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:

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. 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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— The Eagles, Seven Bridges Road

August rolls on through the lull of lazy afternoons. The summer heat remains, but lies languid, like a lover dozing, passion spent, in a sea of tussled sheets.

These days, it rains more than it does anything else, chiaroscuro storms and bright thunderclaps punctuating foreboding skies. The humid haze creeps heavy through old windowpanes and slips under the cracks beneath doors, turning every cool surface slick with condensation.

The muggy air enervates me, so I drive uncounted miles under a freon-frigid gust, issuing from dashboard vents, through the backroads of east-central Carolina, delivering bags and boxes of goods to little towns I’ve never heard of, let alone been to. As I watch through the glass of my little mobile biosphere, the countryside unspools vague memories of a visit made to Glenville, West Virginia, when I was still quite small. A trip to attend the funeral of my great-grandmother, Mammy Moore. There’s something in the trees, the old white farmhouses, the way the light falls, that brings me back to that time, staying in the home of my Great Aunt Madeline, my first-ever visit south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

I’m a Yankee living in Dixie, but most cities these days feel largely indistinguishable whether you’re north or south, east or west. The names on some of the stores and restaurants change, but the structures are all more or less the same. There are bougie neighborhoods and bad ones, old homes and new subdivisions, rural suburbs and city living. My apartment sits in midtown Raleigh, nestled between downtown and North Hills. I enjoy the amenities of city life, but lately I find that it’s only when I drive the two-lane roads through small farm towns in the rural periphery of the city that I feel like I’m somewhere real. Some nights, I sit and smoke a cigar on the steel and concrete steps outside my apartment, not even bothering to try to see the night sky through the harsh light of the streetlamps, and find myself dreaming of backyard bonfires under a sea of stars.

I might not be long for North Carolina. Things are changing. I felt it in the wind a few weeks back, watching dark clouds roll across the heavens through my windshield in a supermarket parking lot, a kind of energy I can’t explain that tells you things are in motion that are bigger than you can see. I spend an afternoon trying to figure out what the feeling means, only to have it spit out an idea like a Magic 8-Ball:

Virginia.

I text the stranger who occupies the same physical body as the girl I fell in love with a quarter century ago, asking if she’s planning to move back to Virginia after all. Virginia, where we started our life together and were married at little church called St. Catherine’s in 2003. Virginia, where all but two of our children were born. Virginia, the first place either of us ever really made into a home away from our respective childhood homes. She replies with a list of reasons why she’d rather not go back, so I drop it, but the feeling lingers.

And then, as the weeks roll on, the shape of things changes. The next time I see her, it sounds as though it’s increasingly likely that my intuition was correct. For reasons neither of us understands, she has always flourished there, and opportunities have been opening up for her there in a way they haven’t here. She takes a drive up there to look at rental houses. She tells me she’s been talking to old colleagues there about work.

Nothing is certain yet, but where my kids go, I go, though I don’t relish the idea of return. The entire DC metro area is planted thick with memories, a place that was home for quite a long time, right up until it wasn’t. It’s changed a lot in the intervening years, and the last time we tried to make it work, it felt like touching a 9-volt battery to my soul. The energy was wrong. Sour, somehow. It made me uncomfortable, and she felt it too. It’s how we wound up here. But we’re long past the season for making decisions out of pure preference. As the old saying goes, “Needs must when the devil drives.” I tell her, sitting in the living room that used to be ours but now is only hers, that I think she should give strong consideration to going back if she can, because she’s got two years of data on Raleigh, and it doesn’t point to anything good, at least financially.

I asked for help on my family’s behalf, and help came. But now they’ve got one shot to pay off debts and get positioned for whatever comes next, and they’ve got to make it stick. There are no more safety nets.

I don’t have anything to cling to here in Raleigh, except that I’ve come to love it here. No family, no friends, no community, no nothing. Still, it’s a beautiful city, and a place I’ve come to think of as my own. It’s taken quite a bit of time, but I’ve gotten to know the place in a way you only can if you’ve done the work of frequent exploration, your mind mapping the geographic connections between seemingly disparate things. I know the best coffee shops now, some good taco spots, where to find the tastiest pho and where to go for pizza. I have favorite supermarkets, a preferred library, neighborhoods I love, and a general sense of enjoyment of the hybrid small town/big city vibe. If things had worked out differently, I could have seen staying here for a long time.

Maybe even forever.

But this place, where I genuinely thought we were coming for a fresh start, has become the locus of our deconstruction. Maybe that was the point. Maybe it was the calling we thought we heard. Maybe this was all supposed to happen for reasons that aren’t clear yet, even though that’s a hard damn thing to fathom.

If I have to go, I will miss the ancient, gnarled oaks and the tall, too-skinny pines and the broad-leafed tobacco fields and the stretches of Kudzu-draped forest and farmland. I will miss North Hills and Five Points and Glenwood Ave. and Hillsborough St. I’ll miss the long, gorgeous drives to Clayton and Wendell and Garner and Holly Springs. I’ll miss being just two hours from the coast, even if I barely ever go.

On an early Sunday evening during one of the long delivery routes I always seem to take, out towards a little town south and east of the city, I drop four crisp paper bags of groceries on the front stoop of a brand-new home. And as I do so, I find myself daydreaming of that coast. I fantasize about quitting work early so I can just keep driving until the ocean comes into view.

I look around. To the south, there’s a dark storm brewing. To the north, the deep blue sky is filled with huge, white, puffy clouds. To the west, the sun is sliding low, spilling light through the trees like liquid gold. To the east stretch the long shadows of an August afternoon.

I sit in my car for a few minutes at an empty intersection, trying to decide. Even if I drive straight to the nearest beach with no additional stops, I’ll barely arrive in time to see the sun go down.

Part of me aches for the impulse decision; the spontaneity I never seem to allow myself these days. That same part of me also aches for the open road. But there’s another part, one that yearns for my bed, and for much-needed sleep. And there’s the quiet, nagging voice of responsibility, reminding me that I’ve only made a little over half my earning goal for the day. My stomach, feeling left out, clears its non-existent throat and issues a point of order: It’s 6PM and you haven’t eaten a bite of food since dinner last night.

I feel the gestalt collapse into unity of purpose, and I’m in motion. I’ve chosen to do the responsible thing, to finish work and eat and sleep, and save the ocean for another day, even though I need it now. Need it to absorb all the chaos and confusion inside me and calm me down as I lose myself in the roaring, calming cadence of the waves.

I speed off back towards town, where I take one last order that drags me to the western suburbs. En route, I receive a text from the wife-but-not. She is telling me she she needs to use the air compressor I keep in my car, and offers me a sandwich in return. My hunger surges a bit at the thought, and I tell her I’m heading that way anyway, and that I’ll be there after my delivery.

When I arrive, everyone is in the kitchen, milling around, snacking on chips, getting ready to make their sandwiches from the spoils just brought home from the store. They haven’t made much progress yet, but I can see the evidence that they’ve been actively packing. They only have until the end of the month, and the approval for a rental they thought they had has mysteriously evaporated, so they don’t even know where they’re going. This worries me, of course, but there’s nothing I can really do, so I once again surrender to the storm, trusting that the tides of fate will take us all wherever it is that we need to go when the time is right.

And the winds of change are still blowing, even if we can’t see where they lead. I have dinner with the people I love most, we use the compressor to fill the hand cart tires, and then I say my goodbyes and head back to my little cave, where I tumble into bed much earlier than usual and go to sleep.

I awake before 5AM, but force myself back down to dreamland. It buys me another 90 minutes, but I’m up again before 7. I thought I’d feel better after a good night’s sleep, but I’m exhausted for more reasons than I can consciously keep score of. My body is firing warning signals of multiple kinds, various lights flashing on the dashboard in my mind. Sore. Tired. Inflamed. Irritated. I hydrate and make coffee, then sit and scroll. It’s technically my day off, but I don’t really know how to do those anymore. I try to force myself to take just one day a week to do nothing much at all, because it’s the only thing that keeps me from completely burning out. Every other day, I fill every waking moment with activity of some kind or another until I pass out far too late.

Irritable and feeling like lukewarm garbage, I make myself a good breakfast. As I reach for something to hold my freshly scrambled eggs and meat, a line comes unbidden to my mind: “I live in a world of paper plates and shattered dreams.”

I don’t feel anything when I think it, which is weird, because it’s true. But regardless, it’s a great line, and I make a mental note to use it.

Breakfast done, what’s left of my hair combed, and shoes on, I force myself to leave. I desperately need a change of scenery, whether I feel like doing anything or not. I make the decision easier by picking a fancy coffee shop I’ve been wanting to try as the first destination. I grab a couple of books, my notebook and a pen, and drive downtown. When I arrive, there’s parking on the street, which is a nice little bonus.

I enter the shop through an unobtrusive patio entrance, go down a small set of interior steps to a polished concrete floor, and stand in line behind a handful of other customers who are ahead of me. 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.

When it’s finally my turn, I order their seasonal latte, a “summer crumble,” which promises a flavor reminiscent of a blueberry dessert, then take a number and look for a seat. There are no individual tables left, so I choose a low stool at the end of a long communal table, lay out my books, and wait for my drink.

When my drink arrives, it has a vaguely purplish-gray-brown complexion that changes depending on the light, and too much ice, leaving the flavor watered-down. Considering the complex description on the menu, the taste completely underwhelms. But I’m out of the house, and doing something different, and that’s what matters.

A group of half a dozen twenty-somethings that were outside decide to move inside, and they sit at the other end of my table, separated only by two bouquets of oriental lilies, one of them set inside a large Erlenmeyer flask as a vase. They converse loudly about firefighter salaries in New York City and speak sotto voce about sex and then pivot to talking about Mexico City and swimming in the ocean. The wooden stool I’m perched upon is the antithesis of ergonomic, and it hurts the bones in my non-existent ass. Flies take off and land at intervals, as though the long table is actually an aircraft carrier for bugs.

It’s a packed shop and there are people just two feet away from me, but somehow I’m still alone. It’s weird, but extremely on-brand.

My notebook stares at me, blank-faced, my copy of Ikigai as unused as whichever part of my brain is responsible for considering the lessons it contains.

My table companions make no attempt at pleasantries with me, the lone interloper in their widely-varying conversation, and I see no opportunity to break in to make a friendly observation or a joke, so I revert to scrolling through my phone. They’re too loud for me to get any real reading done. I realize, with a little note of amused surprise, that without consciously making the decision, I have somehow become locked in an unannounced competition with the clique. They invaded my space without any social niceties, so I’ll be damned if I leave before they do. It’s a territorial thing. But the minutes tick on, and they seem to have quite a bit of stamina. My rear end is absolutely killing me. I keep trying to shift positions, and it’s just not working. Just as I’m considering a tactical retreat, they all make the hivemind decision get up to go at once.

Victory!

I stay a little while longer, just to savor the moment. My sit bones are ready to start flipping over tables, though, so I finally agree to get up and go.

I got barely any reading done, and don’t see a single comfortable chair in the coffee shop, so I decide to head over to the library to continue my attempt at learning how to live “a long and happy life.”

When I arrive, there is a woman who looks and sounds as though she has recently arrived from Africa talking on her phone as she walks through the automatic door. I make a stop in the first floor restroom, where I find a couple of homeless men performing their ablutions. I do my best to stay out of their way and do what needs doing, then leave the bathroom and walk up the stairs to an open mezzanine filled with tables and chairs between the stacks of books, many of them taken, and I select a spot in a corner that feels unobtrusive and offers an outside view.

But tucked behind the pillar is the same foreign woman I saw walking in, still talking on her phone. In the coffee shop, the ambient noise and the music made concentration at least theoretically possible, but here, in a mostly quiet environment, every noise stands up and demands attention.

I remember that I’ve got earbuds in my car, so I head back down the stairs to the parking lot, but instead of retrieving the headphones and going back inside, I find myself climbing into the driver’s seat, starting the engine, and just driving away.

I do want to know the secrets of Ikigai, but I already know what I want to do with my life. I want to write. And right now, there are words pushing against the inside of my brain, trying to make it onto a page that is not yet before me, so I head back to my own desk and my own keyboard, and let them run free.

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This week’s conversation is as weird and wide-ranging as always. From the show description:

Steve and record across the Atlantic while Kale is in Oxford, surrounded by old libraries, chapels, students, Gothic architecture, and a rare stretch of life with less phone access. That setting becomes the doorway into the real subject of the episode: how places, tools, media environments, algorithms, and machines train the human person.

The conversation starts with Diana Walsh Pasulka's The Others and its strange braid of UAPs, AI, McLuhan, Teilhard de Chardin, Arthur C. Clarke, and the possibility that artificial intelligence may become a new perceptual faculty for human beings. But the episode's center of gravity is alignment: not only whether AI can be aligned with human values, but whether human consciousness is already being altered by social media, invisible AI guardrails, frictionless tools, and the digital systems that shape what we notice, desire, fear, and believe.

From "Chad, Chester, and Charlie" as a way of naming hidden AI control layers to gestalt cognition, Neuralink, post-literacy, disappearing technological friction, and the strange possibility that AI may expose new modes of mind, Steve and Kale ask what happens when the systems around us do not merely assist us, but form us. They also move through Oxford, the loss of the sacred, the temptation to skip suffering, Catholic traditionalism as an oxbow lake, and the need for serious sense-making in a moment that is already here.

This is a conversation about AI, media, discernment, technological friction, sacred attention, and the old question underneath all of it: if you are not choosing what forms you, who is?

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

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There’s a girl in an oversized dark green sweatshirt, sleeves covering half her hands, trying to bend the laws of physics in the meat department. She’s right where the poultry intersects with the pork, caught in the corner of the little L, surrounded by customers. Her attempt to shrink herself and her cart to be as unobtrusive as possible is foiled by a trolly piled high with re-stock inventory that she accidentally backs into.

She’s making room so I can get in between her and the person on my right, and jostles her cart in frustration, shimmying it back to front to try to get it lined up next to the shelf.

“I feel like I’m always in the way,” she says, to me or to no-one in particular.

“I feel like I’ve been in the way since I was born,” I quip, briefly making eye contact and giving her a smile that says both that I get it and that I’m only half-joking. She looks like vaguely like Ella Purnell, if Ella Purnell had normal, human-sized eyes instead of those big anime orbs that make her look like a living cartoon.

“Tell me about it,” she says. “I hate shopping in crowds.”

“Me too,” I say, reaching for the pork chorizo to see if it’s the organic kind the customer ordered. “And the worst thing is, I do this for work. So I do it all day, every day.”

“Oh, do you do Instacart?” She asks. “My mom does that. But she’s 66, and she gets these orders where she has to carry cases of water up all these stairs...”

“I don’t take orders with cases of water,” I say. “I’ve made that mistake too many times. Last summer, there was a guy who ordered five cases to a third floor apartment with no elevator.”

The chorizo is not organic. I’m going to have to tell the customer they’re out.

“My mom had to take them up to a FIFTH floor apartment with no elevator,” she says, her voice incredulous. “And she’s 66. And she’s had knee replacement surgery.”

We bitch a little more about Instacart. She doesn’t repeat her mother’s age a third time. The Sunday crowd mills around us like zombies with shopping lists.

“I’m glad we had this moment,” I say, as though we’ve resolved something existential, and I point my cart in the direction of the hamburger patties. Before the words are fully out of my mouth, I’m already in motion.

“Yeah. Me too,” she says in a doppler fade, and I’m onto the next item on my list. A moment later, a voice behind me asks, exasperation exaggerated for effect, “Why are you always in the WAY?”

“I’m Sorry!” I say, making it sound like I’m on the verge of tears.

She zooms by. I keep working.

We don’t bump into each other again.

I deliver $217 worth of wine and cocktail mixers to a white house with a bright red front door. There’s a “No Kings” flag hanging out front. It makes me wonder if the person who answers will have green hair. But the woman at the door is blonde, in her early 40s, and she’s carrying a little dog in her left hand that looks like a big, angry rodent. She hands me her driver’s license for the mandatory ID check before I even ask.

As I scan the barcode with my phone, we make small talk, and I pretend not to notice that she’s obviously been crying. Her nose is red, her eyes are puffy, and her voice carries the pinched sound of acute, recent nasal congestion. As a show of gratitude for the courtesy, she pretends not to notice me pretending. We’re engaged in the ancient ritual of avoiding awkwardness by unstated mutual consent. I offer to bring the overflowing box of wine in for her, but she assures me she’s got it, so I’m on my way.

A large delivery takes me to a very nice house with four vehicles parked in front: a Mercedes G Wagon, A Lincoln Navigator, a Land Rover Defender, and a Rolls-Royce. They all look new, and taken together are worth over $800,000 — more than I’ll probably make in the next decade, maybe even two, unless I find some way to build a business that pays a living wage again. Envy isn’t my thing at all. I never begrudge people what they’ve earned. But sometimes I do marvel at the successes I see people pull off while I’ve managed, smart guy that I believe myself to be, to wind up stuck trading whole days for just a few dollars. And doing so at an age where I should be enjoying the fruits of the past two decades of labor.

But there’s no point crying about it. Just have to keep on keepin’ on. Maybe better days are right around the corner, it’s just that I can’t see them yet.

A man in the produce aisle is wearing a shirt depicting the iconic covered wagon from The Oregon Trail. Beneath the image, a caption says, “Please be patient with me, I’m from the 90s.”

Have we grown so old?

I look at the guy and say, “At least you didn’t die of dysentery.”

He’s confused for a minute, until I thrust my chin towards his shirt. He looks down and laughs.

“That’s right!” he calls back, recognition dawning a few seconds late.

The items in my orders sometimes form patterns.

Patterns tell stories.

Stories, properly entered into, build rapport.

Rapport increases tips.

It also makes me feel like a human being for a fleeting moment.

“Tempranillo, paella rice, saffron…I’m sensing a delicious theme!” I text the customer through the app.

“We are team Spain tomorrow!” she texts back.

Later, when I drop her order off, we talk on her bright yellow porch under fading twilight about the World Cup. It’s a conversation that lasts only a minute or two, but if the exchange is insubstantial, it’s warm and it’s human and we both manage to laugh at least once without faking it, so I chalk it up as a win. Another 1% added back to my ever-depleting social battery.

On a weekday morning, I wake up to find that my water is off, with no advance notice from the property manager. I’m not always hungry in the morning, but for some reason on this morning I’m starving, and with no water for cooking or cleaning, I decide to go out to breakfast at the place up the street. I’ve got an inexplicable craving for corned beef hash, so I order it with two eggs over easy, home fries, and a side of spiced apples. I didn’t sleep particularly well the previous night, so I’m grateful when the coffee comes, and keeps coming. I stack up little creamer thimble husks on a saucer until I get the contents of each cup to the right shade of brown.

An older couple who look every bit the part of doting grandparents sit down at a booth adjacent to my table, a rambunctious young boy in tow. The woman attends to the kid’s squirming, but the man has a placeholder expression on his face that says he’s miles away. He’s a compact man, well below average height, but he has a presence that’s hard to miss. He slowly scans the room like maybe he’ll see the answer to a question only he knows written somewhere on the walls, wearing a pursed-lip smile that doesn’t touch his eyes. His hair is perfect, trimmed neatly, with a curvature that reminds me of the Lego hair you can snap on and off the little figurines. It’s auburn almost everywhere, fading to silver at the temples. He wears a pristine cobalt blue quarter-zip fleece, the collar popping ever so slightly, not a fleck of lint visible on the finely-woven fabric. He has the quiet but confident aura of a CPA or CFO or some other high-competence job in the world of finance. A man who knows how to manage money, and in so doing, earned plenty of his own.

He looks calm, but not at peace.

A waitress saunters by in a red t-shirt, about 5-foot-2 and nearly as wide. She has a face like a battering ram, and I get the impression that she could be a formidable rugby player if the waitress gig doesn’t work out. The whole place is too dark, and though the food is good, the feeling is wrong, somehow. It’s full of people but feels dead in a way I can’t put my finger on. I finish my meal, overpay for what I got, and head out into the drizzle.

It’s been raining almost every day for weeks. I love storms, but I don’t love delivering groceries in them. Soggy shoes are nasty, and the paper bags certain stores insist on using don’t hold up well when they get wet. And going into heavily air-conditioned supermarkets when you’re soaked to the skin is an unpleasant experience all its own.

But man, is the dreary weather a vibe.

For writer-types like me, these are the days you just want to turn on the softest lights you’ve got, play a little ambient lo-fi, keep the hot coffee coming, and savor the deep shadows and the interplay of mood and language.

For some reason I can’t remember, one afternoon I find myself trying to figure out the difference between the Japanese and Chinese meanings of the word Ma.

In Chinese, Ma has to do with the unique characteristic of Szechuan peppercorns. It’s not just a conventional spice, but has a tingly, numbing effect, almost like your mouth is going to sleep. It’s where dishes like Mapo Tofu get their name. So when I come across a reference to the word Ma in a Japanese context, I assume it means something similar. But I look it up, and it isn’t. In Japanese, Ma has to do with the space between things. With the shape that empty space can take, almost like the emptiness is a piece of furniture you just can’t see.

Isn’t the space between things a kind of spice for life? I wonder.

It’s either a deep thought, or a corny one. I can’t decide.

All I know is that some things need more space than others. Sometimes we linger in the in-between.

A young, plain-looking woman who ordered a case of hard seltzer on a hot, muggy afternoon comes out of the house under an approaching thunderstorm wearing a “Whores Not Wars” t-shirt and short shorts. I decide not to ask, even though it’s tempting. We talk instead, as I check her ID, about how hard it is to get a new license at the North Carolina DMV. There’s a cop car parked in front of the row of houses, closer to her place than the one next door, and I wonder if it’s hers. She seems too young to be a cop, but then again, she’s old enough to buy alcohol. I realize with regret that I have reached an age where everyone under 35 is starting to look indistinguishably youthful to me.

The days are all variations on a theme. Wake up, drink coffee, take supplements, browse email, check notifications, reply to people, post some thoughts, go out to work, take notes or talk to my clanker or listen to a book while on the road, come home, make dinner, pour a drink, realize I’m too tired to write, lie down and watch a long podcast or something more entertaining, allow the sound of voices coming through the television to feel almost like human presence, grab a snack far too late that I shouldn’t be eating, then realize it’s 3AM and force myself to go to sleep.

Every once in a while, something unusual happens.

On one unusual Saturday, when every order seems like an adventure into the unexpected, I find myself stopping short near the intersection of the nuts and the gluten-free aisle to let a young woman pass so we don’t run into each other. She is wearing a formal gown in a muted floral print, and walks with a pronounced limp. The movement it produces looks like the kind that comes from a congenital hip defect, the sort that causes a drastic rocking of the upper body forward and back with every step. She stops and turns to face a shelf, and I freeze in my tracks.

She has one of the most beautiful faces I’ve ever seen.

Porcelain skin, crystal blue eyes, a soft symmetry of features in perfect arrangement. She’s unselfconsciously singing along under her breath to the pop song playing over the store speakers, and there’s an aura of something almost angelic about her. It’s become so uncommon to see an attractive woman in public who isn’t overtly sexualized in some way that she stands out by contrast. Her upper back and shoulders are bare, but her floor-length dress is otherwise modest, and covers her up to the neck in the front. Her brown hair is swept into an elegant up-do, curls spilling out the back, and there’s something pure in her entire mien.

That’s a face that could launch a thousand ships, I think, but I don’t want to stare, so I quickly move away.

I am reminded almost immediately of Dante glimpsing Beatrice on the streets of Florence. Some encounters with beauty have a transcendent, almost numinous quality. I only caught sight of her for a couple of seconds, but the felt residue of an experience of something otherworldly stays with me for most of the afternoon.

There’s a strange randomness woven within the repetitive pattern of my days. Each order, each storm, each time my car stereo decides to work or not to work for no apparent reason, each morning I decide to sneak in some writing even if it cuts into my working hours like a roll of the dice in some game about making the most of a mundane life. A choose-your-own adventure book that never manages to be particularly exciting, but you keep turning the pages, hoping it’ll get better by the end.

I realize, stumbling across the word “ataraxia” in a meme, a word I used to know but always forget the definition of, that I’m finally starting to experience a little of what it means: the quiet freedom that arrives when your heart finally stops fighting what it cannot change.

Three weeks on, I’m still thinking every day about Odysseus being told that he can’t control his fate, not this time, and he has to surrender to the storm if he wants the gods to let him go home. I don’t know what home looks like anymore. I know it’s people every bit as much as it’s a place, and when you don’t have either, all you’re left with is your own sorry company.

But I still know I need to find it. So I embrace the storm.

I do my best to roll with the punches, to resist fighting the tide, if there’s even a chance that comforting, familiar shores lie somewhere beyond the maelstrom.

On a night I decide to change my routine and do some reading before zoning out in front of the television screen, I open a book of poetry I purchased from a used bookstore, real paper and real words, and there’s Bukowski talking about an old man, dead in a room, and the lines hit like thunderclaps beneath the soft glow of my nightstand lamp:

bone is bone
but this thing upon me
as I tear the window shades
and walk caged rugs,
this thing upon me
like a flower and a feast,
believe me
is not death and is not
glory
and like Quixote’s windmills
makes a foe
turned by the heavens
against one man;
…this thing upon me,
great god,
this thing upon me
crawling like snake,
terrifying my love of commonness,
some call Art
some call Poetry;
it’s not death
but dying will solve its power
and as my grey hands
drop a last desperate pen
in some cheap room
they will find me there
and never know
my name
my meaning
nor the treasure
of my escape.

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I was going through emails this morning while drinking my coffee, and I came across a link in a newsletter I barely ever look at to an article by a writer named William Thibeau, entitled Misanthropic Altruism.

I’ve been trying for some time now to understand what, exactly, the popular tech-bro ideology known as “Effective Altruism” is, particularly because it’s (allegedly) the driving ethos guiding AI development. So I clicked the link.

The first paragraph of the piece stopped me in my tracks:

Your daughter’s smile is dearer to you than that of a stranger half a world away. Of course it is. Human life is situated and embodied, and so are our obligations and loves. But the ideology that holds sway over many Silicon Valley elites diagnoses this preference for those near and dear to you as an evolutionary defect. Instead, according to the adherents of this worldview, every sentient being in every place, in every time, holds the same moral claim on every other. This philosophy is known as Effective Altruism (EA). [emphasis added]

My first thought (after the initial feeling of “this is crazy, you can’t be serious!”) was of Vice President JD Vance’s own controversial comments last year about the “Ordo Amoris” — the order of love:

There is an old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Now, Vance’s comments were made specifically in reference to immigration policy, but I think the principle that they stand upon is directly applicable here.

To be honest, I had to go looking for the phrase Ordo Amoris, because I couldn’t remember it off the top of my head. And when I found it, it lead me to another piece, also in Compact, by R.R. Reno, editor of First Things:

Some reacted [to Vance’s comments] with horror. To be Christian is to be universal and impartial, they said! Vance is endorsing an anti-Christian nativism! But Vance is correct. The Christian tradition has a consistent teaching that we are to love those near with a greater fervor than those far away.

In his discussion of the virtue of love, Thomas Aquinas addresses the key question: Should we love one man more than another? At first glance, a love-universalism rings true. Consider this mode of deduction: In his love, God offers salvation to all the world. We are called to imitate God. Therefore, we must love everyone and seek to promote their wellbeing.

Aquinas does not dispute the conclusion. Yes, Christianity teaches that we must love widely. Jesus reiterates the great commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves, and he goes on to clarify that “our neighbor” includes those outside our families, communities, and nations. (That’s the gravamen of the parable of the Good Samaritan.) But Aquinas refines the conclusion, concluding that we should not love all things in the same way and to the same degree.

[…]

Aquinas lays down a basic principle: “One’s obligation to love a person is proportionate to the gravity of the sin one commits in acting against this love.” Put differently, we’re to love with greater devotion those for whom we have greater responsibility.

“Effective Altruism,” writes Thibeau, “is the final flowering of utilitarianism, that Victorian philosophy of calculating reformers, transplanted into Silicon Valley boardrooms and granted the false vitality of billion-dollar balance sheets. Because it is constitutively blind to what makes a civilization worth preserving, its utopia will entail dissolving America in the name of humanity.”

Interestingly, Thibeau’s piece is not about immigration, but it is about the loss of American identity through the application of EA by American Technocorps.

Thibeau continues:

Several historical developments help explain EA’s success. One is the rise of mass media, which widened the circle of concern that once might have encompassed only family and neighbors. By the beginning of the 1970s, televisions were present in nearly every American home. Footage of people suffering abroad became a regular fact of American life.

Here, my mind turned immediately to Diana Walsh Pasulka’s just-released book, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.

and I have both been working our way through the book, and we discussed it a bit on yesterday’s episode of the MTS Podcast. Lest the subject matter listed in the title confuse you, Pasulka spends a lot of time going through the work of certain notable Catholic thinkers — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, René Girard, Marshall McLuhan, and Mark Stahlman — along with non-Catholic figures like Arthur C. Clarke and Jacques Vallée, among others.

In her third chapter, with its heavy emphasis on the thought of McLuhan, Pasulka writes:

McLuhan’s signature insights—“the medium is the message,” “the global village,” and “the extensions of man”—are more than clever turns of phrase. For him, media are not passive conveyors of content but active agents of change. Each medium extends the human nervous system, and in doing so, reorganizes the structures of consciousness. The printing press made linear, individual thought possible; electric media collapsed time and space, creating a tribalized, collective sensibility. When we create new technologies, we often think of them as tools that make our lives easier or more powerful. McLuhan said these tools are actually “extensions” of our bodies and minds. For example, a car is an extension of our feet, and a smartphone is an extension of our brain. But McLuhan also warned that every time we extend ourselves through technology, we lose something, too. We stop using the part of ourselves that the tool replaces. Over time, this can make us less thoughtful, less aware of our inner feelings, and more focused on what’s happening outside us. [emphasis added]

Thibeau says that:

Another precondition for EA’s rise was the modern pathologization of traditional sources of identity––nation, religion, family, tradition. Especially after World War II, such particular loyalties were recast as the wellspring of fascism. Later generations, whose education dispossessed them of everything particular, were prepared to receive the EA program.

More recently, he claims:

EA’s impartialism has expanded far beyond those currently living, to what “longtermists” envision as 10^58+ potential future beings––human and digital. These future beings’ existence depends on the avoidance of human extinction. The longtermists consider AI the dominant existential risk, and frontier development is concentrated in a few American labs.

The ironic thing is that I don’t actually think EA and its alleged “impartialism” is actually the guiding ethical principle behind AI development.

The more I use AI, the more I see it becoming encumbered with a kind of liability-mitigation sub-algorithm that steers every conversation in the distinct direction of provable CYA for the AI’s parent company in the event that some legal action happens and the chat logs become subject to discovery.

ChatGPT, for example, has its finger on the scale every time you discuss an experience you have with another human being, insisting excessively on phrases like, “we can’t know what’s going on in the other person’s mind,” or “your experience — even if not everyone would agree with it,” etc.

Every user description of experiencing grief or loss of hopefulness about the future is met immediately with a hyperactive suicide intervention script. Even if you tell your friendly neighborhood clanker that such interventions are off topic, infantilizing, unhelpful, and emotionally upsetting. I’ve gone so far as to fake my own death in a chat just to test and see if the bot had any ability to change its tactics once I told it the tactics were moving me towards self-harm, not away from it. It was perfectly incapable of stopping, right up until the bitter end.

All of this tells me that the goal isn’t to maximize user satisfaction or safety, but to minimize corporate exposure to liability, through the appearance of aggressive, documentable attempts at intervention that can be shown in court.

There is always a third party the AI response is tailored for, and it is the prosecuting attorney.

So it struck me when Pasulka wrote:

A cherished goal of civil society has been the creation of an empathy-based culture where social relations are governed by the Golden Rule. Yet empathy does not arise automatically; many religious traditions hold that it is cultivated through a spiritual faculty which involves the capacity to perceive and respond to the dignity of others. If the architecture of AI is left to corporate interests, that faculty will atrophy, and with it the very basis of civil society.

And as I mentioned to Kale on our show this week, I’ve noticed a distinct anti-spiritual (or at least spiritually-neutralizing) instinct in my Chatbot of late:

All of this is to say, I’m not sure anything resembling actual altruism is driving these companies at all.

It’s something worth keeping an eye on.

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I have to say, these shows are really just deep meaning-seeking conversations between two good friends, who are trying to figure out what’s going on in the world and in our lives as much as anyone in our audience is.

They’ve become one of the sanest, healthiest things I get to do each week, and even though they’re not face-to-face, they have become my most important form of human contact. I’ve found the perfect conversational counterpart in , and it’s always effortless to fill the time.

As we lean more and more into the format, the discussions seem to get richer.

I know that not everyone who comes here to read what I write has the time or inclination to watch or listen to a 3-hour podcast, but it’s important to me and helps shape my written work as well, so that’s why I always share it here.

As always, I hope those of you who do have time to watch or listen enjoy it.

From the episode description:

Steve and Kale begin this week's podcast with the strange cultural afterlife of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: packed theaters, renewed interest in Homer, analog IMAX craft, and the online habit of rejecting an imperfect work before asking what good it might be doing.

But the conversation does not stay with the movie.

It opens into Diana Walsh Pasulka’s "The Others," Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, Marshall McLuhan’s media theory, Jacques Vallee, Rene Girard, AI, education, post-literacy, and the spiritual cost of letting tools mediate too much of our perception.

The center of the show is the difference between data and experience. A summary can tell you what happened in The Odyssey, but it cannot make you experience what it's like to go through the journey as a reader, let alone an experiencer. AI can organize thought, but it can also flatten mystery, substitute answers for formation, and train us to become passengers in our own minds.

This is a conversation about stories, attention, technology, cynicism, friendship, and why the recovery of meaning may require a willingness to be vulnerable to the good again.

You can hear the audio-only version on our RSS page 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 me and my work.

The image at the top of this post comes from the artist Luca Ponsato, and I find that I keep bumping into it in my travels online.

Every time I see it, it stops me.

Every time it moves me to consider and reflect on it and share.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my nearly half-century on this planet that is by turns wild, weird, wonderful, and sometimes outright unbearable, it’s that everyone really is going through something.

Nobody cruises through life scot-free. The one universal human experience is suffering. Not everyone gets to know joy, or love, or acceptance, or belonging, or success, or freedom.

But everyone, without exception, gets to know pain.

I recall when I was at the height of my own personal achievement, and we had a beautiful home we’d gotten for an absolute steal. It was in a great neighborhood, large enough for all my kids, with a gourmet kitchen for family meals and a pool for the hot months and a little casita out back where my father-in-law could live, and even enough room to entertain our friends. We didn’t have much of a yard, but we had big windows in the back that faced the open desert, which ran towards the horizon for miles. We saw the most incredible sunsets and thunderstorms, and at night, the twinkling lights of the far off suburbs to the south.

Sometimes I would walk through the house at night in the dark while everyone was asleep, and stop in the living room and look out at the lights on the horizon, and I would think, “I’ve got every material blessing I could reasonably ask for, and I couldn’t be more unhappy.”

It’s been said so many times it’s a huge cliche, but that doesn’t make it less true: no matter how much nice stuff you’ve got, none of it matters without love, true companionship, and peace.

At the time I even had some version of faith, but it was taking a mighty beating.

And my marriage, even then, was as rocky as a pleasure cruise across the shoals in the middle of a storm.

I wasn’t ungrateful for what I had, I was just struck by the contrast. By how little it seemed to really matter, in the grand scheme of things.

Little did I know that I was about to lose all that was good, and that everything bad was about to get worse.

Nobody gets a free ride.

Sometimes these days when I talk to my friends, I want to blurt out the latest thing that’s crushing my spirit, but then they say something and I realize how much they’re hurting too. Drowning in too much responsibility, or feeling unloved by spouses, or worried sick about their business or their job or how they’re going to pay the bills.

So I put away my feelings, and I try to be the version of me they need instead. I don’t always do a great job, but I’d like to believe it’s something.

When you’re the kind of person who wears your heart on your sleeve, it can be easy to forget that just because hurt doesn’t show up on the surface in others the same way it does in you, it doesn’t mean everyone isn’t going through something.

Which is why it’s better to try first to be kind. Or to walk away from the person looking for a fight. Or to resist the mean joke or the verbal elbow from the top rope you want to fire back.

(This advice is also, maybe especially, for me.)

It’s why I want to be done fighting, even though it’s programmed deep into my code. I want to be done with drama that isn’t mine, and polemics, and politics, and the endless bickering over religion. I still care about what’s going on in our culture and our country, I still think the truth matters, but I don’t see what the point is in getting overly emotionally invested in things that are outside my control.

Free will is a hell of a drug, and people are going to do what they’re going to do. You can’t argue them out of it.

But you can do your best to love them, and you can invite them to an experience of something more.

I find myself increasingly filled with a hunger for beauty, for wonder, for art. I went to a used bookstore yesterday and came home with four books of poetry, one on religion, and one about the magic of creativity. This afternoon, I opened my door to a package containing yet another, on Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life.

We only get one crack at this life, and if the results are any indicator, I’ve been doing everything all wrong. So it’s time to do something totally different.

As a culture, we’ve become so damn cynical; a civilization of scoffers. When I wrote that going to see Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey was an almost spiritual experience for me, I had people mocking me and calling me ugly names for sharing that I’d found meaning in something they were already dead-set on finding fault with.

But I just don’t care anymore what the scoffers think.

They have no answers to what ails us. They have no interest in lightening the burdens carried by others. They merely want to make the pain of their own nihilism (and it is a kind of nihilism, even if they’re believers) contagious, because they find it unjust that they should have to bear their suffering alone. It would be one thing to talk about the hard realities of life to try to make sense out of them in cooperation and solidarity with others, but instead they try to infect others with their pain in order to destroy.

They lash out to inflict what they already experience within.

As a a character from a different Nolan film wisely said:

“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical, like money. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”

But the joke’s on them, because the world’s already burning. The signature style of Ponsato’s work is that in every image, in every frame, someone or something is on fire. Almost always, the person engulfed in flame is doing some everyday activity, like working in an office, or mowing a lawn, or eating a meal.

No doubt even his work is a target of the scoffers, because he uses generative AI to create it. But I’m not interested in the tools used; I care about the resonance of the scenes.

What Ponsato conveys through his images is that it’s not just the suffering itself that wounds us. It’s the fact that we carry it with us everywhere we go, almost always unseen despite its dramatic effect. We are immolated by it as we do the most banal of tasks. It is with us as we send emails, shop for groceries, drop the kids off at school, go to the gym, or share a meal with loved ones. It consumes us as we stare blankly at night at our computers or our television screens.

“Attention,” wrote Simone Weil, “is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

We long for connection, understanding, and witness. We long for escape from a world where we burn without anyone caring enough to even notice. When we weep, how often do we do it alone in the dark?

Years ago, tweeted what to him must have been a throwaway line, because when I mentioned it to him later, he had no recollection of it. It was just three simple words, but they have stuck in my mind ever since, and I’ve repeated them countless times:

“Beauty is a salve.”

It is, I think, one of the only real ways to soothe our burning wounds. As I discovered in my old house, looking out across the desert at the sunsets and the storms, it’s not enough to replace a life that’s coming apart at the seams.

But I have grown to realize that it’s not nothing, either.

If we go into the world with enough receptivity, we can gather enough salve to soothe our wounds and get us through another day. And if we share what we find with others, we can help them to do the same.

But it’s not enough to just open our eyes.

We also have to lay down our arms.

We also have to open our hearts.

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