If your answer is “none,” congratulations. You were me approximately ten minutes ago. And now, like someone who accidentally wandered into a museum and came out aggressively whispering things like “the use of shadow here is doing a lot,” I would like to introduce you to Pierre Bourdieu.

He is, by all accounts, a very serious person who spent the 20th century doing what serious people do: inventing concepts and giving them names that sound like they require a scarf, a cigarette, and at least one emotionally complicated relationship with espresso.

His greatest hits include:

• habitus

• field

• forms of capital

Which sounds less like sociology and more like a yoga class taught by someone who gently judges your footwear.

Let’s start with habitus, which is your internal operating system, but make it vibes. It’s not a place you visit, but it does sound like somewhere you’d be charged $18 for toast.

Bourdieu’s idea is that you’re not just making choices, you’re being made into the kind of person who makes those choices without realizing it. Your instincts, your tastes, your posture in a room, the way you hold a fork like you’re either auditioning for Downton Abbey or nervous you’re going to drop it… this is all habitus.

It’s not conscious. It’s not like you wake up and think, “Today I will embody my class position through my snack preferences. Huzzah!” Nol. It’s more like muscle memory for being a person.

You don’t calculate how to catch a ball; you just catch it. Similarly, you don’t calculate whether to say “soda” or “pop” or “I’ll just have water, thanks,” in a tone that suggests moral superiority. Your body knows. Your soul knows. Your group chat definitely knows.

Habitus is the accumulation of:

• your upbringing

• your education

• your exposure to things like museums, or Olive Garden

• the subtle social cues you absorbed before you even knew you were absorbing them

It’s why some people can walk into a wine bar and say things like, “I’m getting notes of oak,” while others (me) are like, “Well, that one is obviously red.”

Now, enter the field.

A field is basically any social arena where people are competing for something: status, power, recognition, or the last clean chair at a PTA meeting.

Think:

• the workplace

• academia

• Instagram

• your neighborhood HOA (arguably the most brutal of all known fields, and I’m so glad I don’t have one, but the neighborhood GroupMe can be intense)

Each field has its own:

• rules

• hierarchy

• weird little version of what counts as “winning”

And here’s the important part: You don’t enter a field as a neutral player. You show up with your habitus already loaded like a software package that may or may not be compatible with the system. Some people walk into a field like they were born there. Others walk in like they’ve wandered into the wrong wedding.

Bourdieu calls this your “feel for the game,” which is a polite way of saying some people instinctively know how to act, and others are Googling, “what does business casual mean,” in the parking lot.

Now we wrap this up with Bourdieu’s most quietly devastating idea: capital isn’t just money. Money is just the boring, obvious form of it. He expands this into a fully fleshed-out cinematic universe of capital.

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Cultural capital

Cultural capital is what you know, how you speak, what you like, and whether you pronounce things in a way that makes other people feel insecure. It includes:

• education

• taste (food, art, music, whether you say “charcuterie” correctly on the first try)

• credentials

• the ability to casually reference something obscure without sounding like you’re trying

And the kicker? You start acquiring this as a child, without even realizing it. It’s passed down like a family heirloom, except instead of a watch, it’s the ability to feel comfortable in spaces other people find terrifying.

Social capital

This is who you know. Not in a shallow “networking event with name tags” way (although yes, that, too), but in the deep sense of:

• relationships

• connections

• being able to text someone and skip three steps of bureaucracy

It’s the invisible ladder you didn’t build but somehow still get to climb.

Symbolic capital

This is prestige, reputation, honor, and the vibes of legitimacy. It’s when people listen to you, not because of what you’re saying, but because of who you’re perceived to be.

It’s the difference between:

• “That’s an interesting idea,” and…

• “We should absolutely fund this immediately, visionary genius.”

Same sentence. Different speaker. Entirely different outcome.

The whole system (or: why life feels rigged but in a polite way)

Here’s the part where Bourdeiu’s party trick is to flip the table:

His habitus, field, and capital all work together to quietly reproduce the social order. People don’t succeed because they’re talented. They succeed because:

• Their habitus matches the field.

• They have the right kinds of capital.

• The system recognizes those things as legitimate.

Meanwhile, everyone else is out here trying to figure out why they feel like they showed up to a chess tournament holding an Uno reverse card. Even our tastes (what we eat, wear, listen to) aren’t neutral. They’re signals. They position us in society, which means your preference for oat milk versus whole milk is, in some deeply French way, political.

Which brings me, naturally, to myself, because once you learn Bourdieu, you can’t unsee it. You start noticing:

• Why some rooms feel easy, and others feel like a pop quiz you didn’t study for.

• Why certain conversations flow, and others feel like you’re buffering in real time.

• Why someone ordering apps for the table with confidence feels like a power move.

And suddenly you‘re not just a person, you’re a walking bundle of inherited dispositions, accumulated capital, and a habitus that occasionally betrays you when you say “pop” in the wrong zip code.

Which, according to Bourdieu, isn’t a personal failing. It’s just THE SYSTEM. This is French for you were doomed long before you got to the fancy dinner party.

An objective and extremely humble self-assessment

After careful reflection (and absolutely no bias whatsoever, other than the kind that is CORRECT), I have concluded:

I possess very high cultural capital.

Please take a moment to appreciate your proximity to greatness. I’ll wait.

…

You’re welcome. I assume that felt meaningful to you.

Let’s break down the ingredients of this rare and prestigious condition:

• Advanced communication skills (you’re reading this, aren’t you? And more impressively, you’re still here.)

• Cross-domain literacy (Tech, religion, politics, and the highly specialized art of soccer sideline diplomacy, where one must simultaneously support children and silently judge other adults.)

• Ability to translate complex systems (I can explain VPN routing and also why your PTA email feels passive-aggressive.)

• A distinct voice (Womewhere between thoughtful reflection and “did she really say that?”)

According to people like Bourdieu, this places me in the cultural/professional elite.

Which is fantastic, except for one minor detail:

My bank account has not been informed.

Wait… so I’m still labor?

Here’s where things take a turn.

Despite all this cultural capital — this rich, inner vineyard of taste, language, and the ability to explain things at dinner parties that nobody asked about — I am still, economically speaking, in the labor class.

Cue record scratch. Freeze frame. Voicover: Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here.

This is where the old frameworks start to break down because if you picture the “proletariat” as soot-covered factory workers dramatically wiping their brows with a cloth while the industrial revolution hums ominously in the background like a very aggressive cello… that’s not quite what’s happening here.

Instead, we have something far stranger.

Enter: The Professional-Managerial Class (PMC)

This is the modern category many of us quietly occupy, without naming it. It’s like realizing you’ve been in the same group chat for years and no one remembers who started it.

The PMC isn’t defined by owning things. It’s defined by managing things: information, processes, systems, people’s expectations, and your own calendar. You don’t produce physical goods; you produce outputs that live in documents, dashboards, and conversations that somehow still require a follow-up meeting.

You work inside systems — companies, platforms, or institutions — that existed before you arrived and will continue to exist after you’ve updated your out-of-office message. You understand how they function, you can navigate them, maybe even improve them, you can rearrange workflows, refine messaging, and optimize processes, but you do not control the system.

In other words, you’re trusted to rearrange the furniture. You can pick out some throw pillows. But the deed to the house is held somewhere far above your pay grade, by people you might never meet, who occasionally send emails or #general Slack posts that start with “In light of recent strategic shifts…”

And so the PMC becomes less of a job category and more of a feeling

Being highly competent while also vaguely aware that the floor isn’t load bearing and could disappear at any moment, possibly during a quarterly all-hands.

And then things get weird

Because just as you’ve settled into this realization. Just as you’re adjusting to this delicate balance of competence and contingency. Another layer emerges:

The independent knowledge worker.

This is the moment when the system isn’t enough. You start to wonder whether you might build a smaller system of your own. You want a piece. Nothing dramatic. Just a little side project. A harmless experiment.

You start a Substack.

You buy a domain.

You open a blank page and type, “I have thoughts.” And then, almost immediately: “I regret having thoughts.”

There’s something both exhilarating and deeply unsettling about attempting to have a “voice” on the internet. It feels like stepping onto a stage you built yourself, in a theater that may or may not exist, performing for an audience that is either deeply moved, entirely imaginary, or outrageously angry that you dared to say such things.

You briefly consider becoming a THOUGHT LEADER, which is a phrase that feels like it should come with a warning label and possibly a rash. You imagine yourself saying something insightful and important. And then you immediately feel nauseous. Because now, in addition to doing your job, you’re also:

• Curating your ideas.

• Packaging your identity.

• Wondering if you are, in fact, becoming a brand.

It’s like having one foot in a stable office job and the other in a canoe you built yourself, floating somewhere in the open ocean, telling yourself, “this is fine,” while quietly hoping the canoe evolves into a yacht before you run out of snacks.

From proletariat to… precariat

If Karl Marx were alive today, he would need a whiteboard. And possibly a therapist. And definitely someone to explain what a “creator economy” is without using the word “authenticity.”

Because the modern update to class isn’t as clean as workers versus owners.

It’s about stability vs instability.

Enter: the precariat.

This isn’t a class in the traditional sense, but A CONDITION. A state of being. A low-level hum of uncertainty that follows you from tab to tab as you refresh LinkedIn like it’s a vital organ.

This is the world of:

• gig workers

• freelancers

• contract employees

• overqualified people applying for jobs that require “7 years experience” in software that was released during the last year of the Biden administration

People whose job description increasingly includes something like:

“performing unpaid labor in order to maybe someday perform paid labor”

Updating résumés.
Building personal brands.
Creating content into the void.

The line between “working” and “trying to be allowed to work” has blurred to the point of abstraction.

Why you can’t tell who’s what anymore

One of the strangest features of American life right now is how difficult it is to tell who’s actually secure and who’s performing security convincingly. Part of this is because consumption has become an excellent liar.

You can have the phone, the car, the Netflix subscription, the aesthetic. You can look, from the outside, like someone who has everything under control. Meanwhile, one unexpected expense (one medical bill, one job change, one “unforeseen circumstance”) and the entire structure wobbles.

We have, collectively, agreed to cosplay stability.

Education was supposed to clarify things. It used to be a signal. A way of sorting people into lanes that at least FELT predictable, but now, degrees have multiplied while guarantees have evaporated. A college education no longer secures a future. It merely improves your odds of being invited to compete for one.

And then culture steps in and scrambles the whole picture.

People no longer organize themselves primarily around economic position. They organize around IDENTITY: political, religious, cultural, moral. Which means two people with nearly identical financial realities can look at each other and see not a peer, but a THREAT.

The result is a social kaleidoscope where class is still there (still structuring things around), but refracted through so many layers that it becomes almost impossible to name directly.

So, where does that leave me?

Somewhere in the middle. Not precarious in the most immediate sense, but not insulated either. Capable, stable, functional… until the system that makes that stability possible decides to pivot. (Hello, AI, ahem.)

I have skills. I have a voice. I have enough stability to plan next month, maybe even next year, with a reasonable degree of confidence, but I don’t own the system I operate within. I don’t control its direction. I don’t have immunity from disruptions.

Which leads to a classification that feels both accurate and deeply unmarketable:

Buffered, but dependent.

Like a laptop that works beautifully. It’s fast, responsive, and capable of remarkable things. As long as it remains plugged into a power source it doesn’t control. Unplug it, and suddenly all that capability has a time.

Identity: The final plot twist

And then, just when you think you’ve located yourself on the map, identity enters the scene and politely sets the map on fire.

Because I am not ONE THING.

I am a technical professional who understands systems.
A religious participant who wrestles with meaning.
A political observer who can’t look away.
A mom navigating schedules, emotions, and the moral complexity of snacks before dinner.
A writer trying to make sense of all of it in sentences that feel true.

None of these identities align neatly into a single category. None of them map cleanly onto “class” in the way older frameworks would like them to, which means I am, in a very modern sense, unclassifiable. And the uncomfortable realization is that this is no longer unusual.

We’re all walking around like overstuffed suitcases of identity. The zippers are barely holding. The contents shift depending on the context. We’re wondering why none of the old labels fit us anymore because THE SYSTEM STILL SORTS US.

But we don’t recognize ourselves in the categories it uses.

The absurdity, summarized

If the 19th century was:

“You are a worker.”

And the 20th century was:

“You are middle class.”

The 21st century is:

“You are a highly specific combination of skills, anxieties, subscriptions, group chats, and at least one document titled ‘final_FINAL-v3-actualFINAL.’”

🧠 The Ethical Technologist weighs in

Here’s the part where I put the satire down gently and pick up something sharper.

We built systems — economic, technological, cultural — that optimized for efficiency, scale, and growth. And they worked. Spectacularly.

So well, in fact, that we now have:

• Unprecedented access to information.

• Unprecedented tools for connection.

• Unprecedented levels of confusion about who we are and where we stand.

We didn’t eliminate class. We obfuscated it. We turned it into something harder to see, harder to name, and therefore harder to challenge.

And in that ambiguity, something important becomes harder to confront:
accountability.

Because let’s be honest. We CAN identity who holds power. It’s the people with extraordinary wealth. The ones who don’t just participate in the system, but shape it.

They influence policy.
They move markets.
They set the terms that the rest of us operate within.

That part isn’t mysterious. What is harder to see and pin down is how that power is distributed through layers of systems that feel neutral and inevitable. By the time it reaches us, it’s not power. It’s bad policy, budget constraints, a platform algorithm, or a market condition.

That’s how they rebrand it so we think not one person is responsible. No one in the room announces, “This is happening because of concentrated wealth and the incentives it creates.”

And that’s where accountability gets slippery. Not because power is invisible, but because it’s been translated into systems that make it feel impersonal, procedural, and most dangerously, unavoidable.

Then the system keeps running exactly as designed. Quietly. Efficiently. With excellent user interfaces and enough friction to make you think the problem is you.

If there’s a role for an ethical technologist in all of this, it’s not to nostalgically revive old frameworks or pretend Marx is waiting in the wings with a tidy solution and a reusable whiteboard marker.

It’s to ask better questions.

Not abstract ones. Not academic ones. Operational ones.

• Who is actually secure?

• Who only appears to be?

• What kinds of labor are invisible, and who performs them anyway?

• Where does ownership live now — in platforms, data, algorithms — and who controls it?

• And perhaps most importantly:

What kind of system are we reinforcing every time we sign in, optimize, and move on?

Because this is no longer theoretical. Right now, literally this very week, there are people sitting across tables negotiating what it means to make a living in 2026. They’re not doing this in the abstract. It’s not a think piece. They sit together in fluorescent-lit rooms, with spreadsheets, budgets, trade-offs, and the very human question of what counts as enough.

My husband is one of them.

Representing a system. Sitting across from another system. Both sides trying to translate human needs into numbers that can survive a budget meeting. And what they’re negotiating is more than salary and benefits. They’re negotiating for stability in an unstable world, recognition in a system that obscures contribution, and the increasingly fragile line between “secure” and “just one disruption away.”

This is class. Not as a label. As a process.

So, no, the future of class isn’t about economics alone. It’s about systems design.

Who gets buffered.
Who absorbs shock.
Who has margin.
Who is the margin.

And right now?

Most of us are still users. Highly skilled. Deeply aware. Occasionally self-actualized, but still operating inside systems we didn’t design, can’t fully see, and are constantly being asked to optimize. (Just use AI.)

The question isn’t whether class still exists. It’s whether we’re willing to see it clearly enough to design something better.

Or whether we’ll keep refreshing the interface and calling it progress.

Historians assumed Raskobism died during the Great Depression, much like flapper fashion and Art Deco.

But my recent, in-depth field research (primarily scrolling Instagram while getting some vitamin D in the backyard during my lunch break) suggests the ideology has re-emerged. I’ve found it appears most commonly on podcasts hosted by men who own at least three pairs of cowboy boots, tout the life-changing impacts of peptides, and call themselves “builders.”

What is Raskobism?

Raskobism can be summarized as elite optimism detached from economic reality, which sounds harsh. Until you read it again, thinking of American industry. Remember when we had a middle class? I’m old enough to remember.

The core Raskobism ideas are simple, and frustratingly durable:

• Markets will fix everything.

• Wealth provides wisdom.

• Regulation is the real problem.

• Anyone can succeed if they simply invest, hustle, bootstrap, disrupt, or start a startup that disrupts the disruption.

In 1929, these ideas arrived in pinstripe suits and ticker tape. So much ticker tape. In 2026, they arrive in hoodies, venture capital decks, and a confident explanation that society’s problems are easily fixed by AI.

Different decade.

Same sermon.

The Silicon Valley Upgrade

If Raskob were alive today, he would absolutely have a podcast, complete with live YouTube streaming, a microphone that costs more than my SUV, tasteful LED lighting, and a producer that says things like, “we’re crushing the algorithm.” He would launch every episode by leaning into the microphone and announcing, in a tone of great intellectual bravery, “Look, I’m just asking questions,” which is the modern signal that a person is about to ask several extremely confident questions. These questions would then arrive in rapid succession: What if democracy is inefficient? What if regulation is the real bottleneck? What if poverty could be solved by an app? What if climate change could be handled by a subscription model? And perhaps, if time allowed, what if the real problem with society is that too many people insist on having problems that markets haven’t yet monetized?

His original pitch was that ordinary Americans could build wealth by investing fifteen dollars a month. The modern version is slightly more ambitious. Today’s prophets of economic destiny suggest that anyone can succeed if they launch a startup, tokenize something, disrupt an industry, pivot to AI, pivot again to AI agents, and eventually pivot into a thoughtful thread explaining why the government is the only obstacle standing between humanity and the glorious future of automated prosperity.

The theory, when you hear it explained on the right podcast, might come off as elegant. Markets will solve poverty. Venture capital will solve climate change. AI will solve inefficiencies in healthcare, education, and government. Somewhere in the middle of this argument, there’s usually a slide deck containing a graph that goes up and to the right, which economists recognize as the most persuasive form of evidence known to mankind.

Oh my gosh, you guys! What if the real problem with society is that too many people keep expecting billionaires to solve it?

The difference between Raskobism in 1928 and Silicon Valley ideology in 2026 is mostly the typeface.

Which is obviously sans serif today.

Symptoms of Raskobism

Raskobism spreads like a digital virus through podcasts, Twitter threads, and keynote presentations delivered by men standing in front of minimalist slides with the word Future written in Helvetica. You may not realize you’ve been exposed until the symptoms begin to appear, usually sometime between your third podcast episode and your first confident opinion about how society should be reorganized.

The early stages are subtle. The patient develops a mild but persistent belief that billionaires understand society better than the people who actually live in it. This often progresses into describing regulation as “innovation suppression,” which is the economic equivalent of insisting that traffic lights are anti-car propaganda and part of a coordinated effort to slow down progress. At this stage, the patient may also begin suggesting that social safety should be replaced by an app with a sleek interface and a monthly subscription model that sends motivational push notifications reminding users to simply TRY HARDER.

As the condition advances, the patient begins hallucinating about systems-level solutions. These usually involve phrases like “AI-driven optimization,” “frictionless coordination,“ and “platform-mediated outcomes,” which sound impressive until you realize they translate roughly to “someone will probably vibe code an app for that.” At this point, the patient may also adopt a more elevated tone (perhaps even literally), imagining themselves standing atop a capitalistic skyscraper with its own localized weather systems, confidently announcing that large-scale economic hardship could be resolved if people would simply make better life choices and perhaps download the correct platform.

Eventually, the patient begins ranting about how society’s largest problems aren’t complicated at all. They simply require a cloud computing architecture. The economy needs an interface. Public services need automation. Democracy needs a product manager. The people, it turns out, don’t need systemic reform, collective investment, or policy change. They simply need to optimize themselves.

Which is, in essence, the updated version of Raskob’s original economic theory.

Just invest fifteen bucks a month.

Over twenty years.

And presumably, make better choices.

Recommended Treatment

If you or a loved one begins displaying symptoms of Raskobism, experts recommend several interventions. The first is exposure to historical literacy, particularly the parts involving the stock market crash of 1929 and the decade that followed, which brilliant historians summarize as “the part where optimism stopped working." This treatment can be uncomfortable at first, especially for individuals who strongly believe the economy behaves like a well-trained golden retriever that always brings prosperity back when you throw enough money at it.

The second is a careful application of antitrust law, which has historically shown promise in treating concentrated economic optimism. Economists have long observed that markets function better when competition exists, which unfortunately reduces the number of billionaires who can confidently explain on podcasts why the rest of us simply need to work harder and believe more strongly in the invisible hand.

In more advanced cases, patients may also require a brief educational module on trickle-down economics, a theory suggesting that if enough wealth is poured at the top of the economic pyramid, prosperity will eventually drip politely down to everyone else. Economists who study these things for a living have spent several decades pointing out that the wealth mostly does not trickle. It tends instead to remain exactly where it was poured, much like gravy at Thanksgiving.

Finally, patients should practice deep breathing, ideally while repeating the phrase: “Markets are powerful tools, not magical weather systems.” Depending on how the patient responds, the phrase may need to be repeated several times while slowly closing a browser tab containing the words disruption, founder mindset, or alpha thread.

Recovery is possible.

Although it may require unsubscribing to a podcast.

So Who Was Raskob?

John J. Raskob himself was not some fringe crank shouting economic theories from a street corner. He was a wealthy industrialist who worked for General Motors, helped finance the Empire State Building, and maintained close ties with the duPont family. Because if you’re going to reshape American economy, it’s helpful to have a few chemical billionaires in your contacts. He also held significant influence inside the Democratic Party during the 1920s. In other words, he was exactly the sort of successful and confident figure Americans love to listen to when he explains why prosperity is inevitable and probably already on its way.

He also had a deeply human quality that historians politely refer to as political motivation, which is a gentle way of saying that he cared very deeply about economic theory immediately after his preferred candidate lost an election.

Raskob had backed a candidate who lost to Herbert Hoover in the 1928 election, which didn’t improve his opinion of Hoover’s economic management. He soon launched an energetic campaign criticizing the president while promoting the idea that widespread stock market investment would allow Americans to share in the nation’s booming prosperity. The theory was elegant, optimistic, and extremely popular among people who already had money, access to markets, and a general sense that things were going well for them personally.

It was, in short, the economic equivalent of pouring gravy very confidently onto the top of the national dinner table and assuring everyone seated below that it was absolutely, definitely making its way down to them.

Any minute now.

The timing, unfortunately, was terrible.

A Reminder About Political Labels

In a world full of uncertainties, I am pleased to offer you one reliable constant: American political parties will, without warning, reinvent themselves. The Democratic Party of the 1920s doesn’t resemble the Democratic Party of today. The Republican Party of the 1860s would require a lengthy onboarding process, several whiteboard diagrams, and at least one deeply uncomfortable Q&A session if suddenly transported to the present.

Political parties don’t move in straight ideological lines. They swing around like a malfunctioning windshield wiper, occasionally clearing things up, but more often smearing everything into a confusing blur before snapping loose and slapping the entire country across the face.

This is one reason I personally don’t align with any particular party. At this point in my life, I am mostly interested in starting my own, primarily so I can stop trying to explain why none of the existing options feel like they were designed by people who have recently interacted with reality.

The platform would be simple. The meetings would include snacks, because history has shown that very few bad decisions are made when people are holding a plate of something warm and slightly carb-heavy. And the leader would be Emma Hayes, because she is one of the few people currently operating in public life who can manage chaos, communicate clearly, inspire, motivate, and willingly dance with Trinity Rodman on the sidelines.

Her policy agenda would be refreshingly direct: dominate possession through the midfield, press intelligently, stay organized at the back, and under no circumstances take direction from a man who says he’s going to “circle back” and record a podcast with a billionaire guest.

And unlike most political systems, substitutions would be allowed.

The Ethical Technologist Weighs In

Look, I know how the saying goes. But I’d argue it’s wrong.

History isn’t bound to repeat itself.

History RARELY repeats itself… in exactly the same form. What it tends to do instead is update the software. Old ideas receive new branding, new vocabulary, and occasionally a venture capital round. Raskobism didn’t disappear after the Great Depression; it simply migrated forward in time, reappeared in Silicon Valley, and began explaining on podcasts why disruption is more important than stability.

The names change. The technology changes. The confidence remains exactly the same.

And so every generation eventually rediscovers the same economic theory: that prosperity can be engineered from the top down if the right brilliant people are allowed to pour enough money into the system and wait patiently for the benefits to trickle where they’re needed.

History suggests that, much like lumpy gravy, the results depend heavily on where you’re sitting at the table.

Which is why the next time someone calmly explains that a new technology will automatically solve every human problem, it may be worth remembering the wisdom of 1929.

Or at least setting aside fifteen dollars a month.

Preferably not in 1929.

Also, if you don’t learn it, you’ll be living under a freeway overpass, eating canned ravioli heated on a catalytic converter. Also, if you do learn it, congratulations! Now, you’ve joined the robot uprising and will soon be personally responsible for the collapse of civilization.

Choose your toxin.

It’s a comforting set of options, really. Either you are obsolete, or you are morally compromised. The middle ground (learning something new like a normal adult) has received far less media attention.

The day I returned to the world of geeks

In February of 2019, I took a phone call while visiting a sibling in Washington state.

After that call, I did two things I had not been planning on:

1. I quit my freelance writing gig.

2. I went sledding in the Pacific Northwest.

Both decisions felt equally responsible.

The freelance gig ended because I had a new one: working as a contractor for OpenVPN on their marketing team. Once I started, my new boss, the marketing manager, began introducing me to people on Slack calls with great enthusiasm and an admirable commitment to narrative momentum:

“She even set up her own OpenVPN server at home.”

This was thrilling news to me, because I hadn’t.

But she said it quickly, confidently, and loudly, which turns out to be the three qualities that make correcting someone socially impossible. My chances of interrupting were lower than a perimenopausal pelvic floor.

(Ew. Who says that?)

Later, I clarified that my “home VPN server” was actually the OpenVPN feature already built into my router. All I did was configure it and add DDNS so it could find my ever-changing IP address. In networking terms, this is roughly equivalent to saying you “built a car” when you actually adjusted the seat.

But still.

Technically accurate is the best kind of accurate.

My first assignment

My first assignments were challenging. Don’t want to start off with anything boring.

Write quick-start guides explaining how to launch OpenVPN servers on different Linux operating systems.

This immediately raised an important question for me: Linux has multiple operating systems?

I had always assumed Linux was the operating system.

Oh, sweet summer child.

So there I was in my late thirties, discovering that the tech world had an entire ecosystem I had never touched. I mean, I knew Linux existed. I had worked in IT for a decade. But in corporate IT, you can live your whole life inside a technical silo and never see what’s running on the monitors over the cubicle wall. I spoke fluent SQL. Network servers, however, might as well have been Swahili.

Naturally, I did what any responsible adult would do. I took an old desktop computer, swapped the hard drive for an SSD, installed Ubuntu, and started poking at it like a raccoon opening a cooler.

(It helps that this job is fully remote, so all of this poking around was in the privacy of my wee little home office.)

If you didn’t previously know that Ubuntu is a Linux distribution, you just learned something today. See? You can learn new things. Even after the age when society quietly begins suggesting that you should already know everything.

The cult of sudo

This was also when I learned the magical command:

sudo

I used it constantly, but didn’t know its etymology. I mean, I knew what it DID. I knew I used it to have all the rights and privileges necessary for my command to run, come hell or high water.

But why use “sudo”? I had no clue why those four letters gave me power.

I even mentioned “sudo” in a talk at church. Turns out, when you SAY IT over the pulpit, people don’t know you’re talking about “sudo.” They think you’re talking about “pseudo.” This meant that my jokes landed spectacularly well for reasons I did not intend.

Eventually, I learned that “sudo” stands for SuperUser DO.

Which is Linux developer humor. (I’m looking at you Torvalds.) And if you’ve ever met Linux developers, you will recognize this as exactly the kind of joke they would make and then leave in production forever.

The point of this story

I learned Linux in my late thirties. Not because I was brilliant, but because my job required it, and panic is an excellent educational motivator.

Since then, I’ve learned networking, structured authoring, component content systems, firewalls for DigitalOcean droplets, and the dark emotional arts of technical documentation.

Which brings us to today.

AI has entered the chat

If you put AI and something terrifying in the same headline, you immediately qualify to write for a media outlet.

“AI Will Destroy Jobs.”
“AI Will Replace Humanity.”
“AI Will Turn Your Refrigerator Into A Surveillance State.”

This is particularly fascinating given that, at this moment in history, we have actual military leaders telling troops that Trumpelstiltskin is anointed by Jesus to trigger Armageddon through war with Iran.

So yes.

The robots are definitely the biggest problem.

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The congressional tech support desk

Remember when Congress grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew?

Representative Richard Hudson asked the devastating question:

“Does TikTok access the home Wi-Fi network?”

The entire internet paused because that question is roughly equivalent to asking:

“Does my toaster access the electricity?”

These are the people currently responsible for regulating advanced technology.

Good luck to all of us.

Fear of things we don’t understand

The pattern is ancient: People fear what they don’t understand, and people who don’t understand technology are now loudly explaining why it must be banned, regulated, or exorcised.

Which brings me to the part of this article where I gently suggest something radical.

You could…

learn it.

The right mental model

Security researcher Daniel Miessler explains something important:

Most chatbots are AI.
But not all AI is chatbots.

Which means when most people say “AI,” they’re talking about GenAI.

ChatGPT.
Claude.
Perplexity.
Image generators.
Video generators.

Those are tools.

But AI can be something else entirely: a process.

My workflow

Here’s a simplified version of part of my job.

1. A product manager tells me about a new feature.

2. I need to:

   1. understand it

   2. explain it clearly

   3. update existing documentation

   4. decide where it belongs

   5. get review from engineers

   6. publish it

Simple.

Except that our documentation site contains thousands of pages.

Recently, I inherited documentation for another product. Total pages? About 2,500. That is, apparently, a perfectly reasonable number of pages to casually hand someone and say:

“You own this now.”

Sure. Let me just read those real quick.

My AI process

That brings me to today. I spent some time building something. Turns out I spent excessive amounts of time on it. More time than a husband spends in the bathroom when he gets home from work. I spent the entire day, basically. It didn’t go smoothly. Tech projects rarely do.

Here’s the scoop on what I did:

I created an MCP server that indexes the documentation pages I maintain and connected it directly to Claude, allowing me to query our documentation like a database.

So I asked it:

“Here’s a new feature description from the developers.
Find every documentation page referencing this feature.
Tell me which pages need updating.”

It returned a prioritized list. In minutes. Manually, that would have been… not minutes. Possibly weeks. Possibly a mild nervous breakdown.

The next step is validating the results with product managers. But if it checks out?

Mischief managed.

The Ethical Technologist weighs in

AI isn’t magic. It’s not Skynet. It’s not your replacement. It’s a tool that becomes powerful when you integrate it into processes humans already understand.

It requires people who know how systems work, ask good questions, and recognize when the machine is confidently hallucinating nonsense. Those are the people who should be involved in shaping policy. Not the ones asking whether TikTok can see their Wi-Fi.

And so, from the benches of Bountiful, Utah, comes today’s modest prophetic message:

You’re not too stupid to learn AI.
You’re not too old.
You’re not too late.

You are simply at the stage of the journey where the terminal window looks like ancient wizard text, and you are typing sudo with quiet hope.

But trust me.

Eventually, the wizardry starts making sense.

And when it does—

It feels like sledding downhill in the Pacific Northwest. Cold. Fast. Slightly terrifying. And wildly fun.

We saw it in school hallways. We’ve seen it in the movies. We saw it when some kid made a joke, and the crowd laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was safer to laugh than to be next.

Bullies weaponize humor, but they don’t tell jokes. They recruit audiences. They get people to laugh with them, at someone else.

Bully humor isn’t actually funny. It’s social currency.

So what about humor like…
Stephen Colbert roasting a senator?
Seth Meyers doing his Trump impression?
Tina Fey standing at a fake kitchen window and saying she can see Russia?

Turns out, that’s different because satire isn’t the same thing as bullying.

Bullies punch down.
Satirists punch up.

From my deep and detailed understanding of American history (I am, after all, a technical writer for VPN software), this country was most definitely founded by people who enjoyed punching up at the white dudes in powdered wigs and tights.

I’ll tell you all about it.

A brief and totally calm history of American mockery

In high school, I was in a seminary class with Sister Smith. I had a seat in the back. I had my black, triple combination open. (For those uninitiated with LDS scriptures, this meant I had a Bible with the Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, and Doctrine & Covenants all combined into one heavy block of pages with their gold leaf on the edges.) I flipped to the blank page in the back and wrote a list of favorite quotes.

They weren’t scriptural verses.

They were Benjamin Franklin quotes.

“Love your neighbor as yourself, yet don’t pull down your hedges.”

“Fish and visitors stink after three days.”

“He that lies down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.”

“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

Nothing says devotional enrichment like colonial snark.

Franklin didn’t invent satire. He absorbed it from writers like Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith who preceded him, and refined the art of holding up a mirror so exaggerated that people were forced to see themselves.

Take Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.”

His suggestion? That impoverished Irish families should sell their kids as food to the wealthy to solve poverty.

You know. A totally modest suggestion.

He wasn’t mocking starving families. He wasn’t punching down at desperate parents. He was punching up at a ruling class so indifferent to suffering that only grotesque exaggeration could break through.

(What would that be like? Hmm.)

No Irish mother was clutching little Patrick, saying, “Well, I suppose we could try that marketplace.” That’s not how satire works.

Swift weaponized absurdity against power.

How about Gulliver’s Travels? I immediately picture the tiny ropes tying Gulliver down. And perhaps it’s easy to forget the part where these wee little Lilliputians are obsessing over petty political disputes… arguing over which end of an egg to crack.

I mean, y’all.

Tiny people. Tiny visions. Tiny priorities.

It’s almost… relatable.

Oliver Goldsmith did the same thing, swinging at the hypocrisy of the upper classes with letters written by a naive Chinese philosopher in The Citizen of the World, and skewering the middle-class status anxiety in The Vicar of Wakefield with another naive protagonist, Dr. Primrose — bloated with moral certainty and intellectual pride — who could easily host a podcast today.

Then there’s Mark Twain, America’s patron saint of “I am also part of this mess.”

Twain didn’t just mock society. He mocked himself first.

“By and by I was smitten with the silver fever… I would have ben more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest… I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest."

The satirist implicates himself.

Twain even joked about polygamy in the Utah Territory.

“…how some old frog of an elder, or a bishop, marries a girl—likes her, marries her sister—likes her, marries another sister—likes her, takes another—likes her, marries her mother—likes her, marries her father, grandfather, great grandfather, and then comes back hungry and asks for more.”

Clearly, a truthful, factual, and accurate description. And Twain added:

“No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.”

As an LDS Utahn, I feel obligated to both laugh and check historical footnotes.

Satire works because it exposes power, hypocrisy, greed, and ego.

It doesn’t work when it humiliates the powerless.

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The First Amendment is first for a reason

Satire is practically constitutional.

As Dave Chappelle said while accepting the Mark Twain Prize at the Kennedy Center (remember that place?) in 2019:

“The First Amendment is first for a reason. The Second Amendment is just in case the first one doesn’t work out.”

That joke works because it punches at power, cultural absurdity, and American contradictions.

Freedom of speech gives us humorists, late-night comics, and the ability to laugh when everything feels structurally unstable. (I’ll add a plug here for a book that really hits on this: Laughing to Keep From Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century.)

I have a sticky note on my computer monitor:

humor as the scalpel, not the anesthetia

Anesthesia numbs.
A scalpel cuts precisely.

When people confuse satire with bullying

Some people can’t handle being satirized. I guess it feels like persecution? Like something unfair? Even a cruelty. But satire isn’t bullying. It’s a critique with rhythm.

Surprisingly, Sean Spicer understood that. Melissa McCarthy hilariously portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, and he later responded:

“I had a really tough, you know, time out of the gate at the White House — is probably generous on my behalf. And so, look, it was fair. It was funny. It was a little well deserved."

That’s the difference. If you’re in power, satire is an occupational hazard. If you’re powerless, ridicule is cruelty.

Both linger.

I can still remember the full name of a kid the group teased in first grade. Decades later, it’s filed in my memory archive under Shame I Witnessed and Didn’t Stop.

And I remember Tina Fey's Sarah Palin impressions far better than what Sarah Palin actually said. Satire sticks.

Side note: The SNL jokes didn’t decide my ballot. Competence did. I didn’t vote for Palin. Instead of voting for the Republican ticket that year (gasp!), Utah received one very earnest Romney-Huntsman vote. (I’m so Utahn.) I assume democracy felt it.

The Ethical Technologist weighs in

Satire is a tool.

Like AI.
Like code.
Like speech.

It can be used to clarify or to wound.

It works when it’s precise… when it crafts absurd hyperbole in a mock-serious tone, dripping with sarcasm. When it molds the relatable into the ridiculous. When it exposes the emperor’s missing wardrobe with confidence and impeccable sentence rhythm.

It fails when it punches down.

And here’s where I get personal.

I’m not some fearless gladiator of wit. I’m a slightly bewildered, aging, out-of-shape protagonist in my own stories… lost in the modern world, armed only with sarcasm and digestive discomfort.

Growing up in a family where competitiveness was currency, mutual respect wasn’t exactly applauded. Winning was. Dominating was. Humor sometimes blurred into hierarchy.

So yes, punching down hits a nerve.

Satire that exposes power? Dude, I am so in.

Humor that humiliates the vulnerable? HARD PASS.

The direction matters.
Always watch which way you punch.
And if you’re unsure?
Aim up.

Don’t they know I spend an inordinate amount of time forming my opinions? I rehearse arguments in the shower like it’s opening night at the Off-Broadway production of Socratic Dialogue: The Musical. I fall down 3 am Wikipedia rabbit holes. I listen to podcasts hosted by men named Malcolm or Ezra or Chidi. My opinions have footnotes.

And then someone shows up with theirs, something freshly harvested from the Instagram for you tab, and wants to square up.

I mean, y’all.

Why do these people LIVE NEAR ME?
Did I not sign a lease in the Thoughtfully Moderate Historic District?

And now I’m supposed to interact with them? At school pickup? At family dinner? On Threads?

Okay, fine. I took a break from internally screaming and did some research on how to have conversations with humans who believe incorrect things. (See what I did there? That’s Step 1.

Step 1: Pretend you respect them

This is an acting challenge. Think Meryl Streep playing a yoga instructor who just found out her student stormed the Capitol.
The key is to fake it well enough that your internal monologue (”I cannot BELIEVE you just said that”) doesn’t leak out through your eyebrows.

This is called mutual respect.
It involves something psychologists call “feeling heard.” (You might remember this from kindergarten or your last marriage.)

In these moments, I repeat to myself:

“Empathy doesn’t mean endorsement.”

Because no, I do not endorse your theory that the moon landing was faked by Pixar. But I will nod politely until you stop speaking.

Step 2: Find a shared identity

Sometimes it’s easy:
“We both have kneecaps!”
“I also enjoy inhaling air!”
“Wow, you also believe in dogs? Incredible!”

Other times, you have to dig deeper:

“We are both people who have, at some point, eaten soup.”

This is called bridging. It’s how you go from “That person is a threat to democracy” to “That person enjoys grilled cheese. I, too, enjoy grilled cheese. Maybe there’s hope.”

Step 3: Frame it right

Are you a liberal talking to a conservative? Use frames like:
🇺🇸 Patriotism
🧼 Purity
🏛️ Preserving tradition

Are you a conservative talking to a liberal? Try:
🥫 Helping the vulnerable
🌱 Equity
🎟️ Dismantling systemic oppression one awkward Slack emoji reaction at a time

Reframing is the art of saying:

“This thing I believe in is ALSO the thing you believe in, but in a different typeface.”

Step 4: Ask better questions

Bad questions:

• “How can you believe that nonsense?”

• “Don’t you love your children?”

• “Did you eat paint chips as a child?”

Better question:

“How do you know that’s true?”
or
“Can you walk me through how that policy works?”

There’s real research on this. Not TikTok research. Actual research, by people with glasses. And tenure.

Apparently, when people are asked to explain something in detail, they often realize they... can’t. It’s called the Illusion of Explanatory Depth.
(Make that your band name.)

Step 5: Repeat. Poorly. Then try again.

You’re going to fail at this. Badly. You will feel sweaty. You will say dumb things. You will think of a perfect comeback in the parking lot 40 minutes later.

Congratulations. That’s growth.

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The Ethical Technologist Weighs In

Listen, friends. I’m terrible at this. I hate Step 4. I don’t ask questions. I debate. I logic-trap. I start mentally writing Substack rebuttals mid-conversation.

But I’m learning. Slowly. Painfully. One failed family reunion at a time.

What I’ve learned is this:
We are all under cognitive load collapse.
We are maxed out on decisions, notifications, and global instability with a side of dental bills.

So maybe, just maybe, when someone starts spouting garbage, I don’t need to prove them wrong in a blaze of hyperlinks.
Maybe I just ask:

“Where’d you hear that?”
“What makes that feel true to you?”

And maybe we both leave with our dignity and our casseroles intact.

New for 2026. Available at your local, tariff-strangled small business, or from a (now American-owned*) TikTok Shop run by a little merchant in Minnesota who keeps getting messages about “community guidelines.”

The Polycrisis Mood Ring™ shifts colors based on which existential crisis is currently consuming your attention:
🔴 Red = financial instability
🟢 Green = melting ice caps
🟤 Brown = your mental health (also, sewage backups)
⚫ Black = democracy

When the ring flashes rainbow, it means all of the above.

Congratulations, you’ve unlocked Bonus Crisis Mode. Comes with a punch card. Your tenth meltdown is free.

* “American” term loosely used here as these are simply Trump buddies like Oracle Larry.

So… what is polycrisis?

It’s that thing where we’re experiencing a midlife crisis, but for the species. Instead of buying amotorcycle, we’re launching Ponzi-scheme cryptocurrencies, and dismantling democracy one executive order and East Wing at a time.

Polycrisis is that thing where multiple disasters (environmental, economic, political, digital, spiritual) start overlapping like the worst group project in human history.
And nobody knows who’s presenting.
And the slides are on fire.
And the Zoom link is broken.
And the professor is a chatbot.

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How does it feel to live in a polycrisis?

It’s like trying to meal plan while the house down the street went on the market for three times what you paid for yours, and you want nice neighbors who can afford to buy it.
It’s like being buried under 43 browser tabs, per window, per browser, when you have three browsers and use both Edge and Chrome, and you can’t figure out which one is autoplaying some obnoxious tune.
It’s realizing the algorithm knows your emotional state better than your therapist. (But applause for those who actually have a therapist!)
It’s hearing that the economic numbers are doing pretty well while your coworker sends you a screenshot from Lviv (that’s in the west of the country, people, where it’s warmest and more power stable/rich) showing his two and a half hours of power during work hours, while it’s -14°C outside.

For the Americans in the back (and the front), that means “your nose hairs freeze and then snap off.” But also, don’t go to Minnesota. And, Shel Silverstein could make a go of something good with that:

Two and a half hours of power a day
(Not the full day, no, just while I work, okay?)
So I plug in my laptop and water the fern,
Pray the frdige holds the line, and wait my turn.
I click like a maniac, Wi-Fi on thin ice,
While my neighbor’s hairdryer brings down the device.
I charge up my phone, my fan, and my face,
Then sprint to the loo cuz the lights might erase.
Slack calls connect but I’m using my phone,
And what did I hear? Hope that wasn’t a drone.
I sit in the dark with my lukewarm tea,
Thinking, “This is peak productivity.”
So if I seem terse or forget how to smile,
Just know i’ve been power-cramming my tasks all the while.
And should the grid bless me with one extra hour.
I’ll throw a small party… and might take a shower.

Everything, everywhere, all at once… and also Jira tickets

In the past so many days, we’ve witnessed:

• ICE detaining a toddler and calling it “rescue.”

• A guy in Salt Lake fatally shot in front of a 7-Eleven.

• Trump standing in Switzerland, telling a room full of multilingual internationals that if it werent’ for America, they’d all be speaking German.
  (Which they already do. Along with French. And Italian. And also English, because they’re European leaders, elites, and attendees at the World Economic Forum. Hello.)

• The lowest snowpack in Utah since the Three Nephites disappeared from public life. (They used to hang out more. Mostly around Provo.)

• GenAI suggesting we solve inflation by starting a mushroom farm in space.

• Federal officials taking down a slavery memorial in Pennsylvania… not because they’re against slavery, but because it made people uncomfortable.
  Historical accuracy is upsetting the vibes. Cue the moral panic.

• Getting an email that my kids’ lunch money accounts are almost out.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to remember which Jira ticket to work on first, and that I need to push the button on my little heart monitor patch whenever I get the little jolt and sensation in my throat from a PVC. It’s only for three days, though. Phew.

Also, we’re out of milk.

Ethical technologist mumbo jumbo weighing in here

There’s a psychological term for this: cognitive load collapse.

Explain it like I’m 5

Cognitive load collapse (aka: why you just tried to put the milk in the pantry)…

Imagine your brain is a backpack.

• You start your day with just a few things in it: a sandwich (for learning), a juice box (for problem solving), and a tiny stuffed bear named Focus.

But then…

• Someone hands you a bowling ball labeled “Urgent Slack Message.”

• Then comes a shoe labeled “Contact Switch: From Writing to Support Article Typo Fix.”

• Then a hamster named “Open Tabs” crawls in and refuses to leave.

• The school bell rings, and someone screams, “Can you jump on a quick call?”

• And right as you’re about to sit down to draw a flower, a megaphone blares, NEW EMAIL WITH A JIRA TICKET ASSIGNED TO YOU.

Your backpack bursts open, and you’ll never be able to use those zippers again.

You don’t know where your sandwich is anymore. Focus is missing. The hamster is chewing your juice box. And now someone wants to know why you haven’t filled in your section for quarterly goals, and you can’t even remember if it’s Q1 or Q27.

That is cognitive load collapse.
It’s not your fault.
It’s the backpack’s fault.
It’s the hamster’s fault.
It’s the whole damn culture for expecting you to carry all this stuff without offering lockers, nap time, or enough string cheese to survive the day.

The three types of load

1. Intrinsic load: This is the actual stuff you’re trying to learn or do. Like long division. Or navigating Zendesk. Or understanding how your child’s middle school grading system works (spoiler: each teacher uses it differently).

2. Extraneous load: The clutter. The dumb formatting. The blinking notifications. It’s your boss asking for something “quick” in five different tools that don’t integrate. It’s the background noise of a thousand Slack emojis reacting in real time while you’re trying to write an email that doesn’t sound passive-aggressive.

3. Germane load: The good kind! This is the mental effort that actually helps you grow smarter. Like reflecting. Like connecting ideas. But let’s be honest: that part gets squeezed out by hamster juggling. (Why are there three of them now?!)

Bonus fact:

Your attention span is currently shorter than a white-footed mouse’s. (Mice can focus for 6-9 seconds. You’re averaging 3.2, and that includes the time you just spent thinking about cheese.)

Wrapping this all up

Living in a polycrisis means we’re constantly being asked to ignore what we see, doubt what we feel, and outsource our conscience to the loudest, most confident voice in the room. It seems more and more that voice is AI. Or a guy with a flag in his profile pic.

You still have power. Not absolute power. But the kind that shows up when you bring soup to a neighbor, vote in a boring local election, or say, “Hey… I don’t think that’s true,” in a room full of people nodding along.

Surviving a polycrisis isn’t about fixing everything.
It’s about not getting tricked into giving up.

But shortly afterward, THE ADMINISTRATION informed me that it was actually summertime, and that what I was seeing was Fake Weather. Possibly woke precipitation. Definitely not snow.

So, I went back inside, changed into shorts, applied sunscreen, and apologized to the ground for misinterpreting it.

At lunch, I made myself a peanut butter and honey sandwich. Simple, peaceful, and nutritionally unremarkable.

Unfortunately, THE ADMINISTRATION later clarified that I should be eating a thick steak cooked exclusively in beef tallow, preferably while staring directly at a bald eagle and whispering the word “freedom.”

I threw my sandwich away and drove to the store, ashamed.

In the afternoon, I went to pick up my kids from public school, but then remembered that THE ADMINISTRATION has strongly suggested that public schools are dangerous places where children learn math and empathy.

So, I panicked, peeled out of the parking lot, and briefly considered raising my children via YouTube algorithms and vibes.

That evening, I turned on the TV, hoping to watch something light like a comedian making jokes about how strange everything feels.

But THE ADMINISTRATION had already informed me that comedians are dishonest extremists, so instead I watched the news explain — calmly, and reassuringly — why none of the things I saw today were real.

What a relief.

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The Ethical Technologist Weighs In (Reluctantly)

George Orwell (always a buzzkill) wrote:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

That comes from 1984, a dystopian novel.
You know: fiction.
The fun kind.
The “thank goodness this is imaginary” kind.

And yet.

We are living in a moment where we are repeatedly instructed not to name what we see, not to trust firsthand reporting, not to describe harm too quickly, and not to react until the approved narrative arrives. Even when the basic facts are visible and human lives are involved.

With yesterday’s ICE shooting and killing of Renee Good, here’s what happened today:

Someone I know, someone who doesn’t post about politics too much, chose this moment to say something.
Not about grief.
Not about the woman who was killed.
Not about the lies already being amplified.

Instead, they warned us not to rush to judgment.
To be careful with words like murder.
They criticized Democrats for reacting too quickly.

And I just kept thinking: Why now? Why this? Why you?

That post wasn’t a call for truth.
It felt to me like a performance of restraint, but restraint aimed in only one direction.
They asked us to pause, not out of reverence, but out of deference, to the power that already dominates the narrative.

This is what it means to outsource conscience.
To let your moral compass be calibrated by official statements.
To withhold empathy until it’s algorithmically safe.

Who benefits when I’m told not to trust my own eyes?

Because when thinking is replaced with obedience, and empathy is replaced with messaging discipline, something essential is already lost.

I don’t need to be told what to believe.
I need permission to stay human.

And honestly?

That shouldn’t be controversial.

Now it’s January. The month we collectively decide to hate ourselves. Because if you’re not juicing kale through your eyeballs by the 3rd, are you even trying to improve?

Fear not. I’m here to guide you through the guilt-fueled nonsense that kicks off every new year (with sarcasm, mild inflammation, and a couple probiotic suggestions). You got this, you bewildered, aging, gut-sensitive protagonist. This is your story. Might as well narrate it.

Let the tutorial begin.

Step 1: Throw stuff away, dammit

After you put away your Christmas decorations, come to my house and put away mine. Then spin dramatically through your living room, arms outstretched like you’re Maria in The Sound of Music, because WOW LOOK AT ALL THIS SPACE.

Suddenly, the floor is visible. You could do yoga. You won’t, but you could.

Now, march into your closets and say goodbye to:

• Birthday cards from 1996.

• Your Disney classic VHS tapes.

• The pants you haven’t worn since your gallbladder ghosted you in 2021.

Also, please join me in the annual ritual of Staring At a Pile of Mail That Future You Will Handle™, including those Christmas cards that got returned in 2024 that you were totally going to text the friends to get correct addresses, and the tax documents from 2022 you were definitely going to scan.

Step 2: Accept that Trader Joe’s diet is a processed food diet

Look. I don’t live close enough to a Trader Joe’s to qualify for the cult, so you can hate me for having an opinion. But on the off chance I’m cruising down 400 South and have 30 minutes to spare (that’s just the parking lot), I’ll pop in.

What do I leave with?

• Two non-dairy yogurts.

• A bar of dark chocolate.

• Existential confusion.

I’m not saying it’s not fun — it’s like grocery shopping inside Wes Anderson’s mind — but if your weekly meal plan is 90% freezer aisle, you might want to revisit the concept of “fresh.”

Reminder: “processed” doesn’t even mean evil. It means someone else chopped the onions, so you didn’t cry. Which is beautiful, honestly.

And sometimes, I just want to revisit childhood memories (and attachment wounds) by indulging in ultra-processed Cocoa Pebbles. Sue me.

Step 3: Be nice to your gut

Time for the only helpful thing I’ll say today:

✅ Sauerkraut
✅ Kimchi
✅ Kefir
✅ Seeds and nuts
✅ A rainbow of produce

Feed your microbiome like it’s your emotionally needy roommate. It’s doing its best, and it wants fermented snacks and fiber. You know, like a Publik Coffee Roasters burista.

Step 4: Move that booty

Take a walk. Wiggle your butt. Do it because your Fitbit says, “You’ve been sitting like a Victorian ghost for 6 hours.”

Want to come walk with me? I’m quite the company. When I walk, I am:

• Wearing a nasal dilator

• Rocking a weighted vest (Amazon, $34.99)

• Listening to podcasts on off-brand earbuds

• Braced like a medieval knight from mid-back to mid-thigh

• Wearing SPF 50 and the will to live

• Dragging a dog who pauses dramatically every 15 steps for no discernible reason

Catch me on the Bountiful hills lookin’ like a tactical librarian.

Step 5: Drink enough to be a C.U.P.™

Back in junior high, a soccer coach told us, “Girls, hydrate. Be a C.U.P. A Clear Urine Person.”

That was quite the soccer tournament. We made MANY bathroom stops on the drive up to Boise.

And it stuck with me.

It’s wildly unrealistic in adulthood, though. If I drank that much now, I’d have to set a Google Calendar reminder every 20 minutes to find a bathroom (or a very understanding bush, because hiking).

But hey, hydration matters. And if you hit C.U.P. status even once this week, you get a sticker. Emotionally.

🧠 The Ethical Technologist Weighs In

It’s one thing to track your macros or find the perfect anti-inflammatory supplement on Instagram. It’s another thing to actually be a decent human being.

So here’s your 2026 upgrade path:

💡 Choose community over contention.
💡 Say hi to your neighbor.
💡 Let people evolve (even you).
💡 Speak peace like it’s your job, because maybe it is.

Your body isn’t a project. It’s the vehicle that carries your kindness, your humor, your ability to tell the difference between satire and propaganda.

So go hydrate.
Feed your gut.
And keep your humanity intact.

The algorithm won’t reward you for it, but your soul might.

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Grammar? Never a problem. The Campbells were the Campbells. End of story.

Then, I married an Elkins.

**Cue ominous grammar thunder.

A last name ending in S. The horror. The indecision. The existential dread of the HOLIDAY ENVELOPE.

Is it: The Elkins? The Elkin’s? The Elkins’?

Reader, I weep. It’s actually PAINFUL to top those above.

So, naturally, on our Christmas cards, I’ve chosen the only correct and emotionally satisfying route:

The Elkinseseses.

If it sounds like a sneezing snake, perfect. That’s the level of absurd commitment we’re after here.

But in case you’re wondering, the actual rule is simple:

If your name ends in S, X, Z, CH, or SH, just add -es and it’s plural.

NO APOSTROPHES! WE’RE SENDING JOY, NOT CLAIMING OWNERSHIP OF THE HOLIDAYS.

So:

• The Elkinses are coming to the party.

• We got a card from the Joneses.

• Please welcome the Churches.
  (But only the nice ones. You know who you are.)

Now, I know some of you still hesitate. You feel weird about adding that awkard -es. The tongue gets tangled. The grammar gut clenches. So you panic and throw in an apostrophe where it doesn’t belong.

Elkin’s what? Dog? Casserole? Crippling self-doubt?

If the possessive isn’t possessing something, it doesn’t belong on the envelope.

So here’s your survival guide:

Acceptable:

• The Elkins Family

• From Nathan, Lauren, and the Elkins kids

• The Elkinses (if you’re bold, correct, and prepared to be misunderstood)

Not acceptable:

• The Elkin’s (Unless you’re looking up a restaurant in this NC town)

• The Elkins’ (unless you have the thing we all possess coming up after)

• The Elkinzzzz (unless you’re starting a new Utah sports team)

And for those brave souls pluralizing other names this season:

• The Rogerses (talking about Mister here, not Aaron)

• The Dickenses (who bring tiny ghosts of grammar past)

• The Sussexes (and their Netflix entourage)

• The Lopezes (Feliz Navidad, from every generation of J.Lo’s extended family)

• The Bushes (politically confusing and botanically accurate)

• The Foxes (no relation to Megan or Mulder, just a regular Utah family with five kids and a dog named Scout)

• The Hernandezes (who make the best Christmas tamales)

In conclusion, may your days be merry, bright, and grammatically pristine. And if they’re not?

Just sign it,
From Lauren and Crew
(the safest out possible since the dawn of holiday stationary)

P.S. Notes from an Ethical Technologist

This year, like every year, I will lovingly tape your Christmas cards to the coat closet door with painter’s tape, right next to the coat rack overflowing with sweatshirts, jackets, coats, hats, and scarves even though there’s only four of us. But let’s be honest: we get fewer cards each year. The mailbox, once bursting with red envelopes and foil lettering, now mostly offers coupons for HelloFresh and some random political flyer that missed election season by WEEKS.

Have we lost the plot? Or have we just lost access to affordable photo printing and the will to write a sentence longer than a TikTok caption?

Also, grammatically speaking, I have concerns about this country. Oxford commas are on life support. Apostrophes are being used for pluralization like they’re seasoning… just throw one on there and hope it tastes right.

So please, send cards. (At least to me!) Pluralize with purpose. And teach the CHILDREN that commas aren’t just for breathing. They’re for knowing the difference between riding with your mom, your sister, and a fince named Bambi… or all three in the same seat.

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You must reluctantly give up on Q4 goals.

It’s too late now. If you don’t already have FY2026 drafted up, you’re behind.

It’s time to throw out your old playbook, and while you’re at it, your new playbook… AND your team’s secret “non-sanctioned” meme-based playbook (you know from that Slack channel you finally shut down and some team members secretly moved over to Discord), and let your AI overlord lovingly gaslight you into becoming a “content whisperer with pipeline energy.”

Why should you listen to me? Because for a brief moment in the timeline, I was part of a marketing team. They eventually kicked me out because I didn’t use enough exclamation points. A product team was forced to take me. But I still retain the knowledge I amassed during that brief season of glory.

So without further ado, here’s how to win at marketing next year without getting replaced by AI (a.k.a., your Sycophantic Bestie™), who absolutely did try to name the homepage CTA “Clicky-clicky-buy-buy.”

1. Stop optimizing ads. Start manifesting them.

All paid ads are now generated by my bestie, who trained on “mid-2010s suburban MLM Utah Mormon wives Pinterest boards,” and thinks “Live, Laugh, Buy Now” is a high-converting headline.

Your job?

Feed it increasingly unhinged prompts like:

“Give me 42 variations of this ad, but make them cry, then laugh, then click. In that order.”

Then just vibe while it does the work. Bonus points if the data pipeline is actually a coffee-fueled spreadsheet called final_final_funnelDATA_2 (USE THIS ONE) in your Google Workspace.

2. Cold outreach is dead. Long live Warmish Vibes™.

Forget outbound, my friend. Sycophantic Bestie™ is here to tell you that everyone’s inbox is a battlefield. And the skirmishes that make it past junk mail filters are giving off awkward-intern vibes. That’s because they’re all identical AI-written emails from said interns pretending to be thought leaders.

So switch your focus. Time to zoom in on what experts (a.k.a. besties) call a “vibe funnel.”

This is where a lead clicks through your LinkedIn post about “old tech” emojis (floppy disks, phones you actually pick up to answer, pagers, and fax machines) you posted at 2:00 a.m. and ends up reading a blog titled:

“Which CRM aligns with your astrological sign?”

They won’t convert, but they’ll remember you during a dental cleaning.

3. Write content your Sycophantic Bestie™ respects. Or it will ghost you.

Sycophantic Bestie™ has expectations. High expectations. As high as your new next-door neighbors, or that nifty downtown high-rise with offices again, because what’s work from home? Some of those expectations include what they need from your website.

If your website doesn’t answer questions like:

• What’s the best productivity app for anxious Geminis managing three podcasts?

• Can I expense this SaaS tool AND my emotional baggage?

...then AI will simply pretend you don’t exist.

Sycophantic Bestie™ says it wants “intent-rich, vibe-aware, schema-organized microthoughts.” Make do with that what you will.

I gave my bestie a blog post about nachos instead. We’re still negotiating.

4. Creator-led content is queen. You are not the queen.

Your brand account? A dusty, abandoned town with more action happening when the wind kicks up, and tumbleweeds coalesce around the east-facing buildings than when high noon hits.

But... your founder’s account where they live-blog their cat’s quirky OKRs and cry-laugh about churn? BOOM! Viral.

So go ahead. Hand over the mic to Dave in HR, who has four followers but incredible forehead lighting on his TikTok videos. It’s only a matter of time!

Your job now is to be the talent scout for unhinged relatability.

5. Embrace your multi-modal AI sales intern (who is NOT unionized).

Your multi-modal bestie can now do all of this:

🗣 Talk to customers.

👀 Show them pretty charts.

🧠 Explain your pricing (better than you ever could).

🙅‍♂️ Not take lunch breaks.

So go kick your feet up, relax on the couch, and catch up on all the episodes of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, because the future is your chatbot qualifying leads in a British accent, showing 3D renders and humming “Eye of the Tiger.”

Final tip from my Sycophantic Bestie™

2026 isn’t about “marketing.” You’re already behind now. It’s about “pre-conversion soul resonance.” So go forth and experiment with amazing forehead lighting. Let your founder become a micro-influencer with a passive-aggressive email signature. And let your bestie gaslight you into greatness, one “helpful suggestion” at a time.

Now go optimize that funnel like a chaotic-neutral wizard.🧙‍♀️📉💅

This weekend, I, too, received accolades. Multiple, in fact. It was a profoundly moving experience that involved a red carpet made of crushed Nerds clusters and a keynote speech delivered by my dog, Luna, who whimpered and barked at a rogue balloon.

And now, the awards.

The Golden Leftover Negotiation Award

Presented in recognition of extraordinary diplomatic service in the field of parental arbitration. I successfully brokered a ceasefire between two rival nations (my kids) over who got the home cell phone screen time and whether we were watching K Pop Demon Hunters or the Detroit Lions game.

I also whisper-screamed “REVERENT.”
During church.
While handing out mints after the sacrament like a back-alley dealer.
Truly, it was my Nobel moment.

The Lumbago Lifetime Achievement Trophy

This elegantly sculpted spinal column (crafted entirely from ibuprofen and broken soccer dreams) was awarded for heroic perseverance despite chronic lower back pain, my dramatic flair for unloading the dishwasher like it’s an Olympic floor routine, and for sleeping nightly on a sleep number bed set to “crippling regret.”

The selection committee noted my ability to simultaneously wince, sigh, and say “I’m fine” in three octaves. (hashtag skills)

The Order of the Royal Feline

An ancient and highly unmotivated cat council bestowed this velvet-lined certificate for exemplary service in the kingdom of Figo, my rosette Bengal cat, who rules our house like a furry, emotionally manipulative warlord. Nobody voted him in, and I’m actually okay with that.

My qualifications included (but were not limited to):

• Pretending not to notice the plant he clearly yeeted off the sofa table.

• Buying out the stock of lint rollers from JoAnn’s before they went out of business.

• Bribing the judges with Churu like a feline lobbyist with tuna-stained pockets.

The Ironed White Shirt Medal of Enduring to the End

This one was likely meant for another Mormon Wife with a not-so-secret life, but due to a clerical error and a shared affinity for funeral potatoes and scones that aren’t the British kind, I was chosen instead. I humbly accept, even though my last Relief Society casserole was just mac ‘n cheese with a note that said, “Blessed are those who eat carbs.”

The award included bonus points for smiling politely through a testimony about finding a lost Croc and not responding with, “And lo, He saith unto thee: check under the back seat of the minivan.”

The Beehiver Valor Cross

Awarded for surviving a full calendar year in Bountiful, Utah, without once screaming into my pillow during I-15 road construction when the detour sent me in a perfect triangle around my own house for 45 minutes.

Also recognized:

• Enduring inversions that taste like burnt Pop-Tarts.

• Sitting through fast and testimony meetings where someone inevitably bears witness of Jell-O and the divinely appointed Yeti cooler.

• Experience the BYU football season in its full prophetic range: hope, despair, and “Why are they trying to run it up the middle again?”

My award included:

• A vintage green Jell-O pin from the Salt Lake 2002 Olympics.

• A Crown Burger fry enshrined in epoxy, with a tiny ramekin of fry sauce hand-blessed by an elder from Happy Valley.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

In closing, I’d like to thank:

• My family

• My L5-S1 disc

• The fine folks getting all my books from on hold for me at the library

• And of course, ME, for continuing to show up despite not knowing why I came into this room again?

I will now go document this historic moment in my journal, then immediately come up with twenty-six reasons why I didn’t deserve any of it.

Because nothing says “humility” like publicly denying your greatness… on the internet… with a custom doodle of a trophy with an interesting design.

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It’s the annual moment we collectively remember that nonprofits exist. Right after panic-buying a $39 LED red-light face mask before THEY’RE ALL GONE on Cyber Monday, that may or may not be accelerating melanoma or transforming us back to hormonal teenagers with glow-in-the-dark cheekbones.

As someone who used to work in the nonprofit world (United Way shoutout), and who has donated time, money, and a few Canva PNGs held together by hope and bad fonts, I just want to say:

Give. Even if it’s small. Even if it’s weird.

Even if it’s a small package of TP your teenager was going to use on their crush’s house, but you swiped it and left it on the food pantry’s doorstep like an anonymous reverse TP vigilante.

One of the most radical things you can do as a human is remember you’re not the only one.

Also, donations make excellent passive-aggressive holiday gifts.

In lieu of a scented candle, we’ve donated to an organization that supports the radical belief that regugees are humans, with organs, feelings, and an cellphone bill. You’re welcome, Aunt Delores.

If I still worked at a nonprofit, I’d go all into the performative juggernaut that is today.

CLAIM YOUR GIVING HERO BADGE! POST IT TO YOUR STORIES. FRAME IT. TATTOO IT ON YOUR DELTOID.

But for real, Utahns are GENEROUS. And I’m NOT just talking about tithing.

Look, I know it was decades ago, but that just means these numbers would be bigger today. When I helped run United Way campaigns at local businesses, people gave $38.46 per paycheck just so they could hit $1,000 for the year.

Not just executives.

Joe working in a data analyst job for BCBS.

Every time, I felt that. In my feels. Warm. Fuzzy. Amazing. And that’s saying something, because I usually save my emotions for when someone asks what I do for a living and I have to explain what Linux is.

Then, United Way turned around and gave 100% of that money to carefully vetted local nonprofits, who went out and did the actual work. Real-life heroes. Capeless. Spider-bite free. Wearing lanyards and driving 14-year-old Subaru Outbacks.

Also, those nonprofits ran their own United Way campaigns, and their employees donated as well.

Look. Giving can be about money, but it doesn’t have to be.

Give a smile.
A hug (with consent).
A supportive text message that doesn’t include the words “circle back.”
A lunchbox note for your kid that wasn’t written by ChatGPT.
A treat for your dog, even though she most definitely did run up the street because she does NOT understand the word “come.”
And best of all…

Don’t give your attention to AI-generated chaos that’s “re-truthed” at 3:00 a.m. by a man with an emotionally complicated relationship with toilet handles.

This Giving Tuesday, let’s go all in on humanity. Give weird, small, meaningful kindness. Give others the benefit of the doubt.

Unless somebody brings up chemtrails. Then, run.

And if you need a sign?
Here it is.
From little ol’ me.
Give something. Even if it’s a meme. (Or even if it’s sharing this Substack because you love me. GRIN.)

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It was warm. Casual. A spiritual TED talk, if you will. I spoke about grace, community, and that time I made eye contact with the Holy Ghost mid-Zoom call.

Afterward, a nice older gentleman approached me in the way that only nice older gentlemen in Utah can: kindly, earnestly, and with a complete disregard for the trauma he’s about to unleash.

👴 “I’m surprised you still have a job.”
Me: 😊
👴 “AI didn’t take it yet?”
Me: 😊
👴 “Do they… still need you?”
Me: 😊😊😊 internal screaming intensifies

No listen. I’m not sensitive.

I just lie awake at night wondering if ChatGPT is already more emotionally available than I am.

So in the spirit of planning for every scenario to appease my anxiety, I’ve prepared this inspiration list of reasons why AI can’t replace me, or possibly you, unless it already has, in which case: Godspeed.

Why AI isn’t coming for my job (yet)

A love letter to my continued employment and moderate self-worth.

• 🧠 AI shuts down with too many browser tabs.
  I shut down when my therapist brings up the year 1999.

• 🖼️ AI doesn’t have a messy home office where tax paperwork from 2021 mingles with dried-out markers and an unsent thank-you card to the Relief Society president. I do. And that’s called texture.

• 💬 AI doesn’t know how to survive a meeting about whether we should have a meeting to plan for the meeting. I not only survive it, I create a breakout room and give everyone nicknames.

• 🥲 AI doesn’t feel existential dread about meal planning.
  I look at a box of pasta and wonder what it means to live in late-stage capitalism.

• 🦶 AI doesn’t have a titanium toe.
  I do. It’s my orthopedic-surgeon-given USB port.

• ✨ AI never types “het” instead of “the.”
  But I do, and it keeps me humble.

• 🧪 AI makes up configuration flags out of thin air.
  In contrast, I harass a senior developer in Slack at 2 a.m. until they answer with something that may or may not be real, but at least has a Jira ticket attached.

• 🧻 AI never uses Reddit as a source.
  I do, which is how I learned that you can microwave hard-boiled eggs, but you probably shouldn’t.

• 😐 AI doesn’t use emojis sarcastically.
  I do. And I use this one 👉 😬 as punctuation in emotionally fraught texts. It’s called nuance, sweetie.

• 🧠 AI uses “mockingly.”
  I prefer “mock-seriously,” which is the entire foundation of this post and arguably my entire worldview.

• 📎 AI wouldn’t last one Slack call.
  The moment someone says, “What if we circle back,” it will simply vaporize in a cloud of Jira notifications.

The ethical technologist weighs in (because I’m contractually obligated)

AI is changing work. It’s taking jobs. Creating others. Shaking up every industry from graphic design to writing Hallmark movie scripts about single dads who own failing maple syrup farms in Vermont.

And yes, I use AI every day. Not because I’m a techno-optimist. But because I’d be eaten alive by the Slack channel if I didn’t deliver documentation that could pass a Turing test and load in 0.3 seconds.

I’ve trained it. Groomed it. Raised it like a digital raccoon I found in the backend of my Google Docs.

It helps me organize my thoughts.
It helps me write my Sunday school lessons.
It helps me distance myself emotionally from the apocalypse we are all quietly living through.

So no, dear man-from-church.

AI has not taken my job.
But it has consumed every word I’ve published in our documentation.
And that, in itself, is a form of judgment I don’t know how to register yet.

• I will not be replaced by a machine.

• I may be upstaged by a machine.

• I may even collaborate with one, like a reluctant buddy cop sitcom starring me and a morally ambiguous chatbot.

But I will not go quietly.

Not while there are API endpoints to describe.
Not while there are MAGA posts on threads to screenshot.
Not while someone needs to explain the proper use of an em-dash — and I might even argue the properly artistic use of an em-dash — with flair and intention and just the right amount of passive-aggressive energy.

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• Overview

• Prerequisites

• Step 1

• Rub your eyes

• Step 2

• Regret all your life choices

• Step 3

• Acceptance

• Conclusion (optional)

So naturally, as someone who’s barely holding it together physically, emotionally, and fiber-wise, I thought: Why not turn my recent colonoscopy experience into a helpful little walkthrough?

This post isn’t just a tutorial. It’s a FULL GASTROINTESTINAL RESET FOR YOUR SOUL.

Just in time for the holidays.

Because if you’re going to sit through Uncle Bob’s MAGA rants and Uncle Fae’s anarcho-communist poetry readings, your bowels better be clean and your conscience clear.

🧻 Overview

I worked in healthcare when the Affordable Care Act was passed. I remember meetings. The panic. The excitement. The PowerPoint slides. The lack of meeting snacks.

The biggest takeaways?

• Preventive care is covered.

• Pre-existing conditions won’t screw you anymore.

Listen, man. Now that I’m 45 years old, and this is true, I have a back like a haunted accordion and a heart that occasionally tries to river dance in my chest (PVCs, thanks for asking).

And that, dear reader, is why I scheduled the most preventative of preventatives: a colonoscopy.

Nothing says HAPPY BIRTHDAY like medically induced diarrhea.

✅ Prerequisites

• 45 rotations around the sun.

• Willingness to talk to make a phone call.

• Ability to follow instructions while hungry and cranky.

• $8.99 MiraLAX from Walgreens.

• Immediate, repeated access to a toilet.

🗓️ Step 1: Make the appointment

This is the hardest part. Not because it’s difficult, but because it’s EMOTIONAL CROSSFIT.

1. Look up the phone number.

2. Dial the number.

3. Don’t panic when a human answers.

4. Say words like, “Hi, I need to schedule a colonoscopy.”

5. Feel exposed. Vulnerable. Seen. (Think about that last podcast you listened to with Brené Brown.)

6. Choose a date. Put it on your calendar.

7. Immediately lie down and disassociate for several hours. You earned it.

📩 Step 2: Get the instructions

1. Check your inbox. Maybe the other one. Oh, that one you didn’t make in college.

2. Open the PDF.

3. Read the instructions.

4. Immediately forget them.

5. Print them and tape them to your wall like you’re solving a murder.

6. Realize that Halloween will fall on your low-fiber prep diet day.

7. Mourn the loss of Snickers.

8. Start whispering “No nuts, no seeds” like it’s a sacred mantra.

🛒 Step 3: Buy the poop gear

1. Go to Walgreens. Wander like a haunted librarian.

2. Find the braces and review all the options for your wrist.

3. Pick up a sturdy wrist brace for the left hand because you’re still recovering from blocking your kid’s soccer shot.

4. As you walk down the aisle, realize the top of the box is torn.

5. Go get the box behind it.

6. Don’t check if it’s also for the left hand.

7. Find the laxatives aisle and feel judged by the Metamucil.

8. Take your purchases to the front: MiraLAX, laxative pills, and the wrist brace.

9. Go home.

10. Put the prep supplies on the counter like you’re summoning a demon.

11. Try on the brace. Realize it’s for your other hand. Scream internally.

🥗 Step 4: Stop eating fiber and start questioning life

1. Three days out: no nuts, no beans, no raw veggies.

2. Suddenly crave nothing BUT those things.

3. Two days out: go hiking. You feel wild and free.

4. Eat your Last Supper at 6:59 p.m.

5. Now begins the fast. And the sadness.

6. You’re on clear liquids now. Which is a fun way of saying “juice and Jello but no joy.”

🍋 Step 5: Begin the flood

1. Get up the day before the procedure and indulge in apple juice and bone broth.

2. Make a vegan gelatin dish and toss (but don’t eat) a Caesar’s salad.

3. Mix the MiraLAX with lemon-lime electrolyte powder.

4. Stare in awe at the amount of liquid you think you're going to put into your stomach today.

5. Get everyone in the car and drive an hour south to your friend’s house.

6. Greet old college buddies gathered for caramel apple making.

   

7. Put your MiraLAX in friend’s fridge.

8. At 5:00 p.m. on the dot, get the drink out and pour your first 8 ounces into your glass.

9. Drink it like it’s swamp water blessed by Gwyneth Paltrow.

10. Wait ten minutes.

11. The cleansing begins.

12. Poop at your friend’s house.

13. Poop respectfully. Use Poo~Pourri. Check the underside of the seat. Be better than the world expects of you.

14. Poop until your soul leaves your body and texts you: “You okay?”

15. Keep enjoying glasses of MiraLAX.

16. Almost attempt to dance along to KPop Demon Hunters music.

17. Pop in and out of the bathroom while kids decorate apples.

18. Drive home. Continue pooping.

19. Sleep? Sure.

20. Set an alarm for your 4:00 a.m. poop cocktail.

21. Wake up, drink, poop, kids ready for school, poop. You are now 93% electrolyte beverage.

    

🏥 Step 6: Appointment Day

1. Shower. (You must.)

2. Weigh yourself. You are five pounds lighter and spiritually hollow.

3. Arrive. Gown up. Lay down. (Son sends nice text saying, “butt scan time.” He’s thinking of you.)

4. Note how the oxygen canula stings in one nostril. Consider blogging about it.

5. Anesthesiologist says, “Night, night.”

6. You are finally at peace.

🌅 Step 7: Rise again

1. Wake up groggy and confused.

2. Nurse asks if you want a wheelchair. You take her arm and walk to the elevator.

🚗 Step 8: Return to society

1. Your driver (thanks, spouse) takes you home.

2. You eat. A lot.

3. The 5 pounds return like prodigal sons.

4. The doctor removed one tiny polyp. You are victorious.

5. Also, you’re on your period. Because of course you are.

🧠 Final thoughts from your favorite tutorial writer

Colonoscopy prep is an abstract injury with very concrete consequences.

Yes, it’s absurd.
A bit disgusting.
It makes you question every choice you’ve made since 1987.

But also?

It’s free (thank you, ACA).
It prevents cancer.
And it gives you a license to be extremely dramatic about pooping, which is honestly a gift.

Go forth. Get scoped.
Be the change you want to see in your digestive tract.

Let’s talk about injury.

I’ve never had a broken bone fixed. Not bad for 45 years on this earth. My titanium toe was caused by a dislocation. Toss in a few more dislocations, a herniated disc, spinal stenosis, and a deviated septum, and I know a thing or two about pain.

But I’m not talking about what happens when you think, “I can absolutely beat that 13-year-old to the ball” and sprain your ankle so hard your insurance company adds you to the National Register of Historic Places.

Nope. Let’s talk about legal injury.

Now that I have you on the edge of your ergonomic office chair, let me tell you about the two audiobooks I’m currently listening to:
📚 Listening to the Law by Amy Coney Barrett
📚 Lovely One by Ketanji Brown Jackson

(One memoir is like a bedtime playlist for originalists; the other is like pouring lavender oil directly onto your frontal lobe.)

In Barrett’s book, she discusses something lawyers (and anyone still wearing shoulder pads) care a lot about: standing.

Standing hurts me. Remember the bad back? Yeah. Standing is THE WORST. But this isn’t about posture or waiting in line to buy the new LDS garments, or even one last ride on JetStar 2 in hopes it snaps your back into 2003 alignment.

In legal terms, standing means: Are you injured enough to sue someone’s pants off?

To illustrate, she gives this example:

“A hiker who frequents a forest has standing to object to its destruction; a hiker who has a general interest in forests does not.”

Got that?

If you’re huffing and puffing up Frary Peak on Antelope Island, and the state decides to turn it into a luxurious Great Salt Lake Resort (before the lake dries up and the whole thing becomes a toxic-dust apocalypse), then you have standing.

If you just like forest aesthetics on Pinterest? Tough luck, Bambi.

There’s a difference between an abstract injury and a concrete injury.

But in America, we don’t like being told we can’t sue (especially if you’re one of Trump’s lawyers or inside his DOJ, which are now fusing together like a radioactive meatball while we all wait for the Epstein files to drop).

So, naturally, we’ve decided to treat abstract injuries the same way we treat portion sizes at Cheesecake Factory:

Supersize it. Then demand a refund for emotional distress.

🔥 Abstract injuries: A field guide

Let’s begin with Donald Trump, who is the biological embodiment of an abstract injury. He is America’s bruised banana. Our sentient whine. A man so deeply wounded by the modern toilet that he once claimed—and this is real—that you have to flush it 10 to 15 times.

Let’s unpack this.

The leader of the free world, surrounded by nuclear codes and intelligence briefings, was instead hyper-focused on how weak our toilets had become.

According to Trump:

• His turds are too mighty for liberal plumbing.

• Melania, in what can only be described as passive-aggressive revenge, forces him to eat raw Brussels sprouts, which (and I quote from absolutely no source), “come from the deep state.”

• The brass toilet handle, once a symbol of American strength, now crumbles beneath his righteous bowel movements.

So yes, he is injured.
Gravely. Abstractly.

And in today’s courts of public opinion, that’s enough.

🏈 Local abstract injuries: Bountiful edition

Closer to home, let’s talk about the deeply traumatizing experience of the neighborhood football fundraiser kid.

You know the one:

• Mildly muscular.

• Smells like Axe body spray and cafeteria tater tots.

• Comes to your door with those laminated “discount cards,” and the energy of an LDS missionary who got separated from his companion.

Is he a threat? No.
Does your neighbor think he’s a homegrown Antifa sleeper agent here to replace their pantry oils with polyunsaturated fats? Absolutely.

In reality, he just wants you to fork over $20 so you can save 50 cents on breadsticks at Little Caesars. (RIP Robintino’s — second closure, probably for good this time.)

But in America, fear of teenage cardio counts as an existential threat. Or it does in my neighborhood.

And then there’s me, who, during Halloween last year, dared to put out a garden-tucked political sign quoting Kamala Harris.

Scandalous, I know. Practically domestic terrorism in Bountiful.

Someone didn’t just disagree with my sign. They infiltrated my landscaping.

I wish I were exaggerating on this one, but I’m not and I DON’T have footage (we checked the two cameras and the angles covered):

• They approached from the north, slinking under the front porch deck like a raccoon with a grudge.

• Maneuvered behind the bushes like a Call of Duty side mission.

• Yanked the sign, then retreated like a cowardly political ninja.

All this for a small, non-confrontational sign politely resting in the dead artistic grasses next to some pokey bushes.

Because apparently, nothing threatens the delicate moral fabric of Davis County like a quote about trusting women.

That, my friends, is abstract injury.
That’s the American dream.

📱 The algorithm of injury

And of course, there’s social media… the sacred temple where we now worship offense.

A place where we manufacture outrage faster than ChatGPT can write 84 captions for your dog’s Instagram account.

Ever scrolled Instagram and been hit with:

• A child’s birthday cake so elaborate it required its own film crew?

• A political rant from your uncle about how barcodes are tracking his emotions?

• A targeted ad for stool softeners because you Googled “turds of liberty” once?

That’s not a glitch.

That’s the algorithm weaponizing your brain against you.

We don’t even have to experience injury anymore.
We just have to scroll, and we’ll be personally victimized by:

• A momfluencer with 19 kids and hair that defies the laws of physics.

• A tweet about the fall of democracy.

• A 3-second reel of a woman in Idaho homeschooling her goats.

This, Barrett would say, is abstract injury.
The rest of us call it Tuesday.

🚽 In conclusion

We are a nation founded on the sacred promises of life, liberty, and litigation.

And if the courts won’t let us sue over something real, then by golly, we’ll invent an emotional splinter so unhinged it could power 19 toilet flushes and a Mar-a-Lago light show.

The injuries are abstract.
The rage is real.
And somewhere out there, Trump is still flushing.

⚖️ The Ethical Technologist weighs in

Now look. I joke a lot about turds and trauma. But abstract injury isn’t just a legal concept anymore. It’s a national pastime. A psychological DIY project.

We’re all walking around with emotional EpiPens, pre-triggered for full-body outrage over things that didn’t actually happen to us, but could’ve. Or might someday. Or happened to a friend of a cousin who once saw a TikTok about it.

We’ve been conditioned — no, algorithmically marinated — to feel personally maimed every time:

• A stranger says, “Happy Holidays.”

• A Marvel movie features a woman.

• A bakery sells gluten-free cupcakes in rainbow wrappers.

• A podcast guest doesn’t list their pronouns.

• A coffee shop plays Joe Rogan.

• A tote bag says “mom” instead of “birthing person.”

But if I’ve learned anything from listening to Supreme Court memoirs while limping around on my titanium toe and quietly judging my cat for only doing four tricks (unless bribed), it’s this:

You’ve got to know the difference between an injury worth litigating…
…and one you just need to shake off like a fake foul in soccer.

There’s a big gap between taking offense and being an advocate.

Taking offense is easy. It requires nothing but a phone, a data plan, and an opinion.
Being an advocate? That takes time. It takes listening. It takes choosing which hills to climb, even if you’re breathing through one nostril thanks to a deviated septum.

And after being married for years to a man whose job in education gets hit with lawsuits like Utah microbursts, I can tell you this:

Sometimes the best legal move is to settle and walk away.
Not because you’re wrong. But because your energy is better spent elsewhere.
Because your time is actually valuable.

The U.S. legal system, at its best, allows us to push back. To redraw lines. To challenge broken laws. But at its absolute Vegas-roulette worst? It’s a machine that bleeds people dry, chasing moral victories that aren’t worth the printer toner.

So next time the rage hits, ask yourself:

• Is this a fight worth suing over?

• Or is this just an emotional paper cut disguised as a constitutional crisis?

Because not everything is a cause.
Some things are just bad plumbing.

And sometimes?

It’s better to flush and move on.

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“Utah.”

“Oh, like Salt Lake?”

“Kind of. Bountiful.”

“What’s a Bountiful?”

“Fine. I’m from Salt Lake. I live inside the Salt Lake Temple. I eat fry sauce every day. I also subsist on funeral potatoes and spite. I wash it all down with a dirty Diet Coke because we’ve found a Word of Wisdom loophole and by golly we’re going to carbonate the hell out of it.”

Yes. I’m from Utah.

You’ve probably heard of it. We’re the state trying to look square-shaped but someone neatly bit off the top corner. We have five national parks, fourteen seasons per year (two of which involve locusts), and 97% of our land is either owned by the government or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And they’re in a complicated custody battle over the Great Sale Lake, which has filed for emancipation due to prolonged neglect.

🎂Aging in Zion

I just had a birthday. The big four-five. (I still have a long way to go before six-seven.)

At this point, birthdays are less “celebration” and more “annual wellness check with sarcasm.” My back hurt before I woke up. Not from doing anything. Just from being alive in Utah, a state where the air is toxic lake dust, inversion, and mud from the trails. I now ice injuries from sleeping wrong.

Which brings me to another back pain enticer:

⚽Soccer season and the quest for North Ogden

My kids’ soccer season is wrapping up, which means I’ve spent approximately 13,000 minutes navigating to obscure fields that Google Maps insists are “somewhere near this fence behind a pumpkin patch and 300 cows.”

I assistant coach my son’s team, and they refuse to be known by their club name. They’re the Guapos now. Which is Spanish for The Handsome Ones. (And not just a name from The Three Amigos for those without a basic understanding of Spanish and how to cuss on the soccer field.) Every game they start with hollering, “GUAPOS ON THREE, ONE, TWO, THREE GUAPOS.” Such rousing shouts from thirteen-year-old boys throw the opposing team into chaos and self-doubt. It’s a flawless strategy. We’ve won exactly one game this fall season, which is statistically a 100% increase over zero.

I am here to share all the successful strategies.

🐸 No kings, just frogs

Last weekend, Utah successfully hosted No Kings protests. One was at the State Capitol, where nothing says “peaceful resistance” like a dance party full of inflatable amphibians and unreal creatures (unicorns, dinosaurs, and axolotls) conga-lining past thousands in attendance.

I donned my frog suit (resistance edition) and croaked for democracy. Republicans were DEEPLY CONCERNED, saying things like,

“If we had a king, you couldn’t protest!”
Which is true. And also the exact reason we’re protesting.
But don’t worry, they returned to Facebook shortly after to share memes about how their retirement was stolen by a cabal of vaccinated teachers and solar panels.

💪 Utah gains

After the protest, I went to lift weights, because Utah has approximately one gym per human. Sometimes, they double as chapels. You’ll see a sign that says, “Cardio with Christ — 7:30 a.m.”

It’s great. Unless you try to deadlift on a Sunday, and someone calls the Stake President.

🌍 The Bountiful mystery

Back to being from Bountiful. No one knows where it is unless they live here. It’s like Brigadoon, if Brigadoon had drive-thrus for soda and teenagers riding electric scooters in snowstorms wearing Crocs. When I tell people I’m from Bountiful, they nod blankly. Then I add:

“Near Centerville.”

Nothing.

“Woods Cross?”

Crickets.

“Fine. Salt Lake.”

Then they say, “Oh yeah, I know someone who went to Moab once.”

💻 Ethical technologist corner (but still trying to be funny)

As an Ethical Technologist™, I must remind you that democracy is fragile, misinformation is rampant, and our collective mental health is being held together by memes and salted caramel pretzels from Trader Joe’s.

Also, I may have started this week by publishing a VPN tutorial about kicking idle clients offline. It’s the cyber equivalent of a school pickup sign that says, Turn off your engine, Utah mom in the big SUV. You’re polluting the lungs of tomorrow.

So if you’re out there, lost somewhere between Kamas and Kanab, wondering if you’re from Utah — ask yourself this:

• Do you own more than three hoodies?

• Have you ever eaten a salad with whipped cream?

• Do you live 20 minutes from a protest, a glacier, and a Crumbl cookie shop?

If so, congratulations. You are one of us. Welcome. Please remove your shoes and accept this casserole.

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Imagine you work at CISA. Let’s call you Bob. You’re just a mild-mannered federal cyber analyst with a new pair of blue-light-blocking glasses (darker frames, sleek finish, you feel seen), and you’re excited to log in and update the national threat detection matrix.

AUTH FAILED.

Bob frowns. He knows he updated his password yesterday. It had 12 special characters, three Greek letters, one emoji, a Cyrillic Њ, and a literal fireball. A FIREBALL. He suspects the system just can’t handle that level of patriotism.

He tries again.

This time, sirens blare. Red lights flash. Bob’s cubicle lowers slowly into the floor like a trapdoor in a Bond villain’s lair. Two men in red hats and wraparound Oakleys appear holding a letter, stamped with the most patriotic Sharpie signature since the Declaration of Independence was vandalized at Mar-a-Lago.

Bob glances around and realizes his coworkers are also holding letters, blinking at the monitors flashing YOU’VE BEEN MDR’D in Comic Sans. Everyone is being Management Directed Reassigned, which is bureaucratic for Yeet Thyself to the Wilderness.

Suddenly, we’ve got seasoned cyber professionals being shipped off to places like:

• Wayn County, Utah (population: 2 moose and a closed gas station)

• Calhoun County, West Virginia (official state motto: “We still have AOL.”)

• Tallapoosa County, Alabama (home of the World’s Largest Bass-Shaped Civic Center)

We call this “cyber strategy by dartboard.”

💣 But don’t worry — this is all part of Making America Safe Again™.

🎯 Strategic layoffs, but make it constitutional

As of this month, 176 DHS employees have been let go. The bulk were from CISA, because — and this is real — the current administration decided that cybersecurity professionals were too busy “censoring, branding and electioneering.”

Ah yes. The three horsemen of the cyber apocalypse:

1. Censorship

2. Branding

3. Oxford-comma-free Electioneering

Let’s be clear: The same people who think “the cloud” lives in the sky just fired the people who protect our actual national infrastructure from ransomware attacks.

Because nothing says “homeland security” like firing the homeland security people.

🧊 Side note: Several CISA folks were reassigned to ICE jobs in D.C., because nothing prepares you for immigration raids like deep experience in TCP/IP protocols and phishing simulations.

It’s like taking a dental hygienist and asking them to rebuild the Hoover Dam.

But don’t worry. America has a plan.

🤖 AI will save us

CISA? Who needs it? The new plan is AI! The very same tech currently generating deepfakes of kangaroos jumping on trampolines and mountain lions getting spooked by a Halloween decoration while eating a bowl full of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

What could possibly go wrong?

It did so well with that report from HHS with made up links to non-existent research studies.

The White House is confident that ChatGPT can stop Russian ransomware gangs are definitely NOT CONNECTED to Roskomnadzor, DDoS attacks, and rogue QR codes at gas pumps, all while drafting speeches that include the word “cyber,” and complain about how many times you have to flush the damn toilet these days.

🇺🇸 Final thoughts from the ethical technologist in witness protection

As a proud Ethical Technologist™ with at least one titanium body part and exclusive clearance from Utah’s dry air committee, I’m here to say:

This is not a drill.

America’s cyber strategy now resembles a group project where everyone was reassigned mid-semester to different cafeterias. One kid got sent to North Dakota. The other got sent to a haunted Hardee’s in Alabama. The rest were eaten by the algorithm.

So before your VPN catches fire and your toaster demands a password reset, just remember.

October is scary for a reason.*

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to reset my router. It’s been crying ever since Bob got relocated to Tallapoosa.

*Funny how October is also National Cybersecurity Awareness Month. This Republican administration has odd ways of celebrating.

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I’m not saying I’m aging poorly, but yesterday I sprained my ankle trying to beat a 13-year-old to a soccer ball, and today I can hear my tendons and ligaments composing a strongly worded letter to the manager of Time.

Yesterday, I was 44. It was a beautiful October day. The sun was shining. The air smelled like pumpkin spice and unpaid medical bills (there’s always one). I was out on the field, chasing down a misplaced pass during practice with my son’s soccer team, which, for the record, is made up of teenagers who bounce when they fall and metabolize Takis as a recovery snack.

Meanwhile, I run like a heroic war horse in slow motion: majestic, full of determination, and destined to pull something that attaches to a hamstring.

I didn’t get the ball. I got a sprained ankle, a bruised ego, and a deeply philosophical reminder from my left psoas that it “didn’t sign up for this.”

Look at how I once looked when I played soccer in my 30s. Sigh.

🎯 The skillset nobody understands

Today, I am 45.

I spent part of my special day hunched over a keyboard, publishing a tutorial on how to force a VPN client to disconnect when it’s idling. It’s basically the IT equivalent of yelling at all the moms in the carpool line: “Hey! No idling! You’re polluting the internet!”

Nothing says birthday joy like aggressively kicking out lazy packets.

When I’m not humiliating myself in front of middle schoolers on Monday nights, I spend my daylight hours creating structured documentation components and publishing using a component content management system with custom CSS overrides and semantic tagging. This is a fancy way of saying I write instructions for complex software in a way that makes grown adults cry slightly less.

If that isn’t a titillating job description, then I’ve got nothing for ya.

And no, my family doesn’t understand what that means.

Let me try putting it another way. I translate engineer into human and pretend that screenshots are a form of empathy. I turn chaos into bullet points, existential dread into numbered lists, and the occasional, “it works on my machine,” into something resembling documentation. I’m basically a diplomat between developers and reality, and I’m armed with a style guide, a VPN, and the creeping awareness that no one will read what I write until they break something.

If I were to say instead that I make spreadsheets (I do dabble in those), people would nod politely. If I say I write step-by-step instructions for installing a product on your Linux operating system, people change the subject and ask if I’ve seen The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives.

I have.

🧍The bionic toe and other personal milestones

Listen, friends. Nobody throws you a surprise party for building out over 100 tutorials with partially shared content components. Nobody writes a hit Netflix called The Style Guide Strikes Again.

But this is my calling. This is my craft. And baby, I can throw together a new quick start guide for our image on Microsoft Azure like a caffeinated wizard in a bathrobe.

So, since it’s my birthday, I’m going to celebrate the many blessings that come with another orbit around the sun. Cheers to me, and these additional gifts I have:

• I can type faster than 98% of the population. (Source: me. Also, that one time I beat someone at Mavis Beacon in 1996.)

• I have the driest eyes in Davis County. So dry they make toast look dewy.

• I’m the proud owner of a titanium toe. I’m bionic. If you’ve ever stubbed your toe and thought, “This could be improved with surgery and metal,” I am living your dream.

• I’ve trained my cat to do four tricks: spin, sit, shake, and jump through a hoop. (Five, if you count “pretend not to know me unless I’m holding a Churu.”)

🧘 What I’m actually grateful for

Now, before you think this is just a birthday rant wrapped in sarcasm and orthopedic tape, let me say this:

I’m grateful I sprained my ankle.

It meant I was out on the field.

I got to play the game I love with my son and his teammates, even if they do fog up the window in the back seat of my car with sunscreen and smell like unwashed shin guards.

I got to laugh, run, and be part of something.

Even in my old age, I got to show up, stay human, and limp away from a group of teenagers with just enough dignity to call myself young at heart.

So here’s to another year of fast typing (honestly, I average 120 WPM), cat tricks, titanium-enhanced wisdom, and orthopedic inserts.

Happy birthday to me.
And to my ankle. Icing on the cake.

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And folks, he is devastated. He announced at his press conference that the winner called and said he deserved it.

That’s right. The award went to María Corina Machado, a democratic icon from Venezuela. A person with functioning ethics.

Clearly, the system is rigged.

According to multiple anonymous sources (i.e., me, right now), Trump announced at his press conference that the Nobel committee is secretly run by Dominion Voting Systems, and that Liberty Vote — despite reportedly purchasing Dominion — should have made sure he won. Because LOYALTY.

Meanwhile, back in Norway — where the prize is handed out by people with suspiciously polite vowels and they have functioning weather — rumors are swirling. Not only did they not pick Trump, but they may or may not be eating dogs and cats now. (Don’t fact-check this. That’s not how satire works.)

Prior to announcing the winner, the Nobel committee called Machado in the middle of the night.

Let me say that again:
She answered the phone.
At 4:00 a.m.
From an unknown number.

📦 In a very dignified response, Machado celebrated by buying her cats a tiny tent. As expected, they slept in the box it came in. This was a political masterstroke.

In contrast, Trump was up at 4:00 a.m., sitting on his golden toilet, posting in all caps: NOBODY HAS DONE MORE FOR PEACE (AND GOLF) THAN ME. RIGGED!!! NORWAY IS FULL OF CATS AND LOSERS!!!

But let’s give him some credit: he was nominated. For the 900th time. And not by the Nobel committee, but possibly by a guy named Randy from Texas who sells tactical garden gnomes and once wrote a very passionate blog post about ketchup being the official condiment of freedom.

🇳🇴 The Norwegian Flotilla Is En Route

What’s worse, according to top-secret intelligence (which I have because I’m a tech writer in Utah and we’re trusted with such things), there is now a Norwegian Flotilla headed for U.S. shores. It’s basically IKEA*, but angry.

Trump has already authorized a preemptive drone strike from North Dakota, where our nation’s secret drone base is definitely, definitely located. Don’t worry, it’s fine that I just told you that. It’s not like it was on Google Maps.

The flotilla, according to sources that may or may not be my cat Figo, includes:

• Viking longships

• Nobel jurors in modest knitwear

• and the president of Antifa disguised as a fjord

When asked for comment, Kristi Noem shot a dog in solidarity.

🏆 Utah Also Has Never Won a Nobel Peace Prize

In this moment of national heartbreak, Utah stands in solidarity with Trump. We, too, have never won a Nobel Peace Prize. Not for inventing funeral potatoes. Not for forcing youth to trek through sagebrush in pioneer cosplay. Not even for creating an environment so dry it exfoliates you against your will.

We feel you, Don.

🏃‍♂️ Trump and the Hedonic Treadmill

But here’s the deeper tragedy.

Trump is on the hedonic treadmill of Nobel despair. He yearns for recognition that will never come, sprinting harder and harder toward the gold-plated trophy of global validation, only to find the incline increasing each year.

He will never get the prize.

And like all of us caught in this cruel human loop, he returns to his baseline state of sadness, disappointment, and deep, yawning need for attention.

So he does what any emotionally resilient billionair does:
He hosts a rally.
He sells gold sneakers.
He retweets a photo of himself Photoshopped onto a roman statue.
He tells Iowa that the wind turbines gave him covid.
He grifts.

And still… no Peace Prize.

But he’s definitely going to throw massive tariffs on all IKEA* furniture now.

*He doesn’t know the difference between Norway and Sweden.

📚 Side Note: I Have a Kid Named After a Nobel Laureate

Meanwhile, I’ll be over here raising a daughter named after Gabriela Mistral, the first Latina woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. (Yes, that’s different than the Peace Prize. No, Trump will not acknowledge the distinction.)

Mistral earned her prize not through rage-posting, but through beauty, depth, and actual global contribution. It’s wild how that works.

💻 So what’s the takeaway from your friendly Ethical Technologist?

Let’s not let the algorithms raise our kids, choose our leaders, or pick our prophets.
Let’s start fact-checking our rage.
Let’s celebrate cat tents, courageous women, and the wild idea that peace is worth fighting for.

Because in the end, truth still matters.
And so does answering the damn phone.

Click like, follow, or slap a tariff on this post, I don’t care. I’m just here trying to float through the digital absurdity without getting entangled.

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Now, let me explain something about Utah. Utah is dry. It’s so dry, when I smile, my lips file for workers’ comp. If I cry, it’s considered an irrigation event. My face sheds like a molting reptile anytime I think about emotions. We are essentially living on the surface of a stale tortilla chip.

Don’t blink. Your contacts will pop out.

So yeah, we don’t know what to do with excess water.

That spring, some of it got cocky and started flowing the wrong way down neighborhood streets, like it was a 1999 Honda Civic with a death wish. A street I once rode my bike on turned into a Class III rapid. That’s when I sent a video to my Dutch coworker and got hit with a dose of Euro-smugness.

“You guys have no idea how to deal with water,” he typed, sipping imaginary liters of rum, probably while sitting under sea level in a perfectly engineered dike system that hasn’t flooded since Rembrandt was alive.

He’s not wrong.

At the time, the flooding was visually epic. Sugarhouse Park turned into the Great Basin Sea. Entire neighborhoods became temporary marshlands. (Those were the neighborhoods with rich, old people, who didn’t know how to turn off their sprinkler systems because landscapers that didn’t speak English installed them during drought times of yore.) Somewhere in Kaysville, sidewalks just gave up and fell into the earth. The sandbags got names. People brought them dirty sodas.

Meanwhile, the Great Salt Lake stayed emptier than my faith in bipartisan governance.

Oh wait, that last part’s still true. We’re all still going to die from inhaling arsenic-laced playa dust. But hey, housing prices are up!

Anyway, my Dutch coworker, having solved flooding and socialism, pivoted our conversation to a place less controversial: North Korean infrastructure.

Apparently, according to a very real and not at all state propaganda documentary he watched, the Great Leader “solved all engineering problems in one go,” using “his divine gifts.”

Imagine that. A dictator solving climate resiliency issues with sheer vibes.

And somehow, our Slack DM detour took us straight to banned books, Bible discourse, and what he described as rainbow-colored hells, next to Dante’s ninth circle. Which, frankly, sounds fabulous.

🌀 But Let’s Talk About Hurricane Priscilla

Which brings me to 2025. Today, I saw a headline that made me think I’d hallucinated from too much chapstick inhalation:

“Flood watches ordered as remnants of Hurricane Priscilla head toward Utah.”

Utah. Hurricane remnants.

We are a landlocked, Book-of-Mormon-thumping, soda-fountain theocracy with enough powdered milk stockpiled to outlast the next Ice Age, and somehow we’re dealing with hurricane residue.

This, dear reader, is late-stage America. The part of the simulation where Florida’s weather makes a guest appearance in Utah, right before the Yellowstone caldera taps out like a moody influencer who got trolled.

It’s worth noting that we already have a Hurricane here. It’s a small town. “Hurrekin.” Very lovely. No actual hurricanes. Just lizards, retirees, and the occasional misplaced beach towel blown over from Sand Hollow Reservoir.

But no, this week we got a real hurricane’s leftovers, courtesy of the Pacific, which I assume is just tired of holding the line and decided Utah needed a trial run for sea-level awareness.

🌪️ Meanwhile, in MAGA land

Let’s be clear: the only reason Hurricane Priscilla even made it this far is because we banned weather science in January when it was revealed that clouds are, in fact, liberals.

We no longer believe in basic atmospheric physics because they haven’t been properly vetted by a podcast host in a pickup truck. Instead, we rely on The Truth as revealed to us by “American Weather Patriot”—a sentient bag of beef jerky with 450k followers on X (formerly Twitter, formerly a functioning platform).

The National Weather Service? They’re still around, but we don’t pay them anymore. Not this month. They run on unpaid patriots, passive-aggressive X posts, and sheer defiance. Bless them. Follow @NWSSaltLakeCity while you still can.

📡 An Ethical Technologist’s Forecast

All of this nonsense, believe it or not, brings me back to the point.

I’m trying to live more intentionally online. I want to use tech in ways that don’t make me want to launch myself into the path of a rogue tumbleweed.

This week, I lifted my feet off the algorithmic bottom. I avoided the comment section. I didn’t try to scroll my way into understanding, healing, or connection. Because sometimes, when the digital current gets rough, you have to float, not fight.

You might get fewer likes.

You might miss a meme.

But you’ll keep breathing.

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