notes on loneliness, connection, and being human.
August 17, 2026
Smart people can back up and think stupid, but stupid people are not yet smart; therefore, the onus is always on those who comprehend.
read →August 13, 2026
Family is an ideal. We are not automatically granted admission into one just by being born. Instead, it must be built collectively by its members.
read →August 3, 2026
An illuminated orb drifts from the cosmic Oort cloud into a cottony fog. We are born blind because we are void of experience, and true sight is experiential. A meditation on why we chose this human form, the amnesia that makes it survivable, and the one hack — Kindness, Awareness, Understanding, Love — for finding each other while we're here.
read →July 27, 2026
Love is the great human ideal, the benchmark of benchmarks, a cliche so flogged it could wake a dead horse. Most of us don't even know what it is. The key is not in the feeling but in the source.
read →July 19, 2026
We live behind glass now. If you want to know what real, raw, human connection feels like, you do not look at a glowing rectangle. You look at a 1974 Chrysler Newport sedan.
read →July 15, 2026
We spend most of our waking hours in compliance. Looking the part. Sticking to script. This is the one public place left where the molting you is welcome.
read →July 12, 2026
True enlightenment cannot be engineered in a vacuum or streamed through a glass display. It is better to be among our own kind—constantly trying and failing—than to sit solo in a sealed pod, succeeding only because we are exclusively nice to ourselves.
read →July 9, 2026
On the machine that looked at human connection and saw only risk, and the generation that will choose the body on purpose.
read →July 3, 2026
On the regrets that arrive only when the body can no longer fix them — and the surplus of regret being built right now by a generation cowering behind a screen.
read →June 28, 2026
If the lights went out in New York City tomorrow — really went out — what would happen? An honest answer, and why it matters.
read →June 25, 2026
We are all very lonely. So it goes. Scientists tell us the universe is mostly empty space. Humans are built the same way.
read →June 21, 2026
We have built a magnificent, global electronic nervous system, just as we planned, but we forgot to hook it up to a human heart.
read →June 19, 2026
The roadmap given to us at birth was drawn for somebody else. We squinted, folded, and forced it — but it was useless. This page exists because finding each other is worth doing badly.
read →June 16, 2026
The mountain is at least honest about what it wants from you. People are a puzzle, however.
read →June 15, 2026
It is a wonderful trick of the human language. If you tell a general you have a wizard on the payroll, he will lock you up. But if you tell him you have a "trained intelligence collection asset utilizing anomalous cognition," he will give you a clipboard and twenty million dollars.
read →June 14, 2026
The rationalists—the ones who stare at algorithmic charts, doom-scrolling graphs, and the flashing lights of impending collapse—predict a rather dreadful finish for mankind. But it turns out the rationalists are missing the point, because they’re looking in the wrong places.
read →June 10, 2026
On parasocial intimacy, and why the real thing is harder, slower, and quietly worth it.
read →June 7, 2026
The soul doesn't come here to collect. It comes to work something out. And the fun part, it turns out, is the risk.
read →June 4, 2026
There is a particular kind of loneliness that completely misses the evening news, mostly because it lacks the good decency to produce any camera-ready rubble.
read →June 2, 2026
Cupid never swiped right. He drew, he aimed, he waited. The algorithm would have flagged him as inefficient.
read →May 30, 2026
Early days living in Manhattan were both thrilling and bleak. Walking home at 2am, table tips bulging my pocket, I envied the rats — they seemed to have friends.
read →May 28, 2026
A few years ago, at two in the morning, a massive explosion shook my house in Vermont. What I saw on the road afterward took a while to make sense of but taught me more about consciousness, AI, and human connection than anything I've read.
read →May 27, 2026
The tools democratized creation. Nobody democratized vulnerability.
read →May 24, 2026
I grew up in small-town America with parents whose moral framework was so sturdy their adopted creed had to fit them, not the other way around. Catholicism was the chosen fit. The problem was that this added up to an exemplary foundation for an 18th Century Scottish crofting community — and almost zero preparation for the world at large.
read →May 23, 2026
On what happens to bold people when the world starts paying them for it.
read →May 22, 2026
On training falcons, the three kinds of love, and why platonic friendship is the most underestimated — and most squandered — bond we have.
read →May 18, 2026
We built a plastic oracle, dropped our quarter in, and laughed at the predetermined wisdom. Then we built a real one. The question is what we're asking it.
read →May 17, 2026
New York will break you a hundred small ways before noon. But there's a counter-force — and it runs on proximity.
read →May 15, 2026
Marshall McLuhan gave an interview to Playboy in the fall of 1969. He laid out exactly what would happen to the first generation raised on a diet of television. He was right about all of it.
read →May 14, 2026
A meditation on AI, consciousness, and the irreplaceable act of human connection in an age of displacement.
read →May 13, 2026
Robert Pirsig looked for Quality across America. What he found was that the five traits that make us human—self-awareness, language, empathy, creativity, morality—only become real through contact with another person. Chickenlist is where that contact happens.
read →May 11, 2026
they evolved away hunger, lust, the inconvenient drip of a runny nose. and now they circle our planet in silent ships, weeping.
read →May 10, 2026
We are becoming a nomadic nation again. Not because we lost something. Because we remembered something.
read →May 8, 2026
A meditation on solo travel, human longing, and the quiet relief of knowing that somewhere in every city on earth, someone decent is also looking for company.
read →May 7, 2026
The internet pretended to connect us. Then someone figured out you could sell the mycelium.
read →May 5, 2026
A child of four will tell you the tree is angry today. She is not being poetic. She is being precise. The tree has a mood, the river has opinions, the dog down the street is sad for reasons that have nothing to do with food.
read →May 4, 2026
The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. For most of that time, nothing knew it existed. Then, rather suddenly — cosmically speaking, between one Tuesday and the next — something did. You.
read →May 3, 2026
In 1995, Craig Newmark — pocket protector, taped glasses, self-described nerd patient zero — started emailing a list of San Francisco events to a few friends, because he thought people in a city might want to know what was happening in it. This is not a complicated origin story. Most of the best ones aren't.
read →May 2, 2026
For the past twenty years technology has made a promise it couldn't keep. It said: we'll connect you. And it did, in the way that a photograph connects you to a place — you can see it, you can describe it, but you cannot feel the air or smell the rain. We got very good at the photograph version of human connection. This is about what comes next.
read →May 1, 2026
The personal ad is older than the internet by roughly three centuries, older than the telephone by two, older than the photograph by one-and-a-half, and yet somehow the internet managed to look at this ancient, elegant technology and decide the problem with it was that it wasn't gamified enough.
read →April 28, 2026
The smartphone didn't create social anxiety — but it gave it an infrastructure. A whole parallel world where you could be present without being present, connected without being vulnerable, seen without being seen. You could curate the version of yourself that got to meet people. Edit before sending. Disappear without explanation. And for a while, this felt like freedom. It was not freedom. It was practice, at scale, for never having to show up.
read →