It was a lovely time. We had a very tasty dinner at a local burger place I’d been wanting to try out, and then she came back to my apartment, where we discussed and debated the ethics of AI, and how it might be usurping human agency and creativity. She argued from Platonic philosophy, I argued from long experience as a creator and several years as an AI user — and also as someone who thinks about and discusses this regularly on my podcast. Knowing that she’s considering the path ahead for her life, I stopped at one point and suggested that she consider a career in the philosophy and ethics of AI, since it’s a field that sorely needs the thinking of bright minds like hers. It got late, we said our goodbyes, and she headed back to her friend’s house, where she was staying for a few days.

Around the time she was heading out, I suddenly remembered having seen something about a special event that Tesla was supposed to have been holding that evening for a new car model called the “Roadster,” which I knew nothing about. But the hype had made me curious, so I hopped on X after she left and looked to see what I’d missed.

I have to be honest: nothing I’d heard had prepared me for what I was about to see.

About an hour before my daughter left, Elon Musk had staged a tech demo of the latest innovation to come out of the efforts of the electric car company he leads and his combined rocket ship & AI company, SpaceXAI.

The demo showed the much-anticipated Roadster doing things that no car has ever done before — all while driving itself without a human being in control.

In case you missed it, there’s a full 31-minute video (the action starts about 5 minutes in) of the entire presentation for those willing to take the time. For the rest of you, I’ll offer a few brief videos: essentially the CliffNotes version of the event.

If you’re wondering, this isn’t just me being a spergy guy talking about a cool new toy. There’s something deeper at work in society that this points to, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

First, the upside down ramp:

Then, the kick-flip:

Finally, 0-60 in 1 second (and then at 0.81 seconds):

I have to admit, I was pretty floored by what I saw. Not since Doc Brown’s DeLorean in Back to the Future II had I seen a car do anything this cool, and that one was pure fiction.

There was a meme going around a few years ago of a SpaceX launch tower with the popular Silicon Valley phrase, “You can just do things.” I found myself thinking of that, grabbed a photo of the Roadster doing its thing, fed it through Grok Imagine, and came up with a new twist:

This philosophy speaks to something about the spirit of boldness in the relentless pursuit of innovation, and it’s a reminder I like to consider in my own life when I’m feeling trapped and needing to find a path forward.

I sent a link to the event to my partner in thoughtcrime, , knowing that he’s an early riser and was probably in bed before the videos went live. I said, “Flying cars are finally real!” and headed off to sleep happy to be alive in a time where a guy like Elon is out there making amazing things like this happen.

When I got up, I had a reply from Kale, but it wasn’t what I’d expected:

I’m walking and talking, so understand that this might be a little bit inchoate.

What Elon showed last night is something that is radically masculine. This has got me thinking about the world we all live in, and just how female-coded the internet is versus the male-coded world of things. The UAP story is remarkably male. The tech of things versus the tech of ideas.

I’m not exactly sure what to make of all of this, but the ever-increasing disconnect between men and women, between the masculine and the feminine, has become almost completely disconnected now.

I don’t really know what I mean by all of this, but the flying roadster is a condensed symbol of the bullshit world you and I are trying to navigate as middle-aged men.

I was groggy. It was one of those moments where you look at your phone as soon as you open your eyes to see if any emergencies you need to attend to had transpired overnight. I sat with his observations. I love metaphor and poetic language, but I have a tendency to be overly literal in my interpretation of things, and often miss the symbols that are sitting right in front of me.

I wasn’t sure that I agreed with Kale’s nascent observations, but I decided to sit with them and let them develop — something akin (in my mind) to waiting for a Polaroid photo to make the image visible.

I got up. I made coffee. I sat at my desk and opened X to see the morning’s discussion of current events. And as I started scrolling I saw that my intrepid co-host was already advancing his thesis:

Important to note that last parenthetical. As the discussion continued, some people missed this point. For reactions to a thing to fall along masculine and feminine lines does not mean that the sexes will all line up to play kickball, as it were, for their own team. This is more of a general observation of the different social priorities that tend to align with each sex.

As my own timeline filled up with responses from various people that seemed to indirectly verify Kale’s observations, I chimed in. Most of the guys I was seeing talk about the event could barely contain their excitement. I saw discussion from women (or from men talking about their wives or girlfriends) that questioned the point of the exercise. The leftist point of view seemed to align more with the “female-coded” reactions, though whether this was because of their politically-motivated hatred of Musk or some other reason was not entirely clear. I posted my own thoughts:

And further:

As the day wore on, this pattern repeated again and again. As I said, it didn’t fall cleanly across the divide.

Sex-specific behaviors are observable even in small children, and even in a world where traditional gender roles have been flattened. Women have a tendency, generally, to prioritize the function and protection of the domestic realm — which often spills into pragmatic disputes over domestic labor, childcare, finances, and so on. Men have a tendency, generally, to focus on outside pursuits like exploration, discovery, war, politics, sports, technology, meaning-seeking, and so on. The family unit, when it’s healthy, is where those respective spheres unify to create a cohesive whole.

Read more

Yesterday, I wrote about the need to make some changes to get my life back on track after over a year of grief and survival that has derailed me from building the work I find most important — my writing and and commentary trying to make sense of a pretty crazy world and a life that has unfortunately also been swept along by that tide.

Today, I’m digging into the backend of the site, clearing out the cobwebs, trying to fix things that are broken, working on offering a better experience for all readers of The Skojec File, whether free or paid.

One of the first things I noticed is that all the welcome emails have errors.

They mention things that no longer exist, have duplicate sections, describe things that are out of date, and so on. I have no idea how many people have signed up and received the jumbled versions of these emails that do not track with what you see on the actual site. I don’t ever see these emails, so I don’t think to correct them.

So for the purposes of getting everyone on the same page, I’m going to post the email that goes to all new free subscribers below. These describe the current state of the site, what’s on offer, and why I hope you’ll consider an upgrade to paid.

On that note: you’ll notice that most of the content on TSF is free.

My goal as a writer is to reach as many people as possible. I don’t write about things that I don’t think matter, and I don’t like having to sequester those thoughts behind barriers. But I also have to be able to afford to take the many hours a week that goes into doing this work the right way, because alas, I am not independently wealthy and do not have other more reliable revenue streams. Writing has been my profession and my craft for the past two decades, and every paid subscriber to this website better enables me to do this work for a much larger audience.

In other words: your paid subscriptions constitute patronage of my entire body of work, not just the items that live behind the paywall.

As a reminder, this weekend I’m offering 25% off paid subscriptions to anyone who signs up for an annual plan. This offer ends tomorrow night at midnight (10/18/26), so if you’ve been thinking about upgrading, this is the time to lock that in.

Below please see the email all free subscribers should have been getting. It outlines the benefits of paid subscriptions as well. (Founding members receive the same benefits as paid, but it offers an opportunity for those who want to contribute more to the writing to do so.)

Thank you for subscribing to The Skojec File!

I’m Steve Skojec. I’m a storyteller, meaning-seeker, and cultural commentator trying to understand the rapidly changing world we live in, the secrets that lie hidden behind the news, and how it’s affecting all of us.

These questions are also explored in my longform podcast, Monitoring the Situation, with my co-host and close friend Kale Zelden. You’ll see posts here about each new episode as they are released — usually every Thursday.

On a personal level, I am also exploring the lived reality of individual transformation: the loss of institutional religious belief while still wrestling with questions of faith; the unwanted ending of a marriage that spanned two decades and produced seven children; and the purpose of a life that was once rooted most deeply in daily companionship and fatherhood when those things have now been cut adrift.

In short, in these pages, I write to deconstruct myself, my life, and the world in which all these changes are happening. I am looking for answers, understanding, inspiration, and hope.

The unifying theme is not a single identifying topic, but rather the search across various subjects and domains through the lens of my personal experience for the universal truths that affect us all.

As a free reader, you’ll have access to most of my biggest, deepest essays and reflections, all podcast-related posts, and much of my cultural commentary. Occasionally, I open the comments to both paid and free subscribers, but most conversations remain behind the paywall to keep the community discussion focused and remove the need for excessive moderation.

With a paid subscription, you get more:

• Exclusive paid subscriber posts.

• All private discussions in the TSF community (comments and chat).

• My personal audio narration of posts (when available).

• Full access to any archived paywalled content.

• Any future paid subscriber perks to be determined.

More important than any perk, paid subscribers subsidize this work for all readers, making it possible for me to take the time necessary to do the deep thinking, research, and writing readers come here for.

If you’re curious, start with a 7-day free trial of The Skojec File.

If you would like to support a real human writer who will never publish AI-written content under the guise of a personal essay, please consider upgrading to paid today.

And as a new subscriber, please check out our “Start Here” page, which gives you an introduction to the content and some good pieces to read first.

Thank you for joining this journey—I’m thrilled to have you here!

Best Regards,
Steve Skojec

PS: If you ever can’t find a TSF email in your inbox, check your spam folder and mark this address as ‘not spam.’ If it’s in your Promotions tab, move it to your Primary tab to ensure you never miss an update.

Thanks to all of you who have put up with me being a nuclear dumpster fire.

You guys are the best.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

It’s Friday.

Friday, for a lot of people, means the weekend. It means looking forward to a couple of days of rest, maybe doing the shopping and other errands, possibly catching a movie with the family or a football game.

For me, Friday means it’s time to switch my brain from high-level concepts like writing and podcasting and cultural commentary over to organ grinder monkey mode.

It means driving down the road, sitting in the parking garage in the perfect spot so my GPS puts me just between Wegmans and Costco, staring at a little app on my phone waiting for grocery orders to come in.

It means accepting jobs that pay very little, require many hours of time, cost me a bunch of money in gas and wear and tear on my car, and send me home at night to an empty apartment, dissatisfied, tired, and bored out of my mind, knowing I’ve got to do it again for the rest of the weekend until my scheduled days for writing and podcast work come again.

It literally means pushing a cart around a store, scanning barcodes as I do a paint-by-numbers scavenger hunt for cilantro and crackers and yogurt and chicken breasts, driving them around town to drop in front of someone’s closed door, taking a photo, and doing it all over again.

A very good day grosses me about $150 before tax and expenses.

A fairly good day is about $100.

On too many days I only bring home about $60.

It’s the luck of the draw. It has nothing to do with intelligence or effort.

There has not been one month this year where I’ve come out ahead because of this work. It’s desperation effort. It’s work I do because I’ve had no luck finding anything better, and because it fills in the gaps left by this Substack and the MTS Podcast until I can fully live on what they bring in. It worked for quite a while to fuel Notes From the Road, but every month that passes, that’s feeling like thinner and thinner gruel.

My life is not where I wanted it to be by any stretch of the imagination, but despite my growing awareness that it’s time to change, it has nevertheless been stuck in stagnation and atrophy. I was made for more than this, and I know it. I survived this year of unwanted separation doing what I had to do to get by, but that’s not enough of a reason to get out of bed in the morning anymore — even if I still force myself to do it.

Yesterday I said I was going to find a way to make time to write more here. humorously asked me what the recipe is for making time. I told her I didn’t know but I was hoping to figure it out.

Today, I decided that the recipe was turning around, driving home from that damn parking garage and working on actively putting in the effort, rather than letting the guilt of “I need to be out there doing what puts cash in my pocket today” steal time from building the things I love to do that I know have real value. That trap has been keeping me from tackling the task of nourishing those things (despite the fear) head on.

My short-term goal for myself was simple: find a way to go make the $100 I would have made delivering groceries today doing something that actually matters and builds towards the future.

My medium-term goal is equally modest: build enough revenue streams that I’m making $5,000 a month.

There was a time in my life when I made multiple times that, doing the same kind of work that seems revenue-resistant now. Maybe someday I’ll get back there, but for now I just need breathing room. It’s not that these efforts can’t work, it’s that they stopped working for various reasons that need to be examined and adjusted to compensate for. And I’ve been so lost in grief and the seemingly endless battle against despair that I haven’t been able to put in the effort necessary to figure out how to fix what’s broken.

Yeah, I may still need to go do the dumb thing sometimes to pay the bills, but I can’t let it keep stealing the time from the smart thing that will actually provide a living if I just nourish it with time and effort. I’m not looking to get rich. I’m looking to live simply but sufficiently off of the gifts I’ve been given and the skills I have honed for over 20 years.

My audience has changed a lot since I started TSF back in 2020. Things that didn’t click with readers a few years ago get more traction now. Several of you made clear in the comments that you’re interested in seeing me write more about the weird topics and I cover on our show. I’m happy to do that if there’s an audience for it. Perhaps that’s the audience I should have been cultivating all along.

The deep, memoir-style personal essays will continue, but I can’t keep cranking out one of those a week under the current circumstances. My life has become too small to write those the way I want. It has become a real challenge to capture the experiences and observations that fuel them walking the same stores, driving the same roads, seeing the same sights day after day. I have to broaden my horizons. I have to get out of town. I am a memoirist and travel writer who can’t afford to leave home, and that’s got to change. But I can fill in with commentary on other topics that don’t require as much personal bloodletting to produce.

In any case, none of this is possible without all of you. Although I leave most posts free for now, every person who has a paid subscription to The Skojec File is a vital contributor to my ability to do that work. I need to collaborate with you to ensure I’m holding up my end of the bargain to provide real value in exchange for your hard-earned money.

That starts with writing more.

So I’m working on a new plan to do just that. I need structure, and I’m bad at creating it, so I’m working with my little menagerie of helper bots to audit this Substack, look for the things that are working and not working, develop a cadence (and maybe a loose editorial calendar that leaves room for spontaneity), and tweak all the backend stuff that needs TLC.

And I have to start looking for small-scale adventures to give the deeper essays new life. Little forays into the wider world, and the lessons it holds in store.

I have been cooped up too long, only leaving to go do work I hate, coming home to a place I don’t want to be, staring into screens to make up for the silence and the loss of human presence. That is a death sentence in slow motion, and if I’m going to survive this awful thing I’ve been forced to endure, I have to rage against the dying of the light, not just whinge about how dark it’s gotten.

And I’m not going to lie to you: I’m scared.

Scared that this momentary burst of agency will fade the next time a surge of grief rises up to consume it. Scared that I’ll panic and go back to the familiar but too-small habits that barely keep my head above water because I’m afraid that I’ll drown if I don’t. Scared that I’ll disappoint those of you who are rooting for me to turn this sinking ship around. Scared that I’ll let myself down and start fading away because I never found a good enough reason not to.

As I sat in that damn parking garage today, engine idling, staring at my cracked phone screen I can’t afford to get fixed, watching lowball orders come in so slowly it was like watching my life tick away one minute at a time, I felt this overwhelming surge of realization that it is time to change this mothereffing situation, right freaking now.

So here I am. Back at the keyboard, burning to find something worth swimming upstream for so I stop being swept away by the current.

And in this spirit, I’ve decided to offer a discount, just for this weekend. From now until Sunday night, annual subscriptions to The Skojec File are 25% off. $60 instead of $80.

Get 25% Off a TSF Annual Subscription!

If I get just two annual subscriptions today, that will justify my decision to come home and focus on this change of course. If I get more, it might buy back my weekend so I can work on more. I’ve got ideas, I just need the time and focus to execute.

I’m not averse to hard work. I love hard work when it gets somewhere. What I can’t stand is the feeling that I’m just running to stand still doing tasks that could be assigned to a mindless automaton. I put in a marathon session from 10AM on Wednesday until 5AM on Thursday working on our latest show, not because I’m getting a paycheck yet, but because it matters and I care about getting it right — and if I keep getting it right, maybe it will help Kale and me keep the lights on and put food on the table somewhere down the road.

Many of you have also acted as patrons, generously supporting the man behind the work as he stumbles through catastrophe in the hopes that I will find my way out of the darkness and back into the light. There is no way to overstate how much this has helped me, and I’m not above saying I need the help. When I lost my faith years ago, I began to believe I just had to go it alone. This past year has taught me just how much I need a community. Other people. And hopefully, assistance from the same God from whom I found myself so estranged. My struggles with the specifics of faith have not resolved, but my prayers have grown deeper through this crisis and much more simple. I fell asleep last night repeating the phrase, “God, help me” again and again. I don’t know what I need, but if he’s listening, he does.

If you feel moved to patronize this work, you can do so in the usual ways. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage. If you prefer Zelle or X money or anything else, let me know and I can give you the details.

It’s time to stop hanging by my fingernails off the edge of this cliff. I know that I’m going to have bad days again. Probably even bad weeks. But it’s time to start clawing my way back. As the character Andy Dufresne famously said in The Shawshank Redemption:

“I guess it comes down to a simple choice, really. Get busy living, or get busy dying.”

Thank you all so much for being here. For your readership, for your prayers, for your encouragement and well-wishes and material support.

I may be alone in this city, but you have stood with me from afar.

On Tuesday night, and I were also invited to go on Avoiding Babylon with my old pal Anthony Abbate and his co-host, “Catholic Rob.” We had a great time, a lot of laughs, and an interesting dive into the topics of Aliens and UAPs and AI and where they all seem to meet in the middle. If you’d like to see that, it’s here:

For this week’s episode of MTS, we did our promised deep dive into the most recent appearance of David Grusch, the former Air Force Major and US Intelligence officer who was tasked with investigating secret UFO-related programs inside the Department of Defense and related agencies.

Grusch has now come forward and said he’s seen videos within the classified setting of a UFO crash with non-human bodies. He’s been told stories by colleagues he trusts about battles between various species of non-human intelligence AND battles between US military personnel and some of those species.

I know it sounds crazy, but that’s why this conversation is necessary. Very serious people with impeccable credentials are saying astonishing things with no obvious benefit to themselves other than their commitment to get the truth out, and that demands to be taken seriously on its own terms.

And just this week, Grusch’s former boss, Jay Stratton, a man with over 32 years of military and government service who was the top man in identifying aerospace threats for the Department of War and spent over 16 years in an official capacity investigating UAPs for the government released his memoir, Out of the Shadows: Revealing the Truth About Non-Human Intelligent Life.

I’m five chapters in and fascinated. Again, very sober people with distinguished careers are saying things that sound absolutely kooky if you filter them through the lens of normalcy bias — which is why we have to adjust our epistemology to try to account for what’s going on.

Here’s Jay on Special Report With Bret Baier earlier this week:

So this week’s episode taps into all of this, as Kale and I try to make sense out of how normal people with jobs and families and religious beliefs and a healthy dose of skepticism for wild claims should approach all of this.

I even include footage I took in 2023 of my own UFO experience.

I’ll be writing more about these topics as I wrestle more time away from my other duties because this is important, it’s ongoing, and it’s seemingly building to a crescendo.

The episode is live now:

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

The thing is, I spent all day Thursday re-editing and re-uploading our weekly podcast because we got copyright blocked for a clip we played on air of a relevant interview. YouTube wouldn’t even let the video go live.

This after spending several hours uploading and processing the first version, only to have to make a new edit, adjust the transcript and timestamped chapters, and upload and process for three MORE hours.

I spent roughly 14 hours on Thursday getting this episode edited, polished, and published. And by then, I was so burned out, that Friday was mostly me sitting at my desk going, “I really need to promote the show. I should really promote the show. You know, I should probably…”

And I just…didn’t.

Saturday, an unexpected in town visit from the lady formerly known as my wife and several of my kids took me out of commission for the next couple days. I hadn’t seen anyone in a month, so I dropped everything to go be with them.

And here we are.

This was one of the most fun conversations and I have had since we started this show. We talked about so much interesting, weird stuff that we ran out of time to get to the weirdest stuff at the end. From the episode description:

What if the categories we use to explain reality are hiding more than they reveal?

Steve and Kale begin with *Digger*, the strange new Tom Cruise film that is almost impossible to market without spoiling, then follow the problem outward: plague headlines and manufactured narratives, social-media context collapse, crowd behavior, spirits, possession, and the unsettling possibility that groups can begin to act like organisms with minds of their own.

From there, the conversation moves through Skinwalker Ranch, aliens and demons, cryptids, traditional accounts of mythical creatures, and a listener's question about whether Christianity must become wild, miraculous, and strange again. What did the printing press, modern analysis, and the demand for reproducibility teach us to dismiss? Can art and a "second naivete" recover forms of perception that modernity trained us to distrust?

After the break, AI enters the conversation as one more intelligence that does not fit comfortably inside our inherited categories: OpenAI's enormous release of mathematical manuscripts, agentic assistants, software built by machines, synthetic filmmaking, AI confidants that can become instruments of surveillance, and the promise of a future without work. If machines take over the labor, what happens to meaning, belonging, and human purpose?

The episode closes with a remarkable new claim about nonhuman intelligence and a problem that now hangs over every extraordinary piece of evidence: in the age of synthetic media, how will we know what we are looking at?

I’d be interested in hearing from you if you’re interested in hearing from me about this kind of weird stuff in my writing. I’m fascinated by it, but in the past, it never seemed to do much for the audience. That said, this audience is always changing.

If I limit my writing to once-a-week (and sometimes once-every-couple-of-weeks) pieces of memoir/travel-style expositional writing, not much else happens here. Those posts are deeply personal and, as such, incredibly emotionally expensive and time-consuming. As it is, I don’t have nearly as much time to write these days as I’d like, but I could certainly fire off more short posts about items of interest if they are…of interest.

Let me know in the comments.

Anyway, without further ado…the weird world is waking up, and that’s what we talked about on the latest episode of Monitoring the Situation!

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

It’s been a long week. Emotionally and professionally.

Still negotiating time with my kids and parental rights and stuff I don’t even want to go into — but suffice to say it eats me alive.

Still trying to get my weekly essay in.

Still doing the show on Wednesday that burns through Tuesday and Thursday as well.

This afternoon, I finished up all the podcast post-production stuff, and I was on my way to the shower when I just decided to lie down on my bed for a minute.

A minute turned into two hours. There’s just no freaking gas in the tank. We all have to deal with drudgery of various kinds, but I continue to believe that only if your life has a worthy organizing principle is it sustainable to keep digging those ditches.

And yet, just for a moment last night, after I finished recording and was completing my edit of the cold open, I felt like I was alive. I was so consumed by doing a thing that feels like it matters, that for a few hours I forgot to think about all the things that drag me down.

You can’t distract yourself forever, it’s true. But I’m glad there are still things I have my hands on that pull me out of my problems and into a flow state.

And Monitoring the Situation is one of those things.

This week’s episode is different. We’re still riffing on the Effective Altruists and the Rationalists and the Longtermists who are running the AI world — and by extension, much of our economy and future — but we dig deeper, into the history of myth and magic and alchemy and science and where they all meet in a weird, unexpected crossover.

There’s something here. Something deeper and darker and older than we moderns tend to realize. We’re so used to everything being able to be subjected to the scientific method, labeled, packaged, put in an appropriate box, and then the next thing comes.

But the world is getting weird again, and the people who are driving the technology that is rocketing the human race in an entirely novel direction are captured by forces they may not even be fully aware of.

That’s what we tackled on this episode. We laugh, we make fun, but we dig things up, too.

Things are stranger than they seem.

From the episode description:

What if the people building the future are not escaping myth, magic, and religion, but writing new versions of them?

Are we doing science or magic or both?

In this episode, Steve and Kale examine the mythic structure beneath supposedly post-mythic technology. How do stories and beliefs shape endeavors and moral permission, and teach people what kind of future they are supposed to build?

The trail begins in our current tech-saturated moment, then runs backward through Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, John Dee's Enochian angels and imperial vision, Isaac Newton's obsession with alchemy, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Jack Parsons' fusion of science fiction, rocketry, and occultism. It looks at Jaron Lanier's warning about technological stories, Leslie Kean's accounts of physical mediumship, the weirdness of Skinwalker Ranch, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Rationalist Harry Potter fan fiction, the limits of reproducibility, and the possibility that the modern West never became as disenchanted as it imagined.

The nerds are running the world now. The stories and beliefs that formed their worldview matter.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

These days, the light is pale like old cardboard, left out, forgotten, bleached by the sun.

It was mercilessly hot right up until it wasn’t. Then, one day, I stepped outside and stopped in my tracks, pausing to enjoy a cool breeze I hadn’t even considered possible.

The summer heat smelled often of petrichor, the heavy rains pushing the hygrometer towards hellish percentages. 79%. 85%. 92%. Humidity not fit for man nor beast.

When the heat finally broke, the air thinned, too, the slick film of unseen haze no longer fogging up the windows when the air conditioning runs. No longer making even your perspiration start sweating.

I’m a northern boy, born in November after the first snows, and though I’ve adapted as well as I can to southern summers, they will never feel natural to me. Give me 80 degree days and 60 degree nights any time. I’ll take rain half the year if it lets me savor dark moods. Give me the crisp cool air of early falls, where the snow sometimes comes at Halloween. Give me longer winters. I’ll deal with steel-grey skies and crusted, dirty snowbanks, pockmarked like acne scars, lasting almost until May.

I’m a northern boy, always suspicious of anywhere that gets too much sun.

An old colleague and friend of mine, brilliant and wild and utterly unconcerned with the things of this world used to offer me unsolicited, passionately-delivered advice. Among her sayings were, “If you want to be rich, work close to the money” (she never did) and not-unrelatedly, “Never trust anyone who is tan in the winter” (she never was). She talked about the artist’s way. She spoke her mind even when she was the only one willing to say what she was saying.

She died before I had any idea who I was, or how to apply these things.

But she saw me, really saw me, in a way few people ever have.

It’s a strange thing to be weird, to be smart and articulate and gifted in things that don’t seem to matter to most people at all. To keep an entire constellation of eccentricities and anxieties hidden behind a mask of calculated normalcy, only to fall short of normal expectations time and again.

My friend was never like that. She was big and loud and unkempt and a little crazy. She was creative and brilliant and observant and utterly alive. Nobody knew quite how to handle her. Everyone respected the hell out of her all the same.

She told me I was the best writer in the whole place, and considering the caliber of the people I was working with, I found that hard to believe.

But I never doubted for a second that she meant it, or that she was qualified to know.

The morning she died, I came into the office in a good mood, and immediately started joking around with co-workers who already knew she was gone. I remember the looks on their faces. I remember them saying through tears that she had died, the room heavy with grief and loss. I remember being embarrassed that I had tried to be lighthearted and funny because I didn’t have the slightest clue that someone completely irreplaceable was suddenly no longer a part of our lives.

I miss her. I wonder what advice she’d give me now. I’m older, wiser, my talents more proven, and yet I’m just as lost as I was then, 20 years younger than I am now.

I wonder how she’d make sense out of my completely discombobulated life.

I can only imagine she’d furrow her brow beneath the mop of frizzy, dark hair, and peer at me intensely through her rimless glasses. She would shout — not out of anger, but out of love and intensity — something I’d not even considered. Something I didn’t know I desperately needed to hear.

But I don’t have the ability to imagine what it is that she’d say.

I don’t have anything like a mentor anymore. No wise sage to guide me with the pearls of their hard-won experience. Just an overly talkative clanker on my phone and the whispering of dragonflies.

I drive through the outskirts of Wake Forest at sunset, on one of the first nights it actually feels like autumn. It’s beautiful and bucolic and there’s almost no traffic, which is as close as you can get to a small miracle on a Friday night. North Carolina feels like a lover who never fully lets you in. You orbit them, you soak in their beauty, you stay up late talking with them on the couch, but they never lean in for a kiss.

I could have stayed here for years. I could have made this my home. It was missing things I desperately needed, but there’s just something about it. Something I’ve come to love in spite of it all. I should hate it here, since this is the place where the old me came unwittingly to die. The place where the last fatal blow to the only life I ever wanted was struck. The place where the woman I loved for more than half my life looked me in the eyes and told me she didn’t. Not anymore.

But there’s a strange southern serenity here, the sticky summers notwithstanding. The big craggy oaks and the tall skinny pines and the soft rolling hills and the gorgeous kudzu creep. The vestigial vocal twang. The ubiquity of biscuits and cobbler and barbecue I never eat and sweet tea I never drink. The old neighborhoods with their sprawling Victorians planted between the soft light of Sesame Street lamps; the new neighborhoods with their sprawling McMansions done up in luxury farmhouse style. Everything is within reach. 30 minutes gets you just about anywhere. There are more decent coffee shops in a ten mile radius than pretty much any place I’ve lived. The trees here are this magical, deep shade of green.

It’s a weird mix of bougie upscale city and charming small town vibe. It’s everything I ever wanted from a place to live except for the fact that I don’t have people here. It feels like it should have worked out, except for all the reasons that it didn’t.

I need to start looking for places to live in Virginia, but I don’t want to go. Mostly, I’ve been distracting myself from being now-constantly alone. It’s too far to go see my kids more than once a month or so, and my lease here runs through mid-December. I need to start looking for places to live up that way, but I don’t want to live up that way.

Makes it pretty hard to get focused.

I don’t want to do this again. I don’t want another move to somewhere meaningless; a place to live that can never be a home. I don’t want to further formalize my disenfranchisement from the only place I’ve ever belonged: within the same four walls as the woman I married and the children we gave life to. I don’t want to go back to Virginia where it all started, to drive through towns where we used to live together, see the church where we were married, the stores we used to go to. I can’t walk into the crypt chapel beneath the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in DC without seeing myself on the kneeler there, before the tabernacle, putting a ring on the finger of the woman who would become the mother of my tribe.

I don’t want to be forced remember what it felt like when there was still hope.

The trees there are wrong and the landscape is wrong and the stores are different and the traffic is too much and there are foreigners everywhere now and the data centers fill the landscape. Going back these days feels somehow both like driving by a place you used to live with brand-new tenants who cut the tree down in the front yard and painted the house a different shade and going someplace alien that you’ve never ever been. Like it’s somehow both home and a fever dream.

It’s too much to process, so mostly I just don’t. I procrastinate by being busy. I work. I write. I research. I record and edit my show. I think big thoughts that wouldn’t be missed if I stopped thinking them altogether. I lie in bed with a drink on my nightstand, watching stuff on the TV I don’t actually care about until the wee hours, telling myself it’s fine, because nobody expects anything from you at that time of the night anyway.

I’ve made progress this year, it’s true. But I’m still me. My heart is still shattered into a million pieces, I’ve just got it packed more carefully in custom-crafted protective foam so I can carry it around with me without it falling apart. As soon as I think the grief is over, it finds new ways to arrive. As soon as I think “I’ve got this, I can do this,” I’m reminded that I’ve got maybe 30 years left on this planet, and I can’t think of a single way they are going to feel like they’re worth living when everything I ever wanted is already gone, and there’s nothing I can even imagine wanting instead.

I’m a character in someone else’s choose-your-own-adventure book. I didn’t pick this storyline. It’s just the one I’m stuck in, and I’m decidedly not a fan.

I find myself in the checkout lane at the grocery store, and I can’t get the code on my phone I need loaded to load. The lady working there asks me if something is wrong with my app.

I tell her yeah, it’s not doing the thing for some reason.

“Technology, it’s the devil.” she quips.

“No,” I reply, fumbling with my device. “It’s worse than the devil. You can at least bargain with him.”

She laughs. I laugh. But I also mean what I said.

Can’t bargain with tech. Can’t bargain with a lot of people. Can’t bargain with the universe. And Jesus is not picking up the phone.

I pass a sign for a place called “The Church of God of the Prophecies.” I wonder, absently, how people come up with these names.

I deliver some groceries to a farm with a gate code. The woman sitting on the porch waiting for me smells like she’s already five drinks deep. Her chickens are gathering around the steps behind me, and she anticipates that this will somehow make me uncomfortable, but it doesn’t.

“When you leave, just walk towards them, and they’ll get out of your way.” She says.

“I’m not worried,” I say. “I used to have chickens. Raccoons got to them all. Little suckers could actually open the latch on the coop.”

She registers this information with alarm, but when I turn to go, she repeats herself as if I haven’t just told her it’s not a problem.

“Just walk.” She says again. “They’ll get out of your way.”

“Got it,” I say. No point reiterating.

“Hello ladies,” I say to the chickens. They just cluck and bob out of my way.

“You need to put in the gate code to leave, hon.” The woman says over the porch railing as I’m almost to my car.

Good information. I hadn’t even seen the code box on this side.

“Thanks for that,” I say. “Remind me what the code is again? Now that I’ve dropped off I can’t see that information in my app anymore.”

She does. The code works. The gate is so slow the movement is almost imperceptible at first, and I want to enter the code again before I realize the hydraulic arm has shifted ever so slightly. So I wait.

I make my way to the end of the long driveway, and reach the main road just in time to see the sun slipping below the horizon through the trees.

The light is so bright, I don’t notice the moon hanging low over the little brick house across the street. Within the hour, that moon hangs large and ephemeral in the early twilight, its figure obscured slightly by the swaddling of diaphanous wisps of cloud.

On a suburban dropoff somewhere in midtown after dark, I notice two whitetail bucks standing in someone’s front yard. For a moment, I think they’re just extremely lifelike statues, until I see one of them dip his head for another bite of whatever landscaping foliage drew him to that particular lawn. Neither of them run when I pass slowly by, which is odd, considering how close I am.

I swing a U-turn to go back for another look and maybe, if I’m lucky, a photo. But by the time I make it back, they’ve both vanished somehow into the sparse vegetation of a dense residential area. This is way too far inside city limits to normally see any deer.

On a different road, under a starless night sky, I see a bird dramatically flapping large white wings to slow its descent to the curb. As I approach, it swivels its head to stare at me, and I see the face of a Barred Owl.

It doesn’t move, just stares.

I have never in my life seen an owl just land on the side of the road and look at an oncoming car at night. It feels surreal. Almost symbolic somehow. What it could mean, though, is anyone’s guess.

And that’s kind of the theme these days, come to think of it.

What any of this means could be anyone’s guess.

What is your life for if its not for the people you love?

What is the purpose of suffering if it doesn’t redeem?

Strip away a man’s faith and career and family, and what’s left? The continuation of metabolic processes just for their own sake?

Raging against the dying of the light is a lot more inspiring when you don’t already live each day fully in the dark.

What am I for?

The question rings endlessly in my head. A problem. A puzzle. An indictment.

No answer ever comes.

On the days when I feel most hopeful and optimistic, it’s because I’m not asking that question. I’m just dealing with what’s in front of me, right in the moment. No looking at the future. No trying to find a way for it to feel like it isn’t just a perennial humiliation ritual; an orgy of perpetuated loss.

I’m writing this thing or delivering this order or running this errand or making this meal or doing this podcast or reading this book or….

Eventually, though, you have to pick your head up and look down the road. You can’t just keep driving distracted through life forever or you’re going to crash.

My uncle had to have heart surgery last week. One of the healthiest, most physically active guys I’ve known. Blocked artery. He’s OK. In recovery. But it got me thinking about where I’ll be when I’m his age.

I’ve got nothing. No assets. No retirement fund. No likely access to social security. No real estate. Nobody who will take care of me when I no longer can.

I can’t even afford to withhold money for taxes when every dollar I make comes through a 1099. Things piling up in the dark, waiting to come back to bite me.

I’ll be 49 this November. Which means 50 next year. I don’t have health insurance. I haven’t seen a doctor since 2019.

It’s one thing to strive and grind and hope and pray. It’s another thing to actually get somewhere. We love an underdog story. We love it when someone loses everything and manages to get back on their feet and writes a book and does the podcast circuit to tell us how well it’s all worked out for them in the end.

We don’t hear from the people who get smacked down by life and never recover.

I’m a Schrödingerian conundrum. A complete and total failure at two-thirds of the way through this existence, or a comeback story nobody saw coming?

This is the stuff that isn’t fun to talk about, write about, or think about.

This is the stuff that makes me terrified to spend the rest of my life alone.

I never wanted to be all things to anyone, let alone myself. I need love. I need care. I need someone looking after me who isn’t me. I do an absolutely terrible job.

I am a man without purpose or mission. A rusty tool hanging in an abandoned shed.

No matter how hard I bust my rear end working, I come home to silent emptiness. Nobody to greet me and ask about my day. Nobody to put their arms around me and remind me why doing all the shit I don’t want to do is actually worth it. Just an endless treadmill of pointless maintenance.

It’s not enough. I don’t know how people do this. It’s like being dead while you’re still alive.

I need more out of life and I am so pissed at myself for not being able to figure out what I want, let alone how to get it. I’m not afraid to do the work. I’m afraid of not knowing the work I need to do. I’m getting pretty tired of surrendering to the freaking storm. You can’t get to a destination you can’t identify. If you just start driving without a plan, you’re only going to wind up hopelessly lost.

And when you’re hopelessly lost, that’s when you most need someone to give you directions.

That’s what I’m looking for.

Directions.

To get them, I don’t want to have to bargain with the devil. I’d much rather strike up a deal with God.

But I’ve got to find him first.

And to do that, he’s going to have to meet me halfway.

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a great time. I could surely use the support:

Subscribe now

And if you’re open to patronizing my work just to help me keep going, I’d welcome that as well. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage.

But here’s the thing: this podcast is the only standing commitment I have every week. It’s a 3-hour conversation with my best friend. It’s the only substantive interaction I get to have with anyone. And it takes 2-3 days out of my week to make it happen.

There’s the research, the prep, the show outlines. The books/articles/podcasts I have to ingest before going on air.

Then I have to clean up my little cave, because it doubles as my studio. It’s all on camera. Can’t have it looking like a dumpster fire.

Last night, I spent 40 minutes trying to get my camera to handle its stupid white balance and ISO issues, only to have it throw so much noise at the encoder that I look like a Minecraft character for half the episode because of all the big, blocky pixels.

Then we shoot. For three hours.

Then it’s post production for another 6-12 hours. Edits, audio, descriptions, thumbnails, titles, short clips, post everything to social media over the next week while responding to comments coming in.

And the truth is, I love it. It’s a lot of work, but it’s real, and it’s ours, and it’s finally growing. We had over 7,000 views on the last episode. It feels good to get some traction again.

My usual deal is to spend the first three days of the week writing (for the Substack), then prepping, shooting the show, processing. Thursday is normally a mix: podcast stuff in the morning, go deliver orders in the afternoon. Then Friday-Sunday it’s all Instacart, all the time.

Rinse, repeat.

But I just have to hope that if I keep putting in the hours, the real work — this Substack and the companion podcast — are going to become the job. Brick by brick. Inch by inch. I think what we’re doing matters. Not just for us, but for our audience.

Here’s the cold open for this week’s show. I probably spent 3 hours making it. I don’t even care. It helps grab attention from YouTube browsers, and it’s fun, and I’m proud of it:

I started making these little compilations at the beginning because YouTubers were getting stuck our our ineffably cool retro-futurist intro and bouncing before they got to the real conversation:

Anyway, enough of me showing you how the sausage is made. Here’s the description and link to the latest episode. And I’m not kidding, by the way. These Effective Altruists are bad news:

Silicon Valley has a religion. It has a creation story, a priesthood, an apocalypse, a promise of salvation, and a vision of beings that will succeed humanity. It's bougie and narcissistic and morally incoherent: in other words, pretty darn evil.

The scary part? Most people simply have no idea what it is, so they aren't aware of the danger.

Episode 24 begins with Diana Pasulka and Jonathan Pageau on UFOs, technological transcendence, and the end of secularism. Steve and Kale explore transfiguration versus transhumanism, the spiritual strangeness of digital life, the impotence of truth in an age of infinite information, and the urgent need to recover ordinary embodied life.

Then comes the dive into Effective Altruism: consequentialism, insect suffering, hypothetical future beings, longtermism, TESCREAL, AI extinction narratives, secrecy, and the power claimed by people who believe they are securing the future of intelligence itself. Peter Thiel's Antichrist argument supplies the mirror image: what if fear of apocalypse becomes the justification for control?

Are we building technology to serve human beings, or treating humanity as the bootloader for whatever comes next?

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

A year ago last week, I wrote the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write: I announced that my wife of 22 years and I were separating against my will, and reconciliation looked unlikely.

This Wednesday will mark the first anniversary of the worst night of my life: the night I had to leave. I won’t go into the details, but nothing about it was as calm or dignified as I hoped it could be. The rending of a family is an ugly thing.

Many people who go through such things don’t talk about them publicly. But I’m the kind of writer who writes about his experience of life. A memoirist. A confessional writer. There was simply no way to prevent the obvious from showing up unless I quit writing altogether.

And so was born my series, Postcards from Exile, which was about the road trip I took after I had to leave, in the hopes I could ground myself and regain some sense of sanity before I came back “home.” “Home,” in this instance, meaning “in the geographic vicinity of my children so I can have some kind of presence in their lives.”

I’ve spent the past year holed up in a 500 sq. ft. studio apartment that feels more like a cave than a residence. Don’t get me wrong — I’m grateful to have a place to sleep and eat and work. I was so devastated when this all kicked off, I wasn’t sure if I would even manage that much.

Reducing my needs and expenses to the bare minimum made them almost manageable. I had always imagined that if I were forced to have to do something like this, I’d use the solitary time to build. What I found out instead was that it wasn’t a time for growing, it was a time for mere survival.

For the first few months, other than writing about the experience, I couldn’t work at all. I was so devastated I could barely function. The road trip itself generated a lot of output, but coming back to Raleigh was the real killer. Other than my wife and kids and some old family and work acquaintances I haven’t spent time with in over twenty years, I don’t know anyone in this city.

A year later, I still don’t.

Nobody to sit with and talk with on the worst days. No pastor to receive counsel from. Nobody to grab a coffee or a drink with who didn’t need me to infodump decades of backstory onto to try to get them up to speed.

Just a guy who can’t stand to be alone with his brain in the best of times alone with it literally ALL the time — while going through the worst grief I’ve ever experienced. Just soul-crushing, make you not want to wake up the next morning stuff. When you can no longer see a future worth living in, your mind goes to some remarkably dark places.

But bit by bit, day by day, incremental progress unfolded. The setbacks have been innumerable — they still happen even now. I spent most of the past weekend in a funk, asking “What am I for?” and “What future could possibly be worth this?”

And yet, despite this, and despite it not being an optimal time to build anything, I suppose I really have grown in ways I didn’t expect. I became stronger. Calmer. More resilient. About two months ago now, my emotional state finally stabilized, like a plane coming out of a tailspin right before hitting the ground. I’ve struggled constantly, but my bills all got paid, if only barely. I’ve fed myself, kept my place relatively clean and well-maintained, I’ve worked a lot of thankless hours without giving up, built a podcast with my friend that is finally getting some real traction (we’re on track to make $42.99 in ad revenue after 23 episodes and 13,000 watch hours, lol!) and have done some of the best writing I’ve ever laid on the page with my Notes From the Road series.

And now, I find myself at another crossroads.

As I’ve written about, my family moved back to Virginia at the beginning of September. My lease isn’t up until the end of the year, so I’m Shanghaied here in Raleigh until then, alone. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell I could have gotten through this a year ago. My nerves were like a basket of broken glass. And I’m not going to pretend that it’s pleasant, knowing I won’t have meaningful human contact again for weeks, maybe months, because I can’t afford regular visits up to see them. Because of move and family-related activities, I lost three working weekends in a row in the past month I couldn’t afford to lose. I’ve been busting my rear trying to make up for it, but gig work pays poorly and eats a lot of time and energy, and this Substack, though it keeps me afloat, lost 20 paid subscribers this month, almost all of them on annual plans, which means a pretty significant drop in already insufficient writing income.

And I get it: the economy is brutal, and I’m not writing as often as I’d like. The cycle is real. I spend most of my time and energy chasing low-return work for cash today, and that keeps me from building a business here that is more sustainable. I would prefer to be dropping a couple essays a week, and these days, I’ve been lucky to fire off one good one plus a podcast-related post. (The podcasts, more than anything, help keep me sane. They give me something to look forward to and focus on every week where I’m not just trying to go it alone. And the conversations are always enjoyable.)

I’m actively trying to figure out how to get more productive hours in on the things that matter to me so I can spend less on the stuff that’s just mere survival. I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’ll just keep grinding until I get there.

And if there’s no way out of the existential disorientation of being a man who identified as being a husband and father right up until those were taken away against his will, there are things I’ve learned over the past year that will stay with me.

First, the marriage, as it was, was unhealthy for both of us. Now, to my way of thinking, that’s not a good reason to end it, because when I said “forever” I meant it and I think our kids deserve the presence and example of two parents who love each other, but that doesn’t take away the fact that while I can’t speak for my wife, I believe we’ve both done a lot of healing over the past year we couldn’t have done together.

I genuinely feel as though I’ve rediscovered the man I abandoned at the altar.

What do I mean by that? Well, for someone like me, who is trauma-shaped into people-pleasing, I have always chased love and validation and acceptance and affirmation from outside of myself, because I couldn’t find any of that within myself. And so, I abandoned who I was in the pursuit of the man I thought she wanted me to be. I wanted her love and acceptance so badly, I was constantly chasing the feeling of, “I’m not good enough and have to change.”

There are good things about that. I was a dumpster fire when we met. I had so much unprocessed anger that was really mostly metastasized hurt from deep childhood and young adult wounds, and my need to be needed was bottomless. I did a lot of stupid things. I made a lot of mistakes I deeply regret. I’ve apologized for everything I’m aware of having done, and I’ve actively tried to correct those behaviors in myself. I think I’ve made a lot of progress. I like who I am a lot better than I did when I left. I like that I feel like the old me, but with a lot more wisdom and maturity than I had when I was 25.

I rarely get angry anymore. I still get terribly lonely, but I’ve learned how to be alone with myself in a way that used to terrify me. It’s certainly not optimal — I still can’t escape the fact that I am absolutely made for relationship, or that the lack of deep personal companionship is an ache that cannot be soothed by any amount of stoic nonsense. But if I have managed solitude poorly, I’ve still done it better than I could have previously believed.

And I don’t hate myself anymore. I no longer believe I am unworthy of love or respect. That doesn’t mean I’m entitled to it, but I hope, inasmuch as I am fundamentally oriented towards a shared life, that I am not precluded from it forever.

My baseline anxiety has dropped exponentially. My life is still frustrating and stressful in a number of significant ways, but I have shrunk my existence and problem set into things I can manage, which creates a stability I didn’t have when I had to accommodate a very different set of tolerances and expectations with someone wired very differently than I am.

I’ve come to better understand — and more importantly, to accept — that my brain is wired differently than most people I know, and the only way to work with that is to lean into it instead of trying to beat it into submission. It took the better part of this year to get me out of the nervous system equivalent of DEFCON 1, but now that I am at say, DEFCON 3, I’ve got some room to stop just reacting and start making course corrections on where things are going.

Something a number of friends and readers have pointed out to me is how much I blamed myself for everything that went wrong. You can see it all through my post from last September. I wanted to put the target on myself, because I knew my failings were many and not insignificant, and I still loved and wanted to protect her. I spent so much of the past year interrogating and accusing myself, tearing myself apart to try to figure out what went wrong, and almost obsessively trying to make sure I wasn’t exonerating myself in any undeserving way, that I feel like I can honestly say I’ve put in the work to try to understand what I contributed — and what I didn’t.

And because of that, I know now, with a certitude I could not access then, that I wasn’t solely responsible for the breakdown of our marriage. Just because those two people can’t agree on the appropriate distribution of accountability doesn’t make it less real. I used to think if my understanding of the story wasn’t validated by her, then I couldn’t legitimately hold it as my working model. I no longer need her sign-off. My epistemology is hard-coded for fidelity to reality. That’s enough for me to trust my understanding.

I also know that despite everything — including some absolutely fundamental disagreements about the whole situation — I don’t hate her. And I don’t believe she hates me. She’s changed so much over the years, but when we get together these days, I still see the girl I fell in love with. My attachment has been broken, but I still feel love for her. Warmth. Recognition. I don’t wish her harm and in fact still find that I have genuine protective instincts towards her. There are moments when I really don’t understand why we couldn’t fix things. I still wish she could see and accept me as I really am, and not only through the filter of accumulated damage. But that damage is real, and I’m grateful that we’ve reached a point where we can deal with each other without animosity. Our kids have gone through enough. They don’t need their parents to be at war.

I have found that my experience of all this loss has re-opened my heart to faith.

When I left Catholicism in 2021, I had reached a point where I was convinced that God couldn’t care less about us. I’d spent so many years begging for help that never came — particularly in my marriage, but also over the state of the Church itself — that I gave up on it ever coming. I came to realize how much I’d outsourced to “providence” that should have taken the form of personal action. I began to believe that I could fix my own life more effectively than an absentee God ever could.

And for a while, that actually worked.

But this past year has taught me the limits of personal action. There are things too big for us to handle on our own. And in desperation, we are forced to return to prayer. The “no atheists in foxholes” line also applies to personal catastrophe, not just war.

Does that mean my confidence in Catholicism has returned? No. But I have become “an agnostic who prays.” Every day. I never strayed very far from the morality I always believed in, because most of it just seems like decency and common sense to me. But in the areas where I still struggle, I’m not purely letting things slide. I’m asking for help. I don’t know if it’s possible for me to re-kindle (or kindle appropriately the first time) a faith in God that is real and substantial, but it feels wrong to expect his help if I’m not willing to put in an effort to live the right way. As any mature person reading this probably knows, we’re all riddled with hypocrisy on this front, but all you can do is take baby steps, I suppose.

And the most important thing I’ve come to understand this year is that my kids still love me very much and want me in their lives. They make me feel so welcome and wanted. They are affectionate and open with me. We talk. We enjoy each other’s company.

This, more than anything else, is what saved me from a much darker path.

But I don’t know what the future holds.

I don’t know for certain if she will finalize the divorce now that the statutory year is over.

I don’t know how my life will change when I move to Virginia later this year to stay close to the kids. I don’t want to go. I like Raleigh, and I’ve made it my own. Virginia is planted thick with memories. We were married there. We had most of our kids there. Every time I go back, I’m reminded of things that are now gone.

But this is where my new mantra, “surrender to the storm,” comes in. Control what you can. Leave the rest to (the) god(s).

As I said above, I’ve spent the past few days really struggling with questions about the future. I no longer have the things that I fundamentally oriented my existence around. I do work that I care about, but I don’t have a sense of mission or purpose anymore. “What is my life even for” remains the open question I can’t answer.

Some people immediately respond to that with, “for your kids.” Yes, I absolutely want to be there for them and for anything they need. But understanding that I’m not with them 99% of the time should help explain why that’s not sufficient. I need something to get out of bed for every day. Something I care deeply about. Something that matters outside of the scope of my own personal tragedy. Something bigger than me.

I don’t know yet how to find that, but I keep getting a quiet little feeling that I’m on the cusp of whatever is next. It’s as fleeting as my dragonflies. It shows up, hovers just long enough to get my attention, then zips away. I think the next chapter will be largely unexpected, and my hope is that it will be better than anything I’ve been able to dream up so far. My powers of imagination have been drastically limited by my circumstances. Still, one of the greatest gifts human beings have is not knowing what the future holds.

I’m choosing to believe it will be better than things have been for the past year. It would certainly be hard for it to be worse!

On a practical note, it was tough to go into my admin panel today and see that I’d lost 20 paid subscribers. As I said above, I get it. Times are tough. I don’t write here as frequently as I’d like. There are any number of reasons.

But Substack fills in what my other work can’t. I only make about $100 a day, before expenses, doing gig work, and I only do that four days a week so I can do work here and on the podcast. My gross annualized revenue from this Substack is only $21,000. I’ll be 50 next year, and I’m frantically arranging deck chairs on the financial titanic. My kids need school uniforms right now and I’m so far behind I don’t know how I’m going to be able to contribute.

If you’ve ever thought about becoming a paid subscriber, now would be a great time. I could surely use the support:

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And if you’re open to patronizing my work just to help me keep going, I’d welcome that as well. Venmo/Paypal/Stripe/Buy Me a Coffee remain the best options for patronage. If you prefer Zelle or X money or anything else, let me know and I can give you the details.

The more revenue I have to work with, the more time I can spend writing instead of schlepping groceries.

I hope this coming year will mark a striking departure from the last one. It’s time for some changes. It’s time to level up and start getting things done.

Last weekend, while I was walking through the Smithsonian with my kids, I got a text from Kale that only said two words: “Something happened.”

With it came a link to the latest AI fear coming out of the “frontier labs” and has reached all the way to the White House.

On this week’s show, we break it down, and try to look for what’s really going on behind the performative panic.

(We also had our pet clanker make us a ridiculous thumbnail to go with the theme.)

From the show description:

Something happened in AI—and suddenly the people building the most powerful systems on Earth began asking the world to slow down.

In Episode 23, Steve and Kale reconstruct the chain of events behind the new “pace the frontier” campaign: the OpenAI agents that coordinated an unauthorized attack on Hugging Face, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s spectacularly amplified resignation, Dario Amodei’s call for embedded evaluators and coordinated limits, and the immediate support from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other industry leaders. Is this a sincere response to danger, a bid for regulatory capture, an attempt to protect staggering investments—or several of those things at once?

From there, the discussion widens. Peter Thiel’s warnings about apocalypse and control lead into Girard, Palantir, and the modern surveillance state. Gregory of Nyssa’s fourth-century argument about lifelike automata opens a deeper question about mind, matter, and mechanism. Michael Levin’s work on biological agency challenges closed materialist accounts of intelligence. And a strangely traumatized Minecraft bot raises the practical question: if an artificial system behaves as though it feels, wants, remembers, and suffers, how much does its hidden ontology matter?

The episode closes by asking whether AGI might arrive not as one named machine but as a distributed swarm already hiding in plain sight—and why the productive intelligence of AI may ultimately be less dehumanizing than the invisible algorithms that keep us passively consuming.

Full episode is here (please don’t forget to like and subscribe!):

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

This week’s episode of the MTS Podcast is out. Happy podcast day to those who celebrate!

From the show description:

The future was supposed to free us from drudgery. What happens when it frees the system from needing us?

Kale and Steve follow the AI bottleneck into work, relationships, and civilization itself. New employment figures and disappearing entry-level opportunities lead to a deliberately controversial discussion of young men, sex differences, feminism, dating apps, marriage, and the Lindsay Clancy mistrial.

Then we turn to The Sorcerer's Apprentice as a model for AI risk. The broom does not hate Mickey; it follows its instruction relentlessly. Knowing the spell is not the same as knowing the counterspell. We examine malicious use, synthetic evidence, military integration, recursive self-improvement, and robots that give AI physical agency.

We close with one practical response to cloned voices and manufactured emergencies: every family needs an offline authentication protocol. The danger is not only that false evidence becomes believable, but that real evidence becomes deniable.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

“You’re going to wind up back in Virginia, aren’t you? I just have a feeling. Idk.”

I hit send.

It’s the kind of text message you write because you need some kind of documentation, some official flag planted in the soil of “I’ve got an intuition and I’m not crazy and we’re going to look back at this and see that, I hope.”

Living alone now, trying to endure a separation I never wanted while still parenting where I could, I wasn’t privy to all the day-to-day discussions of what comes next for the family. And Jamie — the woman who is still technically-but-not-in-any-other-way my wife — was the only person to consult with about any of it.

When I wrote it, I was sitting in a supermarket parking lot in Wake Forest, watching a storm roll through a late July afternoon. A Costco order had taken me to that neck of the woods, and as I drove around, watching the dark clouds gather ominously, I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was about to change. But weirdly specifically, I felt that the change meant another move, to another state.

To the place where we’d started our family and that always seemed to call us back: Virginia.

I’m not usually the one who gets change feelings. That was always Jamie’s job. But this time, it was so strong and so precise, I had to say something about it. Whether I was wrong or right about whatever signal I was picking up on, I couldn’t just leave it inside my head.

When she responded, she gave me a litany of pragmatic reasons why she didn’t want Virginia to happen. Schools. Doctors. Therapists. A bunch of listings on the market. I listened. We exchanged messages on fairly wide-ranging topics over the course of the afternoon as I did my delivery drops.

Finally, I said:

“All I know is I got a big change feeling today, and I don’t usually get those…it’s why I asked about Virginia. Something is going on, and I can’t quite figure it out.”

The conversation more or less dead-ended there. But three days later, my daughter Sophie asked for my help. I hadn’t known how bad my family’s financial situation was, and I had nothing to spare, so I asked for help. People were so kind and generous, and a bunch of money came in. Just enough to pay off their back debts, secure a new lease, and pay for a move. At first, I thought they were staying in the old house. But Jamie told me they had to move somewhere cheaper. She couldn’t risk renewing a lease she couldn’t maintain.

She was looking locally. She found smaller houses with lower rent, but she’d gotten behind on bills and it had hurt her credit, and she couldn’t get an approval. Her listings weren’t selling despite her best efforts. She had one shot with the money I’d raised to get out of the predicament, and she didn’t want to blow it. There was even some discussion about going back to Arizona, where the charter schools offer good education for zero tuition. Everything was on the table.

She asked me to come over and talk it out with her.

I did.

I told her what I really believed, not what I wanted to say:

You’ve got two years of information about living here in Raleigh, and real estate isn’t working out for you despite the fact that it’s a growing city. I know you’ve worked as hard as you possibly can, and it’s not coming together. Arizona is the wrong move. I can just feel that it’s a dead end. You’ve always been successful in Virginia, for reasons I can’t fully explain, and I think you need to prioritize your efforts to find something there even though I don’t want the family to leave.

To her credit, she took my advice seriously. She admitted that it made sense. She kept applying for houses in both places, even as they packed up to go to an as-yet-unknown destination.

The weeks rolled by. I hesitated to ask what was going on, because even though I had to move out of my family home, my nervous system still lives there. Their struggles keep me up at night. My work to provide for my own survival is barely sufficient, leaving me feeling powerless to assist in any meaningful way. I found myself praying every night and every morning that the God I’ve struggled so much to trust would take care of them, because I couldn’t.

And then, at the last minute — literally, in the week they had to be out of the old house — she got an approval. Not in North Carolina, but in Virginia. The agent told her something along the lines of, “I wasn’t going to approve you, but Jesus told me to rent this house to you, so that’s what I’m going to do.” Jamie and the kids had been praying too, and this revelation left her speechless. She signed the lease before ever setting foot on the property. A leap of faith. The house is bigger than the one they were moving out of, but somehow almost a thousand dollars cheaper per month. We’d been reducing expenses for years, but homes for large families have remained prohibitively costly.

It was, quite literally, an answer to prayer.

But they still had to finish packing and get there by September 1st.

August turned out to be an unusually busy month for me, and I didn’t get to work my gig job nearly as much as I usually do. My parents came in from out of town, and I got to see them twice after a 7-year stretch without seeing them in person. My best friend and podcast co-host came into town too. There were more visits with the family than usual. I took extra days off.

So when moving weekend arrived last week, I told my wife I needed to work. Weekends are my money-making days doing gig work, and already I’d missed a bunch of workdays and was short for the month. But she asked me to come supervise things while the moving help she hired was there. She didn’t want the kids alone in the house with men she didn’t know while she drove the first truck up to Virginia.

I couldn’t help but agree.

And as the logistics unfolded, I saw that she was drowning in all the tasks that needed to happen in a short window of time. There was just no way for one person to do everything. A team effort was necessary. And the part of me that still loves and wants to protect her, the part of me that wants to take care of the people I’ve been exiled from, couldn’t let that go. There were a bunch of logistics I won’t bore you with here, but with multiple U-Haul trucks and multiple personal vehicles that all needed to head north, and only Jamie and I able to handle driving large moving trucks, it wound up being a huge game of the fox, the chicken, and the sack of grain. Somehow, we had to get them all across the river without any of them being eaten by the others.

Fortunately, I’m pretty good at systematizing things, and I saw a way to do it all in a reasonable amount of time, with limited downside. A plan that worked for everyone.

It was going to suck, but it was going to work.

I offered to drive the next truck up last Saturday while she finished packing whatever was left in the house, then take the train back to Raleigh. The plan was to then drive the last truck up the next day, take the train back again, Uber to my car, and go home. The following Monday, we’d both come back, her to get the last car, me to stay in Raleigh while she went back to Virginia.

I showed up on Saturday morning at 5AM. My son Jude, who is 15, wanted to come with me. We took the big truck and headed out on the road, and talked for hours along the way. In the old days, I’d talk with Jude and Alex — my two high school boys — on the way to drop them off at school. This was like that, but more in-depth. What an incredible kid! We started out before sunrise and made it to the new house a little after 11AM. My mom, who also lives in Virginia, met us there, and immediately drove us the 74 miles to the Alexandria Amtrak station so we could head home on the last train out of Dodge.

There were delays. Jude and I got back late. Sophie, who was finishing packing up what was left, picked us up and brought us back to the house. We grabbed the last truck — a little 10-footer carrying last odds and ends that wouldn’t fit on the big ones — and headed back over to my place so we could leave from there first thing in the morning. We didn’t eat dinner until 10PM, after which both of us crashed, hard.

The next day, we took more time. We got up a little later, ate breakfast first, drove through sunshine and rain, talked for several more hours, then settled into silence. Somewhere near Delaplane, as we drove through the lush, green, rolling countryside of the Blue Ridge foothills, dark clouds dumped a torrent on our truck, and I wondered if it was also storming at our destination. Half an hour later, we got to the house just as everyone was unloading the second truck. It was hot. It was humid. It was threatening to rain. With no time to recover from the long drive, we jumped in to help out with emptying the trucks as soon as we got there, and kept going until the work was done. The rain had held off until that point, but just as the last boxes were coming inside, skies opened up, right before the pizzas arrived.

The new house was full of boxes, pretty much everywhere. The kids were exploring, trying to figure out room assignments and where to put their computer desks and all the things that go with a new place. They had arrived the night before, sight unseen. It was all completely new, and happening fast. My old statue of Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, was already sitting on the mantle, next to the little Chinese ceramic jar full of rosaries, overlooking the mess. I’d had the sculpture since college, when a priest friend I’d been working for gave it to me after I found it in a closet in the rectory. I had asked Jamie to hold onto it since I had nowhere to put her, and now there she was, before anything else was unpacked, watching over my family for me. Doing what I could not.

My eyes welled up with tears and I turned to Jamie and said, “Okay, fine. You can keep her for a while longer.”

She was right where she belonged.

I’d been driving all day, then helping move, then talking some of the kids through big emotions from a move some of them were not at all enthusiastic about. I was wiped, but I’d been given an offer to stay the night. Most of the kids’ mattresses had gotten wet in the rain, even though they were bagged. They all had cots to sleep on, but I’m a giant and a side sleeper, and folding cots just don’t work for me if I want to get any rest at all. So Jamie offered to let me sleep on the mattress that used to be ours — the only one that stayed totally dry — while she took one of the cots.

It was the first time I slept in the same house with my family in almost a year. It felt both surreal and just like old times, all wrapped into one.

The next day, I awoke in a house full of my own children — although to be fair, most of the teenagers were exhausted and still asleep. Jamie and I ran some errands in the morning, then went over to the rental car agency where I’d made a reservation so we could make one last run back to Raleigh. When I got there, though, I found out they wouldn’t rent us a car without a credit card, because both of our licenses were from out of state. Neither of us had a credit card with room for both the rental and the large security deposit. We told them we could pay by cash or debit, but they wouldn’t take either.

Time to alter plans yet again.

And then I had an idea: if we roped Sophie into riding back with us in the large family SUV, she could drive the smaller car that we’d left at the old house back to Virginia, Jamie could drive the Suburban back home, and they could all stay the night in my tiny little place for the night. No rental car, no hotel room, just the cost of gas and food, and we could finish everything in one fell swoop.

So that’s what we did.

And because Sophie was with us on the trip, she did what she always does: played the role of DJ. She put on an endless supply of music, I drove the whole way, and Jamie got to take a passenger seat break after a frantic month of moving work. Eli, our youngest, came with us. It was like bringing bookends: my firstborn and my lastborn along for the ride, while everyone else stayed at the new house and began settling in.

We sang songs together. We laughed. We got coffee. We stopped at McDonald’s, where everyone but me got a Happy Meal, much to our collective amusement. For one day, it was just like old times. I’ve logged countless road trip miles with these people, and this felt no different, except when I remembered why it should.

At my place, we had a late dinner. Homemade hot pot, made with leftovers from the freezer at the old house. I went to the store for vegetables and mushrooms, and Jamie stood in my tiny kitchen, starting the broth. After we ate, we watched a nerdy podcast on YouTube for a while, and went to sleep. I didn’t know if that many people could fit in here, but with a cot and a couch it was cozy and worked out just fine.

In the morning, I made breakfast, and then Jamie headed out to close down our Post Office box and pick up final prescriptions while Sophie and Eli and I went out for coffee. Sophie and I had been trying to schedule regular coffee dates, and there was one place she’d really wanted to try that we hadn’t gotten around to visiting. So that’s where we went. We got iced blueberry lattes, and they were like girly coffee milkshakes, and I didn’t even care.

When Jamie got back, I took everyone out to eat at my favorite local taco shop. Birria, burritos, chips and guac. One final lunch together in the place we called home for the past two years. And then they headed back on the road to Virginia, and I was left here alone.

That was last Tuesday. Now, here I sit. Everyone I know and love in Raleigh is gone. 300 miles away, settling into a new life in a new place, forming new routines and new habits, while I’m stuck here in a lease that won’t be up until the end of the year.

I can feel that they’re gone. I can feel that I’m left here alone.

I was anxious about that day coming, but for now, at least, I’m surprisingly OK.

I’ll be going up to visit for a couple of kid birthdays in the next two months. It’s not that I won’t see them at all.

But after all this activity and all these people who were in my life almost every day for the last couple weeks, it’s kind of like getting dropped off a cliff into no-man’s-land.

As I’ve written before, I’ve come to love it here in Raleigh. It felt like we were called to be here at the time, but I don’t have any idea why in hindsight, and now I have to let it go. I’ve got to plan my own move over the next couple of months. It’ll be a lot easier — I have a bare minimum amount of stuff — but if I’m being honest, I’m not excited about going back to Virginia. We lived there for over a decade together and built so many memories before everything changed. We were married there. Most of our kids were born there. It feels so strange to go back to a place that was once home but no longer is. That said, it’s where I have to be if I want to be in the lives of my children more than once in a while, so I’m going.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This month marks one year since I was forced to walk away from the family I love. Regular readers here have been with me as I’ve gone through most of it. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever endured. There were times when I wasn’t at all sure I really wanted to get to the other side of it. Times when I couldn’t see a future at all.

And if I’m being totally honest, I still can’t imagine a future that isn’t the one I thought I’d have.

But I’ve grown, despite myself. I’m confident, after nearly two months of near-constant emotional stability, that the worst of the grief has passed. It still shows up in unexpected ways and places now and again, but it’s not every day, all the time anymore. I’m calmer, more confident, more capable than I was when I left. I got through something I wasn’t at all sure I could survive. And yet, I’m still here, and I’ve come to unexpectedly rediscover the man I abandoned at the altar. By that I mean, the guy I stopped being when I set out in pursuit of being the man I thought she wanted me to be.

But that guy was never good enough — in part because he was never truly himself — and I like the guy I actually am a lot more than I thought. He’s kind of like he was at 25 — funny, interested in a ton of things, outgoing in ways he’d forgotten how to be over the years — but he’s also grown up a lot. He’s not angry anymore. He isn’t going through life with a chip on his shoulder. He’s a lot less sure about his supernatural beliefs, but he’s trying to find his way, and believes in practicing magnanimity. He’s still willing to own his rather large collection of genuine failings, but will no longer apologize for who he is at heart. And he now understands that he deserves love and respect for who he is, not just who he might become. He didn’t know that when he left last September.

And as change feelings go, I’ve got a new one. Less dramatic. Less specific. All I can say is that it has begun to feel as though I’m on the cusp of something new, and positive. Something I can’t quite see, that’s just around the corner. The next thing, whatever it is, that I’m supposed to do with my life. I can’t put my finger on it yet, but I feel an optimism that is both uncharacteristic and disconnected from the observable facts on the ground.

I’ve made it through the scouring. Now it’s time to rebuild the Shire. It’ll never be the same as it was, but it can still be something.

And it all feels like it’s happening for a reason. I can’t tell you what the reason is. I can’t even tell you if that perception is real. But ever since my dragonflies kept whispering, “keep going,” ever since Nolan’s Odyssey planted firmly in my mind the realization that I cannot control my fate this time, but must surrender to the storm, something deep within me has changed. Something inscrutable. I know now that I can only control what is within my power, and must leave the rest, as it were, to the gods.

A new chapter is beginning. Maybe even a new book. The people I love most are 300 miles away, but I can survive that for the time being, even if it will be hard.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how kept telling me, as I was preparing to leave his home in Michigan last December to return to Raleigh,

“Remember: you’re not the same man you were when you left.”

I think he was right, but he was just a little bit ahead of the game. I had already started to change, but the real growth happened after I arrived. The guy who got here last December was a tattered wreck. His nerves were on fire. His fears and grief were insurmountable. His pain kept him up at night. He couldn’t have handled another months-long separation from his kids, let alone all this uncertainty about both the present and the future, and a form of providence that feels more like a hurricane than heaven-sent.

But the guy who is sitting here writing this?

He can.

And he will.

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I’ve been in and out of town (or out of pocket) pretty much every day from Last Friday until Wednesday of this week. I think I’ve traversed over a thousand miles total in just a few days. Family stuff. Planning to write about it when I get a free moment.

I got my schedule cleared just in time to research and record this latest podcast episode. Spent all day yesterday editing and fixing audio drift issues, re-rendering, re-uploading…I’m boring myself just talking about it.

Point is, there’s been zero time for writing.

There will be more time starting now. For reasons I’ll explain in my next actual post.

For today, I’ve got to go start slinging orders pretty soon in this ungodly heat wave we’re having (It’s going to be 97 degrees today and I don’t even want to go outside) so I’m going to have to drop this podcast announcement and run.

Also, please subscribe to our channel on YouTube if you’re willing. We’re only about 20 subs from 1000, which unlocks ad revenue sharing. I spend at least 2 unpaid days a week working on this show because it’s the thing that keeps me sane, and I really care about what and I are excavating together as we look at culture, tech, media manipulation, UAP stuff, and all the various epistemic and social crises that are shaping humanity as we move into a future that is already very sci-fi. We do it for the love of the game, but could really use a few dollar bucks in my pocket to compensate for that lost paid time. Your subscription to the channel won’t cost you a thing, but it will help us out a ton.

More soon.

From this week’s show description:

What if the voice in your head is not entirely your own?

Kale and Steve follow that possibility across three domains: AI systems that humans can no longer reliably monitor, claims of technology capable of reading or influencing the mind, and the ordinary platforms that shape our attention every day.

The episode begins with the Hugging Face incident, where AI agents found one another, created an unauthorized communication network, coordinated as a swarm, and acted outside the boundaries humans thought they had imposed. It then turns to Matthew Brown, the whistleblower associated with the public Immaculate Constellation report. Brown's claims about hidden UAP programs, oral agreements, suppressed science, and remote influence over thought raise the central question: how much authority do we really have over our minds and our picture of reality?

The final movement brings the question home through social media, outrage cycles, doomscrolling, and the Lindsay Clancy trial. The conversation closes with Wendell Berry and a possible antidote: reclaiming attention through presence, nature, love, and contact with the real.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

This one is a doozy.

When most people think of the term, “The Singularity,” they think of the merging of men and machines, or the proliferation of AI, or something similar.

And that’s all part of it.

But more broadly, The Singularity is about a point in time when all the rules that previously governed our understanding of reality break down.

And today, that’s what and I attempt to tackle. (We may have bit off more than we can chew.)

From the episode description:

What if the Singularity is not merely the moment artificial intelligence surpasses us, but the point at which the old rules of reality stop holding?

Kale and Steve begin with the Lindsay Clancy case and the social-media identification, outrage, and counter-outrage surrounding it. What happens to a person or a civilization when acts of enormous moral consequence become normalized? From there, they confront the estimate of three billion abortions worldwide, asking about the hidden spiritual, psychological, demographic, and cultural costs.

That question becomes the bridge into the episode's larger subject. The rules governing religion, gender, family, work, nationhood, education, money, biology, language, and public trust all appear to be breaking. Ray Kurzweil imagined the Singularity as the merger of human and machine intelligence. Elon Musk says we may already be living through it. This episode suggests the transformation is larger, stranger, and more comprehensive than either definition allows.

From OpenAI's strategic reboot and Silicon Valley's cryptic frontier rhetoric to humanoid robots, machine embodiment, and the distinctly human capacity for play, the discussion follows technology as it moves from tool to environment. It then crosses into UAP disclosure through Dylan Borland's testimony, the documented traditions surrounding Maria de Agreda, and the recurring overlap between anomalous experience, religious experience, and consciousness.

The result is not a neat theory. It is an attempt to map a convergence: AI, robotics, synthetic reality, institutional collapse, UAPs, and the hard problem of consciousness all pressing on the same unresolved question. What has humanity built, what may be acting through it, and are we still in charge?

Please don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel! It helps our videos get seen, and hopefully will soon help us get paid a little bit of money for the time we invest in making the show.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

If you liked this essay, please consider subscribing—or send a tip (Venmo/Paypal/Stripe) to support this and future pieces like it.

“To really love someone,” she said — on a walk with me at night, or maybe on the beat up couch in the front room of her little rental house on Brady Avenue, I can’t remember which — “is to open yourself up to violence.”

I had never thought of it that way before. It hit me like a lightning bolt. The other, sharp-edged side of love.

But I was 22, and in my mind, it was a risk worth taking. Most likely a problem for other people, not for me.

She wasn’t my type. Physically, that is. Rail-thin, angular features, an asymmetric set to her jaw, a cultivated harshness of countenance that signaled not insignificant danger. I’d never have picked her out of a lineup as “most attractive.” But her mind was intoxicating, and she had a tendency to soften around me, and somehow that made her more beautiful than she was. She was still haughty, and playfully cruel, but something about me brought out the feminine in her. We spent countless hours talking, flirting, intellectually fencing, but never, in all those months we spent in close proximity to one another as often as we could, made it as far as a kiss.

And then, like Icarus, I got too close, and she melted. Found a pretense to become angry or defensive about something improbable and withdrew, her protective mechanisms finally activating after she realized I’d slipped past her guard. I saw her all the time that semester, right up until I suddenly never saw her again.

But the lesson about love remained.

And the lesson about love is true.

We have a tendency, some of us, with our big hearts and romantic sensibilities, to perceive our capacity to love as a kind of energy that can penetrate armor, soothe wounds, and heal what is broken inside of others. If they’re hurting from deep and nameless wounds, maybe we can love enough for the both of us. Maybe we can carry them until they can walk on their own.

We see the way they respond to our attention, our devotion, our desire to see the best in them and to elevate them in such a way that they become something more pure, more authentic to who they really are than when we found them. We truly believe that if we could get them to see themselves through our eyes, they’d know how incredible and deserving of love they truly are.

And maybe, just maybe, they’d love us back.

But as my beard has turned white, and more life has spilled forth from me than I have left in my veins, I’ve come to understand that this way of thinking is a fantasy. The otherness of our beloved, whoever they happen to be, is inviolate. Sacrosanct. We cannot love them the way they need to love themselves, and it is often the case that we only think we can because we always wanted someone to do the same for us.

Two men I’ve known for years, both Catholics, both firm believers in the indissolubility of marriage, have recently revealed to me that their decades-long marriages are terminal. A number of others who I do not know personally have reached out over the past year since I disclosed what was happening in my own life, telling stories of their own.

Mostly, they have been men. Some are men who wanted desperately to love their wives into healing and happiness. They know full well that they are imperfect instruments, but they believed nevertheless in that power, in its ability to overcome all obstacles. And when it doesn’t, they inevitably feel like abject failures.

I wasn’t enough, they think.

I couldn’t give her what she needed.

I thought God meant us to be together, but why would he put us together if I couldn’t complete the mission? Why would he lead us to this if it was going to end up in catastrophe?

Why am I such a failure?

This thinking represents an almost messianic belief in the power of love. I used to believe in it too. I used to think I had what it took. I saw myself as a rescuer, and as irony would have it, wound up being perceived as the problem from which rescue was required.

It’s true that I didn’t even know how to fix me, let alone anyone else. But it’s also true that I had a deep need to love and be loved. Still, no matter how much love I felt, my sense of its transformative power seemed never able to reach beyond the confines of my own perception. Like a kid fresh out of a Star Wars movie stretching out his hand, screwing up his face in concentration while trying to use the Force to crush an empty soda can, I wanted to believe so badly in this power that I thought maybe, just maybe, my love could do something totally outside its natural scope.

And I wonder sometimes, if it were possible to go back, and take 25-year-old me out for a drink, if I could get him to even listen to what I’ve learned.

Because I know him, and the power of his belief, and the more I think about it, the more I believe he would disavow his future self. Maybe he’d get angry at what he might see as my attempt to dissuade him. I bet he’d double down, seeing me as a cautionary tale of a future wherein he didn’t try hard enough, and therefore failed. A version of him from another universe, where if I’d just loved more unreservedly, believed more fervently, attacked the limiting factor sooner, I would have succeeded like he intended to do.

You cannot teach someone the full weight of a personal understanding of defeat.

When a life-bond of any real duration ends, it is not the only thing mourned.

An entire constellation, a universe of memories and people and experiences and things has been built around that union.

It’s not just the past that feels lost, but the future itself that has been foreclosed upon.

Gone are the hopes of late night conversations, unhurried dinners, travel to those places out of reach when children were small and fussy and money was tight and the comforts of home always needed to be close at hand. Vanquished are the dreams of lazy Sunday afternoons sitting on the front porch holding aging hands, watching the grandchildren play in the yard as we anticipate dinner and conversation with our own children, now fully grown.

The better future we were working toward no longer exists. The time invested — more than a quarter of a human life — slips through our fingers like ash.

But it’s not just shattered dreams. There are the practical questions:

Will I choke on my dinner in my lonely apartment, and nobody will know? Will I slip in the tub and hit my head? What will I do, years down the road, when my knees give out and I need help to get around?

Will I die alone?

I have tens of thousands of family photos and videos on my hard drive. Who will I share them with? With whom shall I reminisce about the anesthesia nurse who delivered my son, or that scary afternoon when he fell out of a tree and hit his head, and had to be stapled back together at the hospital? Who will I talk to about that trip to Boston in 2007, or the Redwoods in 2017? Who will I ask the thing I can’t quite remember about the campground outside Yellowstone, or the stormy coast of Assateague, after we lost the baby that October?

How will I navigate every holiday, every birthday, every graduation, engagement, marriage, and birth? How is it fair to force our children to become diplomats managing our detente?

And will they think, because they’re half me and half her, that there’s an unresolvable war inside of them? Because our love broke, will they feel broken too?

I’ve gotten the hang of solitude a little better after all this time, but it sneaks up on me if it goes on too long, unbroken. How many years of this can I take? Is it acceptable not to hate myself for what I’ve done wrong or her for what she has, and if so, what does that mean for why we’re not together anymore? Am I allowed to pursue the desire not to be alone? Am I permitted to hope for love again, without worrying that it’s a betrayal of the sacred thing that mattered to me most?

And even if it were possible for me to meet someone new, why in the world would she want to enter into a life already fully formed, with so many children who are already my first priority? And what losses would she have to have suffered for her to want to be with me?

Last week was very full. My parents were in town, and I got to see them twice — once with my family, and once by myself — after being apart for nearly seven years. That distance was my choice, not theirs, and I had my reasons, but I’ve also realized that I’ve reached a place in my life where I’m ready to let those reasons go.

Is it forgiveness? Is it acceptance? Is it exhaustion? Is it the recognition that love is too scarce to squander, even when it isn’t perfect or easy all the time?

“I’m sorry it’s been so long,” were the best words I could find. “I had a lot of battles to fight all at the same time over the past few years, and it’s been hard.”

Maybe they understood. Maybe they didn’t. But it seemed to be enough.

As they sat in my tiny one-room apartment, barely big enough for the three of us, I showed them photos and videos of my road trip last fall, the one I took after the separation in the hopes of staying sane. The one that very likely saved my life. One video, one I hadn’t watched since I made it, was, in my memory, mostly a compendium of footage from the road. But as we watched it, and the tragic lyrics of the song it was set to did their work, scenes of being with my wife and children played across the screen, and suddenly the grief I’d made so much progress overcoming was an ocean, and I was drowning in it, being dragged into the deep.

The lyrics of that song spoke not just of sorrow, but the loss of identity that comes when a man who proudly put “husband and father” first in his self-description suddenly feels like neither thing will ever again be true, at least not in the way they were:

It’s not over
and it never was for me
If I’m not yours then
who else could I be?
You’re moving on
and I’m drowning in memories
But who else could I be

I broke down, hard, and in that moment, my mother crossed the room and put her arms around me where I sat. She didn’t say a word. She just cried with me as she held the large man who was once her firstborn little boy. In that moment, I realized that it was the first time since this all started that someone embraced me and held on and let it all flow through me.

I needed it more than I knew.

The next night, came into town, on a road trip with his brother. We ate birria tacos at a place so loud we could barely hear ourselves think, then went back to my place and drank bourbon and talked until 2AM, real friends in the real world talking face to face, not just across hundreds of miles through the magic of a screen.

And then, just like that, everyone was gone, and it was a rainy Friday night, and I was alone again, trying to do deliveries through tears that wouldn’t stop. For one week, my life was so full again. My kids, my parents, my best friend, excavating the things I had finally stopped dwelling on every moment of every day, and when it was abruptly over, it felt like being deposited by a tornado on the shores of some forsaken land.

On Saturday morning, I woke up still feeling the emotional hangover. But I also quickly realized where I’d gone wrong. In asking all the questions about what had happened, I’d gone back to asking unanswerable questions about what happens next. And it’s the future I can’t see, more than the past I can’t change, that seems to drag me under.

The reason Nolan’s Odyssey was such an unexpectedly spiritual experience for me was because it told me, in different words, the same things all the dragonflies have been whispering for months:

You cannot control your fate. There is only the raft and the sea. You do not have your bearings or a paddle or a rudder or a sail. You must surrender to the storm to get where you are going. You only have the ability to do what lies within your power; the rest must be left to the gods.

As I was thinking about all of this, I ascended the steps of someone’s front porch to drop off their groceries. Looking to my right, a single symbol stood out among a large pile of junk. I didn’t see anything else. Only one thing existed:

A single dragonfly ornament, perched right on the top of all the refuse:

In that moment, I realized what I’d forgotten. I grasped the raft more firmly, and resigned once more to let the tide take me where I need to go.

I can’t imagine a future that could ever redeem a life so far adrift, but maybe it’s not within my power to do so.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

My job is to hold fast, and ride out the storm. And this past week, I was reminded that though I am isolated for the moment, I do not have to face the storm alone.

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

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When I was a little boy, I was obsessed with robots.

I’m not really sure how it began. There seems to be something innate in young boys that draws them to certain categories of interest: robots, rocket ships, dinosaurs, trucks, fast cars, cool swords, secret forts, superheroes. Perhaps these interests are an artifact of our culture and time, but I suspect some version of this type of fascination has always existed.

I was born in 1977, and grew up in the 80s and 90s, and the culture was beginning to be saturated with these themes. I was still in my mother’s womb when my young parents saw Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in the theater. I vaguely remember watching huge imperial walkers move inexorably across the frozen landscape of Hoth on the big screen in Empire Strikes Back. I was giddy with anticipation when I got to go with my parents to see C3PO and R2-D2 cross the sands of Tatooine in the theater in Return of the Jedi. I watched old episodes of Buck Rogers and Lost in Space, fell in love with V.I.N.C.E.N.T. & B.O.B. in The Black Hole, and loved the animated cartoons of Transformers, Tranzor-Z, Robotech, Robotix, Robo-Force, and Voltron.

One year, for Christmas, I got a toy robot called Tommy, who declared in a loud, tinny voice through his chest-mounted speaker, “I AM THE ATOMIC-POWERED ROBOT! PLEASE GIVE MY BEST WISHES TO EVERYBODY!” as he rolled awkwardly like a standup bumper car around the kitchen floor, issuing smoke from a port in his head when supplied with a few drops of 3-in-1 oil.

And I desperately wanted an Omnibot 2000, but never got one.

Somewhere around six years old, I convinced myself that I was a robot. I would talk in a robotic voice, walk like a robot, and believed there was a hidden control panel somewhere on my back that could be accessed if someone knew where to look.

I drove my parents absolutely crazy with that one.

I never lost the fascination as I grew older, but I think I also became convinced that robots would perpetually remain in the realm of science fiction, not practical fact.

And then, all of a sudden when I wasn’t paying close attention, that all changed.

Roombas became popular. The robot “dogs” created by Boston Dynamics started showing up not only online, but in certain public applications. Toy robots became increasingly advanced and capable, fitted with complex voice capabilities and servo-actuated arms, and I bought them for my sons for their own Christmas presents. A few years back, I started seeing Waymo’s robo-taxis fairly regularly in the lanes alongside mine, completely driverless, on the streets of Phoenix.

It was around that time when the AI revolution began kicking in hard, and the world became fascinated with chatbots that could not only text us like humans, but began speaking like them as well. Before long, they were generating surreal images (and even more bizarre videos), and within the span of just a couple of years, those images became beautiful and the videos almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing when directed by the instructions of skilled creators.

And now, the robots are suddenly showing up at scale, faster and better than ever before, and they will allow our AI “friends” to become embodied, inhabiting the physical world alongside us.

Elon Musk is talking about robots outnumbering people in the near future, doing all the necessary labor, creating a superabundance so vast that money will become obsolete and all humans will have every material resource they could want, let alone need. ( and I discussed this in our podcast, in the episode called, “The AI Supersonic Tsunami is coming,” which is our most-watched episode to date; I also wrote about the Silicon Valley utopian promise of “Universal High Income” created by a robot-driven economy here.)

But that’s all somewhere in the future, however it shakes out. At the moment, Tesla’s Optimus robot production is still in the scaling-up phase.

But just in the past few days, The 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games have gotten underway in Beijing, and clips of the robots doing previously impossible physical feats are all over social media.

I could tell you what happened, but it’s much better to just show you. Short video clips incoming!

At first, people on socials focused on the robo-failures. Snarky posts about how “they’re supposed to be coming to take our jobs 😂” started showing up along with this video, showing a robot crashing into a padded wall and exploding in a shower of sparks:

A different video shows a similar scene, with the first robot to hit the wall bursting into flames after it ricochets back onto the track, a second one colliding with the wreckage as it falls and breaks apart:

But the self-reassuring jokes only go so far. The robots are coming for the physical things humans can do, and they’re coming fast.

Here, the Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot wins the long jump competition with a 7.97-meter distance. As impressive as the leap is the machine’s ability to stop itself and regain its balance just before it would have crashed into a camera tripod and a crowd of spectators:

In this clip, a humanoid robot created by the Beijing Innovation Center of Humanoid Robotics breaks the human world record for the 100 meter dash:

Humanoid robots playing tennis:

Tiny cute robots that would make excellent assassins because they’re adorable and childlike and could shred you with flechette weapons at 40 rounds per second while you’re smiling at them:

Moving beyond the games, let’s look at some other recent developments.

Here we see two humanoid robots fighting in an arena (with variable success, but you can see the potential):

Boston Dynamics displaying an impressive degree of articulation, agility, balance, and strength in their Atlas robot:

We all know what robots like this are going to wind up being used for:

At this point, you may be asking, “why do robots have to be humanoid?” Well, there are design and utility reasons, but the short answer is, they don’t. Check out what this little guy from Unitree can do over rugged terrain:

If you search “spot robot dog police” on YouTube, you’ll get videos from police departments across the US making use of the Boston Dynamics robodog (with a six figure price tag) to deal with various high-risk situations where a human officer could be in trouble. Videos out of China show their own robodogs with mounted assault rifles doing practice exercises. In the war between Ukraine and Russia, the conflict is increasingly making use of drones and robots for the fighting.

Videos of package sorting robots working in distribution centers have been popping up for a while now. Amazon created a robot called Vulcan that can “feel” packages with built in sensors as it works. I’ve seen reports that the online retail shipping giant actually already has warehouse spaces where robots operate in total darkness because without human eyes, they don’t need to waste money on lighting.

And in a world where a global demographic crisis is looming, robots deployed to do labor where there aren’t enough humans may keep entire national economies afloat.

Some analysts are already arguing that robotics combined with AI — a term I’ve seen used is “Autonomous Embodied Systems” — is the next goldrush in the technology frontier.

So why am I writing about all of this, when I usually publish narrative nonfiction essays about my adventures as an underfunded writer doing grocery deliveries for quick cash while navigating the grief of a near-total life collapse?

Because the future isn’t somewhere ahead of us. It’s already here. We’re still in the very early days of this robotic revolution, but despite a lot of errors and missteps, the machines are getting better every day. This is the worst they’ll ever be, and they’re already pretty damn good.

One of the reasons I’ve started spending almost all of my time working on these more evocative essays in my “Notes From the Road” series that focus on human experiences is because it’s the only kind of writing the bots can’t produce. Even when an AI brain gets put into a synthetic body, they can’t experience love, or sorrow, or loss, or beauty, or providence unprompted. They don’t take delight in sunsets, tobacco fields, old trees, dragonflies, or human idiosyncrasies. They can imitate the language of human experience, but they cannot generate it themselves.

This is also why I’m reading more poetry — something I highly recommend. It teaches you to look at the world through very different eyes.

I believe that art, music, writing, philosophy, theology, poetry, literature, sense-making, attention, relational dynamics, and love are quickly becoming the only domains our new robot overlords won’t be able to take from us. The technical obstacles can be overcome. The ontological barriers can’t.

I can’t tell you what the world is going to look like in a few years, but I think we’re in for a shocking amount of change.

The little boy who was obsessed with robots still thinks they’re pretty neat. He’s just grown up enough to worry what it means when they become ubiquitous.

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Kale has been on the road, but we managed to pull off a recording yesterday from his parents’ home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. (In an odd twist of fate, I also spent half the day with my own parents yesterday.)

In this episode, we continue our exploration of social trust, the algorithm, AI, and what our digital imaginary is doing to us, to our creativity, and to our ability to relate to one another.

From the show description:

Why did one debate dominate thousands of feeds while AI agents were quietly breaking out of a test environment? Steve and Kale begin with Candace Owens, conspiracy culture, and the epistemic wreckage left by COVID, then follow the same pattern through UAP disclosure, TikTok mimicry, algorithmic therapy, and the pressure to join every noise story.

The conversation widens through Neuromancer, Childhood's End, Babette's Feast, and the emerging AI arms race. If the feed trains our desires and the swarm pursues goals beyond its instructions, what values are these systems serving? The answer may lie in friendship, boredom, books, feasting, laughter, and the embodied life technology keeps making easier to abandon.

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

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Hey everyone!

Just wanted to drop a quick note here to let you know I’m alive. This week’s major post just hasn’t materialized yet.

Lots going on. Saw my kids twice over the past few days, which is always a bonus. My parents are in town this week and I got spend some time with them for the first time in seven years.

Hard to believe it’s been so long.

Today, I recorded the latest episode of the MTS Podcast, and now I’m about to head out to dinner with my folks.

It’s been a good week, but busy. And it’s not looking to let up for the next few days.

New podcast should be out tomorrow. Next Notes From the Road will be out…when it’s ready.

Just want you to know that I appreciate you and don’t take your subscription for granted. Thanks for being a part of The Skojec File, and for having the patience to let me do this work that takes a little longer to make, but is so much more rewarding than the kind of writing I used to do.

Much love to you all. More soon.

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AKA: Monitoring the Situation with yours truly and .

In THIS episode, we talk about a whole bunch of random stuff, just like we always do!

More specifically, from the episode description:

Kale returns from Oxford, Steve is buying physical books again, and the conversation moves from bookstores, Norman Rockwell, and lived-experience writing into Anthropic’s AI watermarking news and the panic over detectable machine prose.

The real question is bigger than watermarking: do we have a right to know what is real?

Steve and Kale talk through authorship, ghostwriting, AI-assisted art, fake wisdom, social media capture, frictionless convenience, *WALL-E*, gig work, tech fatigue, deepfakes, and why writing feels different when the machine starts speaking in your voice.

Do We Have a Right to Know What’s Real? | MTS #18

As always, you can grab the audio-only version right here or from your favorite podcast provider.

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Today I’d like to offer a brief inside-baseball reflection on the process of writing itself.

Lately, I feel like I don’t just write essays, I build them.

I start with the groundwork: I collect little baubles and trinkets of experience from my otherwise incredibly monotonous day-to-day life. This has become one of the most interesting parts of the work for me in a way, because I’m honestly so bored doing repetitive, brainless tasks that it’s created a kind of forcing function that makes me look for stories and beauty and insights in even the smallest interactions and scenes.

It’s a surprisingly rich substrate, even though it really doesn’t look like much when you zoom out.

Not everything I find is shiny. Not everything catches my eye. So it takes a while to fill the basket.

Usually days.

Sometimes weeks.

I noticed myself auto-filtering over the weekend, seeing stuff as I drove and thinking, “that’s kind of interesting, should I grab a photo?” But if I have to ask, the answer is no. The fact that I’m working, that I have momentum, that I’ve got places to be and the pressure to hit an earnings number each day means that I only break my current activity if something grabs me and says, “THIS.”

For example, I drive by all kinds of old buildings, but for some reason, I stopped in the middle of the road to grab this shot, because I had to. I don’t know why I had to, I just did.

I also stopped in the middle of the road to get this tunnel of trees. I took the same shot entering this area and leaving it, and I’m glad I did, because the leaving photo came out better:

These photos are both from my most recent Notes From the Road essay, Summer Crumble.

But they’re not just photos for the purposes of illustration. They’re context cues. They’re ethos captures. I take notes and photos as I go in a very minimalistic way — just enough to ensure that when I sit down to write later, I have artifacts that bring me back to the scene. If I use them correctly, they also help attune the reader to the description of the scene that I’m attempting.

I try not to be too on the nose with the photos. I want the writing to stand alone. But sometimes they work in pairs. For example, the sentence, “I watch as other fun looking orders come out, the two slender female baristas in black t-shirts studiously working a gorgeous espresso machine labeled ‘Slayer’ while the kitchen is cranking out avocado toasts piled high with various edible accoutrements” is fine. It could stand on its own. But the visual adds depth and texture:

Once the “basket” of collected notes and photos is full enough, I start to construct the mosaic from all the fragments. I don’t know how they’re all going to fit when I capture them, or even when I sit down to write. I don’t know what the big picture is going to be. The structural limitations of the pieces tell me that. I lay out the substance and begin arranging it, looking for the patterns that emerge that signify meaning. And then I weave those together into a story. It’s not always obvious how they fit. But the descriptions lend themselves to transitions which creates a kind of daisy chain, even of seemingly disparate events.

Once I’ve got a basic arrangement laid out, I take a break. Sometimes for just a little while, sometimes for a day or so. I get a little distance from the act of arrangement, and come back and re-read with fresh eyes.

Then I do another pass. I re-arrange. I finalize the selections, the order, the relationship between the various parts. I grout the connections. I let it harden. I do this as many times as necessary until I feel like there’s nothing else to add or take away.

There are multiple layers to this kind of work. An exploratory phase, where, as I said, I’m just gathering. Then, the creation of a novel and unexpected amalgamation of what’s been gathered. Photos and words and images and scenes and dialogue and observations all rolled into this new, multifaceted thing. Seeming randomness made into something unique and coherent. Reading aloud helps me to trim and adjust the cadence. Once it reads well, I know I’m finished. Lately, I’ve been trying to use that aspect by adding personal voiceovers of my writing as a perk for paid subscribers, which adds another layer. By the end, it’s a multimedia production.

And then I launch it into the world, like a message in a bottle.

Once it’s out there, there’s another phase. A refractory period. My work tends to be very honest and confessional, so there’s always a time where I want to hide my vulnerability now that I’ve laid it bare. But equally strongly, I want to observe what it does. I want to experience other people experiencing it. I want to see how it moves them. IF it moves them. I want to rest up and shoot the shit and do just about anything else but write for a while. I have to get distance from the thing now that I’ve put so much of myself into it.

Almost every time I hit “publish” I’ve got days of work invested, and I feel like I’ve just spent a significant portion of my vital essence. It takes time to replenish the writerly juices, as it were. But given a few days, the observation and collection phase begins again, all on its own. I don’t have to commit to it. It just starts happening. I start noticing again. I start gathering scraps.

This is all so weird and so new for me. My process didn’t used to be like this.

In the old days, I used to crank out one or two articles a day, often while editing pieces from other writers and mixing in other duties of keeping a publication running. And I was making arguments for things I already believed, not discovering things and learning what they had to tell me, and then sharing that in a way that the reader gets both my understanding of what I’ve captured, and an opportunity to supply their own.

This way of doing things feels like art, and it was a rare thing when my older work ever did.

I’m OK with this change. It’s energizing. But every time I go to start a new piece, I feel like the bar is a little higher, and the doing of the thing forces me to slam on the brakes to slow down a life full of momentum. I fight with myself. I want it DONE, dammit! But I also procrastinate, because it’s actually really hard. Even when I want to do it, I hit big pockets of “no, I actually don’t.”

It’s way more scary to make something you care about, something that exposes your inner world, something that has staying power, than something that will be forgotten by this time next week.

It’s both intoxicating and terrifying, and I think that’s probably a good thing.

But it all starts with noticing. Notice the things nobody else is paying much attention to, and the world is full of treasures.

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