Two passages have been haunting me as a writer and a musician. The first is Rainer Maria Rilke’s reference to the “half-artistic” professions in his Letters To a Young Poet. Here is the full quotation:

“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art —as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.” (Last paragraph of letter X).

Depending on your profession you might be incensed or traumatized by this sentence. I will not comment on the censure of journalism and almost all of criticism because I do not have Rilke’s certainty. One could accuse him of arrogance, but I do think he is hitting on a truth, which is the human propensity for making ends of our means. Good reporting on current events serves a valuable end for democracy, but it is not meant to be art. Good literary criticism can help us understand great works and what they mean to us, but the criticism itself would not exist without the art. As a writer and podcast producer who puts work online, I would also add podcasting and content creation and cultural criticism to the list of unreal half-artistic professions. They may serve a good purpose, but they are not a worthy end in themselves, and they can easily eclipse art itself. In my own life I have noticed that I often use the busywork of podcast editing or post publishing to avoid the creation of real art (such as my novels or songwriting). Rilke’s words haunt me in those moments.

The second passage that haunts me is Habakkuk 2:20:

“But the Lord is in his majestic palace.
The whole earth is speechless in his presence!”

This comes at the end of four or five lines in which Habakkuk decries lifeless idols that do not speak or talk:

“Woe to the one who says to wood, ‘Wake up!’—
he who says to speechless stone, ‘Awake!’
Can it give reliable guidance?
It is overlaid with gold and silver;
it has no life’s breath inside it.” (NET)

What strikes me is the image of the entire earth being silent. It made me realize just how much noise we all make. Such a cacophony of words and sound. And yes, I do count online words. They may not make noise out loud, but they make noise in our minds. This is humbling to think about. I wonder: What am I doing, adding to this cacophony? Am I following my calling, or just idolizing myself and attempting to talk over God?

Think about this: our laptops and phones are made of precious metals, and we say to them “Wake up!” We ask them for guidance. We use them to magnify and record our most secret vices and our most admirable virtues. We imbue them with meaning just as ancient people imbued idols of wood and stone. By writing content, I am giving a potential reader more meaning to imbue their personal idol with. Of course, this metaphor has limits, or perhaps none, which is what makes it dangerous. If an idol is anything we imbue with meaning, then an idol could be a book or a coffee mug or a house or a person. What is the middle Way here? The point, for me, is to take the pressure off what I create. God does not need me to proclaim His beauty or His goodness. I can be silent before Him.

After spending hours mixing and mastering I have often gone outside and listened to the wind in the trees and the singing of the birds and the subtle creaking of branches and the fluttering of insect wings and thought, “I have never heard music more beautiful than this.” God, after all, is the Lord of sound itself. Our creations, even the Greatest, are really not so great compared with Him. They are only reflections in a dirty mirror. In a similar way, the publishing of art is a compromise, an attempt to reflect the joy and meaning I have discovered in the act of creation. By the time I share it it is already dead to me, but it can take on a new life in the mind of the reader, and so haunt them.

---

Thank you for reading. If you would like to be haunted by more of words, please consider supporting them by subscribing or buying me a coffee:

Buy Me a Coffee | Listen to My Music | Listen to My Podcast | Follow Me on Mastodon | Read With Me on Bookwyrm | Connect With Me on Substack

rule #4

The Mapmaker

The map hung on the wall of the village hall for as long as anyone could remember. It was a large map, hand-drawn on yellowing paper, its corners curled with age. The roads wandered across it like uncertain thoughts. Rivers bent where no river bent. Distances were optimistic in one direction and pessimistic in another. Entire fields appeared where there were now houses, while several houses appeared not at all. Everyone knew it was wrong. Visitors would stand before it and laugh. “That road isn't there.” “The bridge is in the wrong place.” “The church is far too large.” The mapmaker who had drawn it was long dead, though his errors remained remarkably alive.

One wet afternoon, I found myself standing before the map with a farmer, a retired schoolteacher, and a man who repaired bicycles. The farmer pointed to a line crossing a stream. “There never was a bridge there.” The schoolteacher disagreed. “There was. My grandfather spoke of it.” The bicycle repairman shook his head. “It was not a bridge. It was a ford.” Within minutes, nobody was looking at the map anymore. They were talking about the village. The stream became a story. The story uncovered another story. The missing bridge led to a flood, the flood to a wedding, the wedding to a disagreement between two brothers that apparently continued to influence local politics many decades later.

The map had failed completely. Yet somehow it had succeeded. Years later, the old map was removed. In its place appeared a new one, produced with the latest technology. Every road was precisely located. Every boundary was exact. Distances could be measured to the metre. Nothing was misplaced, exaggerated, omitted, or imagined. The map was true.

Nobody gathered around it. People glanced at it and moved on. There were no arguments. No stories. No discoveries. No old memories called unexpectedly into the present. The map answered every question before anyone had the chance to ask one. One day I stood before the new map and found myself missing the old one. This seemed irrational. After all, the old map was wrong. The new map was correct. What more could one ask of a map?

Yet something had vanished. The old map forced people into conversation with the place. The new map replaced that conversation with information. The old map made visible the difference between what was shown and what was known. The new map concealed that difference beneath its accuracy. It was then that I began thinking about a distinction that has occupied me ever since.

There are mistakes that reveal truths. And there are truths that conceal mistakes.

The old map was mistaken about roads, rivers, and distances. Yet through those mistakes it revealed something true about belonging. Its inaccuracies invited participation. One did not merely consult it. One entered into a relationship with it. The new map was true about roads, rivers, and distances. Yet it concealed a mistake. It assumed that understanding a place consists in locating it correctly. But a place is not exhausted by its coordinates. A village cannot be reduced to the geometry of its streets any more than a friendship can be reduced to an exchange of addresses. The old map was wrong about where things were. The new map was wrong about what a place is.

At first sight this appears paradoxical. We assume truth and error are opposites. Yet experience suggests otherwise. Sometimes an error misses its object and reveals a horizon. Sometimes a truth captures its object and hides the horizon entirely. The distinction is important. For when we discover a mistake, we should not ask only what it gets wrong. We should ask what becomes visible through it. And when we discover a truth, we should not ask only whether it is correct. We should ask what disappears in its light.

The old map no longer hangs in the village hall. I do not know what became of it. Perhaps it was discarded. Perhaps it lies forgotten in an attic somewhere. But I suspect the old mapmaker understood something that his successors did not. He knew that a map should not merely tell us where we are. It should help us discover what it means to have been there.

Later that evening, I wrote the following in my notebook:

Rule #4 Beware the truth that ends a conversation. Attend carefully to the mistake that begins one.

✒️ Sigi

Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0

So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post:

The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that's par for the course. My chickens have come home to roost. I mean, if you're going to share your work with the world, then you need to expect the world to respond.

So, to set the record straight: I didn't start with the intention of writing a 3,600-word critique in response to Brennan's article. Especially not one as critical as it is. Personally, I like to pick up on someone else's thoughts that have some similarity to mine, or are tangential and seek a common ground. That's how my responses to Gordon Mclean and Michael Lynch have largely gone.

In this case, it felt necessary to start out of with a few corrections before moving on to my own thoughts. But, by the time I had written those corrections, I was no longer sharing my thoughts. Instead, I was back in the role of the critic, attempting my best to use academic scrutiny (despite being out of academia for over forty years):

Believe it or not, we haven't even gotten to the meat of Brennan's article yet. This article is so dense with information that it's going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.

And this is where I failed. I wasn't able to maintain the level of even-handedness in my criticism that I should have maintained. My only excuse: I was frustrated with myself for being so critical that I turned my frustrations towards the author at times, instead of maintaining focus on the work itself. For that I apologize.

Brennan then goes on to talk about his reaction to my article:

But my body doesn't know the difference. I'm somebody who has struggled with scrupulosity, or moral obsessive-compulsive thoughts, for my entire life. I hold a high (maybe impossible) bar for myself to do good, and feel as though I'm failing no matter what I do or don't do. Irrationally—because of mental illness—I see a bad article I've written as an awful moral failure. The same order of magnitude as the things that actually get people milkshake ducked

And I want to address this point because I think, while we experience it differently, there is some common ground here.

For those who don't know, I have another website that has been dormant now for about ten years. But, during it's prime, I wrote over 500 articles on it, over half (360-420) music reviews. And I have a netlabel that has been dormant for about the same period of time. The reason I bring this up is to talk about two situations I found myself in that bear some similarity to Brennan's struggle.

The first, one of the artists I was working with on my label started demanding that I supply materials for him to use in support of his performances. None of those materials had ever been discussed when we started working together, and nowhere had I documented making any such materials available. The truth: the whole operation was running on a shoestring. I was putting in whatever money I could. There were no profits from the label to work with for supplying the artists with anything more than I had provided. The artist was enraged when he heard this, and started posting all over the place about me, trying to assassinate my credibility.

Nobody who knew me bought his allegations. I made a couple of posts correcting misinformation he was spreading, and providing receipts. Receipts I had pulled together in a panic because his attacks felt personal enough that I thought we were going to end up in a legal action. That's when things got worse: his attacks turned into threats against me. Yes, those kinds of threats. However, after his attacks had been called to the attention of the platforms he'd posted them on (by others who knew me) he cooled down a bit. At least publicly. And that allowed both of us to walk away, working relationship shattered.

In the other case, an artist I had written numerous reviews about decided, at some point, that I was his enemy. He wrote a long diatribe to me demanding that I pull down all the reviews of his works over several years. Apparently, this started because I had made a couple of mistakes in some reviews, combined with him having some bad personal experiences unrelated to my reviews. It took a week (or more) of going back and forth with him, but in the end, he agreed that it would be best to just add corrections to the reviews in question. That was something I was always more than willing to do.

But, the reason I relate these two experiences is they are similar in some respect to Brennan's experience. I was invested in the work that I was doing. I thought I was doing a greater good for everyone involved. Never would I have considered my work to be harmful in any way. (Even in my reviews I had a policy: I had to have a minimum of three good things to say about a release, if I didn't, the review would likely not be published.) But both of these experiences made me feel like I was in a war in a way, under attack and on edge for days, even weeks after the experiences. Both experiences severely undermined the person I thought I was, made me question everything.

That is an experience I don't wish on anyone. It is an experience I don't wish to inflict on anyone. And, it is something I will endeavor to improve on in the future.

---

Categories: #Response Tags: #criticism, #scrutiny, #scrupulosity, #writing, #experiences License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

21 July 2026

Psychological price (working title, maybe Goodbye ground): I've had a few variations on a painting of a curtain reacting to a force (thinking of it almost like a gut being punched) lying around the studio for a while, and this may be the first instance of one working. I think the reason it does occurred somewhere in the process of two unsuccessful paintings merging to supplement and solve one. This has happened a couple of times now in the development of this recent body of work as I've begun to notice visual or sensorial similarities in seemingly disparate subjects. In this case, while working on the curtain, I had also been attempting to paint a cloud formation based on one I saw over Spiaggia Blue Moon in Lido. It looks like a large, flat, gray-blue mass of fabric billowing across the sky, like a flag or a tall stage curtain moving right to left, with a small tuft of white cauliflower cloud sinking itself into a wrinkle near the bottom of the form like a paperweight.

That little cloud turned black and ended up filling the role of the aforementioned force, and it gelled such that it now seems it couldn't have been any other way. There's something ineffable in those switches from arbitrary to surprising to inevitable that I don't want to try to define, but I will say that working with paintings as both streams and estuaries is starting to make more sense as certain subjects become motifs. And this also speaks to the potency of opposition and tension and friction (formal and emotional) as it relates to resolution. Crucially though, these relationships are not to be sought, but rather found or stumbled upon or recognized in the aftermath of getting to work. This approach feels important to remember and preserve, because observation still lies at the heart of what I am doing, not invention. Although, with that being said, there is also something to contemplating the modern pattern of widespread dissatisfaction with what is already in front of our eyes.

A lot of time spent with Redon's drawings this week. In his words: “One must respect black. Nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism.” Woman with Outstretched Arm (1868) especially—the wind, the birds, the body, the earth all moving as one cohered instance.

Their first page is a warning. I had read it for years as liturgy.

DO NOT EDIT OR CHANGE THIS BOOK OR THE MESSAGE CONTAINED WITHIN EITHER THE WORDS OR THEIR NUMBERS FOR ALL IS SACRED

It is not liturgy. It is a maintenance instruction.

Page fifteen, last line. The transcription I had trusted for as long as I had trusted anything reads ENL, then LIGHTENED.

Somebody typed the letter twice carrying it across a line break. Somebody else copied that. Then everyone did.

Their script has a fixed pitch. Their cipher is one glyph for one letter. So the copy makes a physical claim and the photograph can refuse it.

Four hundred twenty-nine pixels of ink. Eight runes predicts four thirty-four. Nine predicts four eighty-eight.

The page said eight. The copy said nine.

4430 → 4357

and the difference between them is seventy-three, which is the value of the letter L, which is the letter that was typed twice.

A composite, corrected, becomes prime.

my lungs are inhaling great volumes of air, what a miracle!

Yesterday and the day before that, I was having some super allergy with asthma out if not asthma, something in the lungs,

But not today

Today I’m counting down until vacation (1,5 days)

I’m counting down to retirement too, but that is ridiculously far away

Isn’t it strange how I can feel this old and yet have soo many years of work left?

It’s some sort of joke,

Like when I was fixing this cable, the one between the barn and the pump house labelled internet, to replace one which mysteriously broke, I sat on my tenth try with all of these tiny cables trying to get them all into their slots of this RJ45 connector, T568 A style. To clamp down, but my hands are way too big and I don’t see what I’m doing, it felt ridiculously hard, I don’t even see what I’m doing, not even without these tears of frustration and shame!!!

But last time, having broken the clamp tool with my mighty grip, having discarded five connectors, I prayed to God please let this work now

And it did!

I feel the same anticipation about my remaining career!!

It’s called faith?

The path lies empty.

They wrote that in 2016 and I took it for a taunt and it was a reading taken off an instrument.

I no longer think it means the door is locked. I think we have all been standing a very long time in front of a very good drawing of a door.

It also turns out I did not ruin my chances of a terrific public service job! There was an internal candidate already! My chances were limited (and reduced to zero since I didn't want to replace anyone who wanted to be there. Nor was I even given the opportunity to. Truly zero).

Still back to square one, but with a less pervasive crushing sense of failure.

Portrait of a bedroom in disorder.

For two weeks in January 2026, a browser extension removed AI Overviews from the Google search results of 374 people. The remaining links moved silently up to fill the gap, so the interface looked just as the search always had. At the end of the two weeks, researchers asked participants how they felt about their search experience: satisfaction, quality, and ease of finding information. On every measure, the numbers matched the group that kept their overviews. Nobody missed them. The only difference was that people without overviews left Google for other sites 67% more often.

This field experiment by Saharsh Agarwal of the Indian School of Business and Ananya Sen of Carnegie Mellon, published on SSRN in April and revised in June 2026, produced the first causal measure of what Google's AI Overviews are costing the rest of the web. The answer is 40% of outbound organic clicks on queries where overviews appear, with no measurable benefit for the people doing the searching. On 20 May, at Google I/O, the company made AI Mode, that demonstrably made no improvement to the user experience, the default search experience worldwide.

What the experiment measured

The study recruited 1,065 US desktop Chrome users through Prolific and randomly assigned them to one of three groups. A control group saw Google as normal. A treatment group had AI Overviews removed in real time by the extension whenever they would otherwise have appeared, with organic results shifting up to fill the gap so cleanly that over 95% of participants reported noticing nothing. A third group was redirected into Google's AI Mode for all queries.

The experiment design settles a methodological argument that has run since the first observational studies appeared. Ahrefs, Pew Research, and Similarweb all pointed at the same traffic decline, but none could prove that the overviews caused it rather than some other change in search behaviour or Google's algorithm. Agarwal and Sen's extension created the counterfactual that observational data cannot. The only systematic difference between the two primary groups was whether the overview appeared. Everything else–the queries, the organic results, the ads–was the same search engine on the same day.

The numbers were stark. For queries where an overview appeared (about 41% of all searches), hiding it increased outbound organic clicks from 0.37 to 0.62 per search. Sponsored clicks stayed at 0.02 in both groups. Total search volume did not change. The overview did not create anything; it simply kept the 40% of clicks it absorbed inside Google.

After the main two weeks, the researchers swapped the conditions. The group that had been browsing without overviews got them back, and their outbound clicks fell from 0.61 to 0.33 per search. The group that had been seeing overviews lost them, and their clicks rose from 0.33 to 0.55. Same people, opposite intervention, mirror-image result.

The “higher-quality clicks” defence

Google's vice president of product for Search, Liz Reid, has characterised AI Overview clicks as “higher-quality clicks” that signal stronger purchase intent and longer downstream engagement. In April 2026, the company advanced a “bounce clicks” explanation, arguing that overviews mainly remove low-value visits — the kind where a user lands, finds nothing useful, and taps the back button within a few seconds.

Agarwal and Sen tested that claim directly. For every click that reached a downstream website, they measured whether the user bounced (left within ten seconds with no further navigation), how long they stayed on the page, and whether they hit the back button to return to search. Across all three measures, there was no difference between the group with overviews and the group without. The extra clicks generated by removing overviews were no different in quality from the clicks Google's system allowed through. The authors are careful to note that Google may measure something further down the funnel that the extension cannot observe. But at the top of the funnel, where the “higher-quality” claim was made, nothing supports it.

In contrast, Adobe Digital Insights' Q1 2026 analysis found that visitors arriving from AI assistants converted 42% better than non-AI traffic, reversing March 2025, when the same channel converted 38% worse. The volume is small, roughly 1% of total site traffic for most businesses, but the quality gap matters for anyone trying to value what remains.

Although the findings appear contradictory, They measure different things, so both can be true. Agarwal and Sen answered: does the AI overview filter out only the junk clicks? No. The clicks it suppressed were the same quality as the ones that got through. It just reduced volume.

Adobe looked wider but shallower. They took all traffic across thousands of sites and split it two ways: came from an AI assistant, or didn’t. Then compared conversion rates. That’s broad, but it can’t answer the Google question, because “AI assistant traffic” doesn’t isolate Google’s overview clicks. Those just get lumped into ordinary search traffic. So Adobe tells you assistant referrals convert well; it tells you nothing about whether Google’s surviving clicks are any good. Agarwal and Sen looked only at Google: narrow but deep: one channel, controlled comparison, cause and effect.

The mechanism, however, is straightforward: the AI overview wins the way anything wins in position zero. In the study, 87% of AI Overviews appeared above all organic results. When the overview sat at the top, removing it led to an 88% increase in outbound clicks. When it appeared lower on the page, the effect disappeared. People did not seek out the overview. They consumed whatever occupied the prime on-page real estate, the way supermarket shoppers take whatever sits at eye level on the shelf. Move the product, and the behaviour reverses instantly.

Forced into Google's fully conversational search interface, users rated their satisfaction at 2.9 out of 5, compared with 4.0 for both other groups. Attrition was roughly four times higher. Some participants installed workaround extensions to escape. This is the experience Google chose, on 20 May, to make the global default. Record queries and accelerating search revenue explain the decision. The fact that their own experiment's closest analogue produced the lowest satisfaction scores and the highest quit rates does not seem to have figured in the calculus.

Meanwhile, roughly twenty national news outlets are negotiating licensing deals for the privilege of appearing in these overviews, with Google winding down its older news-payment programme and making future payments conditional on granting AI training rights. If you are not one of those twenty, nobody is coming to the table. The response has to be self-directed.

Read your own exposure

Not all traffic is equally at risk. Agarwal and Sen classified queries into informational, navigational, and transactional categories. Informational queries accounted for 71% of all searches in the study and had a 53% AI Overview trigger rate. This is where the entire effect played out. Navigational searches (someone typing a brand name to find the website) triggered overviews in only 6% of queries, and transactional searches (purchase-intent, booking, downloading) in 15%. Neither category showed a statistically meaningful decline in clicks.

This means that if your search traffic comes through “what is” and “how to” queries, you are sitting ducks. If it comes from people searching for your name or your products by name, the damage is minor and may stay that way. Open your Search Console, filter for query type, and look at the split. The ratio between informational and branded traffic is the single best predictor of how badly this will hurt.

For many smaller businesses, an audit will show that informational traffic was always the least valuable, even though it has traditionally been encouraged to build domain authority. A plumber whose search visibility comes from “how to fix a leaking tap” was getting visits from people actively trying not to hire a plumber. That traffic was always thin on conversions, and the overview is now absorbing exactly those clicks. The branded traffic, from someone searching for the plumber by name after a recommendation, was always the higher-value stream, and it remains largely untouched.

Stop producing what the machine can summarise

The clicks that persist in a world of overviews share a common trait: the user wanted something the summary could not provide. A named opinion. A tool. A dataset. An experience report. This matches the evidence from the GEO literature I have previously reviewed. The Princeton benchmark found that content with sourced statistics, named quotations, and inline citations earned more citations from AI systems. ZipTie's cross-platform analysis found that sites with high original-data density received 4.3 times more citation occurrences per URL than directory-style listings. The surviving trickle rewards specificity. What a summary can reproduce, the summary will absorb. What it cannot reproduce, because it requires a person to have done, measured, or decided something, retains its click.

For a smaller business, this completely changes the question of content. The commodity “what is X” post, the 1,200-word explainer written to capture an informational keyword, was always a bet on Google continuing to send traffic to the answer. This content type has taken a 40% haircut and already converted poorly. That is a signal to stop producing it, or at least to stop treating it as a customer acquisition channel. Spend that same effort on content the summary cannot assimilate. Publish your own data, even if the dataset is small. Name your prices, your methods, your results, your opinions. Write the thing only you could write because only you did the work, and leave the commodity answer for the overview. Fix your GA4 attribution before drawing conclusions. AI referral traffic typically defaults into “Direct” or “Referral” buckets, and only 14% of marketers track it as a separate channel. You cannot manage what you have filed under miscellaneous.

Build the channels the intermediary cannot close

One result in the study was completely unaffected by the presence or absence of overviews: ad clicks. Free organic traffic from search fell 40%. Paid traffic held steady. If your free visitors from Google are disappearing, the route Google left open is the one you pay for, and that was clearly not an accident. If you start to spend more on Google Ads to replace the traffic it used to send for free, it should be watched closely for true return on investment.

So what should be done? Google has remained an intermediary for organic search traffic long after others cut it off at the knees to drive ad revenue. But the organic game has become increasingly difficult as ad slots and other additions to the search engine results page have made the real organic links less and less obvious. The direction of travel has been clear for many years.

Relying on an intermediary’s whims for traffic, even one as durable as Google, has always been a Hobson’s Choice. As its presence continues to fade, we return to basics: email lists, direct bookmarks, repeat visits, communities, and all the channels that do not pass through a search results page.

None of this is new advice; the case for greater focus on owned channels has been made for a decade, and each year the argument grew stronger and the urgency louder while the execution stayed more or less the same. The difference now is that experimental evidence puts a number on the cost. Every month that informational traffic goes unprotected by a direct relationship is another month in which 40% of those visits vanish into a summary.

One caveat deserves emphasis. Do not block AI crawlers outright. The major labs have split their bots into training crawlers and search crawlers. OpenAI separated GPTBot from OAI-SearchBot in late 2024, and Anthropic made the same split with ClaudeBot and Claude-SearchBot. Blocking the training crawler is your call. Blocking the search crawler cuts you out of the AI answers that are replacing the links you used to get. A Rutgers and Wharton study published in December 2025 found that publishers who blocked AI bots across the board experienced a 23% traffic decline compared with peers who allowed crawling. Google is the harder case, because Googlebot still handles both search indexing and AI features in a single crawler, which is exactly the bundling the CMA’s conduct requirements are trying to force apart.

The empty space

The 374 participants whose overviews were silently removed are, as far as the published literature shows, the only group of people to have experienced modern Google search without AI-generated summaries and been formally asked what they thought. They reported feeling no difference whatsoever.

That absence is visible only from the other side of the results page, where a company watches the traffic graph flatten and wonders whether visitors are finding better answers or simply never leaving the search process. Agarwal and Sen's contribution is to show that the latter is the case. The visitors are not finding better answers; they are milling around in the foyer before going home.

I’m kind of overheating a little bit and I think it’s a little bit funny because A was Surprised that I was A Sagittarius, mentioning that a lot of the traits of being the life of the party, funny all that stuff, but surprised for the sole reason that I don’t have an ego to her. And I think it’s so funny because I absolutely have an ego, I think it’s one of those things where I can keep it to myself, and I’m secure enough with it where it doesn’t need to be pushed down anyone’s throat, I just have a pretty good view of myself in certain lenses. Afterwards we were talking and she was telling our group how she wants to match make us, and she was talking about all these different things that men should due to improve their chances, and the other guys, I was surprised how clueless they were with several things. She even used me as an example and was saying that they should take notes, but also it won’t work for them because they’re not me and they don’t have that dog in them like I do. I remember she was telling this one guy at the beginning that she was going to find him someone because even though he was afraid of women and a bit older, and not as attractive, he was a homeowner. And I held back from mentioning that I am also, and don’t get me wrong. I absolutely understand that this is something that I would not be able to do without the privilege of my dad‘s financial support. But I also kind of do want to acknowledge the fact that it is privileged, but it is privileged that I have., Am I still didn’t mention it because I didn’t want to boast or flex, but it kind of just makes me feel even more like damn I am that guy. I remember I saw an Instagram reel earlier today about something about clavicle length, and I am very fortunate with my genetics. I saw my doctor today and he asked if I was on steroids, and I think that he is being nice, but at the same time there’s a reason that complement lands. I think I have an incredible amount of potential, and I’m very grateful that I’ve done a lot of the work and I’ve gone through a dark enough place that it required me to realize and recognize that potential in actuality. And it’s something that I’ve kind of thought about a little bit where when some of my friends asked me for advice with things or they ask me about how they can have more success in certain endeavors, sometimes they’re just is that somewhat insurmountable gap of just the cards that we are dealt. And I’m not saying that I have the perfect hand or anything like that, and I use the fact that I tried to kill myself a few times, and I still struggle with that as an indication that even though I have all these amazing things, I am sometimes more than I would like to willing to throw it away, and if someone else is not willing to do that, I think that somewhat of a telling comparison, that they would choose to keep living that life instead of just ending it. But that all being said, I feel like for a lack of the brighter word, it’s a brutal mog. Like what am I supposed to say when one of my friends that isn’t doing well in college for a worst major is asking me about career success. And frankly, it’s a mixture of genetics, the environment I was raised in, and everything that I sacrificed to contribute to my intelligence and my success, and so when someone asks me how to be more smooth or how to be better at flirting, how am I supposed to just tell someone to in essence to me what feels like be smarter. Like if someone is asking about how to be funnier or more charismatic and yes, you can work on these things absolutely and I think there isn’t enough of a reason to feel discouraged, it’s one of those things where it’s like if someone ask me hey how am I supposed to lift this heavy amount of weight and it’s a mixture of the cards that I’m dealt and also the work that I put in. And I think it’s one of those things where I have almost slingshotted in life going from being incredibly behind in a lot, if not all different avenues, other than maybe academic success, to having to really put the pedal to the floor and end up surpassing most of my peers. And of course, I’m now surrounded with new peers, but I find that I still am used as an example or a subject of envy or a goal or gold standard to strive for. I remember one of my friends in college kept saying that she was going to beat me on a test at least once or he was going to do something like that and he never did. And I’m sorry, but that’s just how it is. And it’s not at all the case that I’m the best of everything, and I actually really enjoy the things that I’m not the best at because I’ve dealt with the issues of other people comparing themselves to me and holding that resentment and that’s not something that I can necessarily deal with nor is it my responsibility to deal with. Like I remember in college when we would all be in a class together, and I would set the curve on a test and my friends would not be happy. And if they would get excited when they would get a question right that I didn’t while we were cheating and working together on test during Covid, all for me to then point out that they were actually wrong and I was right. I think about how online my friends are sometimes a little bit insecure about the fact that I am better than them at the games and much higher ranked. And because of that, I need to be careful and it’s not honestly that hard, it’s not like I need my ego to be stroked and it’s not like I need them to acknowledge that either and I’m happy letting them shine and not taking up spotlight. But in a lot of different avenues, I find myself near the top and I find myself worrying that friends or people around me will compare themselves to me. And so I really like things that I am not great at, like for example Chess. I’m rated 1000 which is not a horrible, but it’s also definitely not exceptional or great by any means. And because of that at the chest club, most people are better than me, and it’s a little bit difficult in the sense that sometimes when I win or when I make them have to really focus. They are in a situation where they kind of have nothing to gain, but they have a lot to lose. But I think generally I am a good loser in that sense. I am completely comfortable, losing and somewhat stroking someone else’s ego if necessary. But overall in life, I kind of feel bad because there’s nothing I can’t do but just mog certain people. Like on paper, I think a lot of people would wish to swap lives with me and I can’t really say that I’ve met anyone where I felt like I would want to swap lives with them, because I have an incredible amount of potential and I think I have an incredible amount of gifts that are not at all common. And I guess maybe this somewhat egotistical self reflection is an exercising gratitude. I think about that one conversation topic of if you were to swap problems with a random person in the world, would you and I think almost everyone says no. And I think that’s a very insightful thing, that even though we have our problems, we recognize that they could be way worse at the end of the day our problems are not insurmountable. And I guess I’m happy to hear that I have this sense of self value, and I don’t feel like this is the needle swinging too far the other side from the past where I had a horrible sense of self-esteem, and I also got a lot of shit from people. I’m kind of comfortable with me having this echo because I don’t think that I’m being unreasonable or incorrect about anything that I say, but more importantly, I’m writing this on my fucking website that I hope no one really reads. Like I think I’m comfortable with people reading this distant in the future or something like that because by then I have plausible deniability to be able to say oh that was past me. But I’m essentially just saying this into the void and so I’m not putting anyone else down or I’m not trying to convince anyone else of something. I’m just kind of worried dumping while I drive back home from chest with voice to text. But overall, I just wanna say that I’m really proud of the person that you’ve become. If the choice arises again choose to keep living please. Don’t let a temporary lack of chemicals, rob you of an incredible life opportunity.

Okay, amazing, I'm still stuck in a Groundhog Day-style slow flurry of the same and then some. Things have happened but then they really haven't? I had a really amazing job opportunity (was very excited) present itself, but I flubbed the interview from hypersensitivity pneumonitis flare-induced, and aided very happily by anxiety, scatterbrained matter thoughts spilling all over the floor. It happens? Learning from it, hopefully. Disappointed with myself but being kind to my body and attached mind regardless… after I pieced it together again from the floor situation, yes. Back in place now.

God damn I'm inconsistent though. It's tiring.

These steps are a towering behemoth raging against my progress. Their ongoing friction aimed at my forward momentum mocks the pace I drum into being.

Step. (Feel that?) Step. (What happened to not enjoying pain?) Step. (Can you move any slower?) Step. (Are you even moving at all?) Step. One. Two. Three...Twenty-five. A fraction forward.

Better I fry in the sun! Better my heart explode in the heat! Better I quit instead of torturing myself so! Better I stop complaining and take another bloody step.

Eventually it will get easier. Eventually my soles won't mind. Eventually I will forget today...and feel much more like myself.

These steps are a towering behemoth raging against my progress. Their ongoing friction aimed at my forward momentum mocks the pace I drum into being. KissKiss. May they feel me dance!

Written July 23, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.