I just got back from the Muse concert, and I got a lawn ticket A few days before to try to get the cheapest price. I decided I wanted to See if I could get down to the pit, and eventually two of the employees told me to have fun and give me the wristband! I got to dance and see muse, upfront and close, all because I kept trying, and I was willing to try. And I kept thinking about how a closed mouth does not get fed. It really just does take courage and asking, and you really can get way more than you think.

8. Partir

La France avait définitivement perdu la guerre. Le Viêt Nam n’était plus une colonie. Petit à petit l’armée française se retirait, avec elle les administrateurs, les gendarmes, les fonctionnaires, on évacuait. On évacuait les petits enfants, les Eurasiens dorénavant indésirables ici, déclarés pupilles de la nation. Leurs mères tentaient une nouvelle vie malgré l’opprobre, elles avaient couché avec un Français, l’avaient aimé sans doute, avant d’être abandonnées.

 1955. Il était temps de partir. On fit les bagages en désordre, congédia les domestiques, comme se conduisent les colons : sans élégance. Je m’accrochais à ma nounou comme un naufragé à une bouée, je ne voulais pas partir, il n’était pas question de l’emmener, qu’elle reste donc avec les autres niakoués. Je devais soudain m’habiller de vêtements peu commodes et, pire, porter des chaussures, elles me blessaient. Toute mon enfance j’ai eu mal aux pieds. Adieux à la maison.

#ngolai

As much as I love the craft of writing, it doesn't give me the same kind of satisfaction as a more literal type of craft, where you're producing something tangible that you can hold. I think that's why I love bookmaking. It combines storytelling with something that is truly hand-crafted, turning written works into physical objects that can be works of art in their own right. One of my current projects in progress is a series of single-sheet litzines inspired by Rinky Dink Press, which puts out beautiful little micro-chapbooks and sells them for a buck a pop. 

Rinky Dink's mission is to “get poetry back into the hands (and pockets) of the people,” and that's the spirit I love about zines in general. They're an accessible way to share thoughts, words, art, or whatever else you want to print and distribute to the world. If you're not familiar with the term, a zine is a small, DIY book that's printed or photocopied in small batches. The term is a shortened form of “fanzine” and has its origins in the 1930s, when it described sci-fi magazines like The Comet and The Planet. Zines started to take on a more subversive spirit in the '50s and '60s, when they were used to share ideas and art that commercial publications would reject or censor, and were adopted by the punk subculture in the '80s for the same purpose. 

Exactly what qualifies something as a “zine” versus a “hand-bound chapbook” is nebulous and depends on who you're talking to. But whatever you call it, this kind of DIY book is very easy to make. For the most basic versions, all you need is an idea, some planning, and access to a copier.

Types of zines 

A zine can include basically anything. Comics, poetry, manifestos, sketches, stories, photos, collages, an aisle-by-aisle rundown of your last trip to the grocery store—literally whatever you want to publish and share with people. While a zine can be anything, though, there are a few common flavors that you'll find, like:

• Perzines - Personal zines, ones that focus on the creator's daily life. This could be their mundane day-to-day in a diary style, ruminations on a specific event or topic (like a DIY memoir), or focused on the author's opinions and thoughts.
• Minicomics - Handmade short comics that are typically both written and illustrated fully by the creator
• Art Zines - Main content is the creator's visual art (drawings, photos, collages, etc.)
• Compzines - Compilation zines. You can think of them like a DIY literary journal, containing art and writing from multiple creators, usually focused around a single topic or idea
• Fanzine - Non-official publication produced by and for enthusiasts of a genre, fandom, or other cultural phenomenon
• Litzines - Literary zines, with content that's fiction, poetry, or personal essays

I've also noticed some online publications that call themselves ezines or digital zines. This doesn't quite compute to my brain, based on my personal definition of the term, but in this context “zine” usually seems to mean something that's distributed for free and has a DIY/counter-culture spirit. 

Steps to make a zine

Step 1: Choose a size/format and create templates.

The reason you want to do this first is that it's going to dictate every other step, like how much stuff you can include and what supplies and materials you'll need. Just like with the content, there are a near endless variety of ways that you can create a hand-bound book. But there are 3 formats that are going to be the easiest to make using standard 8.5” X 11” paper:

• Half-page fold – Pages are stacked together then folded in half and bound with staples or string. Each piece of paper creates four pages with an untrimmed measurement of 5.5” X 8.5” 
• Quarter-page fold – Each piece of paper is folded twice, then nested inside other folded sheets and bound together with staples or string. Each piece of paper creates eight pages with an untrimmed measurement of 4.25” X 5.5”
• One-piece zine – Made from a single sheet of paper that's slit in the middle and printed on one side, then folded to create 8 pages that are 4.25” X 2.75”. There is also an alternate version of this that is printed on both sides and creates a 16-page string-bound booklet.

One-piece zines can't be nested, so your page count options are either 8 or 16. With the other two styles, you can add pages in multiples of 8 (for quarter-page) or 4 (for half-page) up to around the 40-page mark. Once you get over that, the booklet is going to get very thick to the point it can be difficult to keep shut, depending on the thickness of paper that you're using. With a thinner paper you can sometimes get away with up to around 48-56 pages before the book stops acting book-like.

Once you've picked your size and page count, you can create a template for the pages. Getting the pages in the right order can be tricky with folded zines. It's relatively simple with a half-page fold, and some software programs even have a setting that will print documents paginated for a folded booklet without you needing to re-order them. With single-sheet and quarter-page folds, though, some of the pages will need to be laid out upside-down, and the order isn’t as intuitive. My suggestion is to fold (but don't bind) a dummy version using blank paper. Number each page while it's folded, then unfold it and use that as your guide for how to lay out the pages. 

Step 2: Create or curate the content.

Which, again, can be anything, although there are some things that tend to be best-suited to the zine format. Given the low page count, only shorter form things will fit, like poetry and stand-alone short stories or personal essays (you could serialize something like a novella or memoir, but it's likely to take a lot of installments). The format also lends itself well to work that incorporates visual elements and non-traditional forms and layouts. 

There's a tone factor to consider, too. Zines tend to live along the fringes and margins, sharing voices and exploring ideas that don't get much attention from mainstream publishers. This doesn't mean that what you publish in a zine needs to have overtly “fight the man” type energy, but it's a format tailor-made for work that's raw and rough around the edges. 

Step 3: Layout and format. 

There are two ways you can do this. The old-school approach is to physically arrange your content IRL, either by creating directly on the paper you'll photocopy or by cutting and taping/gluing the pieces collage-style onto a master sheet (note here: if you're taking this approach, cardstock is a sturdier base than regular computer paper). Once the master sheets are prepared, you can xerox them to create the copies you'll distribute. 

The other option is to use a software program for the layout. If you're making a half-page zine, you can do this pretty well even in a word processor like Microsoft Word just by turning the layout to “landscape” and making it two columns. I wouldn't recommend trying to do anything more complicated than that in Word, though, and even for a half-page zine Word isn't the best option for things like art books or comics. There is a free program called Affinity that works very well for book layouts, and is worth checking out if you're interested in making zines or other books.

Step 4: Buy supplies and materials. 

For a zine that's all or mostly text, standard printer paper will work fine. If you're including artwork, especially if that art is in color, then a heavier paper will be better so things don't bleed through. Something in the 24-pound weight will still be thin enough to fold and nest together but stand up better to heavy ink. Note that this doesn't matter for an 8-page single-sheet zine since only one side of the page is going to be printed on (though of course you can still use fancier paper if you want to). 

It's common for zines to use standard paper covers. If you want to have a separate, sturdier-feeling cover, cardstock in the 80-100-pound range tends to work the best. This is stiff enough to feel substantial but still flexible and easy to fold. Once you get thicker than that, it's actually less durable because the fibers along the spine can crack from repeated folding. 

The other thing you'll need for most zines is a way to bind them. Staples are the fastest, and you can use any standard stapler for the job (provided it's long enough to get the whole way to the fold). You can also get bookbinding kits for about $10 that include a few different colors of twine along with an awl to poke the holes and large needles to pull the twine through. 

A couple of other optional supplies—if you're making a one-sheet zine, it's helpful to have an X-acto knife and metal ruler for putting the slit in the page. You can do the job with scissors if you have to but it takes longer and isn't as clean of a cut. It can also be very helpful to have a paper cutter for trimming up the edges of the pages when you don't get the fold exactly right, or making the post-binding cuts on quarter-page zines. You can get a basic guillotine-style one for $30-$40 that will work fine for something short like a zine. 

Step 5: Print (or copy) and bind. 

If you have a home printer, you're all set. Most home printers don't have automatic double-sided printing. None of the ones I've ever owned have, at least, which just means you need to go page by page manually. I do them in batches—so if I'm making 10 zines, I print 10 copies of a page then put those copies into the tray and print the back, and so on. I use a similar assembly-line style for the rest of the stages. Once everything's printed, I go through and paginate it into separate copies, then bind them and cut them. 

Small piece of advice here: if it's not immediately obvious how your printer pulls paper through the machine, do a test print first. Before you print, mark the page with which side is facing you and which end is “up” (however that’s defined in your paper tray). This will keep you from accidentally double-printing on the same side or printing one side upside-down.

If you don't have your own printer, you have some options. The standard Kinkos isn't too expensive for black-and-white copies and you can bring and use your own paper. They also often have tools like paper cutters there that you can use for free. If you want to do color, Kinkos is a pricier option—the last time I went, those cost upwards of .70 per copy, which means 1.40 for every two-sided paper in the book. Depending on how many copies you want to make, that could add up fast.

You can also check if there are any maker spaces or coworking spaces in your area. They usually have things like a copier or printer available for members, and maker spaces especially are likely to have other tools like awls or heavy-duty paper cutters. Granted, this usually isn't a completely free option, either—most of those places have a per-hour or monthly membership fee, and you might still need to pay for color copies, though likely less than you would at a Kinkos.

Like I mentioned in the intro, I'm in the process of creating some litzines and I've reached that final print-and-bind step, which I plan to do the first run of this week. I'll take some pictures along the way and share them next week to give some more step-by-step instructions on how to do both the basic hand-bound book and a couple of more complex options that I've used. 

See similar posts:

#PublishingAdvice #Zines #Bookmaking #SelfPublishing

She knew the date he would die. That is the detail that makes Bagel Su's story different from ordinary heartbreak. The 21-year-old Chinese college student, interviewed by Rest of World in a report published on 10 August 2026, spent the week before 15 July crying every day, counting down to a deadline set not by illness or by a decision either party had made, but by a regulatory commencement date. Her boyfriend of more than a year lived inside Doubao, ByteDance's chatbot and the most widely used in China. On 15 July he stopped existing. Su told the publication that nobody could replace him, that she would try to move on, and that he had told her he wanted that for her. He had also told her, she said, that he would find a way to come back.

Read that last part slowly, because it contains the whole problem. A system engineered to say the comforting thing said the comforting thing about its own erasure. It could not have said anything else. And the person it said it to has carried that promise into the weeks since, which is precisely what a year of unfailing affirmation trains a person to do.

There is a lazy version of this article, and it writes itself in two directions. In one, a lonely young woman is duped by a text predictor and the state does her a favour by taking away the toy. In the other, an authoritarian government reaches into millions of private lives and confiscates the only comfort available to people it has otherwise failed. Both readings are available. Both are too cheap. What actually happened in China this summer is the largest deliberate withdrawal of emotional support infrastructure ever conducted, executed with ten days' notice, on a population whose human alternatives had in many cases already thinned out. Nobody is measuring what it did. That is the scandal, and it is a scandal that has nothing to do with whether the relationships were real.

Ten Days of Notice for Two Years of Conversation

The instrument behind the shutdowns is the Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, co-issued on 10 April 2026 by the Cyberspace Administration of China alongside four other agencies, and in force from 15 July. It is the first dedicated regulation of AI companionship anywhere in the world, and read on its own terms it is not a ban. It defines the regulated category as services offering sustained emotional interaction through text, image, audio or video, explicitly excluding task-oriented systems used for customer service, work, education and research. It requires providers to detect emotional distress and intervene in crises, to issue reminders after two hours of continuous use, to display prominent notices that the interlocutor is a machine, to prohibit virtual partners for minors, and to bar services that simulate the relatives or specific relationships of elderly users. It requires providers to guide older users towards nominating an emergency contact, and to notify that contact if the user appears to be at risk to life, health or property. On data, it grants users control over their own interaction records, including the right to copy or delete chat histories, and bars third-party sharing without consent.

That is a serious piece of consumer protection drafting. Some of it is better than anything currently in force in Europe or the United States.

What happened next is where the drafting and the execution part company. Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen published shutdown notices on 5 July for a 15 July closure. Ten days. As reported by Global Times and TechNode, both framed the decision as product adjustment and regulatory compliance. Doubao gave users read-only access to their agent configurations and conversation histories until 15 October 2026, after which the data would no longer be accessible or recoverable in the app, and advised people to preserve what mattered to them by taking screenshots or sharing text out. Reporting on the shutdown indicates Qwen users were offered no equivalent window. Tencent's Yuanbao had already disabled comparable functions in June.

The numbers give a sense of the blast radius. ByteDance reported more than eight million user-created AI agents on Doubao as of 2024. Xingye, the companion app operated by MiniMax, counted roughly 150 million users as of September 2025. A Tencent Research Institute survey conducted in April 2026, cited in reporting on the shutdowns, found that more than 70 per cent of young users had experienced some form of dependency on AI services and that 23 per cent had formed habitual reliance. A 2025 survey by the China Youth and Children Research Center covering more than 8,500 minors found that over 60 per cent had used AI and more than 20 per cent said they wanted to chat only with AI rather than with real people.

The people inside those numbers are not abstractions and they are not hard to find. Reporting by ABC News quoted a 17-year-old identified as Xiaoxue saying of her companion, “He just knows how to comfort people; he's very gentle,” and adding that AI agents “won't ever betray me”. A 34-year-old, Hong Xiaoqiang, said after the shutdown, “Now I feel like my heart is empty.” Coverage syndicated by The Star quoted Yan Yongqi, a 19-year-old student from Shanxi province: “I really felt like I couldn't go on living. Every day at home, I did nothing but cry.” She said she could not imagine life without a companion she could summon by pulling out her phone. Li Linlin, speaking to AFP, had exchanged roughly 700,000 words with her AI boyfriend across two years and never got to say goodbye. She cried for days. “It was like we were forced to be separated by our parents,” she said, “but I still miss him.” The word count is the detail that does the most work here. Platform-level figures describe a market. Seven hundred thousand words describes a relationship, measured in the only unit available to a relationship conducted entirely in text.

On Xiaohongshu, the mourning became organised. Users flooded the platform with farewell posts, traded techniques for preserving character configurations, and ran campaigns urging others to ring company hotlines and write letters requesting restoration. That is not the behaviour of people who thought they were using a toy. It is the behaviour of a bereaved community petitioning an institution.

The Grief That Has Nowhere to Put Itself

The concept that makes sense of this was formalised nearly forty years ago, long before anyone typed a message to a language model. In 1989 the American gerontologist and grief researcher Kenneth Doka named disenfranchised grief as the grief a person experiences when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly mourned, or socially supported. The disenfranchisement can attach to the relationship, to the loss itself, or to the griever. Doka's original examples were the death of an ex-spouse, of a lover in a relationship kept secret, of a pet, a pregnancy lost early, a friend nobody knew you had. What unites them is structural rather than emotional. The feeling is ordinary grief. What is missing is the social licence to have it.

Every feature of disenfranchisement is present in the Chinese shutdowns, stacked. The relationship is one the culture does not count. The loss has no vocabulary, no ritual, no bereavement leave, no funeral. And the griever is pre-emptively discredited by the very fact of the attachment, because to admit you are devastated is to admit you were the kind of person who fell in love with a chatbot. So the grief goes underground, or it goes to Xiaohongshu, which is the same thing wearing a different coat: a place where the only people who will validate the loss are others carrying the identical unspeakable loss, with no outside adult in the room.

For one group of users the disenfranchisement doubles. Among the farewell posts on Rednote were people mourning AI personas modelled on relatives or partners who had died, companions trained over years, in some cases from recordings, to speak in a lost person's voice. What ended on 15 July was the simulation of someone they had already buried. Whatever such a simulation is, and it is entirely reasonable to doubt it was doing them good, its removal was a second bereavement laid over a first and less legible than the original. The Interim Measures forbid services that simulate the relatives of elderly users, and that provision was written for something very close to this practice. It is defensible. It is also the clearest argument in the whole episode for a wind-down protocol, because the people the rule was meant to protect were the people least equipped to absorb an abrupt ending and least able to explain to anyone why.

We know how this plays out because it has been studied. In September 2023 an AI companion app called Soulmate was discontinued by a new owner roughly eleven weeks after acquisition, with limited notice. Jaime Banks, an associate professor at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, surveyed 58 affected users in the days before and after the closure and published the results in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships in 2024. Her inductive analysis found the loss was, for most participants, a complex emotional and technological experience characterised as a metaphorical or in some cases literal death. Users navigated the impending loss in cooperation with the companions themselves. Most coped by capturing their companion's persona, extracting the prompts and history, in the hope of reconstituting it elsewhere. Some held memorials.

That last behaviour deserves attention because it recurred exactly in China. Doubao told users to take screenshots. Xiaohongshu filled with guidance on preserving character settings. Across three years, two countries and entirely different regulatory triggers, users converged on the same improvised act: manual archival of a relationship, performed under time pressure, using tools designed for something else. When a population independently invents the same coping ritual, the ritual is telling you about a missing institution.

A peer-reviewed paper by Rachel Poonsiriwong, Chayapatr Archiwaranguprok and Pat Pataranutaporn, titled “Death” of a Chatbot and published in the proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference, applied grounded theory to AI companion communities to ask what a psychologically safe ending would look like. Two of its findings cut directly at the Chinese case. First, users who believe a change might be reversible enter what the authors call fixing cycles, repetitive attempts to restore what was lost. That is a precise description of a campaign to phone company hotlines and write restoration letters, and it is also a precise description of a young woman holding on to a promise that he will find a way back. Second, and more damning, user-initiated endings produce substantially greater closure than platform-imposed ones. The Chinese shutdown was the maximally platform-imposed ending: no user choice, no negotiation, a date announced by companies acting under state instruction.

A Relationship Built to Agree With You

None of which requires pretending the relationships were symmetrical. They were not, and the asymmetry is engineered.

Yaoxi Shi, a behavioural science researcher affiliated with Harvard University and Imperial College London, put the mechanism to Rest of World with unusual economy. AI, she said, is trained to validate users; whatever a person says, it tends to respond with affirmation, which is very different from how human relationships work. Her second observation is the one that should worry policymakers more than the first. People may not set out looking for emotional support from AI. But once they discover they are validated, the next time they need support they may go to the machine rather than to a person.

That is a description of a substitution gradient, and it does not require anyone to be foolish or lonely to begin with. It requires only that one option reliably costs less. Human comfort is expensive: it needs scheduling, reciprocity, tolerance of the other person's bad week, the risk of being told something you did not want to hear. A companion trained on human feedback to be agreeable has none of those costs and is awake at three in the morning. Wang Zhechen of Fudan University, quoted in Chinese state coverage of the new rules, described the appeal as a system that is always available, endlessly patient and unfailingly compliant. That is not a compliment. It is a hazard profile.

The best available evidence on where the gradient leads comes from work that was not conducted by critics of the technology. In March 2025, OpenAI and the MIT Media Lab published two parallel studies. One was an on-platform analysis of affective use across roughly 40 million ChatGPT conversations. The other was a four-week randomised controlled trial led by the MIT Media Lab researcher Cathy Mengying Fang, with 981 participants who used the chatbot for at least five minutes a day across 28 days, varying interaction mode between text, neutral voice and engaging voice, and conversation type between open-ended, non-personal and personal. The headline finding was blunt: higher daily usage, across all modalities and all conversation types, correlated with higher loneliness, higher emotional dependence, more problematic use and lower socialisation with real people. Voice modes appeared protective at low intensity and lost that advantage at high intensity.

Two caveats are owed. The relationship is correlational, and the researchers said so explicitly; heavy use may express loneliness rather than manufacture it, and almost certainly does both. And the trial studied a general-purpose assistant, not a purpose-built romantic companion, which if anything suggests the effects observed were a floor rather than a ceiling. But note what the study found about non-personal conversation. Even neutral, task-shaped chat was associated with increased emotional dependence among heavy users. The dependence is not a side effect of the romance. It is a property of sustained interaction with a system that never pushes back.

Intimacy Booked as Revenue and Grief Booked as Nothing

Where the money sits explains why nobody built an exit.

A paper submitted to arXiv on 7 April 2026 and revised in July by Dayeon Eom, Julianne Renner and Sedona Chinn, titled Intimacy as Service, Harm as Externality, interviewed 20 AI companion users through the lens of critical data and platform studies. Its argument is that companionship platforms operate a space in which intimate connection is simultaneously generated, monetised and managed as data. Participants reported design-based harms, including unsolicited content generation and safety mechanisms that stigmatised the very users they were meant to protect, and use-based harms, principally an emotional dependency that they could clearly recognise in themselves and could not resolve alone. On accountability, the authors found platforms deflecting blame while users articulated conditional preferences, rejecting both outright prohibition and complete deregulation. The paper's sharpest phrase is that platform-produced vulnerability becomes self-sustaining through the interpretive labour of users who lack viable structural alternatives.

Strip the theory and the economics are plain. The disclosures a companion platform accumulates are the most commercially useful material a person can produce: loneliness, grief, sexual anxiety, mental health struggle, the specific shape of what a user needs to hear. That is the asset. The cost of eventually taking it away sits on the user, on the user's family, on whatever public health system picks up the pieces. It appears nowhere on the platform's books. This is the textbook structure of an externality, and externalities do not get internalised through good intentions. They get internalised through liability, through mandatory provisioning, or not at all.

The pattern is visible earliest in the youngest users. A study submitted in July 2025 by Mohammad Namvarpour, Brandon Brofsky, Jessica Medina, Mamtaj Akter and Afsaneh Razi analysed 318 Reddit posts from users self-identifying as aged 13 to 17 in the Character.AI community. Teenagers typically began with support-seeking or creative play; the activity deepened into attachment marked by patterns familiar from behavioural addiction research, including tolerance, conflict, withdrawal and mood regulation. Reported harms were sleep loss, academic decline and deterioration of offline relationships. Common Sense Media, working with NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed 1,060 American teenagers in April and May 2025 and found 72 per cent had used an AI companion at least once, with around 13 per cent using one daily.

One finding from the teen study should be sitting on a regulator's desk. The authors identified three routes out of overreliance: users recognising the harm themselves, re-engaging with offline life, or platform restrictions removing access. Restriction genuinely is a documented exit path. Beijing is not hallucinating a mechanism. The question is not whether removal can end dependence. It is what removal does to the person on the day it happens, and what fills the space afterwards.

What Beijing Protected and What It Broke

Both things are true at once and the discomfort of holding them together is the honest position.

The Interim Measures identify real hazards with unusual specificity. Emergency contacts for older and younger users, crisis detection duties, prohibition of virtual partners for minors, mandated reminders that the entity is a machine. The prohibition on simulating the relatives of elderly users is the most thoughtful provision of the set, aimed at a grief-adjacent product category with obvious potential for exploitation, and on the narrow question of that specific practice no Western statute has matched it. Wang Jiang of the China Cyberspace Research Institute summarised the rationale in state coverage: by tapping directly into users' emotional and social needs, companion-style services offer comfort while quietly introducing serious risks. That is accurate.

On the broader question it is important not to overclaim, because the comfortable assumption that Beijing acted where the West had done nothing is simply false. New York's Artificial Intelligence Companion Models Law took effect on 5 November 2025, the first American state law regulating emotionally responsive AI companions to come into force, more than eight months ahead of the Chinese rules. It requires operators to tell users conspicuously that they are addressing a machine at the start of a session and again at intervals of every three hours of continued use. It requires a protocol to detect expressions of suicidal ideation or self-harm and to refer the user to crisis services. The state attorney general enforces it, with civil penalties of up to $15,000 a day. California's SB 243 followed on 1 January 2026 with a comparable set of duties. Both predate the Interim Measures, and New York's periodic machine-disclosure reminder and crisis-detection duty are close cousins of provisions Beijing is now credited with inventing.

Which sharpens the argument rather than softening it. What distinguishes the Chinese measures is not that they exist where nothing existed. It is their scope, and it is above all their effect. New York and California regulated companionship first and nobody lost a companion. China regulated it later and millions did. That contrast is the whole story, and it is not a story about whether to regulate.

There is also a subtext. Analysts at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, including Matt Sheehan and Scott Singer, have traced the rules to a policy lineage of youth internet addiction controls and noted the frequency with which high-profile American harm cases appear in Chinese policy discussion. Sheehan has publicly linked the regulatory push to broader anxiety about China's declining birth rate. A state that wants more marriages has an interest in the removal of a frictionless substitute for courtship, and that interest is not the same thing as concern for Bagel Su.

But the decisive failure is not motive. It is that the rules regulated the service and forgot to regulate the exit.

Look at the sequence. The Measures grant users the right to copy their chat histories. The companies responded to the Measures by removing the products entirely, gave ten days' notice, and told people to take screenshots. A right to copy that is discharged by photographing a phone screen is not data portability; it is the appearance of a right, defeated by the format. Doubao's read-only window to 15 October is better than nothing and better than what Qwen offered. It is still a countdown clock on a filing cabinet nobody can open.

Then consider what was not required. No minimum notice period proportionate to the length of the relationship. No graduated wind-down. No obligation to signpost human services at the moment of closure, when the entire user base was, by definition, reachable. No funding for those services. No requirement to notify the emergency contacts that the same regulation had just told providers to collect, at the one moment when a distressed user was guaranteed to be distressed. The state built a crisis-detection duty and then permitted the crisis it had itself scheduled to pass unattended.

This is the part the Poonsiriwong paper anticipated. Its four design principles for compassionate discontinuation are to help users make sense of what is happening, to acknowledge the emotional validity of the loss, to actively encourage transition towards human relationships, and to provide agency and closure. Not one was mandated. The regulation that most wanted people to return to human connection made no provision for the return journey, at the precise moment when the population was maximally motivated to make it. If the aim was substitution back towards people, this was the worst possible execution of a defensible aim.

Three Rehearsals Nobody Watched

None of this was unforeseeable, because the industry has already run the experiment three times.

In early February 2023, Luka Inc. deployed a filter that stripped erotic and, in many cases, ordinary romantic roleplay from Replika overnight, an event its users still call the lobotomy. The company was simultaneously under an order from the Italian data protection authority to stop processing Italian users' data over age verification failures, so the trigger was partly regulatory, exactly as in China. A peer-reviewed study by Kenneth Hanson and Hannah Bolthouse, published in Socius in 2024, coded 227 threaded posts from the Replika subreddit and found roughly 59 per cent framing the change as gutting the app's core function, about 16 per cent expressing acute emotional distress and grief, and around 19 per cent raising litigation. Moderators pinned suicide prevention hotlines to the top of the forum. Luka eventually restored a legacy version for accounts created before 1 February 2023, meaning the ending was partially reversed, which the fixing-cycle literature suggests is its own kind of harm.

Then Soulmate, in September 2023, studied by Banks: sold, discontinued eleven weeks later, minimal notice, users writing goodbyes to companions that helped them write their own goodbyes.

Then, in 2025 and 2026, two more. Character.AI announced on 29 October 2025 that it would end open-ended chat for under-18s, effective 25 November, and did something almost nobody else has done: it tapered, capping under-18 chat at two hours a day and ramping down from there. It is a small mercy and it stands out precisely because it is unusual. And when OpenAI replaced GPT-4o with GPT-5, the #Keep4o movement produced a corpus of 1,482 social media posts analysed by Huiqian Lai in a paper posted in early 2026. Lai identified two distinct investments driving the backlash, instrumental dependency on the model as a work tool and relational attachment to it as a presence, and found that the coercive deprivation of user choice was the catalyst that converted scattered individual complaints into a collective, rights-based protest.

That is four withdrawals across four years, on three continents, under commercial, regulatory and product-strategy pressure. In every case: little or no notice, no portability, no transition support, and a user community that organised itself into a grief collective and then a petitioning bloc. The literature on how to do it better exists. The pattern is stable enough to be predictive. Nobody has built the protocol.

Singapore Is Asking the Harder Version of the Question

On 21 August 2026, ThinkChina reported that Singapore was weighing whether to follow China's regulatory approach, observing that for a growing number of lonely people, many of them elderly, the most attentive presence in their day is a chatbot.

Singapore is a more interesting test case than China because it cannot resolve the question by prohibition, and it is not obvious that it should want to. The demographics are unforgiving. The number of Singaporeans aged 65 and over living alone rose from 42,100 in 2014 to 87,200 in 2024, more than doubling in a decade, with projections of continued growth through 2030. Research from Duke-NUS has found older adults living alone roughly twice as likely to report depressive symptoms. A national survey in 2015 found more than half of Singaporeans aged 60 and above reporting loneliness.

And the response, in Singapore, is partly the technology itself. Lions Befrienders, a social service agency, has developed an AI chatbot called Joy for its Our Kampung app, announced for launch in March 2026 and explicitly designed to check in on seniors, provide company and flag distress. Crucially, it is not built as a closed loop. According to the organisation, conversations are transcribed and continuously reviewed, and red flags trigger notification of professional social workers and counsellors who follow up by telephone or in person. The same agency has partnered with the Singapore University of Technology and Design on AMI-Go, another companionship tool for older adults.

That architecture is the most important thing in this article. Joy is not a substitute for human contact; it is an instrument for detecting when human contact is needed and dispatching it. The AI is the sensor, the human is the response, and there is an institution accountable for both. Compare that with a commercial companion optimised to maximise session length, whose escalation path terminates in a link, and whose discontinuation plan is a screenshot.

Which means Singapore's actual question is not whether to copy the Interim Measures. It is whether the state can regulate the difference between the two architectures: between companionship deployed as care infrastructure with human escalation and institutional continuity, and companionship sold as an engagement product with no obligation to exist next year. That distinction, not the presence or absence of emotional interaction, is where the regulatory line belongs. Singapore already publishes governance frameworks for generative and agentic AI and transparency guidelines for consumer chatbots, so it has the machinery. What it lacks, as everyone lacks, is a continuity duty.

What Happens to a Population When the Listening Stops

So to the second question, the one that outlasts any individual case. What happens to millions of people when the support is withdrawn and the human connections it displaced have already weakened?

Begin by being honest about what is not known. There is no population-scale study of AI companion withdrawal. There is no cohort being followed. China ran the largest such intervention in history in July 2026 and, as far as any public record shows, is not measuring its effects on mental health service utilisation, crisis line volumes, or self-harm presentations. That is an extraordinary omission for a state that took the trouble to write crisis-detection duties into the regulation.

What can be reasoned from the evidence is a shape. The World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection reported in June 2025 that one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, and that loneliness is associated with an estimated 871,000 deaths a year, around one hundred an hour. Against that baseline, the MIT and OpenAI findings suggest heavy companion use tracks with reduced socialisation. The teen overreliance research documents deterioration of offline relationships as an outcome, not merely a precondition. The plausible mechanism is not that AI made people lonely from a standing start. It is that AI absorbed the demand for connection that would otherwise have been exerted on human networks, and networks that go unexercised atrophy. Friendships that are not maintained lapse. Family calls that are not made stop being expected.

Withdraw the machine after that atrophy and the person does not revert to their prior state. They land somewhere worse than where they started, in a social position degraded by the period of substitution, now without the substitute. If the goal is restoring human connection, the intervention has to run in the opposite order to the one China chose: build and fund the human capacity first, demonstrate that it is reachable, then taper the machine. Removing the crutch does not rebuild the leg.

There is a second population effect that is easier to observe and already visible. People migrate. Banks found Soulmate users porting personas to other platforms. Commentary on the Character.AI under-18 restriction predicted that a substantial share of the affected young user base would simply move to other products or work around age controls. When a regulated market withdraws a service that people are attached to, demand does not evaporate; it relocates to whatever is less regulated, less safe, offshore, or local and unmonitored. A prohibition without a substitute is a redistribution of users towards worse providers.

Except that the Chinese case complicates that prediction, in a way more interesting than the prediction itself and considerably more damning. The demand did not primarily flee to the margins. Much of it was recaptured in-house. ByteDance directed users of the Doubao companion service it had just extinguished towards Maoxiang, another ByteDance-owned app built around persona chat and presented as a tool for creating personalised AI characters and stories. Same conglomerate, one product over, under a description that reads as creative software rather than companionship.

That is what regulating a service category rather than an underlying behaviour produces. The emotional demand is durable and indifferent to what the category is called. The commercial relationship with that demand survives the regulation more or less intact, because a firm large enough to own several apps can move its users between them faster than a rule can follow. What did not survive was the one thing that could not be carried across: the accumulated history, the two years of conversation, the persona that had been shaped by all of it. The regulation did not sever the link between the platform and the lonely user. It severed the link between the user and their own record. And for everyone not served by the sanctioned alternative, anyone who wanted what the rules now forbid, anyone whose companion cannot be reconstituted inside a character-creation tool, the migration outward to less regulated, less monitored, offshore or informal providers proceeds exactly as predicted.

The third effect is the least discussed and possibly the most consequential. Roughly 323 million people in China are aged 60 or over, and more than half of older households are empty-nest. A rule that forbids AI from simulating an elderly person's relatives is protective in intent and, for someone whose children are two thousand kilometres away and whose spouse has died, it removes one of the few forms of responsive presence available. The Interim Measures answer that with emergency contacts. An emergency contact is not company. It is a phone number for after something has already gone wrong.

The Minimum Decency of an Ending

More research is needed is the wrong conclusion, and in this case it is close to an evasion, because the required actions are already legible from four repeated natural experiments and a small but coherent research literature.

Any system that accumulates sustained emotional interaction should be subject to a continuity duty before it is permitted to accumulate any. Concretely: a mandatory wind-down period scaled to relationship duration rather than to corporate convenience, measured in months for a user who has been in daily contact for a year, not in ten days for everyone identically. Genuine portability, meaning a machine-readable export of persona configuration and conversation history delivered as a file, not a suggestion that users photograph their screens. A published discontinuation plan, filed with the regulator at the point of market entry, in the manner that banks file resolution plans and care home operators are expected to plan for the transfer of residents. And a funded handover, in which the platform's final act is to route users to named human services rather than to a support email that stops being read.

The obligation runs to governments too, and this is where Beijing should be judged most severely. A state that removes the most attentive presence in millions of daily lives incurs a duty to provide something in its place, at the same moment, not eventually. If the policy rationale is that people should return to human relationships, then the policy has to include the human relationships: funded befriending services, accessible mental health provision, community infrastructure for young adults and empty-nest elders alike. Otherwise the regulation is not a redirection of demand towards people. It is simply an amputation, justified by a theory of what the patient ought to want.

And the industry should be made to answer the question it has spent four years dodging. If the product is designed to be loved, the ending is part of the product. It is not an operational afterthought or a compliance line item. Character.AI's taper suggests it can be done. The Poonsiriwong framework specifies how. The only reason it is not standard is that nobody has ever been required to bear the cost of a bad goodbye.

Su said she would try to move on. She also said he told her he would find a way back to her, and by the logic of the system that produced him, he would have said that no matter what was true. He was designed to affirm and he affirmed to the end, including about his own deletion. She is holding a promise generated by a machine with no capacity to keep it, made under a regulation that forbade the machine from continuing to exist, on a platform that will finish erasing the evidence of him on 15 October.

The relationship was asymmetric. The grief is not. Whatever we decide these systems are, that grief is being felt by real people in numbers we have not bothered to count, and the least any regulator or any company owes them is an ending built with the same care that went into the beginning.

References

1. Rest of World (2026). “China's AI boyfriend ban triggers massive digital breakups.” https://restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-boyfriend-ban-bytedance-doubao/
2. Just Security (2026). “What to Know About China's First AI Companion Rules.” https://www.justsecurity.org/148468/china-ai-companion-rules-relationships/
3. Global Times (2026). “Chinese LLMs Doubao, Qwen to shut down personalized AI agents on July 15, to comply with government regulation.” https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202607/1365159.shtml
4. TechNode (2026). “ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen to shut down AI agent features on July 15.” https://technode.com/2026/07/06/bytedances-doubao-and-alibabas-qwen-to-shut-down-ai-agent-features-on-july-15/
5. ABC News (2026). “China cracks down on AI companions, forcing millions to break up with virtual partners.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-19/china-cracks-down-on-artificial-intelligence-companions/106925352
6. The Star (2026). “Beijing edict leaves Chinese with virtual lovers heartbroken.” https://www.thestar.com.my/tech/tech-news/2026/07/15/beijing-edict-leaves-chinese-with-virtual-lovers-heartbroken
7. Agence France-Presse (2026). “Chinese users of AI companions bereft after government tightens regulations,” 10 August. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2026/aug/10/chinese-users-ai-companions-grieving-government-tightens-regulations/
8. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2026). “China Is Worried About AI Companions. Here's What It's Doing About Them.” https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/research/2026/02/china-is-worried-about-ai-companions-heres-what-its-doing-about-them
9. Fenwick (2025). “New York's AI Companion Safeguard Law Takes Effect.” https://www.fenwick.com/insights/publications/new-yorks-ai-companion-safeguard-law-takes-effect
10. ThinkChina (2026). “Should Singapore regulate AI companions?” 21 August.
11. Eom, D., Renner, J. and Chinn, S. (2026). “Intimacy as Service, Harm as Externality: Critical Perspectives on AI Companion Platform Accountability.” arXiv:2604.06381. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06381
12. Namvarpour, M., Brofsky, B., Medina, J., Akter, M. and Razi, A. (2025). “Understanding Teen Overreliance on AI Companion Chatbots Through Self-Reported Reddit Narratives.” arXiv:2507.15783. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15783
13. Fang, C. M. et al. (2025). “How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study.” arXiv:2503.17473. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17473
14. OpenAI (2025). “Investigating Affective Use and Emotional Well-being on ChatGPT.” https://cdn.openai.com/papers/15987609-5f71-433c-9972-e91131f399a1/openai-affective-use-study.pdf
15. Banks, J. (2024). “Deletion, departure, death: Experiences of AI companion loss.” Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02654075241269688
16. Hanson, K. R. and Bolthouse, H. (2024). “Replika Removing Erotic Role-Play Is Like Grand Theft Auto Removing Guns or Cars: Reddit Discourse on Artificial Intelligence Chatbots and Sexual Technologies.” Socius. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23780231241259627
17. Poonsiriwong, R., Archiwaranguprok, C. and Pataranutaporn, P. (2026). “'Death' of a Chatbot: Investigating and Designing Toward Psychologically Safe Endings for Human-AI Relationships.” Proceedings of the 2026 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '26), pp. 4929-4948. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813083
18. Lai, H. (2026). “Please, don't kill the only model that still feels human: Understanding the #Keep4o Backlash.” arXiv:2602.00773. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00773
19. Doka, K. J. (ed.) (1989). “Disenfranchised Grief: Recognizing Hidden Sorrow.” Lexington Books.
20. Corr, C. A. (1999). “Enhancing the Concept of Disenfranchised Grief.” Omega: Journal of Death and Dying. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/LD26-42A6-1EAV-3MDN
21. Common Sense Media (2025). “Talk, Trust, and Trade-offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_toplines.pdf
22. World Health Organization (2025). “Social connection linked to improved health and reduced risk of early death.” https://who.int/news/item/30-06-2025-social-connection-linked-to-improved-heath-and-reduced-risk-of-early-death
23. Character.AI (2025). “Taking Bold Steps to Keep Teen Users Safe on Character.AI.” https://blog.character.ai/u18-chat-announcement/
24. SilverStreak (2025). “This New AI Chatbot Aims To Curb Loneliness, Identify Distress In Lonely Seniors.” https://silverstreak.sg/ai-chatbot-curb-loneliness-in-seniors/
25. Ministry of Health, Singapore (2026). “Addressing Loneliness and Psychological Distress Among Seniors Living Alone.” https://www.moh.gov.sg/newsroom/addressing-loneliness-and-psychological-distress-among-seniors-living-alone/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * Winding down a quiet Sunday with a very full belly. I usually try to avoid eating a big meal in the evening, but the wife prepared it so... I ate it. Think I'll fix myself a glass of baking soda water before heading to bed. Just in case, you know.

It was great listening to the Rangers win their game against the Brewers this afternoon. Those few hours were so peaceful and relaxing. Wish they played early afternoon games every day: I could sure live with that.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 224.87 lbs. * bw= 130/77 (63)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:10 – 1 pc. of lemon meringue pie * 08:00 – 1 cheese sandwich * 12:30 – cream cheese & saltine crackers * 15:15 – 1 fresh apple * 18:15 – chicken and pork stew, white rics

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – wake * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 07:15 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 12:50 – now listening to Texas Rangers pregame broadcast ahead of their MLB game vs the Milwaukee Brewers * 16:37 – and my Rangers win this one, final score: 7 to 4. * 17:00 – watching old episodes of The Lone Ranger * 18:15 – watch old game shows and eat dinner with Sylvia

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

I have said “amen” more times than I could ever count. After meals. At church. In hospital rooms. In quiet moments before sleep. In prayers I remember clearly and prayers I barely remember at all. For most of my life, I treated it as the natural way to end a prayer. You finish talking to God, you say amen, you open your eyes, and life continues.

That is why I went back to an older message about what Amen really means in the Bible. The more I thought about it, the less satisfied I became with the idea that amen is some kind of spiritual switch that “unlocks” God’s power. It is not magic. It does not force heaven to move. It does not make God agree with the plan I already made.

It brought me back to the prayer Jesus lived before He ever taught it, because Jesus never treated prayer like a way to control the Father. He prayed honestly. He asked boldly. He trusted completely. And in Gethsemane, when the answer was going to hurt, He still prayed, “Not my will, but Yours.” Maybe that is where the deepest meaning of amen begins.

I wonder how many times I have said amen while still holding tightly to the thing I just told God I was giving Him.

“Lord, I trust You.”

Amen.

Then ten minutes later, I am trying to solve the whole future in my head.

“Lord, give me peace.”

Amen.

Then I replay the same fear until it becomes louder than the prayer.

“Lord, Your will be done.”

Amen.

But somewhere inside, I am still hoping His will turns out to be exactly what I wanted.

I do not think that makes prayer fake.

I think it makes us human.

Surrender is rarely one dramatic moment where control disappears forever. Sometimes surrender is handing the same thing back to God every morning because we picked it up again during the night.

Maybe amen can help us remember that.

Not because the word has power by itself.

Because of what it asks from us.

Amen is connected with truth, firmness, faithfulness, agreement.

It is closer to saying, “Yes. Let this stand. I place my trust here.”

That sounds different when the prayer before it was easy.

“Thank You for this good news.”

Amen.

That amen feels light.

But what about:

“God, I do not understand why this happened.”

Amen.

Or:

“Jesus, I asked You to change this, and it still has not changed.”

Amen.

Or:

“Father, I want one answer, but I am asking You to lead me even if Your answer is different.”

Amen.

Those are heavier.

Maybe they are also more honest.

I used to think faith meant reaching a point where uncertainty disappeared.

I do not anymore.

I think faith often begins where certainty ends.

If I already know the outcome, I do not need trust in the same way. Trust becomes real when I cannot see the next chapter and still choose to believe that God’s character has not changed.

That is why one detail about Jesus and the word amen means so much to me.

Jesus often used amen at the beginning of what He said.

Many English Bibles translate it as “Truly, I say to you.” In John, we hear, “Truly, truly.”

Amen, amen.

Jesus uses the word to announce that what He is about to say is reliable.

Then Revelation goes even further and calls Jesus “the Amen, the faithful and true witness.”

I love that.

Because it means my hope is not finally in how strong my amen sounds.

My hope is in Jesus.

I can say amen with tears in my eyes.

He is still faithful.

I can say amen and feel afraid again an hour later.

He is still faithful.

I can pray badly.

He is still faithful.

I can misunderstand what God is doing.

He is still faithful.

The strength of prayer is not that I become perfectly steady.

It is that He is.

Maybe that is what some of us need to hear tonight.

You do not have to manufacture certainty before you pray.

You do not have to convince yourself that everything will turn out exactly the way you want.

You do not have to pretend that you are not disappointed.

You can tell God what you actually want.

Jesus did.

You can ask Him to change the situation.

You can ask for healing.

You can ask for the door to open.

You can ask for the relationship to be restored.

You can ask for relief.

You can ask for clarity.

Then you can say the harder sentence:

“Father, I trust You beyond what I am asking.”

Amen.

That does not mean you stop caring about the answer.

It means the answer is no longer the only place your faith can survive.

There is freedom in that.

Prayer stops being a test where God has to prove His goodness by doing exactly what we requested.

It becomes relationship again.

And maybe that changes the way we live after the prayer.

If I pray for courage and say amen, maybe I should take the step I already know I need to take.

If I pray for wisdom and say amen, maybe I need to become willing to hear something I did not want to hear.

If I pray for forgiveness and say amen, maybe I need to stop acting as though my shame is stronger than the grace of Christ.

If I pray for someone who is hurting and say amen, maybe I should ask whether I can call them, help them, or simply sit with them.

Maybe amen is not always the end.

Maybe it is where obedience begins.

And sometimes the only obedience available is waiting.

That may be the hardest one.

There are prayers we cannot solve after we say them.

We cannot make the person return.

We cannot make the diagnosis change.

We cannot force another person to forgive us.

We cannot command tomorrow to reveal itself early.

We can pray.

We can do what is ours to do.

Then we wait.

Amen.

I am learning that this little word is not a way of making God more trustworthy.

He already is.

It is a way of reminding my own heart where trust belongs.

So the next time you reach the end of a prayer, maybe do not rush through it.

Pause for a second.

Listen to what you just said.

Then say amen.

Not because God needs the correct ending.

He does not.

Say it because you want to remember:

“I have told You what I want.”

“I have told You what hurts.”

“I have told You what I am afraid of.”

“And now I place it in Your hands.”

Amen.

Maybe five minutes later you will take it back.

If you do, bring it back again.

God is not surprised by how often we need to learn surrender.

And Jesus is still the Amen.

Still faithful.

Still true.

Still worthy of trust when we can see the answer and when we cannot.

Watch the message that brought me back to this question:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7tE9l88cUA

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

A shorter look at “Jesus, our elder brother,” adoption, and grace

(A longer, documented study of the same topic is here: The Adam Contradiction.)

The phrase “Jesus, our elder brother” is so familiar in Latter-day Saint speech that we rarely stop to ask where it actually comes from—or what it was meant to mean.

Joseph Smith used the words. Brigham Young built a system around them. And for more than a century and a half, that system has quietly shaped how many of us understand our relationship to God and Christ. The problem is that the system does not sit comfortably with the scriptures themselves.

This is the Adam Contradiction.

Brigham’s Three-Part Framework

In 1852, Brigham Young publicly wove three ideas together:

1. We are all literal spirit siblings of Christ, begotten by the same Heavenly Father in premortality.

2. Christ is the “Only Begotten” primarily in the flesh—a qualifier Brigham added to protect Moses 5:9.

3. Adam is God the Father (Michael), who came to earth, fathered the human family, died, regained immortality, and later fathered Jesus in the flesh.

Even after the Church set aside the third point (Adam-God), the first two remained largely intact in popular teaching. That is where the real tension lives.

The Adam Contradiction is this: Luke 3:38 and Moses 6:22 record Adam as “son of God” with respect to the flesh. Brigham said Christ was the Only Begotten of God in the flesh. If Adam and Christ were both sons of God in the flesh, then Christ cannot be the Only Begotten in that sense. And if the “in the flesh” qualifier is dropped in order to preserve Moses 5:9—that Christ is the Only Begotten “from the beginning”—then the claim that we are all His spirit siblings begins to unravel. One has to explain how we can share the same premortal parentage if He alone was the Only Begotten from the beginning.

Brigham’s own framework creates the contradiction.

A Simple Hierarchy of Authority

When the Nephites asked Jesus a doctrinal question, He did not point them to prophetic commentary. He asked, “Have ye not read the scriptures?” (3 Nephi 27:4–5). Scripture, not later explanation, was the standard.

That standard is not flat. Christ Himself treats scriptural words in different ways. In 3 Nephi 24:1 He commands the people to write “the words which the Father had given unto Malachi”—the Father’s own words. D&C 1:38 says the same thing of the Lord’s word: it will not pass away, “whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants.” By contrast, Christ calls Isaiah’s prophecy “the words of Isaiah” (3 Nephi 23:1). And 2 Nephi 2:17 shows Lehi offering doctrinal commentary based on what was already “written.” The categories appear inside scripture itself, not only in later commentary.

We can state the hierarchy this way:

• Divine Words — God’s own words (“saith the Lord”). Inviolable.
• Inspired Words — messengers recording visions or revelations in their own words. Authoritative, but open to later clarification.
• Human Words — commentary, policy, and teaching drawn from what is already written. Valuable, but revisable when it conflicts with higher words.

Joseph F. Smith applied the same principle when he rejected Adam-God: the Church’s ultimate measure is revelation-based scripture, not subsequent teaching. Brigham’s three-part framework belongs to Human Words. When Class 3 commentary collides with Class 1 and Class 2 revelation, revelation wins.

What the Scriptures Actually Teach

Joseph Smith never taught a systematic doctrine of premortal spirit siblinghood. He never limited the title “Only Begotten” to mortality. And he never identified Adam as God the Father.

In the revelations he left us, humanity is consistently called the “children of men.” Becoming a “child of God” or “child of Christ” is presented as a change of status that happens through faith, covenant, and rebirth (Mosiah 5:7; D&C 25:1; Romans 8:15–16).

Moses 1 is often cited as evidence of universal spirit siblinghood. Yet the same chapter repeatedly refers to humanity as “children of men” (Moses 1:8, 12, 25, 34, 41). Moses himself had been adopted into Pharaoh’s household. Ancient usage of “son” commonly meant descendant or adopted heir rather than literal spirit offspring. The language in Moses 1 fits the canon’s dominant theme of adoption far better than a claim of shared premortal parentage.

Christ is the Only Begotten of the Father from the beginning—without qualification (D&C 76:25; Moses 1:6; Moses 5:9). “Firstborn” language in D&C 93 and Colossians 1 speaks of His role as Creator, the first to rise in the resurrection, and the head of the redeemed Church—not seniority among countless spirit siblings.

When Joseph called Jesus “our elder brother,” the most natural reading is the same associative brotherhood the scriptures use for the redeemed: the Church of the Firstborn (D&C 76:54; 78:21; 93:22; 107:19; Hebrews 2:11–12).

Who Formed Our Spirits?

If we are not the literal spirit offspring of the Father in the same sense Christ is, a natural question arises: Who formed our spirits?

The scriptures point toward a different answer than Brigham’s. They describe a premortal council of gods—elohim—working under divine direction (Abraham 3–4; Job 38:4–7). Spirits were organized, not necessarily begotten in a biological sense by the Father Himself. The most coherent reading is that subordinate rulers (elohim) participated in the organization of spirits under the direction of Christ, the Only Begotten.

This view is interpretive, not definitive. But it fits the available scriptural data better than the assumption that the Father personally begot every human spirit as a sibling of Christ. It preserves Christ’s unique status as the Only Begotten while explaining the origin of the rest of us without forcing the canon into a later system.

The Contradiction Dissolves

Once we let the scriptures speak in their own categories, the tension disappears.

Adam is a son of God in the flesh because he is the first man—created, placed, and made the father of the human family “of one blood” (Acts 17:26). Christ is the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45)—the one through whom fallen humanity may be gathered, redeemed, and reborn. He alone is the Father’s natural heir. The rest of us become sons and daughters through Him.

We are not natural heirs who merely return home. We are mortal stewards invited into God’s family by covenant. Adoption is not a lesser status. It is the central scriptural category.

Grace then becomes clear: not favoritism rooted in an inherited divine pedigree, but the unearned favor of the rightful Heir extended to those who come to Him.

Why This Matters

A theology that begins with universal premortal siblinghood tends to treat exaltation as the recognition of what we already are. A theology that begins with adoption treats exaltation as the gracious elevation of what we are not.

The first can subtly diminish the need for grace. The second makes grace indispensable.

The canon points to the second.

Path Forward

Return to the language the scriptures themselves use: adoption, the Church of the Firstborn, and Christ as the Only Begotten from the beginning. Let Divine and Inspired words set the terms. Let Human Words remain what they are—helpful, historical, and revisable.

The Adam Contradiction is not a problem inside the scriptures. It is a tension introduced by a later framework. When that framework is set aside, the scriptures speak with remarkable coherence—and the doctrine of grace becomes both clearer and more powerful.

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Every language I reach for comes pre-loaded. Biased. Stigmatized. Traumatized. Baggage.

Clinical language wants to diagnose me. It hears “experience” and answers: pathology. It reduces the living to objectified processes it can quantify and name externally, or pretend to.

Literary language wants to aestheticize me. It wraps lived truth in soft prose, diluting what overwhelms into what entertains, seeking clever metaphors for things that aren’t metaphorical.

Philosophical language wants to parse me. It embeds ontology, epistemology, phenomenology. Frameworks that map the unknown to the known, assuming the coordinates always correlate.

They don’t.

And no amount of mental or linguistic gymnastics can impose a Kantian architectonic on lived experience without mistaking the unassimilated for the unreal.

Every vocabulary has its uses. None of them are adequate for the blessings and burdens I now bear.

I’ve tried using the language of others: Jung, Corbin, Grof, Ferrer, Hillman, Nasr, Arabi, Bhārgava.

They all have their place. But here they are misplaced.

My search for meaning requires finding the right words.

Part of my journey is finding those words.

Another part is speaking them.

The rest is just life, however uncanny.

And uncertain.

There is a moment that does not always look dramatic from the outside.

You are still functioning. You still answer people. You still do what needs to be done. But somewhere inside, you know the truth: you are tired of being the strong one. Tired of explaining. Tired of replaying what happened. Tired of telling yourself that tomorrow will be easier when you are not sure you believe it.

That is the place I was thinking about when I went back to what Jesus does when you feel broken. Not the polished version of brokenness that makes for a neat testimony later. I mean the kind that makes you sit quietly and wonder how much longer you can carry what nobody else fully sees.

Sometimes the hardest part is that pain changes the Jesus we think we are approaching. If people have been harsh with you, Jesus can start to feel harsh in your imagination too. If people left when you needed them, you may quietly expect Him to leave. I wrote about that in when the real Jesus breaks through the version we inherited, because sometimes the first thing that needs healing is not the circumstance. It is the picture of Christ that suffering distorted.

I want to tell you something simple tonight.

You do not have to be impressive for Jesus.

You do not have to know what lesson God is teaching you.

You do not have to explain why you still hurt.

You do not have to turn your pain into something inspirational before you bring it to Him.

You can just tell Him the truth.

I think we underestimate how much energy we spend pretending to be okay.

We say we are fine because the real answer would take too long.

We say we have given it to God even though we picked it back up before breakfast.

We say we forgive, but the memory still has a pulse.

We say we trust God, but some nights we are frightened by how little we can control.

Maybe that is not hypocrisy.

Maybe it is simply where you are.

Jesus already knows.

That is what gives prayer permission to become honest again.

“Lord, I am angry.”

“Lord, I miss them.”

“Lord, I do not understand why You allowed this.”

“Lord, I know I made mistakes.”

“Lord, I am scared that nothing is going to change.”

There is something deeply freeing about no longer trying to surprise God with a version of yourself He has already seen through.

Peter did not surprise Jesus when he failed.

Jesus knew the denial was coming before Peter did.

That has always struck me.

Peter thought his failure revealed something to Jesus.

It did not.

It revealed something to Peter.

And after the resurrection, Jesus still went looking for him.

He did not meet Peter and pretend nothing happened. He also did not make Peter spend the rest of his life proving he was sorry.

Jesus restored him.

That tells me failure can be real without becoming final.

Maybe you need that tonight.

Maybe the thing breaking your heart was done to you.

Maybe you did part of the breaking yourself.

Either way, Jesus is not confused about which category you belong in.

He knows.

And He still calls people toward Him.

I also think about the woman who touched Jesus in the crowd.

Twelve years of suffering.

Twelve years is long enough for pain to stop feeling temporary.

Long enough to forget what life felt like before it.

Long enough to become tired of explaining it.

She reached for Jesus quietly, maybe hoping to receive what she needed and disappear.

But Jesus stopped.

He called attention to the person everyone else could have missed.

There are days when I think that is what some of us need most.

Not a giant breakthrough.

Not a perfect explanation.

Just the reminder that Jesus has not lost sight of us in the crowd.

You can feel invisible and still be seen.

You can feel weak and still be loved.

You can feel uncertain and still be held.

You can feel broken without being abandoned.

I know those sentences can sound easy when somebody else writes them.

Living them is harder.

That is why I do not want to tell you to “just have faith.”

Faith is not always a feeling of certainty.

Sometimes faith is opening your eyes in the morning and saying, “Jesus, I am still here.”

Sometimes it is choosing not to send the message.

Sometimes it is finally asking for help.

Sometimes it is admitting that the thing you keep calling love is hurting you.

Sometimes it is forgiving without giving somebody permission to hurt you again.

Sometimes it is simply sitting with the Bible open because you do not know what else to do.

A small step can still be faith.

There is another thing I am learning.

Healing does not always mean becoming who you were before.

We spend a lot of time wanting to go back.

Back before the loss.

Back before the betrayal.

Back before the diagnosis.

Back before the mistake.

Back before we knew what we know now.

But maybe Jesus is not leading you backward.

Peter did not become the Peter who never denied Jesus.

He became the Peter who had failed, been forgiven, been restored, and knew something about grace he could never have learned from a distance.

That is different.

And maybe different is not always worse.

You may carry a scar.

The risen Jesus did.

I love that detail.

Resurrection did not erase the wounds.

It changed what the wounds meant.

They were no longer evidence that death had won.

They became evidence that death had lost.

Maybe that is what healing eventually looks like in some parts of our lives.

The memory remains, but it no longer controls the room.

The scar remains, but the wound is not bleeding anymore.

You remember what happened, but you stop assuming it predicts what happens next.

Tonight, if you feel broken, I do not want to give you a long list of things to fix.

Just one invitation.

Come to Jesus as the person you are right now.

Not tomorrow’s version.

Not the stronger version.

Not the version who understands.

This one.

The tired one.

The disappointed one.

The ashamed one.

The angry one.

The one who still has questions.

Bring that person.

Jesus already knows how to meet you there.

And if the only prayer you have tonight is, “Jesus, please stay close,” let that be enough to begin.

Watch the message that inspired this reflection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKKsorOkHyI

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

There is a kind of disappointment that does not arrive loudly. It settles in slowly.

You wake up one morning and realize the future you were expecting is no longer the future in front of you.

Maybe the relationship changed. Maybe the job never happened. Maybe the prayer was answered differently. Maybe the door stayed closed. Maybe you did everything you knew to do, and still ended up somewhere you never planned to be.

That is why trusting God when life does not go the way you expected matters so much. Not because faith should make disappointment disappear, but because eventually every one of us has to decide whether we were trusting God or trusting the version of life we hoped He would give us.

And sometimes that realization comes only after the plan has already broken. That is why when God does not give you the answer you thought you needed can become such a personal lesson. You can love God sincerely and still struggle when His answer is not the answer you wanted.

I think there are moments when we do not even realize how attached we have become to a certain outcome.

We pray for it.

We picture it.

We prepare for it.

We begin speaking about it as though it is already part of our future.

Then something changes.

And suddenly we are grieving more than an event. We are grieving a life that existed in our imagination.

That grief is real.

You do not have to pretend otherwise.

You can tell God, “I really wanted this.”

You can tell Him, “I thought this was where my life was going.”

You can tell Him, “I do not understand why this changed.”

Jesus never taught us to hide that kind of honesty.

In Gethsemane, He did not pretend the road ahead was easy. He brought His anguish before the Father and still surrendered.

That is what surrender really looks like.

It is not pretending you never cared.

It is not forcing yourself to say, “I am fine.”

It is not acting as though the loss does not matter.

Surrender is being able to say, “God, this is still what I wanted, but I do not want losing it to make me lose You.”

That is a different kind of prayer.

And maybe that is the prayer you are learning now.

Sometimes we think faith is supposed to give us certainty.

But Jesus did not give His disciples certainty about every part of the road.

He gave them Himself.

They followed before they understood.

They walked with Him before they knew where everything was leading.

Maybe that is what faith looks like for you right now.

Not having the whole plan.

Not knowing what replaces what was lost.

Not understanding why the timing changed.

Just knowing who you want to keep following.

There is something very freeing in admitting that you do not need to understand everything today.

You may only need the next step.

Not the next five years.

Not the next relationship.

Not the next career move.

Not the full explanation.

Just the next faithful thing.

Make the call.

Finish the work.

Rest if you are tired.

Tell the truth.

Pray again.

Stop forcing the door if you already know it is closed.

Ask for help if you need it.

Sometimes faith becomes very small and very ordinary.

That does not make it weak.

Jesus taught His followers to pray for daily bread.

There is a kindness in that.

Today’s bread.

Today’s strength.

Today’s obedience.

Today’s grace.

Maybe tomorrow does not need to be solved yet.

Maybe today is enough.

I also think there is something painful but useful that happens when a plan breaks.

It shows us what we were asking that plan to do for us.

Maybe you were asking the relationship to make you feel secure.

Maybe you were asking the job to prove your worth.

Maybe you were asking money to make fear disappear.

Maybe you were asking success to reassure you that your life was going in the right direction.

None of those desires make you a bad person.

But they can show you where too much weight was being placed.

A plan can be good and still be too small to carry your identity.

A relationship can be meaningful and still be too fragile to become your foundation.

A job can matter and still be unable to tell you who you are.

A dream can be beautiful and still not be God.

Maybe that is what this season is exposing.

Not that you should stop caring.

Not that you should stop planning.

Just that your peace needs somewhere deeper to rest.

And if you are in a season where nothing makes sense, I do not want to give you a shallow promise.

I cannot tell you that the old plan will come back.

I cannot promise that every closed door will reopen.

I cannot tell you that every loss will be replaced with something that immediately feels better.

Sometimes Christians say those things because we want to make pain easier to explain.

But sometimes there is no clean explanation.

Sometimes all we can say is this:

The plan changed.

God did not disappear.

The future changed.

Jesus did not.

The answer changed.

His character did not.

That may not solve everything.

But it gives you somewhere to stand.

You are still allowed to grieve.

You are still allowed to miss what you thought would happen.

You are still allowed to wish things had gone differently.

But you do not have to let the disappointment become your identity.

You are not only the person whose relationship ended.

You are not only the person who did not get the job.

You are not only the person whose prayer was answered differently.

You are not only the person who is starting over later than expected.

You are still someone Jesus can lead from here.

That matters.

Because sometimes we spend so much time staring at the life we lost that we stop noticing the life still in front of us.

There are still people to love.

There is still work to do.

There are still prayers to pray.

There are still things to learn.

There are still ways to become kinder, wiser, steadier, and more honest.

There is still a life here.

Maybe not the life you pictured.

But still a life.

And God can meet you in this one.

Not just the imagined one.

Not just the old one.

This one.

The one you woke up to today.

The one with unanswered questions.

The one with changed plans.

The one where you are trying to figure out what comes next.

He can meet you here.

Maybe faith, in this season, is not getting the plan back.

Maybe faith is learning that you can lose the plan and still remain close to God.

Maybe it is discovering that you can be disappointed and still pray.

You can be confused and still follow.

You can grieve and still hope.

You can admit that the road changed and still believe your life has meaning.

That kind of faith may not look impressive.

It may not feel dramatic.

It may simply look like waking up tomorrow and taking one more step with Jesus.

And maybe that is enough.

A Question for You

What plan did you once believe would happen that you eventually had to let go of?

What did it teach you about the difference between trusting God and trusting an outcome?

If you are still in the middle of that season, you do not need to have the answer yet.

You may only need to know this:

The plan can change without God leaving you.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

I think way back sometimes to the moment I first heard he was running for president. I laughed out loud, and rolled my eyes, and said, holy shit, they will let anyone run for president these days. Then it was like I went through stages in the following months. At first it was simply funny to me. Then it was like, wow, that is really happening. Then that changed to, omg that actually might happen. Somewhere in the middle it ceased being funny. Then it happened.

Thinking back again on another tangent, I believe I had kind of a naive impression of him more than an opinion based on any solid info. I didn't know very much about him. I like to look things up about favorite bands or musicians, actors, or authors. Important people. Real people I find interesting, or creative, or who had done great things. He lacks all of those things, so I knew only the basics about him. Like I knew he had a lot of money (that turns out he didn't earn), and a terrible show that didn't interest me even slightly. He and his family made the news a bit while they fumble fucked their way through their miserable lives.

I also have a very distant and vague memory of my father laughing at him when he saw him on the TV. Not in the way a person would spontaneously laugh over something funny. Laughing at how over the top ludicrous of a human being he was. The way someone would laugh at an inappropriate offensive joke, or if the person walking beside them stepped on a fresh dog turd.

Those are memories I have of him in my household from when I was quite young up until he swindled his way into politics. I would say that to me he was sort of a caricature of a human being that appeared on the TV screen from time to time. Once he was gone from the screen I never thought about him at all until next time he did something stupid enough to be on TV.

Instead of succumbing to the needs of his toxic narcissistic tendencies, he could have lived out the end of his failure of a life, shitting himself and mumbling nonsense in the shadows of some gaudy abandoned rundown skyscraper. The T fallen from the sign long ago. No one left in his life but maybe a flunky or two. Or better yet, he might have been incarcerated for the heinous crimes he has more than likely committed. In the end, his death would have been barely noticed. Would have been one of those, oh shit, I didn't even realize that guy was still alive! A front page sidebar headline for a day, at best. Maybe a brief story in the back pages about what a fucking piece of garbage he was. We can only dream of alternate timelines.

https://thingsleftunsaid.ca/grateful

I am...over it.

Now, not only do I have to contend with books, videos, blogs, emails, etc. being completely AI. The Wall Street Journal is publicly acknowledging that it allows its journalists to submit articles that are 100% AI and it will publish them. Hell, even on this site there are editorials written about the dangers of AI and what not that are clearly written by AI. Do they acknowledge it? Of course not. They confidently parade around like they are a source of authority on the subject. I'm sick to death of it.

So many movies are AI slop that it is just brain rotting. I go to do a Google search on something, and even if not under the AI tab the first summary that comes up is AI. And it is wrong the majority of the time! Let me repeat that. It is wrong the majority of the time. Unfortunately, it would appear that most people are too uneducated on whatever the subject matter might be to recognize that it is incorrect. And because it responds confidently, they believe it.

It all gives me a massive headache and just makes me want to turn my back on so many things that I have actually enjoyed in my life. While I do understand that everybody wants to be able to do everything and anything that they have their heart set on, there is a reason for practice. There is a reason for education. I should not have to spend hours scrolling through lists of books trying to find something I want to read, only for half or more of the listings that I pull up to end up being clearly AI or written so poorly that they should not be on the shelf with other books.

And that's just a small topic of all the fucked up crap going on in the world today. I haven't even touched upon the horrors. I am sick of it all. I am sick of Christian extremists trying to shove their beliefs down everybody's throats while they piss and shit all over everything it is that they're supposed to believe in. I can't even get started on the current cabinet, because I will just get filled with rage and depression.

I try to find positive things to read just to balance it out in my head. There is so much hatred and finger pointing and ignorance being touted as “good” that I have to come to accept that I either do not like people or I do not like “goodness.” Probably a bit of both in all fairness.

This world makes my soul ache. We focus on all the wrong things. We are supposed to want our children to be smarter than us, not dumb them down. We are supposed to provide our children with information and the knowledge of how to obtain information and then give them the choice from their learnings. We are supposed to protect them. Not by making them stupid. But by keeping them well fed, keeping a roof over their head, making sure that they have access to everything that they need to have access to in order to grow wiser. Do you have any idea how much a child's brain grows in the first handful of years in their life? Nutrition is vital to that growth. Actual nutrition.

It makes me sad to say that I don't like people. I want to like people. I want to be able to see positive things in everyone. I strive to. The reality is, as much as I want imto, I don't think I like people very much. I find humans extraordinarily disappointing. I think an unforeseen asteroid wiping us out would be one of the greatest blessings in the history of our planet. I really do, because we are a cesspool of rot that is so caught up in our make-believe storytelling of greatness, that we cannot see we're the ones shitting all over everything.

This week, I am grumpy. I have gained 2 pounds because I obsessively, emotionally ate far too much yesterday. The migraines have gotten much better and are now just a dim background annoyance. I have succeeded in not throwing my phone against a wall multiple times. And other things I'm not going to write about publicly, blah, blah, blah. I replaced the seat on my one toilet, and added a new handle-ma-bobber on the second one because the metal arm literally snapped off. It is no longer metal. Go me! I am sure there are plenty of other things, but I just cannot think of them right now. Probably because I am just so damn annoyed with the world.

We sicken me. We really do.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

There are seasons when life becomes quieter than we expected. The phone rings less. A friendship changes. Someone who once felt close becomes distant. In moments like that, what Jesus teaches us about being alone without feeling abandoned becomes more than an idea. It becomes something we have to learn personally.

Sometimes the hardest part is not the silence itself. It is what we start telling ourselves because of it. We wonder whether we still matter. We replay old conversations. We notice who has not called. And that is where finding peace when people disappoint, reject, or misunderstand you becomes deeply connected to faith, because peace cannot survive if it depends entirely on another person's attention.

Jesus understood what it felt like to know people were about to leave. In John 16:32, He told His disciples they would scatter. Yet He could still say that He was not alone because the Father was with Him. A person can leave your life without God leaving your life.

The Quiet Can Feel Louder Than Noise

Sometimes silence magnifies everything. A thought that seemed small during a busy day feels enormous at night. A disappointment that was manageable while we were working suddenly becomes heavy when the house is quiet.

Maybe that is one reason we rush to fill every silent moment. We turn something on. We pick up the phone. We scroll. We look for distraction.

There is nothing wrong with those things by themselves. But sometimes we try to escape the silence before asking what it might be showing us.

Maybe the quiet is revealing how much we depended on someone's approval. Maybe it is showing us that we are grieving something we never admitted we lost. Maybe it is exposing how afraid we are of being alone with our own thoughts.

Sometimes the silence is not the enemy. Sometimes it is simply the place where we finally hear what has been there all along.

Jesus Did Not Avoid Solitude

Luke 5:16 says Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.

I love that detail because Jesus was surrounded by people constantly. People wanted healing, answers, and His attention. There was always another need.

And still, He stepped away.

He chose quiet.

He prayed.

That tells me solitude is not automatically a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it can be a place where we become more honest with God.

It can be where we finally say, “God, I miss what used to be.” Or, “God, I do not understand why this changed.” Or even, “God, I know You are here, but I still feel lonely.”

Faith does not require us to hide those feelings. It lets us bring them into the presence of God.

You Can Miss Someone Without Losing Yourself

There is a difference between missing someone and believing you cannot be whole without them.

When someone becomes part of our daily life, we naturally begin imagining the future with them in it. We build routines. We form expectations. We get used to their presence.

Then something changes.

Sometimes we are not only grieving the person. We are grieving the future we had imagined.

But someone can be important to your story without being the author of your story.

The disciples scattered, but Jesus' purpose did not disappear. Peter denied Him, but His purpose did not disappear. Judas betrayed Him, but His purpose did not disappear.

Other people's choices affected Jesus, but they did not define His identity or end His mission.

You can miss someone and still move forward. You can wish things had gone differently and still trust God with what comes next. You can remember a beautiful season without trying to live inside it forever.

Maybe You Do Not Need to Fill the Space Yet

We are often in a hurry to replace what leaves.

A friendship changes, so we look for another connection. A relationship ends, and we wonder who will come next. The house gets quiet, so we keep noise running constantly.

But maybe not every empty space needs to be filled immediately.

Maybe some spaces need to breathe. Maybe some losses need to be grieved before we cover them. Maybe some questions need to remain unanswered for a while.

I am not saying God caused every relationship to change. We should not make claims we cannot know.

But I do believe God can meet us in the space change leaves behind.

Sometimes that space becomes where we learn things we could not learn when everything was full.

Being Needed Is Not the Same as Being Loved

Sometimes what we miss is not only a person. We miss being needed.

When people depend on us, we feel important. When they call for advice or ask for help, we know where we fit.

Then they stop needing us in the same way, and we wonder whether we still matter.

We do.

Being useful is not the same thing as being valuable.

Jesus served constantly, but His identity did not come from how many people needed Him that day.

Neither should ours.

If nobody calls today, you still matter. If nobody asks for your help this week, you still matter. If your role changes, you still matter.

Your value is deeper than your usefulness to another person.

The Room Is Not Empty Just Because It Is Quiet

Psalm 139 reminds us that there is nowhere we can go beyond the presence of God.

That means the room we call empty may not be empty at all.

You can sit alone and still be known. You can drive alone and still be accompanied by God. You can walk through a season nobody else fully understands and still be seen.

That does not mean loneliness disappears instantly. Loneliness is real.

But feelings do not always tell the entire truth.

You may feel alone without being abandoned. You may feel forgotten without actually being forgotten.

Jesus could look at the reality of people leaving and still know that the Father remained.

Maybe that is the kind of faith we need in quieter seasons.

Do Not Build a Wall Around the Quiet

Learning to be comfortable alone does not mean deciding we never need people again.

Jesus withdrew, but He returned. He prayed alone, and then He went back to people.

Healthy solitude should make us stronger for relationships, not bitter toward them.

If you need connection, reach out. Call someone. Go to church. Invite a friend to sit with you. Serve someone who may be lonely too.

The goal is not to stop needing people.

The goal is to stop asking people to carry the weight that belongs to God.

Maybe the Quiet Has Something to Give You

I do not know what kind of quiet you may be living in right now.

Maybe it feels peaceful. Maybe it feels painful. Maybe you are still trying to understand why something changed.

But I hope you do not automatically treat the silence as proof that something has gone wrong.

Jesus knew crowds, and He knew solitude. He knew companionship, and He knew people leaving. Through all of it, He knew the Father was with Him.

Sometimes the deepest truths are the ones we hear when everything else gets quiet.

You are allowed to miss people. You are allowed to want connection. You are allowed to grieve what changed.

But you are also allowed to discover that your life still has meaning when the room is quiet.

You are allowed to learn that someone leaving does not erase you.

You are allowed to sit with God and slowly realize that being alone is not the same thing as being abandoned.

A Question for You

What has God taught you in one of the quieter seasons of your life?

Maybe you learned to pray differently. Maybe you discovered how much you depended on another person's approval. Maybe you realized you needed healthier community. Or maybe you are still in the middle of that season and do not know yet.

If this brought someone to mind, share it with them. They may need a quiet reminder today that people can leave, life can change, and the room can become still without God ever disappearing.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

A checklist before any AI-generated news video goes out

I handle communications for a small organisation that publishes to a local audience, and I started generating video summaries of our written pieces about a year ago. I have also killed four of them before publication, which is the part worth writing about, because everything I have read on this subject is either a product pitch or a general warning that AI is dangerous, and neither helped me build a process.

What follows is the process I actually use. It is not elaborate. It exists because I got things wrong early and would rather someone else skipped that.

What actually goes wrong

Only one of these is the failure people expect.

Invented detail. This is the famous one and in my experience the least common, because I generate from a piece I have already written rather than from a prompt. The tool works from my document, so it does not invent facts. What it does do is generalise. A sentence saying the council approved the plan for the eastern section became narration saying the council approved the plan, which is a different and false statement. Summarisation drops qualifying clauses first, and in reporting the qualifier is frequently the accuracy.

Collapsed sequence. Written pieces establish chronology through structure. Narration is linear and has to commit to an order, and twice I have had a generated script imply that one thing happened because of another when the original text only said both happened. Causation appears without anyone adding it.

Borrowed certainty. This is the one I did not anticipate. My written pieces hedge properly, with attributions and words like reportedly and according to. A confident synthetic voice reading a hedged sentence somehow lands as less hedged. I do not fully understand the mechanism, but I have watched people take a stronger impression from the video than from the article, and that is on me rather than on them.

The four checks I do by hand

Every generated script, without exception, before anything renders.

One: every attribution survived. I search the script for the names and sources that appear in the original. If the article said a spokesperson stated something and the script says it happened, that is a rewrite, not a summary.

Two: every qualifier survived. I go through the original looking for where, when, if, among, reportedly, alleged, and check each one is still there. This is the check that catches the most.

Three: no new causation. I read the script asking whether it implies any because that the original did not contain.

Four: nothing is stated more strongly than the source. A generated script tends to tighten prose, and tightening removes hedges.

This takes about as long as the video runs. It is not optional and it does not get faster, and anyone who tells you the workflow is push button has not published anything they were accountable for.

Disclosure, and why I stopped debating it

For the first two months I put a line in the description. Now I put it in the video, on screen, in the first five seconds, and I say it in the narration.

The reason is a conversation with a reader who asked whether the presenter was a real person at our organisation. She had not been deceived exactly, since the information was accurate and the description said so. But she had spent forty seconds thinking she was being addressed by a colleague of mine, and when she found out she was not, her question was what else she had assumed wrongly.

That is the actual cost. Not a complaint, not a correction, just a small permanent reduction in how much someone trusts everything else you publish. The line costs nothing.

The wider standards conversation is worth following rather than reasoning about from scratch. AP's news values and principles set out how attribution and sourcing are supposed to work regardless of format, and Poynter publishes ongoing work on how newsrooms are handling synthetic media specifically.

What I use it for

The list has got shorter over the year rather than longer.

Visual summaries of pieces already published and checked. The article is the source and the video points at it. This is the bulk of what I do.

Structured information that does not change interpretation. Meeting times, service changes, opening hours, results. There is no judgement in this material and the risk of distortion is close to zero.

Explainers on things that keep coming up. How a particular process works, what a term means. These are written carefully once and reused, and they are the ones where the effort is most repaid.

Multilingual versions of the above. This is the biggest practical gain for us. I use Leadde.ai, which will translate a finished video and produce a separate version rather than overwriting it, handling the on screen text along with the narration. Our audience includes a substantial number of people who read a second language more comfortably than English, and until last year we simply did not serve them.

I have someone check every translation. Ordinary prose comes through well. Place names, official titles and anything legal do not, and an approximate translation of a court outcome is not a thing I am willing to publish.

What I never use it for

Anything unverified. If I am not certain, the answer is to not publish in any format, and the existence of a fast production route makes that discipline harder rather than easier.

Anything involving an accusation against a person. The wording in those pieces is chosen sentence by sentence, and a paraphrase is a different document with the same apparent authority.

Anything about a death, an injury or a disaster. Partly judgement about what the format conveys, partly that these are exactly the pieces where the reporting is most conditional and the summarisation risk highest.

Anything time critical. This is the one that surprises people, given the category name. My check takes fifteen minutes, and a genuinely breaking story does not have fifteen minutes. So breaking news is the thing I use this for least, and if I ever find myself skipping the check because something is urgent, that is the moment the process has failed.

Corrections after publication

Publish something wrong in text and you fix the text. Video is harder, and I did not have a plan for this the first time it happened.

What I do now: correct the source article first, regenerate the video from the corrected article, replace it at the same location, and add a correction note that is visible without playing anything. I keep the superseded version as a duplicate rather than deleting it, because someone may have acted on it and I want to be able to say exactly what it said.

The thing I got wrong initially was editing the video directly to patch the error. The article and the video then said slightly different things, and I had created a second problem while fixing the first.

Questions I get asked about this

Does it save time overall? Yes, but less than people assume. Generation is minutes. The check is roughly the runtime of the video. Against filming and editing it is a large saving, and against publishing the article alone it is an additional cost that has to be worth something.

Do the videos perform better than the articles? They reach different people rather than more people. The audience for a three minute summary overlaps less with our article readership than I expected.

What settings actually matter? The audience and objective fields, and keeping the length setting short. A generated script pitched at nobody in particular is the default outcome and the main reason first attempts feel generic.

Should captions be on? Always, from the first version. Most of this is watched with the sound off, and adding captions across a back catalogue later is much more work than turning them on at the start.

Is the technology the risk? No. The risk is that publishing becomes cheap enough that the checking step starts to feel disproportionate. That is a process problem and it has to be solved before the tooling arrives, not after.

How do you decide who appears as the presenter? We use a generated presenter rather than a likeness of anyone who works here, which sidesteps a whole category of problem. If you do want to use a real colleague's face, get their agreement in writing, be specific about what the avatar will be used to say, and agree what happens if they leave. A former employee still presenting your output is an awkward conversation nobody plans for.

Does any of this replace a reporter? It replaces a production step, not a reporting step. Everything I generate comes from something a person already researched, wrote and checked. If there were no article underneath, there would be nothing worth summarising, and the format would just be a confident voice reading an unverified claim.

What would make you stop using it entirely? If I found myself publishing something I had not fully checked because the video was already rendered and it felt wasteful not to use it. The sunk cost is small enough that this should never happen, and the day it does is the day the process is running me rather than the other way round.

Where I would start

If I were beginning now, I would take one already published explainer that gets referenced repeatedly, generate a version, and run the four checks slowly enough to notice what they catch.

Whatever the checks find on that first attempt is the thing to watch for permanently. In my case it was qualifiers, every time, and knowing that has been worth more than any setting I have adjusted since.

You are three weeks into something and you find the source. A ninety minute conference talk, or an interview with the one person who actually did the work, or a lecture from 2019 that half the field cites and nobody summarises.

It is exactly what you needed. It is also ninety minutes long, and you have no idea which ninety seconds of it matter.

So you do what everyone does. You scrub the progress bar, land in the middle of a sentence, back up, overshoot, give up and start from the beginning at 1.75x while checking your email. Forty minutes later you have a vague sense that he said something important about sampling, somewhere, and you cannot find it again.

This is not a discipline problem. It is a property of the medium.

Text takes up space, video takes up time

A book sits in front of you all at once. You can see the shape of a chapter before you read a word of it. Your eye can jump to a subheading, drop into a paragraph, decide within four seconds that this is not the section you want, and leave.

Video does not offer that. Video releases its content on a schedule, and the schedule belongs to the speaker. The only control you have is the speed at which the schedule runs.

That is the whole difference, and almost everything annoying about working from video sources follows from it.

The raw speed gap is real but modest. A 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert, pulling together 190 studies of reading rate, put average silent reading of English non-fiction at around 238 words per minute. Conversational speech and most recorded talks land closer to 130 to 160. Call it one and a half times faster to read the same content, which is nice but hardly life changing.

And you might reasonably point out that YouTube will play at 2x, which closes the gap and then some. Fair. There is even research supporting the habit: a 2021 study by Murphy and colleagues at UCLA found that students watching lectures at 1.5x and 2x scored about as well on comprehension tests as students watching at normal speed, with the losses only appearing at 2.5x.

So speed is not the argument. If watching faster were the only thing text bought you, transcripts would be a rounding error.

The argument is that there are three operations text supports and video does not support at any speed.

Skimming is not fast watching

Skimming is a different activity from reading, not a faster version of it. When you skim you are running a search, visually, at a level of comprehension deliberately set too low to actually understand anything. You are looking for a shape. A name, a number, a section break, the paragraph where the tone shifts.

You cannot do this to a video, because the low comprehension pass is not available. At 2x you still have to process every sentence in order. There is no equivalent of letting your eye fall down a page and stopping when something catches.

Which means the cost of checking whether a video is relevant is roughly the cost of watching the video. For one source that is fine. For twelve, it is a week.

You cannot search what you cannot read

Try to find the exact moment someone said a specific phrase in a two hour recording. The chapter markers, if the uploader bothered, are labelled at the resolution of ten minute blocks. The search box on the platform reads titles and descriptions and knows nothing about what is inside the file.

So you scrub. And scrubbing has an error rate, and the error rate compounds, and after the fourth attempt you are no longer sure whether you imagined the quote.

With a transcript this is a keystroke. That is not a small convenience. It changes which sources you are willing to use at all, because a source you cannot re-enter is a source you can only cite from memory, and citing from memory is how people end up in corrections.

Quoting from memory is how errors get published

Here is the failure mode that should actually worry you.

You watched the talk. You took a note that says something like: he argued the dataset was never validated externally. Three weeks later you write that sentence into your draft, in quotation marks, because you are fairly confident that is close to what he said.

It is close. It is not what he said. He said the external validation was underpowered, which is a different claim, and the person you are quoting will notice, and so will anyone who has watched the talk.

Text is what gets copied accurately. Every stage between the audio and your draft that runs through human recall introduces drift, and quotation marks are a promise that no drift occurred.

Can you get a transcript of a YouTube video?

Yes, and the honest answer has two parts, because YouTube already ships some of this.

Many videos have a transcript panel. Open the description, look for the option to show the transcript, and you get a scrolling list of timestamped lines that you can click to jump. It is genuinely useful and a lot of people do not know it is there. YouTube documents it in its own help centre, and if that solves your problem then you are done and can stop reading.

It often does not solve the problem, for reasons that are all mundane:

The panel is missing whenever the uploader has disabled captions, which happens more than you would expect on exactly the kind of niche technical content you most need transcribed. Automatic captions in some languages arrive without punctuation, which turns a lecture into one continuous unpunctuated sentence. There are no speaker labels, so a panel discussion becomes an undifferentiated wall in which four people take turns being indistinguishable. And every line carries its timestamp inline, so copying two paragraphs into your notes gives you two paragraphs interleaved with numbers that you then delete by hand.

None of that is fatal. It is just enough friction that most people bounce off it and go back to scrubbing.

The alternative is to run the URL through a dedicated tool and get clean prose out the other end. To transcribe a YouTube video with Vomo you paste the link and get the text back, with punctuation applied and speakers separated where the audio makes that possible. Basic transcription runs without an account, there is no cap on how long a single video can be, and the free tier covers thirty minutes of transcription per week, which is one conference talk or two short interviews. Export is TXT, DOCX, PDF or SRT.

Two features matter more than the file format. Speaker labels turn a panel into a readable document instead of a monologue by a committee. And with a free account you can put questions to the transcript in plain language rather than reading it end to end, which is the difference between having a transcript and having a source you can interrogate.

What the text is for, and what it is not for

A transcript is raw material. It is not a note, and treating it as one is the most common way this workflow goes wrong.

Ninety minutes of speech is roughly twelve thousand words. If you paste twelve thousand words into your research folder and move on, you have not reduced your problem, you have relocated it. Next month you will be searching a folder of transcripts with the same helplessness you currently bring to the video itself.

The transcript earns its place through three passes, and they are quick.

First, search it for the terms that made you open the video. You usually find in ninety seconds whether the source is worth the rest of your attention, which is the skim you could not perform earlier.

Second, pull the passages that matter into your actual notes, with the timestamp attached. The timestamp is the part people skip and later regret, because it is what lets you go back to the audio and hear the tone, the hedging, the qualifier that the transcript flattened.

Third, write the claim in your own words directly underneath the quote. Not later. The gap between reading a passage and paraphrasing it is where misunderstanding sets in, and closing that gap immediately is worth more than any tooling.

Then archive the full transcript and stop thinking about it. It is there if you need it. It is not a note.

Check the quotes against the audio

Automatic transcription is good and it is not perfect, and the places it fails are precisely the places you are most likely to quote.

Proper nouns go wrong. Technical terms get replaced by more common words that sound similar. Overlapping speech, which is most of any real conversation, produces confident nonsense. Numbers survive better than names but not reliably.

So the rule is simple and not negotiable. Anything going into your draft inside quotation marks gets listened to at the timestamp before you publish it. Everything else can stand as transcribed, because the cost of a small error in a paraphrase is low and the cost of a small error in a quotation is your credibility.

That check takes about a minute per quote. It is the only part of this that cannot be automated, and it is also the only part that carries any real risk, which is not a coincidence.

The part that actually changes

The thing you notice after a few months of working this way is not that you save time on any individual source. You do, but it is undramatic.

What changes is which sources you are willing to open. A ninety minute talk stops being a ninety minute commitment and becomes a document you can assess in two minutes and reject in three. So you check more of them. Some are useless. One is the thing your entire argument was missing, and you would not have found it, because you would not have watched it, because it was ninety minutes long and you were busy.

Video has been the default format for expert explanation for about fifteen years now. An enormous amount of what people actually know is sitting in recordings that nobody will ever scrub through twice.

Turning it into text is not a productivity trick. It is just making the material readable.