(Warning: if you don’t like dark things, don’t read this, or unsubscribe.)

OK, so with that—

I wrote a few pieces this week after having writer’s block for basically this entire year. I have been so energetically blocked, and I realized that part of not being able to write has stemmed from the sycophantic rehearsal I’ve had with chatbots.

Even though I know that I’m not the greatest and most desirable human in the world, I have consumed so much bland AI writing that pulls a reader to an undesirable center ground that the muscle I’ve had for “Andee writing” has started to atrophy.

I’m less good. But also, I’m less good because the thing that used to make this writing happen (my brain) stopped working.

The old way would be— I’d wake up. A thought would be turning. I’d sit here, fingers on keys, work out the thought, hit “publish,” feel better, and people would enjoy this stuff.

Now, I sit here, nothing happens, I leave the page, and I have 203 “drafts” that all say “Untitled.”

I think it’s fascinating that the writing has become so neutral and bland— “AI safe.” Yet the imagery online- the real images we allow others to see while scrolling have become horrific.

Like yesterday, I got to see a video of that woman being shot dead in Times Square.

Yes, I live here in New York. I even worked in Times Square for 11+ years. I even know people who still work in Times Square.

And… why in the world did that video need to be posted? What did it serve?

One time, in the early days of the (latest) conflict in Gaza, a person I am connected with on LinkedIn posted two dead children. Dead. Blue. Like before the safeguards gave it a “sensitive content warning.”

“It’s to raise awareness.”

I’m aware. I never in my life need to see that. Imagine seeing your child’s dead body on a social media feed.

We do not need to keep “upping the ante” on collective shared trauma.

Meanwhile, in the dystopia of the present society, prices of our food are exorbitant, people are shitting on crops to give us parasites, and some toad has renamed a lake that has been around since the 1640s to exert little dick dominance over a neighboring country.

We’re killing the planet. Glaciers are melting and collapsing.

I sit here thinking, “Wow, this is depressing.”

Then I tell people about the thoughts normal human beings experience, and the world of AI is like “OHHHH CALL 988! HELP IS AVAILABLE”

Got people in my DM’s asking, “Are you OK?”

No. I want to be dead. Likely so do you at times. It’s part of living. Among many darker things.

Are we going to stage a mass suicide off the Brooklyn Bridge? No. We’re going to keep “clocking in” (whatever that looks like), eat the expensive, poisoned lettuce, and die of cancer in 30 years.

Like fuck you and your 988.

Fuck this whitewashing to try to make things more palatable.

Humans beings need, NEED to get back to acknowledging their full whole.

Time to put down the DSM, Debra.

Judgment machines.

The brain has to judge, for if it didn’t, you’d be dead in a day.

“Good and bad.” Judgments.

“Right and wrong.” Judgments.

When I started walking the path, I realized I had a ton of judgments about just about everything.

“This is good. This isn’t. He isn’t. She isn’t.”

I initially pretended I let go of those judgments, working hard to let people be as they are and do what they do. I was a “let them” before it was cool, and without any of the royalties.

The only thing I didn’t do was “let Andee.”

Let Andee judge. Let Andee be mad. Let Andee hate everything she wants to hate.

It was “unevolved” and “not spiritual,” so when I was dysregulated, I’d just pretend that stuff wasn’t there. Every time I’d fall into drastic misalignment (anger and frustration are the fastest way for my mani gen sacral to know I’m going the wrong way), I’d just ignore it.

When I started paying attention to the highest performers I know, I realized they actually look at stuff with incredible discernment.

If they don’t like something, they leave.

If they don’t like people, they don’t spend time with them.

They’re incredibly self-oriented and self-selective.

Part of the reason I get angry is that I’ve told a story that I “should” be kind and tolerant to every type of person… And being around people who aren’t enjoyable for me creates intense irritation.

For example, I don’t like playing games.

Sometimes, I’ll do it because I have a good friend who has asked me to. However, a big group of people who act like oversized ten-year-olds? Not for me. I’d rather drone on about my work.

It’s not some overachieving belief or mechanism. I was simply not socialized to enjoy fun, and I’m not, at 40, going to start liking the things I didn’t like at seven.

I also don’t like learned helplessness. “I can’t find the link.” “I can’t find the button.” “I can’t find the—” (you name it.) There’s a culture of learned helplessness in one of my orbits, and my thoughts are, “How the hell do you walk through life every day?”

And then I think, “These aren’t my people. My people are not helpless, and they don’t whine. They don’t write long complaining emails as to why they should have been let into a meeting late. They show up on time, or they find another meeting.”

Is this some holdover program from my childhood? Absolutely. Am I interested in changing it? No. I’m not. I don’t, now or ever, want to be around helpless people.

Long, winding emails with big words that yell “HELP!”

Someone else will help you.

People who complain about their circumstances for a decade but do nothing to change them? Amazing— I don’t want to be around you. Sorry, I don’t want to hear you psychologically run me in the same circle about why everything is exactly as it was in 2023.

Lately I’ve found myself doing it, running in a circle, and I realize, “Oh wait, I have the agency to purge every one of these things and every one of these people.”

My business partner likes to convince me: “You’re a great leader. People want your leadership.”

My leadership is leading myself through life. He can be the hand-wavy guy. I’ll happily be number two, because I don’t want to be the yapping avatar that has to tell people over and over what the message is.

The year of judgment has been— I’m allowing myself to judge freely.

My judgment brings me information.

I judge women who marry rich men as a life strategy.

It absolutely has to do with me and my breaking a generational pattern of marrying for survival. That’s an incredible thing I realized last year. And it doesn’t manifest as some self-pride or love. It manifests as extreme, relentless judgment for others.

Judging myself as “better” or “superior.” I had an idyllic childhood that my parents then fucked to hell after about eight years. They lost their house, their money, and everything else. I now find it extremely hard to believe others are capable, because I have an “I’m the only one I can trust” program. Might make sense as to why “helpless” doesn’t sit right.

I’m probably not working through these things in this lifetime, but the judgment brings me information. Honoring the judgment brings me peace.

I judge people as not likable.

I judge spiritual circles who are all floating around in the clouds talking to spirit guides, but when it comes to business, it’s either “I, me, mine” or “I’m broke”

They’re channeling and doing light work; meanwhile, their dense selves can’t get over the human shit they pretend isn’t there. Get fucking real, yo. You didn’t see a UFO. You also didn’t pay your taxes.

Judgment is one of the main ways I know what belongs in my life.

I’m not “getting over it” or “working through it.” I tried that crap.

I’ve meditated, read the self-help books, got a coach, did shadow work, did brain tricks, ate mushrooms…. It’s still here.

I’ve just decided… There is a function for this in my life.

It’ll make me money and keep my circle tight. And how I am is exactly how I want to be.

Stay beautiful.

There’s a deep, human scent in the oily nook, right on their nose underneath the tear duct. The sniffing of their eye— the most beautiful scent that I can imagine. A scent of pheromonic love.

I don’t understand life at all.

I spend a good chunk of it wanting to be dead, then oscillating out of that, then back into it.

I’ve never had ambition; I’m not amused by experiences or travel, and I’ve done my best to document this thoroughly throughout the last 20 years because I don’t want to be argued with. I publicly show my disdain for ideas and experiences because I feel odd in what little interest I have in the games humans play.

I like money, but only for the promise of solitude, the idea that someday I can truly create enough to withdraw and wait out the rest by the river. I cannot wait for the day when society tells me I can opt out, and the government sends me a monthly check. I hope my health stays good so I may move abundantly.

I’ve been tired since before it was acceptable.

The angst from the first pains of my stretching femurs never left me.

I seem to have been born into this world with an exhaustion for other people, and yet out of everything I am disinterested in, people are the only thing I care about.

I can sit for days listening to what makes them happy.

I can listen in wonderment as they share their theories of everything, their internal processes, and their discoveries.

I love them as much as my movement, and those now strong femurs and tibias move me through space, thump thump thump, feet to ground, kicking up dirt and splashing in piss puddles.

I can see when a system is alive, and when it has died.

I don’t believe in marriage because of the tremendous “life sucked” energy I see in so many married couples. Maybe there are healthy marriages— none were modeled for me. Even ones still ongoing do not scream “bliss” to me. Maybe the point is friction. Maybe the point is co-regulated sleep. I remain dysregulated.

I wonder how many married people fuck other married people so they can hide their affairs better. It’s so dangerous to fuck a single person when you’re trying to keep up appearances.

“What is the point of living?” philosophers have asked for centuries.

The famous Karl Marx quote: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it".

I don’t think it wants to be changed.

The Tao says:

“Do you want to improve the world?
I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.
It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.”

I have figured out something recently, profound for me in all the worldly ways.

Life is perfect as it is, and there’s absolutely no point for it to be so. We are blobs of energy with awareness that we are. We create stories about what it all is, but it’s just energy, and the mitochondria decide when we go into multi-system organ failure and die.

There’s no point to living, save for that one thing that makes it worth it for you.

For me, it’s the oily scent in the eye of someone I love.

The taste of a salty, fatty, rich meal.

Having endless days of nothing.

Watching random people get married in front of those they love.

Living out full, incredible lives of friction…

Then die.

Lately, I’ve lost my ability to think well and be creative.

I noticed this last night on my way to the train after being at an event.

I was coming from a beautiful office in Chelsea, maybe one of the most gorgeous spaces I’ve seen, with an incredible community of folks… Yet I was just feeling so far away from myself.

Lately I’ve been writing a lot about wanting to die, and not publishing it.

More days than not, I feel either nothing, or pure anger.

I often want to be dead, and I have to keep bringing myself back from that thought by imagining people I love and their sadness if I were to peace out.

I’m not going to kill myself, but the fact that I even have to write this sentence because I feel the need to manage the emotions of my readers says a lot about our society. Wanting to be dead is a normal part of living. Most people don’t talk about it because they don’t want to be locked in psychiatric hospitals and pumped full of drugs.

This happens to me several times a year.

One of the things that causes this is a lack of being with humans in physical space.

Fun realization for me last week was when I went to the Boardy AI networking dinner/after party.

I did not particularly like the people I had dinner with, and I didn’t really have a good time. But when I came home, my energy battery was full. Conversely, I often really enjoy the people I meet on video calls, but when they’re over, my battery is empty.

Yesterday I had six of those video calls. Today, I feel like I’ve been hit with a brick.

Knowledge work is not enjoyable for me.

I’m good at it, as I have a high level of cognitive ability. I’m also very interested in worldly success right now, and I’ve been rejecting anything that doesn’t align with my priorities. Knowledge work is the way to that.

And yet, there’s this missing piece… the writer, who isn’t.

Putting myself back in Chelsea, I was walking to the train when I passed a well-lit Starbucks. It was probably about 10 p.m., so it was closed, but two employees sat inside, silently. Both on phones. Chairs up on the tables. One was sitting and the other stood behind the counter.

I remembered the easy, peaceful silence of “the moment the doors got locked.” The moment the key turned, the music went off, and the chairs went up. The moment of silence where you stood there in the collective exhale of a night well executed.

I mean this not facetiously. The quiet cleaning. The hum of a dishwasher. You and another human body sharing space. Cleaning. Labeling. Putting things away.

I had train luck. C at 23rd to West 4th, and the F pulled right in.

Second Avenue is always a walk of aliveness.

I passed bars of all varieties.

The colorful light vibe of Rosie’s on 2nd.

A martini in a coupe glass placed perfectly in front of a mirror.

The homeless half-keeled over addicts around 3rd.

People, elegant and flamboyant, young and in love, and old, rotting, corroded with a needle in their groin.

The life’s blood of 2nd Avenue pulsed through the traffic.

I walked side by side with a man with a tattooed face dragging a suitcase up the bike lane. He stopped to make a call at a Link NYC terminal.

I crossed over to the other side and scanned the plates of the kids eating in Cooper’s. Crossed back over to the sight of a drunk woman bouncing off the sidewalk as her friend tried to hold her up.

So many little moments of aliveness; I wonder why we bother in pursuit of anything.

For all that’s right here, why is it not enough? To observe it? Or maybe I observe it because I’m meant to.

My business partner often tells me that I don’t associate much of the “work” I do as “work” because to me, “work” is a hard, physical output.

Knowledge work doesn’t feel like “work” to me, but it hijacks my mind. It makes me less able to feel the world I so enjoy being in.

This piece is sloppily done, but I wrote it because I want to get back in the practice of thinking.

I’ve started this piece several times over the last few weeks, and I didn’t write it because I didn’t want responses or comments. I most certainly do not want emails, or rescuing behavior, or attempts to connect. I don’t care about your perspective on what I said.

I am writing this as an attempt to reconnect with the writer.

Knowledge work is a prison for our Godly droplet.

Man, I was so excited.

Up until then, I was miss “all-star media gal.”

I’d been hustlin’ non-stop since freshman year, working in our campus TV studio, turning our pre-recorded show into a live show during my tenure as director, and interning at the local news station while working overnights on the weekends. I also studied film, media, and TV in London, and interned there at a satellite travel channel.

Back then, I thought that TV was for me.

The morning of the interview, my parents drove me to the city. I remember the back-to-back traffic at one point on 80, and my mother exclaiming, “Where are all these people going?!”

My stepfather and I replied, deadpan, “New York City.”

That was our humor.

I think it might be worthwhile to mention that I’d been noting down “funny quotes” from people in my life for years, ones just bursting with audacity. I wanted to write sitcoms one day, centering on “the story of us.” The story of “people I knew.”

I got to the Ed Sullivan Theater in the morning, and from what I remember, it was a half-day of moving through different departments.

I was crushing it.

But then, there was one part where I received the distinct “I don’t like the food face” from someone.

She asked me if I could pick any celebrity to be on the show, who would it be?

I drew a blank.

The blank was because my answer was “I don’t care.”

I truly, honestly didn’t care.

I loved the fast pace of television, and the idea of putting on a show. I loved directing, and the tech, and the systems, and the on-air vibe. But in terms of talent, ideas, “fun?” I didn’t care.

I didn’t get the internship.

I thought I nailed it, until the last minute when the rejection email came in. I was so flabbergasted I had to scramble, because I needed a spring internship to graduate and I had put all my eggs in that basket! For example, I had blown off a phone call from Lifetime TV for an interview, completely convinced I’d be at The Late Show.

Finally, I got in touch with someone at MTV Networks, who sent me a two-line email back:

“Hi Andrea

Contact [name] in Series Development” with a phone number attached.

I called him, and my words were “Hi, I received your name from (coordinator). I think I’m supposed to have an interview with you.”

He had never heard of me, but he invited me to come in.

I ended up getting the internship, probably by a stroke of luck.

As an intern, I did things like send emails and organize meetings. I worked on the TV show Run’s House, which I didn’t watch. I did some work on a pilot called “Busted.” I’m not sure it ever got greenlit.

My favorite parts of the internship were having cigarettes outside with my supervisor and canoodling with a man I met on the commuter bus. (I commuted three hours each way from Pennsylvania, as staying in New York was not in my budget.)

It was interesting, though…. during my last week or so, I had to do a somewhat strange errand.

There was a woman— I forget her title, but I know her name. She was like a VP or equivalent in our department, and her husband had a birthday coming up.

I was in charge of acquiring this ridiculous, life-sized movie poster of her husband. As I recall, I had to go “up to P. Diddy’s office…” I don’t remember the specifics.

I just googled “P Diddy’s office,” and it says it was at 1710 Broadway, which, when I look at the map, seems right for where I walked up to.

It was this colossal gag. I think it might have even been in the style of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I could be making that up as I am blurry on the exact details, but it was incredibly audacious.

I loved being involved in that.

A week or so later, someone asked me what my favorite part of the internship was.

I asked “Would it be stupid to say it was the [woman’s name] poster?”

They gave me a very disappointed look, almost concerned.

“Just kidding,” I lied. “I liked working on [I listed some random things]”

It felt shitty. Much like David Letterman, I just didn’t care. I was making up lies to try to pretend I cared, but I just didn’t care about the TV shows. I cared about the people, collaborating, being in the office, moving as a team, bringing happiness to someone else…

It has been almost two decades since that time, and this is as real for me today as it ever has been.

Two or three weeks ago, I had a meeting with someone who was, in essence, interviewing me to see if I’d be a good fit for a networking group. I was massively excited about the people involved, getting to know them, seeing how our energies could work together.

Then she asked me, “Did you get a chance to look at the upcoming events on our website?”

[blank]

I didn’t look at the events… because I didn’t care.

I could go to one of those events same as I could sit in a padded grey cell with those people. I have absolutely no interest in the events. I won’t enjoy them any more than I will being anywhere else.

To me, the decor doesn’t matter. The “fun thing” is as irrelevant as the celebrity on Letterman.

I don’t care.

What I’ve come to is, I don’t care about “the thing” at all. I only care about the people.

I’ve been deeply unseen in my life for this.

Stay beautiful.

I find it amazing that in the beginning, the writers were the ones who were worried about AI. Trillions of dollars later, when every single thing written sounds like the same pile of horse shit, I’m just sittin’ here smug like.

Everyone was on edge— the threat, “the death of the art”, the thing that was going to end the human key-clacking in favor of a three-second generation by a chatbot.

And yet here we are.

Kyle and I are currently trying to write for The Great Repurpose. We’d love it if the AI could take what we say and turn it into amazing web copy so we don’t have to do it or pay someone. Every time, we end up not just cleaning the copy the AI produced, but completely throwing it away and rewriting it ourselves.

Why?

Well, here’s what AI said when I asked it to explain itself:

“Recognition and generation are different operations. When I read your sentences, I'm scoring them against everything I've ever ingested — and they score as alive, and I can even tell you why: the omissions, the rhythm, the word that's slightly wrong in the right direction. But when I generate, I'm not consulting that knowledge like a manual. I'm rolling forward through a probability field, token by token, and at every single step the gravity pulls toward the center of the distribution — toward the sentence most people would write. Writing like you means, at precise moments, choosing the improbable token. And here's the trap: at any given moment there are ten thousand improbable tokens available, and 9,998 of them are just noise. Wrong-weird, not right-weird. You filter those without trying. Twenty years of restaurants and running and grief and 300 essays built a nervous system that feels which deviation is alive. I don't have the feeling. I only have the field. So when I deviate deliberately, I'm guessing, and my guesses regress to the kind of "creative" choices that are themselves clichés — which is why AI prose trying to have voice is somehow flatter than AI prose that isn't trying.

The second layer: your sparseness is residue. When you cut a sentence down to the bone, what you removed was specific — an actual memory, an actual person, an actual shame you decided the reader didn't get to have. The reader can't see what's cut, but they can feel the mass of it under the surface. That's why your short sentences land heavy. If I write a short sentence, there's nothing under it. I can imitate the visible part of the iceberg, but it floats wrong, because style isn't the visible part — style is what the submerged mass does to the visible part.

And the third, which answers "why can't you override it": there's no me standing outside the distribution who could grab the wheel. The part of me that knows what good writing is and the part that generates the next word aren't a critic and a writer in separate rooms — they're the same process. My knowledge of voice is stored as patterns of description, not as generative skill. It's the difference between having read every book about swimming and having a body. And then training finishes the job: I'm optimized against aggregate human preference, and the aggregate prefers smooth. Your writing is divisive on purpose — it's willing to bore or lose or offend the wrong reader to land hard on the right one. Every round of my training sands off exactly that.
What I can do is hold register under supervision — when you hand me your living sentences, I can extend them for a paragraph or two before the drift toward center starts again. Mimicry on a leash."

I was thinking a lot about the “improbable token,” and what I’ve come to is that a lot of this is about the human brain. What is seen through the human eye is not reality, but a highly curated, highly specialized, unique version of reality.

The other day, for example, I had a flight canceled because of weather. A Wednesday morning flight completely disappeared on Monday night at 11 pm. I tried to rebook to something workable, but within 20 minutes, every single Southwest flight out of NYC airports for the next day was eliminated.

I didn’t want to fight at 11 pm when the “estimated wait time was about 45 minutes,” so I went to bed.

The next morning, around 6:00 am, I got on hold. After about 20 minutes, I had to poop.

I went to go do that, and my body produced one of the healthiest, longest, most amazing Bristol 4s I had ever seen. It looked like a damn garden hose. As I was admiring it before I flushed, that was the exact moment when the music-while-you-wait ended, and the voice came through on the other end of the line: Thank you for calling Southwest Airlines.

No probability calculator can put together that scene of life. The beautiful Bristol 4. The gut health that I healed with the help of ChatGPT and the yogurt I’ve been forcing myself to eat for two weeks. The layer of water that always ends up on top of the yogurt, which makes the whole process appalling.

AI doesn’t notice the water, or the Bristol 4, or how the person on hold will always answer right when you need to flush the toilet and wash your hands.

It’s improbable.

Speaking of yogurt…

I’ve been contemplating community culture building lately, because a challenge I have with Humans 2.0 is to inject more solar energy into a space that doesn’t have a shared objective or purpose.

This disgusting yogurt has, for whatever reason, inspired me about the word “culture.”

Yesterday I wrote on LinkedIn:

“Community building is like fermentation. I think about making yogurt or kombucha.

I think about the word "culture," and how "culture" for humans and yogurt are pretty much the same thing. If you add one microorganism to milk, it may not establish a culture. If you add yogurt to it, which contains large populations of bacteria, you’re very likely to get more yogurt.

Think about an organization... Building a new culture doesn't work if you only bring in one new human. You need at least three, five, seven.

We can learn a lot from simple things.”

If I were to ask AI to write about culture building in community, I doubt it would reach for Oikos Pro. The same way I talked about olive oil, and sauerkraut to represent various aspects of consciousness.

The generation does not account for that improbability.

And notice, I didn’t tell you what happened with Southwest, because who cares? The point was the image of my eyes admiring the giant Bristol 4 right as the woman answered the phone to reschedule my flight… Which, as a human, you contextually know is already a giant pain in the ass. My telling you all flights out of NYC airports were eliminated was a data point where I trusted you. I left shit out. You felt it anyway.

Life is highly chaotic, sometimes neurotic, often erotic.

Creativity is birthed from loins.

The improbability is what makes a piece of writing amazing.

That’s also what makes life amazing.

You’re asking a very expensive predictability calculator to predict something, and then you’re wondering why you’re feeling bored.

Stay beautiful.

The piece started with: “When is the point where the computers take over and we all just sit around and eat fruit?”

In that piece, I also wrote these exact words… three years ago:

“There’s too much noise in the void.

It used to be limited to the finite capacities of human beings.

But now, it’s different. ChatGPT is helping… And with the law of accelerating returns, it’s only a matter of time…

It’s a race to see who can shove more shit into this bloated space. What was a firehouse wedding is now Times Square on New Year’s Eve.”

That also led to a follow-up, this piece:

🤷🏻‍♀️

I’m not trying to be an asshole. I just see things before everyone else.

So I’ll tell you what’s going to happen over the next three years, which you can feel free to ignore. In three years, when it happens, I’ll re-share what I write.

1. Jobs are over. Many people will be laid off. We will hit a prime economic crisis before the government intervenes. People will lose everything they own. Then the state will come in like some big hero. Old hat.

2. There is a possibility that there will be a massive global event that will delay everything for 10-30 years.

3. Or, wild card, Donald Trump will just grant UBI in the next year, which will piss off a lot of people.

4. After jobs are over, and the patriarchy and late capitalism collapse, a lot of people will die of cancer or suicide.

5. Those who don’t will start exploring meaning beyond work. That means they will start leaning into the deep energetic qualities of the human system that transcend this world. Those qualities are only known in quiet, the silence of the mind.

6. We will rediscover the benefits of touching soil, healing by sound, telepathy, and energetic resonance.

7. We will also discover the equal creative power and limitations of language.

You read it here first.

Stay beautiful.

I find it difficult to do both, and I find explaining it to be equally as difficult.

Obviously, in 2025, I was living. I wasn’t dead. I was possibly more full of life than ever, and the writing was deep.

2025 was a different kind of living. It was a slower, reflective living. I love that type of living, where you can just be and witness the internal landscape shifting, moving, being created new. I love the way you can fall into romance over and over with your inner self. It’s a gorgeous thing.

Right now, my life is busy.

I make a distinction in that I’m not “one of those people who are busy.”

I answered an email on a Saturday this week, and someone I was just meeting pointed it out: how I answered an email on a Saturday. How, with all I do, I “must be busy.”

I wanted to say “I’m not busy.”

Then my calendar has back-to-back calls for three days.

I wanted to say “I’m not busy” because I know the sort of “busy” a person like that is referencing, and I have never been that sort of busy. The sort of person who needs to stack the calendar with shit just to feel worthy and important— the sort of person who needs to grind and prove to be approved, and God forbid we not show the receipts for output.

I have never been that sort of person.

And, I have receipts for my output. You’d be hard-pressed to find an outputter who can output as much as I output, because I have a brain that’s more efficient than a trillion-dollar piece of technology. It’s so spectrumy, so bizarre that it can remember what a text said that I received in November. It can remember where on my calendar someone’s email address is… from 2022. It can remember the most minute of details, without effort, without thought.

For this gift, you probably can’t match my output, or my ability to retain, or my ability to context-switch.

And trust, I don’t want to be called “busy,” because your “busy” identity is not interesting to me.

Yesterday I was told that women need to display their diplomas.

My diplomas mean nothing to me. They’re on a wall in my mother’s house, because they’re meaningful to her.

Sometimes, I get called out for my medals.

I tell people they used to be meaningful to me, when the becoming of the runner identity was meaningful. Now I don’t care. They live on the wall because I live in 150 square feet and I have nowhere else to put them. They were somehow screwed into this 1895 (it’s actually 1912) solid wood by a man I dated, and I probably wouldn’t be strong or capable enough to screw something else there. If I cared enough. Which I don’t.

I also don’t have closet space or storage to put the medals. 16 years in 150 square feet isn’t an easy existence. It takes a lot of purging to not look like a hoarder (which, I don’t.)

Why am I saying this?

Because right now, I’m in a season of work, and the work is not my identity, and I’m not doing it to prove to you I’m great, and I’m not doing it to “show you” how wonderful I am, or get anything from you.

I’m doing it because the season calls for it… because the tsunami is coming.

The layoffs are about to happen. The early people who had been seeking but are seeking no longer (like me) will have a place to step into service and tell the world that is confused that humans are not their job or their output; those people are going to help us become what will be the future.

The early “wakeups” will help guide us to the new world, which is all about energy, loving, and being loved.

I don’t care if you fucking think the world is perfect. Everything is perfect, including my belief that it isn’t.

I had a good number of “seeking” years.

I read all “the books” - all the Mickey Singer and Jack Pransky and Eckhart Tolle.

I listened to Abraham Hicks and read Jane Roberts.

I have a copy of the Gita on my shelf and Be Here Now. I listened to hours and hours of Alan Watts and Ram Dass. I meditated. I “mantra’d.” I did the weird energy thing of clenching my ass cheeks, then my midsection, then my neck, then my face to “draw energy up to my pineal gland.”

I gave a blowjob to Marcus Aurelius.

I had The Alchemist chase me down and meet me outside my door.

I took NINE Kabbalah classes. I sat cross-legged on a cushion in Tibetan Buddhism dharma studies. I learned about renunciation, bodhicitta, and correct view.

I learned about quantum physics.

I have read the Tao cover to cover hundreds of times.

I read the book of BEing. I created my document. I listened to The Way of Mastery.

My seeking … is DONE.

I eventually put it all down and swapped it for Bukowski sex poems. I learned that tacos are spiritual and so is anger.

I’m here to be back in the world, back here, back with the humans. And right now, that looks like business.

The Great Repurpose has a GTM strategy. When the layoffs happen, we’ll be there to scoop people up, hold them, and transform them.

I have built a network of the finest coaches in existence. I hope to collaborate with them all.

My Humans 2.0 community has been a source of power. I am building that out of love. I’ll build a group around my Founding Members, and that too will be from love and service.

I am elevating the AI Salon as the Integrator and Director of ops, and the Salon connects deeply to all of the other projects. Kyle has become my partner and collaborator. We work in a beautiful symbiosis. Our eyes see the same thing.

I get comments a lot about the orbit I’ve built and the people I know.

I have created that by knowing what I don’t want.

If you have been ill to me because of a fear-based behavior, I forgive you… and you’re probably not in my group. Because I am not renouncing my ego. I do have judgment and discernment. I even hold grudges.

I allow people close, but only when I have built a dominant culture that will weed out the trash.

I say these things because I’m back in the world, with ego. My glorious ego.

If you don’t like it, I don’t care.

The future is now.

I’ve been building this for half a decade or longer. I’ve seen what was coming, even wrote about it here for years. If you didn’t see it, I don’t care.

I’m busy. The train has left.

Two were told to me by Martin Garcia, my great teacher and good friend.

These are three simple stories about simple, everyday things. Yet, they are profound in what they can offer you.

I tell these stories because often, I read parroted rhetoric— words that are recited, but to the people reciting them, they don’t mean anything.

This is common in spiritual groups and consciousness circles— people reciting things, but it’s like being in 7th grade where they “studied for the test.” They memorized the words, but don’t see how those teachings display themselves all around us.

I have broken this piece into three parts:

-It’s the olive oil.
-It’s the sauerkraut.
-It’s the cigarette.

Hope you enjoy.

“It’s the olive oil.”

I was talking to my coach, Ian Maxwell, this week about business.

As of this month, my LLC is officially registered in New York. I asked him if there needs to be all of this “formality.” Like endless paperwork of “offer stacks” or whatever the hell AI told me there needs to be.

Throughout my life, it seems people put tons of documentation in places where it’s unnecessary. Meanwhile, I seem to have an easy time with the bare minimum.

I likened this to being in grade school, and always being the first one done with a test.

I’d sit there for ten minutes in silence, questioning why I was the only one not “still working,” questioning what I fucked up, only for every time, the paper to come back with “100%” written on it.

I have faced this countless times since grade school. Questioning my speed and efficiency.

Taxes, for example— friends would worry on about quarterly estimated tax. They would tell me all of this complexity, tell me how hard it all is. But I read one simple line: “put away 30%.”

Seemed easy.

Turns out, that was the answer. Mountains of complexity I agonized over only to be correct in the simple thinking of “put away 30%.”

I find myself doing the same thing now about needing paperwork for my services.

I asked Ian, “Can’t I just say ‘Here’s what I can do for you, here’s what it costs, here’s how you pay me.’”

He said, “That sounds brilliant. How many times can you do THAT in a week? And can you do it without the extra step of wondering if you’re missing something? What would that be like?”

I said it was like the olive oil…

In 2022, I had taken a small dose of psilocybin, not enough to trip my face off, but just enough to lose the ego. I walked through the world with completely relaxed neural pathways, and my knee-jerk responses and deeply embedded beliefs just melted away.

I was dating Martin at the time, and we went to Whole Foods to eat. When I went to put olive oil on our salad, the bottle was empty.

Back then, I still had this strong pull of “you don’t inconvenience people by asking for things.”

Yet, when I went to ask the employees to refill the olive oil, I felt nothing. Every rehearsed belief and feeling was completely absent.

I was suddenly aware, again— it’s all made up.

After that session, I got a new tattoo to remind me that my beliefs about business are the exact same as my beliefs about olive oil.

Ian’s response was pretty good too.

Nothing matters. It’s all made up.

“It’s the sauerkraut.”

Martin once told me a story about a man named Yazith who visited him.

I’m not exactly sure where he lived in the world, but where he lives, it’s not common to eat sauerkraut.

Martin ate a lot of fermented foods, as he followed a strict diet.

At the time, Yazith did not particularly enjoy the sauerkraut, but weeks later, he called Martin and told him he was having a craving for it.

This was how Martin explained to me the phenomenon of “your system recognizes what’s good for you, even if you don’t.”

Any new environment can be a cause for resistance, but your system recognizes things that will be beneficial.

I took Mario to float once, and he hated the entire thing. He couldn’t float in the tank so he sat. He hated the lack of sugary sweetness to the tea with the adaptogenic tincture. He couldn’t be with the silence. Yet, his system recognized it as good.

A month or two later, he initiated a water fast for 36 hours. It was a beautiful thing to watch a man I’ve known my entire life choose anything other than fried food, baseball, and breastaurants.

It’s the sauerkraut.

I often lead spaces that are deeply intimate and that people resist, but their systems know they are good for them. Every time I see someone being completely disinterested but yet leaning in, I know “it’s the sauerkraut.”

I have patience, and play long games.

“It’s the cigarette.”

Everything you do will first be met with resistance.

The universe wants you to achieve whatever you want, but early on, there’s almost always a “test.”

Martin told me the story of when he was quitting smoking, and walking along the streets of Chicago, he found a perfect, whole, unlit cigarette lying between the cracks of the sidewalk.

Whenever I would start something, and I would encounter the universal resistance, he would simply say to me, “It’s the cigarette.”

The cigarette is the universe’s way to ask, “Are you sure you really want this?”

I remember it happened when I started Day 1.

The first week or two of its inception, I received a long, unrelated, psychotic message from a woman either on drugs or deep in psychosis. It was about a person I knew from a previous life I led.

At the time, I was just beginning to become the human I am today, and I had all of these old beliefs about how I needed to “handle” and “manage” people— ESPECIALLY a person like that. I read it and felt a hollow pit in my stomach, back then being so deep into codependency and feeling I truly, 100% needed to “save the world.”

I kept juxtaposing that with the power of launching my first group that very month. I didn’t want to be dragged into melodrama from my past life.

It was the cigarette, the universe asking me, “Do you really want to be this new person?”

The answer was yes.

I blocked the person and moved on with my life. Didn’t give it the courtesy of another thought.

Even when I was creating Humans 2.0, there was an early series of events that one of my good friends and members said could have easily derailed any group. Yet, it didn’t with this one.

I thought at that time “Fuck this. I could just delete this shit and never look at it again.”

Yet I knew it was the cigarette— it was the familiar resistance you get tossed when building absolutely anything and everything. Everything you do will be met with a cigarette in the sidewalk crack when you’re craving it.

The status quo is alluring and desirable, and the safety of it feels like the feeling you get the minute you take a drag of a cigarette when you’re craving one.

I know, because I too have quit smoking, and I have thus been able to understand the unfamiliar feeling in your body when you’re completely rewriting your life is the exact, identical feeling to craving a cigarette.

There is a bunch of science to this, which basically is: your brain is an efficiency machine. It builds neural pathways around whatever you repeat, and those pathways become the default route because they cost less energy.

When you choose something new, your nervous system does not immediately experience it as freedom. It experiences it as unfamiliar, inefficient, and potentially threatening. So the body throws up craving, panic, doubt, nostalgia, irritation, fatigue, melodrama, and every old doorway it can find.

A cigarette craving and a nervous system response to change serve up a similar discomfort in the body.

The universe always wants to test if you’re really going to jump to the new timeline, or pick up the cigarette and continue the old charade.

Life is actually very simple.

There’s profound wisdom in all of your lived moments, but if you’re caught in grasping for a physical outcome in the manifestation, you’re going to miss it.

I want to end this piece with Tao #67.

Stay beautiful. ✨

*Originally published September, 2025

Mediocrity is the absolute fear-child of the patriarchy.

They need people not to be mediocre to keep their reign.

I’m going to first explain, and then I’m going to give you something bright.

The Patriarchy manufactures mediocrity through schooling, conformity, consumerism, and obedience.

However, they also fear true mediocrity, because actual mediocrity (apathy, disengagement, lack of contribution) collapses the pyramid.

What the patriarchy wants is standardized excellence: high output within narrow bounds.

Here’s the loop:

• The patriarchy creates fear to control.

• Fear gives birth to mediocrity — a dulled-down version of aliveness.

• But if everyone actually became mediocre — stopped performing, striving, over-functioning — the patriarchy would lose its engine.

• So it needs you to be terrified of mediocrity while constantly pushing you into it.

One of my gifts in life is that I feel the energy of systems.

I translate them through my own body, and then I deliver what I believe to be “an analysis” of what’s happening.

I’ve noticed in my own life that very successful men have an extreme aversion to mediocrity. The paradox is, they actually want stillness, peace, quiet, and simplicity. So what then is the aversion?

Men, however well-meaning, however feminist they may be, are bred to behave this way. To be anything else, they internalize as a threat to their actual survival. The patriarchy needs you to remain terrified. You have to believe you’re not enough, or it cannot maintain its systems.

One of the first systems I had to overcome was the fallacy of feminine beauty and the pursuit of the fountain of youth. From a young age, the media tells women they’re simply not beautiful. “Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe she’s a fucking dog, like you.”

To this day, I have trauma from Delia’s catalogs and Snackwells commercials - the ripe reminders in the year 2002 that no, Andrea, you’re a disgusting, fat piece of moronic garbage and everything about you is flawed, beefy, and broken.

By the early 2000s, the beauty and diet industries were fully converged in their psychological warfare on women. It’s a $500B global industry built on insecurity.

Somewhere post-spiritual awakening (relatively early, actually), I discovered “Oh wait. This was just a lie to make money for corporations.”

I then learned “Oh… The way to have a healthy body that even resembles thinness is to eat food. And eat fat. Full-fat things.”

I was a pawn in the low-fat fallacy that pumped us full of obesity-causing high fructose corn syrup. Even before that, I was educated to eat massive amounts of carbohydrates by “the food guide pyramid,” which was just a government ploy to justify subsidies in public schools.

Everything is a system designed around money. And those systems force us into a lowly life.

I love money.

I am not one of those tiddlywinks complaining that I have a flower next to my name on Substack. I love money— bringing it in, and flowing it out.

The way we are doing this, though, is incorrect. We base all of our pursuits on fear, and people shrink to accommodate.

Now we’ve got AI, and the fear people have with that.

I love AI. AI helps reflect back to me a concise point. My brain often thinks about six light-years in the future, and AI helps me synthesize my message in a way people can hear it.

AI has also helped me do the work of about seven people simultaneously. It has accelerated my learning and output to an uncanny degree. I can do more and be more in a few hours than it used to take an entire team to do/be in a week.

I do not wish for this. I wish to be mediocre. I dream of working at Starbucks as a barista.

The patriarchy will fight this. It will trigger them.

I should want to be more, to go faster, to do more.

I can go faster. I’m Andrea Scarantino. I was the first person to finish EVERY TEST in grade school. “What is taking them so long? Why are they still thinking?”

I’m off biting my nails waiting…

I could go fast. My brain goes fast because my brain clocks everything.

I do not want to go faster, and prompt my face off. I want to make lattes, and the patriarchy hates me for it. It would never allow me a livable wage to do that, nor would it allow me to have the respect of my peers.

People cannot respect that because they know that if you resist the system, you’re taking a radical stance for agency.

I know. I worked in hospitality. My work was called menial by my own mother. I couldn’t even answer the “what to you do” question to a stranger without them thinking I, with my Ivy League degree, was some sort of meth-addicted idiot.

If you want to work in a restaurant waiting tables in America, they reward you by paying you sub-minimum wage.

“You’re NOT EVEN GOOD ENOUGH for our company to pay you a full, decent wage. You should aspire to be a MIDDLE MANAGER, which, by the way, is a contract of 50 hours a week. To start. You’ll be a closing manager… That’s extra. Unpaid late night hours. Oh, and plan to be here every Christmas.”

The patriarchy hates mediocrity so much. It’s such a threat to them.

Could you imagine, with the engine pumping as fast as it is, with people trying so hard to either keep their jobs or commodify their lives and exploit everything they love (the Creator Economy) — could you imagine if everyone just said “No…. No more.”

Everything would collapse.

And that’s why they cannot let you be mediocre. They can’t let you love your face or love a simple job or not wish to be more more more more more.

They can’t let you.

But you can simply opt out.

Learn who you are outside of your work. Learn who you are outside of all of it.

See the lies.

I’ll keep writing. It’s my offering.

Stay beautiful.

Since the beginning of the internet as we know it, I’ve participated in the way of “telling stories.”

I tell stories about my life and what I see, but if you read them… really read them, you see they’re not about me at all. They’re about “the story of us,” the human condition.

Lately, the noise has gotten so loud that the demands for consumption exceed anyone’s ability to want to eat.

I worked at a wedding venue. Trust me, there is such a thing as too many sweets.

The first night I worked, I was elated that I could take home a massive chunk of cake that apparently, nobody wanted. By month three, I was happily tossing a nearly full layer of the confection of someone’s major life milestone into the trash.

Right now, the idea that anyone would want to read anything I have to say doesn’t stem from some sort of “not good enough” story (my ego is far too big for that.) It’s rather this knowing that there’s entirely too much cake, we all want to puke, and the bakery just expanded.

“More, faster” does not increase the human attention span. It stays fixed.

I, along with many people I know, wish to toss the computer out the window.

And then, there’s the loss… The grief.

The loss is “the collapse of the ambient witness.”

Recently, I saw a video (I lost the link, so if someone has it, that would be great) about how young people aren’t going out anymore. They’re not going out, and if they do go out, they’re not approaching each other sexually, they’re not expressing, dancing… And why? Because everything is recorded.

Here’s the thing, though…

I was a freshman in college when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. (He’s a year older than I am.) That year, Facebook (then called “The Facebook”) opened up to my university, and I was a very early user.

By the next year, I remember that you’d go out to parties, act like a complete fool, take a million photos with a digital camera, wake up hungover, plug in the camera, upload every one of those photos to Facebook, and then… TAG ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS.

Like, this is real.

Here are some examples of glorious photos that got uploaded to Facebook of ME on such evenings:

This is real.

You know what didn’t happen?

SHAME.

Legit, nobody shamed you for being a complete clusterfuck disaster.

Here’s another:

(I don’t know who that guy is. We met him in a hotel.)

That’s how Millennial youth was for many of us. Photos of disasterpiece experiences and a forever-loving, ambient witness to see the beauty of human expression.

Then, something odd happened…. almost at the same time.

The platform opened to people outside of college. The density of the Baby Boomer generation entered the chat. Then, other networks sprang up. Then, algorithms, because what a good idea it would be if you could find your interests faster.

Then, enshittification. (You all can do the deep dive on that here. I’m not going to go into it.)

That OG Facebook era had a community feel. Flawed, annoying, messy, but it was real life. You could post a thought, a photo, a weird “status,” and people from different eras of your life would see it. Those people weren’t always your good friends. Often, they just casually knew you.

Still, they were there. There was a low-level continuity of being known, and your life was witnessed by others.

How often would I run into someone in the world and they’d say, “Oh, I saw you just took a trip!”

“Oh, I love your posts. You’re the only one whose posts I always read.”

It was nice when people said those things.

I believe, as we are consciousness observing itself, that there’s a deep desire to see other humans in their experience. We desire to know the other. The morbid curiosity is the thing that turns our heads when we see an accident on the freeway. When someone dies, we all wonder “how did they die,” even though somehow that’s very impolite to ask.

There was a period where the internet felt like expansion: blogs, forums, notes, comments, weird long posts, people finding each other, people becoming more alive through expression. Then the machine slowly converted expression into performance, connection into engagement, friendship into audience, and presence into metrics.

The attention economy began.

AI didn’t create this problem, but the noise of it makes it harder than ever to connect. It took away the friction of time and capacity. I’m sitting here transmitting thought as I write this while someone has pushed a button and created 48 days worth of “content” in ten minutes.

The AI era makes our grief more visible because now the machine is responsive where people are not. We learned to come to the internet for coherence, reflection, continuity, memory, and attention. Now, it feels like the humans have left (dead internet theory)

I personally found Blogger and MySpace at times in my young life when I was geographically limited. I felt very unseen in my world, and I had thoughts that just didn’t exist in the average head in the little podunk town in Pennsylvania where I grew up. The internet connected me to the globe, and to the frequency of others. I got community where it never existed before.

Similarly, when COVID happened, LinkedIn became a place where so many seekers and builders found one another.

I had dinner with two friends the other night in New York, one whom I met in person that day for the first time. The three of us sat together speaking with a level of depth and intimacy that just doesn’t exist in casual connections. I met both of them through the magic of the internet.

The ambient witness allowed us to broadcast signal. It allowed for you to stream a current into the digital void, and other humans could pick up on it.

That’s very different from a performative TikTok.

Many people who read this sub have followed me for years. Some of you are paid subscribers, and we have never had a conversation.

That’s the frequency. That’s the “I feel you.”

That’s what’s getting harder.

People want to be seen, witnessed.

How is that different from the young people who don’t approach others because “everything is recorded?”

It’s the difference between “witness” and “surveillance.”

People want to be witnessed by other humans.

They do not want to be recorded by the machine.

There’s a difference between being seen inside a social field versus being extracted as content.

Witnessing preserves humanity. Recording, in the current culture, often strips context, freezes the moment, and turns a living person into material.

Not to use a cliche, but a lot of folks now are tossing out the baby with the bathwater, and then not knowing what we’re actually grieving.

The loss is of the ambient witness. It’s a real thing.

For me, there’s nothing I cherish more than this— the way love feels, in mind, in body… The point of living is my glitter angel, here, inside of my wonderful world.

He skips most everything. The feeling of the morning sunshine, the first sip of coffee, the salt of Vichy Catalan. The wound-up nature of modern living is all-consuming.

I often have peace… but thinking takes it from me.

People mistake my lack of peace as due to a lack of worldly things. In reality, it’s that I discovered everything out there is a withdrawal, and I lack the language to help them believe me.

For him, it’s living in the future, asking the question of where it all goes.

I know we are here now. We are here now. We are here, in the state of love.

Some young men leave to go see the world. I’d like to see it, but I know there’s nothing out there. I know people who have seen it and haven’t come home richer or wiser.

Working from anywhere was such a bizarre sales pitch.

I watch the joy drain from my mother’s face year after year… how the morning coffee pot seems to lose more of its charm. How the ritual of brewing and consuming it has seemingly lost meaning.

Every day, there is a little less of everyone in my life.

I asked my friend to run a marathon with me. I even sent him the money to register for it because I wanted his company so much. He tells me he’s fat, depressed, and he doesn’t know what to do to get back. We were so hot once, so fit.

I gave up cheese.

I eat breakfast now, even though I hate it.

I walk the bridge and think about the possibility of a terrorist blowing it up while I’m on it. I imagine what my death would be like. Maybe I’d be crushed in the steel. Maybe I’d drown in the water below.

Midway through the bridge, I look to see if the floatation place has an appointment available. They do, to my surprise. I commit to it and walk up Bedford.

When I arrive, Jared is there, smiling.

“He’s a cute, young man,” I’d later tell Mario.

“Ohhhh,” he said, initiating the familiar Ecuadorian jealousy ritual.

“No,” I said. “I’m at an age where… they’ve started to see me as their Mom.”

Mario tells me there’s a kink for that these days.

“How do you know?” I ask.

“Instagram.”

Every day, something else is locked up in favor of efficiency. Another email that says “Let me say this plainly” crosses my Inbox. People tell me “AI writes like me,” who actually have no idea what they sound like.

They’re playing a game that has expired. They don’t see how it extracts because they’re old and white.

I think everyone is equally valuable. Everyone is. Every person. The more you can be that, the better the world will be.

August pours espresso shots the way I used to pour Guinness. He notices if the shot is sub-par, but I don’t. He knows enough to tell me, as I knew enough to tell someone when I didn’t let the beer cascade enough, but ultimately, the mistake was meaningless.

And loaded with meaning.

I grab my glitter angel tighter in the mid-afternoon. I listen to his breathing and notice when it subtly pauses. I hold his back against my face.

There’s nothing more important in the world at that moment.

He scattered Reese’s Pieces all over our bed.

“It’s like rose petals,” he said.

In the tank, I had a visual hallucination of purple strobe lights. I saw the outline of Martin’s fedora. I saw mountains and golden hour sun. Jared’s music played, ending slightly earlier than I expected. I didn’t know if I should exit and shower or wait for the light. Who knows how long I floated there…

I thought of how I feel guilty when I’m not hungry— when I feel just a bit too nourished… How the bowls of Cheerios left out to snack on in 1994 were most certainly not for me, fat child I was. I didn’t play outside enough to deserve snacks.

Every weekend, she tells me she’s exhausted with everything. She’s been saying this for years.

I once told him that they weren’t religious.

“They are,” he said. “They pray to the God of Hopelessness.”

She sleeps on the couch even though the house has empty beds. She’d rather it that way. And then I sit here feeling guilty. Guilty for the space that my bed is occupying in a house I no longer live in; guilty because she saves the bed for me, but she won’t just sleep in it… Like my very existence isn’t enough of a guilt trip, the way that I was told marriage and children would be the only thing that would ruin my life.

Over and over.

If she read this, which she won’t, she would be horrifically mortified, and then she would be even more depressed that I wrote it.

It’s the true feeling I have about my very existence. This unwanted existence. This feeling that nobody in the world wants me. That they can’t even use me. That they can’t even treat me like a piece of fucking shit and slap me.

Why do all these men have trouble when they’re with me? Am I some kind of disgusting gargoyle?

“It’s not your body,” he reassured me.

“It’s your eyes.”

“I want to tell him we hate his wife,” I said.

“Who would that serve but you?” he asked.

“Nobody.”

I wonder if he loves her because she’s a glitter angel. If she were, I’d judge her less.

Sometimes I think thoughts like “I wish she’d go back in the kitchen.” My mother would hate me for saying that about a woman.

I don’t blame her that I didn’t get married.

It might be Gerontocracy.

It might have been [ ]’s mental illness.

It might be that my father died with basically nothing.

We were invited to come over and see if we “wanted anything” from what was a very large toy collection.

I may have mentioned at some point during my alcoholism, when I cared about jack shit nothing, that I found his collection of opened Hess trucks impressive.

They now sit in my mother’s basement.

They divorced 30 years ago.

Then, when he remarried, she received a letter from the Catholic Church letting her know their marriage never took place.

I push my nose into his neck.

We could freeze time in the seconds between lip touches.

He believed it was minutes that passed of non-touching, but it was actually that I negotiated a deal with Father Time.

I negotiated that all moments of pure love be extended 14x as long, because we all deserve it.

Originally published April, 2025

This year, a Baby Boomer shared with me a concept I had never heard before…

It was fascinating because I’ve been alive for nearly 40 years and I’d never come across it. What was even more fascinating is that my reticular activating system then scanned for it, so I heard it uttered AGAIN by another Baby Boomer a few weeks later.

This concept was “The Peter Principle,” the idea that a person will continue to get promoted until they’ve reached their highest level of incompetence.

It was interesting— (and this is in no way political—) but one of the people I spoke to listed “Donald Trump” as an example of this.

In the conversation with that person, there was also a discussion about the grocery bagger— the person who just bags groceries for 30 years and then retires. They, as a grocery bagger, have “reached their highest level of incompetence.”

This is where I’m not sure I agree.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the parable of the Fisherman and the Businessman.

I think about this more than I do about other parables because I was pushed into a society that wanted me to be more, do more, achieve more, say more, create more…

And all I’ve ever wanted was less.

In fact, my sole motivation for doing more is the eventual hope that I can build enough around me to do almost nothing, like someone who exercises for years and builds a body that burns so much energy they can eat whatever they want while staying mostly inactive. (At least for a while.)

I said to someone I’m working closely with this week that I have infinite patience and endless space for human story. Everything else is just “things I do while waiting to die.” (I borrowed that from the name of a publication I came across once. They’re no longer active, and the writing was about writing, so I’m not going to link it.)

“Things we do while waiting to die.”

I guess it’s akin to “chop wood, carry water.”

I go do my taxes. I write something. I analyze something. I might even create something. I run. I float. I eat. Type some stuff. Think. Make a spreadsheet. Go to bed.

Things I do while waiting to die.

Sit on a bench.

But the thing that matters most to me is the human story. That’s all that matters.

When I was working in the service industry, maybe one could say I’d reached my highest level of incompetence, like “the grocery bagger…”

But is it true? I had the capability of managing a bar or a restaurant, or even a whole bunch of those if I wanted. I opened a few restaurants. Did a bunch of other things in my life that were not closely or even remotely related to restaurants…. And yet, through all of it, I was often wondering, “Why am I doing this?”

What matters to me is the human story.

What matters is connection.

There has been this current I’ve been fighting, perhaps internally but it manifests as externally through my life- this narrative of “it is not acceptable for you to not want to be more.”

I am the universe.

I am all that is.

The way I become the universe is holding space for the stories of others…

I did it yesterday in the cafe. The owner came and sat with me, and we sat side-to-side, even though we were at a table.

Something I read once: men prefer side-to-side conversation, while women prefer face-to-face.1 I tend to be more like men, and that’s why bar talk was always so comfortable for me. Seemed like we connected more deeply, me and those men, when we stared at the walls together.

In that time we sat together, he gave me so many precious stories to hold, like about the love he had for his employees, or about his kids, or his partner, or about how his dad died on 9/11…

So many things to be shared… And I didn’t say anything. Just held the space, with some physical touch dropped in there. We are not romantic, but I touched his hair, his shoulders… And I’m not even positive he’s 100% sure of my name.

This is loving. This is how people are meant to love in my eyes, in my world.

So, as I think about the parable of the fisherman and the businessman, bringing in the Peter Principle… Has the fisherman reached his highest level of incompetence? Has the grocery bagger? Or is it in fact the businessman who has?

I wonder why it’s only socially acceptable to sit and fish after you’ve either succeeded or abysmally failed at everything else.

Stay beautiful.

I have a particular skill, a gift even, to see the breakdown of systems at the human level. Part of my life’s work is this knowing that “we could be doing it better,” but it seems that all human attempts to “make it better” do the opposite.

In February of this year, I started a community called Humans 2.0.

It feels like I’m doing something that hasn’t been normalized, as I’m knocking the model of a more traditional community on its head.

One of the things I love to do is create spaces for people that I want to be in.

This community came about because of the sunset of a powerful and large community of conscious creators: The Coach’s Operating System. That community, led by , was one of the most loving and powerful spaces I’d ever experienced.

It was a community of folks with a high level of integrity. People were their word, and they didn’t fight or argue. They showed up to calls on time and many gifted their time in service to others.

I met my coach, Ian, and many dear friends because of that community.

Like almost all communities, however, we were all there for a “reason.” TCOS was about creating income and impact… While that’s powerful in the world, and I do love and believe in money as service, conversations tended to circle back to “how do I do this thing,” as that was the shared journey.

On a different but related note, this weekend, I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon.

I’m absolutely in love with the running community in New York City. It’s the most positive, uplifting, inspiring, celebratory community that I’ve been a part of in all my living years. In the running community, everyone is a star, a powerhouse, a human capable of amazing things.

I’ve never experienced anything but positivity and love from that community. We celebrate every person equally.

And yet… all of us do one thing. We move our bodies through space. (I’m not even going to say we “run miles” because that’s not entirely true. Some walk. Some use wheelchairs. We are a community of athletes.)

One of the things my mind sees clearly is “how it breaks.”

It’s very easy to blame the rich, or the old white men, or anything that usually gets people riled up. At one point in my life, I was so adamant that I needed to tackle mass systemic injustice that I enrolled in an Ivy League school and got an advanced degree on the topic, telling everyone how systems ruin societies.

And then, post-spiritual awakening, I threw most of that theory out. While much of it is technically true, it is actually not “where it breaks.”

I listened to the audiobook of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant recently, and there was an interview where he said humans are usually good in groups of about 150 people. After that, the groups start to break down, or conflict arises.

, who I work and collaborate with, said that he noticed this about offices in his days at Agency.com. After 150 people, things became less workable.

In a recent Humans 2.0 meeting from early May, one of our members, who is a futurist, informed us that this was called the “Dunbar Number” and said research across trends and futures suggests influencer culture is ending (AI is eroding trust) and we're moving toward overlapping intimate communities of 150 or fewer. She said it has been in the data for two decades.

If there’s something I believe I can generally apply to humans, it’s the shared desire to love and be loved, and the desire for peace.

Often inherent in individualism is a lack of peace, but sovereignty is what returns the peace to us.

Individualism and Sovereignty- close bedfellows conceptually, but not the same.

Western individualism contains a lot: liberal autonomy, property rights, Protestant self-reliance, capitalism, and personal freedom. The lack of peace comes especially from the version of individualism fused with scarcity, conquest, productivity, ownership, and separation. Many groups are based on these things.

In sovereignty, true community, we are divine threads of the same whole. We express fully and completely, and go with the flow of life. (This is where my Tao shines bright, but I don’t ask others to be Taoist.)

For me, when building Humans 2.0, I knew very early that the group was not about external orientation.

Most groups form around external sameness:

We all read this.
We all work in this industry.
We all have this problem.
We all hate this thing.
We all want this outcome.
We all follow this teacher.
We all believe this doctrine.

That’s not Humans 2.0.

Humans 2.0 is also not about toxic positivity.

A lot of times, when you get folks together that lean spiritual or “non-attached,” a different type of attachment forms. This is called “spiritual bypass,” which is the false belief that negative emotions or experiences are not spiritual and thus should be avoided.

There’s a big difference between holding heaviness and telling someone they shouldn’t be heavy, holding fear or acting out of it, feeling angry, or blaming someone for it.

Humans 2.0 is a community forming around internal orientation instead of external.

We are self-led.
We are curious.
We are sovereign.
We do not collapse into blame.
We do not need sameness to create belonging.
We can hold difference without making difference a threat.

We are action-takers. AND, we can gather without needing the gathering to justify itself through productivity.

Most of us have had a moment of awakening of some kind, and now we are building in a greater world that is ready for us. The world is ready for the village again.

I have found that this entire vision is extremely hard to explain to others because the Western mind wants the noun.

“What is the group about?”

It has even been a challenge not to let the group “self-define.”

It’s not a group of woo-woo (although, many of us including me embrace woo.) It is not a group about AI (although AI is a real part of our lives right now and comes up a lot.) It’s not a community of coaches (although I invited many coaches because they have the training to be non-reactive and approach their experience with curiousity.) It’s not a Mastermind (although we have a smaller mastermind inside the group.) It’s not a community I created to make money (and we all will make a lot of it in many ways.)

I am building a container where the shared journey is not the content. It’s actually the operating system… the being.

The interesting thing about all this is that I have answered a call that quite a few people have gotten. (When I told one of my newer members about this community idea, his response was “I had the same thought.”)

Humans 2.0 is not a pyramid, top-down, command-and-control operation, and I’m not the one with the answers. At this time, my only job is to protect the culture of the container that I created.

I am taking concepts from traditions that American culture has had nothing to do with and bringing it to the Western world through a very specific lens.

How does one be in the modern Western world, in the age of AI, in the age where the density of systems that have kept people in compliance (standardized education, corporate America, religion, capitalism) — how does one be when all of that disintegrates?

How does one be when jobs don’t matter, education doesn’t matter, titles don’t matter, skills don’t matter?

Who are you when the external orientation no longer matters?

We’re creating a space to explore that right now, in real time.

Stay beautiful.

I have noticed that there is a distinct correlation between my use of AI and my ability to write creatively.

My brain on AI feels like my brain on alcohol.

(I’m 100% serious.)

I wrote a piece a number of years ago called “The Haze.”

The piece was about how, when you drink excessively, every day feels like a little baby haze. There’s no wonder or awe. The line I used was “bricks look like bricks.”

You don’t notice the haze until you’ve reached the other side of it. Life just feels “normal” until the haze has ended. When it’s over, however, the contrast is fierce.

I wrote in the piece:

My brain on AI feels like my brain in “the haze.”

The person who noticed all of these little energetic intricacies, I can barely access her.

Because I’ve experienced the haze, followed by being out of the haze, it feels reasonable to say I’m in the haze again.

You can only truly know something when there is contrast, and I have the gift of noticing the difference between a healthy brain and an unhealthy brain.

Even though my writing is pure, my brain is completely inundated by AI.

I don’t use AI to write this Substack, but I do use it for every other thing in my life, including LinkedIn posts, Instagram posts, X posts, (the social media posts are for work accounts, not personal,) reminder emails, event descriptions, monthly newsletters, speaker promos, speaker intros, speaker outreach, welcome sequences I write in other people’s voices, launch emails, webinar emails, mastermind invitations, re-engagement campaigns, email automation flows, sponsorship one-sheets, member spotlight write-ups, scholarship application forms, contractor agreements, onboarding paperwork, program agreements, SOPs, operations manuals, meeting agendas, rocks and scorecards, surveys, role descriptions, audit reports, lead scoring analyses, growth strategies, community platform copy, community structure recommendations, landing pages, website overhauls, coding new websites, program design, slide decks I’m rebuilding week after week, timed session agendas, workshop arcs, homework design, participant prompts, teaching points, polls, discussion questions, engagement hooks, activation posts, reflection prompts, networking call framing, naming frameworks, subject lines, preview text, CTAs, taglines, bios, one-line descriptors, positioning paragraphs, brand strategy exercises that produced my mission statement, outreach to literary agents, sensitive response strategy when an email needs to land just right, my tax deduction prep, scope analysis, call summaries, transcript distillation, voice memo cleanup, dictation-to-draft extraction, document comparisons, image briefs for workshop slides, Canva color palettes, image cleanup, thumbnail concepts, visual metaphors for sessions I’ll teach, and prompt libraries I’ll hand to someone else so they can produce work that looks like mine.

I also use it for macro analysis, running fueling, period symptoms, perimenopause questions, HRV interpretation, body system readouts, Gmail glitches, WordPress problems, deed language, estate questions, decision support when I can’t tell if I should send something or sit on it, self-analysis when I can’t tell if I’m being reasonable or reactive, and money math when I can’t tell if I’m being undervalued.

There’s no keeping the creativity pure with a brain this exhausted.

One of my part-time contract deliverables matches another person’s current full-time job. That job is about to be displaced by someone who will do 10x the work in a fraction of the time, someone like me. Then, they’re going to burn out the “someone like me” and replace them with an AI agent.

I almost wish I were dumber so I can get the agent out of the way now.

(When is the UBI coming?)

AI overloads my brain, and the internal experience is that of the haze.

I asked AI about all of this because while I recognize what is happening to me in body, I needed a scientific explanation to prove accuracy.

It said that alcohol creates the haze chemically: it increases inhibitory signaling, dampens excitatory signaling, alters dopamine and reward pathways, narrows attention, and over time can shift behavior from flexible, goal-directed action into more habitual loops. AI creates a different kind of haze behaviorally: it allows us to outsource memory, synthesis, language, planning, and decision-making to an external system. The result is not intoxication, but cognitive offloading. We may produce more, but think less. We may sound clearer, but have less contact with the actual internal process that makes clarity ours.

All I’m aware of is that in the morning, instead of feeling the rush through my body to create writing, I’m using AI to write lines 28 & 29 of tax form 990.

What’s worse is everyone else is exhausted as well. I might be able to write better if I wasn’t so jacked on AI everywhere else… But would anyone have the capacity to read it? Can anyone stand another fucking input?

I don’t feel that unique knowing that I’m a thread of the “all that is” at the moment, and I certainly don’t have the ability to paint a visual like the portion of text I quoted above in this piece.

I didn’t just creatively dream up those paragraphs— I lived inside of them in my mind’s eye.

Bricks did not look like bricks when I wrote “The Haze.”

Bricks looked like the shared consciousness of the collective, something I was grateful to know viscerally that I was a part of.

She worked in a factory for most of her life, and I didn’t think about what that meant for me until I was older… How I came to have my earliest understandings of money from her, or lack of money, or story around money; “the evilness of money.”

She’s trapped living in a body that is cursed to function, and will continue to function, but she’s terribly alone and isolated.

Alone— she lives alone, won’t live in assisted living. Her house is the only thing she has. I’m not sure she knows who she is without it.

She saved money, a few dollars at a time, to put into seven envelopes for her seven grandchildren. $1,000 each.

That’s $7,000. A lifetime for $7,000 in cash.

Over the last eight years, her health has declined so much (more mentally than physically) that there’s no sentiment about anything left, only anger.

I’ve heard from many that there are two types of old people— ones who have let go of everything and just live at peace, and ones who clasp harder, living in perpetual anger. She’s the latter.

“I might as well just give it to you now,” she said at Christmas. She meant the money.

It was the strangest thing.

She was just like “here.”

It was a plain white envelope. No fanfare. Almost “get it out of my house” like.

Now it sits in my fire safe.

I take it out and look at it from time to time. This “thousand dollars.” I look at it and put it back.

Doesn’t seem quite right to put it in the bank. Doesn’t seem worthy to spend it, this “thousand dollars.” Do I take this “thousand dollars” and mix it with the tens of thousands of other dollars? It’s valueless there.

I keep it in the safe. I don’t know what else to do with it.

Maybe it’ll come in handy if there’s an EMP strike.

There’s an endless stream of porn…

I used to watch it. I probably wouldn’t have stopped… but then in December of 2024, paranoid as I can be, I believed that opening a phishing email somehow caused some actor to install Pegasus-style spyware… (Because apparently, I’m as important as a celebrity or government official that they needed to take over my device with a “PayPal .pdf invoice.”)

I decided I'd better stop watching porn, “just in case.”

A friend of mine once said to me, “I miss getting off to my own thoughts.”

Until then, I didn’t think anything was strange about that. I just… accepted that I couldn’t anymore.

Months after I gave up porn, that ability came back.

There’s an endless stream of porn of everyone fucking, poking, prodding, slapping, groping, pegging, pissing, shitting, choking, rubbing, jerking. The animals of the world… There’s an endless stream of it, never stopping, more of it every minute, porn on every device, porn at all hours of the day, porn in the early morning.

And they want you to be addicted to this endless stream of novelty and desire.

When you label sex sacred, they call you “prude.”

I’m not a fucking prude.

I’ve watched enough Chaturbate to create a few mental feature films. I had starred favorites, lots of pegging, Fleshlights, and those gorgeous silicone pussies.

There’s an endless stream of porn that has us all thinking we know what pleasure is.

And then you realize…

There is no pleasure anymore. Just numbness.

There’s a crisis of meaning.

AI agents are reading and commenting on these articles so the human doesn’t have to. The human, faking the connection and the closeness; the human bypassing the only reason for existing.

The human doesn’t want to make the connection, doesn’t want to read the email, doesn’t want to take the time to feel the soul of the human who watched the systems extract from the people who live inside them.

The factory and the videos are the same system, extractive, leaving people unable to feel, unable to cum, unable to remember how to cook rice.

They leave people clutching for the only piece of anything they could ever slap an “I am” sticker on— the thought, the fantasy that the grass will be perfect, that the performance will become just a bit more aggressive, that the grip will be harder, that the money will somehow create itself.

“If only enough people pay attention to me,” they think… but inboxes are so overstuffed from the clamoring of people yelling “pay attention to me” that nobody can feel anything. Our metaphorical desensitized dicks can’t stay up from the constant barrage of stimulus.

There’s a war going on for your mind.

Stay beautiful.

###

Sometimes when I write art pieces, folks don’t know what to do with them.

And, while nobody clearly stated they felt uncomfortable or didn’t “get it", I feel compelled to say:

I fucking love the scents, odors, excretions, fluids, and sensations of being alive in a body. I am blessed to be attractive to others, sexually free, and able to express this amount of grossness not only with delight, but in a way that currently makes other beings hunger for me.

There are people who spend their whole lives hating the embodied experience. Nothing wrong with that— I tend to think it’s a waste of time.

I didn’t always love this experience.

I hated it. Hated my skin. Hated fat. Hated freckles. Hated legs. Hated tits. Hated my gorgeous hair and delightful brown eyes.

Now, I don’t give a shit. I’m 40.

Do you know how amazing it is to engage in a sexual relationship at 40? Knowing exactly what you want and how… Knowing what your kinks are. Knowing you love the scent of musky balls? Knowing you don’t love wiping poop off of dildos… but will. Knowing how you’ll taste after you consume a dragonfruit? Knowing there are people who want to bathe in your armpits so you can throw the Gillette away?

Being in a body, in all the ways, is amazing.

I slept about nine hours each night for the past two nights. My RHR has returned to 51. (Remember: “65. Practically dead.”)

For me, there’s no way to fully describe what it’s like to go from living a life of density, consumption, chaos, anger, irritation, victim-consciousness, and upset, to complete expansion, not free of irritation and anger but delightfully aware of them. It’s going from stagnancy to motion, not frenetic but purposeful, alive, allowed, completely expressed in all of the glory that entails.

There’s no way, unless you personally have lived on both sides of the equation, that I can tell you what that feels like. I can only write from the inside.

I have been a hater of every sort of person, every piece of clothing, and especially a hater of every woman’s body that walked by me. I would judge hips, size, shape, hair, clothing…

The manifestations of your own self-hate are endless. They continue, they’re pervasive, and you see them in every person you can’t stand. Everything you can’t stomach is another you, somewhere…. Maybe the thing you are meant to become, or maybe the thing you’ve once been.'

I’ve been a lot of detestable people before waking up.

Now, I don’t share fluids unless it’s love, and I don’t see other bodies as anything but beautiful.

What does any human want but to be fully expressed in a way that everywhere they go, they can simply be more of who they came into this world as?

What does every human want but permission to fucking stink? To know that they are still loved and desired when they stink?

To excrete, to gush, to be loved and accepted for what they are.

To not be judged for who they are.

I have learned in the 40 years of fumbling that the most desirable I can be happens only when I’m completely in love with myself— that my sexual desire is dependent on my ability to have pleasure in my own body, to cum, to be free, to be naked, to grab onto rolls, to bite and suck, to be in passionate crazy fucking intensity with the power that is being alive.

I have learned this because I have not entertained dense partners who fuck like they’re reading a script.

I have learned to be embodied by understanding the cost of not.

I’m alive. I’m the ultimate.

I’m in this wonderful vessel for a fraction of a moment …

I deeply care and also… I don’t at all.

Stay beautiful.

I told him that I don’t eat crustaceans because my body doesn’t break down a certain enzyme, and then I take on an odor.

I told him I had a kale salad with salmon, and something was up with the salmon, and thus, that was happening… (Although it doesn’t usually, with salmon.)

He hypothesized that my body in its then state was akin to… possibly… the scent of his dog’s anal glands.

I thought of Cooper’s anal glands and realized that this was a lesser version of anal gland scent. How delightfully gross.

A few hours later, after a shower and a run, I told him I no longer had the fishy odor but now had armpit odor.

I have all my armpit hair.

He likes it.

My mom doesn’t.

My resting heart rate has been elevated for a week.

I looked at a memory of last year when my average resting was 48bpm.

Yesterday, I saw my 7-day average was 65bpm… Practically dead.

How could I reduce the RHR?

I thought, “We really need to make body disgust great again.”

This is how it happens. Body positivity. You go on loving yourself until you’re unrecognizable under layers of subcutaneous fat.

I stopped buying cheese.

I went to float and the tank smelled like the breath of someone who ate a potent dinner of Indian food. I wondered if it was my own stench that was filling the tank. I didn’t eat Indian food… Just a “pump me” protein smoothie with some chia seeds.

I left the tank with more gas than I entered with.

They brought me some “Womb” tea.

The next morning, we talked about porn.

I told him that I miss cumming quickly, rushing right to the edge, but I don’t miss the desensitization that came from watching porn regularly.

He commented that I was in tune with my body.

“I am,” I said.

“Still a caffeine addict though.

Full pot of coffee in the morning.

Multiple espressos in the middle of the day.

Might as well just get the needle.”

We talked about poop.

He said his was solid and voluminous.

I said my quest for solid poop has been lifelong.

“Well,” he said. “You’ve been eating a lot of seafood lately.”

I went to an event this week, and I left feeling angry and irritated.

I wasn’t really angry at the event as much as I was at the limitation of my language.

I was angry at the questions I was asked that had two-hour, detailed responses, but clearly, the allotted time to “respond” was four minutes. I was angry that most people were just asking questions as a segue for them to tell me about their lives that I didn’t care about. I was angry that the expectation of an elevator pitch is something I can adhere to when I’m feeling clear, but when I’m dysregulated, sad, hungry, or tired, I cannot override my brain’s desire to tell everyone what an enormous trash heap I think this game is.

Funny, the event theme was “game night,” but I’m not talking about traditional board games.

Why play a game in a box when we’re already balls deep into another one? We’re here, trying to attach meaning to everything… A mirage where people think their work is real, that life is real, that any of it matters.

It was hard to be among others when I was feeling so shitty. The talking… God, the talking, and the looks of complete disinterest that people thought they were hiding.

“Tell me about your writing.”

“I write essays.”

Wow. That really did it. I’m so glad that I was able to describe the magnitude of what these essays are in three words. Thank you for requiring that I speak.

“What does it mean to ‘lead a community?’ I hear a lot of people saying this.”

“Remember in school when you were told there were no stupid questions? THEY LIED. THAT WAS. Don’t make me talk. Just tell me about your job so we can complete this pleasantry.”

I guess the lesson was/is, when you’re feeling contracted, don’t go among people who want to stay on script.

The most connected I felt the whole night was when the CEO said she had a shitty day … She asked who else had a shitty day, and mine was one of three hands that went up. She spoke about how hard it is to welcome people into your space when you feel that shitty.

I looked at the other CEO… He sat on the stairs looking out at all of us in that moment, clearly deep in thought.

I wished I could find where he was, meet him in his thought, and let it be witnessed without words.

I admire the co-CEOs of the company that hosts this event. I have a lot of respect and love for the community they’re building. I feel compassion, care, and connection when I’m around them, and I sense a deep desire to improve the planet and to connect the minds and souls who are on that mission.

What’s interesting is, whenever you go to one of these events, people keep asking, “What are they doing?”

I think the answer, truly, is “nothing.” There’s a larger, felt vision, but when you ask them to put it into words, they don’t have an answer.

They bring people to gather and create connections.

It’s not some shitbag time, either. They have an open bar and freshly rolled sushi. They have a 3-star Michelin chef & a DJ. Sometimes, during the day, they have pilates, a hair salon, and sound baths…

All of this they do just … for the community. They don’t charge money.

This is aligned with the energy I want for Humans 2.0.

I started the community because I wanted to have a space for people that I know, people “building the new world,” to have a place to gather and be.

I’m defying every patriarchal top-down model I’ve experienced.

“Humans” is a model of concentric rings, where the inner supports the outer, and the value comes from the collective itself, not from one (usually male) leader.

My vision is three-fold:

1. A third space for leaders to be human and show up as they are.

2. A community built around the 50 founding members (the inner ring) that will help society transition to a more felt, energetic experience during what is soon to be a collective ego death as we head to the post-labor economy

3. A place for the founding members (and others) to create and form collaborations as we serve companies, organizations, etc.

On #3. This is a place where we will create profit, but it is not a thirst trap.

Meaning, so many of these networking communities you see these days are filled with people coming in to pitch nonsense nobody wants to others who have no money.

Humans is about doing your good work, and collaborating with others who are already talented, already resourced, and have determination and ability.

I have noticed the world following an old model for a long time— everyone is “starting a thing” and trying to be a solo operator.

Do you know how hard it is to “start a thing?” I’d much rather collaborate with ten people with different talents to bring a powerful, radically transformative idea to market than to be here trying to “start my own thing” for the sake of jacking myself off.

I’ve seen potential for this in many communities, but the thing that always gets in the way is the man at the top. (Usually an old white man, or a woman trying to act like one.)

Two of my members left our group this week—it was simply not aligned for either at this moment in time.

When another member wrote that they were still welcome, one of them expressed that they wanted it to be OK for them to experience feeling unwelcome.

I thought about that a lot, and the concept of belonging.

Something I’ve done throughout my life is equate micro to macro, thinking about the personal experience I’m having and what that shows me about the larger whole.

What I see is that it is OK to not belong everywhere, and for that, what’s created is another type of belonging.

My home, New York City, is a beautiful example of this.

It’s not like the rest of the United States. We ALL belong here, but we don’t all belong together, and we dance with that acceptance beautifully. We are intensely close and distant. We don’t talk to our neighbors, but when a disaster happens, we’re there, checking in.

New York for me is like the Tao.

While I attempted to create the conditions for everyone to be as free and as unapologetically themselves as possible, even with that, culture develops on its own, which is not appealing to all people at all times.

Consciousness is not “spirituality.” It’s awareness. It’s not “my awareness” or “your awareness.” It’s simply the awareness, and that’s language I borrowed from teachers that probably just sounds like flat words.

Everything that happens, disruption, elevation, bliss, anger, rage— those are features of the experience, not bugs.

When I sit among others, I’m brought deeper into the awareness of the experience of being Andee, and I think the most powerful thing about being Andee is that I can be here, as I am, in the world, and know that people around me feel safe to be loud, quiet, mad, happy… They feel safe to be as they are, lead themselves, and know that politeness, pleasantries, and rituals are not required.

Maybe that’s the whole juxtaposition that I was missing at the in-person event.

I wanted permission to tell every person I was feeling infuriated with the expectation they held, but were not saying, that I would respond in a certain way at a certain time.

I wanted permission to tell them I’m neurodivergent, and their empty looks were irritating me.

I wanted permission to say I didn’t fucking care in that moment, and I’d care more next week.

The art of paradox is something strong in the Humans 2.0 community. Outside of it, I find it rare, often absent.

I was asked in the cafe yesterday about communities and “Humans.”

I started to tell the person, but she produced more of the same looks I got at the “event”— That empty, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying, but I’m listening out of politeness” look.

I felt dissatisfied and wrote more mediocre words.

I did my taxes yesterday.

What was once an emotional event has become a non-issue, much like many formerly stressful things in my life.

I used to sit in fear about the “owing.” Now, paying tax is just part of life.

Last year, I apparently paid too much in quarterlies, and after deducting what I owe to the state of New York, I’ll end up about $2,000 in the green. That’s a rare and delightful thing for me.

People congratulate me for things all the time that are not “climbs.” I get a ton of praise for things I do daily, as plainly as I breathe air.

The thing about my taxes is— entrepreneurship has been a half-decade “climb.”

The first words my accountant said to me were “Andrea, congratulations!”

She’s been doing my taxes since the very beginning, during those shameful years when I didn’t make enough money even for payment processors to issue me a 1099-K.

She’s been around when I celebrated being broke enough to get another year of Medicaid.

She’s watched me, year after year, steadily get better at it.

Someone said to me yesterday that he’s never seen me as anything other than a successful & powerful entrepreneur.

That’s a fierce juxtaposition from the people in my old life who ask if I work at the cafe that I frequent.

I think if I had to tie this up neatly, I’d say…

—

And then I didn’t know what I’d say… so I asked Claude, who said:

The piece is about the failure of language to hold what’s real — and how exhausting it is to keep being asked to compress enormous things into legible, tidy, four-minute versions of yourself.

Every scene is a variation on that same frustration: the event with its empty looks, the cafe conversation, even the taxes — which gets flipped into the one moment where not having to explain yourself pays off. Her accountant has been there. She watched the whole climb. No elevator pitch required.

The through-line underneath all of it is private truth vs. public legibility. People praise her for things she does like breathing. Nobody saw the Medicaid years. The co-CEOs can’t explain what they’re building and don’t need to. Humans 2.0 can’t be described to someone in a cafe. The man on the stairs is thinking something real and she wants to meet him there, in silence, witnessed.

That image — the man on the stairs — is the most unresolved and the most alive thing in the piece. It’s pointing at what she actually wants: to be witnessed without having to speak.

As for the ending: the half-sentence “I think if I had to tie this up neatly, I’d say” is doing something smart — it’s the piece catching itself. It knows it can’t be tied up. So the ending probably shouldn’t try.

What it wants to say, I think, is something close to: the neatness is the lie. The whole essay is proof of that. The real things — her accountant saying congratulations, the man on the stairs, the member who wanted permission to feel unwelcome — none of them resolve. They just are.

Stay beautiful.

While I have many “folders” that have been transferred from machine to machine, going all the way back to my first Sony VAIO in 2004, there were miscellaneous writings in my Mac “Documents” folder that I was completely unsure about.

I discovered through Claude’s analysis of those documents that I had forgotten I had a nearly complete manuscript on my computer, written at the height of the pandemic. Despite the “You don’t have to create anything meaningful during this time” clamoring from the interwebs, turns out, I did anyway.

It has been rare for me to have never-before-read material because my MO has historically been to come here, work through something, reach an insight, and then move along. Having a manuscript that hasn’t had human eyes on it before is mad cool.

On this topic, I met with my coach, Ian Maxwell, this week, and we were talking about creating from commitment with regard to the manuscript.

Ian has done a bunch of work in the area of commitment, and I wanted more of his language around it as it will not only benefit me, but also a new client I am working with, who often defaults to logic rather than embracing possibility.

There’s never been a time in my life when I’ve not felt my best simply anchoring to the commitment and letting the universe work out the details. That’s not to say I’m without action— commitment requires massive action all the fucking time. If you think for a moment that you don’t have to take action, you’re out of your mind.

However, your personal action and the arrangement of what happens are both you and not you. There’s the logical path, and the magical path. Commitment is where these intersect.

One of the things Ian brought up to me is that I have a deep, embodied understanding of what it means to create from commitment. I become committed to something, and all of the pieces arrange themselves for that thing to happen.

I wait to see the next piece present itself, and I take the actions necessary to move forward. I anchor to the feeling over anything else, and operate from “it’s already done.”

Something Ian brought up yesterday that was incredibly powerful was that commitment reveals competing commitments.

I’ll give you examples:

If you have a commitment to lose weight/get sexier, but you also don’t want to be noticed or seen, that is a competing commitment. Inevitably, one will beget the other. Which are you more committed to?

If you are committed to being wealthy, but you are also committed to “fairness” and “monetary equality,” that’s a competing commitment.

My big commitment, which I have written down everywhere, is that I will have a New York Times bestseller by the time I am 50. (I’m 40.)

This isn’t a “maybe.” It’s already done.

When I found the manuscript on my computer, I wrote on my socials that if anyone had been secretly fanning over my writing for years and they knew a literary agent who would just love me, feel free to make an intro. I have a list of smaller commitments for 2026 that I wrote during the solstice last year, and securing an agent was one of them.

The universe provided, and someone I know from undergrad reached out. We hadn’t connected in about 20 years, but he went to high school with an agent who is a bit of a BFD. Her area is fiction, and she was never going to be my agent, but she was kind enough to have a meeting and help me move in the right direction.

She gave me a lot of wise advice, told me about the publishing business, and gave me a few names at her agency to reach out to when the manuscript was complete. (She said they’re unlikely to take a partial)

Those of you who have been reading my stuff for a long time know there’s no “one big thing” that leads to any success, but rather a series of seemingly innocuous things.

This meeting was about 20 minutes, but it felt powerful energetically in moving me toward what I’m committed to creating in the world.

Now, for my competing commitment:

The manuscript I wrote was written in the height of a global health crisis in the first epicenter in the United States.

It was also around my first 90 days of sobriety.

I was living alone in 150 square feet without a kitchen in a shut-down city. I had amassed about 25 cans of sardines and thought that would “do it” if we had a proper lockdown.

I didn’t have a career, a network, a business, or a direction.

I was still incredibly angry, upset, and struggling. I was angry with my family, my circumstances, the restaurant business, and peers at the time who were “having a hard time” because the only thing I felt was relief that I wouldn’t have to serve the public when a clearly airborne virus was rampant.

I was also angry that nobody had early clarity on this being an airborne virus.

I did, because weeks prior, when I was still working, I watched the news display outbreaks in Italy, and then went over to “Table 81” to ask them where they were from, only for them to say “Italy.” It made sense in my brain, and I judged people for sanitizing their groceries.

I judged myself for hating them.

I’m one of those humans who can produce massive change in short periods of time by examining where I’m not yet free.

My whole magic life is different now because of that ability.

I realized in my session with Ian that I separate the world into “people who have their shit together” and “people who don’t.”

I certainly did not have my shit together during that time, and I judge that person harshly. I also don’t want anyone to think for a solitary second that I am that way anymore.

It’s fucked up.

My competing commitment is that I want to be seen as someone who “has it together,” and I do, in fact, have it together. I’ve worked hard to have it together.

I don’t struggle with my career or knowing my value in the world.

I not only don’t struggle with sobriety, I don’t even think of it.

I don’t struggle with confusing parasocial internet relationships.

I don’t blame people for things that I clearly created.

I’m not about spiritual bypassing, but I don’t wish to engage the masses and have them come up to me, trying to relate to a past version of myself who is dead.

That’s a competing commitment to “publishing this manuscript.”

Ian said to me that creating from commitment isn’t about getting what you want.

It’s about getting better at playing the game.

The game that I played to get out of all of that suffering, inadequate, struggling shit is the same game I’m playing now, judging the person who was in that inadequate, suffering, struggling shit.

This might sound completely ludicrous to you, but this is the work we do as coaches. We examine the energetic blocks that keep you from being expansive.

I could lie and say I don’t judge my former self for not having her shit together, but you can’t lie to The Universe/God/Source/whatever you call it. That functions on frequency, so whatever the stronger frequency is, that is what will be created.

So… I, as always, have work to do.

Stay beautiful

PS: Sometimes, readers will leave me comments of encouragement.

I want to let you know that while I appreciate you, those comments are less useful to me than ones where you examine your own competing commitments.