected AI-generated YouTube channels that try to intrude into these spaces because they want to enjoy something a real person made because they wanted to make it, not something an AI guessed the optimal shape for, engineered to maximize approval, attention, or clickthroughs.

Some of it is fine, purely informative. There are history and science channels out there that just churn out videos based on existing information from Wikipedia, with the most median, droning AI voices you’ve ever heard. Somebody’s probably put to sleep by that stuff, so maybe it serves a purpose for someone.

But the moment a lot of people realize it’s that kind of video, they close out of it immediately. I’m one of those people.

Especially when there’s an obvious AI-generated voice in the background. The second I notice that, I’m out. I no longer care enough about it to give it any more of my time or attention. It just isn’t interesting to me at all.

That is not because I “hate” AI. It’s more human-centric than that. It’s not anger toward AI. If you’re making things like that, I’m going to respond to your complete lack of care with my complete lack of care. I’m simply matching the energy going into the work. If you didn’t care enough to give it your time, why would you be so entitled as to think I should care enough to give it mine?

This is why the yapping reels are so interesting to me. People talking over gameplay footage, going into detail about their thoughts, their challenges, their everyday lives, memories of pets and friends… whatever’s going on with them or on their mind on that day.

A lot of what they’re doing reminds me of early blogging, early Twitter, early Tumblr. The things that don’t exist in those spaces anymore are the very reason many of us gave up on those spaces. The medium has changed many times, but what people want to talk about and why they want to talk about it hasn’t really changed all that much at all. The desire to connect with others by talking about the things we have in common hasn’t gone anywhere.

I think it’s interesting that this is what’s driving so much content on YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms right now, because it flies directly in the face of what the AI bros are trying to position as inevitable. They want you to think it’s important that you never have to sit down and make something again. As if being able to harvest attention is the point of any of it, the thing that motivates most of us. They can’t imagine why we wouldn’t want to be a part of this weird misunderstanding about creativity and human connection that they’re all having without us.

Compare that to the people making these reels, actually sharing their stories over throwaway gameplay footage. The video is just there so the message can exist in a format they can upload to a place where they still feel like it’s possible to find that human connection.

The substance is mostly if not fully in the audio. There’s a level of care, thoughtfulness, creativity, self-awareness, and articulation in that voiceover that’s just not present in any of the AI slop. I think that’s exactly why people care about it. When there is a real desire to connect with other people, it is evident in how we go about doing that.

Even if I never talk to these people one-on-one, I’m there for some small part of the shared human experience. You can’t get that from something that’s been run through a robot, because the robot hasn’t lived a life that earned it the credibility to share that experience.

A lot of the time, people making AI slop aren’t doing it out of insecurity. They’re trying to build a system, a pipeline, a set of prompts that spits out “content” on its own, slick enough to rack up views without them ever having to actually make anything. They don’t care what kind of damage they do to the rest of the ecosystem chasing after imaginary internet money. People can usually tell. The profit motive is palpable for one reason or another, and makes the content feel like exactly what it is: an attempt to extract something from you, not connect with you.

Not everyone doing this is trying to build a money churn. Some people are just scared. A guy on the Anthony Bourdain subreddit posted an obviously ChatGPT-generated review of A24’s Tony biopic a couple of days ago and got shredded for it in the comments. He tried to defend himself by assuring commenters that, no, these aren’t ChatGPT’s thoughts, they’re my thoughts, I just asked ChatGPT to tidy them up a little bit! He’d fed what he originally wrote to ChatGPT and had it “edit” it for him.

But that’s not what an editor is for. You don’t need an editor if your purpose is just to share your thoughts on something. You need an editor when you’re doing something professional, when you want to be polished. You don’t need one to talk about why you liked something.

But eventually, after enough flogging (which I did not participate in, but also did not stop despite being a moderator of the aforementioned subreddit), he edited his post to add his original, unedited text at the bottom, prefaced by something to the effect of fine, I get it, here’s the original.

I thought the guy had already been piled on enough, and since he’d taken the time to admit what he did and put his real thoughts there, I took the time to read them.

There wasn’t nearly as much in the way of quantity, but what was there was more interesting. I could understand his point of view just fine from what he wrote. It was messy the way thoughts gathered in real-time are messy, the way I allow my own to be messy when I don’t have to produce a polished deliverable for a client.

Not only was there nothing wrong with what he wrote, his words had a character that was completely absent in the slop ChatGPT churned out. There was no award to be won by producing something “better” for Reddit. That character didn’t deserve to be erased.

I told him:

Your ‘unedited’ version says it with more personality and in less words. The version ChatGPT shit out after chewing up your words felt pretty soulless by comparison. It did not in fact know better. Have some self-confidence in your ability to write a goddamn sentence man. We don’t need everything to have the soul fucked out of it by the robots. I’d like to read the actual thoughts of the people here, not what a language model assumed was a better version of those thoughts.

When you put your own thoughts out there to connect with people instead of to get rewarded for how well you picked out your words, the highest value of that writing is in the connections you’re enabling.

When you hand your words to a machine and assume letting it rewrite the whole thing will make it “better,” you might not ever realize you’re polishing out everything that would actually make someone want to connect with you. Not because “AI bad,” but because people don’t connect with things that lack genuine care. That includes things that had the feeling of care edited out of them just as much as things that never had it to begin with.

You’re not just cutting yourself off from other human beings by doing that. You’re cutting yourself off from the creative process itself, the one that would have taught you better if you’d stayed in it long enough.

People can tell when you care more about looking smart or skilled than about having a real connection with them. It feels like manipulation. And when people realize that, they won’t want anything to do with it, or with you.

The opposite of all that is sitting on YouTube right now with 87 views. Some kid digging in Minecraft for eleven minutes while talking about their parents splitting up, or a friendship that fell apart, or something they figured out about themselves last year. Somebody walking around their downtown with a phone, sharing what they see with their community. Someone’s hands putting a LEGO set together or doing a craft while they think out loud to strangers.

The gameplay is not “epic.” The walking stream is a shaky view from their phone’s camera. Anyone can buy the LEGO set and follow the instructions. People don’t show up and get invested just because the “content” is there.

They show up, over and over again, to connect with real human beings in a space that feels like it’s meant for real human beings.

Their ability to create a space where that can happen is exactly why the yappers are winning.

Someone who knows me very well in every other respect said this to me over dinner the other night when the conversation turned to work. I thought it was kind of funny, so I laughed, pointed at my chest, and said:

“You know what? Me neither.”

I was being coy, but I wasn’t kidding. “What I do” doesn’t distill down into something that can be blurted out in a split second. It doesn’t map neatly to any one familiar job title, definition, or area of expertise. It changes day to day. It adapts its shape to the work as the work is being done in real time.

My work is adaptive and relational. Sometimes I’m writing. Sometimes I’m editing. Sometimes I’m listening more than I’m speaking. Sometimes I’m helping someone work through an idea that’s been circling them for years without ever quite landing. The throughline isn’t a specific output. It’s the process of helping something take shape that couldn’t quite do so on its own.

I’ve been using the phrase personal producer to describe a lot of the work I’m doing lately. I’m not using it as a clever title, or because it fully explains anything. I’m just using it because it feels like it’s pointing in the right direction.

Like a music producer in the studio, I’m not there to create the work for someone else. I’m there to sit alongside them as they try things, discard things, hesitate, double back, and eventually realize a version of the work that feels like what they’re looking for.

I do whatever I can to help others create the right conditions for their best creative moments and best creative work to come into being.

That’s not something most people would “get” from a quick read of a business card. It doesn’t boil down to a list of services, a price sheet, or a job description. Much of its value is invisible while it’s happening.

What I get to do with my clients lives in the space between intention and expression. It lives in half-formed thoughts, unfinished sentences, and instincts that haven’t yet found language. It involves helping someone slow down enough to notice what they already know and haven’t yet articulated. It involves a thousand little details that need attention. And it involves an ever-changing list of combinations of these things.

Some work is compression-resistant.

So, when someone says they don’t understand what I do, I don’t take that as a criticism, as a failure of my own writing or communication skills, or even a warning signal that I’m explaining myself and my work poorly.

I have come to see it as a natural response to work that lives between many different categories, and to my way of looking at the world through the lens of all of the things that might help the people I want to work with the most.

Some kinds of work only make sense once they’ve been seen in motion, and I don’t need everyone to understand my work. I need the right people to understand it.

The people who want to engage in this kind of work don’t usually find their way to me because of a perfect summary of a service I provide. They recognize the value in my work because something they see me doing, or the way I talk about the work, aligns with something they want to bring into the world themselves. Understanding, in that sense, is less about definition and more about recognition.

My friend Rudi, who has gifted me with several phrases I’ve used to describe myself and my way of looking at the world over the years, introduced me to an old Irish proverb nearly a decade ago: Aithníonn ciaróg ciaróg eile — a beetle recognizes another beetle.

It came back to me while I was writing this, because how people tend to find someone like me and choose to work with them makes me think of the sentiment behind it, something akin to birds of a feather flock together, or like knows like.

I no longer feel a sense of urgency about making the work immediately legible to everyone. Not everything that matters needs to be quickly understood. Some things take time. Some things reveal themselves gradually through exposure, observation, and pattern rather than through explanation.

“Positioning” has its limits, too.

Doing work that’s hard to explain does have consequences and challenges.

It can be harder to introduce, harder to place, and harder to describe without reducing it to something smaller than it actually is. It doesn’t always survive first contact with a conversation about “what you do,” because the full shape of the work isn’t meant to be understood all at once.

Over time, I’ve learned that this isn’t just a communication problem. It’s a feature of how creative work unfolds in practice, especially in spaces that don’t have creative directors, org charts, or preassigned roles to lean on.

Every meaningful client relationship I’ve had begins with one specific thing. That thing might be a problem, a question, or a frustration, and it’s always immediately relevant. The meeting between their most pressing challenge and my most applicable skill set becomes the bridge that gets me across the chasm into their world. It isn’t their whole world, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s simply the entryway.

Once I’m inside, and once I’ve helped someone with the thing that brought them to me in the first place, trust forms. Context accumulates. The relationship deepens. Only then does the broader shape of the work become visible. Only then does it make sense to talk about the other ways I can help.

Trying to explain everything up front defies how trust works. It asks for comprehension before experience. It assumes someone needs a complete picture of my capabilities before they’ve seen me work at all.

That has never been how my work has actually unfolded.

People don’t come to me to understand me. They come because there’s something specific they want help with. That something matters to them, and I happen to be well positioned to work on it. The rest emerges later as a result of doing the work together.

Clarity doesn’t mean full disclosure at the beginning. It means precision at the point of entry.

Naming the job isn’t the same as describing the work.

There’s an opposite side to this coin.

Job titles are supposed to explain what someone does, yet they rarely do. They’re shortcuts rather than descriptions. They flatten complex, situational work into a phrase that fits on a business card or an org chart.

Anyone who’s held a title for more than a year knows this. The lived reality of the work always exceeds the label. The day-to-day involves judgment, adaptation, context, and decisions that never show up in the title itself.

In that sense, my situation isn’t unusual. I’ve simply refused to oversimplify.

Most people have a title that sounds clear and obscures the real work. I have work that’s real and clear to the people inside it, and it resists being cleanly named from the outside.

The mistake is assuming that a title should carry the full burden of explanation. It never does. It can only point, and it can only suggest.

“Personal producer” isn’t a complete description of my work. It’s a signpost. It’s a way in, not a map of the entire territory.

Once you accept that titles are inherently incomplete, the discomfort around not being immediately understood starts to ease. The goal shifts from perfect explanation to appropriate entry.

Not everyone needs to “pick a niche.”

For a long time, I’d been aware of the tension between what my work actually looked like and how I felt compelled to describe it. I kept assuming the solution was better framing, a cleaner title, or a tighter explanation that would make the shape of the work feel more settled, recognizable, and acceptable.

Over time, that effort went from annoying, to exhausting, to infuriating.

That didn’t come from the work itself being “wrong.” It came from how much energy I was spending trying to make the work resemble something it wasn’t. I was optimizing for legibility instead of honesty. I was trying to resolve my own discomfort with the language choices needed to get the point across as quickly as possible, and in the process I was completely ignoring what the work itself was trying to tell me.

I’d known for years that the more honest move was to stop insisting on a single, stable description. I’d also known why I avoided it. Titles offer reassurance, and they give other people something they can find easily, and buy easily. Letting go of that reassurance felt risky as someone who’s prided himself on complimenting my creative skills with a strict approach to processes and documentation and chasing “clarity.”

By the end of 2024, the balance tipped. I became more frustrated by the friction than I was afraid of the ambiguity, and I stopped trying to resolve the conflict. Or, more accurately, I just stopped treating it like something that needed to be resolved in the first place.

It wasn’t much of a reinvention, or a pivot. I simply let go of my long-held assumption that the work needed to be simplified in order to be legitimate.

What followed was exactly what I hoped for, but had been afraid wouldn’t come.

The work became easier to inhabit. Conversations became more natural. The people who engaged with me were the ones who were excited to tackle the work together as it actually unfolds rather than needing all of the answers fully discovered, scoped, and explained in advance before agreeing to start the work.

I don’t have a cleaner title now than I did before. What I have is less resistance to the uncertainty around the work, and much more trust that once the work begins, the work will be good.

The trust in myself it took to let go of those assumptions and embrace this way of looking at my own work… took quite a few years for me to build up. I was afraid to act on it for a long time, even though I suspected it would lead somewhere better.

So far, it has.

It’s July 21st again, which means it’s the anniversary of the day Lexicontent was officially live to the outside world.

I've been lucky to work on projects for and with some very cool people and companies over the last 11 years:

• The inventors of the machines that make a famous frozen drink pretty much everybody knows the name of

• A forensic engineering firm that is often involved in investigating major incidents like the Waco, TX fertilizer plant explosion

• A nonprofit working to eliminate HIV in a major U.S. city

• Several top-rated UX design agencies working with global brands

• A leadership conference featuring Malala Yousafzai, Ed Catmull, bestselling authors Malcom Gladwell and Seth Godin, and many other wonderful people.

• A planetary scientist who worked on several Mars rovers

• A space startup that used a pitch deck I wrote to raise $25M at Y Combinator Demo Day

• The founder of a non-profit organization that encourages people to write and share their stories by sending them to space and other extreme environments

• A cybersecurity firm protecting the infrastructure behind some of the most important systems we touch

• A data aggregation company powering hundreds of tools we use all the time

• A biotech company developing portable light therapy treatments for chronic skin conditions

…and many, many others.

It all still feels surreal sometimes, honestly. None of this came from chasing prestige or optimizing for money. It started with something much simpler:

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. Not because I loved drawing (even though I did), but because I just thought that’s how you told stories.

At 5, every story I loved came with pictures. So to me it made sense: If I wanted to tell stories, I’d better learn how to draw.

It took me a while to realize “writer” was a "job" too, and then I got involved in my school newspapers, and eventually things like Flash animation, and making my own websites, and blogging.

But what I was really chasing all along was the ability to help people see things I was excited about sharing with them. And now I get to do it all the time.

I work with some of the most fascinating people on the planet. Scientists, engineers, artists, performers, founders, creators, builders, helpers, doers. I get to help them tell their stories in ways that actually move people. It blows my mind sometimes honestly.

None of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t spent so many years telling stories in one form or another for fun. Just because I loved doing it.

Before it was a job, before anyone paid me for it, I was already putting in the hours. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what made all of this possible. Now I get to take that same curiosity and joy, and use it to help others tell their stories.

I put in the work before it was work, and somehow, that’s made the work feel more like play. Sometimes the work that sticks is the work that feels like play.

Kind of wild how far that can take you.

Happy 11th birthday, Lexicontent.

Kathy Rooks was kind and creative. She used virtually all of her free time to make things for others -- and it's because of the examples she set that I do that, too.

One of my earliest memories of making things with her was sitting at the kitchen table while she put together my first elementary school's newsletter by hand. Scissors, paste, the whole thing.

Because of her influence on me:

• At my second elementary school (which was just grades 3 through 5) I was the only student to write for the school newspaper all three years.

• In middle school, I worked on our yearbook, drew comics, and got all of my friends to draw them with me too.

• In high school, I became the first dedicated editor of our school paper in who knows how many years.

I just decided to do these things, and did them… all because my mom made that so normal for me.

She never made me feel weird about the things I loved or wanted to make or do. She encouraged me no matter how I wanted to spend my time as long as I was doing something creative with it. If I wanted to build something, she was right there helping me figure out how to make it happen. If I just wanted to be alone in my own little world to tell stories to myself, she let me.

How she treated me growing up was the foundation for everything I do now. I tell stories because of her. I make things because of her. And I feel great about it.

The world would be a much darker place without people like her enabling creativity, opening doors to new possibilities, setting examples of self-expression, and building community through making things.

So, my gratitude goes out to all the women out there who, like my mom, set an example of how to be creative and kind. I’m incredibly thankful for you and the wonderful people I often get to meet because of you.

Happy International Women’s Day.

I chuckled to myself incredulously, and felt my mouth curl into a smirk that I immediately got self-conscious about and straightened out.

What was this kid talking about?

It was my first time participating a hiring interview at USNC, and we’d just moved to the part of the interview where we ask the candidate if they have any questions for us.

This was the one he decided to lead with.

I had no idea how to respond, so I figured it was better to sit back and watch how the more experienced members of the team would deal with a situation like this.

"For legal reasons, I can neither confirm nor deny..."

No. You're kidding me. You're fucking kidding me.

Our logo is the Death Star exploding? There’s no way. They’re just goofing around.

Right?

I made it through the rest of the conversation without losing my composure, but I stayed dead silent for the remainder. The moment the call ended, I started grilling them.

Yes, allegedly, the logo was based on “the Death Star exploding,” or some version of that.

I’d been at the company for three months, and this was the first I’d ever heard of this. I wasn’t even really sure what they meant. After growing up a Star Wars-obsessed child, there’s no way I could look at our logo every day and miss a detail like that if it was really there. Surely.

A few hours later, I went home and frantically scrubbed through my copy of A New Hope. And during the briefing on Yavin IV, when they’re reviewing the projection, after the proton torpedo goes down the exhaust shaft… there it was.

The company’s logo. Or something enough like it to be unmistakable.

Over the next few days, I worked my way around the office, casually bringing it up. “Did you know our logo is the Death Star exploding?”

Turns out, pretty much everyone there at the time did — everyone but me, the guy whose job description included “managing the USNC brand.”

I had to have an explanation, and boy did I get one. One of the people responsible tried to reassure me it wasn’t actually the Death Star exploding, that it was just a big coincidence. They even wrote out a “brand story” documenting how the logo came into being, complete with variants that looked like they took inspiration from the notorious 2008 Pepsi rebrand document by Arnell everyone in the design world loves to rip on for how tremendously full of shit it is.

At one point, it was suggested that we could put that brand story on the website just to make sure anyone could easily verify that it definitely wasn’t the Death Star exploding.

Not only was that not going to happen, I said, but we were never going to speak about that “brand story” or acknowledge it to anyone, ever again, from then until we could figure out how to make a real rebrand happen.

The logo stayed. Nobody ever brought it up again, for the most part, and suggestions of doing a serious rebrand were quickly shot down. But I never forgot. For me, it became an indicator of something much more important.

This was the first crack in a facade I’d not previously had any particular reason to question. The first evidence I had that they could and would lie about something completely trivial. There was no need for it, no reason to do it, and still… they did.

Prior to USNC, I worked for myself to avoid being put in a position where I was expected to lie, as I’d come to expect of the agency world. My intention was to protect myself from being pressured into lying about big things.

But what insulted me the most about this situation was that they expected me to buy into their lie, and lie myself, about something so small.

A logo.

A fucking logo.

In an industry where people could smell bullshit a mile away, they were willing to lie to my face and everyone else’s about the most trivial thing. And I had to wonder: if they were so comfortable lying about something so obvious, what else were they willing to lie about?

The answer, I would learn, was everything.

I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. It was never some grand ambition, never a pursuit of freedom or wealth. It was survival — plain and simple. The least bad option in a system where working for others meant exploitation, and working for myself meant standing up for honesty, integrity, and the autonomy to say no to things I believed weren’t right.

The cruel irony of trying to build something ethical in America is that the very principles that supposedly form the foundation of good business — integrity, fairness, transparency — have become liabilities.

The worst people see them as openings, vulnerabilities to exploit for personal gain. They know that if you hold yourself to a standard, they can use that standard against you. And they do. Over and over again.

I’ve watched ruthless people succeed while the honest and kind ones burn out. I’ve seen how the system rewards those who manipulate and discard others, while the ones trying to build something real struggle just to keep going. The game is rigged, and trying to play it on principle feels like willingly stepping onto a battlefield where the enemy has all the weapons and no rules.

So, what’s left? What’s the other option, the way forward that doesn’t mean selling out or being endlessly ground down for daring to live with good intentions?

Leave.

Not just the industries I work in. Not just the toxic environments full of people who thrive on cruelty. Not just the American way of doing business.

Leave America entirely.

The idea isn’t some passing frustration. It’s not just a fantasy of escape. It’s the logical conclusion of years of seeing, time and again, that this system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly the way a system would if designed with the most abusive priorities in mind.

It sure wasn’t designed for people like me, or my parents, or my grandparents. It wasn’t built to support people who want to do things the kind way. And if the environment is hostile to kindness, then staying is just self-immolation.

But where to go? That’s the question I keep turning over. Have been, for years and years. About 15 years, last I counted.

Are there places where fairness isn’t seen as weakness? Are there places less suffocating, where I wouldn’t constantly feel like I have to watch my back, burn myself out, wait for the next person to take avantage of my optimism and hopefulness?

I don’t know. What I do know is that if the place where I live feels so exhausting, if surviving with integrity is such a constant uphill battle, then I owe it to myself to try to find something different. Looking for it where I know I won’t find it is just a waste of my life.

If America makes kindness this much work, then America probably isn’t the kind of place where I’ll ever feel at home.

It's harder for bad actors to get away with what once was very easy to hide. We're still in the early years of that massive shift in reality.

When a narcissist, sociopath, or other high-conflict manipulator gets unmasked and can’t manipulate people like they used to, they escalate.

Aggression becomes their only viable move. "Scorched earth" tactics become the go-to method of deterring anyone from fighting back, because they know they’re exposed and nothing else will work.

Their unmasking, whether through scandal, exposure of hypocrisy, or the sheer weight of their own contradictions, sends them into a tailspin. They do not engage in honest self-reflection or accountability. Instead, they react with rage, denial, and desperate attempts to reclaim the narrative.

They will attack critics, fabricate new justifications, and most importantly, discard their former supporters who have seen through them to find new enablers who are willing to buy into their revised version of events.

Malignant antisocial politicians do not have convictions in the way most people think is "normal." Their ideology is power, influence, and control.

They adopt the language of other ideologies, but they do not value them. Ideology to them is not an authentic expression of belief and conviction and even communication and connection, but rather, a tool for extracting loyalty, admiration, and compliance from others.

Once their deception is exposed, they do not change. They simply find new marks willing to buy their act.

If one mask stops working, they will put on another.

If one voter base abandons them, they will cultivate another.

If one party disowns them, they will infiltrate or hijack another.

When malignant political figures lose control over their narrative, they follow a strikingly predictable script. This pattern repeats so often that it might as well be a theatrical production, played out on the grand stage of public discourse.

Like a modern take on Shakespeare, the dialogue changes constantly to keep up with the times.

But the underlying plot… That never changes.

Act One: The Charismatic Savior

The politician presents themselves as the ultimate answer to the people's problems.

Their followers see them as special, the one who finally "gets it."

The manipulator alone sees the corruption, the broken systems, the enemies in the shadows.

They promise a return to greatness as an antidote for lesser politicians’ failures and weaknesses and lack of ambition.

Act Two: The Unraveling

Cracks in the mask start to show.

Their past statements contradict their present actions.

They fail to deliver on their promises in any lasting way.

Their own allies turn on them.

Their actions cause collateral damage to people and communities who were convinced they’d be getting help.

The people who once adored them start asking hard questions for which the manipulator has no answers.

Act Three: The Fury.

The manipulator's incompetence becomes undeniable.

The adoration they depended on wanes.

Unable to cope with the loss of their illusion, they lash out.

They accuse critics of betrayal.

They reframe themselves as the real victim, persecuted by conspiracies and shadowy forces.

They double down on their lies, hoping that sheer volume and repetition will erase the truth.

If necessary, they will burn down the institutions they once claimed they would protect, blaming those institutions every step of the way.

All in a desperate bid to make people depend upon them.

All in a desperate bid to hold onto power.

The only thing they have left.

The Finale: Reinvention, or Oblivion

Some political manipulators manage to reinvent themselves.

They attach themselves to a new ideology, a new movement, or a new set of enablers.

They repeat the cycle, playing the same role with a different cast, wearing different costumes, using different props.

Others fade into irrelevance.

They’re out of smoke. Their mirrors are too broken to piece back together.

If they lose all power, they retreat into self-pity, convinced that they were wronged by history rather than undone by their own actions.

Sunk Cost of Admission

The only lesson here is that political manipulators do not learn or change. They do not become better people once they are exposed, the way “normal” people would. They do not suddenly develop integrity after being caught. They will continue running the same con, over and over again, on anyone willing to fall for it.

The only way to break the cycle is to refuse to play the role they have cast for the public.

Do not be the hyped up follower who enables their wishful delusions.

Do not be the naive optimist who hopes they will become better for us.

And do not let them rewrite history to erase their failures or the harm they have caused.

Instead, see them for what they are: performers, playing the same script, hoping the audience will keep watching.

The only way to win is to walk out of the theater, regardless of the cost of admission.

And sometimes, no matter how much it was a part of your own story and identity, to burn down that theater with them still inside.

The “life” we’ve built on top of our world — “life” in the societal sense, not the alive sense — is something else. I don’t fit into our way of life too well. It feels like it’s on the Earth, not of the Earth.

I feel uncomfortably pinned between the two. I like the world: the air, the dirt, and the sea. But I hate “the world”: the killing, the excess, the supposed progress, the absolute bullshit we’re expected to eat up hook, line, and sinker.

“The world,” our version, demands more of me than the Earth ever would, and it threatens me with financial ruin, imprisonment, and bodily harm if I don’t acquiesce to those demands. The weight of that isn’t heavy enough to crush me, not yet anyway, but it’s enough to push me down into the dirt regularly, make me choke on the dust it kicks into my face. Have to show those human resources what they’re dealing with — wouldn’t want them getting too many bright ideas.

I know that my survivability makes me one of the lucky ones, even though the margin for error feels pretty slim most days.

I really hate what we’ve done with the place, as if there’s something in me that knows what it used to be like… what it could have been like. I hate the lies, the greed, the parasites who shred the planet for personal gain and then abuse and gaslight anyone who tries to have a healthy relationship with it.

People will tell you that hate isn’t constructive, and maybe they’re right because so far hating what we’ve done with the place hasn’t changed anything for me. But it’s kept the circumstances from changing me for the worse, I think.

At least I’m being honest. Does that count for something?

It still counts to me.

When you break, you lose a little bit of yourself, although you might not notice it blowing away like the dust cast off from the edges when a ceramic bowl shatters. It isn’t romantic. It isn’t poetry. It’s subtraction. What’s gone is gone, and no amount of glue will bring it back.

The dust settles, and nobody notices it’s missing from the breakpoints it scattered from. People will tell you to put yourself back together, but they won’t tell you how to fill the tiny little gaps that dust used to take up. They might not even notice, but you’ve got to live with all your pieces, and you notice when things don’t quite fit together the way they used to.

They’ll tell you survival is admirable and flaws are beautiful. Some of them say it because they hope it’s true when their next turn to get broken into a million pieces comes around. Others only tell you the cracks where you broke are beautiful so they can sell you a $19 kintsugi repair kit you can use to piece yourself back together.

The world doesn’t care if you’ve had enough. It doesn’t care about your cracks, your missing pieces, how many times you’ve broken or how much dust you’ve lost. The world just keeps going. It drags us forward in time, indifferent to our struggles.

Humanity got as far as it has by acknowledging that and collectively coming up with one new plan of attack after another to do more, together. But humanity only got as far as it has today because at some point, the most hurt and angry people figured out how to hold little pieces of the collective good hostage.

The suffering we accept is a part of everyday life isn’t necessary, and I think it’s unimaginative and cowardly to think otherwise. A bad idea, popularized by the worst people on the planet, however it is they came to be that way. Suffering makes us tired. It strips us of our time and energy and dignity and creativity, until there’s nothing left but the movement required to stay alive. It makes machines out of us: machines that convert that movement required to stay alive into a surplus of survivability for somebody else.

The word parasite is too kind to describe the people who keep that whole way of doing things humming along as-is. I think we need a new word, but I can’t think of anything good. We’ll just have to repurpose one of the words we already have that’s outlived its usefulness, or perhaps one that never lived up to its full potential.

I propose, “billionaire.”

We built machines that could fly us across oceans, machines that could split atoms, machines that could bring the stars into focus. We invented languages, philosophies, and fictional worlds out of nothing but imagination. We pulled ourselves out of caves, out of darkness, out of ignorance. We did all of that together.

And to what end did we do it? So we could design a way of life where the best we can do is let the short list of humans who take all the credit treat us like machines who exist just to fill the bottomless pits inside them, our own needs be damned? To say nothing of all the possibilities that will remain unexplored not because they’re impossible, but because they’re trapped inside people who cannot get a fucking break.

This is what our last few generations deserve to be remembered for, as a cautionary tale to some future civilization that has more of a taste for standing up to bullies, hucksters, and thieves than we apparently do. Our legacy will be the dust that scatters as we shatter one another over and over again, until the dust eclipses everything else we’ve achieved. I bet Pompeii was a beautiful place, filled with wonderful people and stories, but in a historical context it’s the ashes that fell on it which tell the story. Our story will be the fact that we proved we could do just about anything we set our minds to, and yet we chose this.

It’s no wonder I hate brutalism so much: It reminds me that some people would rather build something that lasts forever and would be recognizable even after the apocalypse, rather than something built for now that helps people now.

What could progress really look like if we actually stood up for ourselves, instead of letting the most insecure and unhappy humans bring our progress to a halt so far short of a world that’s better for everyone?

What could progress really look like if we stood up for ourselves instead of letting the people who take the most dictate who gets what? If a record of today survives, our shame will be that we failed to dream of a world that was as good for everyone as it was for the people who took all the credit every chance they got, and were never better people for being allowed to get away with it.

We dared to imagine machines that could help a few survive on the Moon, but not ways for everyone to thrive on Earth. We mapped the ocean depths and human genome, yet let dignity slip through our fingers. We turned suffering into an industry and called it progress.

And yet, despite it all, I find myself unable to let go of the idea that we could do better. That we could imagine a world built on empathy, dignity, and shared humanity. A world where progress isn’t measured by how much we can get, but by how much unhappiness and insecurity we can work together to resolve. It’s not that we lack the tools or the creativity; it’s that we’ve let parasites infect our societal nervous system.

The Earth beneath us remains steady, indifferent to our struggles. But we are not indifferent. We are not machines, and we are not dust, not yet anyway. If we can dream of flying, splitting atoms, and touching the stars, then surely we can come up with a better way to live.

And yet, the bitter truth remains: if we don’t get some fight back in us, we’ll be history’s next great cautionary tale of decline. We’ve normalized the disease of unchecked greed, allowed billionaires to metastasize into a class that hoards unimaginable wealth while the rest of us struggle to breathe in the dust of their violent, humanity-shattering excess.

We don’t need another gadget, another rocket, another monument to their egos. What we need is a societal immune response: a cure for the common billionaire. Not just a collective rejection of the parasitic tendencies that allow this infection of billionaires to spread, but active interference with anything and everything that allows them to carry on as they do without pushback.

We need to inoculate ourselves against the idea that their success and our suffering are both inevitable and necessary for human progress. The people most interested in this lie are at risk of becoming the very kind of parasites we need to develop a defense against in the first place.

If we can’t shake off our learned helplessness and muster up the courage to fight off the infection of the billionaire class that’s ravaging everything good in our society, then maybe a cautionary tale for some future civilization, buried in dust of our own making, is the next best thing we can hope to be.

What’s your major going to be? What career do you want? What's your passion? What do you want to be when you grow up?

Our culture loves stories about specialists: the violin prodigy, the tech genius, the youngest chess grand master, the gold medal athlete who started training at age five.

Specialists and their stories are neatly packaged up to inspire people who have been sold the notion that we're all born with some innate purpose far "greater" (see also: "more profitable" or "more useful to someone") than ourselves.

If you find yours, then you, too, can have a life that looks like all of the other ones around you! You, too, can feel "normal." You can feel like you belong.

The shadow assumption lurking behind that line of logic is, of course: "Everyone else with a life that looks like that already found their one thing. Why can't you?"

Why can’t you?

I tried. I really did.

I tagged myself with socially-compatible metadata for "what I do," based on the things that excited me, and I expended an ungodly amount of effort to make them useful to the rest of the world in the most practical, pragmatic, and valuable ways possible.

(Aspiring) Architect. Designer. Copywriter. Storyteller. Advisor. Senior Communications Specialist. (Their job title pick, not mine, and against my objection.)

They all felt like hats I wore more than a description of the person wearing them. Poorly fitted hats. Not even cool hats.

More like beanies with the little propellers on top, because I knew I was dumbing myself down to fit neatly into unimaginative, ineffective, and sometimes terminally stupid ways of doing things.

Was this somehow my fault? Was I was scattered? Indecisive? Afraid of commitment? Why couldn’t I find my "one thing" and just do it the way everyone else seemed to?

The four-star generalist

It took decades for me to realize that even though I was a failure as a specialist, I was also succeeding wildly at being a generalist.

I've been told many times that a generalist is a jack of all trades and master of none. But I’d argue that a good generalist is a master of one particularly rare skill: context.

Generalists aren’t tied to any one puzzle piece or any one machine; they’re looking at the lines in between the puzzle pieces and the gears, and how they fit into each other, and how different arrangements affect the larger whole.

Generalists understand how the pieces, and their placements, and their movements affect that larger whole, even if they don't know as much as the specialists do about how the pieces themselves are made or how they individually work.

Generalists see patterns in everything and relationships between everything; or maybe the ability to see them is what makes someone a generalist to begin with. Engineering looks like art, science looks like a story, and business, more often than not, looks like a clown show at the county fair.

Specialization offers stability in "normal" circumstances (although there are far fewer of those than there used to be), while generalists develop resilience, adaptability, and foresight in the disorder and chaos that arises from the absence of such “normal” circumstances in their lives.

When hell breaks loose, generalists break it back.

And it’s a good thing generalists have those traits, because holy hell are they going to need them. It turns out disorder and chaos are part of the everyday state of things, and if you hadn’t noticed yet, that’s probably thanks to a generalist.

Unfortunately for the generalist’s social standing, when things run smoother than they could have, when a situation is calmly stabilized before it became unrecoverable, or when you find a way to dig the tunnel before they flatten themselves against the picture of it on the wall, Wile E. Coyote-style, few people notice, and even fewer people appreciate how bad it could've been.

Nothing about being a generalist is glamorous. It’s just necessary. Nobody sees a generalist's skill set or the resilience that comes with it until they need the benefit of both, and that's a real tight turnaround for such a diverse skill set so the people who already have it get stuck cleaning up the mess.

The specialist still gets the spotlight for the end result, while the generalist just keeps on plugging away at the process. It's the group project dynamic all over again -- or rather, it's what that lesson was really about all along. I get it now.

Specialists are the stars of the show, standing center stage under the bright lights. They shine because their contributions are tied to a singular, show-stopping moment: a dazzling solo, a breathtaking feat, a perfectly executed finale, and beautifully designed product. It's easy to celebrate what happens in the spotlight because the outcome is polished, dramatic, and undeniable. Their role is built for visibility and measured in ovations, awards, five stars, and thumbs up.

But that spotlight comes with a price. Specialists build their confidence on the stability of their role, the safety of excelling in one thing, and the reassurance that the world values their skills.

When things go wrong, it can shatter that sense of invincibility that comes with the spotlight. Specialists suddenly confronted with failure or fragility have to grapple with fear and shame at the revelation that their safe and stable thing might not be as safe or stable as they believed it was.

Generalists, by comparison, are the unappreciated crew behind the scenes. Their work is not tied to a single dazzling moment, but to the messy ongoing process of ensuring the show goes on. The generalist’s moment to truly shine rarely comes, but when it does, it's usually when something is going catastrophically wrong. It is in these moments that generalists reveal just how indispensable they are.

Vulnerability in specialization

Their rare high-visibility triumphs can put specialists in a place of discomfort, causing them to feel exposed by the generalist’s ability to pivot, adapt, and thrive in a situation that feels, to them, like a failure and a risk to their own stability.

While generalists might feel empathy for the fear and shame specialists experience in situations like that, because generalists have always lived with the uncertainty specialists are just now confronting, it may not even occur to them that it’s a new or rare experience for some people.

The specialists quietly go back to their work, reluctant to endure their vulnerability any longer than they have to, and believing that avoiding it has no downside for them.

The generalists, for the most part, have long given up on begging for respect they know they will never get from a culture of performative perfection that will pretend not to know what they're talking about.

The divide usually doesn't get discussed because, well, we don't know what we don't know.

I don't begrudge specialists for this situation. After all, generalists love a good show, hate when things go poorly for others, and despise the spotlight because we know we don’t belong there. I know the status quo is not due to malice, but a lack of awareness brought about by prioritizing profitable “events” over everything, including empathy and understanding.

What I do resent is that our society only knows how to treat one like it's deserving of a "normal" life, even as things get less normal an alarming rate. The need for generalists to step in and do their thing has never been higher, but the opportunities for us to help never come about due to widespread cultural ignorance.

I’m not sure how to wrap this up, and I’m fine with that: Generalists are used to messy work that’s never quite finished. There is no neatly packaged finished product here.

There is only the hope that a few people will recognize this divide the next time they see it, and try to do something positive in their own way with that awareness.

I'm not holding my breath… not because I don't believe it can happen, but because I've got yet another mess to clean up while I wait. I’m going to need those deep breaths.

The word "should" was toxic for me for a very long time.

It seemed harmless enough, like it was trying to help me “be my best self” and “live up to my potential.” In reality, it was a thief of joy, stealing clarity, draining energy, and setting me up for endless second-guessing. It tricked me into believing there was one right way and countless wrong ways, and that it was very likely I was doing things one of the "wrong" ways.

One “should” that really got me good me in Lexicontent’s first year: "I should offer as many services as possible because I know how to do a lot of different things well (thanks, ADHD!) and offering more of them means I'll get more clients and sell more to some of them too, right?"

It made sense on the website. I did everything: writing, photography, podcast production, social media marketing, thought leadership articles, research, workshops... whatever clients needed. And I still think I did a really good job of delivering those things, when I sold them.

But the chaos of explaining, selling, and delivering such a variety of services left me exhausted. Some days, I sat in traffic for in-person work I barely wanted to do -- and that was time that I couldn't use to get any of the rest of my pile of work done, too. Much less actually get some rest for myself.

It wasn’t sustainable. I kept telling myself, “This is success, right? Staying busy, proving I could handle it all… Proving to myself that I’m actually good at all of these things I think I’m good at, by doing it for others?”

Deep down, I knew better. I wasn’t building a business... I was building a cage with the bars made out of the colorful little blocks in Google Calendar.

What finally turned things around was letting go of “should” and starting to ask, “What would I want if I were the client?”

If I was looking for someone to work with, would I choose someone juggling everything? Or someone sharp, focused, and excellent at one thing? The answer was obvious, I just had to think about it in terms of "would" instead of "should."

So, I made the scariest decision of my career... I opened up the services section of my website and deleted 90% of it. I stopped offering everything except for writing and content strategy, the work I loved and could deliver exceptionally well.

Everything got easier. Clients became more excited because I was more excited. I could explain what I did in one sentence. I created space for myself to breathe, think, and build something that felt like it really reflected how I look at the world.

Looking back, “should” was the only thing standing between me and this version of my business. It conned me into meeting every need, playing every role, and being everything to everyone. But “should” only knew what I could do. It didn't know who I wanted to be, and it did not care if I was unfulfilled and exhausted.

For a business rooted in creating or consulting, and for a fulfilling life as well, there’s no perfect path forward to be found in someone else’s playbook. The only way forward was to write my own. No one could tell me what I should do, but deep down, I already knew what I would do, once I stopped shoulding myself.

Shitposting: the act of posting low-effort, absurd, or intentionally nonsensical content online, often for humor or to provoke a reaction. While it appears to be about getting cheap laughs on the surface, shitposting often takes the form of subversive creativity, experiments in engagement and human psychology, and rebellion against overly polished digital norms.

Shitposting is useless. Frivilous. Just plain stupid.

And yet, for me, it’s been a digital playground that has taught me more than my own inner critic ever could about how to navigate the world, harness creativity, and ultimately build a career that revolves around making things. The seemingly random, absurd, silly, stupid things I’ve done over the years were unimportant noise to almost everyone, but to me they were important signals.

Shitposting is just a form of creative practice without the weight of expectation. For an instructive example of what I mean by this, I present to you some early adulthood Joseph Rooks Lore: my awakening as a writer, as it happened on MySpace.

Back then, chain letter-style notes were everywhere. Low-effort pre-BuzzFeed Q&A posts with a format along the lines of, "answer these 25 questions and share." Except… I didn’t share. Instead of participating in the trend, I would leave the body of the note out entirely (replacing it with random GIFs I had on my desktop at the time) and focus solely on rewriting the note titles into what is now known to the world as "clickbait."

See, back then everyone had little counters embedded at the bottom of every page on their profile, and I was curious to see if I could get more people to click on my post than the original creator. There was no grand plan, just the simple thrill of testing ideas and seeing results.

Looking back, this was my origin story as a copywriter. Every click was a lesson in human curiosity, in the power of words to compel action. It was low-stakes A/B testing a decade before I even knew what A/B testing was.

Years later, I launched several Tumblr projects — Dalrympled and Color Merlin among them — because I wanted to do something funny related to Dan Benjamin's 5by5 podcast network, which I listened to a lot of back then.

Dalrympled was a parody Tumblr dedicated to putting tech journalist Jim Dalrymple's beard on other people in the tech blogging world, while Color Merlin revolved around adding Merlin Mann’s coloring-book-like Twitter avatar to random coloring book pages.

I wanted to get cheap dumb laughs from my internet pals, sure, but I also wanted to learn how Google Analytics worked. I had it set up on all of these sites before letting them out into the world. I figured if I could generate enough traffic to get a little data, I could shitpost and teach myself a new skill at the same time.

Dalrympled got picked up by popular tech blogs like LoopInsight (Jim Dalrymple's blog) and MacSparky (by David Sparks, who had been "Dalrympled" himself). Color Merlin got reposted by Merlin himself and attracted quite a few submissions from his friends and fans. For a few days, I got plenty of traffic to play with. Every hit, every submission, every spike gave me something new to learn about audience behavior.

The content itself was “useless,” but the process of creating something that people wanted to look at, and using that as a lens through which to observe how attention flowed on the internet, was a revelation to me at the time.

These experiences taught me something I’ve carried with me into everything I've done since: shitposting something is better than not making anything. The act of creating, no matter how frivolous, builds momentum. It’s a way to build not just your creative muscle, but your creative reflex: the reaction that tells you when it's time to make something... and it's probably always time to make something.

MySpace clickbait and Tumblr parodies weren’t high art, but they got me out of my own head and into the experience of creating something for a human audience. They taught me to focus on the act of creation, instead of worrying about how something might be received. And they led to new interests, hobbies, curiosities, and discoveries that significantly outlasted my silly little projects.

Shitposting is a mirror. It reflects the absurdities and quirks of my own behavior, which is itself a form of human behavior. It’s one low-stakes way to engage with the world, to experiment with ideas in real time, and to understand what resonates and what doesn’t. In the process of making something ridiculous, you learn something serious... about making people laugh, about getting someone's attention, about connecting with others.

You see patterns in what people click, share, and comment on. You learn to tweak and iterate and watch how the results play out and adjust accordingly instead of trying to nail it on the first try. Shitposting is, in so many ways, a microcosm of the greater creative process: try something, see what happens, learn something from it, and incorporate that into the next dumb thing you make.

Shitposting is the highest form of antiperfection. It doesn’t try to impress. It isn’t analytical, or strategic, or wrapped in the pretense of deep meaning. It’s the purest rejection of a perfectionist reflex that is notorious for paralyzing creativity. Shitposting is nothing more and nothing less than an opportunity to make something because you felt like it. That’s as complicated as it needs to be.

Shitposting sneaks imperfection in through the back door when your inner critic isn't paying attention. It thrives on doing things that are unpolished, unfinished, impulsive, silly, and note that good and complete aren't on that list. It gives creators a way to circumvent the always-on pressure to make something “important” or “good.” When you strip away that pressure, you’re left with pure, unfiltered creating.

Creating is the one thing you must do to increase the odds that when you do finish something that matters to you, it's actually good. But not all creating needs to be about to the thing you want to be good.

For anyone struggling with creative inertia, I implore you: Build the muscle of creating through whatever means you have available to you, in whatever way gets you moving. It doesn’t have to be polished. Nobody needs it to be profound. It can be something "dumb" if that's what it takes.

What matters is that you’re making something. Every practice round, every every moment of human connection and engagement, every little thing you put out into the world (or don't) is a small step forward. Over time, the steps add up, the small steps become effortless, and the big steps seem a lot smaller than before.

I was once a deeply perfectionist person myself. I learned to write, to analyze, to connect, all through shitposting through my own frustrations about not getting anything good done.

By giving myself permission to do that, I learned that creating something imperfect is infinitely better than creating nothing at all. The world is a weird, fascinating place that is best understood through the act of putting something, anything, out there and seeing what it does to the world.

Many times, you will make something and it will go completely unnoticed. And that’s when you'll get to learn first-hand that even when you make something that does nothing to the world, it still does something to you. It still helps you grow. It still helps you understand something for the first time. It still helps you work through your feelings about expectations. It still helps you build some skill you can use later.

Even when nobody else notices what you create… creating it still creates you.

Those revenue, partnerships, and opportunities make what they pay me feel like a no-brainer, whether they're paying me a small amount for ongoing work or $10k for a top-to-bottom overhaul of something gigantic that already exists whole or in part to get it across the finish line or fully utilize whatever pile of content they already have.

(The real business model part is there to ensure I’m building relationships that last, and not sharing a bunch of junk advice by people who want attention but haven’t put in the real work to have experience worth sharing.)

But honestly, the biggest reason I love writing for other people — and will always come back to it in some form or another — is because it feeds my curiosity.

I get to talk to brilliant, interesting people who are building things I’d never dream of on my own. Then I turn those conversations into something useful for them.

I love writing, but I'm not happy with what I write for others unless it's practical and useful to them and their audience, too.

Writing for other people is also incredibly flexible. If I want to travel somewhere, create my own products, or dig into some new skill set (as I often do for months at a time, thanks ADHD), my writing work gives me the breathing room to do it without freaking out about paying the bills.

It’s hard to beat that kind of flexibility doing any other kind of work — or at least it is for me.

If you're starting over, or thinking about changing your career path, or just feeling kind of lost, my best unsolicited advice is reallyreallyreallyreally simple:

Focus on work that creates value for other people by connecting them with each other; that makes you want to show up every day; and that leaves room in your life to actually live your life.

Every time doubt started to creep in, I got deathly afraid that it was the universe’s way of flashing a big red “Wrong Way” sign at me. (Not that I have any reason to think the universe would be that helpful, given the number of mistakes it’s let me make without any warning.)

But after years of pushing through that feeling, I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think doubt and failure are directly correlated at all.

Doubt is just part of the process. “The Process.” WoooOOOooo. “Trust the process,” people say. But no one ever really says how. So let’s talk about that.

In my experience - and please, reply to this and tell me if yours is different - doubt is just the friction that comes from doing something new, pushing myself in a direction that doesn’t have a clear path made yet. Every big thing I’ve ever worked on has been full of moments where I doubted myself. Most of the small things, too.

Apparently most if not all people who are successful at anything feel this way too. They still keep going. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have any idea who they are.

There’s a pervasive belief that if you’re doubting yourself, it’s because you’re doing something wrong, as if you need to feel confident every step of the way or the thing you’re working on is ultimately doomed. But it turns out, you can have doubts while you’re doing the work and it doesn’t disqualify you from doing the work right. Thinking back over my very haphazardly self-made career as a writer, I’ve doubted myself almost every step of the way while doing work I am genuinely proud of now.

In other words, in everything I’ve ever done that got me to where I am now, doubt didn’t get the final say… I did.

Doing the work is the only proof you need that you’re trusting the process.

Turns out, trusting the process isn’t an abstract notion. Or at least it doesn’t have to be. It’s not about blind faith, or unshakable confidence, or feeling “zen” about every step you take. Trusting the process just means doing the work, even when you’re unsure, even when it feels like nothing is going to happen… even when nothing has happened for an uncomfortable amount of time.

I’ve wondered many, many times if the hours spent writing, planning, thinking, are worth the extreme discomfort that often comes with them. It’s easy for me to start questioning if I’m moving in the right direction or not when I haven’t finished the work, don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and can’t see the end result yet. But the real trust in the process, for me, is in doing. When I need proof that I trust the process, I look at the work I’m putting in. That’s the proof. Trust is built on action, not on talking myself into believing everything’s going to work out no matter what I do.

Some stuff won’t work out. Some stuff will. But I trust myself to examine what I did. I trust myself to figure out what parts did or didn’t work out and why, and to remember those things next time. I trust myself to look for the reason why a thing I made is good enough for now, and I trust myself to appreciate a thing not just for what I accomplished by making it, but also for the role it played in making me better.

With every thing I make, I learn enough to adjust, tweak, control some new aspect of that thing, and things more broadly. That means “the process” isn’t about just getting better, it’s about getting different, diverse, experienced, in-depth, curious. It’s about learning to approach things in ways you couldn’t have imagined before you approached it the first way. Finishing something, even if it’s messy, gives you the perspective to say, "I can do this differently next time." And honestly? That’s the only thing you can truly control.

After all of the years of self-doubt, and overwork, and burnout where I've still managed to get plenty done, it's my own process that has finally taught me that "the process” people talk about trusting so much is not a philosophy I failed to wrap my head around. Nor is it something I need to have unshakable confidence in. Nor is it something I really need to pay attention to at all.

It’s just me, making things, and noticing what parts of it I might be able to do in other ways, as I go or after the fact. It’s just me, tinkering. I’m good at tinkering. I can trust myself to do that. I bet you can too. So why don’tcha?

I frequently felt like I didn’t belong, and that any moment someone who didn’t believe in the things I believe in would go out of their way to let me know they felt the same way. That familiar voice in my head kept whispering that soon, they’d figure out I didn’t know enough to deserve to be there… even though I got there by acquiring the skill set to learn on the job even about the most technical things, and I was honest about what I did and didn’t know every step of the way.

But something unexpected happened. The more time I spent in those rooms, the more I started to see cracks not in myself, but in others. People I once thought were brilliant were often cornered by circumstances born of their own egotistical and presumptuous thinking. The more I learned, the more I understood I was surrounded by people who were confident to the point of blindness, never questioning themselves, and making the most basic mistakes because they simply assumed they had nothing important left to learn and the world would simply realize what they were working on was important, and reward them for it.

That’s when my whole perspective on imposter syndrome began to shift. I started to see that maybe my self-doubt, the thing I’d always seen as a weakness, was actually the thing that was keeping me sharp. It was keeping me grounded in a way those “brilliant” people never seemed to be. It was protecting me from becoming a version of myself that I couldn’t respect, and maybe couldn’t forgive either.

I used to think doubt meant I wasn’t good enough at something I hadn’t figured out yet… that I hadn’t earned my place at the table because I hadn’t put in enough work. But lately I’ve been grappling with the realization that the people who never doubted themselves were the ones I instinctively became more concerned about, and cautious around.

I used to think of imposter syndrome as something to shrug off, or shed, or beat into submission with sheer confidence and positive results… but lately, I’ve come to believe imposter syndrome isn’t something to be beaten at all. It’s something to be reframed. It has been a guide for me. It has kept me acutely, sometimes painfully, aware of what’s at stake. It has made sure I’m thinking about how my work impacts the people around me. It has been my ally in the battle for my own soul, and I am grateful for its service.

In the past, when I’ve walked into a room and felt out of place, as a college dropout, a guy who’s new to business, someone who’s still figuring out how to do things “right” after 5 or 10 or 15 years… I really envied the confidence of the people around me. But now, sometimes I see the hairline cracks forming that less honest, less concerned, less humble people haven’t yet noticed themselves. Their confidence blinds them to their own weaknesses. They make catastrophic mistakes because they don’t stop to question themselves… a skill that my so-called “imposter syndrome” has taught me to excel at.

It’s not that I’m smarter than them or that they’re any less capable than I am. Many of the people I learned these lessons from are brilliant in their own ways. But so many of them never really paused to reflect or to seek expert advice about the things they weren’t experienced in, and it shows.

So, doubting myself isn’t the liability I once thought it was. In fact, it’s the very thing that has kept me conscious of my need for honesty, humility, curiosity, and continued learning.

I no longer feel the need to “beat” imposter syndrome. I’ve started to get curious about it instead, whenever it crops up. Most of the time, it’s got nothing to do with a lack of ability. It’s fear. Fear of causing harm. Fear of taking unfairly. Fear of leaving people worse off than they would have been had I never shown up.

It’s taken me nearly fifteen years to realize that fear comes from a place of caring deeply about how I affect other people. If I didn’t care about others, I wouldn’t feel that doubt. So instead of running from it, I’m going to lean into it. Let it remind me that I’m deeply, deeply invested in getting it right and making some small slice of life better for someone no matter what I am doing. This is proof that I care, and after years of fighting with this part of me, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s not a powerful enemy, but a powerful ally.

The people who feel like imposters are often the ones who care the most about being real. They’re the ones who are deeply invested in doing things right, and doing right by others. So when I feel like I don’t belong, I remind myself that it’s not because I’m out of place. It’s because I care deeply about how I affect the world around me, and that’s a good thing. In a world where many people are content to coast through, let life happen to them, and let themselves happen to life… an “imposter syndrome” that helps me care more deeply and strive to do better is something I’m going to be proud of from now on.

"Avoid using the first person singular for a few years. Self pity or smart-assedness comes to easy when you are young."

These are the words the journalist Joe Bageant wrote to me just before his death. He was graciously replying to a letter I sent asking for his perspective on surviving as a writer in such an exhausting and discouraging world.

Following his advice made me more successful as an up-and-coming writer than I ever thought I’d be. But I’m not so young anymore. Self pity and smart-assedness aren’t the threat to my credibility that they would have been early on in my career.

And a lot of what I've been writing for others lately feels so very empty.

Since the pandemic, I’ve felt a lot like a mercenary in my approach to writing. Always doing it for others without hesitation, while neglecting damn near everything I could have made for myself and the people around me who I would have been excited to share with.

I guess now, in the gaping maw of disappointment and disillusionment that 2024 is already making itself out to be, maybe I finally have both something to say and the will to say it. And whether or not any of it is worth saying will no longer be the subject of an endless debate that only served to discourage me from connecting with others through the things I make.

"Writing is both an affliction and a calling that eventually must be dealt with. Or not," Joe warned. I guess this is how I'm dealing with it, Joe. By writing. I feel like I should have seen that coming.

If the words I put together have made your life better in some way, please consider subscribing to my little media experiment in the making. To start, I've gathered some old favorite writings and podcasts for anyone who hasn't encountered them before.

These are the things that have stood the test of time, which is to say, I still love them myself after all these years. I'll be following them up in short order with more than two dozen new posts, podcast episodes, and other media featurettes already in the works.

Financial support to make this experiment sustainable comes from people like you. This is completely optional, and I really want anyone reading this to know how important presence and engagement are in giving something like this a life of its own and staying power, too.

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Out of all the newsletters in your inbox, mine will be one of them.

The dream I had last night was the thing that finally shook it all out of me. I was on a plane that had to make a rough emergency landing in some random, backwater, quiet part of a country I'm not familiar with. Everyone was fine, but I felt very anxious just standing around waiting for everything to get worked out, so while we waited for help to come I went for a walk around a nearby town.

After a few twists and turns, I ran into Anthony Bourdain.

His influence on me as both a storyteller and a human being is something I talk a lot about, but that's a story for another time. For now, it's just important to know that his voice mattered, and still matters, to me. His perspective and the work that comes out of it have had a profound impact on the way I see the world, and myself.

In my dream, he was sitting alone, watching some people cook from a distance. He seemed to be waiting for someone.

I struck up a conversation with him. I asked him what led him to create the things he created, and why he was there by himself. We had what felt like a very full conversation about it, one that left me with the kind of feeling I imagine I'd have if I'd ever been able to talk to him in person in the rela world. But the only words from the dream I could still remember when I woke up were:

"I wanted to see the world."

It stuck out in my mind and while I was thinking about whether or not I was even going to write any of this, I did a Google search for the phrase to see what would come up – something I do a lot when I want to see if others have had the same thoughts as me.

This quote was the first result:

"I wanted to see the world — and I wanted the world to be just like the movies." – Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

To my knowledge, I never heard Anthony Bourdain say those words. I don't recall ever looking up any quotes by him, even though I've watched a lot of him over the years. Surely, I must have picked it up from somewhere – or else the world is a more magical place than the evidence suggests.

The dream itself was beautiful and detailed, and I feel like I noticed some things about the world and about myself in a way I’ve never been prompted to notice them before.

I've been sharing a lot more lately about how politically charged or selfishly motivated stories around us take far more than they give, discourage me, and make me feel bitter, cynical, and fed up with everything.

But those stories are small stories that fit into the smallest places, physically and mentally, compared to the world itself and all of the awe-inspiring things there are to say about it and the people who live in it.

In my dream, in the middle of nowhere, I noticed how small I am in the context of the world, and all of the serendipity happening in it every day. The fact that I'm able to stay alive in the midst of so much going on all the time, and to observe so many amazing things every single day I am alive, is what makes the world so awe-inspiring to me.

And feeling — in my dream — the way my own anxiety shrinks away in the presence of my awe, actually made me notice that my anxiety about the world also expands to fill whatever space I'm not actively filling with awe about the world, the people, the serendipity.

When I think about my life as a storyteller — rather than as someone with too many things to get done, or someone who's behind, or someone who's overwhelmed by negativity — I see a version of myself that I like and a life I can be very happy about living, even in the bad times.

I think it's pretty remarkable that my brain, currently an endpoint of millions of years of evolution and survival, managed to cobble together something so deeply meaningful to me while I was asleep.

It's a rare insight into myself, that made me notice that in the good times and the bad times, I'm always going to be wired exactly the same way — to absorb as much of the world around me as I can, and then tell stories about it that help people understand why it's all so beautiful.

I just want to see the world — and then I want to share it with everyone else.

As an only child saddled with the responsibility of going through three generations of “stuff” — mine, my parents’ and my grandparents’ — I don’t think I can ever fully articulate just how much that process changed my relationship to the objects in my life.

But, now that I’m in another period of my life where I’m downsizing quite a bit, and thinking a lot about what the stuff in my life means to me, I thought I would at least try.

After the funeral, I went back to school, packed my things, and moved out. As I walked out of my residence hall for the last time that academic year, I swore that I would get through everything that needed to be done before the end of the summer.

Come hell or high water, I knew I would return to Virginia Tech and start art school in the fall. I had just decided to change my major over spring break, and I was too determined and excited to let this derail my plans.

Then reality set in. When I got “home,” this is what I had waiting for me.

It was up to me, and me alone, to put my hands on every object in this four bedroom, three bathroom house, and draw my own conclusions about the sentimental and monetary value of each one. Do I keep this? Do I have space for it? Do I try to sell this? Do I throw it out?

How in the hell do I even throw out this much stuff?

Thankfully, I’d picked up a copy of “Getting Things Done” earlier that year, with the hopes of using it to become more productive at school, after listening to a podcast where Merlin Mann interviewed author David Allen. It's a good thing I lucked into that, because without a “GTD” approach to all of the stuff in the house, I don’t know how I ever would have gotten through it all, even working on it as many as twelve hours a day at times.

Over the course of the next three months, I made thousands of decisions about things like wooden spoons, tennis rackets, cars, bottles of used oil, hundreds of spices, and so on. A lot of it went out the door in an estate sale. Most of the rest went into a dumpster. Very few things in the house had any real value or meaning to me.

Even many of the things that did — my childhood bed frame (which had also been my mom’s), my dad’s dresser — couldn’t be kept. The house had to be empty when I left so it could be sold while I was at school, six hours away.

I was essentially homeless, with nowhere to go besides my dorm room at Virginia Tech. I had no idea where I’d end up after the year ended, but I knew that until then, just about everything I owned needed to fit into that room. I took some clothes, some personal belongings, family photos, cookbooks that belonged to my mom, and a few boxes of other miscellaneous things that belonged to my family and held some special meaning to me. That’s about it.

My life had been reduced to next to nothing. But after the experience of walking into a house full of objects, most of which had no value to me, and being forced to “process” them one at a time, that brought with it a new but very welcome feeling.

The heaviness of everything up to that point actually made my newfound lightness feel invigorating.

At different times in my life since then, it’s made sense for me to put down roots and try to make a space for myself that feels like “home,” but so far it’s never really worked out the way I hoped it would.

A few times since then, as I've sold things, thrown things out, packed things away, I've returned to this place of questioning the weight of all of the “stuff” in my life, and how the things I own do or don't represent the things that I care about.

About six months ago, I had to walk away from a business I’d poured myself into for three years, a home in the city I thought I’d live in for the rest of my life, and a relationship that had left me feeling exhausted, depressed, and completely broken.

But before I could put that chapter of my life behind me, I once again had to touch each and every object that had been accumulated over the last several years, and make a decision about each and every one.

Thankfully, this time around I had help from a friend with all of the physical labor of moving, selling, or donating all of this "stuff," but the mental and emotional heavy lifting was my responsibility alone.

Parkinson’s Law famously stated that “work expands to fill the time available for its completion,” and I think that with a few edits, it’s an accurate statement about the tendency of stuff to take up my space and my time, too:

I moved to Norfolk, Virginia with about four truckloads of “stuff” that I thought I might want or need as I started my life over, but right away, I felt the weight of even the few things that I kept. After several passes at the things that had come with me, I was able to reduce all of it from fifteen or twenty boxes, to just a handful.

Most of those will go into storage somewhere safe until it makes sense for me to try to put down some roots again. Until such a time comes, I am down to 100 items or less.

After having a studio space to work out of for the last three years, I thought it might be difficult to not have that, but I found right away that a smaller space didn't bother me at all. Smallness was still like second-nature, ever after all of those years of accumulating things to make a home.

Eventually, I started to play with the space: I marked off and measured the square footage of the space I actually use over the course of a day in the house I've been living in, and I challenged myself to reduce my footprint as much as possible.

Right now, including my clothes, writing and drawing supplies, computer, phone, typewriter, food, some essential cooking implements, and a few other things, I am only taking up a couple hundred square feet. There's plenty more space available to me, but I have tried to make the space I use as compact as possible. For example, I currently only use about 49 square feet of my bedroom, which is approximately a fourth of the total area. About 90% of the time I spend at home fits into that amount of space just fine.

Most of my life revolves around making things, not having things: writing, typing, drawing, photographing, conversing. It makes a lot of sense for me to surround myself with just the things that I need to pursue those interests.

If the things in my life revolve around those interests, then it will be easier for my life to revolve around those interests, and the easier it will be for me to go wherever those interests lead me.

When it suddenly becomes dead simple to get more of something that used to be scarce, my natural tendency is to accumulate more of it than what’s really good for me. It feels safe to have more of what I used to have less of.

The network effect puts a sudden abundance of “friendship” at my fingertips. Unchecked, I collect more “friends” as time goes on without thinking about what I’d like those friendships to look like. I never have to lose access to anyone I know. It’s easy to avoid the discomfort that comes with explicitly admitting that a person is no longer a priority in my life.

I have strong feelings about what friendship is to me, and most of those connections don’t feel like friendship to me at all. Having access to a news feed doesn’t even mean I know someone the way they are now or the way I did before. It definitely doesn’t mean I care about them the way a friend should.

My Facebook feed is filled with posts from people I’m not motivated to talk to. We’re not really friends in the way that I define “friend.” They’re not saying things that matter to me. It’s unlikely that I’ll ever see or talk to most of them again in any personal context.

Scrolling past irrelevant posts to find the one from someone I do care about was a constant drip of lost time, and a constant distraction from the people I go out of my way to care about.

Should I maintain those connections and participate in a lie, a known time-suck and a distraction from the people I really do care about? When I say it that way, the right choice for me is obvious.

At one point I had almost a thousand “friends.” Now I have just above 200. Of the 800 people I disconnected from my network, only one noticed. Nothing meaningful in my life changed after those 800 people were disconnected. That says enough about the quality of the relationships I’ve had with them.

I’m still not being completely honest with myself, and I don’t believe I’m still a priority to all of the people I’m still “Facebook friends” with either.

As a means of transmitting ideas, the network is as valid as any other communication tool. It’s not dumbing down our interactions. It’s not making relationships impersonal.

Technology is not making people lazy. We are making us lazy.

Our interactions become dumb and our relationships become impersonal when we conflate being connected by technology with being a friend.

When we share something that makes a friend think, encourage them, show interest in what they’re doing, or participate in a project they’re starting, from one mile away or one hundred, our interactions are brilliant and our relationships are personal.

Technology isn’t one object with one meaning. In the life of an individual, it’s thousands of options with unlimited potential uses. Individuals give meaning to technology by using it to do what they want to do.

New technology has never forced laziness upon us. We’ve only made it an excuse for our own bad behavior. Technology has only ever done the things we’ve told it to do.