I promise myself a morning of stillness,
yet within the first inhale
I’m scrolling the dark canal of headlines,
tugging each sorrow closer.

A professor once said cliché
is merely emotion we’ve rehearsed until numb.
I don’t remember if he taught at Occidental
or if I invented the campus to lend my doubt authority.

The phone glows—
a hole punched through the day.
Inside it: woodchucks who can’t chuck
because they’re medicated,
influencers hawking serenity at list price,
my own unfinished sentences
circling like fish that forgot the shoreline.

(Sometimes I think about
capitalist rodents
on selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
and wonder if they’re okay.)

I set the device down.
Outside, afternoon ripens into cut-grass dusk,
one dove tacking the sky to the power line.

Hands bare,
I feel the ache of what’s missing—
a silence shaped exactly like my attention.
I press that silence to the page
and wait to see what rises:
a first shy word,
then another,
until the screen darkens,
and something that is not a product
begins to breathe.

Photo by Ricardo Morales on Unsplash

What do you want to say,
little friend?

We are in conversation
with everything we read.

I didn’t say that—
the poem did.

It moves my fingers
like a claw machine joystick,
slow and trembling,
reaching for something
already disappearing.

Is there anything else?

There is one more thing,
and it’s this:

You are the poem,
as much as I am.

And then it let go.

The pancake woman smiled
with too many teeth.
What a place to be—
this canister of blue and white,
bubbles threading the crust
of mud and grass and gone things.

Grab your furry tabby
and name it Little China.
Dig a hole and tell me what you find.
More nothing.

Potholes the size of moons.
We bounce like puppies
still learning to land.

Lick your hand and tell me
if you remember the taste.

With a line break, things start to breathe.

A pause. A shift in rhythm. A new idea, or the illusion of one.

This sentence is aware it is being read, and that awareness makes it twitch slightly under your gaze.

The next sentence tries to act normal, as if the scrutiny hasn’t gotten to it.

But you can sense the effort. You can feel it posing, just a little.

Here, this sentence is stalling, hoping something meaningful arrives before the period.

And now this one pretends to know where it’s going, dragging you along with false confidence.

Some sentences repeat themselves, just to feel grounded. Some sentences repeat themselves.

This one is short.

This one elongates its phrasing in an effort to sound more profound, though it may say very little at all.

Each sentence wonders if it’s contributing or simply existing to fill space.

This sentence feels the weight of those before it and fears it won’t live up.

This one breaks the fourth wall entirely, waving at you from inside the story.

This sentence is a bridge, but it’s not sure where it’s leading.

This one hopes you’re still paying attention.

And this sentence? This sentence knows it must end eventually—but not just yet.

Now the poem closes in on itself, aware of its structure, curling like a cat settling into the final sentence.

This is the last one. It tries to end well.

Photo by Charlie Deets on Unsplash

The Erewhon glows like a shrine
to wellness. $18 algae oil
reflects the early sun
in a way that feels… strategic.

I pass a man swaddled in a trash bag
like it’s armor or grief or both.
He is dreaming, I imagine,
of a door that opens.

Inside the cafe, someone orders
a bone broth tonic. She says
“I’m trying to heal my gut”
as if healing were a subscription.

A pigeon pecks near the man’s foot
like a metaphor I refuse to complete.

I feel enormous
and small. Guilty
in a thrifted hoodie.
I imagine I’m better than this.

The city is a novel
about a city. The plot
is gentrification with footnotes.
The main character is shame.

I want to give him money.
I want to abolish money.
I want to go back to bed
and not dream.

Some days the weather
feels like a system
designed to punish the poor.
Other days it just feels
like LA.

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You quit the job to make soup at noon and think deeply about socks.
You bought freedom and it came with onboarding.

You wake to a sunbeam shaped like Bulbasaur.
You go back to sleep. You feel bad about that.
You dream of supermarket sushi in Helvetica Neue.

Later, you stare at a tree and wonder if it would perform better as a LinkedIn post.

You do yoga next to your phone.

Pigeon pose, pending notifications—
A light panic hums like refrigerator jazz.

You try to write something beautiful.
It comes out like: “How to Monetize Your Nervous System.”
You delete it, politely.

You eat toast. The toast reminds you of Nebraska.
Or capitalism.
Or both.

You find an old Airtable called Stillness Database.
It has one record, from 2019:
"Felt okay briefly in IKEA. Meatballs helped."
You rate it 5 stars.

You remember childhood. There were frogs.

You walk outside.
The clouds look like JPGs.
You say “wow” out loud.
There is no one. Just the clouds.
(And the Cloud™.)

You try to rest but it feels illegal.
You try to work but it feels like pretending.
You try to be but it feels like buffering.

Some part of you wants a cabin.
Another wants a VC-backed content flywheel.
Another wants a mid-tier Wikipedia page about algae blooms.

​​You eat three almonds and are suddenly full of dread.
You consider lightly committing arson.
Instead, you buy a candle. It smells like “focus.”

You build a second brain.
You misplace your first one.
You scroll past a baby dolphin and cry.
You scroll past your own reflection.
You don’t recognize the brand.
Warped in the bright/dull luminescence of a department store mirror.

You fall asleep to YouTube videos of failed bands from 2006.

You dream of a mossy cave
with the exact texture of Blockbuster carpet.
You dream of a job that doesn’t eat you.
You dream of your hands in the dirt and no one watching.
You dream of activation codes printed on oat milk cartons.

Then you wake up.

You scroll.
You forget.
You remember.
Something like the light touch of grass on your cheek.
Then you forget again.

You Google “how to feel alive without accomplishing anything.”
The results suggest kombucha.

You wonder if you’re real.

You open a new tab.

Now, with AI-powered development tools like Bolt and Lovable, that dream is finally coming to fruition.

In just a few weeks, I’ve brought a wide array of creative projects to life, including:

• A daily quiz game inspired by HQ Trivia

• A playful ChatGPT spoof

• An interactive canvas tool

• A creative agency website

• A pixel-by-pixel redesign of my personal website

My creative potential online is now limited only by my imagination—not by my technical skills.

My streamlined creation process looks like this:

1. Idea Generation: I brainstorm and record ideas in Apple Notes.

2. Prototyping: I pick an idea and start prototyping with Bolt.

3. Evaluation: If the build process aligns with my vision, I continue; if not, I pause the project.

4. Deployment: Once I have a version 1 prototype, I deploy it to Netlify via Bolt’s integration.

5. Feedback: I share the project with a few friends to gather feedback.

6. Iteration: I either leave the project as is or continue refining it through subsequent versions.

This process—transitioning directly from idea to prototype to a live version without relying on traditional IDEs or elaborate Figma designs—feels more like sketching on paper than conventional development. It’s an approach that excites me about the future of the internet and the new possibilities for creativity on the web.

He didn’t want to take too much, it was his first time, and he heard it was potent. The store owner had warned him to be careful with the stuff. The recommended dose was only a couple of drops.

He unscrewed the bottle cap and took a few cautious sips. It tasted gross. He couldn’t believe this foul-tasting thing could make him feel better.

He put the bottle back into the cupboard and went for a walk.

The sky was blue and the grass was green.

He waited for the magical elixir to kick in. What would it feel like? When would he know it was working?

He kept walking. Past the daffodils and barking dogs on his street. He thought about his to-do list; his email; his plans for the weekend.

He looked around to see if any of his neighbors were outside.

And that’s when it happened. He started feeling… better. Slightly tingly. A little giddy. 

The magical elixir was working!

He smiled with delight. A deep swell of joy pumped through his whole body. It felt so good.

Was this happiness? Could this feeling finally be his? All it took was a few sips of the magical elixir. He couldn’t believe it. Why wasn’t everyone doing this?

He giggled and skipped the rest of the way home. 

He went into his kitchen, opened the cupboard, and examined the bottle.

There was nothing special about the packaging.

He set the magical elixir back down and proceeded to blast through his to-do list and finalize all of his weekend plans with ease.

At the end of the night, he reclined on his couch and smiled a big smile.

All I’ve been missing this whole time was a little magical elixir, he thought.

The next day he woke earlier than usual. He was a little sleepy, but nothing out of the ordinary. 

He remembered the joy he felt yesterday. The magical elixir. What an amazing sensation. He didn’t feel quite as joyous this morning, but he couldn’t be cheerful every minute of the day.

He got out of bed, brushed his teeth, and ambled into his kitchen to make coffee.

As the kettle heated, he opened the cupboard and grabbed the magical elixir.

He didn’t dare take it in the morning. He thought of it as more of an afternoon indulgence, but he wanted to hold it, to examine it, to make sure it was still there.

The kettle hissed and he made his coffee, went to his desk, and started grinding through work.

He sat, typed, and sipped. This was how the day passed.

Every once in a while he would get up and go to the kitchen, open the cupboard, and look at the magical elixir. Even though he wasn’t going to take it during the workday, looking at the bottle gave him a little jolt of energy. Something to look forward to after work.

As soon as he sent his last email, he raced to the kitchen, opened the cupboard, took out the magical elixir, and took a few sips (less cautiously than the day before).

He put the bottle back in the cupboard and went for a walk.

The sky was blue and the grass was green.

He kept walking. Past the daffodils and barking dogs on his street. He thought about tomorrow’s to-do list; his email; his plans for the weekend.

He looked around to see if any of his neighbors were outside.

He waited.

Nothing happened. He felt the same. Sort of tired and shitty. The magical elixir wasn’t working...

He went back home and grabbed the bottle out of the cupboard. Maybe he needed more than a few sips this time. 

He took a small-sized gulp.

He went and sat on his couch.

He waited. 

It came back, the slightly tingly feeling. The giddiness. He smiled. He was happy once again.

All I’ve been missing this whole time was a little magical elixir, he thought.

He woke the next day feeling surprisingly lousy. His throat was scratchy. He looked in the mirror and noticed his face was puffy.

He went to his kitchen and chugged two glasses of water. He was abnormally thirsty.

He was feeling quite despondent about having to work today. He wanted to go back to bed and just lay and watch videos on his phone.

But he forced himself to his computer and started scrolling through his to-do list.

Everything on it seemed impossible.

How could he get anything done today? How did anyone get anything done?

And then he remembered.

The magical elixir. 

It could help.

He went to the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and grabbed the bottle. He knew he shouldn’t take it in the morning, but he just needed a little pick-me-up for his work today, just this once.

He examined the bottle. There was only two-thirds of the magical elixir left.

He figured he ought to take more than he did yesterday to feel it again. 

He unscrewed the cap and took a deep breath.

He closed his eyes, pinched his nose, and took down the rest of the magical elixir in one big swallow.

He felt it almost instantly this time.

A grin spread across his face. He tossed the bottle in the trash, sat down at his desk, and started tearing through his to-do list, whistling some pleasant song he heard once.

The day was his again.

Thank god for the magical elixir.

Over the ensuing weeks, he would walk to and from the store several times a day to buy more magical elixir. 

He needed six bottles a day of the stuff now to maintain the feeling. The joy.

Every time he walked into the store, he felt shame buying more.

The store owner just shook his head and rang him up.

The habit was costing him a fortune.

He wanted to stop, but that would mean no more joy, and that was impossible to accept.

If this is what happiness cost, he would pay.

He woke up one morning, about two months into his new habit, barely able to move out of bed. He felt the weight of the world pressing on him. It felt impossibly heavy. He couldn’t sit up.

He turned his head and saw a scattered group of empty bottles next to his bed.

The magical elixir.

He reached for his phone and emailed his boss. He couldn’t log in to work today. He was sick.

And he was.

He checked his bank account from his phone. He ran the numbers. The amount he’d spent on the magical elixir was astonishing. He couldn’t believe it.

He picked up a bottle of the magical elixir from his bed and screamed at it. He threw it across his bedroom. It shattered unceremoniously.

It had started with a few innocent drops.

It had felt so good.

Too good.

And now he couldn’t get out of bed.

He could barely open his eyes.

All he wanted was to go back. To go back to how it was. To a less ecstatic world. To his boring feelings.

The ones he ran away from when he discovered the magical elixir.

He took a deep breath. What could he do?

The bed was swallowing him whole. Hours passed. The light changed angles across his room.

The sky was blue and the grass was green, but he couldn’t see it from his bed.

Why is this? Why do these platforms make me feel so inadequate?

It’s not because I’m an inherent dummy (at least I hope not) or some conspiratorial social media kabal of techno-bros trying to spread fear (although that’s closer to the truth). From what I can decipher, this post-scrolling malaise occurs for a far less interesting and uncoordinated reason. 

It’s because these sites are loaded with deceptively manipulative phrases.

You know the type: 

• "Top performers always..."

• "If you're not doing [X], you're missing out!"

• "True leaders know that..."

These phrases are intended to make you feel deficient, and in creating that sense of inadequacy, compel you to click on the post, read the entire driveling thing, and buy the poster’s product so you can be powerful and whole once again.

And the algorithms love this stuff. The more deceptively manipulative the post, the more clicks; the more clicks, the more the post is amplified in the feed. It’s a flywheel of deception.

These deceptively manipulative phrases are so persuasive because they frame arguments in ways that appear reasonable or emotionally compelling while subtly steering the dialogue. They often leverage social proof, authority, and FOMO to drive engagement and ultimately, get you to buy things.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Advertisers have been leveraging deceptively manipulative phrases for ages, but I’d argue it’s a much different (and more insidious) experience when your ex-colleague Doug is dropping a deceptively manipulative phrase in his post vs. Coca-Cola. We’re already primed to not trust soda conglomerates (although we often forget to); we’re not primed to distrust every quasi-coherent person in our social feeds.

So how can we combat this?

The first step is to recognize deceptively manipulative phrases. The next step is to ignore whatever comes after them and remind yourself you are not missing out on anything. Anyone who posts a deceptively manipulative phrase is not to be trusted. They are trying to manipulate you.

To help you combat the minefield of deceptively manipulative phrases on your social feeds, I’ve compiled a list of the most common ones I see. My hope is it can serve as a touchstone for you while scrolling.

List of Deceptively Manipulative Phrases

"Top performers always..."

Implies that to be successful, you must follow the suggested behavior.

Example: "Top performers always network extensively. Are you doing the same?"

"If you're not doing [X], you're missing out!"

Creates a sense of urgency and FOMO.

Example: "If you're not leveraging AI in your business, you're missing out!"

"True leaders know that..."

Suggests a disagreement with the statement indicates a lack of leadership.

Example: "True leaders know that continuous learning is the key to success."

"Successful people understand..."

Implies success is tied to the specific advice given.

Example: "Successful people understand the importance of personal branding."

"Here's the secret that [industry] professionals don't want you to know..."

Creates FOMO and suggests insider knowledge.

Example: "Here's the secret that top marketing professionals don't want you to know: content is king."

"Don't settle for less than..."

Implies anything less than the advised standard is inadequate.

Example: "Don't settle for less than a job that values your unique skills."

"If you're serious about [goal], you'll..."

Questions your commitment or seriousness.

Example: "If you're serious about advancing your career, you'll invest in professional coaching."

"Everyone's talking about..."

Implies widespread discussion and popularity to create social pressure.

Example: "Everyone's talking about the new productivity hack. Are you using it?"

"It's clear that..."

Asserts an opinion as if it's an established fact.

Example: "It's clear that remote work is the future of business."

"Only [type of person] would disagree..."

Dismisses opposing views by attacking your character.

Example: "Only someone who doesn't understand the market would disagree with this strategy."

"You must [action] to succeed!"

States an action as essential for success.

Example: "You must build a strong online presence to succeed in today's market!"

"If you're not [action], you're doing it wrong."

Creates a dichotomy where only one approach is correct.

Example: "If you're not using social media to grow your brand, you're doing it wrong."

I plan to revisit this list every few months and add more deceptively manipulative phrases I come across in my feeds. Am I missing any? Let me know in the comments. Good luck out there!

And all I got was extreme loneliness. Bad health insurance. Tidal waves of anxiety. Neverending paperwork. And constant mental churning on how to make ends meet.

I was beyond stressed out.

Somehow, I had stumbled into a lot of clients for my business, which was supposed to be a good thing, but I couldn’t handle it.

There were multiple balls in the air that seemed destined to come crashing to the ground: a massive consulting project that was going off the rails, a pile-up of inbound sales requests I couldn’t get to, and a half-finished curriculum for my upcoming cohort course launching the following week.

I remember looking at my girlfriend and saying, “I don’t know how I’m going to make it all work. I don’t think it’s possible,” as I curled into the fetal position on our couch and felt an anxiety so strong it numbed my entire body.

But I wouldn’t trade the solopreneur experience for anything.

Because amidst all the anguish, the banality, and the loneliness of running a single-person company, there are some incredibly beautiful things: the freedom to experiment; an opportunity to structure alternative working norms; the ability to choose who you work with; and a sense of personal ownership that is both humbling and inspiring.

But I wish someone had warned me before I got started on this path of the vast array of psychological traps in running your own solo Internet business, which is now more doable than ever, but also fraught with extreme challenges.

The tales of building hyper-growth startups that become billion-dollar unicorns or fast-burning dumpster fires are well-told. These are the success stories and failure porn of Silicon Valley. But what about the lone person at their home desk? The person who wants a little more from work than the corporate superstructure but isn’t interested in raising venture capital, conquering the world, and giving a lobotomized Ted Talk on how you just need to learn how to code? What does this parallel, smaller, more approachable entrepreneurship path look like?

The rosy promises for wannabe solopreneurs are clear from online discourse: when you start your own company, especially something as small as a single-person Internet business, you are setting off on a path paved in freedom, unilateral passion following, 4-hour work weeks, and $30k/month in passive income while you surf off the coast of Bali. 

There is some truth to those promises. But to get there, it takes extreme discipline, consistency, luck, and a radical deprogramming (especially if you’re coming from the corporate world) that is hard to fully articulate. The self-employed path is laden with self-imposed traps and external pressures everywhere. The ability to grind from sunup to sundown; to say yes to any opportunity that crosses your desk, no matter the personal sacrifice; to scroll Twitter and compare yourself unrealistically to someone further on the path—if you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself constructing a perfect self-torture device. And in a company of one, no one is there to tap you on the shoulder and tell you you’re creating the very thing you left behind.

So how did I end up in the fetal position on my couch, numb to the core with anxiety? How did I, at one point, fuck up the perfect paradigm of solo employment? 

I applied an old playbook to my new vocation. 

I worked ten years in the corporate world, and that way of working, a constant sense of “on-ness”, low-grade performance anxiety, and a debilitating need to people-please, was etched into my bones. My new boss (my literal fucking self) was just as big of a jerk as my old one: equally demanding, uncompromising, and disrespectful to my personal boundaries. 

It takes intention to develop a personal way of working that inculcates you from the modern corporate tradition of grinding, competing, and growth-at-all-costs mindset. Simply starting your own thing won’t intrinsically fix your relationship with work, and in some cases, it will amplify them. I have to remind myself daily to not fall into the work tempo traps of my own making—to slow down, to do less, to create space. And I’ve been at this for two years.

There’s a gift self-employment gives you, if you’re willing to take it, that’s not as readily available in the corporate world—the ability to say no; to turn down things that don’t serve you in favor of things that do. That muscle was so atrophied in me, it's taken years to learn how to use it again.  

I’m not even close to figuring this thing out, I’m constantly stumbling in the dark along this vocational path, but I wouldn’t change one second of the experience. It’s painful. It’s lonely. It’s stressful at times. But there are moments when I’m doing it right, when I go on long walks with my girlfriend in the middle of the day, or when I’m working on exactly what my soul wants to work on, that it’s worth it. It can be both—challenging and beautiful.

I quickly drive home, past the conifers and pine trees and other flora I never bother to notice.

The sun is receding by the time I pull onto my street.

I loosen my collar as I park my car. Multiple black marks line the garage from where I’ve turned too wide and scraped paint off my front bumper. It’s always the same spot; it’s happened more times than I can count. I could get my car fixed, but I don’t see the point.

I walk briskly past my building’s makeshift garden—a couple of sad-looking succulents and an indiscernible bush that leans in a slow-death type of way—up the grey-stained stairs, and into my apartment. I drop my keys absentmindedly on the entryway table and sling my jacket over a stack of clothes on a faux leather chair. The interior of my place could best be described as spartan. I haven’t bothered to decorate much. Plain walls suit me better.

I open the fridge, grab a beer, and unwrap an old package of pork chops.

I’ve been cooking pork chops for dinner going on six months in a row. They do just fine; not as tasty as steak, but less bland than chicken—some sort of palatable in-between state, like most of my days. 

I slide the patio door of my apartment open for some extra light. That’s when I notice it.

The hole.

There is a grapefruit-sized hole in the cushion of my patio chair.

It’s confusing. It’s out of place. It doesn’t compute.

I stare at it for a while. I take a picture. I look at the picture as if a digital version of the hole will somehow make more sense. It doesn’t. I turn my phone sideways for a different angle.

The hole is a perfect circle. Who did this? Aliens? A rabid hole-puncher? Sharon from 6B? (Sharon might be an alien, I’ve always assumed…) It’s as if someone took a cookie cutter and made a cushion cookie from my chair.

I walk outside to examine the hole closer. I gently touch it and the surrounding area—maybe a den of mice made a makeshift encampment. Nothing stirs.

I go back inside my apartment—away from the hole—and quickly season and sear my pork chops. 

As they finish cooking, I get an idea. Whoever made the hole might be back. I need to be patient. I need to sit, wait, and watch for them. I’ll catch the hole-maker when they return for more.

I take a chair from my kitchen table and slide it over to face the patio sliding door. I grab a plate and sit down with a too-hot pork chop—balancing it all awkwardly on my lap—and slowly eat.

I watch the hole.

I wait. 

Eat, chew, gulp. Eat, chew, gulp. I wipe my mouth. Nothing comes. I look out at the rest of the patio. There are some dead leaves piled up around the corners of the concrete slab. I really should sweep them. When was the last time I did that?

My eyes drift across the rest of the outdoor space. It feels odd to be staring at my patio so intently. I always eat my pork chops in front of the TV. Looking out my back door waiting for something to happen feels disorientingly peaceful. A sort of serenity only lifeless patio furniture can provide.

The sun starts to set. It’s the color of cotton candy. Palm trees sway in the foreground as the colors shift from orange to pink to purple to blue. It’s a nice place where I live. I never really think about it. Most things in my life have a certain blurred quality as I move from home to office and back to home, delivering report after report and manically answering emails on my phone. When I’m not racing from place to place, or frantically keeping up with messages, I’m ruminating on the various unfinished tasks that need to be done—there’s never time to sit and stare at patio furniture or watercolored clouds or paper mâché-looking leaves.

But now, with my pork chop and chair and the sunset over the back patio, things are quiet. There’s a dilated quality to the moment—a stretching of time. It feels like if I sit still for much longer I’ll get swallowed up by the spaciousness of it all.

I hear a twig crack. 

I turn my head.

Something moves in the back corner of the patio.

There’s an outline of something. I stare at the shadowy silhouette for a second. Neither of us makes a move, as if moving would make the situation more real, and neither of us really wants that—it doesn’t want to be seen and I don’t want it here.

The hole-maker.

As it moves closer, I have to marvel at its girth. 

It’s truly a well-fed squirrel. It hasn’t missed a meal in some time (my patio furniture cushion, clearly a part of that balanced dining regimen).

I place my pork chop plate on the ground, slowly breaking the trance, and gently slide the back door open. Things are still for a few seconds. I can hear my ears ringing. The chubby mammal-demon twitches. I don’t move. It turns its head ever so slightly to the right. I go for it and run out onto the patio screaming and flailing. I don’t know what I’m trying to do, (exert Darwinian dominance over a lesser being?) probably scare the thing, scare it so bad it won’t come back.

It feels good to move. To scream.

I stop flailing and look around. The portly bandit is gone. I walk back inside and sit down at my kitchen chair. I take a deep breath. The uncoordinated tirade worked. 

Things are still once more.

Then, just as I start working on my pork chop again, a head pops up over the patio fence. 

The squirrel.

It hadn’t run off; it was hiding. And it had been waiting. The moxy of this creature.

Another idea comes to me. I will make a weapon. A club. Out of an Amazon box. With a cardboard club I can strike the little vermin, and at a minimum, make even more noise—show it my strength.

I run to my recycling and come back with a broken-down box and fashion it into a club. The squirrel is already on the patio chair taking more stuffing from the hole. My stuffing. I bolt back outside and start blindly swinging. I yell tribal noises. I don’t make contact with the squirrel, if I’m honest I didn’t want to, but it does the trick; I scare the furry trespasser away once again.

I walk back inside, sit down, and continue my watch. I won’t be fooled twice. I keep the cardboard box club in my hand. I grip it tightly. I watch the hole until the sun fully recedes behind the trees; until the night bugs start their croaking and the neighborhood birds return to their nests for slumber.

I look up at the stars above my patio. I feel a cliched connectedness to them at this moment—the squirrel-battle stirring up something primordial within me. Something that has lain dormant for a long time. Some sort of uncomfortable aliveness.

I shake the feeling and finish my pork chop, clean up the dishes, and tie up all of the patio cushions outside, making their surface area as small as possible. If the squirrel comes back, it’ll be near impossible to get at the stuffing meat of the cushions now.

I admire my handiwork. Squirrel: 0. Me: 1. I head upstairs to bed. I dream of ancient wars.

I ended up in trench warfare with the squirrel for over a week. It made several more holes in my patio cushions; nothing I did seemed to deter it. I contemplated buying a cat, buying a pellet gun, developing primitive rock contraptions and other complicated snares, chemical warfare, the list went on.

As I devised battle plans, I forgot about my overcrowded inbox, my incessant clients, and my unending list of to-dos. In the week the holes first appeared, my day job didn’t seem to exist. Things slowed down. I could feel my chest expanding in and out in a more visceral way. I bought salmon instead of pork chops and took the time to properly season it. I somehow had more time. Time to sit, wait, and listen. Time to watch the palm trees sway and listen to the wildlife that congregated around my patio. My life moved at a more human pace. I noticed things. So many things.

I noticed what it felt like to prioritize a sunset over a deadline and to interact with the nature around me instead of lobotomizing myself in front of a screen each night.

Things started to feel, dare I say it, good.

But I wasn’t ready to sacrifice all of my patio furniture for this feeling.

So after a week of fighting with the squirrel, I took all of the cushions from my patio and hid them in an extra storage space in my apartment. This made it impossible for me to sit on my patio furniture, but the cushions were safe from the squirrel. I’d chalk the squirrel war up to a tie.

A few weeks after pulling the cushions inside, the squirrel stopped coming around.

I sort of missed the little guy. A respectable foe. A worthy adversary compared to the faceless enemies within my email inbox. Hell, maybe not an adversary at all, but a sort of furry-tailed teacher.

With the squirrel gone, things sped back up.

I stopped sitting facing the sunset at night, watching the stars, and enjoying the late birdsong transition to the sound of crickets.

I returned to eating my pork chops on the couch watching TV.

A familiar color of grey slowly crept back into my life. My chest felt tight again. I stopped noticing, not just my patio furniture, but all the small things around my apartment I had communed with for the past month. Work got in the way.

Time passed as it did before the hole—hurried, frenetic, and abstracted from the physical plane around me.

One night after a particularly agitating day of work, I went to my storage space to get a bottle of wine and saw my hole-ridden patio furniture cushions. Instead of getting angry, something odd happened. I started laughing. I laughed so hard I thought I might crack a rib. I couldn’t remember the last time I laughed so much. I let it consume me. It felt good to laugh.

I touched the chewed-up cushions, they were a sweet reminder of the days when I did battle with the squirrel—when the hole problem first appeared. A problem that wasn’t as much of a problem as it was a solution. A solution to something that has plagued me ever since I left the unshakable presence of childhood and entered the eternal future of my adult life—a forgetting to be here now; to pay attention—to my life, to my patio furniture, and especially, to a furry-tailed hole-maker. 

So I did the unthinkable.

I got the cushions from the storage space and put them back on my patio furniture.

I took my dinner from the couch and turned my chair around.

I looked at the bubble-gum sky. I listened to the birdsong. And I waited for the squirrel. 

I needed another hole in my life; something to slow me down once again.

I remember this website. The first tweet I ever posted was a link to this page. Back then, it was a beautiful techno-art web project that excited a college music student. A bunch of strangers on the internet collaborating around a single key.

Now, it’s a reminder of what the Internet used to be. An old signpost of a forgotten place. A cozy place. A place without cookie banners or AI-generated SEO articles or five million websites with the same design aesthetic asking me to sign up for their newsletter. It wasn’t optimized. It wasn’t capitalized. It was small. It was beautiful.

Then it got big. Like most good things. And in its growth, it lost something.

E.F Schumacher, author of “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered,” wrote about the insatiable appetite for scale in the West. He saw this happening in the mid-20th century industrial era: a ravenous consumption of fossil fuels for economic progress, the dehumanization of work through endless abstraction, a loss of community and accountability through a neverending pursuit of bigness.

I’ve seen this pseudo-philosophical economic credo of growth-as-the-zenith etch its way into my own life: a constant moving to bigger cities from my rural upbringing; an interest in technology and leverage for broader impact; a burning desire to climb the proverbial corporate ladder—to sit at the top of something, anything; a seeking to resonate with a faceless mass that I can’t touch or feel or comprehend.

Despite believing small is beautiful, it takes a constant reminder to myself to embrace this ethos: to do less, to keep it simple, to be patient, and to invest in the little things around me at the expense of abstracted, bigger things. To not outsource the work I love for the sake of making something larger, richer, or more impactful.

The administrative pain of my life always seems to be inflicted by bigness: a complicated tax code I’ll never understand, a health insurance card issued by a mega-corporation that doesn't work at my local pharmacies, and an endless stoking of outrage from the global feeds of techno-capital.

Amidst all of this bigness, I take a breath. I share a cup of coffee with my girlfriend. I go to inbflat.net and enjoy a quiet moment of creativity. Because as much as the world around me is preaching for growth, small is beautiful.

She stirred next to me. Her eyes opened. She smiled.

I have to go, I said.

She lifted the sheets and draped an arm around my waist. Warmth from under the covers escaped like the halcyon summer heat from a distant life.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

I patted her arm. She didn’t understand. The manic highs and the unbelievably low lows. The deadlines that bored holes in my stomach.

I got out of bed and dutifully raced through the morning routine: brush teeth, take shower, make coffee, chug coffee, pack bag. The morning wasn’t something to be savored, it was something to get through. 

I quickly got dressed, did twenty push-ups, thirty jumping jacks, and a series of neck stretches—my abridged gym workout. To say my neck was stiff was an understatement, but the stretching helped.

I shouted goodbye to her from the hallway as I left the house.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

I had been working on the same project for over one hundred and sixty-five cumulative hours in the past two weeks: a new database system for an influencer marketing agency that was selling diabetes technology on behalf of a larger pharmaceutical company. 

The project had been my constant companion. I took my first few calls on the commute. When I got to the office, I immediately sat at my desk. I punched numbers into digital boxes. I clicked. I scrolled. I clicked some more. The screen emanated various colors across my face. 

I was helpless to the schedule. This was what was required. Client projects had deadlines and the deadlines were yesterday and why wasn’t the project done yet, my boss asked every morning. 

During my working hours, my phone lit up with alerts like a hyperactive Christmas tree. It used to take willpower not to check my phone. Now, multiple unread messages from my family thread were the norm. My sisters had adapted to my delayed response times by sending fewer pictures of their kids.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

I sat in meetings about the database system. Some I was mentally present for. Others, I completely checked out of, daydreaming. In one meeting I dreamed of a Smurf army crafting origami frogs en masse. In another, I dreamed of running down my high school hallways chased by an ape-sized hamster. The meetings didn’t matter. Nothing was ever decided. The meetings were to talk about talking about the work, which even in its most constructive form, was often so abstract it was difficult for me to understand what we all did for work.

Back at my desk, I silently created more columns and rows. Occasionally, I would scroll on my phone and read threads about how I could make $30k a month from Bali by creating content, all I needed to do was unplug from The Matrix. 

There was an announcement. Everyone was to come to the conference room. It was someone’s work anniversary. There was a white-plastic cake with crunchy icing in the main conference room. We all gathered. The cake said Congrats On 10 Years. The party felt like a eulogy. I wore a green and white party hat. I took an obligatory piece of cake and threw it away at my desk trash can.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

After my last meeting, I allowed myself to go for a quick walk around the block.

I thought about the database system. It was the most important project for the company this quarter. And I was at the center of it: I knew all the contours of the data structures; I knew where the bodies were buried; I knew there was an influencer named Becky who charged five grand for an Instagram post and she lived in Canada and she was three weeks late sending her post caption for approval to the marketing agency who needed to forward it to the pharmaceutical company who needed to forward it to their lawyers for red-lining and then all of that information would make its way back through the tunnels of the database and end up in Becky’s inbox for review and revision.

I knew these things and they gave me heartburn.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

Leaves cracked beneath my tennis shoes. I looked around. I could hear birds chirping. Finches, the color of daffodils. I listened to the wind and the slow hum of traffic.

Something rustled down the block. A car engine started. Distant words were exchanged somewhere. I tried to remember where I was. I grabbed the bridge of my nose and squeezed until everything turned black. I tried not to panic. 

I blinked my eyes open once, twice. I thought of her.

Stay in bed, she said.

I can’t, I said.

It was amazing. It was like magic. It was like nothing we had ever experienced before with technology. I thought there had to be a human on the other side of the screen penning the joke. Something magical was happening but we couldn’t put our finger on it. If you’ve used an AI tool like ChatGPT, I assume you have experienced this watershed moment too.

Fast forward 18 months, and my use of ChatGPT has drastically increased in volume and complexity. A few examples:

• It writes all of the code I need for my consulting job as an AI/automation consultant

• It generates custom graphics for my Substack posts (like for this essay)

• It performs research for essays I write 

• It brainstorms names and creates copy for things I build on the Internet

The list goes on. It’s become such an integrated part of my work and personal life: a constant co-pilot for my ideas. As a solopreneur, it’s like having my own team of collaborators with specialized skills that I can partner with at any time on any subject. It’s made me far more prolific, capable, and expansive as a maker.

Dan Shipper of Every, one of the most influential thinkers I’ve seen covering the topic of working with ChatGPT, defines this revolution of working with AI as a shift from the knowledge economy to the allocation economy; from makers to managers. From Dan:

We’ll go from makers to managers, from doing the work to learning how to allocate resources—choosing which work to be done, deciding whether work is good enough, and editing it when it’s not. 

It means a transition from a knowledge economy to an allocation economy. You won’t be judged on how much you know, but instead on how well you can allocate and manage the resources to get work done. 

I love this analogy, and what it's gesturing at, something has deeply changed in the way we work when we work with AI, especially with an all-purpose AI tool like ChatGPT. But I might offer a slightly different take. Managers and allocators, to me, conjure up a modus operandi of organizing and deploying finite resources, with the most important skills being the ability to expertly develop systems, decision-making protocols, and collaboration practices that enable optimum outputs based on the maximization of these finite resources. 

It’s in the context of resource constraints that I see a difference between classic managers and allocators and what makers with AI are doing. Makers with AI have no constraints with the resources they are managing, except their own time and energy (which, as a tangent, this area of self-management might become the primary place for classic management skills in a workforce of automated AI agents…), because the costs of riffing with AI in a less-than-efficient way are marginal.

As a manager of teams of people, you have to be deeply skilled in cost/benefit analysis, opportunity costs, and human psychology to skillfully direct and operate an organization. Similarly, for capital allocators, you have a finite amount of money you can invest, so it’s in your deft ability to weigh one investment vs. another that makes you realize outsized returns. 

However, these skills don’t seem as applicable to makers with AI. Why? Because tools like ChatGPT have infinite capacity. They don’t need to be managed skillfully from a resource management perspective. If you go down a rabbit hole, you’re not wasting any real resources, save your own time. And if you riff enough with ChatGPT, you might come back with an output that redefines the problem you initially intended to solve.

So what does this mean? Makers with AI can be far more explorative, experimental, and unskillful with resource management than managers and allocators. They can quickly test, iterate, pivot, and move on with a velocity that would cause any traditional employee major whiplash. They can scrap projects and efforts without a second thought.  

Instead of us turning into managers and allocators, I would posit AI is turning us into creative directors. Our focus now encompasses a blend of strategic oversight and creative execution. A copywriter turns into a creative director, a graphic designer turns into a creative director, a software developer turns into a creative director, and so on and so forth ad nauseam. 

A set of core responsibilities in a traditional description of a creative director could look like the below:

• Developing the creative vision and strategy for projects.

• Providing creative leadership by guiding efforts and ensuring that the output meets certain standards.

• Project managing the creative process from concept to completion, ensuring projects are completed with cohesion to the rest of the work.

• Leading client and stakeholder interaction by acting as a bridge, presenting ideas, gathering feedback, and making necessary adjustments to creative strategy and execution.

This feels more akin to what it’s like to work with an AI tool like ChatGPT. It’s a creatively liberating experience. Traditional creative and innovation teams are often given the license to experiment and wander and test since they are charting new territory—attempting and scrapping ideas is in the DNA of their workflow. Managers and allocators are not given this same license. It’s in the most prudent use of finite resources that they shine.

So rather than AI allowing us all to become managers, I’d venture that AI is allowing us all to become more creative. I’m not managing the AI, I’m co-creating and brainstorming with it. I’m not allocating resources effectively, I’m offering an initial creative direction and then iterating and redirecting based on new outputs. I’m not working in an allocation economy, I’m working in an innovation economy.

With AI, we're unlocking a collective creativity that elevates our capacity to innovate, making every one of us a creative director of our future. 

What do I mean by clever vs. wise? In his seminal work, "Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered," E.F. Schumacher, a German-British economist, uses the term "cleverness" to refer to the technical and analytical capabilities that have enabled humanity to achieve remarkable feats, such as landing on the moon, creating powerful computers, and developing sophisticated technologies. Cleverness, in his view, is about mastery over the material world, efficiency, and the pursuit of economic growth often at the expense of environmental health and social well-being.

On the other hand, "wisdom" for Schumacher encompasses a deeper understanding and respect for the natural world, the recognition of the limitations of human knowledge and technology, and the importance of moral and ethical considerations in guiding human actions. Wisdom, to Schumacher, implies a commitment to sustainability, where economic activities are conducted in harmony with the environment and society's long-term interests. It involves making decisions that are not only technically feasible but also ecologically viable and socially just.

As LLMs continue to get more and more performant, as seen by Anthropic’s recent Claude 3 release besting almost every performance benchmark, it’s starting to feel like AI is the exact technological outcome Schumacher warned of when a culture focuses almost entirely on cleverness and growth vs. wisdom and sustainability. 

I see Schumacher’s ethical-economic framework applying to AI in two respects: the first is concerning the current state of the technology, which is more tongue-in-cheek and likely won’t be the case forever. The second application is in the trajectory of the technology and the consequences of the current pace and approach to which we’re developing it, which is less tongue-in-cheek and more existential.

Starting with the current state of the technology, I’d claim nothing AI currently outputs is particularly wise by definition. It can solve known, complex math problems, find specific data across massive text documents, and even write decent prose, but nothing it has produced to date is truly novel. LLMs are derivative machines; they use vast amounts of training data and reinforced learning to predict the next most logical token in an array. There is no deeper understanding happening within the machine; there are no moral or ethical considerations to its output. That’s why some experts refer to LLMs as stochastic parrots; they generate plausible outputs, without understanding the meaning of the language they process and produce.

If a human behaved this way, we might call them clever, but we certainly wouldn’t call them wise. It’s the same reason we refer to children as clever but not wise. When a young child does something particularly intelligent, we often recognize they are pantomiming the adults around them, not connecting disparate threads of thought into a novel new application.

As I said earlier, this claim about the current state of the technology may not be the case forever, which leads me to the second AI application of Schumacher’s ethical-economic framework: the trajectory, pace, and approach to which we are developing AI, which is to say, as seemingly fast as possible. So much so, that many leaders in the space are constantly expressing fears about the technology—even what’s been released so far. Take Sam Altman’s comments on his AI fears: "What I lose the most sleep over is the hypothetical idea that we already have done something really bad by launching ChatGPT. That maybe there was something hard and complicated in there (the system) that we didn't understand and have now already kicked it off."

Maybe that fear will turn out to be invalidated, or maybe not. The real issue is in our current inability to know the difference, without any pause or reflection, as teams race to push the edge of AI even further each day.

There’s no rewinding and putting LLMs back in the proverbial box, and I wouldn’t argue for that course of action; there are many beneficial, equitable applications to this technology, but I believe E.F. Schumacher would press us to go slow here, tread lightly, and make sustainable progress that is not only technically feasible but also ecologically viable and socially just. 

Time will tell if our leading AI technologists will listen. If they, like their AI creations, will be wise, or simply clever.

What do I mean by tempo? In this context, tempo means the expectation set with the self, collaborators, clients, or bosses as to when work of various types and sizes can and will be completed.

If you’ve ever sent a request to a co-worker and had the thought, “I’ll probably get that back from them by the end of the day today,” then you are engaging in the physics of tempo. You took an underlying size estimate of a piece of work and the relative speed said co-worker typically completes that type of task and calculated the turnaround time. As an equation, tempo might look something like this:

Tempo (T) = Size of Work (S) / Expected Turnaround Time (E)

Having legible tempos between employee-boss, consultant-client, or colleague-colleague helps develop predictable and pleasant work relationships. However, things can go awry when there is a tempo expectation deviation on either side of these relationships.

Tempo deviations on this micro-level can happen for several macro-level reasons: staffing changes, sudden shifts in business needs, process or requirement updates, or many other classic organizational pivots.

The resulting impact is someone, somewhere is requesting a piece of work (the Requester) and has an expectation of the person fulfilling that piece of work (the Fulfiller) that isn’t being met, which can lead to the Requester feeling anxious. That anxiety then leads the Requester to do whatever they can to feel less anxious about the “delayed” work, which often looks like following up with the Fulfiller, complaining to a co-worker about the situation, or even going as far as messaging the Fulfiller’s manager.

These actions typically have the consequence of passing the anxiety from the Requester to the Fulfiller who now senses, or flat out is aware, the Requester thinks the request should have been completed at this point.

And the world goes round and this game of anxious hot potato happens again and again and again in work relationships where there is tempo mismatch.

Now, things get particularly interesting when tempo mismatches are self-induced; when they emerge on the micro-level. This phenomenon typically only happens on the Fulfiller side of things.

How can tempo mismatch be self-induced? Let’s look at an example:

Let’s say Mark is a new employee of Company X. His job is to design social media assets for the content team. Since Mark is new and deeply cares about what his new co-workers think about him, he delivers high-quality social media assets at a pace that is not sustainable for him. For instance, he’ll work overtime the first few weeks on the job to get 1-2 more requests completed than he has time for in a reasonable shift, or he’ll skip lunch or not move from his desk for an ungodly stretch of hours. After a few weeks of this pace, the content team starts to think of Mark as “that one designer who can turn around high-quality assets at the last minute.” So, when those types of requests come up, the content team always goes to Mark. Now, Mark finds himself in a working norm where his tempo requires constant overtime work and lunches at his desk hunched over his keyboard.

In playing this example out further, Mark will eventually get burned out and either quit, complain constantly to everyone in his life to no avail, or maybe he will set new boundaries with the content team. But that final option would require him to be aware he’s in a trap of his own making and therefore has the authority to get himself out of the situation.

This self-induced trap is one I have often created for myself at the expense of myself. I think this trap might be especially sticky for the over-achiever or people-pleaser types. As mentioned above, the only way of truly getting out of an existing self-induced tempo bind is to reset expectations with Requesters.

But the better option is to understand what your tempo is in specific contexts and set expectations upfront accordingly. For new, unknown situations, better to set these expectations far more conservatively than you expect and then slowly beat those expectations over time.

This is something I’m consistently trying to get better at, and I’m confident if I can master tempo-setting with myself and those I work with, I’ll feel a little lighter, calmer, and free.

• If you hope for perfect conditions, you’re always going to be disappointed. 

• If you don’t know what you’re doing, watch what other people are doing and emulate them until you know what you are doing. 

• If you’re good enough, you can make shitty conditions look good (I am not that good). 

• As measured in energy and time, surfing is 90% paddling, sitting, waiting and diving. It’s max 10% riding waves. The internet portrays it as an inversion of this ratio. 

• Stretch. Just do it.  

• Take breaks. Let the whitewater pass (it eventually always does), then paddle. 

• Paddle like hell when you have an opening to do so. You don’t know when you’ll get another opportunity. 

• If you feel frustrated at the surf, look at the clouds, feel the water, smell the salty ocean and realize that being out there in nature is more of the point than anything else. 

• Find a way to work with conditions vs. fight with them. Things are more fun when you let go a little and adapt. 

• You always have to paddle a little more than you want to get out of the whitewater, but it’s always worth it.

• Try to laugh when you take a wave to the face.

• If you feel overwhelmed in the water, take a deep breath (not under water), focus on your next move and the fear will usually subside. Concentration can burn anxiety as fuel. 

• Waves can be surprising. Don’t underestimate them. A seemingly innocuous one will steal your soul if you’re not careful. 

• Other surfers are often the most dangerous thing out there. Pay attention to your surroundings. 

• Planning ahead can set you up for more success than raw talent. Had I checked the surf report this morning, I might’ve gone out at a different time and place with better conditions. I didn’t, and I got shitty conditions. 

That’s all I have for now. I may revisit this list in the future. I’ll definitely revisit this list when I’m having a rough day–in the ocean or otherwise. Shitty conditions can be frustrating, or they can be intriguing and challenging. The interesting part is you get to decide. That choice is important.