Ted Gioia recently published a (typically) excellent set of predictions about AI.

They’re a mix of grim and hopeful. The grim: Bot mafias, the microwave-foodification of culture, financial chaos. The hopeful: inevitable pushback, a return to physical media, effective educational methods that hail from way before the internet.

He ends his article by saying that maybe we should be grateful to the tech elites, because their AI blundering has unwittingly reminded us what really matters.

And that crystallized something that’s been tickling my brain for a while now: I have a lot to say thank you about to the absolute pricks who are in charge of the world right now.

Thank you, you human garbage you.

I remember a while back I heard on a podcast that Vladimir Putin had done more to promote solar power in Europe than every NGO and sane government combined.

His method?

Cutting off the supply of natural gas to European countries with winter on the way.

Putin obviously wasn’t trying to encourage people to turn to solar power. He was trying to be eeeeevil. Because he is evil. It’s kind of his thing.

But the unintended effect of his cruel behaviour is that Europeans, facing untenable costs to keep their homes heated during the winter, bought and installed solar panels in unheard-of amounts.

This kind of thing is happening everywhere.

Donald Trump is creating global economic cooperation and unity that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

His goal is asserting total control over the world economy so he can strip it for parts in ways that will further enrich him and his family. But the accidental outcome is a unified front against the orange-tinted moronic menace, which may lead to a much more sustainable and diversified global economy, with the U.S. no longer at its centre.

Big Tech, meanwhile, is doing everything it can to force feed us AI until we are all mindless, powerless automatons.

Their attempt might (if Gioia’s predictions come true) accidentally lead to a New Romantic age or a second Renaissance, in which people finally abandon their so-called “smart” devices in favour of printed words, local get-togethers, and a return to actual community.

And Netanyahu and Israel are reminding the world of the unbearable horrors of the genocide, and what Primo Levi meant when he wrote “never again.”

They’re doing it by perpetrating at 21st-century genocide against innocent Palestinians, but the effects speak for themselves: fewer and fewer sane people can pretend Israel is anything other than a rabidly genocidal apartheid state, and most people are refusing to allow it to continue to commit its atrocities with impunity.

The worst of the worst might lead to the bettering of the rest.

I sit in judgment of these shitheads not because I am particularly good or moral – I’m not. I’m selfish and lazy most of the time, and despite seeing the horrors of this moment, I don’t do all I could to fight back.

I judge them because they are no longer even pretending to be anything other than venal, self-interested monsters with hearts full of hate.

And that’s why I am sincerely grateful for these absolute trash piles.

Mark Zuckerberg. Elon Musk. Peter fucking Thiel. Jeff Bezos.

All these men are so nakedly awful and so openly trying to bring about the end of human thriving that their actions may end up causing us to wake up from our tech-induced opium dreams and fight back.

Thank god they’re so inhumanly blind to how wrong and bad they are. It might cause a revolution against them and their dystopian technocracy dreams. About fucking time.

Trump. Netanyahu. Putin. Milei. Erdoğan.

These men are openly grasping for power and personal enrichment at the expense of their own citizens.

They are willing and eager to do anything at all to improve their own lot, even (or especially) if it means ruining the lives and livelihoods of those they rule over.

This is not sustainable forever.

It can get you a long way. But at some point, it leads to people waking up and fighting back.

That’s a funny way of expressing gratitude.

I want to thank all of these men (yes, of course they’re all men. Sigh. The terrors of boy masculinity will be a post for another day) for being such utter fucking shitbags, and thus exposing the horrors of our modern world.

But I don’t want to do it by sending a gift basket or a nice card.

I want to thank them in a way they’ll notice.

I want to thank them by tearing down the dystopian hellscapes they’ve built and replacing them with a new model of kindness-led human thriving.

I want to thank them by showing them what the world can be when people like them are deposed, destroyed, stripped of their wealth and fame and power by virtue of not being needed anymore.

I want all of us to thank them by living the alternative, healthy and happy lives that they have tried to steal from us.

If that means that we need to plow through all the people who currently support them and agree with them, then that’s what we should do.

If that means we need to break the power structures that have kept us all passive and helpless for far too long, let’s do that.

If we need to raise money to pay the lawyers that will commit all these awful men to prison sentences for life so that they can pay for their infinitely unforgivable crimes, let’s start planning the bake sale right now.

I look forward to them acknowledging our gratitude with confused expressions as they are locked inside prison cells from which they will never be released.

I hope we will all look back with true gratitude on this bleak moment when it seems like hope is lost, and say thank you to the antagonists that woke us all up to our true heroic potential.

This song is called “Here We Go Again.” I wrote it this week.

I’ve been focused on the impacts of AI on the economy (allegedly productively disrupting industries, but mainly just putting the stock market at grave risk of collapse) and on human thriving (ruining the minds and lives of children and adults alike, undermining objective truth).

My concerns are based on an assumption that big tech is trying to force AI into every corner of our lives whether we want it or not in order to maximize their profits and control everything.

There are some problems with that theory, though, the main one being: AI is not profitable.

Seriously. It loses unfathomable amounts of money every day; the main companies associated with it – Anthropic and Open AI – are spending $10-14 for every dollar they earn, with no realistic path to ever doing anything other than burning cash forever.

(If you want to see a running tracker, check out the glorious website “Is AI Profitable?” Spoiler: it is not.)

But a couple of conversations I’ve had in the last week have made me wonder if the real goals of AI have little to do with business profit and are actually about something infinitely more sinister.

Imagine a boot stamping on a human face…

I’m travelling right now, and happened to have two separate conversations with people who work in the defense industry in Turkey.

What they told me made me rethink the real intent and value of AI technology.

Both of the people I talked to use AI in their work. One helps to import defense technology into the country and the other runs a software startup.

In different ways, each of them explained that the point of AI isn’t improving business productivity or ushering in a golden age of shared knowledge (which is obvious since AI fails miserably at almost all productivity-related tasks and is actively undermining understanding and truth).

Instead, they say, the goal is to create a total surveillance state, one in which the government gains complete awareness and complete control over everything that everyone does.

And there might be robots.

While I am skeptical about AI and use it as sparingly as I can, my Turkish conversation partners use it constantly.

In general, I’ve seen much more obvious AI uptake throughout my time in this country.

AI slop has invaded advertisements on billboards, in shops, on television. People are using it in their daily online life, sharing AI-generated images, watching AI-generated YouTube shows, and treating it, from what I can see, as an uncritical good.

One of the people I spoke to believes that the next step, which is already underway, is for everyone to start buying humanoid robots who will live in their homes and help them with daily tasks, all powered by the same AI under the hood.

When I asked him why all this is happening, he was very clear: so that the government can gain complete knowledge of everything each citizen does and thinks.

He brought up the example of China, where state-owned technology companies have created super apps that citizens must use to do pretty much anything, from shopping to banking to hailing a cab to interacting with their government.

Just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.

Imagine a government run by an authoritarian regime that wants to do whatever it feels like with no consequences and no ability for the public to fight back (hard to conjure up, I know. I’ll wait.)

Now, give that government the ability to track not just the movements but the thoughts, questions, and interests of every individual citizen.

And rather than needing a massive staff of watchers who can interpret that data, the tracking technology itself can share trends, tell you where pockets of resistance seem to be brewing, and even potentially automatically activate a robot army that already lives in people’s houses to “restrain” them before they do something you don’t like.

Pretty attractive concept, no? And at first, the tech elites who helped build this infrastructure would be exempt from its harms – they’d get to live like royalty, in control of the digital leashes and whips that keep the plebs down.

Until such time as they have a belief or desire which contradicts the political leader’s will. By then, the robots will be pretty easy to use.

And no one will be left to stand up against that leader. Anyone who does, no matter how powerful they may have been before, is irrelevant in the face of the total control wielded by those in charge.

It sounds far fetched. But what if it’s close fetched?

When he started talking about robots, I was like “yeah, I don’t think everyone in the world is going to lose their collective minds.”

There’s no way the vast majority of the population would let invasive, intrusive technology into their most private spheres where companies and governments could use it against them at any time.

We would never give up our privacy and autonomy like that.

Unless it was a smartphone. I guess then we’d probably… oh god.

The reality is, we’re already very close to this apocalyptic vision. We’ve ceded most of our right to control our information and retain our privacy.

I keep thinking, lately, about one of the Israeli Defense Force’s many methods of murdering people.

They call the person they’re going to kill. They tell him “you can die with your family or by yourself. Choose quickly.”

He runs outside, or gets into his car and tries to drive away, and then a drone blows him up.

It is one of the most nightmarish scenarios I can imagine. Those moments between receiving the call that says your life is over because an evil government has decided it doesn’t want you around anymore.

The fruitless attempt to flee. Doing all you can to out distance between yourself and those you love so that at least you won’t be killing them as well.

And then oblivion.

This is all made possible by advances in technology. Thanks to the target’s use of cell phones and the Internet, the IDF can know with uncanny accuracy where he is, when he’s likely to be there, and when his family is with him.

And they use that knowledge to serve their ends. Those ends involve ending anyone they see as inconvenient to their genocidal cause.

Sooner or later, the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.

This is obviously an unremittingly bleak vision of the future. But it is rooted in the present.

It helps me make sense of why a technology that is losing trillions of dollars and has no realistic path to profitability keeps not crashing and burning.

Of course a technology will be protected if it meets the interests of governments (a complete, and completely automated, surveillance state) and the interests of business (user data so granular and intrusive that advertisers will have no choice but to pay for it).

I am also reminded of the pilot episode of the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica.

It takes place in a society that has created hyper intelligent robots that rose up and tried to destroy humanity.

The war ended years ago, and the robots have seemingly disappeared. To fight back against the robot threat, humans built increasingly advanced warships that were networked together to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

One ship, the Galactica, refused to be connected to the network. The pilot episode takes place the day the ship, now decades out of service, is to be decommissioned.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say: the decommissioning is premature.

The robots, now indistinguishable from humans, have been plotting their revenge.

They attack without warning. All the networked military equipment, being connected to the robot brain, is destroyed almost insanely.

Only the outdated and old-fashioned tech that has refused to be connected to the grid survives, and with it, humanity survives and manages, against all odds, to fight back.

So say we all.

It can seem impossible to fight the tide of technological interconnectedness. As I pointed out recently in this newsletter, you’re reading this on a device and I’m writing it on one.

But if we hold true to the idea that humanity itself is the thing worth preserving and protecting, and that this technology is, in fact, an active and existential threat, then the need to fight back at least becomes clearer.

I am no Admiral Adama, and unfortunately very few of us are. But I see the wisdom in refusing, as much as possible, to give up our freedom, privacy, safety, and maybe even our lives in exchange for access to digital content.

If the goal is to make us all powerless, surveilled targets who can be neutralized at any time, I think it’s time to start thinking about other ways to live.

Connecting in person, no devices allowed. Reading physical books and contemplating their wisdom. Drawing with a pencil on paper. Dancing, stretching, moving together. Sensing the air, watching the trees, listening to the wind.

These are now radical acts. They are as much a refusal of the panopticon of technology as they are an affirmation of the preciousness of human consciousness and the blessing of being alive.

I hope I’m wrong about what’s coming. But if you think I might be even a little bit right, that should be cause for a true reevaluation of how we’re living now.

Fuck these machines and the unaccountable power-hungry assholes who are deploying them. Here’s to living fully and being free instead. So say we all.

Here We Go Again

Here we go again.
Here we go again. 
We don’t know just when

This will end.
This will end.
This will end.
This will end. 

Here we go again.
Here we go again.
Here we go. Here we go. 
Here we go.
We don’t know just when

This will end. 
This will end.
This will end.
This will end. 

Sometimes it’s all right.
Sometimes it’s all right. 
In the middle of the night. 
Sometimes it’s all right.

When will this end?
When will this end? 
When will this end? 
When will this end? 

Here we go again. 
Here we go again.
Here we go again.
Here we go again. 

I think I am, at some level, bad at vacation.

I’ve been off work for a week now. In that time, I’ve swam in the Black Sea and the Aegean. I’ve driven through stunning mountain ranges, eaten amazing meals above clay-tiled villages, seen old friends and made new ones.

All wonderful. But instead of surrendering to the pleasure and awe of it all, I have spent a surprising amount of my time away overthinking my value as a person and feeling miserable.

This is what happens every time I take an extended vacation, by the way. In the interest of making it worthwhile, I’m going to think about why.

Turning off the noise machine of work.

One thing about time off: you tend to stop stressing about the usual stuff.

There’s probably a ton going on at my job right now, but I’m genuinely unaware. Once upon a time I’d check in and scan my email now and then. Not these days.

Removing the daily routine of work is a large part of the point of vacation: you unplug so that you can recharge your batteries.

But an unintended side effect is that you no longer have the constant noise of daily life to drown out whatever else might be going on in your mind and body.

At which point you are left to find out what’s going on in there when you aren’t thinking about meetings and deliverables.

Fishing for self-hate.

The job I get paid for isn’t my focus right now, but I have other jobs which are more important: husband and father.

Vacation is a time (if you’re me) to notice how I am at those jobs.

And sometimes I feel like the answer is “not as good as I could be.”

Yesterday, for instance: my 12-year-old son asked for a fishing rod on this trip (he went fishing three times last week with his uncle, at night, in a boat, on the sea).

We bought it for him. Yesterday, arriving in Bodrum, he wanted to try it out. At which point the reality that I have no idea whatsoever how to set up and use a fishing rod became painfully clear to us both.

I sat there in the morning sun on the beach, my legs tangled in seemingly infinite nests of fishing line, sweating and swearing. My poor son just wanted to get a line in the water.

I was barely even conscious of where I was or who I was with. My entire awareness had narrowed down to a burning point of self-hatred: what kind of useless idiot can’t use a basic fishing rod that’s already got the line strung?

How did this happen? What’s wrong with me?

Eventually, after a good (bad) half hour of wrestling, I had sheared off the rat’s nest on a rock, restrung things, and the rod was functional.

My son, to his immense credit, accepted my apologies for being insane and started fishing.

For my part, I was left drained and miserable, and wondering whether I will ever escape from this cycle of activation followed by self-castigation.

Reflections on a swimming platform.

It wasn’t just the recalcitrant fishing rod, of course.

I’ve spent a lot of my time in Türkiye, while working and vacationing, contemplating how to be the best version of myself.

I’ve read some thought-provoking books. I’ve written some good journal entries.

I’ve looked at myself and said (not for the first time, by any means), “this is how and who I want to be.”

Which is nice. It’s a great feeling to have the time and space to think at a higher level than the daily grind, and make some decisions about how one wishes to conduct oneself.

The trouble comes, for me at least, when you get tangled up in the lines of idealism, the need for action, and immediate reality.

Yesterday evening, I swam out to a platform in the sea and sat there for a while to have a little conference with myself.

I noticed that one thing I’ve fallen prey to again is a desire to see myself as having “arrived” at some better state.

I seek evidence that all the self-improving plans I’ve arrived at are working as intended, and therefore I must be fixed now!

Then something goes wrong. A fishing rod is more complicated than expected, for instance. And the whole edifice collapses.

The perfectionist swan dive.

I also reflected that I am still seeing things in black and white terms.

When I was feeling confident that I had sorted out the right way to live (there’s a “right” way?) and I was now living it, the story I told myself was that there would be no more problems.

That’s what I’ve been seeking, in my childlike way, this whole time: the perfect solution to life, one that will remove all the pain of not knowing what to do or how to do it.

Then something punctures my certainty. I do something wrong, or I don’t follow the new approach I’ve decided will fix everything.

Instead of receiving that little failure as new information – oh, I guess in that way I haven’t really internalized my conclusions yet – I receive it as proof that I was a deluded fool the whole time.

From my newly acquired perch at the top of the world, where I could comfortably survey my old, naive life with a smirk, I fall a thousand miles and break my back on the rocks.

This is what perfectionism does. It’s a child’s view of the world, in which if you act “right,” you are incontrovertibly excellent, and as soon as you act “wrong” (i.e. don’t do things perfectly) you have fallen from grace and are irredeemable.

Am I good?

The value judgments attached to that perfectionist streak are insidious.

If I act in accordance with what I imagine to be perfect, I am a good person and everything will be fine.

The moment I deviate, I prove that I am not good. I am not even okay. I am worthless.

This is, from any reasonable perspective, insane.

Perfection doesn’t exist. There is no one right way to live. All of us contain multitudes: we are capable of wondrous, loving things and ugly, cruel things, and we do our best each day to be kind.

But there’s a program running deep in my systems that tells me that logic doesn’t apply to me.

I must be judged as good or bad at all times, and most of the time that judgment lands on bad, because I don’t even know how to do things right!

I can’t even set up a fishing rod. What kind of monster...

Vacation vibes.

I don’t want this post to imply that I’ve spend my whole time off burning in hell.

It’s been a wonderful trip for the most part. This descent into overthinking and self-castigation is a blip, really.

It does tend to happen every time, though, which is why I wanted to spend some time examining it.

I’m not sure if I’m alone in this. I do see the removal of daily routine as part of the culprit: with so much time to think on my hands, I am more prone to get lost in the sauce.

It’s all down to the powerful desire I have, in the eternal child parts of myself, to be good.

I want to be loved, which means wanting to be lovable. In order for that to happen (those child parts believe) I need to do and say the right things in the right way.

My adult self – the guy writing this at 6:30 in the morning in a single bed, while my son dreams of more successful fishing trips in the bed beside me – knows that’s bullshit.

I am loved and lovable as I am, fishing incompetence be damned. We all are.

But the things I learned more than 40 years ago, when I was a scared, confused little kid, die hard.

They get packed along with the sunscreen and sandals every time I go away, so that they can resurface and leave me sweaty and overwhelmed.

This is all part of the endless process of growing up, I suppose. Learning that the dance of “being good” includes a bunch of half-steps backwards, so that we can eventually execute that dazzling spin move into simply being, and knowing that that’s good enough.

Maybe I’ll nail that one next trip...

This instrumental is called “Ghost Voices.” I wrote it this week.

I’m officially on vacation at the moment, visiting friends and family in various cities in Türkiye with my wife and kids.

This would be an excellent time, I imagine, to swear off electronic devices.

There’s no need whatsoever to be in my phone. I’m surrounded by beauty: beautiful places, beautiful people, beautiful moments.

And yet.

My children want to watch YouTube or play video games. This is natural: these things are highly addictive, and they’ve had a taste.

We limit them to half an hour a day, which seems healthy enough. There’s some slippage, of course, if we’re taking a flight or driving a long distance.

But I’m not worried about their habits at the moment. I’m worried about mine.

Staring long enough into the abyss.

I mean, I’m writing this on a device. You’re reading it on one.

And that’s not wasted time, exactly.

This is a form of connection, after all. I am here, in my wife’s cousin’s living room, sweating a bit, writing these words.

You’re wherever you are, connecting to these thoughts and this moment.

It’s not nothing. I appreciate you being here with me, however it is for you.

I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to say, until I thought about it and realized this is what I needed to explore: the irony of needing a screen to express my discomfort with needing a screen.

Why on earth do I keep reaching for his gross, stupid technology when I have infinite, delicious reality right there waiting for me?

The comfort machine.

I realize that, while I think of using my phone to look at the news or check my messages as a little pleasure, it isn’t really that.

It’s an escape hatch.

It’s a way of not being in the discomfort of the moment. Of the thoughts I don’t want to face. Or the actions I’m not sure how to take, or even think about.

When I manage to notice what’s really going on under the surface of my compulsive screen use, I see that it’s fear, not pleasure, driving the bus.

I realize not just that this is why I’m picking up my phone, but that I do so hundreds of times per day.

It’s evidence of an addiction, but also of an overburdened nervous system.

The terror of the moment.

Could I learn to genuinely not do this anymore? Could I model it for my children?

Perhaps. But it would be about a lot more than saying “no more devices for me, thank you, I’ve had enough.”

It would require learning to regulate my nervous system. To learn to feel okay with being mildly uncomfortable or uncertain without trying to obliterate my consciousness to get away.

A vacation sounds like a great time to do just that.

So far, not so good. But in the interest of giving myself a little hope, I’ll end things right here.

I hope you will turn off whatever you read this on, take a deep breath, and go and explore whatever is happening in this moment, in the place where you are.

If you’ve been reading this publication for any length of time, you’ve watched me try to figure out how to be.

How to be kind. How to be safe. How to be strong. How to be in relationship with other people.

I’ve come to some conclusions over the years, and I’ve probably contradicted myself, but this whole thing has been a search for ways to live that are better aligned so that I can serve myself and others.

At the moment, I feel as if I’ve worked out some things I didn’t understand before about taking responsibility for my own life, and being stronger and more clear-minded.

As always, though, there are no easy or final answers.

While each of us can only control our own behaviour, not that of other people, we also deserve to be treated with respect and love by those we care for, and they deserve the same from us.

I know that. I think the vast majority of people understand it, and believe they live in harmony with that ideal. We’re all trying, most of the time, to love and be loved well.

The trouble is, we often operate in the dark because of the stories we’ve inherited.

Who am I really?

In my story, I’m basically good.

I may make mistakes and act out of alignment with my ideals some of the time, but those ideals are obviously positive and reasonable.

Step outside of my perspective, though, and things get more complicated.

I may be acting in a way I am certain will serve another person’s needs – as when I do what they want me to do, for instance.

That has to be a good thing, right? I mean, it’s what the other person wants. Who doesn’t want what they want?

The trouble arises when I try to define the terms of my beliefs.

• How do I know what another person wants?

• How do I know that my actions are actually giving them what they want, even if I happen to have correctly guessed what that is?

• Am I acting in line with my own authentic desires in the moment, or am I pretending in order to please them?

• If I am trying to please them, do my actions have anything to do with their wants, or am I in fact trying to get something for myself? (The safety and comfort of making someone else like me and be pleased with me, for instance?)

This may be overthinking of the highest order, but I believe there’s a lot to it.

You’re the hero of your story, but don’t forget: you’re also the author.

The stories we tell ourselves tend to feature us as the hero.

Even if we admit mistakes, we always do so with the underlying knowledge that we meant well, and that everything we did, we did for a good reason.

That’s all well and good – it would be hard to live if we thought of ourselves as the villain in our story.

The problem is, in order to maintain this version of our life’s narrative, we will inevitably have to cast others as the villains instead.

If I am good, and acting in accordance with that goodness, then anyone who causes me pain or discomfort must be less good.

If my partner isn’t making me happy, or my coworkers or clients are stressing me out, or my children aren’t listening to me, but I know that I’m in the right, then they must be wrong.

In order to maintain the coherence of my narrative, I need to make myself the victim of others’ ignorance or cruelty.

And I will do so by making that the story, even if it makes no logical sense.

Where did we inherit our story from?

Where do these stories come from? Why is it that I, for instance, believe being “good” involves doing what other people want me to do?

Because I learned it from my family of origin. Who learned it from theirs, and on, and on, back into the unremembered past.

Other people learn different stories, like “being good means doing what you know is right, no matter what anyone thinks of you.”

Still others are taught that “good” looks like getting exactly what you want when you want it.

The reasons each of these default positions is passed on are often obscure to us and the people we got them from: in the maelstrom of life, this way of being is how I learned to be safe, and so, my child, consciously or not, I am teaching you the same.

If that maelstrom wasn’t so scary for you – if you were able to weather the storm without panicking – then you will probably teach your children a way of being that they can hold lightly and let go of when necessary.

If, however, you felt and still feel danger around every corner, you probably instilled the necessity of clinging to your way of being safe at all costs.

The broke clock.

Every tactic to stay safe is adaptive and smart in some situations.

Sometimes my way of doing it – intuiting people’s needs and desires and trying to meet them – is a great idea.

And obviously doing what you believe is right regardless of the consequences can be wonderful and brave in certain circumstances.

The trouble comes when that’s your only method for dealing with whatever arises.

If my approach to psychological safety is to try and read everyone, all the time, and shape myself to their mood, I’ll end up in a lot of trouble.

Not only will I be run ragged all the time from intuiting and adjusting behavior, but no one will be able to know me or trust me.

When all you do is present an acceptable face to the world, no one gets to see your real one.

And if your story has you constantly standing on principle and doing only what you know is right, you’ll end up alienating and failing to connect with other people whose beliefs and experiences you will have consistently ignored in favor of your own ideals.

So what do we owe to one another?

If these stories are hard for us to see and difficult to break out of, what can we do be better friends, lovers, parents, coworkers, etc?

I’d love to say we owe it to one another to break the chains of our habitual beliefs and show up authentically and with total vulnerability.

That is, in fact, what I’d like to do.

But my experience so far has taught me that perfection isn’t attainable. We are imperfect by nature and we have to work with what we’ve got.

So what I’m trying to get better at is noticing.

Noticing when I’m living and relating from my defensive story instead of connecting with the person in front of me.

Noticing when that person might be living and relating from their defensive story.

And then giving both of us grace. Trying to ask myself, “what if my story is wrong in this case? What if there’s no danger here? What if instead of a threat to be mitigated, the person before me is beauty incarnate, as imperfect and insecure and longing for connection as I am?”

And also thinking about what kind of story they might be carrying based on what you know about them. If they seem selfish to you, might that be because they were taught that getting what you want and protecting yourself is what “good” looks like?

This will not solve all the problems. It won’t take away the stories that divide us.

But it might crack open the door to connection, and to working with your story and theirs rather than wielding them as weapons.

This song is called “The Wine-Dark Sea.” Sadly, the blue guitar was not involved in making it.

I bought a guitar four days ago.

The day after I bought it, it was destroyed.

This is what happened, and what I think it might mean:

I’m in Türkiye with my family, working in the evenings, and I really wanted an instrument to play around with – inventing songs when the mood takes me, maybe learning a few by other people.

So I decided to treat myself. I had found an affordable acoustic online before we arrived. We went to the mall where the shop was, and on a whim, I bought it.

It’s blue, which is an odd colour for an acoustic; I chose it in tribute to my friend JP’s little blue guitar, which he had when we visited him in the Dominican Republic years ago.

Finding the songs in the wood.

I firmly believe that every instrument has songs inside it. Every time I pick up a guitar, it shows me what songs it wants me to make through it. Same with keyboards, pianos, basses, even drum kits.

I played this one in the shop for a minute, and found nothing. It was a little out of tune; it didn’t immediately yield anything up to me.

But my plan was to own it for years, returning to the house annually and picking it up again. I knew the songs were in there – I’d just need time to find them.

We brought the guitar back with us on the bus along with some groceries, a few Hot Wheels cars, and two exhausted children.

I got it home and then had to work; I got the chance to play it properly for the first time between meetings.

I tuned it up, found a few chords, and there it was: the first song hiding inside the blue wood turned up.

“I’ll record a version of this tomorrow!” I thought to myself, naively.

Later in the evening, I heard my brother-in-law playing, beautifully. It was a lovely sound.

Body bag.

The next morning I woke up before the rest of the house.

I brewed a coffee and sat outside soaking in the morning, listening to the wind through the corn in our garden.

Then I went inside, and another melody appeared in my head.

“One more coffee and then I’ll see if I can turn that into a song.”

I opened the cupboard under the stairs where someone had put the guitar away in its soft case.

I took it out, unzipped it… and found a beheaded corpse instead of the brand-new instrument I expected.

The shock of losing something you just got.

It’s a cheap guitar. I wasn’t used to having it. But the experience of opening a bag to make art and finding your new instrument destroyed is very unpleasant indeed, regardless.

It turns out a little visitor to the house had been playing around the night before and had accidentally kicked over the guitar case with the instrument inside.

It must have landed badly, and the head broke right off.

Was I calm and even-handed in the moment that I discovered the guitar?

I was not. It felt like a punch in the gut. I was really upset and shocked.

But it didn’t take me too long to realize that this, like pretty much everything else, must have happened for a reason.

The Stoic Gods strike again.

I wrote a while ago about the idea that there are a group of gods whose job it is to test your stoicism.

Bad, annoying, unexpected things will happen to you. Sometimes several in one day.

How will you respond?

The gods want to test you. That’s why they send you irritating, painful, stupid circumstances – like finding your new guitar in pieces.

In the moment, I failed this test. There was head-shaking. There was swearing. There was disbelief.

But pretty quickly I remembered that the gods love this sort of thing.

I even smiled to myself; “great work, gods,” I thought.

One day! That’s all I got to spend with my precious new thing.

And now it’s gone. I don’t get to make any songs with this guitar. I don’t get to keep returning to it over the years. I won’t show my kids the basics of how to play on it.

Instead, an accident means that my primary memory of it will be finding its dismembered corpse in a cupboard early in the morning.

And now I’m free.

Why do the Stoic Gods do this shit to us?

Because learning not to overindex on what you have, and needing to hold onto to it, is one key to a better life.

A guitar is nothing, of course. Easy come, easy go.

There are more profound things in my life that could disappear at any time.

We see this most painfully when we lose people.

My father, for instance, was here, a permanent fixture in my life, one of the planets around which I orbited.

And then, one morning a few years back when I went to visit him at the hospital, expecting to spend the day beside him, he was gone.

I have learned a lot from that loss. I do not intend to be such a stoic that losing someone I love won’t crush me; but I also know now that the loss is less total than it felt at first.

His spirit continues to live inside me, and inside everyone who knew him.

We get to know that he was here, and in a way he is here still.

The end of his physical body set the songs he had inside him free, and now I hear them in my head all the louder.

We own nothing. We are everything.

So that’s the tragedy of the blue guitar: one day in my company and gone. Songs lost – or maybe set free to float back into my mind at will.

It was never really mine to own. Nothing is.

And yet I think its disappearance means it’s more alive for me than it would have been if I’d gotten the time I expected with it.

Now I will have to find other ways to do what I intended to do. I will go on. Songs will be written; songs will be sung.

And whatever I lose next, or you do, will continue to resonate in the world. The songs cannot be destroyed, even when the instrument is gone.

The Wine-Dark Sea 

Synonymous with evil.
But easy not to see. 
Like cigarettes and whiskey.
It’s putting you at ease.
Growing from the inside
It eats away at you. 
You can call it true love.
Exactly what you’d do. 
It’s ready to be reached for. 
You can say it’s yours.
It’s laying waste to cities. 
It’s starting every war. 
A face to launch a thousand
Ships against the weak. 
But when you look right at it
You can hardly breathe. 

You look so innocent.
More sinned against
Than sinning. 
You look so innocent. 
But you are winning. 

Wait. 
You don’t know
The whole backstory. 
Let me show
You the way
This came together.
How there was never
A thing to be done. 

I wanna tear it apart
Tonight
The veil, the life 
I let myself
Indulge in like
The future wasn’t mine to shape.
Tear it apart
Tonight
The veil, the life
I let myself
Indulge in like
The future wasn’t mine to shape.

I wanna tear it apart
Tonight
The veil, the life 
I let myself
Indulge in like
The future wasn’t mine to shape.
Tear it apart
Tonight
The veil, the life
I let myself
Indulge in like
The future wasn’t mine to shape.
(If you don’t mind
I’ll try to find
The places where
I still hold up.
If you won’t let me 
Arrive back home
I’ll have to go it
Alone.)

I wanna tear it apart
Tonight
I wanna tear it apart
Tonight
I wanna tear it apart
Tonight
I wanna tear it apart
Tonight

On the wine-dark sea.
The wine-dark sea.
The wine-dark sea.
The wine-dark sea.
On the wine-dark sea.
The wine-dark sea.
The wine-dark sea.
The wine-dark sea.

Personal growth is not a linear process.

You can feel like you’ve figured some things out, begun to notice and mitigate unhealthy tendencies in yourself, and started living in a way that’s better for you.

And then something happens and it’s as if you’ve slid all the way back down to where you started.

This morning I find myself at the bottom of the rockpile, bloodied and bruised, bags under my eyes from a restless night.

It’s not because some earth-shattering thing happened.

Here’s what did happen: I did some thinking at work, shared it, and got feedback that it wasn’t quite right.

The feedback wasn’t overly critical — just a suggestion to simplify and redo the work.

But it sent me into a spiral of shame.

Which made me realize, after all the work I’ve done on shifting my approach to life, I’m still outsourcing my worth to the reactions of other people.

You’ve got to feel what you’re feeling, even if you wish you weren’t feeling it.

I wasn’t even going to write about this; it feels kind of shameful in itself to be so sensitive and thin-skinned at this age and stage of my life.

Part of the work I’ve been doing, though, is about seeing moments like this not as horrible pain to get through and then forget about, but as an opportunity to work on equanimity and self awareness.

Yes, I feel as if I’ve fallen from a great height: I thought the work was good, someone else thinks it’s not. Worst of all, I’m pretty sure they’re right.

Yes, this opens up gigantic and unreasonable stories of shame: “this means that not only did you screw up the assignment, but you don’t even know the difference between good and bad; you must be useless at everything.”

It’s quite the conclusion: this one minor thing didn’t go exactly as you hoped, therefore you are worthless.

Years of therapy and journalling and listening to podcasts and writing these posts and still, that hook of “if you’re not perfect, you’re garbage” lurks somewhere inside me.

Yes, I wish stuff like this didn’t happen anymore: it would be lovely to be settled in my self-confidence.

But it does happen. Rather than feeling the meta-shame of “I shouldn’t feel this way at my age,” I’d rather sit with the discomfort, accept it, let it pass through me, and see what it might mean.

The origins of this kind of shame.

I also want to learn from this by asking: why did I react this way?

It has its roots, as so many things do, in childhood.

When I was a kid, I was pretty good at thinking quickly and coming up with answers and ideas. I didn’t even have to work all that hard at it.

I didn’t feel I was great at much else: I was generally insecure and afraid of other people in a lot of contexts.

But I had learned that my quick wit allowed me to get praise from teachers, parents, and other adults.

There weren’t many areas of life where I believed I could do things well: certainly not sports or physical activities, and I was generally uncertain of how to act in social situations with kids my own age in the hockey-playing, gender-rigid small town where I grew up.

But in this one area, I felt like I sort of knew what to do.

So I tied a lot of my worthiness up in that neat trick: I can impress people or surprise them or make them laugh a little with my intelligence.

It was great to have that. To have something to fall back on.

It also meant, though, that anytime the trick didn’t work — when I tried a joke or put forward an idea that just didn’t work — I felt gutted and embarrassed, and worried that maybe I’d lost the one facility I had.

Insecurity and perfectionism.

There are some obvious dangers in tying your worthiness as a human being to your ability to get praise from other people.

First and foremost, you are worthy no matter what. As a reminder to myself: You are worthy when you displease other people. You are worthy when you don’t do a good job. You are exactly as worthy when you’re disliked and failing as you are when you’re praised and succeeding. Believing you need other people to validate you is simply incorrect.

With that said, who doesn’t do this to some degree? We’re social beings. It feels good to be liked; it feels bad to be dismissed or criticized, even reasonably or mildly.

Second, if the only way you can feel worthy is to be told by others that you are, as soon as someone doesn’t agree with you that you’re good — or even if they’re not paying attention to you, which is fully their right — you risk feeling like a piece of garbage.

There’s an element of perfectionism lurking here.

Anytime I encounter a black-and-white, all-or-nothing belief, I know I’m acting from a child part of myself.

The belief that I am either great and loved because people like what I’m doing, or useless and stupid because they don’t, is a recipe for living on a stomach-churning rollercoaster.

The reality is this, always: I am worthy. Sometimes I will do work that is good and effective; sometimes I will do work that is off the mark; sometimes I will do work that is average.

The judgement of the work – which, by the way, is almost all coming from me; no one else thinks about it much at all – doesn’t actually mean anything about my validity.

But the inner critic tells me that good=okay, and bad or average=failure.

The logic of self-protection.

Why do I react this way? Why does my inner critic rush to tell me I’m awful for not being perfect?

It’s actually quite logical, if you think like a child.

The inner critic, like many of my parts, was formed when I was little and defenceless.

It still thinks I am both of those things, so it springs into action to prevent me from making myself vulnerable to attack or danger.

When it yells at me for failing to be perfect, the underlying message is “stop exposing yourself. Stop being seen. Don’t do anything at all ever again; you might fail and then you’ll be destroyed.”

It’s not yelling to hurt my feelings; it earnestly believes that I will only be safe if I go inside myself and hide forever, and the way it knows to convince me to do that is verbal invective that makes me feel like shit.

Like a child, it knows that the stove is hot; if you touch it and get burned, you’ll never touch it again.

My adult self knows, though, that the actual danger of being seen is non-existent, while the benefits are immeasurable.

You need to risk doing work, sharing it, connecting with others, because that’s where life happens.

When you discover, as I do from time to time, that parts of you are still terrified and struggling, that’s not a good reason to go into hiding.

Instead, acknowledge those feelings. Offer your appreciation for the ways your parts are trying to keep you safe. And then let your adult self take charge and get back to work.

You will never be unworthy for being imperfect. We’re all imperfect.

But deciding to stop showing up in order to stay safe deprives the world of what only you can offer it.

This song is called “Favours.” I recorded it a couple of weeks ago.

I’ve been thinking about the band Pulp lately.

In particular, about “Misshapes,” the first track on their 1994 album Different Class.

The song is a beautiful call to arms about how there is a new era coming, one in which the misfit nerds – in other words, intelligent people – will take over the world.

It’s an optimistic and very funny song, implying that while the people in charge may have the money and raw power, they’re vulnerable because they’re idiots.

“We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs, we’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of, and that’s our minds.”

A couple of decades later, Pulp’s frontman ended a solo album with an update on how things actually went, with his 2006 song “Running the World.”

“If you thought things had changed
Friend, you better think again
Bluntly put, in the fewest of words
Cunts are still running the world
Cunts are still running the world.”

They are. We need to stop them.

All this came back to mind when I read Katherine Rundell’s excellent essay in the Guardian, “I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young.”

She lays out the reality in stark, and I think undeniable terms: AI is destroying the minds and hearts of children. It’s also destroying the planet we live on. It’s enriching a tiny cadre of deeply shitty men (for want of a better term, let’s call them mega-cunts).

We have very time left to fight back.

How do we fight back? Rundell isn’t sure. Neither am I.

One thing I do know is that the fight will need to be planned, led, and fought by people who are intelligent in a particular way: clear minded about what is real, just, and necessary.

Willing to be uncomfortable and make others uncomfortable. Unswayed by the temptations of personal enrichment because they genuinely care about the work and the lives of others more than about themselves.

I see evidence that people like this exist in the ongoing amazingness of Zohran Mamdani in New York, and the victory in the Michigan primary – against cunts with $70 million to spend to prevent it – of Abdul El-Sayed.

If they can succeed within the deeply broken system of U.S. politics, against the most insidious (and simultaneously insipid) kind of evil that system can bring to bear, then there must be hope.

A war of joy.

The people in power pursue profit above all else. They don’t care a whit for the humans who they harvest for cash. They will do anything to anyone if it squeezes a few more cents out of the transaction.

What we have on our side is simply this: the good.

The joy of caring more for human decency and love and justice than for increasing our own wealth.

The joy of connecting with other people, of embracing storytelling and human knowledge.

The joy of stepping into the arena to fight a battle we can’t possibly win, and finding a way to win anyway.

It can feel like each of us is David, armed with a stone and a sling and facing an unfathomably massive Goliath.

That story is still told because it was so vanishingly unlikely David would ever prevail. If it became commonplace for a tiny challenger to take down the massive powerhouse, the whole world would be turned inside out.

But the secret of our version of David is this: we may not have the size or the weapons, but there are billions of us.

Nobody wants this. Nobody wants to give their one irreplaceable life over to the anesthetizing, lobotomizing screen, to the thought-destroying AI that’s shoved down our throats more and more.

We do because we have been conditioned to. We are addicts, hooked by a whole system of institutionally supported drug dealers.

Our children are addicts, and they are going to be destroyed by the addiction.

Except that for that to happen, it requires us all agreeing to it.

And even the biggest, strongest Goliath can’t stand against a billion regular people who have had enough and aren’t going to take it anymore.

Read the terms of service, refuse to sign, toss your phone.

We have all been so passive in the face of this.

I certainly have. I keep buying things, staring into a screen day and night.

I find myself using AI at work simply because it’s there, which is precisely the plan.

Not because it works well. Not because it can truly help me do the work – it tends to make me stupider and my outputs less worthwhile.

But it’s ubiquitous now, and I am only human.

My basic proposal is: fuck that.

Refuse. Refuse to be sucked in by it. Don’t let them take away your mind and your agency.

Do it for yourself, certainly. But also know that, whether you have children or not, the younger generation is watching.

They see how we live. What we accept. What we believe life is.

If all they see is a bunch of zombies outsourcing our thinking, our tasks, our socializing, our decision-making, they will assume that’s what life is.

The cunts who are running the world will keep rubbing their hands together in glee as the cities burn and the seas boil.

All this beautiful world will turn to ash, and the children will grow up into mindless corpses.

The fight starts now and it doesn’t stop. But it’s also life.

So we have to fight. But the fight is not a fight of misery or deprivation.

It’s a fight of living.

If you live – truly connect each day and each moment with the people around you, with what you are feeling and thinking, with the ongoing flow of life – then you are fighting well.

Care for the people in your community and around the world who need your help.

Care for yourself enough to breathe and read and think and talk and laugh.

When given the choice between a screen and the infinite space of the outside world, choose the world.

You are better than the cunts. You are smarter than them, more human than them, more beautiful than them.

So are the children you fight to protect. So is the world in which you fight.

They deserve to lose, and lose badly.

Let’s get together and hand them the most resounding loss in history. Do it for yourself, do it for the kids, do it for the earth on which we stand.

Favours

Bottle’s on the table
Filling up with rain
Dawn is coming up now
But everything’s still grey.
Somewhere nearby, 
She’s tangled in the sheets.
Listen close:
You can hear her breathe.

Is this enough to save you?
Time off for good behaviour.
Don’t do me any
Don’t do me any favours.
Memories can break you. 
If you let them take you.
Don't do me any
Don't do me any favours. 

The air is scarred with memories 
Never to relive.
If nothing happens right here
They'll still feel it did.
It did. 

Is this enough to save you?
Time off for good behaviour.
Don’t do me any
Don’t do me any favours.
Memories can break you. 
That’s why we don’t make new ones.
I know it’s true.

Do these days haunt you
Like I want them to?
Do these days haunt you
Like I want them to?

Do me any favours.
Don’t do me any favours.
Don’t do me any favours.
Don’t do me any favours. 

Is there a less inspiring phrase than “you are responsible for your own life”?

Maybe.

“The President of the United States is giving a two-hour speech and you can’t turn it off or lower the volume.” That’s not great.

“We need all 10,000 pages of your tax filing documents from the past five years arranged in chronological order. Get to work!”

Honestly, though, those two phrases are at least timebound: it’s bad, but it will end.

The idea that you – yes, you, the person reading this right now – are responsible for how you live and whether it serves you or not, though?

It’s annoying. It sounds kind of insipid. But it’s also genuinely important.

And, unlike tax filings and presidential speeches, it’s a life sentence.

The reason I’m asking you to read said sentence is that it’s recently come home to me with real force just how true it is.

I have always understood intellectually that I’m responsible for myself. But whenever the thought would occur, I had some fun and easy outs to avoid needing to face the reality of it.

Aren’t other people responsible, really?

That’s the big one right there.

Sure, I’m “responsible for my life,” but the real reason I’m not as happy or fulfilled as I could be is obviously people other than me.

I’d be totally free and easy if it weren’t for…

• The difficulties of being in a long-term relationship

• The responsibilities and work involved in raising kids

• The challenges of personality and style of coworkers and clients

• The differences in lifestyle and availability of friends new and old

• The awful decisions made by the individuals in power, from political leaders to billionaires

And on, and on.

It’s not my fault everyone else is so selfish and crazy and requires so much of me. How can I be responsible for all of their behaviour?

I can’t. I’m not.

What I am responsible for (annoying part incoming) is how I think and act in relation to all of those people.

What I’m seeing with terrible clarity lately is that I’ve been acting like a victimized, powerless child who is somehow being held captive by everyone in the world.

Then I blame everyone else for my actions.

Responsibility is already yours. So take it.

This may shock some of you, but I’m not actually a child.

I am, in fact, 47 years old as of this writing.

In the immortal words of Ron Burgundy, “I’m not a baby, I’m a MAN. I’m an ANCHORman.”

When I look at how I’ve understood my life and my place in it, I have to grin and shake my head at just how childish I’ve been.

I listed out a lot of things above that other people are doing to make my life difficult. Then I suggested that I can’t do anything about any of it – it’s other people, after all. Not me.

Here’s the thing, though: every item on that list can be radically improved by me taking full responsibility for myself and my actions.

It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.

Whatever difficulties I believe I have with others actually originate in me.

If I see my wife or my children or my coworkers behaving in ways that trigger me or confuse me, I have tended to think “why can’t they act more like I want them to?”

What I’m really asking, I realize now, is “why can’t they behave in ways that will allow me to stay exactly the way I am – scared, small, and insecure – instead of forcing me to notice my own flaws?”

The ideal behaviour I’ve been longing for from everyone else: praise me for everything I do, even if it’s not praiseworthy. Intuit what I’d like in the moment and do it without being asked. Never need anything from me unless I’m in the mood to offer it.

Basically, I want them to be responsible for my happiness AND to deliver it to me on a silver platter.

There are some importantly idiotic assumptions underlying this:

1. Everything everyone does is about me. This… is how a little child views the world. In reality, no one is thinking about me; they’re all living their own lives and thinking about what they care about.

2. Other people’s happiness depends on me pleasing them. Uhhh, no. Even when I’m at my most pleasing and helpful, I am not able to control the moods of others. No one notices how I act 99% of the time.

3. My behaviour never affects those close to me. This is the other side of the coin: while most people don’t care how I act, the people closest to me are influenced by my behaviour, profoundly, because they need me to be strong and clear-minded so they don’t have to worry about everything all the time.

Imagine being married to a little kid. Or being raised by one.

It wouldn’t be great most of the time. Even if the kid is really nice and well meaning.

You’d have to make all the decisions. You’d have to worry about their feelings and their survival a lot, instead of trusting that they can keep you safe and steer the ship.

The dark secret: taking responsibility is awesome.

So you’ve realized that you are responsible for your own life. You see that you’ll need to start making your own decisions, directing the course of your life, and taking on more of the mental load of being an adult.

If that sounds bad to you, it’s because you’re still clinging to the comforts of being a child.

When you’re a 47-year-old kid like me, those comforts may still hold some appeal, but it’s hard not to see how sad it is to still want to live that way.

The alternative – being a leader in your own life, and taking action based on your instincts and desires – is, in fact, massively preferable to staying a kid.

Of course it is! I wrote recently that my ambition is to be strong, kind, creatively fulfilled, and to live a romantic life of adventure.

That’s some grown-up stuff.

Kids read about characters like that, or watch movies about them.

They don’t get to be them, because they don’t have agency and freedom.

I do.

Taking responsibility for your own life may not be relaxing, but it gives you the chance to actually live.

If you never grow up, all that is just a fantasy.

I don’t want to end up on my deathbed, a wrinkly, 80-something-year-old toddler, and croak out the words, “okay, I’m ready to start now!” just before expiring.

If I have to file a few tax forms here and there, it’s a price I’m willing to pay. The adventure starts with the irritating embrace of being responsible.

This song is called “Diet Giant.”

I arrived in Turkey on Friday for a month’s stay. I’ll be working the first couple of weeks, and then taking some vacation time.

Packing for a trip this long is always a delicate balance.

My parents in law have a house here, which is where we’ll spend most of our trip. In an ideal world, I’d have been able to pack my acoustic, electric, and bass guitars, a couple of microphones, my digital audio workstation, and, why not, my drum kit too (I still don’t know how to play it, but a month in Turkey would be a great time to learn).

I’d also have brought a small library’s worth of books, and maybe an easel to do some painting.

Back here in the real world, of course, our bags were full to bursting with the basics (clothing, toiletries) and gifts and practical things (coffee, toys, lighting, vitamins, and so on and so on).

So in lieu of a library, we’ve got a couple of e-readers, and in lieu of a full band set up, I have my laptop.

The impossible-to-overstate value of constraints.

What if I want to make music while I’m here?

Well, I can’t make guitar music, because I don’t have any guitars. Except, of course, you can make pretty much anything you want if you’ve got a computer.

It won’t sound the same as me inexpertly hammering away at the strings, and I’ll probably write a different kind of song when I’m using my computer keyboard to play the instruments.

But I can still write a song (the one at the top of this post was composed yesterday, entirely inside my laptop).

I wish I had a guitar or two with me, but I’m also glad I don’t — if I’d had them, I certainly wouldn’t have written this particular song, and I like this song.

My favourite example of the value of constraints remains the Star Wars films.

In the mid-’70s, deciding to make an epic space opera featuring invented ships, technology, and cultures on a pretty shoestring budget required leaning all the way into constraint.

George Lucas was doing all sorts of things that no one had ever done before, and without nearly enough money or crew to do it.

What came out of that set of constraints (after his wife fixed the film in the edit) was one of the defining films in cinema history.

A couple of decades later, Lucas decided to make a new trilogy of films, set before the original trilogy. This time, he had all the money he could possibly use, and as much time as he needed. No one would tell him no, no one would get in his way: he could make literally anything his heart desired.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace is a defining film in cinema history for a different reason: it’s one of the worst movies ever made. (If you disagree, I don’t want to physically fight you because you are almost certainly younger than me. But you’re wrong.)

Using AI to write for you is like letting George Lucas make The Phantom Menace again and again.

Yes, I’m turning this around to artificial intelligence bashing again.

I think that’s one reason I dislike AI so much: it represents the absence of constraints, not only because it can theoretically do pretty much anything you ask it to (albeit badly), but also because, like Lucas’s crew and producers in the late ‘90s, it is constantly telling you that you are right and everyone should listen to you.

Maybe if you use it occasionally, this isn’t the biggest deal. I have dipped into AI at work a few times in the past few weeks; every time I’ve ended up spending much longer fixing the mess it gave me than I would have spent doing the work myself, but I admit I used it.

Over time, though, using AI to do your thinking for you is like doing anything without constraints: it will make you lazy and stupid and less capable of clear thought and action.

This is worrying for people old enough to disdain the Star Wars prequel trilogy; for the young, it is potentially catastrophic.

I don’t really like constraints when they’re presented to me. I’d prefer to lift the lightest weights available, or have someone else lift them for me, rather than trying to hoist something I can barely get over my head.

But over time, if I want to be in solid shape, the heavier, more constraining weight is simply required.

If you never lift anything heavier than the bar — or maybe you only ever tell robots to go and lift on your behalf — you’re going to end up with atrophied muscles and a broken mind.

The hard way is the easy way.

On the other hand, if you accept constraints and work within them, you’ll find that they are, in fact, the source of much that is great and worthwhile in the world.

Another constraint I have when it comes to making music is that I never learned how it works. I don’t know any theory, which is a shame. It no doubt prevents me from making smarter and more satisfying choices as a songwriter.

On the other hand, doing repetitive work within that constraint (I think I’ve recorded at least 50 songs since I began posting them on this Substack a little over a year ago) has begun to give me better instincts.

I can find my way into a song faster. I am better at knowing which way to take things.

My lack of true musical knowledge still gets in my way sometimes. But it might also be why I approach the task with what is probably a naive or even foolish technique, and that makes the music I make unique. Sometimes, that’s even a good thing.

Doing things the difficult way, like Lucas and his crew trying to figure out how to send audiences to a world a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away when no one else had done it, leads to magic.

We are meant, as a species, to work against constraints and overcome them.

When we lean into that need, we become stronger, smarter, and more human. That’s why I believe the harder way of doing things is in fact the easier way over time.

When, on the other hand, we avoid constraints and go with the easiest possible option in the moment, we’re setting ourselves up for terrible trouble later on, as both individuals and a species.

Try doing without.

I understand that some people believe AI is making their lives better. And I can’t speak for them — I only have my own experience with the technology, which has convinced me it’s 99% worthless.

What I would ask them is whether they have considered trying to live without AI for a little while. Just to see.

I feel this way about a lot of the technologies that have entered our lives over the last couple of decades: I remember life before them, hazily, and I don’t remember ever saying to myself “ugh, I hope one day I’ll have a screen in my pocket that’s as addictive as crack but with lots of videos of cats,” or “yeesh, I hope one day a robot will summarize a two-paragraph email into a single sentence so I can use the time that saves me to watch videos of cats.”

In other words, very little of the technology we use now is solving problems we actually had before it arrived.

Instead, the technology has created holes in order to fill them.

I’d like to live my life without a bunch of Musk- or Altman- or Zuckerberg-shaped holes in it, thank you very much.

I brought a paper notebook, a pen, and a mechanical pencil to Turkey with me, as well as some watercolours and brushes. I’m hoping to write and draw in them.

Yes, I’m using the incredible technology inside my MacBook to make music, but the ideas all come straight from some strange place inside me that I don’t fully understand. If the computer dies, I’ll still hum the weird tunes that come to me while I sit beside the fire.

You are a human being with the greatest supercomputer ever devised sitting between your ears and a mechanically exceptional body right below them. Before you turn your thinking and making over to another machine, see what you can do with the one you’ve already got.

Diet Giant

Ohhh.
Ohhh. 
You know it’s true. 

I’ve got a secret
Formula for you. 
A simple plan
To cure what ails you.
It’s not involved. 
You just take it with you,
And like a memory, it
Develops in your mind. 

I can tell you 
Exactly how to be,
Precisely what you need,
But you have to listen. 

I’m a giant,
Giant in my field,
The things that I reveal
Will leave you breathless. 
You might see
That I can hardly stand.
My secrets haven’t helped me.
They’re for you.
One day soon
You’ll tower over me.
You’ll leave me in the dust,
And I’ll be free. 

I can tell you 
Exactly how to be,
Precisely what you need,
But you have to listen. 
I can save it.
The entire world. 
Every boy and girl. 
But they have to listen. 

Ohhh.
Ohhh. 
You know it’s true. 
Ohhh.
Ohhh. 
You know it’s true. 

I can tell you 
Exactly how to be,
Precisely what you need,
But you have to listen. 
I can save it.
The entire world. 
Every boy and girl. 
But they have to listen.

I’m a diet giant
It’s my time.
I’m a diet giant
The day is mine.    
I’m a diet giant
In my mind. 
A diet giant.
A diet giant. 

How do you get good at things?

By being terrible at them. And enjoying it so much that you keep going.

In You Can Just Do Things, which I finished reading this week, Cate Hall talks about “the moat of low status.”

The idea is that when you start anything new, you’re almost certainly going to suck.

This is a “moat” in the sense that most people really, really don’t like to suck at things, and so they avoid any situation in which they will do so.

Which represents a huge opportunity for those who learn to embrace the suck.

If you start seeking out moats and diving into them, you’re going to end up learning a whole bunch of new things, and probably getting good at some of them, while those who fear looking foolish stand outside the castle twiddling their thumbs.

The origins of moat avoidance.

There’s a bigger insight in the idea than just “do things you’re bad at to obtain more marketable skills,” though.

Most of us live our lives in status-protection mode most of the time.

We want to look like we’re in control. We want to stick to activities we already know how to do. We want to appear cool.

The question is: how and when did we learn to get good at those things?

When I examine myself, I see that most of the things I’m confidently good at came from my childhood.

I learned them as defense mechanisms. My sense of humour, my hypersensitivity to others’ moods, my verbal dexterity… these meta-skills came about to keep me safe.

Learning new ways of being in the world, and the kinds of skills required to embody them, can feel like jumping into an alligator-infested moat and doing some laps.

Moat-swimming as lifestyle.

And that, I think, is the broader point Hall (and her husband Sasha Chapin, who coined the phrase) makes in the book.

Embracing uncertainty, embarrassment, and failure will allow you to become more skilled at specific things, but it will also change your approach to life.

Our areas for personal growth don’t lie in the direction of things we’re already good at.

In fact, the smart move might be to direct ourselves away from those skills and toward things that feel almost unbearably uncomfortable, that will make us look like clumsy, naive children.

Defeat your ego by letting it die.

Like a lot of what’s in Hall’s book, this is not easy advice to take.

Most of us – myself certainly included – are very comfortable in our ruts.

We may glimpse, from time to time, a more expansive life, off in the distance, but reaching it will require deflating our delightfully positive and airtight self image.

That image, I often think, is me.

I am the version of myself I want other people to see. So “deflating” it is like murdering myself.

And what I’m finally realizing is: good.

That inflatable statue isn’t actually me. It never was.

If you look closer, its features aren’t quite human, and it’s not all that convincingly real.

To get to a more authentic and fulfilling life, you need to kill your ego, because it’s your ego that keeps you from trying things that might be hard or awkward.

Learning to breakdance in your late forties, for instance (no plans as yet, but I’ll let you know).

Or ceasing to be a victim in your own life and making your own decisions (working on this one; may land me in traction).

If you’re looking for a good way to murder your ego, might I suggest “drowning in a moat”?

This song is called “Royal Road.” I wrote it this weekend.

How does a person make it to 47 years old without growing up?

It’s really easy, actually.

In fact, I’m realizing that it’s a hell of a lot easier to get older without growing up than it is to actually become an adult.

Lately I’ve had occasion to stand back from myself and take stock of who I am and how I operate.

The news is not all bad. I think I’m an intelligent, caring, well-meaning person who has managed to make an excellent life for himself.

What I have not managed to do is transition from being a boy to being a man.

The child (trapped) within the man.

I recently read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette.

The book is about masculinity and modernity. Its basic thesis is that the vast majority of young men no longer go through any ritual transition to initiate them into manhood.

This has led, the authors say, to an epidemic of what they call “boy masculinity.”

Most adult men, they say, do not embody the strengths, wisdom, and clarity of the masculine ideal, which they refer to as “grown man masculinity.”

The result, they say, is a world full of men who act like overgrown children. They are petulant, self-centred, and foolish. And many of them are in positions of great power, despite the fact that they are deeply immature.

The book was published in 1990. If things were bad then, surely they’ve only gotten worse since.

The semi-formed self.

I don’t think I’m as bad as a lot of the overgrown boys who are running around – and running – the world.

What I do think is that, despite all my time on this planet, living, growing, and having children of my own, I never actually crossed the threshold between childhood and adulthood.

That threshold, as described in Moore and Gillette’s book, has had a particular shape and resonance for boys and men in cultures around the world throughout history.

In many traditional cultures, when boys came of age, they faced an initiation ritual.

This ritual could take many forms, but generally the effect is a kind of death: the safe, coddled child “dies” by facing a terrible challenge.

The ritual is controlled by the society’s elders, who transmit a story of what manhood means and oversee a difficult and sometimes painful activity, one that feels like dying.

Through this ritual and this death, the boy is able to learn what manhood requires of him and is reborn as an adult.

Our culture today, of course, doesn’t include any such rituals.

And so, for most of us, there is no moment of transition, or any framework for going from childhood to adulthood.

What the world needs now is grown human beings.

Remaining boys when we are supposed to become men is a problem with immense consequences.

Those consequences play out in our individual lives, when we are unable to show up for the people we love and our communities with the strength and clarity they need.

They play out at the societal level when the patriarchal system – arguably the most insidious expression of “boy masculinity” there is – continues to grant power and influence to people too immature to even take care of themselves, let alone having power over others.

For me personally, I’ve had enough of being a boy in a man’s body. I’m not able to devise my own initiation ritual, but I think I’m ready to die so I can come back to life with a more mature self.

Principles for what’s next.

I recently took some time to think about the values I want to govern my life as an adult man.

These are the four things I want myself to be:

• Strong: I will be strong in body and mind, able to hold boundaries and stand up for what I believe in.

• Kind: I will fight for a better world at every level, and refuse to accept unkind and unfair behaviour.

• Creatively Fulfilled: I will pursue my creative interests and make art as often as I can.

• Romantic: I will live a life of adventure and awe, experiencing as much as I can.

As soon as I came up with these principles I realized they mapped neatly onto the archetypes of masculinity laid out in Moore and Gillette’s book.

• King: this maps onto my ideal of Strength – the King is the figure of wisdom and strength, who leads with clarity and purpose.

• Warrior: this maps onto my ideal of Kindness – the Warrior is the archetypal part of you that fights for what he truly believes in.

• Magician: this maps onto my ideal of Creative Fulfilment – the Magician is the part of us that has arcane knowledge and a sharp mind.

• Lover: this maps onto my ideal of Romance – the Lover is the part of us that lives for connection and heightened experience.

Why so male?

I know all this talk of masculinity and boys and men might feel very gendered, and perhaps irrelevant to you if you don’t identify as male (or believe in gender itself).

All I can say is that the insights I’ve encountered in the book and some of the other thinkers I’ve been encountering lately resonate with me.

I think a lot of this could be expressed without gender (many people today have not attained adult maturity, and it’s killing us).

I do believe, though, that a lot of the world’s problems can be traced back to men and boys.

I think it’s worth considering whether taking masculinity seriously, and redefining it as a potential source of strength and goodness in the world might open up some new pathways to a better future for many individuals and for all of us collectively.

A call to growth.

I am going to try and grow up.

I don’t think I can do it alone. I need help from other people. Other men. Women. Non-binary and gender-fluid folks.

Really any human being who is willing to see me, and care enough to expect a little more of me.

I don’t want to kill my younger self to cause him pain. I want to free him from the terrible burden of pretending to be an adult all the time, so he can go and be free and play.

And if I manage to emerge as a true adult, I want to use whatever strength, kindness creativity, and romantic energy I have to serve my community.

We’ll see how I do. If I’m still acting like a little kid, feel free to give me some peyote and send me into the forest to hunt. I may actually die, but it will be a good story.

Royal Road

The Royal Road that leads into the woods
Tells you it’s a good idea to get out there and see.
I told you once I knew nothing about
The things that come out of my mouth. 
Well now you see it’s true. 

I been too tied to you.
I been too tied to you. 
And now it’s time 
To loosen up or lose.

The Royal Road fell into disrepair
‘Cause no one’s walking there
Since everything changed years ago. 
There are some dangers
Arrayed along the sides.
You really have to hide from them sometimes. 
But now you’ll go. 

I been too tied to you.
I been too tied to you. 
And now it’s time 
To loosen up or lose.
I been too tied to you.
I been too tied to you. 
And now it’s time 
To loosen up or lose.

I been too tied to you.

The brilliant Cate Hall released her book You Can Just Do Things this week.

I’m on chapter five, and it’s already hurting my feelings in the best and most productive ways imaginable.

The suggestion I’ve just arrived at (which I also encountered on her blog a while back), is asking your friends and acquaintances to tell you what they really think of you.

Not in a, “I know you say I’m awesome, but specifically how?” kind of way.

More in the sense of, “if you knew I wouldn’t react with anger or get upset, what would you tell me about my character and habits?”

This is not a thing to be attempted lightly. Especially if you’ve convinced yourself you’re already pretty self aware.

To destroy my self-image, simply fill out this form.

Hall’s recommended approach to getting this kind of feedback is literally sending people you respect a form and asking them to fill it out.

That might sound a little weird or sociopathic.

I did something like it once.

Nearly a decade ago, I went for career counselling.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and I thought it might help.

It didn’t.

I still don’t know what I want to do, but I guess I at least learned that I don’t want to pay for any more career counselling.

It was not a particularly inspiring process, but part of it did involve asking friends about my strengths and weaknesses.

The responses were measured and gently stated, but still bracing to read.

I am now, as I was then, guilty of believing I know what I’m good at and bad at. And then, as now, I have no idea, really.

You are not an idiot, but you’re no genius either.

To be honest, I don’t clearly recall what the three friends and coworkers I enlisted wrote under either “strengths” or “areas for improvement.”

I remember feeling equally embarrassed by both sets of responses.

It’s not always comfortable to catch a glimpse of yourself from the outside.

I’m pretty sure their observations felt right, and thus revealed to me that my carefully cultivated aura of cool, calm collectedness does not, in fact, exist.

Their compliments about my strengths were full-throated, and I didn’t (of course) believe a word of them.

And their constructive feedback also felt pretty meaningful, which is why I have buried it deep in my subconscious, never to be retrieved.

This is the trouble with asking for feedback before you’re ready to receive it: every word will bounce off the shield of your ego and spin off into the void forever.

Ego and curiosity are opposites.

That’s another pearl of wisdom from Hall’s book (I’m not that far in but I know I’ll be recommending it to everyone): the opposite of curiosity is ego.

If you want to learn things, you need to quiet that ego down.

Which means that asking your friends to fill out an online form to tell you about your greatest weaknesses is probably best attempted when you’ve attained a state of relative humility.

The more you need to believe the stories of goodness and rightness you tell yourself about yourself, the less use you’ll be able to make of what you hear.

I’m trying to cultivate more curiosity in myself. It requires a kind of ego death, u think. And it really can feel like dying sometimes.

To truly see yourself, you have to be willing to look from the least flattering angles, and it doesn’t feel great.

But there’s a lot to be gained from it.

Your weakest and strongest points are two sides of one coin.

I sincerely believe that our superpowers offer clues about our kryptonite.

For me, my ability to please and charm people is one of my greatest strengths.

I can read people’s moods like a book. I’m verbally dexterous and able to speak thoughtfully and sensitively without much preparation. I usually have a good joke or two at the ready as well.

These skills have helped me arrive at this very comfortable and privileged life I live. They aid me professionally and personally, every day.

But the more I examine my life, the more I see how those very skills are also preventing me from living authentically.

Because I am constantly scanning other people and trying to adjust myself to become someone I think they’ll like, I’m incapable of tapping into my own desires and needs.

I can’t hold a solid position, or advocate for myself or others a lot of the time.

My happiness and sense of self-worth is often dependent on how I think other people feel about me, which is an awful way to live.

The strengths are real. But so are the massive drawbacks.

Judge for yourself.

Of course, that’s my own assessment of my character (or a part of it).

I bet if I asked other people who know me, they’d tell me a completely different story.

My understanding of my strengths and weaknesses is a part of the narrative I’ve built to help make sense of my life.

It’s helpful sometimes to have a story like that — to be able to say, “yep, that’s me, the funny talky guy who secretly feels alone.”

But is it how I appear to others?

Probably not.

There’s no way to know for sure. Or… well, maybe there is.

If I really want to be a better judge of my own character, I fear I’ll have to follow Cate Hall’s advice.

So to some of my loyal readers: if you receive a Google Form link from me soon, thanks in advance. And also, how dare you.

This instrumental is called “Conditional.” I made most of it back in March with some adjustments this weekend.

Unconditional love is easy to feel.

If you have a child or a pet, you almost certainly love them unconditionally.

Of course you do. They are innocent and in your care. They showed up in your life with no warning and became a part of your heart.

You may not appreciate everything they do, but no matter what happens, you will keep loving them and trying to keep them safe.

That kind of love is powerful and beautiful.

Do you feel it for yourself?

Love with limits.

I don’t think most of us are taught to love ourselves unconditionally.

This is usually not because the authority figures of our childhood are cruel or don’t want us to love ourselves.

It’s because the process of socialization tends to focus on constraining our child’s wonder and lack of focus.

As Wordsworth put it:

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy

As we are taught that our childish perceptions of wonder and unconstrained reality are basically wrong, we also learn to distrust feelings of pure love for ourselves.

After all, if the essence of who we are as children – pure consciousness encountering everything anew and reacting to it without bias – is wrong and needs correcting, then surely the impulse to simply love whatever we see in ourselves is wrong as well.

This lesson follows us throughout our lives.

Whereas we may love some beings and people unconditionally, we treat ourselves very differently.

Conditional love in action.

What does it mean when you love yourself conditionally?

It means you must meet certain criteria to be worthy of love.

If you have done a good job fulfilling your responsibilities, you may love yourself a bit.

If the people you live and work with seem happy with you, then maybe you’ll allow yourself a little self-love.

Sometimes, perhaps, when it feels like no one is watching or expecting anything of you, there could be a silent burst of self-love.

When those conditions aren’t met, though, you can’t possibly love yourself.

It would be irresponsible.

Telling yourself that you deserve love even when people are unhappy with you or you haven’t lived up to expectations would only encourage laziness and bad habits.

So you withhold love from yourself, in an attempt to reaffirm what your socialization process taught you: be good, or else.

Treating yourself worse than a dog.

To understand how weird this is, it can be helpful to imagine your inner self as if it was a puppy.

If you had just taken possession of an adorable and slightly wild little dog, would you love it only when it was rolling around on the carpet whimpering in a cute manner?

Would you stop loving it when it peed on the same rug?

And then maybe start again a few hours later, when the memory of cleaning up the dirty spot was past and it was looking up at you again with its huge, shining puppy eyes?

The answer (unless you’re a psychopath) is no.

You will love the puppy when it does things you like.

You will love it when it does things that make a mess and drive you a little crazy.

You will understand that it is an innocent creature, acting out its nature, and that it has no way of controlling that nature or being “perfect” at all times.

This may be easier to see when the creature in question is a puppy, but it’s equally true of you, even if you haven’t been puppy aged in decades.

Unconditional love isn’t a free pass.

Some people think loving a human being who is not your child unconditionally – whether yourself or another adult – might be dangerous.

What if the person takes your unconditional love as an excuse to do horrible things?

“I just killed a man for no reason.”

“You shouldn’t have done that. But it’s okay, because I love you unconditionally.”

This is not what unconditional love means, for a child or an adult, or a puppy for that matter.

If you truly love someone, you will continue to love them even if they do something bad. But you won’t condone or encourage the bad behaviour.

By definition, you can’t, because you love them.

That means you want them to be safe, and cared for, and happy. Committing terrible acts makes them none of those things, and so you need to help them understand why they can’t behave that way.

If you love them unconditionally, you will keep right on loving them while disciplining them, explaining why their behaviour is unacceptable, or, in extreme circumstances, calling the authorities.

Gravitating toward the conditional.

If you learned early on that love is something given in exchange for “good” behaviour, and taken away when you are “bad,” you will likely treat yourself this way your whole life.

You will also find yourself drawn to people who treat you the same way.

It may not feel nice, but it does feel normal and like a precondition for “real” love.

After all, if someone loves you even when you mess up, it’s very confusing.

Do they just not care enough to withdraw affection and love from you to remind you that you screwed up?

Or are they just crazy? Why else would they keep loving you when you’re not worthy of it? Your childhood authority figures certainly didn’t.

You are worthy of love, no matter what.

And that’s the false story so many of us carry with us: that love is something you earn, or fail to earn.

It can be very hard for me to believe it, even as I write this, but we are all worthy of love, all the time.

You deserve to love yourself.

When you’re doing “well” and other people are impressed with you.

When you’re doing “badly” and you’ve made mistakes.

The soft, defenceless being at the heart of you is always worthy of love, not because of what it does or says or doesn’t do or doesn’t say, but simply because it exists.

Where you came from and where you are.

I said at the beginning of this piece that loving a child or a pet unconditionally is easy because they are innocent creatures that showed up in your life without warning and became a part of your heart.

You are the same thing.

You were born into the world and slowly became aware of your own existence.

Like any child, you arrived without an instruction manual or a singular purpose. You’re just here, now, in this body, with this heart and mind.

If you’ve lived as long as I have, you may look back over your life and see some moments of beauty and transcendence, and many more that make you shudder with embarrassment or shame.

But the reality is, you are still, at heart, a child, just like any child. You are an innocent creature, like a beloved pet.

You deserve love in all those moments of transcendence. You deserve love equally, and completely, in all those moments or failure and shame.

I will not suggest it’s easy to break the habits and beliefs of a lifetime and start loving yourself unconditionally. I’m struggling mightily.

But try to remember that there is a child in your heart who is hurting and scared. That child needs protection and care, whether (s)he is behaving or panicking or uncertain or confident.

That child is you. Can you love it without conditions?

Once a week, I include a song I’ve written with the article I send out.

I started doing it a little over a year ago. I posted a song one time, a friend reached out and said “that was cool! You should do that more often.” So I did.

Recently, a different friend reached out to say he hadn’t been listening to most of the songs as they came out (Substack isn’t really designed as a music consumption platform), and asked if I could package up the songs and send them his way.

It sounded like a straightforward assignment, but it took me a few weeks in the end, between needing to find original files and figure out which posts had songs, etc.

When I pulled together all the tunes that this friend hadn’t heard before, I discovered there were 51 of them.

That is an insane number. I cannot believe I’ve shared more than 50 songs in the past year; most of them I also wrote and recorded in that time.

Quantity, with some qualities.

Since going to the trouble of gathering them and putting them in order (I turned them into five “albums,” roughly grouped by style), I’ve spent a bit of time listening back.

Are they all winners? Of course not.

There are a few in there that I think have real potential. Not a single one is actually finished, of course — when you’re trying to drop something new once a week, you don’t tend to make time to record all the parts properly.

Some of them are a mess, but even those I find I have a soft spot for.

The biggest revelation has been what it always is when I revisit something I’ve made: the extent to which it reveals something about me that I didn’t consciously realize I knew at the time.

It happens so often. I will hear a line or feel an emotion and realize that I was sorting through the events of my life and converting them into something abstract.

It’s a little like dreaming into a microphone: I don’t know where the songs come from, I don’t exactly know what they mean while they’re coming out, but through them, my subconscious is doing some strange calculus.

Off the cuff and into the deep.

I tend to improvise my songs (see above re: lack of time), which also contributes to their unexpected connections to what’s going on underneath my conscious mind.

A song can start with a phrase, a melody, a conceptual framework. As it arises, I find that it is usually writing itself.

The best ones “ride their own melt” (to quote Troy from Reality Bites quoting Robert Frost). They appear, they move, they change, and I have no control over anything.

The worst ones — the ones I cringe to listen back to — tend to be the ones I’ve worked the hardest on with some idea of making a “hit.” That does happen occasionally: I think I have that ability, and it invariably leads me astray.

I’m not sure what to make of this except that it seems to teach the same old lesson art always does: we do not really “create” art; we receive it.

Something vast and incomprehensible works through us, when we are able to receive. What it produces seems better than anything we could think up because it is.

Why stop now?

I don’t think anyone other than my very patient and lovely friend is going to hear any of these “albums.” They’re chaotic. Many songs feature children and Turkish people talking in the background, blithely indifferent to me trying to record.

But I’m glad I made them. Listening to my collection of acoustic songs made me emotional. I wanted to reach through the speaker and give the me that wrote most of them a hug.

One day I’d love to take a smaller selection of songs and record them properly. Make them sound to others as they sound to me in my head when I imagine them.

For now, I’ll continue to find a few stolen minutes in the midst of my busy life to caterwaul into my phone or my recording software.

The next one will be out this Monday. I wonder what it will sound like?

This song is called “Training Yourself.” I wrote it at the end of May.

Vulnerability is a confusing concept.

It seems like something soft. By definition, it involves opening up, letting your guard down, risking attack.

But I’ve realized that the only time you can be genuinely vulnerable – as in, willing to expose the things that make you the most scared and discomfited – is if you are actually feeling fundamentally grounded and strong.

Vulnerability means different things for different people.

This post isn’t me secretly patting myself on the back for being strong.

If you’ve read this publication for any length of time, you’ve probably noticed my near-compulsive tendency to share my weaknesses and anxieties.

I’ve had readers and friends (a lot of my readers are my friends, to be fair) praise me for being so vulnerable.

But I don’t think that’s the case.

For me, sharing my emotional confusion and my fears isn’t vulnerability, because I am not guarding some identity that requires me to appear unfeeling or coolly confident.

If I were then it would be very difficult and scary for me to write things like this.

As you can see, though, I do it twice a week without breaking a sweat.

There are people in my life for whom expressing their emotions in this way would be horrifying.

They are stoic and closed and practical; if I ever saw them opening up like this, I’d know they’d changed in some profound way, and were now able to express the parts of themselves that were previously hidden and protected.

You can’t be vulnerable until you’re deeply strong.

My own version of true vulnerability would be telling people what I want and need and asking them to give it to me or help me get it.

That’s the kind of thing that feels like it will absolutely obliterate me. The kind of thing I have vivid, sleep-destroying nightmares about. The kind of thing that seems absolutely impossible under any circumstances.

The phrase “vulnerable to attack” comes to mind: when I think about advocating for my needs – or even consciously knowing what they are – I feel like I am leaving myself open to destruction.

That’s why I believe true vulnerability is a symptom of strength: because you can’t act truly vulnerable until you’ve developed the confidence to risk it.

It’s a deeper strength than the courage to present yourself a certain way. I’m sure I could find the fortitude to act like I’m advocating for my needs; that wouldn’t be all that vulnerable because it would be improv.

You are able to be vulnerable – whether that means opening up about your feelings, asking for what you need, or some other thing that is specifically terrifying to you – only when you have attained a high degree of inner equanimity.

Where strength is found.

I believe that kind of strength is only gained through repetitive risk.

It’s like progressive overload in the gym: you lift up to your current level and then incrementally add weight. Eventually, if you stick with it, you get strong.

Which means it has to start with small acts of uncharacteristic vulnerability.

If you’re someone who keeps their feelings locked up tight, maybe tell someone close to you the next time you’re sad.

No poetic explanation. No need for follow-ups. Just, “I’m feeling a little sad right now.”

It will feel weird and maybe bad. But you’ll survive it.

And you may notice that it was a little bit nice not to have to hide all that sadness away. Sharing it with someone else really can lighten the load, even if only a little.

For someone like me, it might start with saying no to something that doesn’t align with my true desire.

“I don’t want to go to that restaurant. I’d rather go here.”

It sounds so minor, but that kind of thing is exactly what triggers my sense of being vulnerable to attack: I’m suddenly not going with the flow and being pleasing to others.

Terrifying. But then, also, not remotely a big deal. And so I’ve lifted a little of the weight of fear. Next time maybe I can put a tiny bit more on the bar.

Identify which muscles need work for you.

I am writing this at a moment in my life when, to continue the gym metaphor, I’m a 98-pound weakling.

I kick sand in my own face at the beach.

But I will give myself this much credit: I’m lifting the tiny weights I can lift here and there.

Some people leave me in awe with a strength and self-possession that radiates from them. They are not posturing when they act vulnerable; they do so naturally because they aren’t too afraid to risk being uncomfortable.

I see the value in striving toward this kind of increased comfort with vulnerability.

So many of the world’s ills come back to the inability of a small group of deeply insecure men to accept their own vulnerabilities.

Let’s try to be better than those fuckers. Let’s love ourselves enough to accept, with the best humour we can, that we have huge blind spots but that we can learn to see them better.

What is it for you?

Do you need to share your feelings more? Advocate for yourself more often? Be foolish and loosen up more? Put your opinions and ideas on the table more openly? Listen with a truly open mind to the opinions and ideas of others?

Whatever scares you the most is the one to pursue. Your strength is waiting for you on the other side of some very uncomfortable work.

It’s work worth doing.

Training Yourself

Waiting. Wait for it to change. 
Take fear. Take it and arrange
All of what’s possible.
Of what’s possible. 

Take your time.
Take your place
At the front
Of this race.
Can you go
Fast enough?
Think about what 
Came for you. 
I’ll wait for you.

Training your…
Training your…
Training you
To live their life.
To live with life.

Far too 
Far out there 
You just don’t give in. 

I’ve been following a new diet the past week or so. It’s based on the theories of Dr. Ray Peat, an American biologist with some very strong opinions about aging, nutrition, and hormones.

Dr. Peat passed away in 2022 (he was 86, just in case what you’re about to read makes you worry I might die from eating this way). By the time of his death he already had a fervent cult following, which has only grown since he passed away.

He didn’t actually advocate for eating a specific diet, but his research led him to be very suspicious of some foods (nuts, seeds, raw vegetables that grow aboveground — I know, this sounds insane already) and very supportive of others (milk from grass-fed cows, carrots, oysters, liver, and, uh, white sugar).

My wife started following some health practitioners who are inspired by Peat’s theories, and decided to take the plunge into eating in line with his beliefs. I followed.

If you’re wondering if you’re in a cult… you’re in a cult.

So far, I’m eating well and feeling just fine.

Lots of milk with honey. Some liver and onions. A disturbing amount of carrot salad.

There is a large part of me that wonders whether this is all complete bullshit.

I told my friend who’s a GP about the diet, and her response was unequivocal: “that is not correct.”

But this isn’t my first time trying unorthodox food advice. I tried Dr. Joshi’s Alkaline Diet (Gwyneth Paltrow likes it! It must be good!). I read Glucose Revolution by Jessie Inchauspé, AKA The Glucose Goddess — with a nickname like that, she must know what she’s talking about.

Here’s what I’ve found: every diet works.

Seriously. All of them.

I know that sounds like a ridiculous claim, but for me, it’s proven true.

It’s also a complicated claim, since some of the recommendations are in direct contradiction:

• Dr. Joshi’s “alkaline diet” book includes a section where he confesses that he is naughty enough that — only once a year, obviously, and with lots of preparation beforehand and recovery time afterwards — he drinks an entire glass of orange juice. It’s a wild treat, but he really does believe you need to treat yourself sometimes.

• Dr. Peat recommends drinking multiple glasses of fresh-squeezed orange juice, ideally infused with a heaping serving of gelatin, daily.

How can two not-medically-approved diets with diametrically opposed advice both have “worked” from my perspective?

Well, I believed in them enough, so they did.

The rituals of belief work miracles.

Most of the time I don’t pay much attention to what, or how, I eat.

Whenever I decide to follow a system like this, I am forced to notice a lot of things.

I need to be fully conscious of what I put into my body: the specific foods, how they’re prepared, when they’re consumed.

My theory is that, regardless of the specific recommendations I’m following, the mere fact of paying close attention is enough to create a meaningful positive shift in my health. I feel better because I’m taking real care with what I eat.

And mixed in with that is a degree of faith.

In order to get to the point where I’m willing to throw away longstanding habits (I miss you so much, daily yogurt bowl for breakfast), I need to have absorbed enough of the philosophy behind the diet that I truly believe it has merit.

I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if someone with actual medical knowledge could soundly debunk most of Dr. Peat’s beliefs for me, were I to ask them.

For now, though, I’m reading the literature, I’m soaking up the insights, I’m drinking the Kool-Aid (I’m pretty sure he’d be fine with me drinking Kool-Aid — lots of white sugar).

That feeling of belief infuses every meal and snack and drink. It makes me feel I am doing something that will benefit me. So it does.

I think this is also how religion works.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

I’m sure you’ve encountered a smug religious person at some point — if not live, then certainly on television or social media.

They tend to be smug in a very specific way: an assured sense that they possess a truth so profound and powerful that anyone who doesn’t know it yet is a) hopelessly naive, and b) about to be blown away.

This can be incredibly irritating. But I think most of these people come by their smugness honestly. Believers believe for a reason.

They’ve experienced it firsthand. They’ve seen their lives transformed by the arcane knowledge and rituals that their religion has prescribed them.

They know the truth and have given up all other truths.

Of course, this is an experience available to true devotees of all the world’s religions.

Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist — a true believer in any of these might have powerful experiences that are brought on by following the dictates of their faith.

If the real secret to happiness and wellbeing and holiness is contained in the very specific and very different dictates of each of these religions, then which of them is “right?”

None. All.

We’re believing machines.

The point isn’t that Buddhists are closer to the Ultimate Truth than Fundamentalist Christians. (Actually that’s a bad example. But you get the idea.)

The point is that it’s not the specifics that matter; it’s the application of complex, shared ritual in service of belief.

And of course, that extends way beyond religion.

Look at politics. For the individual completely devoted to the party line, whether it runs to the left or right, there is ecstacy in knowing that you understand exactly how things should be (and they don’t).

I may be horrified by the red-capped idiots of the MAGA movement, but talk about unshakeable faith! If Jesus came back and acted like the current president, I’m not sure how many Christians would stay in the church, but these folks will not be shaken.

Then there’s the stock market.

The economy is exceptionally shaky by any realistic measure. The whole market is being propped up by a handful of tech companies — technology and tech-related stocks now make up 56% of the market — that have bet their entire fortunes and then some on technology that will never, ever, ever earn them a dime in actual profit, and will in fact cause them to collapse financially in the next couple of years.

But the market keeps going up, up, up!

Because those who invest in it believe it should go up. That the rich should get so much richer. That Elon needs more. And the rituals of belief make it happen.

Nothing is true. Everything can be true.

So then: if the vast majority of human endeavour is basically just an illusion based on mesmeric rituals, does that mean nothing is real?

I don’t know! Can’t investigate right now. Too busy pulping a thousand oranges and dissolving gelatin powder into the juice.

I think the immense power of religious belief, and its analogues in non-religious human endeavour, is amazing. I have enormous respect for the human capacity to invest things with meaning, and to create real change as a result.

That doesn’t mean I always agree with the intention or the outcomes of that change (see above, re: MAGA and the stock market).

But I do think it’s an incredible magic trick that our species uses again and again. It’s what got us here. It might be what destroys us all.

I’d like to think the same techniques can be used for truly good things, though. When a group of people comes together around a shared set of deeply held beliefs, there’s very little they can’t do.

They can change their physical health. They can restore their spirits.

Maybe they could even destroy late-stage capitalism, overturn the rule of the venal, murderous idiots who are in charge of everything, and create a better world filled with communal care?

As soon as I finish this box of oysters, I’ll get to work on building that cult.

Who’s with me?

This instrumental is called “Blue Ribbon.” I wrote and recorded it this weekend.

Insect populations are drastically declining and it may be a sign of ecosystem collapse.

On the plus side, we may get bitten less by insects this summer. On the minus side, there may not be many more summers to come.

This was a news item I heard this morning on the public radio station.

It wasn’t the main news item.

They led with an explanation of the muted celebrations of America’s 250th birthday, and how they were marred by a sense that the Republic may be on the verge of falling apart from within.

They followed that up with an update on the World Cup. The insects came third.

Tuning into the morning news over the past week I’ve heard about the ongoing genocide in Gaza (never called that, of course, and always toward the end of the news block – it’s an afterthought now if it’s thought about at all).

I’ve heard about the president of the world’s largest economy earning himself north of $2 billion last year through naked criminal activity, and about the total lack of consequences he faces as a result.

I’ve heard about people protesting the building of data centres to serve the massive and ecosystem-destroying energy requirements of AI, a technology that has no real justification to exist outside of niche medical and technical applications that would require a tiny fraction of the electricity Big Tech is pushing for.

I’ve also heard a lot about the World Cup, often as the most important item in the lineup; a sporting event that I’ve been enjoying, but that seems like it should pale in comparison to the incredibly consequential signals of system failure coming at us from all sides.

Who is this system for?

The news is a part of the infrastructure that helps to socialize us on an ongoing basis: to teach us “this is what is normal; this is how the world works and what is worth paying attention to.”

For most of my life, I didn’t question these conventions much. At times I was irritated with their tendency to gloss over some things and focus on others.

Generally, though, the basic premise of “media professionals are experts who are qualified to bring us the information we need” seemed pretty sound.

I was one of those professionals, kind of, for a while. I worked for Canada’s national broadcaster for three years – not on the news side of the business, but in broadcasting, helping the late-night audience make some sense of their world while hopefully being entertained.

Everyone I worked with did what they did in good faith, with an earnest desire to tell meaningful stories and deliver the audience something worth watching.

And at the time – I left in 2014 – the stakes felt pretty low. The news was just as myopic about a lot of what was going on in the world, but it wasn’t as if we, the privileged and comfortable who were receiving it, had that much to worry about.

That was a large part of the implied message: yes, bad things are happening, here and abroad, but they all fit the pattern. The system is in place; negative stuff takes place here and there, but all’s basically right with the world.

Nowadays, that story seems ridiculous. Nothing is okay. Everything is breaking down. We’ve pushed too far on every front, all at once, and the safe, distanced view of far-off tragedies is rapidly getting too close for comfort.

This is not new.

Of course, the message “everything is basically fine, keep watching the footie” was always a lie.

Genocides, environmental collapse, the disenfranchisement and abandonment and betrayal of communities within our own borders, the absolute power of a tiny minority of the very rich… these are not new innovations.

For most of my life, I’ve had the immense privilege of not needing to know about any of it. And so I haven’t.

The role of almost everything we see and hear is to reinforce the idea that the system is normal and basically good. There are wrinkles, of course, but this is the way things are supposed to be.

It’s not a conspiracy, it’s human nature matching billionaires’ needs.

I don’t view this as a giant conspiracy, exactly.

It’s absolutely the case that this state of affairs – algorithms and news outlets and an education system that work together to keep every citizen in line and believing that things are working pretty well just as they are – serves the ends of the rich and powerful.

And in some cases, the rich and powerful put their fingers on the scale to ensure this keeps happening.

For the most part, though, I think this is human nature surfacing at a societal level.

I don’t believe that most journalists, for instance, are in the pockets of billionaires and trying to further their dominance. Everyone I know who works in that space is trying to tell the truth. That’s harder than it looks, though.

Some truths require questioning the entire underpinning of our society. They cut against everything we’ve been taught since birth. They will not meet existing editorial standards, or fit the approved curriculum.

The system itself is the water in which we all swim, and few of us are willing to go through the unutterable pain of evolving primitive limbs, dragging ourselves on shore, raggedly breathing air, and looking back to describe the scene from above.

A new perspective is brutally painful.

I’ve been following Roger Hallam, a UK climate activist who has spent significant time in prison for refusing to accept the status quo.

He recently helped found “4 Billion Dead,” a comfortingly named organization that is gathering people around the world together to try and make the general populace and our governments aware of what is happening.

Half the human population will be dead in a few decades if we don’t act now. Or yesterday.

And while I am following him, and subscribed to the organization’s newsletter, I’d rather not be.

I’d rather believe that everything will work out in the end. That my children will grow up on a livable planet, eating well, shopping, having kids of their own.

This is the massive force that drives our media coverage, our content consumption, our approach to our daily lives.

No individual can fix the sickness of the system.

Facing up to the reality that the system is, in fact, designed to crush the human spirit, murder hundreds of thousands of children globally right now and closer to a billion in the coming years in the cruellest possible fashion, all to increase the wealth of the already-impossibly-wealthy… it’s beyond unpleasant.

We are all implicated. We cannot keep living this way because doing so is signing a death warrant for all we hold dear, every day that we do it.

And yet, none of us can change it through individual action.

The only way to make a difference is for policies and laws to change (for the better, globally), for the governments we elect to serve the actual needs of our species and our children, and by so doing, force all of us to use fewer resources, have fewer comforts and distractions, and distribute the wealth we have to those who have less.

I can’t tell you how bad the preceding paragraph is as a political platform. I don’t have to; you already know.

No one would vote for it, and if that imagined candidate and party actually won, they would have a single term and be replaced by the most shamelessly capitalist group imaginable.

A framework for change.

All this is pretty bleak. I wish I could conclude with an idea of “but don’t worry, here’s what we can do.”

I don’t have that.

What I have been developing is a different framework for thinking about politics and systems thinking for societies.

I’ve been reading about health and diet lately, and particularly the work of Dr. Ray Peat, a biologist and professor with a rabid following, whose work and experimentation upends basically all the advice I’ve ever heard about diet, exercise, and health.

One of his followers (also an accomplished professor and practitioner) talks about how mainstream medical education, which takes eight years and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, generally includes a total of one hour dedicated to diet and nutrition.

The guidance offered in that hour boils down to: tell people to eat what the government guidelines say. If they do that, they should be good.

This seems insane to me. Diet is one of the most important aspects of health. What and how we eat determines not just our physical health, but our mental and spiritual wellbeing as well, and the likelihood that we will get sick and need medication.

The medical profession isn’t generally focused on this, though. They study for eight years how to treat people once they’re already sick.

I wonder how much healthier our world would be if, say, four of those years were focused on preventive medicine. On learning how people can eat, move, and live in tune with their bodies needs.

Would we all live longer? Get sick less? Require fewer medications? Live and die better?

We would. This would be terrible news, of course, for the pharmaceutical industry (which earns trillions on people being very, very ill) and the industrial food industry (whose entire business model relies on selling people food that causes obesity, illness, and misery).

And so the medical profession remains focused on waiting until our terrible, but “normal,” lifestyle catches up with us, and then prescribing drugs to mitigate the worst effects.

Preventive health for our societies.

This is how we need to think about fixing what ails us.

Of course we can all continue to advocate for particular causes, and fight against the many injustices we see. I don’t intend to stop doing this.

Sometimes, though, it feels like bringing a Band-Aid to the aftermath of a nuclear detonation.

We need to diagnose not the symptoms of our sick world, but the causes, and then find ways to address those. Here are three that

• Digital media, as controlled by Big Tech, is making all of us stupider, more susceptible to addictive capitalist consumption, and incredibly passive and malleable (not to mention the supposed “need” for massive data centres that are going to speed up the already incredibly accelerated death of our climate system).

• Money in politics means that the actual decision makers are not the people we elect, but the people who contribute to their campaigns and tell them what they can and cannot do.

• Corporate control of our food system is not only destroying our individual health, but maintaining a factory farming approach that is horrifically cruel to animals and inestimably destructive to the environment.

It may seem impossible to conceive of changing this system, when all the incentives are set up to reward leaders who bow to moneyed corporate interests. But people like Zohran Mamdani in New York show me what is possible.

A person who genuinely enters public service to serve the public, and whose beliefs are not for sale or abandoned at the first sign of difficulty or friction, may be able to make a real difference.

If such a person, supported by policymakers and functionaries who are working toward the same goal, can deliver on a better life for their citizens — not necessarily better in the sense of “more capitalistically indulgent,” but in the sense of “more livable and kind” — perhaps that can create a hunger for more.

Perhaps when people start to experience a healthier society, they will feel it and want more of it.

The way things are going right now doesn’t feel good to anyone, I don’t think. We need to change it, and we will need some brave, unshakeable people to stand up for humanity against the inhuman interests that are currently dominating us.

I hope that as the younger generations come of age, more of them will say “we do not accept things as they are. This water is poisoned. I’m going to drag myself on land and look for ways to clean up this mess. Who’s coming with me?”

I’ve been having a lot of conversations with friends and acquaintances who work in the charity and not-for-profit sector lately, and realizing how little I really understand about the work they do.

I used to work for a charity, but a bit of a fancy one (the Toronto International Film Festival). I was peripherally involved in their fundraising efforts, but I was never in the trenches trying to convince people to give money to support film and the people who make it.

Those I’m speaking to now work for charities focused on social justice and medical issues: taking action on climate change for the sake of our children, preventing those raised in the foster care system from falling into homelessness, improving medical outcomes across Africa.

Their causes are all critically important, but I never hear about their organizations in my daily life.

What I’d like to do is bring some of the techniques that I use in my day job (marketing strategy) to bear in helping spread the word about charitable initiatives, and to enlist others in my profession to do the same.

But before I can make any progress on that, I need to understand how little I understand.

Don’t call it marketing.

One insight I received early on is that most people who work in the not-for-profit space see “marketing” as a dirty word.

I understand. Most people I know who work in marketing see marketing as a dirty word.

Late-stage capitalism is ugly and awful and anti-human, and marketing is the engine that powers a lot of it.

Those dedicating their lives to improving the lives of others are right to be suspicious of a profession dedicated to extracting the last shreds of people’s already fractured attention in service of faceless, evil mega-corporations.

With all of that said… people’s attention really has been hijacked by constant digital bombardment, and if your organization isn’t a part of that mix, you’re far less likely to make the list of things people will consider donating to.

The same thing is true in the exciting (ahem) world of business-to-business marketing: although most companies that sell to other companies do the most basic, average marketing, studies have shown that the most successful are the ones who make their brands known more broadly, beyond the dull confines of B2B.

We are creatures driven by familiarity and recognition, so one step has to be getting your name and idea into human brains.

But none of that is even the thing.

I was explaining this to another acquaintance — the father of a kid on my son’s soccer team — who works with medical charities in Africa, and he listened very politely to my thoughts and then informed me that, in his work, the point actually isn’t getting individuals to care.

Throughout his career, he’s continually learned that real change doesn’t come from individuals pooling their money or volunteering their time.

His organization spent years helping locals in various African countries become volunteer doctors and nurses in their communities. These were incredible people: smart, caring, talented, tireless. But they were working basically for free, and the need was infinitely larger than they could possibly meet.

Since then, his organization has pivoted to working with corporate health donors and governments who have deep enough pockets that they can afford to pay people a good living wage to provide medical care, as well as setting them up with proper equipment and facilities.

The goal is no longer to ask concerned locals to shoulder the incredible burden of improving health outcomes in exchange for a tiny stipend and the sense of a job well done. It’s about setting up a system in which people are employed and supported in the work of helping others stay well.

There’s got to be something we can do. I want to figure out what it is.

It’s been a lot of fun discovering my own ignorance in this area. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the surface yet, but every conversation I have shifts my perspective and presents me with a new understanding of the landscape and the possibilities.

I still believe there’s some potential at the intersection of marketing and not-for-profit work. I work with so many smart, talented humans who are privately disgusted with how they spend their time.

We’re part of the system that’s making the world worse in myriad ways. It pays pretty well. It’s sometimes fun work to do. But it’s not the best use of our abilities.

I want to see what the things we know might be capable of if we were to point them in a different direction.

Can we market ideas and actions that will prevent harm? Can we get people excited about things that actually matter?

I have no idea. But it sounds like a fun challenge.

If you have any thoughts about this, or any knowledge to share, please send me a message or leave a comment. I’m going to need all the help I can get.

This instrumental is called “Assembly.” I wrote it in 2024.

This will be a short post.

I’ve been pushing hard lately. It’s Sunday night. I’m very tired.

I’m feeling tender and vulnerable and a little bit lonely. Those feelings haven’t had anywhere to go, or any way to come out of me, of late.

I haven’t made time and space to simply feel what I’m feeling.

I’ve been around other people pretty much constantly. People I love, and who love me, sure.

But sometimes you need to give yourself the gift of solitude, no matter how much you might like the folks you’re with.

Maybe sometimes also the gift of collapsing, if that’s what has to happen.

I am no Bukowski.

This feeling of having so much tenderness inside and not being able to release it reminds me of the poem “Bluebird” by Charles Bukowski.

Here are the opening lines:

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.
there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

I have not been pouring whiskey on anything. Nor smoking cigarettes, nor chatting to bartenders or sex workers. Occasionally grocery clerks, but in a much more polite and less consciously masculine way than Bukowski probably did.

Still, I appreciate his awareness, later in life, that a lot of what he did was designed to conceal the fragile, lovely, earnest truth that lay inside him: he had a bird in his heart.

I am, if you’ve ever read one of my Substack posts, not exactly the “hiding his pain behind a mask of whiskey-soaked bravado” type.

But sometimes I do wake up and realize I’ve been pushing myself forward through life and trying everything in my power not to admit that I’m in pain.

Let it fly. Let it cry.

I was hoping to find some time today to go for a walk and maybe listen to some deliberately misery-inducing music and let myself feel as bad as I needed to feel. I think, perhaps, on the other side of a few self-pity sessions, might lie a degree of relief and recovery.

That time did not arrive. It’s late now. I need to be in bed soon.

So I guess this is my walk. Thanks for joining me on it.

I’ve thought a lot lately about knowing what you really want, and being who you really are. I suppose this one is about feeling what you really feel.

I’d like to not feel this way. It’s deeply unpleasant, certainly not productive, and it makes me long to feel almost anything else.

It’s also what’s happening right now. I am allowed to feel it. I am allowed to write a self-indulgent and dull post about it. I am allowed to not be okay, and to wish I were better.

The bluebird in my heart is hopping around with a broken wing today. He can probably still make it into the air; even if not, he can always sing a mournful song and by so doing reaffirm his existence.

Peace arrives when it can, as does everything else.

I am trying to welcome the ugliness of this feeling into my body, to let it be here as long as it needs to, and to listen to what it has to tell me.

I’m sorry you have to listen along with me.

Hopefully I’ll be back to writing things that are a little more interesting soon.

For now, if you have a bluebird in your heart, try to let him out now and then to have a nice flight and maybe sob a little.

And don’t be afraid to tell your bartender all about it.