Move as slow as possible

You’ve heard this one before. When you move quickly, your body enters focus mode and blocks out distractions. This can be useful when you’re on a mission, but not when you’re exploring. Moving slowly lets you see what others might miss. The natives might judge you for dawdling; who cares. It’s absurd to under-explore a city for fear of what strangers might think.

Peer a little further than you should

Right when a neighborhood seems to peter out, where it feels more anonymous and quiet, and the grid gets weird… keep going. Something profoundly interesting is right around the corner. You know this: your favorite spots back home are rarely on the main drag. Peer a little further than you should. When you feel a little lost, you are activating curiosity.

Avoid Instagram traps

The wait is long. The food is only OK. And you’ve already seen it on online.

Avoid the need to check boxes

Well meaning friends may lavish you with “must-dos” for your trip. You “simply must” visit a famous deli, museum, cathedral, boat tour, etc. Instead of obeying someone else’s agenda, define parameters that encourage randomness, curiosity, and exploration. Things like:

• Dinner must be a recommendation by a local

• Devote a whole day to the pursuit of good smells

• If there’s a line for a fried snack, we’re waiting in it

• Attend at least one event discovered on a poster

Give yourself a puzzle, not a checklist. Parameters like these resist disappointment, because the pursuit becomes part of the experience.

Return to a spot more than once

Just as you can read a book more than once, you’re allowed to do this when traveling too. It’s strangely fun: on a 10-day trip to New York City (ever heard of it?), I became a regular at a café by starting every morning there. I got to know the staff and befriended locals. Not every part of a trip has to be novel. Grounding in familiarity can be valuable, because you don’t just want to see a new city—you want to know it too.

You don’t need the “best”

Don’t obsess over finding the best {whatever} in {wherever}. This is a bizarre way to live. You don’t need the best cocktail in Krakow because there isn’t one. You’re not Galahad seeking the Grail. The point of travel is to leave as one person and return as someone else, loaded with memories and stories. Living for “travel OKRs” will flatten your experience. Just try things, even if they only seem OK. Everything becomes what you make it. You are a part of the experience too.

These principles aren’t only about cities. They’re about receptivity: the skill of making yourself available to a world that resists perfection and control. Cities are too complex for itineraries and checkboxes. So are people. The same patience that lets a city reveal itself also happens to be the key to connection. Happy trails.

Your painful day is where you write as if you’re publishing, but your true deadline is at least five days hence. Fake deadline, real energy.

They say six is the magic number. If you can sit and write for six minutes, you’ll easily make twenty. By thirty, you’re officially in Flow and are twice as likely to make it to an hour. None of this is scientific. I made these numbers up. Just sit down and write.

Stack your sentences. Declare your ideas, roughly in order, in language you don’t hate. When you’ve had enough, take a break. Go get a snack (not dairy), and return with a cleaver. Murder your first born ideas. Slash the fat. Get it to 99.9% publishable.

Now the painful part: immediately start another draft. Your goal is 30% publishable. Just make it edible. Persist for at least an hour.

Congratulate yourself. You have made one publish-ready piece and have another ready to edit.

The point of all this is to separate drafting from editing. These are distinct roles that require different mindsets. You are capable of both roles, but not in the same sitting, and not well when a deadline looms.

You never get to avoid the pain of writing, but you do get to choose where it goes. And if you dare to make every day the painful day, you might start to enjoy it. Because it is chosen.

What is art? Art is craft on presentation. Craft is the work of mixing mind (you) and matter (not you). Papier mâché, programming, paradiddles: it’s anything you produce with intention. Presentation means making a work perceivable to someone who is not you. A lover, an adversary, or kin. A conversation requires more than one mind, and the same is true for art. Art is a form of intercourse.

Don’t worry about being an “artist.” You don’t need to wear a smock. Your craft can be welding, weirding, or wandering. You could be living with depression. You can have a stammer. Any life, in any condition, can become a work of art.

But you must make your craft seen. Practice in private; share as soon as it’s edible.

Recall that you are an assemblage of things that come from not-you. This is why you are obligated to share what you’ve created, yourself, with the community who put you together.

That is the point of this life.

Many will simply live out their memoir rather than publish it. You are already writing a story by being. All that is required is that you let yourself be seen.

You are the source of culture.

There is a Reddit community where people post pictures of bread stapled to trees. Bread is defined loosely: you can affix most baked carbohydrates (even gluten-free ones), so long as the fastener is two-pronged and made of metal. That is the sacred idea. This sacred idea comes to life through approved behavior: upvoting, posting content, and following the rules. “No cacti” is one such rule. “Don’t be a crustface” is another.

Creating anything as a collective is tricky (especially when you refuse to leave your house), so your role in culture is critical. You can’t have community without a cost. The cost is everything you do for the community. Culture is labor.

Unlike community, which is inclusive (as long as you accept the sacred idea), culture is by definition non-inclusive. It has to be because it’s a standard of behavior. Community is about getting butts in seats; culture is about keeping the operation moving—and moving in a direction.

Culture will change, and you will face difficult choices. When Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to a church door, it was not in rejection of the sacred idea, but of a culture that had emerged around it. When you are in a community, you define the culture. You (your actions, really) become the standard.

Standards exist to separate the ones who will do the work from the ones who won’t, and to urge the collective energy toward what the community actually needs.

There is tension between culture and community, but they are not in conflict. They are rivals. A community without a compelling culture is an impotent fan club. A culture without a compelling sacred idea is a loyalty program.

The community needs culture. The community needs you.

The sacred idea need not be noble or particularly interesting—it’s whatever the group treats as worthy of devotion, attention, and protection. Sacred is the noun; the related verb is sacrifice, which means “to make holy.”

• A belief in God and the afterlife

• A belief that Queen is the greatest rock band ever

• A belief that the Toronto Maple Leafs may one day win the Stanley Cup (😭)

• A belief in the beauty of bread stapled to trees

Communities are inclusive, so long as you believe in the sacred idea. Communities begin by lowering boundaries. You forget yourself as an individual and surrender to the binding thread that all of you share.

Belief is only the seed, of course. Community happens when a sacred idea is ✨manifested✨ into something the members can return to, contribute to, and share. Community is about what is created.

So you establish communication, roles, rituals, and gathering places to help you build. Forums, jargon, councils, hierarchy, leadership, mascots, feasts, anthems, festivals, temples, and markets are artifacts of community.

Next time you’re at a concert for your favorite band, try to feel the vibes. You are creating something with a community. You are making something holy.

There was nothing, no human voices anywhere, just thousands of versions of the same cheery demon.–Sam Kriss

Dear George,

You keep asking so I’ll state this plainly. I don’t think you should produce words using the prompted output of large language models (henceforth “AI”) and then tell people that you wrote those words yourself. Let’s prune this peccadillo with garden snips before we all need to march around with a machete.

This is not a PSA about AI abstinence. This is about attribution. Producing words using AI and then presenting the output as if you wrote it yourself is—to be a little old-fashioned about it—morally wrong. Not like murder or physical assault. More like shoplifting or kicking a pigeon. It’s low-life behavior. You shouldn’t do it.

To be particular, there are two things that I take issue with:

1. It’s not writing, so you didn’t do it

2. It’s not you, so I don’t care

It’s not writing, so you didn’t do it

You’ll notice that I keep saying “produce words.” That’s because “produce words” is not the same as writing. I’ll forgive you if you find this philosophically tricky, because writing often begets words. It’s also fuzzy, because when working with AI you do, in fact, do some writing. You start with what’s called a prompt:

The act of writing a prompt is followed by a deluge of words that resembles something human-written, but that output is not your writing. You did not write it. Nor is this process writing. Writing a prompt is not a speech act (for all the Searle-heads reading). You typed in 50 words and got back 1,500 words, mostly without any of the thinking, sweating, and self-doubt that comes with writing. You see the difference, right?

Now, if you want to keep a personal diary using AI (obviously psychotic) go right ahead. That’s not my boeuf. The words I care about are those presented in public for other people to read:

• posts on a web log

• motherflipping substack

• birthday cards

• political manifestos

• your country’s constitutional framework

When you produce writing for public consumption and sign your name to it without disclosing that you used AI to do so, that’s wrong both logically and morally.

Logically, you are doing a truncated version of something—but it’s not the actual thing. You can call it a “shortcut” but AI is a psychedelic wormhole of a shortcut quite unlike anything in history. Driving the marathon route is not the same as running it. Buying a cake is not the same as making a cake. Writing a prompt is not the same as writing a book.

Morally speaking, the problem is obvious. You didn’t do the thing you said you did.

But look, I can’t write it myself

I can already predict a litany of limp-wristed objections, because I spend way too much time on the Internet:

• I can’t write it myself because I have ADHD/Autism/AuDHD/R2D2

• I can’t write it myself because English is my fifth language

• I can’t write it myself because colonialism/capitalism/woke/dragons

• I can’t write it myself because I only have 10 seconds left to live

• I can’t write it myself because I don’t know how to write or learn

• I can’t write it myself because I don’t want to learn

• I can’t write it myself because writing is not automatically easy and I would like it to be and I want the feeling of having written without having to do the work of writing (even though everyone can totally tell that I used AI)

You know what? Fine. Don’t write it yourself. I truly don’t care. Make words with AI and slap it on the Internet. All I ask is that you disclose it. Tell people what you’re doing as if you’re proud of what you’re doing. Sign your produced words accordingly: “Prompted by George with the assistance of AI.”

If you’re not willing to do that, please ask yourself why not. Is it because you want people to think you wrote the thing? And if so, why do you want that? Is it because you want them to think you have interesting thoughts? And do you actually want the interesting thoughts? I can’t answer these questions for you, but they are worth thinking about.

It’s not you, so I don’t care

I lied before. When I said “Don’t write it yourself. I truly don’t care,” I do care.

The reason I don’t want you to use AI and present that work as your own is that it makes it less likely that you will choose to undertake the viciously hard process called writing and let people see who you truly are.

We don’t read for the words alone. We read to connect with other people.

“Dear George, happy birthday. I hope you choke on a chicken bone. –Love V.”

This hand-written birthday card is either a death threat or a joke or something vaguely in between. To truly understand it, you need context and, crucially, a sense of who the writer is, how he thinks, and what his intentions are. The use of AI to produce words by the pound exacerbates the fallacy that writing is all about words, and misses the point that writing is all about you.

Beginner writers plead to the ghost of Joan Didion: “If only I had the right words.” It’s like a painter saying, “If only I had the right brushstrokes.” Sure, technique is important, but a painting is more than pigments arranged just so. What makes an artist is her eye as much as her hand. What makes her work meaningful is not just what it depicts but how it depicts it, and that depends on who she is.

Here is a poem set to music (a song) written by The Beatles:

The words convey that it’s a love song. AI could probably produce those words. But how does the meaning of this song change if I told you that it was about John Lennon’s mother? What if I told you it was about his then-new love interest Yoko Ono? What if I told you it was actually, weirdly about both?

Writing was never about words. Writing is the (mind-blowing) technology that allows telepathy via symbols. It connects my mind with yours in silence across any distance. I don’t even have to be in the same room. Words let you feel my thoughts mixing with yours, in your head.

I don’t want to read your AI-produced words because it’s not you. I want to know and feel what you actually think, even if you don’t yet have the right words. You’ll get there I promise. But I know I can’t get that from your AI-produced words because everyone has access to that same random number generator. It’s not just you, and it’s just not you.

But forget about my selfish needs. How will you ever know what you think, unless you try to say it? Writing is a way of actually developing the thoughts you want to share. This essay itself took many turns and twists before it landed here. It’s not perfect. It will never be. Another word for essay is attempt, and when you sign your name to something, what you are really saying is: I gave it my best shot.

Love,
-V

When you are feeling disconnected, consider finding your own way to “turn it off.” It can look like a fika, a year off work, an ocean cruise, or a five-second intake of breath during chemotherapy. To turn it off is to make space for another kind of thought. Breaks are a part of the work.

During my six-month break from writing this newsletter, I visited a partner in Hawaii, I attended a middle school reunion, I wrote a draft of a small weird book, and started a coaching practice based on the principles of this newsletter.

And on again

I believe that we design the conditions of our existence through narrative. To put it another way, if we want a better future, we need to design it by writing it, together, according to principles we believe in. I want to help creatives and makers cultivate this thinking and practice in their lives, especially folks in a period of transition.

If you are interested (or are in state of transition right now), you can read more about this endeavor here.

As for this newsletter, I am turning it on again. Letting it beep, hearing the whirr, and waiting for the light to flicker to life.

Dear George,

How is it that seemingly intelligent people still use generational labels? Generational labels mean nothing.

As far as I can tell, there is no such person as a Boomer, X-er, Millennial, Zoomer, or Alphabet. There are individuals and the generations they belong to. Yes, I remember the spike in births after WWII called the baby boom. Yes, those babies (eventually) had babies, and their children did too. But that’s all a generation is. A baby wave. 👋 👶

For some reason, you keep using it as a personality marker, like Myers-Briggs or Enneagram or Hogwarts. At my last job, some mojambo product designer kept referring to things as “millennial-coded” even though said mojambo would (probably) never apply that same judgment according to a person’s race, religion, gender, or nationality (“Seems like something a Zoroastrian would say…”). Yet there they were, casually asserting that every human born within a 22-year window sounds, acts, and behaves a certain way.

I don’t know, man. Generational labels are dumber than astrology, and even astrology has the restraint to only pigeonhole people into a measly month. Generational labels gulp decades into pithy proclamations: “Only people born between 1982 to 1999 could possibly understand the power of Sour Patch Kids.” It’s not true. Everyone understands Sour Patch Kids.

There is no “millennial urge.” There is no “Gen Z stare.” There is no “boomer cha cha.” There is no “Gen Alpha death grip.” There is no archetype that binds a billion babies. These generational labels exist largely to sell us consumer durables and corn products. Why are you so obsessed with them?

“Gen Z is strange.” No, they’re not. They’re just YOU born later, into a different world. “Boomers are strange.” No, they’re not. They’re how YOU would be if you were born sooner and spent most of your life without the palliative glow of the internet.

Swap in any other group when you see a generational label in print, and the writer sounds deranged:

[British-Italian migrants] like to call themselves the “toughest generation,” but whenever you criticize them for something, they throw huge temper tantrums online or go into denial mode

Why is the older half of [single Black mothers] so obsessed with infantilizing itself

[Asians with cystic fibrosis] aren’t too dumb to read the classics, and here’s why

Ironically, these swapped-in examples might have relevant characteristics that let you talk about them as a group—because they are smaller—but you should apply some discernment when doing so. Generational labels blithely make excruciatingly specific claims about billions of people all across the world, and for some reason George, you can’t get enough.

There is no millennial headquarters. There is no manual on how to be a boomer. There is no right way to be Gen Z. Generational labels aren’t a political party. They aren’t even a social construct. They’re a date range and even the dates are debatable. They are tool for demographers, not culture critics. All these takes do is assert that some generation is the problem and the problem cannot be Other People.

You keep using them like it explains anything. Yes, people born around the same time who lived through the same cultural phenomena are likely to have some shared vocabulary about their lived experience. So talk about the experience, not the person.

A generational label is not a personality.
A generational label is not a personality.
A generational label is not a personality.

As if we needed another reason to separate ourselves. George, we have real problems in this world and instead of fixing these problems you keep slicing the world into low-poly categories, then slap a value on that label (good/bad, yaasss/neighhhh, chummy/cheugy), and then barf honestly not-even-that-interesting takes about it all.

To solve the problems of the world, it will take all kinds: youngs, barely-legal, middle, olds, and dying. People of different kinds all have wisdom. This radical idea is called diversity. Diversity was never about labeling every plant in the forest and working out the sacred ratios for a perfect ecosystem. No one has the authority to do that. The only thing you can do is make the circle bigger and listen.

The gap between generations is not a problem to solve. There already exists a structure designed to help bridge the gulf. It’s called family. Just about everyone has parents, those kind-of-annoying older folks who know better than you (for a while) and never stop telling you what to do. Some people will make children too: the little folks you coddle and teach while avoiding the thought that, if you do your job well, you create people so advanced it may produce an impassable gulf of understanding between you.

And that’s what you want. You’re not meant to understand each other. You’re just meant to love each other. You don’t need to figure out the olds or the youngs. You just need to accept them. Enough with the generational labels. They don’t mean a thing.

Love,
V

Not one to miss out on a bandwagon, I employed similar methods to the Swedish-Luxembourgish Algo-Factory (i.e., hand-waving, guesswork, lies), and compiled this list: your 2025 Microprinciples Wrapped.

Let’s do this.

Top tracks

The principles that gave you life this year:

• You grow toward the light you can find. Soil can twist you into improbable shapes.

• Everything is drugs. The old trombones used to say “Just say no to drugs.”

• Avoid the need to check boxes. Some things are just information.

Truly, madly, obviously

The principles that made you go, “no doy”:

• Sometimes the answer is water. You are water. A sac of liquid with a passport.

• You gotta do something. Making and doing is fundamentally pointless in cosmic terms.

• Experience and words are not the same. Go buy this helmet, and never speak to me again.

Inscrutable percentage

You’re in the top 0.0000000001% of people who read these:

• The experiment works on you too. You’re about to eat an oyster for the first time.

• All sight is hindsight. The future, meanwhile, is behind you.

• Power is a dance, not a throne. Like a hug or a handshake. There’s no one-sided version.

Thank you, next

The principles (I assume) you stopped reading halfway through:

• You’re not invited. Dreams are nebulous. Vision concretizes.

• Beauty is better made. What you call “ugly” is everything you resist.

• Know when to fold ‘em. Your favorite donut shop changed the recipe.

Your Microprinciples age

No one knows what this means or how it is calculated, but it’s true:

• You’re 37

Your new go-to insult

“Trade-in your bovine existence of endlessly chewing algorithmic cud.”
–Boredom is the amuse bouche

Hey, I said that

Principles based on an actual conversation you had with V:

• Make a mess, keep it tidy. Go watch a mammalian birth.

• Think slow to move fast. The faster you move, the less you can see.

• Your handle doesn’t matter. Action matters more than aspiration.

Other side of the tracks

The principles you refuse to accept and maybe for good reason:

• Know your eternal questions. Your playground is another person’s taboo.

• You must learn to discern. Wisdom isn’t a collection, it’s a chemical reaction.

• No growth without demolition. Babies don’t struggle with walking because they’re stupid.

Mom, I’m on the phone!

The principles that made you think of your origins:

• You must find the bridge. An offer of a French fry to a seagull.

• Stop calling people smart. “Smart” is something you have or you don’t.

• Make your boundaries known. But you do this too!

Your Microprinciples club

Which club do you belong to? Cosmic Creator Club, obviously. These principles are especially for you, dear knowledge worker:

• Keep your first drafts. Wading into failure is prickly curriculum.

• Change the plane of conception. The reason was God’s will.

• Never reveal the magic. You’re better off explaining the shape of a sneeze.

• You can’t all be the main character. Too many chefs, spoil the plot.

• Yuck, yum, whatever. A tree can handle an axe blow; Seedlings need extra care.

True ballads

The principles that hit too close to home:

• Let fear ride shotgun. Where “hic sunt dracones.”

• Add probably, feel better. There’s a lot that can kill you.

• Want what sets you free. The rails you mistake for shackles

Thanks you for reading. Microprinciples now enters hiatus while V figures out what he wants to do with his life. (Because integration requires less.) Much appreciation to the readers who reached out to help with my long-form project. I appreciate you!

Onward.

–V. Sri

It’s the entire concept of comedy:
Follow a well-accepted insight
With an unacceptable one,
And delight in the confusion.

Comedy requires discernment,
And discernment requires distance.
Everything is funny from a distance.
So get yourself some distance.

It’s not “touch grass” it’s “touch big.”
A tree, a mountain, the ocean, an ostrich.
Shift your perspective from pixels to something bigger.
Lift your eyes and behold—

Less unity and more diversity.
Less simplicity and more stories.
Less clarity and more acceptance.
Less certainty and more possibility.

It’s a lot of responsibility for a babysitter.
Victor Hugo says: “He who does not weep does not see.”
I say: “He who does not laugh is a doofus.”
And he neglects the other baby in the crib.

Laughter is a blessing not to be squandered.
Every conflict is rife with stupidity.
Every holy war is just two angry book clubs,
Each obsessed with one book.

Besides: death comes for everyone, even the innocent.
All that is made shall be destroyed.
You (yes you) are wrong about everything.
Take a seat in the dunk tank, once in a while.

Hold room for all of life’s babies,
Even the ugly ones.
A mind’s private tornado begins in a playpen
You can learn to let them play nice.

For others, the gulf is wider and deeper. It’s more than “road closed” it is a raging river. If they dare to step into the current, it’s all chaos and foam.

How do you bring your adversary closer?You must find the bridge.

The bridge is where conversation can flow without resistance. It can be small talk or a peace summit; it’s a safe space for discourse.

Instead of trading ideas in a turbulent river, start with something you agree on. You need neutral territory because you most definitely have a bias. The bridge is the space between extremes.

And a bridge can start impossibly narrow—
In fact, every bridge must start this way.

Two words of high school Spanish in a rural village. An offer of a French fry to a seagull. A hand on a shoulder terminating silence. A soccer ball on a battlefield on Christmas Day.

A bridge is a safe passage between minds. This is what you pay therapists for, by the way. The feeling of safe passage.

You can find it or build it; both are the same. Bridges let you leave your island—which isn’t even “yours” in the first place. It’s just where you happen to be.

“I know that travel is valuable because most knowledge can’t be written down.”
–Sasha Chapin

You could go to the Amazon rainforest.
Or you could read about it in a book.
Do you think there’s a difference?
Your body already knows there is.

(And if you think they are the same,
Use my coupon code,
Go buy this helmet,
And never speak to me again.)

If you think they’re not the same,
You already know this bitter fact:
That words are woefully imperfect.
Experience and words are not the same things.

Words aren’t worthless, of course.
Metaphors heave light onto darkness.
Laws let you sheath your swords.
Poems carve beauty from the mundane.

But words are not what they measure.
A waterfall is meaningfully different than “falling water.”
Heartbreak is always peculiar to the ballads voiced in her name.
The longest obituary will never contain a life.

Words are technology, nothing more.
A mind is a private tornado even to yourself.
Your therapist is a mortal with problems, like you.
She cannot read you, and you are not your thoughts.

Even if you read every book ever written,
You would glimpse only a sliver of human experience:
Namely, the fragment of history someone wrote down.
(Don’t forget to tip the patron saints of lost time.)

And if you hurled every book ever written into a machine,
You’d have yet another technology,
Predicted to destroy our way of life.
The know-nothing that makes nothing, but words, words, words.

The know-nothing is your boyfriend who won’t shut up (about taking your job).
Neither waterfall, nor rainforest, nor heartbreak
Can be experienced from his precious plastic helmet.
Nor will it protect him from This Life.

Next time a friend has a profoundly meaningful experience,
Don’t ask them to render the experience into words.
Invite them to remember the feeling in silence.
That’s where the answer lives, if there is one at all.

“Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo.”
–Walter Benjamin

Someone asks, “How is your thing going?”

You might be bursting to talk about it.
You might crave validation for your efforts.
You might want feedback to give your ideas shape.
Incubate your idea until you’re one-fifth through.

In its earliest stages an idea is tender.
It may absorb the meta of other minds.
Foreign agendas may permeate the foetal work
And potentially destroy it.

You can’t learn to drive in a parked car
And too-early feedback can stall your engine.
A tree can handle an axe blow;
Seedlings need extra care.

The first trimester of a work is particularly sensitive.
Be skeptical of reductive opinions in ten-dollar capsules:
“Too atavistic,” “Too truculent,” “Too rebarbative.”
The work will change; all it needs is time.

The early part is more interrogation than creation.
Guiding a stethascope over your disparate inner voices
And listening with the intensity of a safecracker
Trying to liberate his own precious psyche:

• Fear: what asks to be known?

• Anger: what protests the status quo?

• Joy: what longs to be celebrated?

• Sadness: what asks to be released?

• Arousal: what longs to be made?

The final question pulls you into your gut.
The truly wordless voice
That speaks only in “yuck, yum, whatever.”
You Pursue the whole body yes.

In the end, the idea might need to die,
But the work must pass through You before it passes to Them.
You are the first audience, the first critic, the first believer.
Trust yourself before you trust the world.

“Guilt is the teacher, love is the lesson.”
–Joan Borysenko

When something falls apart, the village exists to support you. “It’s not your fault,” they’ll say, and they mean it. Friends and family make you feel like the hero of your story.

But every story needs a bad guy and the bad guy might be you.

Don’t beat yourself up, but pinch yourself a little. Friends help you save face; only you can save your soul. You must acknowledge your role in any failure.

You did too much, or too little. You chose the wrong target. You held the wrong frame.

Mistakes are more than acceptable. You grow by listening to a feeling called guilt.
Guilt is a teacher, not your enemy. Guilt is an emotion that steers you to the universe within.

Your body’s warning that you did something out of alignment with your values. (Because misalignment will kill you.)

Guilt keeps action and character distinct: “I did wrong, but I’m still a good person. Shame fuses the feeling with who you are.
“Because I did a bad thing, I am a bad person.” Shame chisels a mistake into stone.

You are not a singular idea. Your stories do not always align and it takes figuring out. You must bring your adversary closer. Even when it is you.

“Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart.”
–Kahlil Gibran

The designer strives for perfection. Symmetry, balance, harmony: utopia.
Utopia literally means “no place,” and symmetry is a myth.

The truth of the world is chaos and viscera. The trees grown askew in fallow soil. The broadsheet dripping with grief.

This asymmetry isn’t the problem. What you call “ugly” is everything you resist. Confusion. Uncertainty. Imbalance.

Cross-examine your resistance.
You might not have beef with the universe.
Those superlatives might be pure corn syrup.
–Turn complaints into observations, June 5, 2025

Next time aesthetic disgust scrinches your nose, think about what you already find beautiful. You may have recovered beauty in domains where others see none. So reverse it. Push through the recoil. Rotate the frame.

Rotation is the designer’s actual work. Change the frame, not the world. You step into the mirror and Consider how you might change.

You read a book more than once, you bring your adversary closer, you change the plane of conception, and you and turn the impossible into routine.

All potential lies in what appears ugly. Beauty is better made not found. You are not swiping your way to a match. You are what you design; what you design is you.

“The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.”
–Rainer Maria Rilke

History has a direction, but not a destination.
At any point along its river, you can hear its many songs.
It rushes in progress, dribbles in grief.
It is all one river.

You long to know where you are headed,
But all walk backward in this life.
You see only the past before you.
All sight is hindsight.

The past is the stories you chose to record
The parts you could crumb into words and pictures.
A fragment of what happened; much is unwitnessed.
The rest washed away in the flood.

This picture of the past keeps changing,
Like a watercolor unwilling to dry.
New paint daubed with each backward step.
The layers below buried by progress.

The future, meanwhile, is behind you.
You are not entitled to know the destination
Because there is none; only direction.
Tentative backward steps into darkness.

History shapes the potential futures you can step into.
The stories change the shape of the river behind you,
You are a conduit that bends story into possibility.
And you are made of history too: a drip of watercolor paint.

You might find it easier holding someone’s hand.
Painting history together transforms the kaleidoscope.
Disconnected fragments become navigable story,
Which means you must find your people.

You will paint this canvas together.

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
–Kurt Vonnegut

You order the bartender to make you a drink,
She controls what goes in your mouth.
So who has the power?
It belongs to you both.

You say, “Make it again!”
She says, “Get the hell out of my bar.”
Power is a dance, not a throne.
Sometimes you swing, sometimes you’re swung.

Power is woven of alternating acts of service.
A co-created construct,
Like a hug or a handshake.
There’s no one-sided version.

You may resist the idea that anyone should lead,
But someone has to decide.
To lead is to know what you want.
To lead is to evangelize the impossible.

You may resist the idea that anyone should follow,
But to follow is to live your curiosity.
To be led isn’t weakness; it is being receptive.
It requires presence, and a belief in your worth.

There is a phenomenon called “force”
But that’s not what power is.
Force can seize the moment.
Power endures across time.

Should you choose to lead, you must become a servant.
Like a conductor serves an orchestra.
You keep the score, set aside your agenda,
So others can revel in flow.

Should you choose to follow, you must become a teacher.
Because you show the next person how to trust.
Without your assent, there is no truth.
Without your follow, there is no dance.

The bartender pours you a cocktail.
You sip with full trust.
Sante.
Neither wield the power alone.

Once upon a time, people were born into communities and had to find their individuality. Today, people are born as individuals and have to find their communities.
–Youth Mode

You have fallen out of love with the ordinary.
To be ordinary is a failure.
To be extraordinary is the norm.
Revel in how weird this is. Now scroll.

No one is awkward anymore.
Unless it’s deliberate affectation or “cringe.”
A child on camera knows their marks like an actor.
Everyone knows their good side.

You are awash in hyphenates and bullshit job titles.
Everyone has main character energy
And says shit like “main character energy,”
Like you’re interning at Bravo.

The robot vomits slop: “When everyone is unique, no one is.”
More like: when everyone is unique it’s damnedable.
You can’t have ordinary shared experiences.
Like enjoying Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

This is not a paean to a swirling plastic bag in a parking lot.
This is not nostalgia or sonder with a hopecore soundtrack.
It is a boombox raised high in the air
For a six from homeroom called Ordinary.

“I couldn’t possibly give up all this novelty.”
What was the last thing you read on the internet?
Who wrote it? Did you savor it? Did you actually feel it??
Or did you taste a leaf in your mouth during a hurricane?

Just about everyone who read Youth Mode got it dead wrong:
Normcore is not performing normalcy in an aspirational way
The promise of normcore is post-aspirational.
It is less about standing out and more about being together.

“Do you mean I can’t be special?”
You don’t need a brand.
A brand is what they used to tell cows apart.
You have a voice, you have a community, you have you.

You are the same as everyone else.
Can you imagine? Maybe it’s OK to just be
A human person in an ordinary world.
You will learn to survive.

You’ve fallen out of love with the ordinary among you.
You mistake your friends’ online presence for their value.
Your platforms reward mind-viruses and assholes
There is no room in your world for the supporting roles.

But any story struggles when everyone’s the protagonist,
You can’t all be shouting catchphrases and kicking dragons.
Life is as much about texture as it is forward motion
Too many chefs, spoil the plot.

There are other archetypes: makers, magicians, alchemists,
Muses, lovers, caretakers, connectors,
Questioners, contrarians, innocents, and jokers.
They make the story too.

A main character needs a crusade and a crusade is crazy-making;
Those in supporting roles can keep their identity fluid.
For their efforts, you deride them as NPCs
But they are the infrastructure that make human connection possible.

God bless the supporters who whole communities together
Who value the group more than the spotlight.
Who are more interested than “interesting.”
Who have become the ones not talking.

You all have multiple roles in life to play
Which is why people must make new people.
To grow is to enable new main characters
And surrender your role in the franchise.

Never reveal the magic, do not explain it away.
Despite the insistence of the curly-haired rats,
The waste is what works.
You are pulled by the mystery, not the reveal.

Yeah, sunlight is the best disinfectant,
Sure, your podcast “tells it like it is,”
But not everything is solved with a Vox explainer.
Neither your Craft, nor this universe.

“Where do you get your ideas?”
“Is your last song about me?”
“What’s going to happen to the world?”
These questions are not unexpected.

But don’t waste a second trying to answer
You’re better off explaining the shape of a sneeze.
The mortals want to know “Why am I so moved by Chaos?”
When that, of course, was the intended effect.

Besides, you have neither the ability nor the right to explain.
You are not you; you are a conduit.
The artist weaves from Collective Dream
On everyone’s behalf.

You can know your eternal questions.
That’s all a storyteller gets to know.
The listener must know her questions too,
Two shards of curiosity meeting in the prism of Craft.

Ask not about the magic.
Read a book more than once if you want answers
But you’ll mostly learn about yourself.
Which is the “point” were there such a thing.

To craft is to insistently rush into the unknown.
An endless collision of Chaos and knowledge
Producing as byproduct both failure and artifact
And the gorgeous illusion:

That the universe needs to make a lick of sense.