“all beautiful people remain optimistic”

—Pavlo Petrychenko

Again, that’s obvious. It’s very, very important to create human systems that are hard to cheat. Otherwise, you’re ruining your civilization because these big incentives will create incentive-caused bias and people will rationalize that bad behavior is okay.

—Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie’s Almanack

They’ve come to that threshold beyond which words lose their utility.

—Abraham Verghese, The Covenant of Water

Whenever I check back in with social media, I always find the same people doing the same whoring. Because of capitalism, people get defensive about that metaphor, which does not surprise me. Corporations would have us all enslaved by the seductive mechanisms of fame and attention-seeking if they could. That they haven’t yet is not for lack of trying.

The responses from the people captured by market reasoning tend to run the gamut from:

“Who are you to denigrate whoring?”

to

“Everybody’s a whore if you think about it.”

After the dissembling and semantic games, we come eventually to some version of:

“What’s wrong with whoring in the first place?”

Nothing.

I don’t judge.

There’s nothing wrong with whores or whoring except that whores lack scruples. In a whore’s mind everything has a price, everything can be bought. Life teaches whores that nothing is sacred, that everything is transactional. So they wind up like Larry Wheels on Matan trying to justify why it’s okay to work exceptionally hard across multiple domains and achieve status and fame most men will never experience just to be allowed to purchase a plastic wife who neither loves nor respects him. That’s such a sad fate for ambitious men. Surely that’s not the best that men have to look forward to. Is it?

If capitalism has been unsuccessful at convincing you that ethics and morality are the exclusive provinces of the naïve, or that life is best spent on your knees on a hamster wheel chasing cheese, or that adhering to principles external to yourself is the same as being weak...

By which I mean: If you happen not to be a whore, you understand that by definition some things can’t be bought. You can’t buy love. You can’t buy loyalty. You can’t buy integrity or discipline. You cannot purchase respect, serenity, or peace. The closest you will come is to eventually amass enough resources to be able to purchase property and fealty. But those are not the same. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, which is only right since the only place the monarch can find love or understanding is by looking down. You can buy things that look like love, things that feel like love, but you cannot purchase love because intimacy with a price tag is prostitution not love, and companionship with a price tag is conditional and therefore either parasitic, employment, or worship.1

What you read reveals a lot about who you actually are. What you read, and your ability to reason, marks you as someone shallow, or someone comfortable at depth. What you read defiles you as surely as what you write, as surely as what comes tumbling from your brain’s metaphorical mouth. As surely as what you make legible in the world with your actions.

I read more manuscripts than can be considered glamorous. Manuscripts submitted to me by executives, by religious leaders, by entrepreneurs, by influencers, by politicians, by world champions, by scorned housewives, by successful diplomats. I learn a lot about people’s character because of it. It’s harder to hide when you write. People wear all sorts of masks on socials and in person. It’s instinctive given the Machiavellian habitats that form their ecosystems. But your true self leaks out in a manuscript like it does when you are being tested.

Like policemen, like teachers, like psychologists, like investors, like lawyers, like bouncers, like any cashier in any liquor store, editors see the same people repeated. Lots of people come to me with what they think are profound quotes the world hasn’t heard enough of. Quotes that inspired them. Quotes they may even have engineered an entire reason for living from.

And then they meet me. A man who has told thousands of aspiring writers that the profound quote they fenestrated themselves such that they could absorb the errant principle into their bloody insides was never said by the person they imagine said it. And who can prove it.

I get to look at their social media. I get to take stock of their character by whether they accept they were wrong, whether they issue a correction or retraction to their followers or fans, or whether they get irate and attack me for the apparently unforgivable sin of knowing too much. Or maybe the sin of being able to prove what is true. Who knows which of these offends their egos most?

Your pity here is misplaced. The philosophy that birthed the assembly line—that birthed tract homes, franchise restaurants, corporate office interiors, endless sequels, and seasonal fashion—can hardly be faulted for being prejudiced against anything unique.

Whenever you meet someone pretending that these platitudes have meaning or that they were written by someone influential, know that you are in the presence of someone captured by market reasoning. You are in the presence of a liar or a victim. Likely both.

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts,” cannot be attributed to Winston Churchill because he never said it.2

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled,” cannot be attributed to Samuel Clemens or his much more famous nom de plume, Mark Twain, because he never said it or wrote it down anywhere.3

Some of these people who have large audiences and follower counts, people whose very identity hinges on a continued public performance that they are successful and more importantly that they can communicate the process of success to an audience who should then be able to reliably replicate it (since that is the supplement or course or mastermind they’re selling) reveal to me quite early that they are liars. I understand why angel investment return rates are so low, despite never having been an angel investor.

I understand why all these leaders pantomime competence despite the world being a tragic, disastrous reflection of the best they were able to accomplish.

Lots of people pitching, lots of people claiming expertise, lots of people aspiring to leadership didn’t even read the books they claim to be inspired by. It’s not just that they’re lying. They are actors, acting. Their very persona is a lie. For them, selling, branding, and pitching is indistinguishable from lying. They’re always selling, so they’re always lying. And they didn’t fact-check the quotes they posted to “inspire” you to get good at selling either.

Let’s you and I do a bit of easy math. If they’re not good at lying, what’s the odds they’ll actually be good at the thing they’re saying will benefit the economy such that investors will receive high return on their investment? What’s the odds the thing they’re selling benefits you?

The rot is systemic, you see? It spreads, it is communicated virally, like venereal disease.

What’s the point of even hiring whores who are better at lying than they are at whoring? Especially when they’re clearly not that good at lying.

Or, crudest of all, here the sun might make you believe you are beautiful. And if you’re not careful, you’ll embrace the light and joyfully throw your life away to gaze at your deadly reflection. And then you’ll die while the Northern light chants that it was a trick, that you were really dust and maggots all along.

—Karen Michalson, Enemy Glory

These distraction-oholics. These focus-ophobics.

Old George Orwell got it backward.

Big Brother isn’t watching.

He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed.

He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled.

And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched.

With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s on your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.

—Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby

On the night that marked the end of back-to-school season last year my friend’s ten-year-old daughter threw a terrible temper tantrum because neither my friend nor the child’s father bought her a backpack made by the company, Sprayground. I immediately flashed back to another company, a brand I hadn’t thought about in decades—Jansport—a corporation that made backpacks kids used to stab other kids to steal when I was going to school.

Corporations have been training you to form habits that benefit them since you were old enough to dream. Much of who you think you are—your relationship to willpower even—is not even you. You have no idea where you end and where the corporations that programmed you begin.

Before the internet, before TiVo, before VCRs, the only way to watch a program you liked was to show up when it was being broadcast. If you missed it, the closest you could get was your friends talking about it at school the next day. That small situation engineered by brands and the people paid to market for them made you afraid in a way you could feel, but couldn’t identify, couldn’t cup in your hands and examine from multiple angles. A feeling that drained through your metaphorical fingers every time you tried to wrap your growing brain around it. An amorphous fear. A fear without a name. A fear you never hear discussed. A fear you won’t be able to identify until a decade of schooling passes, and you find yourself listening intently to the grey-haired man with jowls and wrinkles walking back and forth across the dais lecturing the class about Marketing 101. The fear of missing popular programs is the infant seed of Fear of Missing Out.

This appointment viewing did another very important thing. Think about what is happening to this pliable, youthful brain, eminently susceptible to being programmed by being trained. Independent of what parents and caregivers mean to teach, the child learns that an intentional action—showing up in front of the TV screen and turning it on when the hands of any clock or watch point to 4 and 12—will lead to something stimulating, something pleasurable, something that seems designed specifically for them, something they’ll enjoy. Corporations plant seeds here, in this fertile ground. Dark patterns.

Cowabunga!1

These roots, dug deep and intertwined with our earliest memories, are with us the rest of our lives.

One of the best things my mother did for me, and the most valuable, was something she withheld, not something she gave. I was only allowed to watch television for two hours every weekday. And those two hours were fixed—between four and six. The two hours weren’t retroactive either. Miss the appointment. Miss the program. Miss the fun. I chose video games. Watching TV required me to waste a third of my two hours watching ads. Playing video games, I got to squeeze out every minute of fun. Because I never got hooked on believing corporation’s schedules were important, my brain never learned the habit of being susceptible to many of the other cognitive traps corporations deploy at children. I did, however, get caught up in the vast dragnet of many others. I have more gadgets, sneakers, and motorcycle jackets than a person who doesn’t ride or do anything more athletic than lift heavy things up and put them back down again has a right to.

Brains release reward chemicals when their owners perform an enjoyable action. Dopamine, serotonin, ... You’ve heard these words before. This isn’t new to you. These chemicals are addictive and exploitable. Brain owners learn to repeat actions that get rewarded. Repeat an action long enough it becomes second-nature. You are compelled to perform that action in ways you do not understand. Those ways become a part of your personality, indistinguishable from your makeup or your character. Have you ever gifted concert tickets to an exuberant fan? If you haven’t, consider just how many people regularly bleed hours of their life away lining up for the chance to pay some company money.

This is precisely how ambitious people build habits by the way—operant conditioning—a well-understood psychological phenomenon. Corporations do everything they can to get children hooked early to the digital equivalent of heroin. But the people who run the corporations are susceptible to the same cognitive biases as the rest of us, so they overlooked the Law of Diminishing Returns. These chemicals carry inherent dangers. Use a little and you’ll want a lot. Use a lot and you’ll lose the ability to know when you’ve had enough. Eventually overdosing is the only way you ever feel anything. Joy becomes trivial if it can be repeated without cost. You chase dopamine because you never seem to imbibe enough, so what little you encounter is meaningless. To even catch a glimpse of Joy now, you need the motherlode. The burnout is built-in.

It’s not just intentional habit-forming that corporations leverage against you. They also leverage loss aversion. Loss and gain have never been proportionate for human beings. How could it be? Who among us in any age would trade one of our offspring for the promise of a future, better child? The future better child could never fill the hole of our loss.

I look around at people addicted to their digital devices because of daily login or check-in streaks. I see these dark patterns utilized by Snapchat, by Instagram. I see these dark patterns used as a core gameplay mechanic in every single genre of video games. From casual hits like Candy Crush and 20 Minutes Til Dawn to triple-A titles like Call of Duty.

Cliffhangers are a particularly effective dark pattern utilized by book publishers and media companies alike.

When I look out at the media landscape in 2026, I can see production companies resisting streaming companies’ mandate that the entire season be released all at once. Cliffhangers aren’t as effective if companies can’t make you wait for the chemicals. If they can’t dangle it just outside your reach, how will you learn to jig?

Wait for it.

You can’t have it until I say.

And the next time I’m giving them out is, ‘Same time next week.’

The things you like, you were groomed into liking them. Lamborghinis and Birkins are not very practical, much cheaper to produce than manufacturers let on, but very desirable and very expensive, and this is not by accident. Expectations about how careers should look, and how you should dress to slot neatly into these careers were created for you. The shirt you choose, the outfit you plan to wear to brunch on Sunday... You were trained to want those. Even the brands you identify as more exclusive, more desirable, more valuable than the rest. How would you know? How precisely would you determine which brands are best? Price? Quality? How do you assess those? Why is a $1200 phone better than a $400 phone? How about if you’re forced to choose between two $1200 phones? How do you know which uses quality components? Because the influencer they paid told you? Your mom? Your dad? Your friend has an engineering degree?

Habits. Training. Coercion.

Go to school five days a week becomes working five days a week.

Eventually, people get used to only being allowed to cut loose on weekends, holidays, and in the evening when the workday is done. It’s engraved so deeply into people’s character it gets embedded into culture. We’ll give it names so even the slowpokes catch on. Happy Hour. We forget that it isn’t human, and that prior to the Industrial Revolution none of the people we are descended from lived that way. Society may have been dominated by some inbred despot and his offspring in our species’ not so distant past, but at least our predecessors never suffered the indignity of living in a culture designed by their employers.

Well, not until the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.

Report cards are released on schedule. As are paychecks. As are performance reviews.

The people who study long into the night, in high school and in college, the people who put in the extra hours earn extra rewards. As do the people who work 120 hours a week, when the majority work a conventional 40.

The system was built for you, and you were trained to desire it.

But this is not what you really want. And none of it nourishes your soul.

Which is why almost everything you earn never means anything, is never valuable. And why you crave more things you won’t enjoy when you acquire them.

This is why it’s so hard for you to find the root cause of your burnout. This is what leads to depression. You know you’re suffering, but it seems like you, yourself, are the cause.

You’re not what’s wrong with you. You are just valuable to companies. So they made sure to start using you early.

The websites you visit and the apps you use are infested with dark patterns. You don’t know what they are, but you feel their coercive effect. At this point, I assume if a service uses a dark pattern it is artificially inflating the end product’s worth. Whatever the end product is worth can’t be that valuable if someone needs to inflate its value to induce me to give them my debit card. Because of my mother’s withholding, I developed the valuable habit of failing to volunteer to be exploited.

I avoid products, services, content creators, influencers, game developers when I identify a dark pattern being leveraged against me.

When I introduce this concept of value to other people, they report this is an easy way to medicate, if not cure, depression and anxiety.

I don’t consent to manipulation. It doesn’t feel good to me the way it feels familiar to you.

I wasn’t trained to want it.

A man who sees that all things are contained in the higher spirit cannot treat any being with contempt. For him to whom all spiritual beings are equal to the highest there can be no room for deception or grief. Those who are ignorant and are devoted to the religious rites only, are in a deep gloom, but those who are given up to fruitless meditations are in a still greater darkness.

UPANISHADS, FROM VEDAS.

— Leo Tolstoy, A Letter to a Hindu

Any excuse will serve a tyrant.

—Aesop 620–560 BC

I am not a good person and I have proof.

A good person would not be standing in the grocery store at 11:04 a.m., staring down a cashier after calling her a bitch.

She...

Is...

Furious right now.

Her supervisor is trying to calm her down. You know the type. She can give it, but she sure don’t like taking it. As soon as she thought she had her boot on my neck, she beckoned Ms. Flanders over. Snitching ass.

No. No!

It’s not her fault. It’s me. This is about me. I can do better.

A good person would have gone home. A good person would have ignored provocation or forgiven it.

A good person would not have turned their car around after they’d driven more than half a mile from the store.

A good person would have capitulated to the voice in their head asking, “Are you really going to do this?”

A good person would not have said, “Yes.” And definitely not out loud.

Glee. That’s what I felt making that U-turn, ignoring my friend’s voice echoing around the atrium of the immense throne room where my conscious mind whiles away this abundance of time I have either earned or lucked into, while my body does the same on whatever beach I’ve wound up on most days.

“You wrong for this, brother. Why don’t you go on home and leave that girl alone?”

I am not worried. There are two empty football fields of marble tile between the throne and the anteroom. He’s not going to cross all that distance to make me comply.

Proof.

I am not a good person.

That’s not the only thing I thought, pulling that U-turn, wind rushing gently through the open windows. I also think, Ahh. I should buy grapes for Mrs. Diamond. She’d like that. Plus I forgot the onions and the green peppers.

Everything feels so familiar. I pull into the same parking space. The glass door still opens outwards to the right. The sign says “Pull” but it still feels unhelpful since the door opens so awkwardly. There’s no bell on the back. Because of how the eidolon clock below the sign bounces against the glass, its impotent hands still pointing to the last time the store was opened, you halfway expect one.

There is one person ahead of me when I get to the express checkout line, a woman fumbling with her cards, and keys, and purse compartments again. So familiar. The cashier is dripping the same invective into the ears of the two baggers at her station. She would be a better manager than Ms. Flanders so they really should listen to her, she says. Even the other company she applied to? Why should she work there when that place was so inefficient? If she ran that place she’d never have everybody turn up so early. That’s just wasting everybody’s time.

Familiar.

The school system is working too well. She’s no more than twenty years old and she’s already capable of running multi-billion-dollar businesses despite a conspicuous lack of qualifications, experience, or demonstrated capability. I fired nineteen young men and women just like her last year. Familiar.

I get the same disinterested response when I say, “Good morning, ma’am.” I am irrelevant to this pastor haranguing her flock.

Smug bitch. She hates it that I’ve called her a bitch. My “language is inappropriate.” She’s lecturing Ms. Flanders. Ms. Flanders looks weary. She’s dealt with this before. The ego on this cashier, this probably happens with some regularity. But not the way it’s going to happen today, Ms. Flanders. I am not a good person. I don’t lie.

I commiserate with Ms. Flanders when she is allowed to give me her attention. I cock my head and affect tiredness. I am weary too. We are both weary together. Why can’t everybody just behave?

“Sir?” Ms. Flanders says.

“Ma’am. I just want to pay for these.” I use the MasterCard in my still outstretched right hand to gesture to the three lonely items on the conveyor belt.

“Sir. You don’t have call her a bitch.”

She’s right.

“Ma’am,” I say gently. “I just want to pay. But if she wants to play stupid games, she fucking with the right one today.” And then I shut my mouth.

I don’t explain reality to Ms. Flanders. I don’t point out that I have my card extended to her in the same way I had my card extended to the cashier while she repeatedly asked me “Cash or card?” getting more and more strident and impatient each time. Ms. Flanders has done this before. She’ll figure it out, and unless I miss my guess the cashier is going to tell it all, and tell on herself. She can’t help it. She never shuts her mouth.

As if on cue, that smug, rat face, untamed by her braces, starts screeching again. She’s almost at the part where I asked her if she is retarded.

To her credit she has only told Ms. Flanders one lie.

Ms. Flanders looks even more weary. She is leaning away from Rat Face, from the ferret tunneling into her ears. Her eyes pop when she hears the word “retarded.” Her body jerks upwards in concert with her eyebrows and her eyes, as if someone has jabbed a pin into her nethers.

This is excruciating. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to hold this.

Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh.

What is wrong with you?!

Don’t laugh!

The rat-faced cashier’s eyebrows did a similar thing.

They flew to the top of her face when I leaned in, holding her eyes. I didn’t raise my voice. I enunciated clearly to ensure she would hear me above the bustle of all the other transactions and asked, “Are you retarded?”

Her mouth formed a little o. Her eyebrows popped, looking for all the world like ships way out in the ocean moments from tipping gallantly across the horizon.

She is confused. Her face blanks. I don’t need to be psychic to know what she’s thinking. I know this thought. I’ve had this thought before. Perhaps you too?

This is not happening.

The slack set of her face, the little o, and the eyebrow ships.

There’s no way.

Her brain reboots and she comes angrily to life.

“What? What did you just say to me?”

“Are. You. Retarded?” I say it slower the second time.

She looked left. And then right. My brain spontaneously does a trick where it transports me and the person I am arguing with back ten years in time but superimposes it over what I’m seeing now. I can see a version of her. Dressed smartly in her school uniform, baby hairs laid down neatly, press curled towards her forehead. She is on the tip, tip, tippiest, tip of her toes, right hand thrust high.

Acknowledge me Ms. Flanders! This is urgent. I need your undivided attention.

She’s making sure the teacher sees. The other kids go, “Oooooo. You’re in trouble,” and then the overlay disappears. She’s done this before. This is practiced. I don’t know what she thinks the consequences are going to be, but she is banking on my comeuppance.

You can probably tell I’m only half listening to her laundry list of authoritarian tendencies masquerading as legitimate complaints. I’m thinking about my omelet. I am surprised to find that I enjoy the preparation an omelet requires. I am always careful to buy both red and yellow bell peppers now. Against my better judgment, I have invested in a decent set of knives. Quality tools make any task sublime.

A ritual makes demands. There is a gravity to the practice, to solemnly presenting your best offering. To committing the sin of pride by humbling oneself. To surrendering to a metric you have not created, but which you are obliged to measure yourself against. One must be objective. One must, after careful consideration, and no little preparation, acknowledge without fear the possibility of failure, and still give a good account. There is a wrong way to dice onions. There is a clumsy way to chop. A way that leaves burning tears leaking from your eye holes, or metal slicing into your skin. So it is too with life—you will hurt yourself if you are not respectful.

I tune in. Rat Face has just said something about “respect” too.

“And people like you want people to respect you?” She curls the end of the sentence upwards. Turning a statement into a question.

“Respect? Bitch, you a cashier. Don’t nobody want respect from you. We want you to do your job. You a cashier, bitch. Cash! Cash the goods.”

I can’t tell if this happens to her every day, or if she’s never been spoken to this way. Every time I say the word “bitch” her eyes twitch but every time I say the word “cashier” her face crinkles as if I’ve hit her.

“Stop calling me bitch,” she says.

“Bitch you a cashier. What part you don’t understand? You don’t get to give nobody orders. You a cashier.”

“Stop calling me bitch!”

“What are you going to do about it?”

This is why I can’t decide. I don’t expect this from a more practiced troublemaker. She is stunned. Perplexed. Silent. The little ships have returned from their sojourn over the horizon but have strayed so close together I am given cause to worry about shipwrecks. She can’t move. She looks like what a child imagines happens if you step on a rusty nail and get lockjaw—a mannequin that has taken up breathing. I take aim. The entire place has gone silent. Customers and staff have tuned in to the drama. Cashiers are peering around customers. I see a funhouse image, reflections cascading off into the distance. Meerkat heads, repeating, cocked sideways, straining to see over the tops of candy arrangements and magazines.

The place is hushed.

Loading...

One beat.

Two beats.

Three beats.

Some of the cashiers and the baggers in the other checkout rows are wearing the satisfied smiles of people enjoying karma being served.

They don’t like Rat Face. Interesting.

Ms. Flanders herself is holding back laughter.

Four beats.

Five beats.

I am not a good person.

“Bitch, if you didn’t want to be a cashier, you should have paid attention in school. Then you wouldn’t be here. Get another job, bitch. This not for you.”

I twist it in and break the handle off.

I am going to go with nobody has ever spoken to her like this. She clearly wants out of this situation. No one is helping her. Absolutely nobody. Not even the two baggers she was regaling with tales of how she would do a better job than Ms. Flanders if she had Ms. Flanders’ job, and how the people at the call center she applied to don’t know how to run a business.

And then I sprinkle in the truth.

“All you going to do is cause these people more and more trouble. Bitch!”

That jerks her out of her stupor.

“You have a nice day, sir,” she says. And then to Ms. Flanders, “I’m not going to cash him.” She folds her hands and turns her back. She spins right back around when she notices we have everybody’s attention. People are even leaning out of aisles to gawk, hopping on one leg to keep balance.

“I will have a nice day. But you not going to.”

Ms. Flanders has been trying to gently guide her back to the cash register but Rat Face is resisting. She shakes Ms. Flanders off and pulls away from her completely. But this puts her face to face with her audience again. She reacts as if scalded. A whirling demon set aspun by holy water. The machine beeps when Ms. Flanders taps my card. Everything comes to a little less than $10.

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“You’re welcome, sir.”

As I walk towards the exit, I lob another one over my shoulder. Rat Face takes the bait again.

“Lookit. Now everybody laughing at you.”

“They not laughing at me. Is you they laughing at.”

I tilt my head back all the way, a wolf preparing to serenade the moon.

“Biiiiitttcchhhh!” I howl.

Laughter breaks out.

Ten miles later, I am knocking on Mrs. Diamond’s door. There is no answer. I begin to wonder if her daughter has taken her to the doctor. I hear a muffled groan, and then rustling, and then grunting approaches the other side of her door.

“Mrs. Diamond, how come it sounds like you’re having trouble getting up?” Two years on, she is almost fully recovered from the stroke. You can barely tell which side of her face is drooping. She’s all smiles. I hand her the grapes. The smile gets wider. I get to see all her teeth.

More fun cannot be had. Not for $10.

“Caveat emptor, quia ignorare non debuit quod jus alienum emit.”

(Let the buyer beware, for he ought not to be ignorant of what sort of right he is buying.)

—Sir Edward Coke, The first part of the Institvtes of the lawes of England ; or, A commentarie vpon Littleton, not the name of a lawyer onley, but of the law it selfe, Printed for the Societie of Stationers, England, 1628

“Any community that lives on staples has relatively few wants. The community that can be trained to desire change, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed, yields a market to be measured more by desires than by needs. And man’s desires can be developed so that they will greatly overshadow his needs.

Newness or style became the new order of the day. Retailers looked for novelties with which to tickle the jaded appetites of lady consumers. Sales organizations began to urge upon production changes instead of standardized low-cost units. Saturation came quickly if the market bought to satisfy demand, but saturation would never be reached if what was in style could be changed quickly enough and made soon obsolete. Standardization became increasingly subordinate to style; uniformity of production was subordinated to style appeal.”

—Paul Mazur, Senior Partner, Lehman Brothers, American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences, 1928 (my emphasis)

“Advertising is an educational force. If effective, desires increase, standards of living are raised, purchases are made; purchases create production, production creates purchasing power, and the circle can be made complete if desire is at this point strong enough to convert that power into actual purchases.”

—Paul Mazur, Senior Partner, Lehman Brothers, American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences, 19281

In America, the market is not separate from the self. The market becomes so personal that people evaluate themselves, their spiritual health, how well they’re doing, with market terms and metrics. This process happens everywhere America spreads her gospel. The eventual supplanting of family, and its replacement with unrelenting work for profit, and the artificial dream advertisers package and market and call success. Success: an experience akin to indentured servitude except they sell your family—piece by piece—back to you. A mother becomes a service. A father becomes a wage. A coach becomes a confidante. Cook, laundry, babysitter, housekeeper, ethics teacher, civics professor, financial advisor. All people you pay, not people you love. You outsource love in America. And you pay for it. Edward Bernays must be so proud.

About a year ago, before men and women began selling their loneliness as content en masse, before “100 women vs accountability” started trending, before women made a point of announcing they were horny for bears and took a fair stab at making bestiality mainstream. Some time after passport bros discovered that the best way for men to find something akin to the romance promised in stories their moms and dads told them—straining against exuberance barely contained—about what life was like when they were young was to travel to places that retained old values, the internet was abuzz about a budding couple who recorded the woman’s meltdown when she realized their first date was about to take place at Cheesecake Factory.

Via all the interviews that were given to satisfy the virality of that moment, we were able, as a culture, to come to grips with something we could not and did not name.

We learned that she was so late to the date the couple missed their original reservation. We learned he waited for more than an hour, downstairs in his car, while she put on purple lipstick to match her lime-green dress and brown coffin-tip fingernails. We learned that she would have had difficulty paying for a meal at the Cheesecake Factory for herself without debt, to say nothing of the expensive restaurants to which she aspired. We learned that her friends and their influence had set a standard for her that they were, themselves, incapable of meeting.

We learned that these two people, made famous by their viral moment, if not empty, if not spiritually bereft, were at least spiritually injured and unhealthy no matter how gently they carried themselves to hide the wound. The moment was lightning captured in an SUV in a muggy parking lot, cracks in the asphalt, vegetation peeking through, on an otherwise unremarkable day. It was a perfect example of the phenomenon of the market supplanting relationships on display. How do you know if you’ve gone on a good date? Chemistry? The buzzy, heady, champagne feeling that smushes your lungs against your ribcage and forces itself up your windpipe when you are alone, that squeezes your throat and cracks your voice and your reason until breathless, you confess what took place and what you want next to your closest confidante?

No.

A slow-burn, blossoming romance, marked by intrigue, and red-herrings, and an insatiable desire to know every detail about another’s life so intense that it turns you into public relations operator, impatient spy, and detective all at once?

No.

Knowing the reggae percussive rhythm of blood pounding in your ears, squelching the world into silence every time the other person turns to look at you, a rhythm that becomes the same experience you recognize as falling just as the elevator hurtling towards the pit of your stomach begins to melt? The runaway elevator melts, and because you experience melting you, yourself, begin to melt at the same gradual speed at which you become aware that the other person looking at you, seeking your eyes, is staring, rapt, either unwilling or unable to look away?

No.

That’s chopped. Not a good date at all. If you evaluate it that way, you’re doing it wrong.

What’s a good date you ask? Why, ensuring that you’ve been taken to the restaurant with the highest current stock price, social currency, and luxurious décor of course. Some place that exudes exclusivity or desirability in the photos you take while you’re there. Some place that advertises that you know your “worth.” Some place that proves to the people you call your friends—but in whom you are always attempting to provoke envy—that you can satisfy advertiser’s ideals.

It’s like everybody’s competing in a never-ending episode of a TV-gameshow called Look at Me, I’m The Biggest Narcissist. It’s so weird watching an entire culture calling itself spiritual but influenced every step of the way by market forces.

They even sell spirituality in America. They’ve been doing it for decades in an altogether different way than the Church did while crusading through Europe and the Middle East. Do you feel spiritually bereft? Does the tiny vestige of your soul that happened to survive the onslaught of advertisers telling you that you weren’t smart enough, or popular enough, or pretty enough, or thin enough, or good enough—just wholly and totally never ever enough—since you were old enough to interact with the screens they specifically designed to arrest your attention and on which they placed the most exciting, stupor inducing content they are reasonably certain self-selects for being engaging and addictive and thus impossible to resist, does what’s left of your soul ache from all that trauma?

America: It’s so horrible that that happened to you. Come. Hush. Allow us to soothe the pain. Over here. We have apps for that. Books, if you don’t want “content.” Outdoor experiences if you want to feel less “connected.” Seminars if you want to bond with strangers. What’s your budget? How much money do you have?

Entire industries exist for the sole purpose of arresting your attention and feasting on what’s left of your wounded soul while you are distracted. Guided meditations voiced by someone you’ve been groomed to like; nature sounds piped digitally into your brain via headphones the marketers made you covet and then pay for. Spirituality offered as a subscription, gift-box, experience, seminar, webinar, exclusive retreat, or one-time-purchase. $9.99. Industries rise like empires and erect temples to the celebration of your woundedness before they fall. They monetize every detail of the human experience—cradle to grave. Endlessly competing for the opportunity to confuse, to stimulate anxiety, to harvest emotion, before selling you peace in monthly installments.

High Value. Exclusive. Meet and Greet. Investment. Top. Bestselling. Afford. Valuable. Trending. Worth. Return.

What do the words in that random string have in common?

Just words people use when they’re talking about their children.

Spirituality. Youth. Health. Beauty. Happiness. Success. Identity.

All advertised. All available for purchase.

Market forces.

Market. Forces.

The free market forces.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth me nothing.

Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up,

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil;

Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth;

—1 Corinthians 13:1-6, New King James Version

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

—1 Corinthians 13:11-12, King James Version

I honestly don’t know how I survived this long. Or why my business doesn’t implode.

No editor is allowed to escape definition. Definitions become a second skeleton—an implacable logic, the arbiters of truth—words and what they mean.

And because I am apparently not that smart, I expect that other people understand the words they’re using. That they live within the lines they draw, that they mean what they say.

I can feel your gentle judgment. I have indeed been too long naïve.

He told me he retired from the military, but his rank took second billing in his email signature. Place of pride went to his honorary Ph.D.

He told me that after the military came “success” in corporate life. He used the word “integrity” often. And he asked me to help him publish a book of quotations. Quotes he was certain would “inspire” the next “generation.”

Almost every quote lacked attribution. Many were incorrect. Being daily immersed in words, and their elegant arrangement, I have committed many profound arrangements to memory and recognize them anywhere. Where once I would have run these down gratis, I have been adult long enough to know that if you are working for a client they should compensate you for time and effort expended on their behalf.

I sent him a second invoice and waited until he paid. Research commenced, investigation ensued. The people he imagined made these utterances never said them, never wrote them. He was dismayed when I showed him the original quotes in the books they had been lifted from. How they’d been altered, bent into bite-sized slogans, kneaded to make them more amenable to sharing in this superficial social media era.

Over a decade later I am still, it seems, too optimistic. Naïve.

He insisted that I publish the book as he had presented the “manuscript” to me. I confess to having expected better. Long, distinguished corporate career; long, distinguished period of military service. And he used the word “integrity” often.

Months after the book was published, he reached out to me.

Someone who knew him well had found errors, and because they knew he “identified” as a “perfectionist” they knew it would hurt him to know that a book he published contained errors.

These words and these definitions. Hurt? Identified? Perfectionist?

He asked me to make “corrections.” Ego bruised, now he wanted me to repair what he previously said wasn’t broken, and he wanted me to fix it for free.

His “request” was a thinly veiled “demand.” I have been an editor long. I decipher tone, and intent, for a living. I edit my clients’ books so they avoid being misunderstood. My clients pay me what I’m worth to help them, and their readers, find clarity.

His request was a thinly veiled demand, couched in a soft “threat.” He used the word “warranty.”

My response, word for word:

“Warranties don’t cover situations where the client was given multiple warnings, including a clear final warning, reviewed the book both in print and virtually, and signed off on the final file prior to publication. Talk soon.”

I have been too long naïve. Two decades ago, the fledgling editor I used to be would have taken joy and pride in running down the attributions for free. And then had my heart broken. And choked on the ashes occasioned by the conflagration of my innocent expectations set aflame.

You have to understand, I am an editor. Words matter. I arrange words until those words satisfy desires: Comfort. Success. Challenge. Career. Abundance. Gratitude. Health. Time. Money.

Comprehension.

I use words to create value, for myself and for my clients.

Words matter. Words matter as much as experience, and my grey hairs should tell you I have experienced the definitions of so, so, so many words. I am an editor. I don’t just know words, clichés, and their definitions. I know what they mean.

I never called him “Doctor” once, although he repeatedly insisted that I should. I know lots of doctors. Many of whom entrust their words to me.

I call him by his first name.

There are no sales, no discounts, for what I paid to make myself free. I had to earn my skill.

I am never impressed by honorary degrees.

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-French a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of a union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself: and therefore it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, when single, are voided by the intermarriage.1

—William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, “Of husband and wife”

Day after day, that system elaborates its evil projects in your presence, day after day its leaders betray you, pursuing, in the name of France, a policy as foreign as possible not only to your real interests but also to your deepest needs.

…

You pride yourselves on keeping your distance from realities of a certain kind: so you allow a free hand to those who are immune to the most unhealthy climates because they create these climates themselves through their own conduct. And if, apparently, you succeed in keeping yourselves unsullied, it is because others dirty themselves in your place. You hire thugs, and balancing the accounts, it is you who are the real criminals: for without your indifference, such men could never carry out deeds that damn you as much as they shame those men.

—Francis Jeanson, “Celte Algerie conquise et pacifee…” in Espirit, April, 1950, p. 624

Every “modern” woman I meet aspires to royalty or divinity. She is either goddess or queen. That ubiquity says so much. In 1952, an actual queen, Queen Elizabeth the Second, inherited the crown from her father, King George the Sixth, a man no one thought would ever become king. King George’s brother, King Edward the Eighth, had abdicated the throne, preferring marriage to an American woman, Wallis Simpson, over the life of a monarch.

In 1947, before her succession, Elizabeth married Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. After her coronation in 1952, Philip did not become king. Elizabeth made a point not to invite her uncle, the king her father should not have succeeded, to her wedding. Queen Elizabeth II is Britain’s longest-ruling monarch. Her reign lasted seventy years and ended at her death in 2022. No coups were attempted or reported.

Under English common law men had a legal duty to maintain their wives even if they were estranged. This law was only abolished in 2010. There are no corresponding laws regarding the responsibilities of women to men.

When Queen Elizabeth II was young, some of the political arguments that dominated popular culture centered around whether husbands had any right to their wives’ property.2

Married women weren’t allowed to own property or enter into legal transactions her husband was not privy to because these were assumed to amount to conflicts of interest to her husband’s agenda. A wife’s sole legal responsibility to her husband was that she bear him heirs—that she have his children. Unmarried women, femme sole, lived under no such restrictions. They were free to own property, work, and conduct business—no male supervision required.

This is not the story feminists tell—that women in the West have always been allowed to choose. It cannot escape intellectual interest that the one part of coverture that women did not challenge was the clause that prevented a husband from saying he was not liable for debts his wife obligated him to, with or without his consent. That was not wholly repealed until well into the 1960s.

While Elizabeth II was queen, Margaret Sanger spent her dead husband’s money to promote the idea that women should have access to “birth control,” a term she invented. Later Sanger convinced Katharine McCormick to spend her dead husband’s money to fund the research of Harvard trained gynecologist, John Rock, and biologist, Gregory Pincus. These scientists’ research resulted in Enovid, the first hormonal birth control pill.3

After that women were free to convince employers that they wouldn’t spend more days out sick than their male counterparts.

It has always been a battle for control of resources and social status. Every woman wants what the queen has. Even if she cannot, or will not, earn it.

Alexander the Great’s mother, Olympias, spent his childhood summers before 334 B.C. filling his head with ideas of greatness and confirming them. When she wasn’t having him educated by the most astute intellects of the realm, she spent time telling him that the king wasn’t his father. She told him he was descended from Zeus, a god, instead. Then she killed his father, King Phillip II of Macedonia, executed Phillip’s seventh and youngest wife, Cleopatra (or drove her to suicide after executing the only other children she believed could make a legitimate claim to the throne), Alexander’s younger sister, Europa, and brother, Caranus.

For the entire time Alexander ruled the world his mother was his unofficial advisor and she profited and benefited from this influence. So powerful was she, in fact, that Alexander had to limit his mother’s political influence lest he lose the realm. After his death, Olympias decided to install her grandson, Alexander IV, as king despite that authorities determined that Alexander the Great’s brother, Phillip III, had greater claim to the throne. Eurydice II, Alexander the Great’s niece, attempted to thwart Olympias and even took charge of the Macedonian Army and met Olympias on the battlefield. Her soldiers defected the moment it sunk in that Alexander the Great’s mother rode at the head of an army they did not belong to. Olympias ordered those men to take Eurydice into custody and, while Eurydice fulminated in her cell, apparently had them bring her a rope, a cup of poison, and a sword and invited Eurydice to choose by which of these three methods she intended to die. Eurydice responded with a note saying she hoped the day when Olympias would be given the same choice was not far in the future and hung herself with her own girdle.

This all comes after Olympias gave her second child, a daughter, her rival’s name. Olympias gave her second child the same name as her husband’s youngest wife, Cleopatra. That’s the chilly, gentle caress of hypothermia turning frost frigid. No. I’m wrong about that. Honestly, there are no words I know that measure anything that cold.

So many stories. Instances I’ve observed, scenes I have, myself, participated in.

Mom observes daughter embarking on a course she is uncomfortable with, and thinks is destructive. Maybe skirts have become too short, or nails have become too long, or daughter has lately taken to spending more and more time with a boy below her social class.

Mom brings her fearful tale of imminent and certain disaster to Dad’s attention, communicates her disapproval, and suggests that Dad should “man up” and, “Do something about it.”

Dad puts on disciplinarian-hat and imposes boundaries.

Mom seeks out daughter in the spirit of friendship, and care, and support. Mom consoles daughter and commiserates with her about how horrible men are.

This is what I think about when I hear Will Smith bellow, “Keep my wife’s name out your mouth!” And the sharp crack, his violent act, and his wife’s expression after. And her confession some time later that the couple had separated years before. Didn’t even live in the same house.

Interesting patriarchy this.

You will be given a body.

You will be taught lessons.

There are no mistakes in life, only lessons.

If a lesson is not learned, it gets repeated.

The more often a lesson gets repeated, the harder it gets.

You know you’ve learned when your actions change.

—Unknown

I’ve been thinking about the Block button. I get blocked a lot. I’m thinking about this social media adventure I’ve foolishly volunteered for, and I can’t resist examining the philosophy that underpins much of the games being played here, the axioms that generally dictate outcomes.

I have found that most people are liars. Some from practice, some on account of a pragmatism that results when a coddled child collides with the real world, and some out of self-preserving necessity. We are living through an egg shortage in 2025, but in the entire recorded history of the internet we have never lacked for catfish.

So, for most people, the Block button represents the removal of a liar from their life. Most people are self-absorbed and solipsistic. They’re lying. They know other people are lying. They assume that the other players in the game are similar to them in this fundamental way. Plus, the information being exchanged doesn’t matter. Information has devalued like a failing country’s currency since it’s almost always false—either outdated myth or useless belief.

But for people playing other games—for people trying their best to find the objective truth, and to say only that… even if it means their intelligence (or lack thereof) will often be publicly illuminated when they turn out to be wrong—for those people, the Block button is practically a gift.

If you’re an honest person and you get Blocked, a liar is voluntarily removing themselves from your life. Where is the downside? Most people’s lives consist of a series of liars worming their way into acquaintance in an effort to siphon resources. Double check your inbox if you disagree.

The vast majority of ads you see are cleverly disguised lies.

The vast majority of “content” you see these days are cleverly disguised ads.

Most of the things you will purchase over the course of your life will be useless or underwhelming given the exaggerated nature of the average sales claim. That is what most people’s lives are like. The parasites are voluntarily removing themselves from mine. 😁

Life is better than I deserve.

I am doing cleanup work for a client. I see too many of these tragedies. I’m re-publishing a book my client published previously. They published a book, the book won’t sell, and the feedback from people they trust has not been positive.

My professional assessment did not help my client’s self esteem.

The book bears all the hallmarks of failure.

The cover is poor. Objectively sub-standard. To make matters worse, the publisher they paid to package the book and get it sold on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and in Walmart apparently doesn’t know that the text on the rear cover needs to be both justified and hyphenated. A glaring error that causes the book my client worked their entire professional life on to look like a friend’s teenager did the design on an “I’m helping you out and you’re paying me with exposure” basis.

I visit the publisher’s website. I want to know what every side of this sad, regrettable, situation looks like. I am engaged immediately by the publisher’s sales team. They have one of those chatbots you can pay $9.99 a month to have hosted on your website, so when a visitor navigates to the site someone on staff can pretend to be helpful. The digital equivalent of “Can I help you with anything?” when you’ve been browsing in a boutique in real life.

The sales exchange causes me to re-evaluate my perspectives, but then it turns darker and changes how I view my client. The sales team is voluntarily sending me spreads and samples of work they’ve done and every single book has the same issues. Page numbers are missing. Dialogue is not contained inside quotation marks. The paragraph spacing is terrible, and the headings... The headings are what really give it away.

The headings were clearly done using WordArt.

All these books were done in Microsoft Word. No wonder they look amateur. No wonder they don’t sell. No book in this company’s portfolio has received more than three hundred reviews on Amazon. Nobody is buying these.

But that’s not the thing that changes how I feel about my client.

It’s the PDF I’ve attached below that did it.

From American Publisher’s perspective, when the sassy salesperson engaged with me, I was a prospective client. They told me how much they expected me to pay, right after they sent me this blurry, unprofessional PDF.

Now I get it...

You want to be a published author, you don’t have the time to learn how to distinguish professional quality books from amateur produced ones but how did you see this blurry, grainy, low resolution PDF and think to yourself, “These guys are going to treat my book with a high degree of attention to detail.”

And then I look at all the cheerful reviews clients have left on their website. I look at all the smiles and correlate them to the poorly produced books, still available, still not selling, on Amazon.

I look at that and I think, “People really seem to enjoy volunteering to be exploited. What a fantastic metaphor for our free-market economy.”

“I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.”

—Shirley Temple

“The Negro child feels neither surprise nor shame at the facts of reproduction, because he is told whatever he wants to know. It is quite obvious, without having to fall back on the subtleties of psychoanalysis, that this difference cannot help having an effect on his way of thinking and hence his way of acting. Since the sexual act is presented to him as the most natural, indeed the most commendable thing in the view of the end that it pursues—impregnation—the African will retain his outlook as long as he lives; while the European, as long as he lives, will always unconsciously keep alive a guilt complex that neither reason nor experience will ever succeed in altogether dissipating. In this way the African is inclined to view his sexual life as only part of his physiological life, just like eating, drinking, and sleeping. […]

“A conception of this kind, one would suppose, precludes the distortions into which the European is led in order to reconcile the conflicts of a tortured conscience, a vacillating intellect, and a frustrated instinct. Hence the fundamental difference is not at all of natures, or of constitutions, but of conceptions; hence too the fact that the reproductive instinct, stripped of the halo which the monuments of our literature have adorned it, is not at all the dominant element in the life of the African as it is in our own, in spite of the statements of too many students inclined to explain what they have seen by the sole method of analyzing themselves.”

—Denis Pierre de Pédrals, La vie sexuelle en Afrique noire Paris, Payot, 1950 pp. 28–29

Sometimes I have to be gentle with people. I say the same things over and over.

“I’m not going to be good for you. You should forget about me.”

It’s not that I don’t like you. I’m not being belittling or condescending. But we can’t be friends. Your boss is already irritated that he can’t afford the car I drive. One day he’ll do something stupid, and I will laugh, and he will fire you.

You’re not strong enough to be my friend.

It’s not fair.

But your life’s not like mine. And I can’t spend all my time defending you.

One girl was a bartender at the gym.

Most of the time I go to new places I drive my junk car. Life is more amusing this way. One day I overhear a woman say to her companion, “Oh my God. I underestimated that one. I didn’t know he has such a cool car.” I’d fucked up. I’d driven my BMW that day and my dumb ass used the key fob to wind down the windows so I could get cash out and pay for my protein shake without needing to open the door. So what these two women in the parking lot saw was me walking to my car, the windows rolling down in anticipation of my arrival. I reach in, root around, and then walk away, windows gliding up in stately German slow-motion behind me. Blithely walking through the world on autopilot, oblivious to what it looks like to other people.

I pay for my shake, and we happen to cross paths on my way back to the parking lot. The woman I overheard volunteers a chirpy, “Hi.” The first time she’s spoken to me in the thirteen months I’d been going to that gym.

I stop, look at her, shake my head, and go back to ignoring her.

The woman walking beside her is a supervisor at the gym bar. The way she twisted the skin around her lips indicates she doesn’t like that I’ve ignored her friend.

I tried to tell the new bartender that being friends with me is dangerous. I tell her multiple stories where women I’ve rejected make multiple passes around my house. Often while I am canoodling with their friend in my car. We haven’t even made it upstairs. She’s enjoying the fear, the anticipation, the defibrillation drip of excitement we’ve tapped into by watching her friend wander repeatedly through my neighborhood, driving concentric circles around my house. Over and over and over. Near dawn, that particular friend confessed. She’d been thinking about how it felt to feel the wash of her friend’s headlights coursing in and out of the parked car we were necking in—that’s what she was thinking about right before she started cumming.

I tell New Bartender stories about what it’s like being on the other side of that too. Me slouched in the driver’s seat, hand between her legs, watching my new friend’s ex-boyfriend’s car making the same circular, repetitive, journeys. New Bartender doesn’t take the warning.

One day I walk into the bar. The supervisor tries to serve me. Since she and her friend have identified themselves as either superficial, gold diggers, or both, I ignore her. She makes a big deal about it. Now the whole gym is watching. She says, “I guess he’s deaf. He’s not hearing me.”

It sounds entitled.

So I say, “It’s not that I’m not hearing you. I’m ignoring you.”

People laugh. New Bartender also laughs.

Wrong.

Wrong!

She shouldn’t have done that. One of the questions the supervisor asks now that she’s raised her voice to soothe her hurt feelings is if the reason I am ignoring her is because I’m waiting for the “new bartender girl” to serve me. She uses the new bartender girl’s entire government name.

🤣

I’m sure it’s coincidence since it took two weeks for the supervisor I ignored to fire my new bartender friend. The gym couldn’t find a new bartender, so the supervisor had to fill in behind the counter. She complained bitterly for weeks about her increased workload.

It is so easy to lose hours at the gym to laughter. ^🤗

Another time I took a new friend to the beach. She left work early so she could enjoy her evening; made the appropriate request via the appropriate channels so she could have this time. When I picked her up I put a crimson pink hibiscus blossom in her hair. She lit up like nature greeting light at dawn and couldn’t hide her beaming from my camera. I pull that photo out from time to time. And lose myself in the pleasure of reverie.

While we were having fun watching the setting sun burn lazy, orange, dusky highlights into the sky, her boss, an older man who’d been breadcrumbing hints about wanting to spend some time with her outside of the knowledge of his wife, called her phone asking for work-related things. He couldn’t find receipts and he didn’t need them now, he needed them right now. Before she left work, my friend had made sure the other girls in the office reminded him about the receipts he’s calling to ask for. I was there when they confirmed. I overheard them speaking to him about these receipts on the phone.

I admit this one was my fault, but she had put him on speaker. I’d never spoken to this man. Don’t even know what he looks like. But for some reason he needed to mention me. Had me on his mind. And he knows what I drive. When the flirting began, I took the phone and asked him why he was calling her to flirt after hours. You don’t need all the details. You can imagine what transpired. What is relevant is he said he wanted to fight, to do me harm, but once he repeated, “Do you know who I am?” twice I realized all we were going to do is waste time talking and I’d rather talk with my friend. That’s why she’s here. That’s why she wants to be here.

“Do you know who I am? Do you know who I am?”

I laughed and hung up on him. I shouldn’t have done that. Insecure people don’t like it when I laugh.

I told her she was out of a job. She didn’t believe me. She chortled, shaking, amused, exhilarated. Such beautiful, full-throated, warbling. I am always in awe of those who abandon themselves to the pleasure coursing through their whole being. The ones who can’t hide it. The ones who laugh with all the innocence of a scarred soul drunk on satori.

The next time she called she told me he fired her before the sun set the following evening.

“As a method of avoiding “pain,” ego-restriction, like the various forms of denial, does not come under the heading of psychology or neurosis but is a normal stage in the development of the ego. When the ego is young and plastic, its withdrawal from one field of activity is sometimes compensated for by excellence in another, upon which it concentrates. But, when it has become rigid or has already acquired an intolerance of “pain” and is so obsessionally fixated to a method of flight, such withdrawal is punished by impaired development. By abandoning one position after another it becomes one-sided, loses too many interests and can show but a meager achievement.”

—Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanism of Defense

There are situations where I don’t know anything about an area of human endeavor, a topic, some subject matter.

Situations where it eventually becomes obvious that irrefutable evidence is publicly available.

Anyone can dig deep enough to find that nobody else knows anything about that topic either. How could they? The problem either doesn’t exist, is not well defined, or hasn’t been solved.

When confronted with these scenarios, I am comfortable with, “I don’t know.”

I must confess that it is endlessly entertaining watching the pathologies and justifications employed by the people who just don’t know how to do that.

All these insecurities exposed.

And all these lies.

All these techniques and strategies they use to coerce you into accepting not only that what is hurting you is in your best interest, but also that what is hurting you isn’t.

These are the wealthiest people on Earth. And they are volunteering this themselves, for public viewing and consumption.

Elon Musk pays people to play video games in private so he can publicly take credit for being good at playing video games. And then gets his feelings hurt when the people who are actually good at games won’t accept him. Look at how he bristles at being rightfully called a cheat.

Regard words typed by the world’s literal wealthiest human:

Regard hubris personified.

Don’t you know anyone else with this kind of character?

You never met the kid who didn’t get the glory he wanted on the playground? Who was denied the dignity of a foul he called to refurbish the damaged fragments of a cracked and broken ego so he grabs the ball because it’s his? And because he’s made up his mind to punish everyone else he’s now clutching at what he owns and stomping towards home?

You never met the kid who had come to accept that everyone would cover for his bad behavior, so it had become ingrained in his personality?

You don’t read books for pleasure? You’ve never come across Draco, or Joffrey, or Tom Riddle?

You don’t know Heathcliff, Tom Ripley, Kinsey Milhone, Lestat de Lioncourt? Catherine Earnshaw? You were never overawed by the excesses of Miranda Priestly? You never learned what Kahlan survived at the hands of the Sisters of the Dark? You don’t know about how Hazel did Nella, or what characters like Stephen did to Hildy and the other people he called brother or sister? You don’t know about the kinds of people who would keep Brendan Dassey in prison for a murder he couldn’t have committed? They put that boy in prison for life before he’d even had an opportunity to lose his virginity.

I wonder what else you let them keep from you.

Maybe you only read the books the corporations suggested to you or your parents—the books on the approved curriculum. Maybe you read too many narratives but never ventured outside long enough to determine what transpires after the words the author left at the end. Maybe in real life you’ve never had occasion to be tinker, tailor, soldier, or spy. For context, Elon was referring to someone who had done no more than tell the literal truth. Before the truth had been made public.

Not: “I should reward those who tell the truth.”

The wealthiest man to have ever lived. This is someone allowed to crack eggs and make omelets at the highest levels of multiple governments worldwide.

Before Project 2025 there was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Before that there was the William Lynch speech. Both have been debunked and discredited in my lifetime. It’s fascinating how even when you see it with your own eyes the government is invested in ensuring you never acknowledge the truth. I wonder if I will live long enough to see Project 2025 “debunked” too.

Many more people are invested in arguing about issues that have already been settled than there are people working on legitimate solutions to actual problems.

Fascinating that the world still sees progress this way.

I wonder what it would be like if people ever collaborated to do the opposite.

“Taken from the painting on the roof of the Capitol Dome:

A rainbow sweeps across the lower quadrant of the Dome of the Sky from Benjamin Franklin to a young boy wearing a Smurf-cap and a toga. The boy attends a goddess who reclines on a large horse-drawn reaper. She is Persephone’s mother Ceres, who was reconsecrated by early missionary adaptation as Anna, mother of the Virgin Mary. The golden boy is officially designated “Young America.” Although Brumidi has hidden the boy’s face from us, he deserves our careful scrutiny for one very important reason. Bearing the name “America,” he is the only element in the sacred national iconography that defines the character of the American person as perceived by government.

Young America’s Smurf-cap is a style of headgear known as the “Phrygian cap.” Phrygia was a district in the Kingdom of Pergamum. We remember Pergamum. It is the middle point in the transfer of Babylonian religion westward to Rome. Phrygia is a Greek word meaning “freemen” (our English word comes from the first syllable, “phry-“). Phrygian caps were given to freed Roman slaves to indicate their new liberated status. Roman law regards liberty as a conditional status. Once granted by a patron, it could be revoked at any time for cause. Phrygian-cap freedom, then, means liberty (freed Roman slaves by the way were called “liberti”) to please Caesar. … Of course, those liberti bold enough to protest what their superiors commanded lost their freedom, no matter how lucid and reasonable their own judgment might have been. They were reverted to slavery. Since the advent of the Febronian State Church, the reversion of protestant liberti, or Protestants, to slavery has been so methodically insidious that it’s hardly noticeable. The shackles are psychological, humanely fitted by increasing varieties of spiritual exercise. Like Aeneas, Anchises, Julius Asconius, and their Trojan followers, most Americans are indeed Phrygian-cap freemen, free to sacrifice their individuality to the greater good of Rome.”

—F. Tupper Saussy, Rulers of Evil

“…America, you, in no uncertain terms, are not free! Allow me to define some of your so called freedoms. There is something called Freedom of Religion—which really means free to keep as much confusion as possible about God in the minds of people, to make God abstract. Freedom of Choice—you are free to vote for any of the corrupt officials that are competing, who have all pledged their dedication to the perpetuation of your captivity. You are free to make your choice of which one you prefer to your own personal tyrant. You are free to participate in politics. You can achieve status in some of the high offices of slave management for “good boys.” As a matter of fact, you are free to be anything or anybody you choose—except yourself!”

—Ben Ammi, God the Black Man and Truth

“Your fantasies about someone are never actually about them. They’re actually about you, your desires, wishes, unmet needs projected onto that person. They’re stories in which the person is not really even a character, but a prop.”

—Zahra Bilal — Psychotherapist

My friend and I watched It Ends With Us over Christmas. When the other self-styled critics are done patting themselves on the back for calling out the naked adolescent narcissism at the heart of whatever it says about our culture that aspirational minded women made Colleen Hoover’s movies, and her writing famous with their ravenous, rabid, interest I will still be left pondering what these scenes Colleen successfully etched into our collective social consciousness mean, viewed through that lens.

Through the lens of entitlement and its malcontents. Through the fun-house mirror perspectives of the immature. Women who are attracted to the fantasy of a world where they are suns at the center of curated universes orbited by desirable men whose passions are continually inflamed by the seminal star’s mere presence. Most women will never matter this much, and they know it, and knowing it makes them, like Lily Blossom Bloom, want it so, so desperately. Even though they shouldn’t. Even when it isn’t good for them.

Scene after scene.

Scene One:

Lily’s mom eggs her on while Lily stands behind the lectern at her father’s funeral, asking her to say what she doesn’t want to say. Coercing her in public like moms often do, leveraging the threat of public embarrassment to nudge Lily to protect the family secret, to protect the legacy neither she nor Lily ever rejects any of the benefits of. Begging her to lie to protect the public face of a privately horrible man.

Scene Two:

How freely Lily gives away what doesn’t belong to her to a random boy she decides to take pity on. How easily she spends, how she never rejects, the resources her father earned.

Scene Three:

How Lily rejects multiple opportunities to tell her boyfriend, her other friends, and her mother that the attractive gentleman whose restaurant she frequents is her ex, which leads, of course, to predictable, explosive, passionate outbursts from her other curated orbiters.

Scene Four:

How neither Lily nor her mom can figure out how to put the baby’s crib together, and how to while away the time they spend being stubborn about their incompetence Lily asks her mother why she stayed in her abusive marriage. To which her mother responds, “It would have been harder to leave.”

Is this scene metaphor or commentary? Is some meta-commentary happening here?

Lily and her mom give up eventually, and later Lily asks her estranged husband, Ryle, to help. He puts the crib together while one of the people who couldn’t supervises. I can’t tell if this is farce or genius, but I can tell you this is a common experience for men.

Scene Five:

Lily gaslights her husband into agreeing to a divorce and also into granting her custody of their child. Because her conception of events is the only perspective that matters, apparently. After he asks her what to name their baby. This is what women want to do with agency? The neurosurgeon subordinate to the flower seller? The one person who tells the truth throughout the entire movie is the only person rejected and punished?

Let me get this straight. Modern women are going to gaslight themselves into presenting a self-defined, self-centered avatar of perfection, a goddess who is never to be questioned, who is always right, always capable, despite the ample evidence to the contrary, and who will never be forgiving because forgiveness is unacceptable. This generation is interesting. It ends with us, indeed.

Interesting.

So very, very, interesting.

I can’t stop thinking about what this says about how modern women see themselves, and how they want the rest of us to see them.

How much of Lily’s bad behavior is excused because women can so easily project themselves into the perspective of this protagonist. How many women come so quickly to this character’s passionate defense. How much of themselves they see in her and other women.

This is what I think about. The thought I can’t escape.

Particularly now where the male director, and the film’s female lead both tell versions of the same strange story to the media. A story where the film’s female lead convinced Sony executives to shitcan the version of the movie the film’s male director made. She convinced the players at the top of the hierarchy to release a version of the film that she edited herself. An unprecedented achievement.

The film’s female lead—an actress—got to tell the director, and the film’s producer, how she wanted the film to be made and when they declined she got Sony executives to intervene so she could edit the movie precisely the way she wanted.

It Ends With Us is the story a woman supported by other women wanted to tell, and how she wanted to tell it. This is how they see themselves.

Lily Bloom lies. To everyone. Casually. Hypocritically. Without second thought. She says it herself. Right at the very beginning. When she’s exchanging vulnerable, naked, truths with a man she just met and is attracted to. Moments before she says some version of, “No” that isn’t really no, but is in fact some version of, “I want you to think I’m special.” Moments after Lily says, “I’m the kind of girl you take home to mama,” when she means something else entirely Lily says, “I’m an unreliable narrator.”

I need you to pay attention. Lily says, “I’m an unreliable narrator,” moments before she says the word “No” in a way that clearly gives consent. Moments before she confesses she assumed the man she just met, has been flirting with, and has given consent to touch her intimately, is a liar.

I think about that and how I can find zero articles, reviews, or critiques by any writer who identifies as feminist who ever discusses that.

How swiftly she decides who needs her lies, and who needs protecting.

How swiftly she decides.

The movie wants to be a form of comfort food, assuring us that everything would be all right if only women embraced their traditional roles as nurturers, mothers, and healers, but it all just tastes stale.

—Roxana Hadadi, a Vulture TV critic who also covers film and pop culture

This man says I’m being unreasonable. He throws the accusation over his shoulder while he is running away from me.

I am in his front yard. He is fleeing it.

My friend lives next door to him. She sent me a message that reads: “My cousin tried to rape me.”

When I call, she tells me that while she was hanging clothes on the line outside and her feet were still wet, her cousin asked her to help him with something in his room. She grew suspicious when he hurried her inside. He would usually have complained about the mud her wet feet would track indoors, but he looked at her footprint puddles and said nothing.

She thought perhaps he needed help with curtains, or bed fittings, but what he wanted help with was the engorged member protruding awkwardly from his shorts. She started backing away when he said it was causing him pain. She moved faster when he started to complain that his baby’s mother had stopped giving him attention months ago. She clawed at the handle of the door he’d closed behind him. By the time he got done complimenting her beauty and describing her body she was already at full speed praying she didn’t slip or trip.

When she made it into her house and turned around he was in pursuit, his hands stretched out for grabbing. She said she didn’t scream. She said, she said, “No. No. No,” just before he could touch her. He withered, confronted with the lack of acquiescence in her gaze. Whatever fever needed to break, broke, and the passion drained visibly from his body, starting at his eyes. He deflated. Neck, shoulders, knees, penis.

Now he’s telling me to control myself, and criticizing my quivering bottom lip, and trying to sprint. He’s fucking running away from me, and the shoelaces threaded through the waistband of his shorts are untied so the shorts bunch at his hips and hinder his flight.

This man says I’m being unreasonable with this machete in my hand and murder on my mind.

And, unfortunately, the law agrees.

My friend has a heuristic he uses to be better at life. He doesn’t call it that, but that’s what it is. If you are being recalcitrant, and he has patiently explained to you that your behavior is inappropriate he will remove you from his life. But he doesn’t do it the way I do it. He stops being nice to you. He gray rocks you, and once you figure out that the orchard of wonderful things he used to provide, the oasis of Earthly delights he used to grant you access to has dried up, you will move on.

I am more direct. If you have proved irredeemable, I will remove you forcefully from my life.

I removed one of the best designers I have ever worked with from my life despite his brilliant book covers. He was triggered by the word “inclusion” and resented that he had to draw the people this book requires in a way that did not identify them as Caucasian. It also appeared to bother him that there were people in the world who do not share his sexual preferences. He really needed his illustrations to be Eurocentric despite what the author told him directly, despite her many requests for paid revisions. What follows is the email I sent him.

This book was originally written in the ’90s. Roslyn fixes children. Survivors of horrific abuse. People who were broken so badly, they had to completely reconstruct themselves.

These children need to believe the bullshit society sells to them on a daily basis. Because they don't have any evidence that it works, you understand? They don't have the experience that if they are good, society will reward them back. That has never happened to them. No, “You were a good boy today.” No day. Ever.

The other day I had to pull [redacted] off a woman slapping her 15-year-old in public because the girl had gotten pregnant, was soundly beaten for having the temerity to get pregnant, and in her distress had allowed the ATM to eat her mother’s card.

I know people whose parents put them out of the house at 13 because they got pregnant.

How you think that girl survives?

After Hurricane Katrina, I met little girls who would try to sell themselves to me for Arby’s.1 Arby’s is like a bootleg version of Burger King, with objectively worse product.

They didn’t want to live in the homeless shelter. They were abused there. Routinely.

So they decided to try to make it on their own. What kind of abuse do you suffer that makes you think a better life is living on the streets, no job, no money at 13?

Their experience is that they are excluded and marginalized, and bullied, and beaten. They know. They have the scars.

Little children.

Those children need to be able to look at something and see themselves. They need to believe that despite what their environment is telling them, doing the right thing can work for them.

No matter who they are, what they look like, what gender they think they belong to, or who they like to fuck.

Otherwise, we will continue to spend $40,000 a year, every year, to house them in prisons once they aren’t little children anymore. Or we will write about them going to their schools and shooting their classmates.

Inclusion has real consequences.

You can find Roslyn’s latest on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSTZTGNM/

“It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”

—James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

I had this argument the other day.

Because the books I work on tend to do well, I was asked if I would ever edit a book written by an avowed Nazi. The gotcha subtext being that no ethical person would use their skills in support of evil.

While I turn down the majority of projects I’m offered, I disagree, and given the legal tradition, I think my position is built on firmer ethical, moral, and logical ground.

The best legal minds have determined that a cornerstone of justice rests on the incontrovertible principle that it is better that a guilty man goes free than that an innocent man spends a single, solitary night incarcerated or otherwise deprived of his liberty.1 That people are presumed first to be innocent, and then investigated in a formal process designed to resist the taint and temptation of subjectivity, before ever being found guilty. That says a lot about what intelligent humans understand about human predilections, our lazy tendency to judge, to profile, to bring men first to the gallows for lynching before we ever determine if they have done what has been accused. How easily men and women regress to lizard-apes wielding flames and pitchforks, how easy it is to seduce ordinary folk with titillating whispers and the baying of the mob. How easy it is to manufacture righteous anger distilled from hurt feelings and imagined victimhood.

How blind and drunk we all are, before we are taught to reason.

I used to be a paralegal. That is a great way to earn a more sober perspective on the real world. Even if I think you’re a murderer, or a pedophile, or a rapist, or, as in more than one case I’ve personally litigated, a person who brutally persecuted others for the exact same thing you are now seeking asylum for, you are still entitled to a competent defense. I am still interested in what you think, and what you have to say. That’s a human, moral, ethical imperative. Society owes you at least that.

I have edited books by authors whose positions I am vehemently and adamantly opposed to. I’ve edited books by convicted drug dealers that went on to be optioned by Netflix. I’ve also declined to work on books by clean cut corporate executives for no other reason than I found them, their ideas, their conclusions, their ideals, repugnant. One guy wanted me to edit a book expounding on the virtues of exploitation. He didn't call it that. On the conference call he and his CFO called his ideas other things, and made appeals to what I’m sure they believe are lofty irrefutable principles—the invisible hand of the free market, how competition is the most efficient way to incentivize innovation, how capitalism leads ineluctably to the most efficient allocation of resources. But I actually read Friedman’s book, debated it, and understand what he clearly overlooked. The market’s invisible hand always seems to be cracking the overseer’s whip. I have never seen capitalism work divorced from slavery. And I read a lot and have been specifically looking. Two thousand nine hundred books and counting. Feel free to take this as a challenge and show me any real-life instance where that is not the case. I am happy to be corrected.

Apparently my opps learned nothing from the underground railroad, have never really thought about justice, or the bravery of Mamie Till-Mobley. It’s fine. Not everyone has the privilege of being Black. Not even those with dark skin who use fashion, labels, appearance, and group identity—whatever they can cadge from TV and Instagram about our culture—to cosplay an ethnicity. We don’t necessarily call it out because a brittle bundle of sticks is still more difficult to break than each individually. We know we need to survive, and there is already enough divide in our community. But lots of Black people are still doing what amounts to Blackface with their online personas. Not everyone knows our stories.

One way to look at it is that editing a Nazi manifesto is tantamount to supporting a cause inimical to my personal ethics. And, in the long and short term, a cause averse to my social and physical well-being as well.

Another way is that my skill in untangling prose and polishing ideas until they are pellucidly clear might just push a closeted dog whistler from the shadows straight into the spotlight, leaving them with no convoluted tangle to hide behind. Everyone gets to see them for what they truly are, and society can then indict itself by doing whatever it does to act accordingly.2 We are all implicated, either way. Whistle Emmett, whistle in your open coffin.

Everybody wants to control the future.

I’m not that smart.

Everybody’s fantasy is that they’re a god, or at least royalty.

I’m content with being just a man.

That’s hard, and satisfying, enough.

You should read your old writing.

I’ve been chasing old for four and a half decades. Thank God, young is over. I wasted so much time and money on so many things. Looking at the remains of all these fashions I used to wear, I’m grateful to be purged of all the anxieties that belonged to all these people I used to be. I found a leather trench coat and a three-piece suit in my closet the other day. Both smelled of mildew and the ancient cobwebs they had gathered were torn—weighed down by dust. Most people’s living spaces are mausoleums, crypts for perished identities, memorials for the living, storage for dead things.

When I was young, I swore I’d never wind up this kind of wasteful person. That I’d never own so much. I was always too ambitious.

I always wanted the freedom to do as I please and not much more, but society conspires to prevent most people from figuring out what that looks like. And I understand why. Bosses need workers. Gurus need followers. Rising tides need boats. I did my best to venture far—I sampled cities, toured states, visited other countries, enjoyed every continent except for The Land Down Under and the icy ones, but I never saw freedom modeled anywhere. Most people get lost in wanting, and wind up conscripted into owning too much to be free.

I’ve found free looks like wearing shorts every day, and spending most of my time at the beach or, whenever I feel sufficiently disgusted at my appearance, at the gym. Different beach every day, or the same one every day for weeks. I’ve found it really doesn’t matter.

It’s like that now. Still. At my age, I still have no idea what I want to be. All I know is what I’ve become.

I was raised well; I think. All the wanting I ever did was in spite of good advice and better counsel.

The other day I thought a thought that I’ve thought before and am never proud of thinking. I own shoes that cost more than the engine and transmission in one of my cars, and I only found that out when my engine blew up because I was speeding on the highway1 and the mechanic who had to come rescue me gave me the answer to the question, “Okay, so how much to replace it?”

What I am proud about is coming independently to the realization that I would not have been happy ending up whoever I thought it was appropriate to idolize when I was eighteen and angry, and horny, and anxious, and barely educated, and scared I didn’t understand the world or what I was seeing, or how what I was seeing made me feel.

Stone Cold Steve Austin? Bertrand Russell? Tyson Beckford in the Toni Braxton music video? Let us rejoice that none of that came to be. I don’t know that you would have enjoyed being on the receiving end of all the extra lip-licking I would have had to practice. And as much as they’ve improved the flavor, Chapstick still tastes like oily plastic.

Or, even worse, imagine ending up whoever it was I wanted to be like when I was dumb and uncoordinated at six. Elroy Jetson? Lion-O from the Thundercats? Bill Nye the Science Guy? Bill Cosby?

People lionize odd versions of themselves. As if this world teaches people stories where being innocent for a second longer than required ends in happy trails and wind-swept sails.

Imagine that.

Contemplate that for a second. The horror of a reality where you become the thing you wanted to be when you were dumb, and easily coerced, and had difficulty thinking clearly. Have you forgotten what you were like when you were young? My God. I clutch at my breast in despair. I hope not. I hope your parents never destroy the evidence. I hope you and your friends save photos, hoard videos, keep souvenirs. You were dumb. And you knew you were dumb, and so did everyone else.

The people who cared about you pretended otherwise for the benefit of your self-esteem. Behind your back, while you were preoccupied with your stupidity, those who loved you in spite of it asked people you wronged to forgive you for things you never apologized for.

The people who didn’t like you exploited your stupidity. How many times have you been convinced to give your time and money away for things you never use, or to people who wound up using you?

You can’t have forgotten what it was like to be young. You can’t. There’s no way. All that pretense? All that embarrassment? When people talk about trauma, they aren’t predicting what life must come inevitably to be in the days when they stumble forgetfully into senescence. There’s no way you forgot. Zero. None.

The next time you have some time, play this little game.

The game is called, “Look For Evidence.”

Look for the evidence of people who became the people they wanted to be. I have a term for these people. I call them “The Perpetually Dissatisfied.” You can mark them by their unceasing complaint. They are never, as far as I can ascertain, ever either happy or satisfied. Not even with what they are forever keen to bend your ear about—the magnitude of their influence, the extent of their reach, the power they’ve accrued, how many people admire them or things they’ve done, or their good job. And they resent having to pretend.

I would not recommend that life. Most people can do better.

The next time you have time, play another game.

Look For Enjoyment.

Look for the evidence of enjoyment. Look for happy people. Those who fell into the people they’re admired for being by luck, by chance, by misbegotten adventure, because of the helpful words, or gentle encouragement, or good example set by a kind stranger. And then the unceasing practice that came after—much of it in solitude.

Mmmm mmmm mmm. Life is better than I deserve. 🤗

Reassess what you know, who you are, and who you think it’s appropriate to aim to be at regular intervals over the course of your life. It’s okay to have dreams. And you can accept as a fact of life that you will dream the wrong ones. Half of being human is failing. The other half is being amazing.

Who am I?

What do I want?

Why do I want it?

Who wants me to want it?

What do they gain from having me want it?

Has my ability to understand the world, and the games the world requires us all to play improved since the last time I checked?

How can I be sure? What’s the best assessment I know now? How does it improve on the assessment I used to think was best?

What have I learned? Is what I learned an improvement on what I used to know?

What new books, movies, music, plays, media have I consumed? What were they trying to teach me?

What new games have I learned to play?

How do I know that doing well at the metrics I care about means that I’m actually winning?

What did society say was appropriate some time ago, but everybody appears to have switched positions on today?

What new places have I visited, and then frequented, and then made home?

Who is in my life now that didn’t use to be?

What happened to the ones these new people replaced?

Was I right to let them go?

Do this at ages 6, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27, 29, 30, 35, 39, 40, 41, 44, 49, 50, and at five year repeating intervals thereafter.

Read your old writing.

If you agree wholeheartedly with what you wrote, if you have done zero growth in any of the intervening periods—if at your next check-in you know no more about the world than your younger self, disappointment is appropriate. It is right for you to be disappointed if you have failed to improve despite the implacable, unrelenting passage of time.

If you are still allowing corporations to trick you into believing that owning logos or brand names should do anything for your self-esteem, you still aren’t old enough to make life-altering decisions. Resolve to do better.

Contentment and spiritual comfort will continue to elude you. You’ll miss the panorama for focusing on the pixels. You won’t know that satisfaction is preferable to pleasure, that serotonin is healthier than dopamine. Life just won’t be good to you if you’re always going to be young tomorrow.

Read your old writing.

See for yourself.

“… So here goes: I am a mentally competent person, over twenty-one years old. I am not under duress, have received no threat of violence, or loss of income. Although John Walker and I are employed by one company, to wit McClaren Life & Casualty, neither of us serves in a supervisory capacity over the other, or expects to do so in the future,—or even to be assigned to the same city. I have not consumed any alcoholic beverages or mind-altering substances. Having given it due consideration, I have decided to accede to John Walker’s stated wish—which I would have liked better implied rather than stated—that I have sexual intercourse with him. I give him permission to get on with it and let me go back to being a little more passive, which is the way I will feel most comfortable tonight. In so doing, I do not give up any vested rights, including the right to revoke permission at my sole discretion and without notice.”

Death Benefits—Thomas Perry

Women make erroneous assumptions about men. Assumptions that find their genesis in the minds of other women. Assumptions that are fundamentally flawed in their axioms and foundations.

Somewhere in the Mary Poppins period of her nascent adolescence, most girls eventually come to realize that boys and girls, men and women, are different—we don’t want the same things. This is if she was thick or woolly-headed and completely missed the hallmarks of indoctrination, the fairy tales and the coded aspirational scripts bread-crumbed throughout her childhood. Girls are sugar and spice and everything nice and, above all, the future.

Who run the world?

But most women get stuck there, the fear inherent in their perspective leading them to imagine monsters where only men exist. Without several daddies to observe and interact with across the pioneering sense of frontier settling that describes the arc of adult life, women find it difficult to escape the shackles of their perceptual prison. They only know the female gaze. And its damning appraisal.

Men don’t see women as body parts. Not even the worst among us. You’ve studied. You’ve investigated. You’ve seen the documentaries. Even serial killers can be prompted into romantic reverie.

I’m saying this as a person who has spent more than four decades as a male, was born a male, and never gave a second thought to being some other gender except on those rare occasions when jealousy made it obvious women experience a grade of emotion that is so wholly out of reach for us as to be both inconceivable and incomprehensible. Sometimes we become aware that we are blind, and women are trying to help us understand not just the difference between darkness and light, but the spectrum of feelings radiated by the colors they see and try futilely to describe.

I have spent significant amounts of time in majority male situations—gyms, intramural sports leagues, Army, private school. I spoke with as many men as would speak to me about this, about fantasies and body parts. On these topics at least, men prove to be decidedly loquacious about their feelings—more than willing to discourse and capable of especial elegance. I have been rapt pupil at multiple impromptu lectures that commenced with the words, “if she ever fuck around and give me the green light, I would eat the corn from her shit.”

I have also spent time in majority female-dominant spaces—being out in public, modern corporate clients, wife, mother, sister, daughter, their friends and cousins and my obligations to all these second-order relationships crowding all the men from my life.

And I want to be clear, nothing I am about to say is meant to indemnify or exculpate any male who takes what was not freely given and vomits the words “I couldn’t help myself,” as his sole, cringe, justification. That’s a lie. Unless you are mentally ill, you absolutely could “help” yourself. That’s precisely the problem, in fact. You helped yourself to what wasn’t yours to claim. No amount of testosterone keeps a man sane while totally overriding his self-control. You were just weak. Weak or crazy. Choose one. Either way, by your foul act, you earned, you purchased, you deserve punishment.

Women get this wrong about men right from the start. Maybe it sounds that way to you when you’re eavesdropping, but women aren’t a series of body parts to us. You’ll see why in a minute. Even when we spot cake, cake, cake, cake, cake bouncing merrily down the street and it propels an involuntary, “Goddam” from our diaphragm, we weren’t thinking about that body part sexually. We just enjoyed what we saw. Wanting to do something to it is a separate thing, a different gear.

First, we don’t want sex. If you had the opportunity to watch a boy grow up, you will have seen it for yourself. How frustrated and embarrassed his penis makes him, given that he can exercise zero control over it. You think it’s funny when he’s squirming away from Grandma and her whiskers. He is petrified that his burgeoning erection in conjunction with the hair scratching at his face means he’s into beards and therefore gay.

We don’t want to fuck you.

We don’t like that women exist who can put us in fugue states we are obliged to wake up from at some later time and unrecognized place solely by virtue of their existence and nothing else. Sometimes you have no idea how you come to be standing near this woman you don’t know, looking at her expectantly. We know it is creepy; it is not intentional. You’ve had crushes. You should understand and empathize. Seek therapy if you’ve never felt this way about another human. Do it now. A better, more satisfying, less self-absorbed, life awaits. Men are not voluntarily opening conversations with women with generous pledges to our resources because we all took vows of altruism in our youth at some super-secret fight club we’ve conspiratorially agreed to never discuss.

Any wife, or long-term-girlfriend, can attest that the man who ravishes her is replaced immediately thereafter by a wholly different, more pliant, more relaxed, more feminine person.

We don’t want to fuck you. We’re passengers in a vehicle and at no point during our development does anybody require us to obtain a license; nobody trains us on the controls. Plus, society is not kind to those of us who devote significant amounts of time to testing the equipment and is especially unkind to the ones who are particularly creative, or public, about it. The last thing in the world you want is to be labeled a creep. As a male, that’s not a difficult label to obtain and one that leaves a pernicious social stain.

Our nature, some part of us we cannot suborn, wants women (or men, or both, as biology and life experience dictates). And it is well practiced at getting its way.

If you were body parts to us, we’d all own molds of our favorite porn stars’ nether regions. Every single one of us. These are always on sale. Fantasy, imagination, the silicon, and lubricant would be enough. Fleshlights, like vibrators and other socially approved adult playthings, would be ubiquitous. Thirsty, ingenious, inventive, men already fashion modular vaginas from rubber gloves, hot water, a tightly rolled towel, some lotion, and some Vaseline. Ask at any boys’ school, any military deployment, any prison. Ask JD Vance what he was doing with that couch. If you were just body parts or dolls to us, cheating would not be pervasive.

Not all of us, males, like you by the way. In case you haven’t already figured that out. You often mistake lust for interest, affection, or desire. Not all of us are concerned with your enjoyment. Sometimes the other one wants his beak whetted and his thirst slaked and you are available, and amenable, and so will suffice.

Now, as for what we want, and what I alluded to earlier, I think Stephen King1 has the right of it.

What we want is the woman who says, “Yes.”

Yes, to what?

Yes, to every disgusting thing that crosses our depraved minds.

Body parts can’t say, “Yes.”

Body parts don’t text: “I didn’t use to like it. Now I spend hours at work correcting Freudian slips… And agonizing about how much I’m looking forward to that thing you do again.”

Ne plus ultra is the woman comfortable enough to admit to all the depraved things she, independent of you, really wants to do. Women find interesting uses for cosmetics bottles, special zones in The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time and the N64 RumbleShock controller, chair legs, massagers, phallic food, furniture edges, candles, washing machines, Venus razors, electric shavers, hand brakes, lip gloss, whipped cream, refrigerated syrups, confections, Sprite and 7-Up my freshman year in college until the administration issued email public service announcements informing all who needed to hear that this activity—Sprite and 7-Up-activity—constitutes a health hazard, ladles and girdles for some reason, and more than once that I have encountered, peanut butter and their pets. Every woman a man meets has made a point to be intimately acquainted with orifices; many men have never so much as encountered the word in real life usage.

Body parts can’t do that. Dolls don’t do that.

Take it from me. Or ask any heterosexual man willing to speak with you honestly.

What we want is the woman who says, “Yes.”

And, “Harder.”

And, “Please, may I have some more?”

And, “I want to go one more time. Did I ever tell you about this thing I always wanted to do but never tried?”

It’s a lot of women right here on Substack confidently and loudly proclaiming just how happily married they are—enthusiast statisticians now, cataloguing and curating orgasms.

If the essential manner of man is sales, the essential manner of woman is advertising. Many of the women expressing dissatisfaction, loneliness, anxiety, or complaining about their partner’s reluctance to come enthusiastically to chores are advertising to a demographic that does not exist, and are only by chance, the inevitability of biology, dumb luck and bumbling acquiescence, ever closing leads. Most men would rather cheat than initiate a divorce. This bears repeating. Most men would rather cheat than initiate a divorce. This is not selfishness; this flies closer to the sun of altruism and despite his best efforts often leads a man to the same singed wings, melted wax, and empty hands suffered by Icarus.

Dolls and body parts don’t satisfy and can’t satiate. They don’t communicate. Neither can say, “I want more.” Neither can say, “Yes.”

The other day I came across a Note on Substack. I read it, I absorbed it, but I didn’t say anything. I blew it off.

Yet another woman was talking about the shame, the anger, the conflict she felt she’d been forced to carry. She tied herself in knots, rending herself into incoherent pieces. Someone she still loved abused her when she was young and could not defend herself. She wanted to know if she should write about it. And the logistics and ramifications of doing so anonymously. She wanted to know whether she should start an anonymous Substack so she could purge herself of this burden. Maybe—she ruminated out loud—writing about it would be therapeutic even if she never identified her abuser.

In my arrogance, I thought to myself, But that’s such a simple thing. All you have to do is tell the truth. Easy.

I didn’t say anything, though. I refrained from comment. Easy solutions are often incorrect.

Telling the truth, confronting the powerful… That comes easily to me. I’m that way by temperament, and I have decades of practice. I have been punished for forcing courts to overturn unlawful decisions. I have willingly paid what price it costs to compel the government to set innocent men free.

Tonight, my client sent me this screenshot.

He didn’t say anything else. The email was blank. Just this screenshot. Expressing gratitude. And you should have seen me. I was like a battered housewife, pacing through my house. Through hallways and living rooms, hands on my hips, face scrunched. I caught my reflection in a mirror and recoiled from the unfamiliar—all that painful, nervous, anticipation and anxiety. I literally had to make myself a cup of tea. All because someone paid me a compliment.

Because someone said something nice about me?

Why am I like this?

Now I’m back at easy again. It’s easy for me to say: growing up, announcing that something good happened to me made me a target for abuse.

My mother would not be pleased that I’d stolen some of her spotlight; she’d make me pay for transgressing. She’d find a way to extract her pound of flesh.

It’s easy for me to say these things.

And it’s not just, You did it when I was helpless.

It’s not, I wish you would try it now.

The way I look at it, if you wanted me to tell a different story then you should have acted differently.

It’s easy for me to say these things because I go out of my way to tell the truth. Even when telling the truth casts me in a negative light. If you did something to me that you didn’t want me talking about, something that you think shows you in a negative light… There is such a simple solution to that.

You shouldn’t have done it.

And if you regretted it, you should have taken the opportunity to make amends. You should have tendered a sincere apology. Just like you gave me this burden to carry, you should have given me the opportunity to set it down, given me an opportunity to forgive.

That’s how I wanted to respond to this Substack Note from days ago that touched me—that I still carry. That’s the advice I wanted to give. But I don’t give unsolicited advice.

I’m not going to identify her here. She’s going through enough. And she probably doesn’t read my notes anyway.

Moreover, I’m probably the last person she should take advice from.

I am only a man.

Give me a compliment and I fall to pieces.

Easy.

The Stories of Us

Is my mum a narcissist?

Is my mum a narcissist? It’s a question I found myself Googling after seeing the image in this post. It was the first time I saw words that summed my mother up and her behaviour perfectly. Could she really be a narcissist…

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2 years ago · 16 likes · 14 comments · Chloe Lovell

One time, when I was trying to hide from my past, pretending to be a day laborer, a man working the hot tar shoulder-to-shoulder with me turned and said, “I don’t like you. You scare me. When I see you, all I see is death. Death all around you.”

I don’t recall now if this is one of those times when I was on the run; it was definitely after my first infantry deployment. But I remember the thought I had, was, How can it be so easy to read a person? How transparent are we exactly? I’ve been stuck on this course ever since.

How transparent are we exactly?

The Japanese have this proverb. It goes:

They say we humans have three faces. The first face you show to the world.

The second face, you show to your close friends and your family.

The third face you never show anyone.

What if that’s not true? What if we only have one face?

And we delude ourselves into believing we aren’t precisely who we think they think we are. Or fear we are, rather.

What if everyone knows exactly what kind of monster you are?

What if you were seen?

Let’s back that up a little. It’s not my intention to be anxiety-inducing.

What if just one someone knew?

Would that person inspire love?

Hate?

Fear?

What do you do to a person like this?

Add this into the mix as well. What if that person truly did not matter?

Had no significance, no worth. What if that person had zero credibility?

And you had zero liability?

What if that person knew? Would you act differently? Are you cocky now? Self assured like society wants you to be? What can you do? What will you say? Which of these faces will you be?

Let’s start there.

I got to the point where I didn’t envy anyone. I think most people get there somewhere after purchasing their second property. One day you realize nobody has it better than you. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to take any of this with you. Not any of it. It’s qualitative. All of it.

I have the best job. Difficult enough that I always feel intoxicated. All of it hinges on my next decision. I am not the lever that moves the world, but damned if I don’t manage the coefficients. Hundreds of people work hard at my direction. All of it hinges on my next decision—my clients’ plans, their goals, their desperate desires, their long-term checklists. All of it. Will it all come crashing back to Earth? Unfulfilled?

I used to die each time I made a mistake. I must have lived a million lives by now. On the other hand, I get to spend most of my days at the beach. Ordering mimosas. Does it matter that I still hate orange juice? I don’t labor beneath the stress of running a courthouse, or Amazon. And they pay me more than the people who run the courthouse. Why the people at the courthouse chose that, I don’t understand. Even though I ask them when they pay me to edit their fiction.

Everyone is obsessed with life. Living life. The meaning of life. Taking life. Issuing life forth. Saving life. Everyone pretends the outcome isn’t predetermined. As if this poignant paradox elevates what limited choice we actually have into art. As if they are genius incarnate for figuring out what makes three-year-olds cry when they first encounter the absence of life. We try to pretend that it doesn’t live with us. That death and aging, though invisible, are not omnipotent. We make a religion of delusion. We are separate, special, chosen. We worship ourselves. We are important. And thus immortal. We tell lies about legacy. That what we’ve done while we live will echo into eternity.

Musashi said you should reflect each day on the fact that one day your days will end. At a time and place you will not choose. I have had more practice at that than most. I encountered this idea in the sixth grade. Most people get here after their second property. Multiple lives are intertwined with yours, despite that you’re unrelated.

A man I hired tells me how his daughter used to cry before he met me. He shows me a photo he took while they were in a store. She is smiling in the photo. Head cocked shyly, arms almost akimbo, working her way up to modeling the new, grey, puffy, winter-coat she’s wearing. He tells me how much she wanted it and couldn’t have it and what it did to him to helplessly weather the longing like grief that pressed her into tears. Having once been young, I can extrapolate the identity she was desperate to purchase. Unprompted, he continues telling me how he felt in the space before he could afford it. Before he met me, before I told him to raise his rates, before I gave him a bonus and a pay raise. When I tell my father about this, Pops tells me to be wary of betrayal.

After he leaves, I read an email from an illustrator. Via this email I hear about the invasion of Ukraine from distance, abstracted via multiple removes. He tells me plainly that he expected I would be angry because he missed the deadline. That I would scold him. And how the extra money I sent was unexpected, and how the bombs whistle before they land. And how he smuggled his wife out of the country. And how after you’ve spent long enough in the bomb-shelter you know the power is about to go out before it does. Sometimes the ground rumbles, familiar enough for recognition, giving him time enough to save the file. He’s lost work he’s done more than once. Power went out before he remembered to save. He says he’ll have the spread completed by early Monday and asks if that will be okay.

He asks if that will be okay. What is this world exactly? I am drinking pink champagne at dusk, he is listening for missiles’ whistles and…

He asks me, if that will be okay.

Who am I? I am just a man. I don’t need it whispered in my ear.

I read this email and my own tears are further away from my face and my inclination than I would like.

I imagine slaveholders always felt this way. It must have never left them.

Most people get here after their second property. All I needed was The Book of Five Rings, an electric toothbrush, and a BMW. All the rest was academic.

Some people have the thought, I can bear all of it and more because every morning I wake up in New York.

Or Dubai.

Or London.

Or Kingston.

We don’t share the same dream; we don’t breathe the same stars. Every morning I think, I can bear all of it and more because every morning I wake up me. I’ve weathered broken, I’ve done never, I’ve held sorrow in my hands and soothed it gently into slumber. I have shaken the hands of crying men who, while weeping, thanked me for negotiating their release from prison. I’ve been pulled into the embrace of women who, driven to apotheosis by words I’ve written, are unable to vocalize much more than damp, phlegmy, sobbing.

I have given birth to things that did not exist before I called them into being. In their precise shape, and exact measurement, and accurate dimension.

Whatever face I am showing you here, whatever face you see when you catch me unawares, that face knows what these things cost. What Art costs.

Bestseller.

After Bestseller.

After Bestseller.

After Bestseller.

Social media is toxic.

Not just because of what these algorithms do to us.

But because of who we become when we use it for too long.

Some of us get so good at marketing and branding we don’t realize we’ve become liars.

Sometimes I’m consuming content—a podcast, a YouTube video, an article on LinkedIn—and they get me. Their sales pitch wins. I’m convinced and I go to Amazon to buy this expert’s best-selling book. But as soon as I get there, it’s obvious the book isn’t a best-seller. Despite being published years before books I’ve published, despite that the expert has way more social media followers than authors I’ve worked with, the expert’s book somehow managed to sell less copies, and garner less reviews, than books I’ve published for my clients. The expert is lying and I can tell.

So many authors, publishers, publishing consultants, coaches, thought leaders, and “influencers” lie about having a best-selling book.

And for good reason.

The benefits of having written a best-seller are legion.

Recognition and social proofing—people know you and know that you are capable of producing content people will voluntarily connect with. Content that touches people.

Long-term career impact—not much needs to be said about this. Just one best-selling book is rocket fuel for a writer’s career. A best-selling book incepts demand into the minds of fans, movie producers, directors, actors, voice-over artists, and other creatives. A best-seller can lead to fame, and fame is a pretty good success lever.

Increased income potential—once you’ve demonstrated that you can do it, the assumption is that you can do it again. Investors will throw resources your way to find out. The thinking is, if the writer can produce this quality while struggling, how much better is the content likely to be when money is used to eliminate stress and distraction?

Social media, like money, amplifies. And just like money, social media amplifies both experts and frauds indiscriminately. Since social media doesn’t come with quality assurance built in, it can be difficult to sift the rare truth from the dross. It’s easy to get caught up in “Dr.” Berg’s bullshit, when you’d be much better off with actual doctor, Dr. Mike. If you’re trying to lose weight it’s much easier to get caught up in Simeon Panda’s or Logan Paul’s bullshit, when you’d be better off with Dr. Mike Israetel, Jeff Nippard, or Stephanie Buttermore.

I suspect, but can’t say for sure, that one of the reasons A.I. “hallucinates” is because it’s trained on massive quantities of internet data and, for better or worse, people pretend on the internet. They lie. They exaggerate their achievements, they curate their lives, they fake it till they make it, they confabulate. AI is no more than us, reflected, more efficient, and amplified by a machine’s relentless advantages.

But there are other paths.

The single greatest success characteristic is the ability to delay gratification. To act without seeing the result of your actions over an extended time horizon. —Alex Hormozi

Success leaves marks is another truism bandied about the internet. The proof is in the pudding. As hokey as it sounds, this one is more reliable than “fake it ‘til you make it.”

If you claim to be something you’re not, you’re an imposter—a liar. It doesn’t matter how much social media appears to condone, or justify, or normalize, this behavior.

A person lying, or confabulating, or faking it until they make it, is deliberately traumatizing themselves and everyone else.

You’re doing both yourself, and your audience a disservice by pretending to be something you’re not.

You’re robbing the person who looks up to you, who trusts you, of the actual methodology they need to live a successful life.

And you rob yourself of pleasure, of the unmitigated joy you experience when you actually do a difficult thing or help someone else accomplish a difficult thing. So many people complain that their lives feel hollow even when it appears to everybody else that they really don’t have anything to complain about. I am not a psychologist, but having spoken to many humans I’ve deduced that this is because they didn’t earn what they’re celebrated for. It’s hard to be proud of something you stole. They lied, and everybody believed the lie and then the world rewarded them for the lie. With no achievements, no foundation, why wouldn’t they feel hollow? Deep down they know that if anyone digs deep enough there’s no bedrock, no anchor—there’s nothing there. The soulless man is always empty.

I live in the data and have for years. I can tell when book-related people are faking. And since I can tell, I can show you how to tell too.

If you have an actual best-selling book, you will regularly receive the email I’ve screenshot above from Amazon.

Amazon is ruthless about sales. Being ruthless about selling—being relentless about ensuring that the machine gets goods into the hands of people willing to hand over cold, filthy lucre in exchange—is how the world’s biggest book nerd became the world’s wealthiest person.

Say whatever else you want about Amazon, but Amazon’s algorithm is ruthless about identifying winners, and then marketing them relentlessly.

If you want actual proof that someone is a best-selling author ask them to show you the email I’ve posted above. Ignore the influencers and thought leaders who go out of their way to find attractive “best-selling” badges to put on their book covers. Ignore the coaches and entrepreneurs who Photoshop fake best-seller tags onto a screenshot of their book’s detail page and then use that in marketing materials.

Ask the author to show you where Amazon asked them for permission to place their book in a Kindle Deal. If a person actually has a best-selling book on Amazon they won’t have any trouble sharing that with you. Amazon sends this email to best-selling authors over, and over, and over. It’s sent this email to one of my clients seven times over the past three years.

Like I said. The algorithm is ruthless, and relentless, about identifying winners. About identifying items that sell well, and then promoting them to people who will hand over cold, hard, cash in exchange.

I would know. I enjoy making best-selling books. And I got so good at doing it, that I make best-selling books for a living. I got so good at doing it, I can teach you how to make your next book a best-seller. All you have to do is ask. I even have the requisite “free eBook” on the topic, I'd be happy to share.

Life has not given me occasion to be proud of much,
But I am proud of being Black and proud of being free.
The Fire or the Water next time,
Neither matters to me.
I have survived both,
And what suffering I have endured,
Has only served to make the others envious of my strength,
And my humility.

By walking alone, by my very gait,
I kiss the Earth and she sheds tears.
Gratitude for all the blood the ancestors volunteered to nourish this soil, to plant these seeds, to toil this world and make it verdant, to teach the wicked the cost of strange fruit embracing Jubilee,
To embody the culture's collective fear all these years.
To encompass multitudes—honeyed truth, and sweeter juice.
Mmm mmm mmm, it is good to be Black.
Ostracized, demonized, excluded and desired.
To be blessed by Nature, abundantly apportioned and well endowed.
Humble,
And proud.