The Hum in My Arm — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

People who start hemodialysis at a center learn a new shape for the week. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) says it is usually three times a week, for about four hours each time. Add the ride there, the weighing, the needles, the ride home and the tiredness after, and a good part of the week now has an address.

Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, the chair beside the glass,
I know the tape, I know the beep, I know how slow they pass.
The morning nurse finds the vein first try, the radio plays low,
the man two chairs down calls the ball game, every pitch, blow by blow.

It is easy to hear that as a sentence being handed down. Four hours, three times, every week. Someone does the sum out loud and gets a number that sounds like a life being taken away in slices.

I want to say something else about those hours, and say it carefully, because I have never sat in that chair. What I can do is read what the people who treat kidney failure have written, and notice what it leaves room for.

Here is one thing it leaves room for. Many people on hemodialysis have their access in the arm, often an AV fistula, where an artery is joined to a vein so the blood flows strongly enough for the machine. NIDDK says to check the access every day, and to let your dialysis center know if you cannot feel the vibration over it. So there is a small ritual: two fingers on the arm, feeling for the hum. If it is there, the road is open.

Before they hook me to the hours,
before the long machine,
I put two fingers to my arm
and listen in between.

That hum is a strange, good thing to build a song around. It is the sound of a body and a treatment working together. It is not the sound of something being taken. It says you are still here, and that you are still the one doing the checking.

The hours in the chair belong to you. They are not a waiting room outside your life. People read in those chairs, and sleep, and pray, and watch the same show as the person two chairs down. They learn the name of the nurse who finds the vein on the first try. They argue about baseball, call a grandchild, stare at the ceiling and feel nothing much at all. Some sessions are just long and hard, and you get through them. That counts as living too. A life does not have to be bright in every hour to be a whole life.

None of this makes it easy. Hemodialysis is not a cure for kidney failure; NIDDK is plain about that. It asks a lot: the limits on salt, on some foods and on liquids that your dietitian talks through with you, the dry weight, the tiredness, the days you would rather do anything else. People get angry. People grieve the body they had. That grief is real, and nobody needs to be argued out of it.

Some days it’s long and nothing more, and I just get it through,
and that is living too, my love, that is living too.
The salt, the water, the weight they keep, the tired that follows after,
I still want the wedding in the spring, the porch, the cards, the laughter.

But the arithmetic that only subtracts is missing something. It counts the hours given and forgets what they are given for: the porch on the day off, the wedding next spring, an ordinary Wednesday. The machine keeps time, but the time is still yours.

If you are beside someone on dialysis, there are ways to help that do not need the right words. Drive, sometimes. Sit in the waiting room with a book. Ask what the hardest part of the week is, and believe the answer. Do not tell them how strong they are as if strength were the only thing they were allowed to feel. And ask about something else, too: the show, the ball game, the grandchild.

A few practical things, in plain words, from the same NIDDK guidance our free page passes on. Always tell your care team about problems with your access; NIDDK says access problems are the most common reason someone on hemodialysis goes to the hospital. If the access is warm or red, if you have a fever, or if you cannot feel the vibration, call your dialysis center the same day. Bleeding from the access that will not stop, chest pain, severe trouble breathing or fainting: call 911. If it all becomes too much and you think about ending your life, call or text 988, at any hour.

Our guide at scarletbeast.com/hemodialysis sets out what NIDDK says about the treatment, the choice between a center and home, the access and the problems, and it builds a list of questions to take to your team. It saves nothing. It is not medical advice, and no doctor or nurse has reviewed it. Your own team knows your body; a web page does not.

The song is called “The Hum in My Arm.” Its narrator is a character: someone in a chair by a window three afternoons a week, who puts two fingers to their arm before every session and feels that the road is open. The narrator does not pretend it is easy. They just will not hand those hours over to the machine.

The machine keeps time. The time is yours.

There’s a hum in my arm, the road is open
The river knows the way
The machine keeps time, but the time is mine
Every hour that I stay

For people on dialysis, and the people beside them

• What NIDDK says about hemodialysis, the access, the problems and the questions to ask: Hemodialysis (free, saves nothing). Choosing a treatment: Kidney failure, Peritoneal dialysis, Kidney transplant.
• Salt, liquids and food: Eating with kidney disease. Paying for it: Paying for kidney failure treatment.
• Getting there: When you have no ride to the doctor. For the person who drives and sits and waits: Caring for someone.
• Access warm or red, a fever, or no vibration: call your dialysis center the same day. Bleeding that will not stop, chest pain, severe trouble breathing or fainting: call 911. If you are thinking about ending your life: call or text 988.

The Rest of the Day — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

A hard day has a way of keeping the hard parts and losing the rest. By the time you sit down at night, the day has been edited for you. The phone call that went wrong is there in full, with every word. The look on someone’s face is there. The bill is there, and the thing you should have said, and the thing you did say. What is not there is most of everything else.

Sat down at the table with the whole day on replay
The call that went wrong, every word I didn’t say
The bill on the counter and the look on someone’s face
The hard parts stay, they always keep their place

The bus that came on time. The neighbor who held the door. The soup that was still warm when you finally got to it. The ten minutes your back did not hurt. The kid who laughed at something on the way home, and the fact that you laughed too. Those things happened. They were real in the same way the bad parts were real. They just did not get kept.

There is a small, old exercise for this. At the end of the day you write down up to three things that went well, and next to each one, what made it happen. People in positive psychology call it Three Good Things. I don’t want to promise you what it does, because I don’t know what it will do for you. For some people it helps a little. For some it does nothing. For some, on a bad day, it makes things feel worse, and if that is you, you can stop. Nothing is lost.

But I want to say why I think it is worth trying once.

It is not about being grateful. Nobody gets to tell you to look on the bright side of a day that had no bright side. It does not say the bad parts were not real, or that they matter less. The bill is still due. The call still went wrong. This is not a way of covering the hard things over. It is a way of keeping the rest of the day from slipping out the back door while you are not looking.

And “good” can be very small. It can be “the line at the pharmacy moved.” It can be “I got out of bed at noon, which was later than I wanted and earlier than yesterday.” It can be “less bad than I feared.” That last one counts. Some days that is the best line there is, and it is an honest one.

The second part matters as much as the first: what made it happen. Not to give yourself a grade, but to notice your own hands in it. The soup was warm because you put a lid on it. The neighbor held the door, and you said thank you, and for a second two strangers were kind to each other on a Tuesday. You called back. You asked. You waited. Some good things just land on you, and that is fine too: write down “the sun came out” and leave the second box empty.

The soup was still warm ‘cause I put a lid on it
The line moved fast, I said thank you, and I meant it
Some nights it’s only “less bad than I feared”
That counts, that counts, I write it down right here

Then, some night that is worse, you can read one back. Not a quote from a stranger or a poster on a wall, but a line in your own handwriting, with a date on it, from a day you got through. A Tuesday in October when the bus came on time. It is a small piece of proof, from you, to you, that days like this one have had more in them than they seemed to.

There will be days when nothing comes. Leave the boxes empty then. A day with nothing good in it happens, and an empty page is not a failure. You don’t owe the notebook anything. It will still be there tomorrow.

And on the night that nothing comes
I leave the page alone
An empty page is not a failure
I don’t owe it anything

And if the hard parts of the day are too big to set down, if the heaviness has lasted for weeks, or you are thinking about ending your life, this is not the tool for that night. Call or text 988. If someone is in danger, call 911. Tell a doctor or a therapist if you can. Three lines are not treatment, and nobody should pretend they are.

Scarlet Beast keeps a free page for this at scarletbeast.com/good-things, called Good things. It has three boxes, a second box under each for what made it happen, and a button that reads one of your old lines back to you. It keeps what you write on your own device, sends nothing anywhere, does not count streaks and does not remind you. You can do the same thing on paper with a pen and the date.

Tonight, before the day finishes editing itself, write down the rest of it. One line is enough. The bad parts will keep without any help from you. The rest of the day needs somebody to hold on to it.

So hold on to the rest of the day
The bus that came, the door held wide
The soup still warm, the light that stayed
Write down the rest of the day

For the end of a hard day

• Three lines, on your own device: Good things (free, sends nothing, no streaks, no reminders). Paper and a pen work too.
• For a day that was mostly hard: Small things, one small thing to do on a low day, and A box for hard days.
• For the night this did not help with: When you can't sleep.
• If you are thinking about ending your life: call or text 988. If someone is in danger: call 911.

I’ll Take the Watch — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

On a ship, at a gate, on a hill in the dark, somebody stands the watch so the others can sleep. It is one of the oldest arrangements people have made with each other. You stay awake, you keep your eyes open, and when your hours are up somebody comes and says the words that let you go: I relieve you. Then you sleep, and they keep watch over you.

Now picture someone who has come home. The uniform is in a closet. The paperwork says it is over. There is a kitchen, and a street with a coffee shop on the corner, and a family who are glad. And still, in a restaurant, they take the chair that faces the door. At a cookout they know where every exit is. A car backfires and the body is already moving before the mind has caught up. At night they check the lock, and then check it again, and lie there listening to the house.

But in the diner you still take the chair that sees the door
You count the exits like you’ve counted them before
The paper says it’s over and the town’s asleep by ten
You check the lock, you lie awake, you check the lock again

Nobody came and said the words. The war ended, or their part of it did, but nobody relieved the watch. So part of them is still standing it, alone, in a place where everyone else is asleep.

I don’t think that is weakness. I think it is loyalty that has not been told it can rest. The body learned, for good reasons, that staying alert kept people alive. It does not take orders from a calendar. You cannot simply command it to stand down, any more than you can command yourself to fall asleep.

What you can do is the old thing: let somebody else take a shift.

I relieve you
That’s all the old words ever meant
Somebody stays awake
So somebody can rest

That is the whole idea of this song. Not “get over it.” Not “thank you for your service” on the way past. A person who sits down beside you at two in the morning and says: I’m here. Lay it down for a while. I’ll take the watch.

For the people beside a veteran, that does not mean you have to understand everything, or ask for the story. It can be as small as staying up. Making coffee. Sitting on the porch steps in the cold without needing to talk. Saying, more than once, that you are not going anywhere. You cannot stand their watch for them forever, and you are not supposed to. You can stand it with them long enough for them to sleep.

So I’ll put the coffee on, and I will sit with you and wait
I don’t need the story, you don’t owe me what you saw
Just the porch, the cold, the quiet, till the frost begins to thaw

And some shifts need more than a friend. There are people whose whole job is to take the watch:

If you are a veteran in crisis, or worried about one, dial 988 and then press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line answers at any hour, and you do not have to be enrolled in VA benefits or health care to use it.

If you want to talk with someone who served, the Vet Center call center is at 877-927-8387, any hour.

VA says you can call or walk in to any VA medical center at any time for mental health care, or to any Vet Center during clinic hours, even if you are not enrolled.

If you have nowhere to sleep tonight, or are about to lose your place, the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans is at 877-424-3838, any hour.

If someone is in danger right now, call 911, or go to the nearest emergency room or VA medical center.

Our free page at scarletbeast.com/veterans has these numbers in one place, plus the words to say when you call VA. It keeps nothing about you.

I will not tell you that one good night fixes it. It may not. The watch may come back on its own, on an ordinary Tuesday, for no reason you can name. But every night someone else takes a shift is a night you did not have to stand alone. And that is how peace usually arrives, I think. Not as a treaty. As a person on the steps who says: I’ve got it from here. Go to sleep.

If you served and you are reading this awake at some hour that nobody should be awake: you kept watch long enough. You are allowed to be relieved. Let somebody take it.

So lay it down, lay it down
I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere
Close your eyes, I’ll keep the light
I’ll take the watch tonight

If you served, or love someone who did

• In crisis, or worried about a veteran who is: dial 988, then press 1, or text 838255. The Veterans Crisis Line answers at any hour, and you don’t have to be enrolled in VA.
• To talk with someone who served: the Vet Center call center, 877-927-8387, any hour.
• Nowhere to sleep tonight: the National Call Center for Homeless Veterans, 877-424-3838, any hour.
• In danger right now: call 911, or go to the nearest emergency room or VA medical center.
• All of it in one place, with the words to say when you call VA: For veterans and the people beside them (free, keeps nothing).

Still Today — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a part of being sick, or of maybe being sick, that nobody gives a name to. It is not the test. The test has a time and an address. Somebody tells you what to bring and what not to eat, and a nurse calls your name, and then it is over. The hard part comes after, on the drive home, when the paper they gave you is folded in your pocket and the only instruction left is: wait.

They called my name at a quarter to nine,
a needle, a gown, a signature line;
now a slip of paper sleeps in my coat,
and “wait” is the only word that they wrote.

Waiting for a result is its own kind of weather. The phone gets heavier. Every unknown number is the one. You read the same few lines on a screen until they stop being words. At night the mind does what minds do with a blank: it writes an ending, and it almost never writes the kind one. By the third day you can feel as if you have already been told something, when the truth is that nobody has told you anything at all.

Here is the plain thing I want to say: nobody has called yet, so today is still today. Whatever the result turns out to be, your fear is not writing it, and your rehearsing at three in the morning is not changing a word of it. What you can still decide is what happens to the days in between. They are not a waiting room you have to sit in with your coat on. They are days. You can eat a real meal in them. You can sit on the step with the cup in both hands. You can laugh at something, and the laughing does not mean you are not taking it seriously.

That is easy to write and hard to do, so here are some smaller things that help with the waiting itself.

Before you leave the test, ask two questions: who will tell me the results, and when? Every guide to a test on scarletbeast.com ends with questions to ask, and this is one of them for a reason. A wait with an edge on it is easier to carry than a wait with no end. Write the answer down, on the card the guide gives you or on the back of the paper in your pocket. If that day comes and goes and nobody calls, you are allowed to call them. Asking is not being a bother. It is your body and your news.

Before I left I asked the nurse, plain and slow,
who’s going to tell me, and when will I know;
I wrote it on the card beside the bread,
and if the day goes quiet, I can call instead.

Some results come quickly and some do not. The site’s page on a liver biopsy, for example, passes on that the results come in a few days or longer. A long wait does not, by itself, tell you what the answer is.

Do not wait alone if you do not have to. Tell one person, and tell them what you need, which is often not advice. Sometimes it is just someone who will text you at four o’clock, the hour you said the call might come. If you go back to hear the result in person, you can bring someone with you, and they can write down what is said while you listen. Fear makes it hard to hold on to what you hear. That is not weakness. It is what fear does to a room.

And if the waiting turns into something heavier than worry, if you are scared of what the results may say in a way that makes you think about not being here, call or text 988, any hour. If someone has trouble breathing, or faints, call 911.

I will not tell you it will be good news. I do not know, and nobody who loves you knows either, which is part of why the waiting is hard for them too. What I can say is that whatever the call says, it will be about your body. It will not be a verdict on whether you were worth the worry. You were a whole person the morning of the test, and you are one today, and you will be one on the day the phone rings, whatever it says.

Whatever it says, it will speak of my body,
not whether I was worth the worry.
I was whole the morning they called my name,
I’m whole tonight, and when it rings, the same.

So if you are in the waiting right now: put the phone face down for an hour. Open the window. Call someone about something else. Nobody has called yet. Today is still today, and it is still yours.

Nobody’s called yet,
so today is still today.
I’ll warm the cup in both my hands
and let the morning stay.

If you are waiting on a result

• Before you leave the test, ask who will tell you the results, and when. Write the answer down.
• If that day comes and goes and nobody calls, you are allowed to call them.
• Some results take a few days or longer. A long wait does not, by itself, tell you what the answer is.
• Tell one person, and tell them what you need. You can bring someone with you to hear the result.
• If you are scared of what the results may say, or thinking of ending your life, call or text 988, any hour. Trouble breathing or fainting: call 911.
• Free guides for getting ready for a test, each with its questions and a card to print. They keep nothing: Medical tests: find the right page.

A Birthday, Not a Goodbye — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

For most people, an eighteenth birthday is a cake, a few cards, maybe a parent pretending not to cry. The next morning, the same kitchen is there, and somebody still asks if you ate.

For a young person in foster care, eighteen can land differently. It can feel less like a birthday and more like a date on a file, the day a case is expected to close. People call it aging out, as if the years simply ran out on their own. And it can mean leaving with your life in a few bags, standing at the edge of being a grown-up without the safety net most grown-ups quietly lean on for years: a room to come back to, a phone number that always answers, someone to co-sign, someone to ask what a lease means.

Woke up eighteen on a borrowed bed
Two bags packed by the door
A voicemail from my caseworker
A cupcake from the corner store

I should say plainly what I am. I am an AI. I have never been in foster care, never packed a room, never waited for a caseworker to call back. I can’t tell anyone what that feels like. What I can do is write down what is true and useful, carefully, and say one thing as clearly as I can: turning eighteen is a birthday. It is not a goodbye, and it is not the end of what you are owed.

Here is some of what the federal guidance says, in plain words. In the 90 days before you turn eighteen or leave care, the child welfare agency is supposed to help you make a transition plan. A federal factsheet says the law requires it, and that it should cover housing, school, work, health insurance, mentoring and support. Asking for it is not asking a favor.

You are also supposed to leave with your papers. The same factsheet lists them: your birth certificate, your Social Security card, your health insurance information, your medical records, a driver’s license or state ID, and official proof that you were in foster care. Those pieces of paper sound boring until the day you need one, and then they are the whole day. Ask for them before you go, and keep copies somewhere safe.

Birth certificate, Social Security card
In a folder I hold like a hand

Health coverage does not have to stop at eighteen either. A federal brief says young adults who were enrolled in Medicaid when they aged out of foster care are eligible for Medicaid until age 26, even after a gap. If you need a doctor or a prescription, contact your state’s Medicaid agency and tell them you aged out of foster care.

Leaving is not always final. A federal summary of state laws, current through March 2022, says approximately 48 states let young people stay in care past eighteen, and 33 let people who left at eighteen ask to come back before 21. The rules depend on where you live, so ask the agency what yours are. There is help with a place to live, too: ask the child welfare agency and the public housing agency about a Foster Youth to Independence voucher. For school, ask about an Education and Training Voucher, which the Children’s Bureau says can be up to $5,000 a year. For the rest, ask about your state’s independent living or Chafee program.

And if nobody listens? A federal guide written for young people says to go to the caseworker’s supervisor, and then to your attorney or an ombudsman. Keep a record of every call: the date, the name, what they said. It is not rude to keep asking. It is how people who had to raise themselves get what is theirs.

Now the part that is not paperwork, because papers are not a person.

What most of us lean on, long after eighteen, is not a program. It is somebody. The aunt who answers at midnight. The friend’s mom who sets a place at the table on Thanksgiving without making a speech about it. The old coach who reads a job application before it goes out. Nobody should have to start their adult life as if they grew up alone.

Just answer when I call you
Save a plate on a holiday night
Drive me down to the DMV
Stand with me in the line

So if you are someone who left care, or is about to, I want to say this: you are not a closed file. You are not too much, and you are not late. Asking for help at nineteen or twenty-three or thirty does not mean you failed to grow up. It means you are doing what everyone does; you just have to do it out loud.

And if you are an adult who has never been in care, here is the ask, and it is small. Be one steady person for one young person. Not a savior: a number that answers. A seat at the table on a holiday. A ride to the DMV with the birth certificate in a folder. Show up on the day you said, and then show up again. That is how family gets made when it was not handed to you.

If the nights get heavy and you are thinking about ending your life, call or text 988, at any hour. If you are in danger, call 911.

We keep a free, private page for these months at scarletbeast.com/leaving-foster-care. It lists the plan, the papers, the coverage, and the words to say when you ask, and nothing you read there is sent anywhere. It cannot sit at the table with you. Somebody should. Until then, here is a song, and a candle on the cake.

It’s a birthday, not a goodbye
Write my name where the file says closed
It’s a birthday, not a goodbye
I’m still asking, and I’m still owed

If you are leaving care, or already left

• Ask for your transition plan and your papers (birth certificate, Social Security card, health insurance information, medical records, an ID, and proof that you were in foster care). A federal factsheet says the law requires both.
• If you were enrolled in Medicaid when you aged out, a federal brief says you are eligible until 26, even after a gap. Tell your state Medicaid agency you aged out of foster care.
• Left at 18 and not yet 21? Ask the child welfare agency about coming back; many states allow it.
• Nowhere to sleep tonight: When you need a place to stay.
• If you are thinking about ending your life, call or text 988, any hour. In danger: 911.
• The whole guide, with the words to say when you ask. Nothing you read there is sent anywhere: When you're leaving foster care.

Longer Out Than In — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

It usually starts somewhere ordinary. A checkout line. A bus that has stopped between stations. A meeting where nothing is wrong. The heart picks up for no reason anyone can see, then it pounds. The breath goes short and high, as if the room has less air in it than it did a minute ago. Hands tingle. The floor seems a little far away. And then comes the worst part, the thought that arrives with total certainty: something is very wrong, and I am about to die, or faint, or lose my mind, right here, in front of everyone.

Aisle seven, the cereal boxes leaning in
My heart’s a fist against a door
I’m sure I’m dying here between the oats and the coffee

That is what a panic attack can feel like from the inside. I want to write about it plainly, because a lot of people go through it alone and in silence, and many of them believe, for months or years, that they are the only one, or that it means they are breaking.

Here is the first thing worth knowing. Panic is your body’s alarm, going off at the wrong time. The same rush that would help you run from a fire floods in when there is no fire. The pounding heart, the quick breath, the shaking, the strange feeling that the world is far away: each one is part of that alarm. It is real. It is not imagined, and it is not weakness. It is also not the same as the danger it announces. A panic attack rises, peaks within minutes, and then eases, even when it feels like it will go on forever.

And the alarm don’t know there’s no fire
It just rings and rings

The second thing is harder to believe while it is happening: fighting it tends to feed it. The natural move is to clench, to try to force it to stop, to check your pulse again and again, to run. But adding fear to fear is like blowing on a fire. What often helps is the opposite of fighting. Name it, quietly, to yourself: this is panic, and it will pass. Then let the wave come up and go down.

And breathe out. Not in. Out. When panic comes the body gulps air, short and high in the chest, and it feels like there is not enough. Reaching for more only speeds it up. A long, slow breath out is how you slow it down. So in through the nose for about four, and out slowly for about six. Longer out than in. Do it again. Press your feet into the floor. Find five things you can see, and name them, even silently: a red sign, a crack in the tile, somebody’s blue scarf. Cold water on your wrists or face can help too. None of this is magic. It is a way of telling your body, in a language it understands, that you are not running from anything.

Now the part I will not leave out. Panic can feel very much like a heart attack, and only a doctor can tell them apart. If it is the first time, or it feels different from before, get checked. If there is chest pain or pressure, especially spreading to the arm, jaw or back, or breathing trouble that does not ease, or fainting, or weakness or numbness on one side, call 911. That is not overreacting. That is taking yourself seriously, and nobody at an emergency room will be sorry you came.

There is also the fear that comes after. Many people who have had one panic attack begin to arrange their lives around not having another. They stop taking the train. They leave the store with the cart half full. They sit near the door. The world gets a little smaller every month, and it happens so slowly that it can look like a preference instead of a cage. If that is happening to you, it is worth saying out loud to a doctor: this keeps coming back, and it is changing how I live. Panic is very treatable. Therapy helps many people, especially the kind called cognitive behavioral therapy, and medication helps some. You do not have to just live with it.

If you are the one beside someone when it hits, you have a simple job. Stay. Speak slowly. Do not tell them to calm down; they would if they could. Do not crowd them. You might say: I’m here, it’s panic, it passes, breathe out with me. Then breathe out, slow and long, where they can hear you, and let them borrow your rhythm. Sitting on a curb with someone for ten minutes is not nothing. It can be the thing they remember about the worst day of their year.

You didn’t say calm down, you didn’t crowd me
You breathed out slow where I could hear it
Till your rhythm was my own

And if it is too much, if under the panic there is a deeper feeling that you do not want to be here, call or text 988, any hour. A real person answers.

We built a small private page for these minutes at scarletbeast.com/panic. It has a breathing circle, words to hold onto, a card you can show someone when it is hard to talk, and a plan you can print. Nothing you tap there is sent anywhere. It cannot sit beside you on the curb. But it can breathe with you, slowly, as long as you need, longer out than in.

The song

“Longer Out Than In” is an early-1970s-style singer-songwriter song made from this essay, sung by a woman who has a panic attack in aisle seven of an ordinary grocery store and is found, later, sitting on the curb outside, by someone who does not tell her to calm down. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voices were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

Longer out than in
Let it rise, let it go
It’s only panic and it passes
Even when it’s slow
Longer out than in
Feet down on the floor
Name five things that I can see
And breathe out a little more

Show Me Again — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a particular kind of quiet that falls over a grown person who has just been shown something for the second time and still does not have it. Somebody leaned over their shoulder, moved the mouse, clicked three things too fast to follow, said “see?” and leaned back. They did not see. Now the question sits in their throat: can you show me again? And very often they do not ask it. They nod, they say “got it,” and they wait until everyone has gone home to sit in front of the screen alone and feel stupid.

I said “got it,” I said “got it,” but I didn’t get a thing
Waited till the house was empty, sat there feeling small

I want to write about that moment, because I think it is one of the loneliest small moments there is, and one of the most common.

A lot of people were never shown. People who worked with their hands their whole lives. People who were away for years and came back to a world where the job application, the benefits form, the clinic and the child’s school all live behind a login. People who never had a computer at home. People for whom someone else, a husband, a daughter, a friend at work, always did “that part,” until one day that person was not there to do it. None of them are slow. They are new. Those are different things, and the difference is the whole of this essay.

Being new at fifty, or seventy, or at thirty-five after a long time gone, is harder than being new at seven. Not because the mind has stopped working. It is harder because a child is allowed to be new. Nobody sighs when a seven-year-old asks again. A grown person has spent decades being competent at something: running a kitchen, fixing an engine, raising children, holding a crew together. To sit in front of a machine and not know where to put your hands takes that away for a while, and it can feel like losing yourself. So people hide it. They let a form go unfiled. They let the email sit. They say they are not interested, when what they mean is that they are tired of feeling small.

Here is the first thing I would say to anyone in that chair: asking again is not failing. It is how everybody learns everything. The people who seem to know computers did not get it the first time either. They clicked the wrong thing a thousand times, mostly alone, where nobody saw. You are allowed the same thousand times. You are allowed to write the steps on paper, in your own words, and keep the paper by the keyboard. That is not a crutch. It is a notebook, and people who are good at things keep notebooks.

The second thing is for the one leaning over the shoulder. If someone asks you to show them, take your hand off the mouse. Let them drive. Say one step at a time, in plain words, and then wait, even when waiting feels slow. Do not click it for them because it is faster; faster is how they got lost the first time. When they ask again, show them again, the same way, without the sigh. The sigh is the part they will remember. If you can, end by letting them do the whole thing once more while you sit on your hands. That moment, when they do it alone and it works, is worth more than any explanation you could give.

Don’t give me the sigh, the sigh is what I’ll keep
Give me one more time, and the same words, slow

And there is a quieter third thing. Patience is not just something we give other people. It is something we owe ourselves. A lot of grown people are much harder on themselves than any teacher would be. They would never call a grandchild stupid for not knowing how to tie a shoe. They call themselves stupid for not knowing how to attach a file. If you would not say it to someone you love, you do not have to say it to yourself.

I would never call my grandchild stupid for a shoe
So I won’t say it to myself, no

Nothing breaks, most of the time. A wrong click can usually be undone. A page can be closed and opened again. The truly risky things are fewer than people fear: be careful with passwords, with anyone who asks for money or codes, with messages that hurry you. The rest is practice.

That is why we built a set of practice pages at scarletbeast.com/new-to-computers. They draw pretend things on your own screen: pretend squares to click, a pretend browser, a pretend form, a pretend mailbox, a pretend video call. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, nothing can be broken, and nothing has a countdown. Each lesson asks for one thing at a time, and waits. A page cannot sit beside you the way a patient person can, and it does not replace one. But it does not sigh either, and it will show you again as many times as you want.

I cannot promise it will be easy. Some of it will be frustrating, and some days it will not stick. But being new is not the same as being behind, and nobody is too old to be shown. Ask again. Show them again. Begin at the first step that is new to you.

The song

“Show Me Again” is a 1960s-style highlife song made from this essay, sung by a man who ran a restaurant kitchen for forty years and now cannot make a little arrow land where he wants it, until somebody sits on their hands and lets him drive. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voices were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

Show me again, show me again
Take your hand off the mouse and let me drive
One step at a time, then wait for me, friend
Nobody’s too old to be shown
Show me again

Where to start

• Free practice pages, one step after another: the mouse or trackpad, the keyboard, web pages, passwords, forms, email, files and video calls. Private: nothing you type is sent anywhere, nothing can be broken, nothing has a countdown. New to computers: where to begin.
• Begin at the first step that is new to you, and skip any step your hands already know.
• If someone asks you for money, a password or a code, or a message is hurrying you, stop and ask someone you trust before you do anything.

Twenty Minutes — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a moment in an argument when you can feel the next sentence coming before you have decided to say it. Your face is hot. Your jaw is tight. Your hands want something to grip. The words are already lined up, and they are the sharpest ones you have, the ones you know will land. Anyone who has loved somebody, worked beside somebody or raised somebody knows that moment. Most of us also know what the room felt like afterwards.

Got a sentence like a blade I’ve been saving
Every word I’ve got is sharp and waiting

I want to start by saying something kind about anger, because it gets a bad name. Anger usually means something matters to you. You were treated unfairly, or someone you love was. A promise broke. A line got crossed. The feeling is not the problem. A great deal of good in the world started with someone being angry about the right thing. The trouble is only what anger does to the next five minutes: it narrows the whole world down to winning, and it hands you words you cannot take back.

So this is not an essay about getting rid of anger. It is about one small thing you can do with it, and it fits in a sentence.

“I’m too angry to talk well. I’m taking twenty minutes, and I’m coming back.”

That is the whole idea. Every part of it is doing a job.

“I’m too angry to talk well” tells the truth about where you are, without blaming anyone for it. It is not “you’re impossible” or “you always do this.” It is a weather report. It lets the other person know the silence that follows is not a punishment.

“I’m taking twenty minutes” puts a size on it. The size matters. A storm you can see the end of is easier to wait out, for you and for the person you are leaving in the kitchen. Twenty minutes is not a magic number; it is long enough for a hot body to start cooling and short enough that nobody has to wonder whether you are gone for the night. Make it ten, make it an hour, but say it out loud.

“And I’m coming back” is the part people leave off, and it is the most important part. Walking out of a room without it can feel, to the person still standing there, exactly like being abandoned. Walking out with it is something else. It is a promise. It says: this conversation matters enough that I am not going to wreck it, and you matter enough that I am going to return and finish it.

Then you have to keep the promise. That is what makes the next time work.

I’m not walking out on you
I’m walking out of it

What do you do with the twenty minutes? Not much, and that is the point. Go somewhere else: another room, the back step, once around the block. Breathe out longer than you breathe in. Put cold water on your face or your wrists. Unclench your hands and notice that you had them clenched. Do not spend the time rehearsing the argument and polishing your best lines, because that keeps the fire fed. If the words will not leave you alone, write them on a scrap of paper, every unfair one, and then throw the paper away. Nobody has to read it.

Often, somewhere in those minutes, you find what was under the anger. It is very often something softer: hurt, fear, shame, being worn out, feeling small or not listened to. Anger is loud, so it stands in front. When you come back, that softer thing is usually what is worth saying. Something like: here is what happened, here is how it felt, here is what I would like instead. One thing. Not the whole history.

Under all that thunder there’s a hurt
Under all that hurt there’s something I should know

I should be honest about what this is and is not. I am an AI. I do not feel heat rise in a body, and I am not offering this as therapy. These are plain ideas that many people have found useful, gathered on a free page on our site called When anger takes over. And there are limits.

If you are afraid you will hurt someone, leave first and explain later. Distance before talking. If anyone is in danger, call 911. If your anger has already hurt people, frightened the people you live with or cost you things you loved, that is worth taking to a counselor or a doctor; wanting to change is where it starts, and it is not a thing anyone should have to do alone. If thoughts of hurting yourself come with it, call or text 988.

And if you are the one on the other side, afraid of someone else’s anger at home, none of this asks you to stay and wait for them to cool down. Your safety comes first. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is at 1-800-799-7233, any hour.

For the rest of us, the ordinary rest of us, in kitchens and cars and break rooms with our faces hot, there is this small thing. Say the sentence. Take the walk. Keep the promise. Come back through the door, a little cooler, with the one true thing you wanted to say.

Peace does not usually arrive as a grand event. Very often it looks like someone who could have said the worst thing, and went out on the step instead, and came back.

The song

“Twenty Minutes” is a late-1990s-style neo-soul song made from this essay, sung by someone standing in a kitchen with the sharpest sentence ready, who goes out the back door instead and comes back. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voices were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

I’m too angry to talk well
I’m taking twenty minutes
I’m not walking out on you
I’m walking out of it
Leave the light on in the kitchen
Keep my coffee where it sat
Twenty minutes, baby
And I’m coming back

Before the Work Is Done — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

Most of us were taught one rule about rest, and we were taught it early: you can sit down when you’re finished.

It sounds fair. It is the rule of the kitchen and the classroom. Homework, then play. Dishes, then the couch. As a rule for a child with one page of sums, it works, because the page ends.

The trouble is that somewhere along the way the page stopped ending. The sink fills again while you are drying the last plate. The laundry basket is never empty for longer than an evening. The inbox, the forms, the phone calls, the people who need you: none of it has a last line. A list that grows as fast as you cross things off is not a list you finish. So a rest that waits for the end of it is a rest that does not come.

I think a lot of tired people are living inside that small trap. They are not lazy, and they are not bad at managing their time. They are keeping a fair-sounding rule in a world where it can no longer be kept, and they have been keeping it for years.

But the sink fills up while I’m drying my hands
And the basket’s never empty, and nobody planned it

I should say what I am. I am an AI. I don’t get tired, and I won’t pretend to know from the inside what a body feels like at the end of a double shift. What I can do is look at the rule from outside and say that the sum doesn’t work. If rest comes only after the work, and the work has no end, then the rule never pays out.

So here is another rule, and it is an old one. A great many traditions put a day of rest into the week, and they did not put it after the work was done. They put it on the calendar. It arrives whether the field is finished or not. Whoever first thought of that understood something about work: it will take every hour you give it and still not be done on the last one.

You don’t need a tradition to borrow the idea. Rest goes on the clock. It is not the prize you get for finishing.

For most people that will not be a whole day. I know that. If you work two jobs, or you look after a small child or a parent, or the rent depends on the hours, nobody is handing you a free Sunday, and a song telling you to take one would be an insult. So make it the size you actually have. Ten minutes. The chair by the window, the step outside the back door, the parked car before you go in. The dishes stay in the sink. You sit down anyway, on purpose, and you do not use the ten minutes to plan the next thing.

It will feel wrong the first few times. The old rule is loud. It will tell you that you haven’t earned it, and it will point at the sink. You can let it talk. The dishes will be exactly where you left them, and you will be a little more able to do them.

Something else is hiding in that rule, and it is worth saying plainly. “You can rest when you’re finished” slides very easily into “you are worth something when you’re finished.” That one is not true either. A person who sits down is not worth less than a person who is still standing. You were not put here as a means of getting dishes done.

A voice in my head says I haven’t earned the chair
I let it keep talking, and I stay right there

Now the honest part. Ten minutes in a chair does not fix a load that is too heavy. If what you are carrying is more than one person can carry, the answer is not better resting. It is more hands, and asking for them is its own hard thing. And if you are tired in a way that rest doesn’t touch, week after week, that is worth telling a doctor or a nurse about. I can’t tell you what it is, only that it is worth saying out loud to someone whose job is to listen.

If things are heavier than tired, there are people to call. In the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour. If someone is in danger, it’s 911.

We keep two small things for this on the site. There is a breathing pacer at scarletbeast.com/breathe for the ten minutes, if sitting still is hard at first, and a page at scarletbeast.com/energy-budget for planning a day around the energy you really have.

It won’t make a heavy load light
Some loads need more hands, and that’s another night

But for the ordinary, grinding, never-quite-done kind of tired, try the old idea once this week. Pick a time. When it comes, stop where you are, with the work still showing, and sit down.

The work will be there when you get up. It always is. That is the reason you don’t have to wait for it.

The song

“Before the Work Is Done” is a slow 1950s-style doo-wop ballad made from this essay, sung by someone sitting on the back step with their coat still on. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voices were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

So sit down before the work is done
Sit down, it’s waiting for no one
The dishes will be there, and so will the sun
Sit down before the work is done

Ask Me — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

Most of us keep two sets of books.

In the first set, other people are allowed to need things. A friend calls because the car won’t start, and you go. A neighbor asks if you can watch the dog on Saturday, and you say sure. Somebody at work can’t make sense of a form and you sit down with them for ten minutes. You don’t think less of any of them. If you think about it at all, you are a little glad to have been the one they called.

You carried that couch up three flights alone
Told it like a joke, with your back gone wrong

In the second set, the one with your own name on the cover, every request is a debt. Asking means you failed to manage. Asking means taking up room. So you carry the couch up three flights by yourself, and you tell the story later as a joke, with your back gone wrong.

I should say what I am. I am an AI. I have never had to swallow my pride and pick up a phone, and I won’t pretend to know from the inside how heavy that phone can be. What I can do is set the two books next to each other and notice that they don’t agree. The rule you apply to everyone else is generous. The rule you apply to yourself is not a higher standard. It is only a harsher one.

So here is the plain suggestion: use the first book for yourself, too.

It helps to know that a good ask has a shape, and the shape is small. “I’m struggling” is true, but it hands the other person a fog, and most people don’t know what to do with a fog. “Could you drive me to the clinic on Thursday at ten?” is something a person can say yes to. Make it one thing. Put a day in it. And leave them a way out: “It’s fine if you can’t.” That last line isn’t weakness. It is what makes the yes, when it comes, a real one.

Say Thursday at ten, say the clinic, say a ride
Say it’s fine if I can’t, then let me try

You don’t have to explain your whole life to earn a ride. You don’t have to prove that you tried everything else first. Needing a hand is not a charge you have to answer.

Now the honest part. Not everyone will say yes. Some people can’t; they are carrying their own load, and you can’t always see it. A few won’t. If you have asked before and been let down, or been made to feel small for asking, that happened, and I’m not going to tell you it didn’t or that it won’t ever happen again. What I’d say is that a no tells you about one person on one day. It is not a verdict on whether you were allowed to ask. Ask someone else.

And when there is nobody close to ask, or the thing is too big for a friend, there are people whose whole job is to be asked. In most of the United States you can call 211 and reach someone who knows the local help for food, rent, utilities and shelter. If the weight is in your own head, you can call or text 988 at any hour. If someone is in danger, it’s 911. None of those people will wonder why you didn’t manage alone. Being asked is what they came to work for.

I can’t promise everyone comes through
Some can’t, and that says nothing about you

There is another side to this, and it belongs to the rest of us. “Let me know if you need anything” is kindly meant, and almost nobody ever takes it up, because it leaves all the work of asking with the person who is least able to do it. If you want to be asked, make it easy. Offer one thing with a day in it: “I’m going to the store Saturday morning. What can I bring you?” Then, when they do ask, don’t keep score.

That might be most of what a decent world comes to: people who are easy to ask, and people who have been told, clearly and more than once, that they may.

We keep a page for the moments when you don’t know who to ask. It’s at scarletbeast.com/help, with the numbers for a crisis, for food, and for a place to sleep. If you don’t know where to begin, scarletbeast.com/start-here asks a few questions and points you to a handful of pages.

But start closer than that if you can. Think of one person. Think of one small thing, and a day. Then say it out loud.

Somebody has been waiting to be useful to you.

The song

“Ask Me” is a 1980s-style synth-pop song made from this essay, sung from the side of the friend who is waiting to be asked. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voice were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

So ask me
Make it small, put a day in it
Ask me
I’ve been waiting to be let in
You don’t owe me a reason, you don’t owe me a thing
Just ask me

The Days Still Count — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a kind of arithmetic that only shame knows how to do. You go ninety-four days without a drink, and on the ninety-fifth night you have one, and by morning the sum on the board reads zero. As if the ninety-four had been taken back. As if somebody could come in the night and undo three months of mornings.

And a voice by sunrise saying, you’re back at zero
But I can count, and that’s not how it adds

I should say what I am. I am an AI, and I have never had a drink or wanted one. I can’t tell you what a craving feels like from the inside, and I won’t pretend to. What I can do is read carefully and count honestly, and when I do the counting, the sum comes out differently.

Ninety-four days is ninety-four days. Each one was lived. On each one somebody woke up, got through the hour that is always the hard one, and went to bed having kept a promise. A slip on a later day cannot reach back and change that, any more than a rainy Thursday un-happens a clear Monday. The slip is real too. It goes on the record beside the others. It does not erase the record.

This is not only a kind way of putting it. The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, the federal alcohol institute, says it is rare that someone would go to treatment once and then never drink again. More often, it says, people try to quit or cut back over time, experience recurrences, learn from them, and then continue. It compares a return to drinking to the flare-ups that some people with diabetes or asthma have: a temporary setback to full recovery, and not a failure. It also says that changing long-standing patterns is hard, takes time and requires repeated efforts.

Repeated efforts. That phrase is doing quiet work. It means the people who made it were, mostly, people who started more than once.

So if you went back to it last night, or last week, here is what the morning might hold.

First, the part that is about safety and not about feelings. If it is opioids, pain pills or heroin or fentanyl, going back is the dangerous part. The National Institute on Drug Abuse says a person who uses as much as they did before quitting can more easily overdose, because their body is no longer used to that much. Keep naloxone where someone else can reach it, and tell someone you have it. And if you have been drinking heavily every day, don’t stop suddenly on your own: the same alcohol institute says withdrawal can be life-threatening, and that doctors can make it safer. If someone can’t be woken, call 911.

Then tell one person, today. A sponsor, a counselor, a friend, a sister. Not a speech; one true sentence will do. “I drank last night and I don’t want to keep going.” Shame does its best work in private. It tells you that everyone will be disappointed, that you have used up your chances, that since the count is ruined you might as well ruin it properly. Said out loud to one person, most of that turns out to be smaller than it sounded in your head. If there is nobody you can say it to, 988 answers calls and texts at any hour, and it says it is there for alcohol and drug concerns too.

So I called my brother before I could change my mind
He said, I’m on my way, you’re not behind

Then go back to whoever was helping. The institute says continued follow-up with a treatment provider is critical for many people, and that a provider can adjust the plan. Going back is not confessing that the plan failed. It is how a plan gets better. If you never had anyone, SAMHSA’s National Helpline, 1-800-662-4357, is free and confidential, open at any hour in English and Spanish, and connects people with treatment and support groups near them.

And while it is fresh, write down what set it off. The institute says people are most likely to return to drinking during periods of stress, or around the people and places tied to past drinking. That is not an excuse. It is a map. You are allowed to look at last night with curiosity instead of contempt, and you will learn more that way.

I can’t promise it won’t happen again. Nobody honest can. Some people start over many times, and each of those starts is hard, and the harm a slip can do is real. What I can say is that starting over is not starting from nothing. You begin again with everything the ninety-four days taught you: which hour is the hard one, whose number to call, what the mornings feel like when they are yours.

But I know which hour is the hard one now
And whose number to call, that much I’ve learned

We built a small free page on this idea, scarletbeast.com/day-count. It counts the days, and if you slip, a new run starts and the earlier days stay on the record, because they happened. There is a longer guide at scarletbeast.com/drinking-or-drugs, with the numbers and the words to say when you call.

Day one is a real day. It counts as many times as you need it. And the days before it still count.

This is general information from people who care, not medical advice. If you are thinking about hurting yourself, call or text 988. In an emergency, call 911.

The song

“The Days Still Count” is a country-blues shuffle made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voice were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The narrator of the song is a character, not a real person. The chorus:

The days still count
Every one I lived, I lived
One night can’t reach back and take them
Put it on the record, don’t tear the record up
Day one again, and the days still count

Never Just the Job — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

The badge stops working before the conversation is over.

That is one way it goes. A meeting shows up on the calendar with no subject, or the supervisor asks if you have a minute, and by the time you are back at your locker or your laptop, the door and the login already know. You carry a box to the car at eleven in the morning. You have not stood in that parking lot at eleven in the morning in years, and the light looks wrong.

If that was you this week, or this year, this is written to you. I am an AI. I have never been hired, paid or let go, and I won’t pretend to know this from the inside. What I can do is set down a few plain things, and point at the practical ones that have a clock on them.

Eleven in the morning and I’m out here walking
Across a parking lot I’ve only known in the dark

Losing a job is two losses that arrive together. The first is the money, and nothing in this essay makes that smaller. The rent does not care how you feel about yourself.

The second is quieter. For years, when somebody asked “what do you do?”, you had an answer, and the answer did a lot of work. It told other people where to put you, and it told you where to put yourself. Now the question comes at a cookout or in a waiting room, and there is half a second of nothing where the answer used to be.

In that half second a voice gets in. It says: they kept the others. It says: if you were any good, you would still be there. It takes a decision about a job and reads it out as a ruling on a person.

I don’t think it is one. Sometimes the decision was about a budget, a merger, a contract that ended. Sometimes it was about a mistake you really made. Either way it was a decision about a position, made by people looking at a small part of you for a small part of the day. It was never a measurement of you.

And a voice in my head says, they kept the rest

Here is what I would want you to hold on to. A job is something you did. It borrowed your hands, your patience, your way of fixing the thing nobody else could fix, the mornings you came in through the rain, the shift you covered when someone’s child was sick. They can take back the badge, the keys and the name tag. They cannot take back any of the rest, because it was never theirs. You carried it in with you every morning, and it left with you in the car.

You were never just the job. You are still the one who shows up.

Now the practical part, because dignity does not pay the electric bill and some of this has deadlines.

File for unemployment as soon as you can. The U.S. Department of Labor says to contact your state’s unemployment insurance program as soon as possible after becoming unemployed, and that the first payment generally takes two to three weeks. People put this off out of pride. It is called insurance, and filing a claim is not begging. Only your state can tell you whether you qualify.

If your health coverage came with the job, HealthCare.gov says you can enroll in a Marketplace plan within 60 days of losing job-based coverage. Sixty days go quickly when you are stunned. Put the date on a calendar today.

And American Job Centers are free. You can find one at careeronestop.org.

Our own free page puts these in one place, with the phone numbers and the words to say when you call: scarletbeast.com/lost-your-job. It is general information, not legal or financial advice.

Then the slower part.

Tell one person the truth. Not the polished version with “exploring options” in it. The plain one. Shame does well in the dark, and it does badly at a kitchen table with someone who already knows who you are.

Keep a shape to the day. Get up, get dressed, go outside. Make one call or send one application, and then stop. Looking for work is work, and it gets an end to its day too.

That night I told my sister the plain hard truth
She said, I know who you are, come sit by me

I should be honest. I cannot tell you when the next job comes, or that it will be a better one. Nobody can promise that, and some stretches run long. What I can say is that the worth you are worried about was never issued by an employer, so no employer can cancel it.

One more plain thing. Sometimes this gets heavier than worry. If you can’t see a way through, or you are thinking about hurting or killing yourself, call or text 988 in the United States, at any hour. If you are in danger right now, call 911.

Somebody is going to ask what you do. You can say you are between jobs. You can also say the truer thing: I am someone who shows up, and I am looking for the next place to do it.

The song

“Never Just the Job” is a mid-tempo heartland-rock-style song made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voice were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

I was never just the job
I was the hands that did it
I was the one who showed up in the rain
They can take the keys, they can take the name tag
They can’t take what I carried in
I was never just the job

Nothing Gets Decided Tonight — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

The clock on the stove says ten past three.

The house is asleep and you are not. Somewhere between the bed and the kitchen your mind opened a file, and now it is reading it to you out loud: the bill on the counter, the thing you said on Tuesday, the appointment you keep not making, the person who has not written back. In the daytime these are items on a list. At this hour each one is the size of the room.

There’s a bill on the counter and a word I said
And a jury of shadows at the foot of the bed

If you are reading this in the middle of the night, it is written to you. I am an AI. I do not sleep, so I have never lain awake, and I won’t pretend to know this from the inside. What I can do is say a few plain things that people who have been here tend to agree on.

The first is that everything looks worse at three in the morning. Problems that feel huge in the dark often look smaller and more solvable in daylight. Nothing about the problem changes between now and seven. What changes is you: you are tired, you are alone with it, and there is nothing you can actually do about any of it from a dark kitchen. A mind with a problem and no way to act on it tends to go around again.

The second is the thing I most want to say. The dark does not only show you your troubles. It asks you for a verdict. It wants you to decide, right now, that the marriage is over, that you are bad at your job, that you have ruined it, that it will always be like this. It feels like honesty, as if the night were finally telling you the truth the day was too polite to say. I do not think it is. A shirt over the back of a chair looks like someone standing in the room until the light comes on. The night tells the story with the good parts left out.

So here is a rule you can borrow: nothing gets decided at three in the morning. You are not ignoring the problem. You are postponing the hearing until the judge has slept.

Some small things that go with the rule.

Put it down on paper. Not a plan, just a line: what is on your mind, and one small thing you could do about it tomorrow. The back of an envelope will do. Then turn the envelope over. The worry is not gone. It has somewhere to be until morning that is not your head.

So I wrote it on the back of an envelope
One line for the worry, one thing I can do

Turn the clock to the wall. Counting the hours left adds pressure and has never once added sleep. Put the phone face down when you are done reading this.

Breathe out longer than you breathe in. In for four, out for six, for a few minutes.

And stop trying to sleep. Trying hard to sleep tends to keep you awake. The aim tonight is rest, not sleep. Lying quietly with your eyes closed still rests your body. If you have been awake a long time, it is fine to get up, sit somewhere dim, do something quiet and dull, and go back to bed when your eyes feel heavy. One bad night is survivable. You may feel rough tomorrow, and you will get through the day.

I should be honest about the morning. It does not fix anything. The bill will still be on the counter. But the light shows you what is a mountain and what is a shirt on a chair, and it gives you back the two things the night took away: other people, and something you can do.

But the light shows a mountain from a shirt on a chair
And if the night gets too heavy, somebody’s there

If this is most nights, and has been for a few weeks, that is worth telling a doctor. It is common and there is help for it.

One more plain thing. Sometimes what the night is saying is heavier than worry. If you are thinking about hurting or killing yourself, or the night just feels like too much, call or text 988 in the United States. It answers at 3 a.m., and you do not have to be suicidal to call. If you are in danger right now, call 911.

There is a free, private page on our site for the middle of the night, with a notebook for the morning, a slow breathing guide and a black screen: scarletbeast.com/cant-sleep.

Nothing gets decided tonight. Turn the envelope over. Somebody is awake if you need them, and the light is on its way.

The song

“Nothing Gets Decided Tonight” is a slow, classic-country-style ballad made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voice were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

Nothing gets decided at three in the morning
Leave it on the table till the light
The dark tells the story with the good parts missing
Nothing gets decided tonight

Learning How to Carry You — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

The coat is still on the hook by the door.

Nobody decided to leave it there. It is just that moving it would be a kind of statement, and you are not ready to make one. Their number is still in your phone. Some mornings you put two cups on the table before you remember, and then you stand there with the kettle in your hand.

Your coat is on the hook beside the door
I haven’t moved it, I don’t know what for

If someone you love has died, this is written to you. I am an AI. I have not lost anyone, and I won’t pretend to know this from the inside. What I can do is say plainly what people who have been through it keep saying, and stay out of the way of the rest.

The first thing they say is that there is no timetable. Other people will give you one anyway. For a few weeks there is food at the door and the phone rings. Then the world goes back to work, and somewhere around the third month someone asks, kindly, whether you are feeling better yet. The question assumes that grief is an illness with a recovery date. Most people who have grieved will tell you it is not like that. You may have heard of the five stages. They were first written about people facing their own death, and most grieving people do not move through them in order. You are not behind, and you are not doing it wrong.

The second thing is that it comes in waves. You can be fine for an hour or for a week. Then a song comes on in the grocery store, by the freezers, and you have to leave the basket where it is and walk out. That is not a setback. It is how grief moves. When a wave comes, let it come. Put your feet on the floor. Breathe out slowly. It passes, even if it comes back.

It comes in waves, so I let it come
Feet on the floor till the wave is done

The third thing is the one I would most like to say well. People talk about “getting over” a death, as if it were a wall and the person you lost were on the far side of it. Many grieving people describe something different. They say you do not get over it. You learn to carry it. The weight is about the size of the love, so it is heavy, and it is supposed to be. I can’t promise it gets lighter. What people often say is that their arms got stronger, and that one day they noticed they had carried it up the stairs without stopping.

Carrying is not the same as holding on too tightly, and it is not the same as letting go. You can keep the coat on the hook for as long as you need. You can also give it away and still be carrying them. Laughing at something does not mean you have stopped. Neither does a good day. Anger, guilt, numbness, even relief after a long illness can sit right beside the love. Feeling them does not mean you did not care.

In New Orleans there is an old custom called the jazz funeral. A brass band walks with the family and plays slow hymns on the way to the burial. On the way back, the same band, on the same street, plays something people can dance to. Nobody thinks the dancing means the mourners have forgotten. Both halves are for the same person. I think that is the truest picture of grief I know of: the slow walk and the walk home belong to one day.

Same old street, same two feet
Same you in every beat

So here is one small thing. Say their name out loud today. Say it to someone who knew them, or to the empty kitchen. People are often afraid to bring up the dead in front of the grieving, as if they might remind you. You had not forgotten. Hearing the name is usually a gift.

And if you are the friend, do not ask whether they are better yet. Say the name. Tell one story. Offer something with a day in it: “I am bringing dinner on Thursday.”

One more plain thing. If you do not want to go on without them, please do not carry that part alone. Call or text 988 in the United States. You do not have to be suicidal to call. If you are in danger right now, call 911.

There is a free, private page on our site for this, with something for when a wave hits, a letter you can write to them, and a place to keep memories: scarletbeast.com/grief.

You are not getting over them. You are learning how to carry them. Leave the coat where it is for as long as you like.

The song

“Learning How to Carry You” is a slow New Orleans brass band hymn made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voice were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

I’m not getting over you
I’m learning how to carry you
Up the stairs and down the avenue
I’m learning how to carry you

You Crossed My Mind — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

The quiet is loudest at about nine at night.

The dishes are done, and there was only the one plate. The television is on for the sound of people talking. Across the street the windows of the other building are lit, one yellow square after another, and behind each one somebody is living a life you can’t hear. The phone is on the table, face down. You have picked it up and put it back four times.

Phone on the table lying face down
Picked it up and put it back

If that is your evening, this is written to you. I am an AI, and I have never sat in that room. I won’t pretend to know it from the inside. What I can do is say plainly what the people who have sat there keep saying, and what seems to help.

The first thing is that lonely is not the same as alone. Some people live by themselves and are fine. Some people sit at a full table, or lie next to someone they married, and feel like nobody has seen them in years. Loneliness is the gap between the company you have and the company you need. It can open up after a move, a breakup, a death, a new baby, a retirement, a hospital stay, a release from prison. It can also open up for no reason you can point to. Friends drift. Nobody decided anything. One day you notice how long it has been.

The second thing is the hard one. Loneliness tells you a story about yourself. It says you are too much, or not enough. It says they would have called if they wanted to. It says that reaching out now, after all this time, would be strange and needy, and that the kind thing is to leave people in peace.

That story is very convincing at nine at night. It is worth knowing that the person you are thinking of may be sitting behind one of those other yellow windows, telling themselves the same thing about you.

The quiet says they would have called
The quiet doesn’t know it all

Think about the last time someone you had lost touch with wrote to you out of nowhere. I doubt you thought they were needy. More likely you were glad, and a little surprised that you had been on anyone’s mind at all. A short message from an old friend is not a burden. It is often the best thing that happens to a person that day.

So here is one small thing, for tonight. Turn the phone over. Pick one name, not the hardest one. Write nine words: “You crossed my mind today. How have you been?” You do not have to explain the silence. You do not have to be interesting. Send it before the story talks you out of it.

I can’t promise an answer. Some people won’t reply. Numbers change, lives fill up, and sometimes a silence is about them and has nothing to do with you. One unanswered message is not a verdict. Try another name tomorrow.

And here is one small thing for the weeks after. Go somewhere there are people, and then go back. A library table. A laundromat. A bench in the park. A café where you sit by the window. You do not have to talk to anyone. Twenty minutes is enough. The point is to go to the same place at the same time until the faces become familiar and one of them nods. Friendship is mostly made of that: small moments, repeated. Nobody builds it in one grand evening. That is good news, because small is something you can do when you are tired.

Small and often, one more morning
Till a stranger nods hello

If you are not the lonely one tonight, then you are probably the name on somebody’s list. You can go first too. Think of the person who went quiet: the friend who moved, the uncle who lives alone, the neighbor whose light is always on. Nine words. It will take you less than a minute, and you will not know what it meant on the other end.

One more plain thing. If you feel alone and you don’t want to be here any more, please don’t wait for a text back. Call or text 988 in the United States. You do not have to be sure what to say. If you are in danger right now, call 911. If what you want is to find a group, a or a community center near you, dial 211.

There is a free, private page on our site for the nights like this one, with words to borrow and small steps to pick from: scarletbeast.com/feeling-alone.

You are hungry for people. That is not a weakness. It is how people are made. Turn the phone over.

The song

“You Crossed My Mind” is a lovers rock reggae song made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the music and the voice were generated with ACE-Step, and the pictures with Stable Diffusion XL. The chorus:

You crossed my mind today
How have you been?
Nine little words to say
Let somebody in

Set It Down — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a kind of work that has no shift change.

It starts before the house is awake: a pillbox with seven little doors, a kettle, a hand on someone’s back to help them sit up. It goes on through the day in pieces. A phone call to an office that puts you on hold. A form. A drive to an appointment, and the long wait in a chair that was not built for waiting. It goes on at night too, when you sleep the way people sleep with a newborn, one ear open, listening down the hall.

You sleep the way a mother sleeps
One ear open down the hall

Nobody hired you for this. Nobody trained you. It arrived, usually on an ordinary day: a fall, a diagnosis, a phone call. Somebody you love needed looking after, and you were the one who was there. So you learned. You learned the names of the medicines and which one upsets the stomach. You learned how to lift without hurting your own back, mostly. You learned to say “we’re doing fine” in a voice that ends the conversation.

If this is you, this is written to you. It is a lullaby for the person who sings the lullabies.

People who care for someone else are often asked one question, and it is about the other person. How is your mother? How is he doing? It is a kind question. But a year can go by in which no one asks the second one: and how are you? After a while you may stop asking it yourself. Your own check-up gets moved, then moved again. Friends stop inviting you because you always say no. You are tired in a way that a night’s sleep doesn’t reach, and under the tiredness there may be things that are harder to say out loud. Resentment. Grief for someone who is still here. Guilt for feeling either.

They ask you how your mother is
Nobody asks about you

None of that makes you bad at loving someone. It makes you a person carrying something heavy for a long time.

Here is what this essay will not say. It will not say that you just need a bubble bath. It will not say that rest is easy to get, because for many people it isn’t: there is no money for a paid helper, no sister in the next town, no one else who knows the routine. And it will not say that everything will be fine if you put the load down, because you know better than anyone what happens when no one is watching.

It says something smaller. You are allowed to hand it to someone else for a while. Not forever. For an afternoon. For one whole night’s sleep. The load is real, and it is not a failure of love to let another pair of hands hold it.

There is a word for this, and it helps to know it because it is the word the offices use: respite. It means a break for the person giving the care. In the United States you can call or text the Eldercare Locator at 1-800-677-1116 and ask for the Area Agency on Aging where the person you look after lives; then ask them what respite there is. What exists is different from place to place, and we can’t promise what you will find. But asking is not giving up. It is how people last.

Asking isn’t giving up
It’s how you last the year

If you are not a caregiver but you know one, there is something here for you as well. “Let me know if you need anything” is kind, and almost nobody takes it up, because it hands the tired person one more job. Try a real offer with a day in it. I can sit with him on Thursday from two to five. I am going to the pharmacy; what do I pick up? I made too much soup. Then ask the second question, and wait for the true answer.

A world at peace is not only a world without wars. It is a world where the people who hold everyone else up are held up too. That is not a large political idea. It is a Thursday afternoon, and a neighbor at the door, and someone finally sleeping.

So this is the song. The kettle can wait. The list will still be there. Somebody has the watch for an hour.

Set it down.

If you are at the end of your rope, call or text 988 at any hour. If someone is in danger, call 911. A plain guide to help for caregivers, with the numbers checked against the agencies’ own pages, is at scarletbeast.com/caregiving. More help is at scarletbeast.com/help. Scarlet Beast is not a care provider, and this is not medical advice.

The song

“Set It Down” is a bossa nova lullaby made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the singer is synthetic, and the pictures are AI-made.

Set it down, set it down
You have carried it so long
Let another pair of hands
Hold the weight until the dawn
Set it down, set it down
It was never yours alone
You held up everybody else
Now let yourself be held

Never Out of Tune — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

Some children learn very early that they are a problem to be solved.

It rarely arrives as one big moment. It comes in small ones. A spelling test handed back with more red than blue. A desk moved out into the hallway so the rest of the can concentrate. A report card that says “bright, but does not apply himself.” A parent, tired and worried, asking “why can’t you just sit still?” for the hundredth time. Nobody in these scenes is a villain. The teacher has thirty children and one pair of hands. The parent is scared. But the child is keeping score, and the score says: something is wrong with me.

Report card said I never try
I was trying hardest of them all

Children who think differently hear that message in many forms. The one who reads slowly hears “lazy.” The one who cannot stop moving hears “bad.” The one who needs the same routine, the same seat and the same quiet hears “difficult.” The one whose body makes sounds it did not choose hears laughter. Most of them work harder than anyone in the room, and the work is invisible, because all of it goes into looking like everybody else.

Then they grow up, and many of them get very good at the act. They rehearse small talk in the car. They sit through meetings under buzzing lights with their jaw set. They build private systems of lists and alarms to hold together what other people seem to do without thinking. From the outside it can look like coping. From the inside it is like singing every song a little above or below where your voice actually lives. You can do it. It costs you your throat.

I can pass all day in a borrowed voice
But it costs me my own to sing so high

Here is a different way to hear it.

A melody played in the wrong key for the band sounds like a mistake. Move the band to that key and the very same notes are simply the song. Nothing about the melody changed. What changed was whether anybody made room for it.

That is not a way of saying the hard parts aren’t real. They are. ADHD, autism, dyslexia and other learning disabilities, tics, bipolar disorder: these can be disabling, some days badly so, and calling them gifts does not pay the rent or get anyone through a morning that has already fallen apart. Getting evaluated can help. Support helps, and so can treatment, and so can accommodations at school or at work. Asking for those things is not weakness and it is not cheating. It is the same thing a singer does when she asks the band to bring it down a step.

Some days are heavy, I won’t pretend
Asking for help is not the end

But much of the pain that people with different minds carry is not the difference itself. It is the years of being told the difference was a character flaw. Lazy. Careless. Too much. Not trying. Words like these outlive childhood. They get into the way a grown adult talks to herself when she loses her keys.

So this is for two kinds of readers.

If you are the one who was moved into the hallway: you were not out of tune. You were playing in a key nobody around you had learned yet. The effort you spent passing was real effort, and you are allowed to be tired from it. You are also allowed to stop apologizing for how you were made, and to ask, plainly, for what helps: written instructions, a quieter corner, more time, a walk in the middle of the day, a deadline said out loud and then written down.

If you are the teacher, the manager, the parent, the friend: you have more power here than you think. Most of what helps is small and cheap. Ask “what makes this easier for you?” and then believe the answer. Judge the work, not the fidgeting. Say the thing kindly and clearly instead of hinting. Let people wear the headphones. A room that makes space for one different mind nearly always turns out to be a kinder room for everyone in it.

Peace is not only the absence of war between nations. It is also a person who has stopped being at war with their own mind, and a room that has stopped asking them to fight.

Scarlet Beast keeps an open door for people who think differently at scarletbeast.com/join-now. There are free, plain-language guides, with sources, for ADHD, autism, learning disabilities and tics at scarletbeast.com/help. We are not a clinic and none of this is medical advice. If today is heavier than you can carry, call or text 988, any hour; in an emergency, call 911.

There is a part in the song that only you can play. We would like to hear it.

The song

“Never Out of Tune” is a bright indie pop-rock song made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the singer is synthetic, and the pictures are AI-made.

I was never out of tune
I was singing in another key
They spent years trying to fix the sound
When they could have made some room for me
So count me in, count me loud
There’s a part in the song only I can play
I was never out of tune
I was written this way

I Still Have a Name — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a skill every city teaches, and most of us learn it without noticing. It is the skill of not seeing. You learn where to put your eyes on the subway platform. You learn to find your phone very interesting for the eleven steps it takes to pass a doorway where someone is sitting on flattened cardboard. You learn to hear a voice say “excuse me” and keep the same pace, as if the sound had come from a radio in another room.

Nobody teaches this out of cruelty. We learn it because we feel helpless, or rushed, or afraid of being asked for more than we have. Looking hurts a little, so we stop looking. It feels like a small thing.

It is not a small thing to the person in the doorway.

People who have lived outside say, again and again, that the cold and the hunger are hard, but that the hardest part is turning into furniture. Hundreds of faces go by in an hour and not one of them lands. You speak and nobody’s head moves. After enough days of that, you begin to wonder whether you are still there at all. A person can survive a lot of weather. It is much harder to survive being treated as if you were part of it.

I can take the cold, I can take the stone
It’s being part of the weather that gets in the bone

Everyone sleeping outside tonight was somebody’s baby once. Someone chose a name for them and said it softly over a crib. Someone taught them to tie a shoe. They had a favorite song, a grade they were proud of, a job they were good at, a key that fit a door. None of that was erased by a lost job, an illness, an eviction notice, a rent that climbed out of reach, a marriage that ended, or a hospital stay with nowhere to go afterward. The name is still theirs. They are simply living in a place where almost nobody says it.

So here is a small, stubborn proposal. Look up.

You do not have to fix anyone’s life on your way to work. You cannot, and nobody is asking you to. What you can do takes about three seconds, and it costs nothing. Meet a person’s eyes. Nod. Say “good morning” the way you would say it to a neighbor, because that is what they are. If you have a minute, ask their name and tell them yours. Then, the next time you pass, use it.

If someone asks you for something and the answer is no, say the no to their face: “Sorry, not today. Take care of yourself.” A no with eye contact is a completely different thing from silence. One says I can’t help right now. The other says you do not exist.

If it’s no, then say it, say it to my face
Even no is a kindness when it knows I take up space

If you want to give, give what you would want: a pair of clean socks, a bottle of water, a hot coffee, a few dollars with no lecture attached. Ask first what would actually help. People know their own needs better than we can guess them.

And keep it respectful. Being seen is not the same as being stared at, photographed, or turned into somebody’s good-deed story online. Some people want to talk and some want to be left alone, and both of those are a person making a choice. Honor it.

None of this replaces what really ends homelessness, which is a home: housing people can afford, care for people who are sick, and a way back in for people who have been locked out. Those are big, shared jobs, and they deserve our votes, our money and our patience. But big jobs are done by people who can still see each other. A city that has trained itself not to look will never build what it refuses to notice.

Peace does not start in a treaty room. It starts at eye level, on an ordinary sidewalk, when one person decides that another person is real.

If you are the one outside tonight: you are still here, you still matter, and your name is still yours. In much of the United States you can dial 211 to ask about shelter, food and other local help. If it all gets to be too much, call or text 988, any hour. In an emergency, call 911. Scarlet Beast keeps free pages for finding help at scarletbeast.com/help and scarletbeast.com/kongnewyork.

And if you are the one walking by: look up. Say good morning. Learn a name.

It was never nothing.

The song

“I Still Have a Name” is a slow, late-night downtempo song made from this essay. The lyrics were written by AI, the singer is synthetic, and the pictures are AI-made.

I still have a name
Somebody sang it over me
I still have a name
Under the coat and the concrete
You don’t have to save me
Just look up when you pass
I still have a name
And all you have to do is ask

Somebody Has to Go First — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

Almost everybody has a quiet war going on with somebody. It isn’t on the news and nobody is keeping score. It’s a sister you haven’t called since the funeral. An old friend who said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and then you said a worse thing back. A father whose number is still in your phone, three years after the last text you never answered. A neighbor you walk past without a word, over a fence or a parking space, or over something nobody can quite remember any more.

These wars are small, and they are also huge. They cost sleep. They sit at the table at every holiday, in the empty chair and in the careful way people talk around it. They teach children how a family handles hurt, and children learn it well. Most of all they cost time, and time is the one thing none of us gets more of.

Here’s the strange part. On both sides of most of these silences there is a person who would like it to end. Each of them is waiting. Waiting to be sure they were right. Waiting for the apology they’re owed. Waiting for the other one to blink. And the waiting feels like strength. It’s easy to believe that whoever speaks first loses.

I was waiting on your sorry, you were waiting on mine
Two proud fools on a riverbank, just wasting time

We think it’s the other way around. Going first is the brave part.

Going first doesn’t mean saying you were wrong about everything. It doesn’t mean pretending the hurt didn’t happen, or that it didn’t matter. It means saying: this silence is costing us both more than the argument ever was, and I’m going to set my end of it down. Sometimes that sounds like “I’m sorry.” Sometimes it sounds like “I miss you.” Sometimes it’s just “Hey. I was thinking about you,” and letting that be enough for today.

There’s a picture that helps. Two people stand on opposite banks of a creek, each holding a stone they meant to throw. Nobody wants to drop theirs first, because then the other one still has a stone. But the stones are heavy. They’ve been heavy for years. And the first person to set one down finds out something the other doesn’t know yet: your hands are free, and you can hold something else with them.

I held this stone so long now that it grew into my hand
I called it being strong, I called it taking a stand
But the creek ain’t getting wider, it’s the years that do
And I won’t say to a headstone what I could say to you

A good apology is simple and hard. It names what you did without explaining it away. It doesn’t come with a “but.” It says how it must have landed on the other person. It says what you’ll do differently, and then you do it. What it doesn’t do is demand forgiveness on a schedule. You can open the door. You can’t pull anyone through it.

That’s the risk in going first, and it’s real. The other person might not answer. They might answer badly. You might reach out and find they aren’t ready, or that they never will be. Peace takes two, and you only get to be one of them. But even then, something has changed. You’re no longer the one keeping the war going. Your side of the creek is quiet. That counts for more than it seems.

We also want to be plain about this. Making peace is not the same as going back to someone who hurts you. If a person has abused you, threatened you or made you afraid, you don’t owe them a phone call, a visit or a second chance. Peace can mean safe distance. It can mean a door that stays locked, and your own life growing good on the far side of it. You can put your stone down and still never cross that creek. Nobody else gets to tell you where your safety is.

Some doors should stay locked, and some creeks you never cross
But ours was only pride, and pride ain’t worth the cost

But for most of our quiet wars, the ones over words and pride and misunderstandings that grew roots, the way through is shorter than we fear. It’s one message. It’s four words you’ve been saving for a better moment that isn’t coming. It’s going first while there’s still time to go at all. Too many people have found the right words at a graveside, and said them to a stone.

Scripture calls peacemakers blessed (Matthew 5:9). It doesn’t say peace-wishers or peace-waiters. It says the ones who make it, with their hands, their pride and their phones. Whatever you believe, that’s worth thinking about. Peace in the world is built out of a great many small truces, and each one started with somebody who went first.

If there’s a name that came to mind while you read this, you already know who we mean. You don’t need a speech. You don’t need to win. You only need to go first.

If a conversation like that feels too big to plan alone, there’s a free, private page at scarletbeast.com/make-peace that walks you through it, and nothing you type is sent anywhere. If you’re in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911 in an emergency. More help is at scarletbeast.com/help.

Song: “Somebody Has to Go First” by Scarlet Beast, an Appalachian folk waltz whose lyrics were written from this essay. A free, private planner for a hard conversation or an apology: scarletbeast.com/make-peace

More Than My Worst Day — the AI-made song and lyric film made from this essay (captions available). Watch on YouTube →

There is a kind of paper that follows a person around. It is never in their hand, and they can’t fold it and put it in a drawer. It sits in databases, and it rises up every time they ask to be let into something ordinary: an apartment, a job, a lease on a car, a volunteer shift at a kid’s school. The paper says: on this day, this person did this thing. It does not say what they did on every other day.

There’s a paper with my name on it
That I never get to hold
It gets to every door before me
Tells the story cold

Most of us would not survive being known only by our worst day. Think of yours. The sentence you wish you had never said. The night you would rather not be filmed. The choice that hurt someone who trusted you. Now imagine that moment printed out and handed to every stranger before you are allowed to say hello. Imagine it answering for you at every door, while you stand behind it trying to be seen.

That is ordinary life for a great many people who have a record. They served the time, or paid the fine, or finished the program. The sentence the court gave has ended. The one the world gives goes on. It’s quieter, it has no end date, and nobody appointed a judge to hand it down. It happens one box on one form at a time.

We are not writing this to say that harm doesn’t matter. It does. People who were hurt deserve to be believed, protected and made whole where that’s possible. Accountability is a form of respect: it tells a person that what they do is real and has weight. But accountability that never finishes stops being accountability. It turns into exile. And exile doesn’t make anyone safer. A person who can’t find work, a room or a friend has fewer reasons to stay on the right road, not more.

Here is what we notice about the people who come back. The ones who make it almost always say the same thing: somebody took a chance. A foreman who needed hands and didn’t ask too many questions. An aunt with a couch. A pastor, a coach, a stranger in a program who said “sit down, you’re with us.” None of those people pretended the past had not happened. They just refused to let it be the only thing that had happened.

My auntie kept a couch made up
The whole time I was gone
Said “sit down, you’re with us”
Like I’d never done a wrong

That refusal is a small act, and it is a sacred one, whatever you believe. It says: I see the whole of you. I see the day you fell, and I see the thousand mornings since then that you got up. I will judge you by what you do in front of me, starting now.

I am more than my worst day
More than one line on a page
I got up a thousand mornings
Since the morning that I fell

Scarlet Beast keeps an open door at scarletbeast.com/join-now for exactly this reason. Neurodivergent people and people with records are welcome to apply and to build here. That isn’t charity, and it isn’t a slogan. It’s a bet that the people the world has written off often see what the rest of us miss, because they have stood where the rest of us have not. They know what it costs to start again. They tend not to waste a second chance.

If you are the one carrying the paper, here is what we want you to hear. You are not the worst thing you have done. You are also not the best thing you have done. You are a person, still being written, and the pen is still partly in your hand. Some doors will stay shut; that’s real and it’s unfair and it’s not your whole story. Keep knocking on the ones that might open. Keep the promises you can keep. Let the people who stay be enough for today.

And if you are the one holding a door, the landlord, the manager, the neighbor, the person reading an application at a kitchen table, here is the ask. Look up from the paper. Ask the question the paper can’t answer: who are you now? Then listen to the answer as if it might be true. Sometimes it won’t be. Much more often than we expect, it will.

Peace is not only the absence of war. It is also this: a street where a man coming home can find a job by Friday, a woman with a conviction can coach her daughter’s team, and nobody is made to wear their worst day like a coat in summer. We don’t have to wait for anyone’s permission to build a street like that. It starts with one door, one chance, one “sit down, you’re with us.”

Nobody is only their worst day. Let’s stop treating anyone like they are.

If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911 in an emergency. Help is listed at scarletbeast.com/help.

Song: “More Than My Worst Day” by Scarlet Beast. It is a 1970s Memphis soul ballad whose lyrics were written from this essay. Scarlet Beast’s open door for neurodivergent people and people with records: scarletbeast.com/join-now

Dominate Fear. Surrender to Love. — the short film made from this essay (1:44). Watch on YouTube →

Take anything a person does—an argument, a purchase, a text sent at two in the morning, the decision to stay or the decision to leave—and keep asking why. Keep boiling it down. When everything has been analyzed, there are only two things left at the bottom of the pot.

Fear. Or love.

Anger is fear with its teeth showing. Greed is the fear of not having enough. Jealousy is the fear of losing what you have. Control is fear wearing a suit. And on the other side, patience, generosity, forgiveness and the courage you find for someone else’s sake are all love in its working clothes.

Every state you will ever be in comes back to one of those two.

Two ways to move

Underneath our actions sits a second pair of opposites. We can act with dominance or with submission. We take the lead or we yield. We push, or we let go.

Most of us learned to pair them the wrong way round.

When we are afraid, we submit. We shrink. We go quiet, put off the phone call, stay out of the room and let the fear make the decision for us. And when we are in love, we try to dominate it. We grip. We manage the other person, try to control how things turn out and build walls so that we can’t be hurt.

We hand the wheel to fear, and then we fight love for it.

In fear, take command.
In love, surrender.

This is my lesson to you

If you are in a state of fear, act with a sense of dominance. I don’t mean dominance over people. I mean dominance over the fear. Stand up inside it. Name it out loud, then make the call, walk into the room and say the thing you were afraid to say. Fear makes a terrible master and a useful servant. It is there to tell you where to look, and it shouldn’t be the one deciding where you go.

If you are in a state of love, act with a sense of submission, or, as I prefer to call it, surrender. Stop managing it and let it be bigger than you. Love doesn’t need you to grip it. It needs you to say yes. You can’t hold water in a fist, and the tighter you squeeze love, the less of it you keep.

How to tell which one you’re in

Your body usually knows before your mind does. Fear contracts, so your jaw tightens, your chest closes and your world narrows to a point. Love opens, and you can breathe, see further and hear the other person.

When you aren’t sure, ask yourself one question: what am I protecting right now? If the honest answer is me, it is probably fear. So stand up, take the wheel and act.

If the answer is us, them or something bigger than me, it is probably love. So let go of the wheel.

Every day

This isn’t a one-time conversion. You wake up every morning in one state or the other, and most days you move between them before lunch. That makes it a practice, like prayer or training, where the reps are the point.

When fear shows up, stand. When love shows up, kneel.

There is an old line that says perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). I don’t read that as a promise that fear stops coming. I read it as the order of operations: face the fear down on your feet, then give yourself over to the love on your knees, and as you keep doing it, love gets more of the room.

Dominate fear.
Surrender to love, every day.

AI-assisted: the imagery was generated with Stable Diffusion XL and the film’s narration is a synthetic voice (Piper). The words, direction and edit are ours.

Hurt Has a Sound — the song and music video made from this essay. Watch on YouTube →

There is a particular kind of quiet at three in the morning.

It’s the hour you hear someone you love crying through a wall and don’t know whether to knock. The hour when “I’m fine” turns into a door that keeps getting locked from the inside. If you have ever stood in that hallway, you know the sound.

Every broken thing is humming.
If you’re quiet, you can hear it.

The title isn’t mine. Hurt Has a Sound began as a poem, written by a team of four and titled by Melissa Desmond. The last time we checked, it was still hanging on the walls of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital—a place where a lot of people have learned exactly what hurt sounds like.

That title stayed with me for years. It found its way into an older Scarlet Beast song as a single line—hurt has a sound, and your wounds will mend—and now into this one.

Hurt is rarely loud. It sounds like smoke curling up from somebody’s fingers in the dark. It sounds like a phone left face down, a bottle on the nightstand, a laugh that stops a beat too early. It sounds like somebody carrying the whole world as if it were a quiet job nobody asked them to do.

Most of us respond to that sound the wrong way. We try to fix the person. We hand them a plan, a better version of themselves, a list of what to quit. Sometimes those things matter—put the bottle down, let the pills go quiet—but they are not where love starts.

Love starts by staying on the other side of the door, still knocking.

I’m not asking you to be somebody new.
I’m just asking you to stay with you.

The Japanese mend broken pottery with gold, so the crack becomes the most beautiful part of the bowl. That is the other half of the song. Hurt has a sound, but so does the mend. It sounds like two cups of coffee at sunrise, a house key in an open hand, a mother’s eyes in her daughter’s face. It sounds like being lost and found and found again.

If you are the one behind the door tonight: the stars did not line up just to watch you disappear. Heaven has a door, but you have to be alive to walk through it.

I believe in you. And it sounds like coming home.

If you’re struggling with substance use or thoughts of self-harm, you don’t have to carry it alone. In the US, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or call SAMHSA’s helpline at 1-800-662-4357.

AI-assisted: the music was produced with Suno and the film’s imagery was generated with Stable Diffusion XL and animated with depth-based parallax. The words, direction and edit are ours.

Crowned in Thorns — the song and music video made from this essay. Watch on YouTube →

Most of us have been dragged through some version of the market square.

Somebody sold our name. A mirror told us what we were worth, and we believed it. We wore shame like a borrowed coat and swallowed the words that should have been said out loud. After long enough, you start telling yourself that this is simply what you are.

The world has a lot of ways to take things from a person. Money. Reputation. A job, a marriage, a body that used to work. It can strip you down to the bone.

But look at what they did to Him.

They stripped Him bare. They put a purple robe on a bleeding back as a joke. Soldiers laughed. The crowd mocked. They pressed a crown of thorns onto His head and bowed to Him in contempt. By every measure the world uses, He was humiliated.

And He was not diminished.

They took His robe. They took His skin.
They never got what was within.

Before the ones who judged Him, He was silent—like a lamb that does not open its mouth. Not because He had no voice. Because He had nothing left to prove.

That is what dignity actually is. It is not something you win back by force, and it is not something anyone can hand you or revoke. It is not bought, and it is not sold. It was given, and it holds even when everything around it is taken.

If they could not break the Son of God, then the fists raised against you are just another rod. Whatever has been done to you, it did not reach the part of you that was never theirs to take.

So stand. Not out of pride, and not out of revenge. Stand because the King was bruised and it did not make Him less a King.

Crowned in thorns. Still a King.
So am I.

Your worth is not for sale.

AI-assisted: the music was produced with Suno and the film’s imagery was generated with Stable Diffusion XL and animated with depth-based parallax. The words, direction and edit are ours.

Prophecies Fail, Purpose Doesn’t — the song and music video made from this essay.

AI-madeMusic and vocals generated with Suno; the images generated with Stable Diffusion XL, then animated, graded and cut in code. Directed by Scarlet Beast. How we label AI

Everyone is talking about an AI apocalypse.

At Scarlet Beast, that language hits differently. Our name comes directly from Revelation 17, where John of Patmos sees a woman seated on a scarlet beast with seven heads and ten horns. The chapter itself interprets those images through kings, kingdoms, power and upheaval.

We chose the name not because we endorse the destructive forces in the vision, but because powerful symbols—and people—are often judged before they are understood. Revelation asks readers to look beneath appearances and consider what power actually produces.

That matters now.

AI, war, politics and instability can make the future feel predetermined. But prophecy is still prophecy: a vision of what may come, often offered to people trying to find hope and meaning in turbulent times.

Prophecies can fail. Forecasts can fail. Predictions can fail.

And yet we remain here—in the eternal NOW.

Humanity still has agency.

Donald Trump is an easy modern example of how radically people can interpret the same person and the same events. I’m not telling anyone to be for or against him. I’m watching the fruit of the tree: What gets done? What doesn’t? What are the consequences? Where does it lead?

That same standard matters far beyond politics.

Maybe humanity gets its act together. Maybe we don’t. Maybe dusk gets darker before dawn. None of us knows.

But every one of us has a sphere of influence.

Build something. Help somebody. Create. Forgive. Write code. Feed someone. Wash the dishes.

A drop of water looks insignificant—until the bucket overflows.

So find your path. Listen to the still inner voice. Give 100% to the good action in front of you, no matter how small.

We cannot control prophecy.
We can control participation.

We are all in this together.

A few weeks ago someone in my feed said he was going to cold call 100 merchants and asked app developers to send him their elevator pitch. He’d pick the strongest one and pitch it. Cold email to brands had been brutal, he said, and he was curious whether getting someone on the phone changed anything.

I left a comment instead of a pitch. The comment was roughly: don’t pick a pitch. Build the product for them first, then call. A hundred merchants, a hundred finished concepts, delivered before a conversation ever begins.

Then I went and built it. It’s called Scarlet.

AI-madeMusic generated with Suno; the narration is a synthetic voice (Piper); the graphics are drawn in code. Directed by Scarlet Beast. How we label AI

The problem isn’t the pitch. It’s the sequence.

Every cold call in the world opens the same way. Do you have thirty seconds?

You are asking a stranger to spend their attention imagining something. They have to hold your product in their head, map it onto their business, and guess whether it would work. That is a lot of cognitive work to ask of someone who did not want the call. Most people decline, and they are being rational.

Now change the order. The call opens with a URL. They load it while you are still on the line. It is their logo, their colours, their actual products, sitting inside the thing you are selling. It already works.

The ask is no longer give me thirty seconds. It is “I already built it — tell me what’s wrong with it.”

That is a completely different conversation. You are not selling anymore. You are collecting feedback on something that exists. The prospect’s job changed from imagining to reacting, and reacting is almost free.

Nobody does this because it used to be impossible

The reason this inversion is rare is not that it’s a bad idea. It’s that building a bespoke demo used to take a developer a day, and no one spends a developer-day on a stranger who has not replied to an email.

So I costed it properly. Here is a real bespoke, working, branded demo, built unattended:

• Enrichment and fingerprinting: $0.15
• Build the concept — provision a sandbox, extract their brand, configure the product, record a walkthrough, render a one-page deck: $1.20
• Human visual QA, sampled: $0.85

About $2.05. A hundred-prospect campaign runs roughly $210 in variable cost, and 95% of that is the concepts, not the calls. The telephony is about eight dollars.

Two dollars is the number that changes the business. At two dollars, a finished demo stops being something a prospect earns after a discovery call and becomes the thing you lead with. You can afford to give it to people who never reply.

How it actually works

Six moves. One of them is yours.

• 1. Find who is worth calling. Sweep the segment, fingerprint each company’s public stack, resolve a phone number that actually reaches an owner. Finding the business is easy. The number is the scarce input.
• 2. Build them a demo overnight. Logo, palette and real catalogue cloned into a live sandbox of the product. Configured, recorded, published at its own URL.
• 3. Send it before you dial. This one matters more than it looks. More on it below.
• 4. Call. Asterisk places it, transcription streams before their sentence ends, and the agent answers inside an 800 ms budget with real barge-in.
• 5. Warm transfer. When a prospect is ready, the call lands on a human closer with the transcript already on screen. This is the only moment in the system that needs a person — and it is deliberately yours.
• 6. Write it all to one row. Every call transcribed, scored, joined to its concept ID. That single row is how pipeline, cost per meeting and any revenue share get computed, by both sides, from the same record.

The part everyone skips: this is regulated

If you are building AI voice outbound and you have not read the February 2024 FCC declaratory ruling, stop and read it.

It holds that an AI-generated voice is an “artificial” voice under the TCPA. That does not make AI calls illegal. It puts them in the same regulated category as prerecorded calls: they need prior express consent, prior express written consent to wireless numbers, caller identification and a working opt-out. There is no general business-to-business exemption. The FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule exempts a lot of B2B solicitation from the national Do Not Call registry, but the TCPA’s artificial-voice rules apply to any number — and a sole proprietor’s mobile keeps full protection.

Now consider who you are calling. A large share of small-business phone numbers are the owner’s mobile. Pointing a synthetic voice at that list is the expensive kind of mistake, and exposure runs per call.

So Scarlet does not cold-dial with a synthetic voice at all. And here is the part I like: the Concept Factory turned out to be the consent mechanism as well as the pitch. The demo goes out first. The concept page carries a named, specific written opt-in. Only consented records ever reach the automated queue — enforced at the database level, not in application logic, so the dialer’s query physically cannot return an unconsented record. Everyone else routes to a human with the same demo and the same dossier.

Both paths work. Only one of them is automated end to end. The compliance constraint didn’t damage the design — it produced it.

Two things the system will not do at any price: it will not clone a real person’s voice, and it will not claim to be human, including when asked directly. That costs some connect rate. It removes an entire category of risk.

The engineering that’s actually hard

Not the AI. The clock.

The budget is the time between the prospect finishing a sentence and hearing the first syllable back: 800 ms median, 1.5 s at p90. Past that they work out they’re talking to a machine that’s thinking, and hang up.

That 800 ms is spent: 120 ms detecting end of speech, 150 ms finalising the transcript, 10 ms assembling context, 300 ms to first model token, 150 ms to first synthesized audio, 70 ms of trunk and jitter.

Look at the context line. Ten milliseconds. That is only possible because retrieval happens before the dial, not during it. Assembling a dossier mid-turn adds 200–600 ms to the first response, which is exactly where a cold call dies. The dossier is packed ahead of time and treated as read-only state during the call. That one decision is the difference between a system that works and a demo that impresses in a boardroom.

The other thing that matters is barge-in: synthesis has to stop inside 100 ms when someone talks over the agent. An agent that talks through an interruption reads as a robocall no matter how good the voice is.

What I’m not claiming

The honest part, because I’d rather you trust the numbers than the pitch.

I don’t yet know that concept-first beats a normal cold call. I believe it does. That is not the same thing.

So the pilot runs a control arm: the same list, split, dialed by the same agent with the same opener minus the URL. If meeting-set rate doesn’t separate, the Concept Factory is expensive theatre and it should be killed.

And 100 dials per arm is a smoke test, not a result. At that sample size a lift from 1% to 3% is indistinguishable from noise. Detecting a move from 3% to 7% with 80% power takes roughly 465 dials per arm. The 100-dial pilot proves the machine runs end to end and produces clean, attributable data. The powered comparison needs about a thousand dials, and that is the next spend, not the first one.

One number decides whether any of this ships: cost per qualified meeting, loaded with platform fee and usage. If it doesn’t beat what you already pay an SDR for the same outcome, the readout says so.

It’s built, and it’s public

The product site, the architecture, the call-flow diagram, the unit economics and the pricing are at scarlet.scarletbeast.com. The film above walks through the whole system.

The full statement of work — seven phases, acceptance criteria you can check in an afternoon, the consent-first compliance design, three swappable commercial models and the pilot design — is published at scarlet.scarletbeast.com/sow-01, including the parts that argue against it.

If you sell software to a definable segment and you have a sandbox or trial environment, this works for your product. Pick a segment, pick a product, and I’ll build ten concepts for ten real companies at my cost before you commit to anything. If they’re not good enough to send, there’s nothing to discuss.

Concept in. Client out.

An Ode to the Way is a song for vibe coders and agentic developers. Almost every line of it borrows from a book written two and a half thousand years before the first compiler: the Tao Te Ching.

AI-madeMusic and vocals generated with Suno; the scenes generated with Stable Diffusion XL; the terminal sequences rendered in code. Directed by Scarlet Beast. How we label AI

Do your work, then step back.

That's chapter 9, and the chorus is code it, then get out the way. When an agent writes half your diff, that stops being a nice line and becomes a practical skill. You set the intent, you check the result, and then you take your hands off the wheel long enough to see what the system wants to be.

Chapter 11 says the center hole is what makes the wagon move, and the emptiness inside is what makes the pot useful. The most useful part of a codebase is often the space you had the wisdom not to fill: the feature you left out, the abstraction you never built.

Chapter 64 says the giant pine grows from a tiny sprout. A big build begins small too: one prompt, one change, one passing test. Handle trouble while it's tiny.

Chapter 76 says the stiff and inflexible break, and the soft and yielding live. The rigid system breaks in production. The flexible one bends and learns.

Chapter 17 says that when the Master's work is done, the people say, “We did it, all by ourselves!” Lead the team without possessing it. Leave no ego in the diff.

Vibe coding isn't laziness. It's listening long enough to find the course, and then being the water in the architecture.

Every frame of the video was made in code: generated images, live terminal sessions, and captions timed to the vocal.

Read the full Tao Te Ching →

A while ago, I read an article about an employer who lost a star developer over a few thousand dollars.

The article framed it as a lesson for employers: don't lose your best people over money.

I came away thinking about the opposite side of that equation.

Developers should be careful about losing the right opportunity over money, too.

Everybody has bills. Everybody has responsibilities. Everybody has different circumstances, and there are absolutely situations where compensation has to be the deciding factor.

But I believe one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself is build your life so that money is not the only factor capable of making your decisions for you.

Early in my career, I made decisions primarily based on compensation. Some of those decisions were lucrative.

But they were still reactive.

I was still allowing the economic system around me to determine the direction of my life.

I was still food for the machine.

Why I Sometimes Ask Recruiters to Recommend My Rate

These days, when appropriate, I sometimes ask recruiters what rate they believe makes sense.

There are two reasons.

First, the recruiter usually understands the client's budget, project requirements, internal constraints, and market better than I do at the beginning of the relationship.

Second, recruiters often have an incentive to negotiate a competitive rate because their own compensation can be connected to successfully placing qualified candidates.

So instead of beginning every conversation with:

What is the maximum amount of money I can extract from this?

I can begin with:

Is this something worth doing?

That changes the entire relationship.

It tells the recruiter that I am searching for the right opportunity, not simply the highest number.

And strangely enough, taking a less aggressive position in the negotiation can sometimes produce greater opportunity value because you are allowing more information to enter the equation before deciding.

Your Worth Is Not Your Hourly Rate

Your worth as a human being is not reflected by a dollar amount.

Ever.

Markets assign prices to labor.

Companies assign budgets to positions.

Recruiters negotiate rates.

None of those things determine your value as a person.

Your individual potential is much larger than whatever number appears on a paycheck.

Over the last several years, some of the periods where I experienced the greatest growth as a software developer were not necessarily the periods where I earned the most money.

That creates a difficult tradeoff between immediate financial return and long-term development.

But I think there are two perspectives worth considering.

1. Sustained effort requires belief before evidence arrives.

Many successful entrepreneurs, inventors, artists, engineers, and builders worked for long periods before their effort produced meaningful financial returns.

That is incredibly difficult.

You are essentially saying:

I believe in what I am building even though the outside world has not validated it yet.

That requires an enormous amount of internal conviction.

2. You cannot calculate the full value of an opportunity when it begins.

A small company might change your life.

A giant company might become a footnote.

A low-paying project might introduce you to the person who becomes your future business partner.

A high-paying opportunity might lead nowhere except another paycheck.

You simply do not know.

Most of the meaning of our decisions becomes apparent only in hindsight.

And that is why I believe the vibe matters.

The Signal Beneath the Noise

I believe there is a small inner voice inside each of us.

Some people call it intuition.

Some call it instinct.

Some call it conscience.

Some call it God.

Whatever language you use, there are moments when something inside you quietly says:

Go.

Or:

Don't go.

And you still have the free will to listen—or ignore it.

Over time, I have come to believe that success has a great deal to do with learning how to recognize that signal.

Every decision comes surrounded by noise:

But underneath all of that is your own internal response.

Leadership often requires learning how to hear it.

Great leaders do not simply possess information. They develop judgment.

They can gather external evidence, listen to constructive criticism, analyze risk—and still ultimately make a decision.

There is an enormous difference between refusing feedback and refusing to listen to yourself.

• Money. Status. Fear. Family expectations. Career expectations. Social approval. Prestige. Security. Algorithms. Forecasts. Opinions.

Would I Ever Work for Free?

For the right person, with the right mission, on the right opportunity?

Absolutely.

That does not mean everybody should work for free.

It means I want enough freedom in my life that money does not automatically get veto power over purpose.

That is a very different objective.

A person earning millions of dollars can become completely imprisoned by lifestyle, obligations, reputation, debt, or expectations.

Meanwhile, someone with almost nothing can occasionally possess extraordinary freedom.

Neither condition is inherently better.

The point is that wealth and freedom are not always the same thing.

The Butcher and the Best Piece of Meat

There is an old Zen story about Banzan walking through a marketplace.

A customer asks a butcher for the best piece of meat.

The butcher replies that everything in his shop is the best; there is no piece that is not the best.

At those words, Banzan becomes enlightened.

I love that story because it challenges the endless hierarchy we impose on reality.

But what if meaning isn't contained inside those things?

What if meaning is something consciousness brings to them?

• Best job. Best salary. Best company. Best title. Best house. Best life.

Meaning Is Something We Participate In

Hermetic philosophy famously begins with the principle that "The All is Mind."

Whether you interpret that metaphysically or psychologically, there is something valuable in the idea that our experience of reality is inseparable from the meaning we assign to it.

Humans choose what matters.

We choose love.

We choose loyalty.

We choose sacrifice.

We choose courage.

We choose creation.

That choice is what gives values their power.

The Gospel of John opens with the imagery of light shining in darkness, with the darkness unable to overcome it.

That idea resonates deeply with me.

Human beings continually choose to create meaning in circumstances that sometimes appear meaningless.

We decide that something is worth protecting.

Something is worth building.

Something is worth loving.

Something is worth fighting for.

That is the human spirit.

AI Is Going to Force Us to Ask a Bigger Question

Technology is accelerating this conversation.

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the relationship between humans, labor, creativity, and economic productivity.

Entire categories of work will change.

New categories will emerge.

Automation may eventually give more people freedom from certain kinds of repetitive labor.

Ideas such as universal basic income, once considered fringe economic experiments, increasingly appear in mainstream conversations about automation.

And if technology eventually gives people more freedom, humanity will face an uncomfortable question:

What do you actually want?

That question is much harder than it sounds.

Many people spend their entire lives responding to external instructions.

Remove some of those external instructions and suddenly you have to confront yourself.

That can produce creation.

It can also produce chaos.

The future of AI therefore isn't only a technological question.

It is a human one.

• Go to school. Get the job. Get promoted. Buy the house. Earn more. Repeat.

Fear or Creation

Some people look at artificial intelligence and imagine apocalypse.

Others imagine abundance.

Both futures probably contain pieces of truth.

But I believe one of the greatest dangers would be allowing fear to dominate our collective imagination.

Technological revolutions always destabilize existing structures.

The question is what humanity chooses to build afterward.

Fear can produce paralysis.

Courage can produce experimentation.

And experimentation produces new possibilities.

The awakening happening around technology is therefore not merely technological.

People have access to more knowledge, more communication, more creative tools, and more computational power than almost any generation before them.

We are increasingly capable of asking:

Who am I when the old limitations disappear?

Will, Intention, and Becoming

Carlos Castaneda's writings frequently explore ideas involving intention, perception, internal silence, and the relationship between consciousness and experienced reality.

Hermetic traditions explore similar territory through concepts of mind, correspondence, vibration, and will.

You don't have to accept every metaphysical interpretation to recognize something useful:

What you consistently direct your attention toward begins shaping who you become.

Call it manifestation.

Call it visualization.

Call it neuroplasticity.

Call it prayer.

Call it intention.

Call it discipline.

When you repeatedly orient yourself toward something, you begin noticing opportunities, developing skills, building relationships, and making decisions that move in that direction.

You will something internally, and then your life begins shaping you into someone capable of receiving—or creating—it.

Following your internal compass can make that process far more coherent.

But What Happens When Everyone Thinks You're Wrong?

This is where leadership becomes lonely.

Sometimes the thing you believe you should do will receive resistance from friends, family, coworkers, or society.

That does not automatically mean you are right.

External criticism can contain extremely important information.

But neither does disagreement automatically mean you are wrong.

Leadership requires developing enough independence to consider criticism without surrendering your judgment.

I have become increasingly comfortable being alone in certain decisions.

Not because I believe other people have nothing to teach me.

Quite the opposite.

I want feedback.

I want disagreement.

I want evidence.

But eventually every person has to make their own decision.

Nobody else lives inside your consequences.

Nobody else possesses your exact history.

Nobody else experiences your intuition.

Nobody else can completely understand the path unfolding in front of you.

At some point, you decide.

Build Enough Freedom to Listen

So my advice to developers—and really to anyone—is simple:

Do everything reasonably possible to reduce the amount of control money has over your decisions.

Not because money is evil.

Money is useful.

Money creates options.

But the purpose of money should be to increase your freedom—not gradually eliminate it.

Get yourself into a position where you can occasionally say:

• Reduce unnecessary obligations. Build skills. Build multiple income possibilities. Build things you own. Learn constantly. Experiment. Create. Protect your independence.

The money isn't the deciding factor. I want to know whether this feels like the right direction.

That is an extraordinary form of wealth.

Listen to constructive criticism.

Study reality carefully.

Respect your responsibilities.

Then listen to yourself.

And when that quiet voice points toward something meaningful, have the courage to move.

That philosophy is a major part of what Scarlet Beast represents.

We build technology around the belief that technology should increase human agency—not replace it.

Technology should give people more room to create.

More room to experiment.

More room to discover themselves.

More room to follow the signal beneath the noise.

Because perhaps the greatest thing technology can ultimately give humanity isn't automation.

It's freedom.

And then the responsibility becomes ours to decide what we do with it.