This floor-lamp I ordered from Ikea (The KLÖVING) refused to adequately screw onto its damn base.

A quick look online revealed that wobbliness is indeed a common issue among buyers. I could've returned it and exchanged for a less pain-in-the-ass lamp, but who are we kidding? I wouldn't be me unless I attempted an unnecessary roundabout problem-solving idea.

Black aluminum wire to fashion a closed hook atop the lamp, and hook clips to secure a [too long] boxing-bag chain between the lamp and and a brass expansion hook-bolt drilled into the ceiling.

The chain is probably overkill, given that the lamp doesn't really weigh that much. I'll probably replace it with a sturdy enough rope of some kind.

#journal #studio #cairo #ikeahack

“Hayat anlaşılmaz bir mucizedir, boyuna harcanır, erir, buna rağmen yine dayanır, sürüp gider. Tıpkı Drina’nın üstündeki köprü gibi.”

 “Tabiatın fazla cömert davrandığı kişiler, bazen işte böyle kadere meydan okurlar.”   

Ivo Andrić — Drina Köprüsü

İstanbul

Chillin, listening to :Wumpscut: again, thorns: Tonight you sleep in hell 🤘🤘

Speaking of which, one of the greatest songs of all time is Slaid Cleaves ”Breakfast in hell”

It’s about these lumberjacks risking their lives every day, dying for example trying to fix a logjam

They all knew in a second or two  He'd be crushed or frozen or drowned

that’s hard work

That’s hard work

That’s hard work, and for what?

It’s not about the Bugatti — that’s just hot smoke!

It’s not

It’s cause it needs doing.

Talk about work bitch, tell that to the sweatshop workers, chained to the sewing machines.

Or to that guy who fell off his truck, and bloated from internal bleeding still finished his route

He just wished to eat at the buffet with his wife!!

How disconnected from reality, I think, do you have to be to write such a song: work bitch by Britney Spears?

Still love her though, i can hold more than one thought in my head ✌️

Today was honestly a really dark day. I struggled a lot with intrusive thoughts about suicide and several other really morbid things. I honestly kind of just stood here for a pretty solid amount of time. Debating if I should write down an example of one of the thoughts, but I think it’s too morbid and so I will refrain. I am honestly pretty scared however. I haven’t had ideation like this in a long time. There were some lines in the song, beach life and death that resonated a lot however and so I guess I’m going to talk about that.

It should be called anti-depression

As a friend of mine suggested

Because it's not the sadness that hurts you

It's the brain's reaction against it

I don’t think this is necessarily groundbreaking in an obvious sense, but I feel like it did capture something that is kind of hard to explain. Depression for me a lot of the times isn’t necessarily the sadness. I think that is something that everyone understands and goes through to some extent, but rather it is the persistent lack of joy. Anything good goes so incredibly quickly from my brain, and the bad is just a persistent drum beat. The second everything goes away I start to hear it again. But it’s not even the sadness, it’s the fear of depression itself. Me feeling sad doesn’t make me want to kill myself, I want to kill myself to get away from the sadness. It’s this terrifying thought of things never getting better, and I know I’m depressed right now because I can’t even fucking fathom what it’s like to not be in this pit. It has been like this for days, and I cannot remember a life before it and I cannot picture a life after this. Even though I know that both of those things are false. I just don’t want to exist and I want to get away from all of it and I want to stop and my life is so incredibly good in so many different ways, and I think those are parts of the reasons why I am not actively suicidal. But even in absence of any meaningful problem, I am so incredibly miserable, and I want to die.

I am learning to bypass the bereavement of a daily information bomb. I still strive to keep myself informed, and I sidestep the ritual damage control that gets flung in our direction. But I've also taught myself to trim away the headlines, and only linger in audience of the corrupted stage long enough to see through the illusion dealt — for chugging it down does little good.

This morning, I wake embraced within life's deep midnight hold, and I gaze out at the world we continue to deform. I listen to the roaring grind of our existence drown out nature's serenade, and I peer blindly up towards the heavens, ignorant to the point of such a doomed existence. Not because we die. I do not view the cycle in that manner, but because of how we enforce death in order to keep ourselves from living.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Salesforce doesn't know how many Financial Services Cloud implementations you've delivered. It doesn't know that you've untangled a household rollup configuration or debugged an Actionable Relationship Center hierarchy that would stump most people who wrote the Salesforce Accredited Agentforce Financial Services Professional (AP-208) exam questions. Salesforce can't assess judgment, experience, or whether you're actually good at this. It can only measure whether you can answer AP-208 exam questions. So that's what you should practice.

What Isn't Scored on the Salesforce AP-208 Exam

The Salesforce AP-208 exam scores a narrow set of things and ignores everything else. Here's what falls outside the rubric.

Judgment. Real consulting judgment is situational. It develops from consequences; from having designed a sharing model that broke a banker's access to client records, from having to rework a data migration under a go-live deadline. An AP-208 scenario question can gesture at judgment, but it can only test whether you'd pick the answer Salesforce prefers, which is a different thing.

Experience. Years of configuring households, the financial account models you've built, the integrations you've mapped between FSC and core banking systems. None of it reaches the score. A candidate with three years of hands-on FSC implementation work and a candidate with six months of study look identical to the scoring software.

Depth. The exam samples. Fifty-five questions across three domains: Discovery, Define/Design, and Delivery; and your score reflects that sample, not the full extent of what you know. You could understand Rollup By Lookup rules deeply and still miss the two questions that happened to represent them.

Whether you're good at the job. This is the biggest one. Salesforce Accredited Agentforce Financial Services Professional certification doesn't measure competence. It measures whether you can pass the AP-208 exam, which is a related but distinct capability, and plenty of excellent FSC consultants have failed it.

The Narrow Thing Agentforce Financial Services Exam Actually Measures

Strip away everything the Salesforce AP-208 exam can't see, and you're left with the one thing it can. Whether you can answer the Agentforce Financial Services exam questions, in their phrasing, at their pace, under time pressure, choosing the answer they consider correct. That's it. That's the whole measurement. Nothing about your career, your judgment, or your ability to implement Financial Services Cloud enters into it. This is not a cynical read. It's just an accurate description of the test. And once you accept it, the preparation problem becomes much simpler: you're not preparing to be a better FSC consultant. You're preparing to perform well on a specific test.

Why Experienced Salesforce AP-208 Candidates Fail This

Here's the failure mode, and it's specific to people who know the material well. They answer the question they'd ask. They pick the option that reflects how they'd actually handle the situation. Which is usually the more thorough, more nuanced, more production-realistic answer. It's also frequently not the answer Salesforce wants, because AP-208 exam questions are written to a specific expected response, and that response is often simpler than what an experienced consultant would do.

So the depth that makes them good at their job actively works against them on the exam. They overthink, they second-guess the obvious answer, they choose the sophisticated option over the correct one. This is not a knowledge problem. It's a calibration problem. And it's fixed by working through Agentforce Financial Services exam questions, not by more study.

Salesforce AP-208 Exam Questions: Practice the Thing Being Scored

If the exam only measures one narrow capability, then that's the capability worth training. And it's the one almost nobody trains directly. Reading Salesforce's AP-208 exam questions' phrasing until it stops feeling foreign. Learning to recognize when two answers are both defensible and only one is theirs. Building the pacing that keeps you from spending three minutes on question nine, then discovering you've lost ten minutes by question thirty. None of that is about becoming more knowledgeable about FSC data models or Action Plans. It's about becoming fluent in the specific format you're being scored on. For that to work, the Agentforce Financial Services practice questions have to match the real thing:

• Written at actual AP-208 difficulty and phrasing: easier Agentforce Financial Services exam questions train the wrong instincts
• Full-length and timed (75 minutes, 55 questions): pacing and pressure don't surface otherwise
• Explained on every answer: including why the tempting option was designed to be tempting
• Randomized order: so you learn the material, not the sequence
• Aligned to current AP-208 objectives: Salesforce revises the blueprint without notice

Salesforce AP-208 exam questions from CertBoosters are based around that single idea. A complete question bank at real exam difficulty, a full timed simulator, untimed mode with explanations, randomized delivery, and updates tied to the current objectives whenever Salesforce changes them. You can get Salesforce Accredited Agentforce Financial Services Professional (AP-208) exam questions in PDF or practice them on the practice exam software (online and offline) with three months of free updates included.

👉 Take a look yourself: https://www.certboosters.com/exam/salesforce/ap-208

Salesforce Agentforce Financial Services Exam Isn't Measuring Your Worth

It's measuring whether you can answer the questions. That's a smaller thing, and it's a thing you can train. What you shouldn't do is keep preparing as though the AP-208 can see everything you are. It can't. It can only see how you perform on the day, in the format it controls. So practice the format. Leave the rest of yourself out of it. If you'd rather find out where you stand before exam day than after, the AP-208 questions are available on the CertBoosters website.

Salesforce doesn't know how many CRM Analytics apps you've shipped. It doesn't know that you've debugged a recipe that silently broke a dataset refresh, or traced a security predicate conflict that would stump most people who wrote the questions. It doesn't know whether you have good judgment, whether you're careful under pressure, or whether you'd be an asset on an analytics delivery team. Salesforce built a multiple-choice test. That's the entire test. Whatever it can measure is limited by what a multiple-choice test can measure and that's a much narrower thing than “whether you're good at CRM Analytics.”

What Isn't Scored on the Analytics-Con-201 Exam

The exam scores a narrow set of things and ignores everything else. Here's what falls outside the rubric.

Judgment. Real consulting judgment is situational. It develops from consequences from having scoped a dashboard that missed the actual business question, from having to rebuild a dataflow under a deadline. An Analytics-Con-201 scenario question can gesture at judgment, but it can only test whether you'd pick the answer Salesforce prefers, which is a different thing.

Experience. Years of building CRM Analytics apps, the datasets you've optimized, the Einstein Discovery models you've tuned and deployed. None of it reaches the score. A candidate with three years of hands-on CRM Analytics work and a candidate with six months of study look identical to the scoring software.

Depth. The exam samples. Sixty scored questions across six domains: Admin/Configuration (17%), Data Layer (23%), Security (16%), Analytics Dashboard Design (13%), Analytics Dashboard Implementation (19%), and Einstein Discovery (12%). And your score reflects that sample, not the full extent of what you know. You could understand SAQL windowing deeply and still miss the two questions that happened to represent it.

Whether you're good at the job. This is the biggest one. Certification doesn't measure competence. It measures whether you can pass a certification exam. Which is a related but distinct capability, and plenty of excellent CRM Analytics consultants have failed it.

The Narrow Thing Analytics-Con-201 Exam Actually Measures

Strip away everything the exam can't see, and you're left with the one thing it can:

Whether you can answer Salesforce's Analytics-Con-201 questions, in their phrasing, at their pace, under time pressure, choosing the answer they consider correct.

That's it. That's the whole measurement. Nothing about your career, your judgment, or your ability to build a CRM Analytics app enters into it.

This is not a cynical read. It's just an accurate description of the test. And once you accept it, the preparation problem becomes much simpler: you're not preparing to be a better CRM Analytics consultant. You're preparing to perform well on a specific test.

Why Experienced Salesforce Consultants Fail This

Here's the failure mode, and it's specific to people who know the material well.

They answer the question they'd ask. They pick the option that reflects how they'd actually handle the situation which is usually the more thorough, more nuanced, more production-realistic answer. It's also frequently not the answer Salesforce wants, because Analytics-Con-201 questions are written to a specific expected response, and that response is often simpler than what an experienced consultant would do.

So the depth that makes them good at their job actively works against them on the exam. They overthink, they second-guess the obvious answer, they choose the sophisticated option over the correct one.

This is not a knowledge problem. It's a calibration problem. And it's fixed by working through Analytics-Con-201 exam questions, not by more study.

Salesforce Analytics-Con-201 Exam Questions: Practice the Thing Being Scored

If the exam only measures one narrow capability, then that's the capability worth training. And it's the one almost nobody trains directly.

Reading Salesforce's Analytics-Con-201 question phrasing until it stops feeling foreign. Learning to recognize when two answers are both defensible and only one is theirs. Building the pacing that keeps you from spending three minutes on question nine and then discovering you've lost ten minutes by question thirty.

None of that is about becoming more knowledgeable about recipes, dataflows, or Einstein Discovery models. It's about becoming fluent in the specific format you're being scored on.

For that to work, the Analytics-Con-201 practice questions have to match the real thing:

• Written at actual Analytics-Con-201 difficulty and phrasing: easier questions train the wrong instincts
• Full-length and timed (90 minutes, 60 scored questions plus up to 5 unscored): pacing and pressure don't surface otherwise
• Explained on every answer: including why the tempting option was designed to be tempting
• Randomized order: so you learn the material, not the sequence
• Aligned to current Analytics-Con-201 objectives: Salesforce revises the blueprint without notice

Salesforce Analytics-Con-201 exam questions from CertBoosters are based around that single idea. A complete question bank at real exam difficulty, a full timed simulator, untimed mode with explanations, randomized delivery, and updates tied to the current objectives whenever Salesforce changes them. You can get Salesforce Certified CRM Analytics and Einstein Discovery Consultant exam questions in PDF or practice them on the practice exam software (online and offline) with three months of free updates included.

Take a look yourself: https://www.certboosters.com/exam/salesforce/analytics-con-201

Salesforce CRM Analytics and Einstein Discovery Consultant Exam Isn't Measuring Your Worth

It's measuring whether you can answer the questions. That's a smaller thing, and it's a thing you can train.

What you shouldn't do is keep preparing as though Analytics-Con-201 can see everything you are. It can't. It can only see how you perform on the day, in the format it controls.

So practice the format. Leave the rest of yourself out of it.

If you'd rather find out where you stand before exam day than after, the Analytics-Con-201 questions are available on the CertBoosters website.

Salesforce doesn't know how many SFRA storefronts you've shipped. It doesn't know that you've debugged ISML rendering issues or traced a cartridge path conflict that would stump most people who wrote the Salesforce Certified B2C Commerce Developer (Comm-Dev-101) exam questions. Salesforce can't assess judgment, experience, or whether you're actually good at this. It can only measure whether you can answer Comm-Dev-101 exam questions. So that's what you should practice.

What Isn't Scored on the Salesforce Comm-Dev-101 Exam

The Salesforce Comm-Dev-101 exam scores a narrow set of things and ignores everything else. Here's what falls outside the rubric.

Judgment. Real development judgment is situational. It develops from consequences; from having deployed a cartridge that broke a checkout flow and watched orders fail, from having to roll back a code version under pressure. A Comm-Dev-101 scenario question can gesture at judgment, but it can only test whether you'd pick the answer Salesforce prefers, which is a different thing.

Experience. Years of building SFRA storefronts, the cartridges you've extended, the OCAPI integrations you've debugged. None of it reaches the score. A candidate with three years of hands-on B2C Commerce work and a candidate with six months of study look identical to the scoring software.

Depth. The exam samples. Sixty scored questions across four domains: B2C Commerce Setup, Work With a B2C Site, Data Management Using Business Manager, and Application Development; and your score reflects that sample, not the full extent of what you know. You could understand ISML templating deeply and still miss the two questions that happened to represent it.

Whether you're good at the job. This is the biggest one. Salesforce Certified B2C Commerce Developer certification doesn't measure competence. It measures whether you can pass the Comm-Dev-101 exam, which is a related but distinct capability, and plenty of excellent Commerce Cloud developers have failed it.

The Narrow Thing the B2C Commerce Developer Exam Actually Measures

Strip away everything the Salesforce Comm-Dev-101 exam can't see, and you're left with the one thing it can. Whether you can answer the B2C Commerce Developer exam questions, in their phrasing, at their pace, under time pressure, choosing the answer they consider correct. That's it. That's the whole measurement. Nothing about your career, your judgment, or your ability to ship a storefront enters into it. This is not a cynical read. It's just an accurate description of the test. And once you accept it, the preparation problem becomes much simpler: you're not preparing to be a better B2C Commerce developer. You're preparing to perform well on a specific test.

Why Experienced B2C Commerce Developers Fail This

Here's the failure mode, and it's specific to people who know the material well. They answer the question they'd ask. They pick the option that reflects how they'd actually handle the situation. Which is usually the more thorough, more nuanced, more production-realistic answer. It's also frequently not the answer Salesforce wants, because Comm-Dev-101 exam questions are written to a specific expected response, and that response is often simpler than what an experienced developer would do.

So the depth that makes them good at their job actively works against them on the exam. They overthink, they second-guess the obvious answer, they choose the sophisticated option over the correct one. This is not a knowledge problem. It's a calibration problem. And it's fixed by working through B2C Commerce Developer exam questions, not by more study.

Comm-Dev-101 Exam Questions: Practice the Thing Being Scored

If the exam only measures one narrow capability, then that's the capability worth training. And it's the one almost nobody trains directly. Reading Salesforce's Comm-Dev-101 exam questions' phrasing until it stops feeling foreign. Learning to recognize when two answers are both defensible and only one is theirs. Building the pacing that keeps you from spending three minutes on question nine, then discovering you've lost ten minutes by question thirty. None of that is about becoming more knowledgeable about SFRA or OCAPI. It's about becoming fluent in the specific format you're being scored on. For that to work, the B2C Commerce Developer practice questions have to match the real thing:

• Written at actual Comm-Dev-101 difficulty and phrasing: easier B2C Commerce Developer exam questions train the wrong instincts
• Full-length and timed (105 minutes, 60 scored questions plus up to 5 unscored): pacing and pressure don't surface otherwise
• Explained on every answer: including why the tempting option was designed to be tempting
• Randomized order: so you learn the material, not the sequence
• Aligned to current Comm-Dev-101 objectives: Salesforce revises the blueprint without notice

Salesforce Comm-Dev-101 exam questions from CertBoosters are based around that single idea. A complete question bank at real exam difficulty, a full timed simulator, untimed mode with explanations, randomized delivery, and updates tied to the current objectives whenever Salesforce changes them. You can get Salesforce Certified B2C Commerce Developer (Comm-Dev-101) exam questions in PDF or practice them on the practice exam software (online and offline) with three months of free updates included.

Take a look yourself: https://www.certboosters.com/exam/salesforce/comm-dev-101

The Salesforce B2C Commerce Developer Exam Isn't Measuring Your Worth

It's measuring whether you can answer the questions. That's a smaller thing, and it's a thing you can train. What you shouldn't do is keep preparing as though the Comm-Dev-101 can see everything you are. It can't. It can only see how you perform on the day, in the format it controls. So practice the format. Leave the rest of yourself out of it. If you'd rather find out where you stand before exam day than after, the Comm-Dev-101 questions are available on the CertBoosters website.

My furry baby turned three today! I got him a little piece of salmon and broccoli as a special birthday dinner.

Today felt a bit lighter! I worked out, volunteered, grocery shopped and even cooked – something I haven't done enough of lately. I feel bright and ready to think ahead to the future.

I submitted my first job application!! It felt daunting, but then again every job application always feels daunting. I hope to spend some time looking for more opportunities tomorrow while balancing the hobbies and appointments I have the remainder of this week. I feel like the future is open and ready for me. I have this gut feeling like I am just on the edge of the life I dream.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office — but not for much longer.

Chapter 1: The Quiet Fear of Being Overlooked

There are mornings when nothing is technically wrong, yet you still feel as though the world has somehow moved two steps ahead without telling you. You stand in the kitchen with a cup of coffee cooling beside you, glance at your phone, and see other people announcing promotions, vacations, answered prayers, new relationships, or some other piece of life that seems to be moving forward. Meanwhile, you are still carrying the same question you carried yesterday. That is why I wanted to begin here, because the lesson Jesus teaches through Zacchaeus about being seen reaches into a place most people do not talk about very often: the fear that your life is becoming too small to be noticed. It also connects naturally with Christian encouragement for trusting God when you feel overlooked, because being unseen by people can quietly make you wonder whether you are unseen by God too.

I do not think that fear always arrives dramatically. Sometimes it shows up while you are waiting for someone to answer a message, when a room goes quiet after you speak, or while you are doing the dependable things nobody applauds. You pay the bill, get someone else to an appointment, finish the work, clean the kitchen, check on the person who needs you, and show up again when you are tired. You can be surrounded by people and still wonder whether anyone really sees what this season is costing you. That is one reason the story of Zacchaeus feels so human to me. Before we ever get to the transformation, the dinner, or the conversation about making things right, we meet a man trying to see Jesus from a place where the crowd has made that difficult.

Luke tells us that Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector and wealthy. Those details matter because they tell us something about how other people probably saw him. He had money and position, but he also had a profession that could make him deeply unpopular. Then Luke gives us the detail most people remember: Zacchaeus was short, and the crowd kept him from seeing Jesus. So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree. There is something wonderfully ordinary about that picture. A grown man with status, money, and a reputation is sitting in a tree because he wants to see what everyone else can see from the ground.

Try to imagine that scene without turning it into a stained-glass picture. There is dust on the road, people pressing closer, voices overlapping, and Zacchaeus trying to find a gap between shoulders. Maybe he moves left and someone steps in front of him. Maybe he moves right and the crowd shifts again. Eventually he decides that looking dignified matters less than seeing Jesus, so he runs ahead and climbs. I have to admit that part makes me smile, because life has a way of making all of us look a little less polished than we would prefer.

You may know that feeling from something much smaller. Maybe you have carried every grocery bag in one trip because you refused to make two. Maybe you have crawled under a desk in good clothes because a cable came loose five minutes before a meeting, or stood on a chair to reach something you absolutely should have asked someone else to get. We can be very serious about ourselves until life gives us no practical reason to remain serious. Zacchaeus must have reached one of those moments. Whatever people thought of him, getting into that tree mattered more.

Then Jesus came to the place where Zacchaeus was, looked up, and called him by name. Jesus told him to come down because He intended to stay at his house that day. Zacchaeus had climbed the tree hoping to see Jesus, but he discovered something far more personal: Jesus was willing to see him. The story changes at that moment. What looked like one man's attempt to catch a glimpse of Jesus becomes an encounter in which Jesus stops, looks up, and turns the attention of the moment toward the man everybody else already thought they understood.

There is a difference between being looked at and being seen, and you probably know that from ordinary life. Somebody can look directly at you while barely noticing you. They can hear the words you say while missing what you are trying to communicate. They can know your job title, your family role, your age, your history, and your reputation without understanding what is happening inside you. Jesus had an extraordinary way of seeing beneath the surface without humiliating the person He saw. That is part of what makes this little moment in Jericho so powerful.

A person can become afraid of being fully known when experience has taught them that being known can lead to rejection. Maybe you told the truth once and someone used it against you. Maybe you admitted weakness and were treated differently afterward, or made a mistake that became the first thing people remembered about you. Sometimes a family can keep an old version of you alive long after you have changed. When that happens enough times, you learn to manage what people see and to present the version of yourself that causes the least trouble.

That can follow you into very ordinary places. Someone at work asks how you are doing, and you say you are fine because there are twenty other things to handle before lunch. Someone at home notices you are quiet, and you say you are tired because explaining the full weight of what is going on feels harder than carrying it. At church, you can sincerely say that God is good while still leaving most of your private struggle unspoken. None of those answers has to be dishonest. Sometimes they are simply incomplete because you do not have the words, the time, or the energy to explain everything underneath them.

Faith does not require you to pretend those hidden layers do not exist. You can believe God is good and still be worn down. You can love your family and still feel overwhelmed by responsibility. You can be grateful for your job while wondering how much longer you can carry the pressure. You can trust Jesus and still have a morning when you need Him to remind you that He has not forgotten where you are. The story of Zacchaeus gives us room to admit that because Jesus does not wait for this man to become easy to understand before He meets him.

I want to stay with that moment for a little while because we often hurry past the kindness in it. The crowd is moving, but Jesus stops. Many people are around Him, yet His attention is not trapped by the size of the crowd. Zacchaeus has a public reputation, but Jesus addresses him personally. Jesus does not call him by his profession or by the accusations people could make about him. He calls him by his name, and that simple detail changes the emotional temperature of the whole scene.

Maybe you need a reminder like that today, not a grand explanation of every difficult thing that has happened to you and not a promise that tomorrow will contain no trouble. Perhaps you simply need to remember that Jesus is not confused about where you are. He does not lose you among everybody else's needs, prayers, accomplishments, or problems. He knows more than the public version of you, and He is not waiting at a distance for you to become impressive enough to deserve His attention. The person you are when nobody is clapping is still fully visible to Him.

That matters in a world that trains us to think attention has to be earned. Most of us learn quickly that people notice achievement, usefulness, appearance, influence, humor, confidence, and success. Even when we know God is different, that way of thinking can slip into our faith. We begin to imagine that perhaps He pays closer attention to the person who prays longer, understands more Scripture, makes fewer mistakes, has a cleaner history, or appears stronger than we feel. Then Zacchaeus quietly ruins that theory by sitting in a tree.

He is not presented to us as the spiritual hero of Jericho. He is not standing in the front row because everybody admires his character. He is a complicated man who wants to see Jesus, and Jesus stops for him. That does not mean Jesus ignores what needs to change in Zacchaeus. Before the encounter is over, Zacchaeus will speak about generosity and making restitution to people he has wronged. Grace is not pretending that nothing matters. Grace allows truth and change to enter a person's life without first requiring that person to pretend they were already perfect.

That is one of the most hopeful things about Jesus. He can see what is wrong without reducing you to what is wrong. People do not always do that very well. One mistake can become an identity, one struggle can become a label, and one disappointment can suddenly hide years of good that came before it. Jesus sees the whole person, including the mess and the possibility of what that person can become when truth, grace, repentance, and love begin working together.

Picture a different scene for a moment. Someone is sitting alone in a parked car after work because they are not ready to walk into the house yet. The engine is off, the phone is face down, and the day has finally become quiet. They have spent hours solving problems, answering questions, making decisions, and acting as though the pressure was manageable. They love the people waiting inside that house and are grateful for their life, but they are tired in a way they do not know how to explain. What they need in that moment may not be another lecture about becoming stronger. They may need to know they are seen.

If that scene feels familiar, let the story of Zacchaeus come close without turning it into another demand. You do not need to make your life look less complicated before Jesus can meet you in it. The exhaustion, disappointment, unanswered prayer, or private uncertainty does not scare Him away. Zacchaeus climbed because he wanted a better view, not because he had finally become worthy of an invitation. Jesus looked up because He already knew where to find him.

There is a quiet freedom in realizing that you do not have to spend your life trying to make yourself visible to God. You already are. You may feel small in a room, forgotten in a season, or hidden behind people whose lives seem louder than yours, but none of that makes you harder for Jesus to find. The question that begins to matter is not whether He can see you. The question is what might happen inside you when you finally believe that the One you have been trying to see has already stopped beneath your tree and called you by name.

Chapter 2: When Grace Reaches You Before You Have Fixed Everything

You can sit with an unsent message for a surprisingly long time. Maybe you owe someone an apology, need to admit you were wrong, or have to answer a question you would rather avoid. Your thumb hovers over the screen while you rewrite the same sentence three times. Part of you knows what needs to happen. Another part wants to wait until you can explain yourself perfectly, sound stronger, or somehow make the whole situation less uncomfortable. That little moment tells us something about the way many of us approach God too. We assume we should get ourselves together before we come close.

That is why what Jesus does with Zacchaeus is so important. Jesus does not stand beneath the tree and demand a complete moral inventory before offering His presence. He does not tell Zacchaeus to settle every account, repair every relationship, and then come find Him when the work is finished. Jesus says, in effect, come down now. I am coming to your house today. The order matters because grace meets Zacchaeus before Zacchaeus has had time to prove anything.

I think many of us reverse that order in our own minds. We tell ourselves that once we pray better, stop struggling with that habit, become more patient, forgive faster, control our thoughts, clean up our history, or finally become the person we believe we should be, then we will feel comfortable drawing close to Jesus. We imagine Him waiting at the finish line with crossed arms, watching to see whether we can earn our way into the kind of relationship He was already offering Zacchaeus in the middle of the road.

But Jesus did not wait for the finished version of Zacchaeus. He met the unfinished man.

That does not make sin unimportant. It makes transformation possible.

There is a difference.

If someone believes they must become flawless before they can come near God, they will either become proud or exhausted. Pride says, “I have finally become good enough.” Exhaustion says, “I never will.” Neither one sounds much like the freedom Jesus brought to people. Jesus could tell the truth about a person's life without making that truth the price of admission. He came close, and His closeness created room for honesty.

Think about what it must have felt like for Zacchaeus to climb down from that tree with the entire crowd watching. A few moments earlier, he had been an observer. He could stay above everything, literally looking down from a branch while Jesus passed through town. Then Jesus called him into the middle of the story. Suddenly he was not watching from a safe distance anymore. He had to come down where everybody could see him.

Sometimes being seen by Jesus feels comforting. Sometimes it also asks something of us.

It asks us to stop hiding behind the distance we have created.

Maybe your distance is busyness. You can stay so occupied helping everybody else that you never have to sit quietly with what is happening inside you. Maybe your distance is humor. You can make the room laugh before anyone notices you are struggling. Maybe your distance is competence. Everybody knows you as the person who handles things, so you keep handling them even when you are running out of strength. Maybe you have simply become skilled at keeping faith in the part of your life where it feels safe while guarding the rooms where disappointment, shame, anger, or fear still live.

Jesus does not expose those rooms to humiliate you. He enters them because hiding is a lonely way to live.

Imagine a woman standing at the bathroom sink before everyone else wakes up. The house is quiet. A prescription bottle sits near the mirror, and an appointment reminder is glowing on her phone. She has told her family not to worry because she does not want to scare them. She has also been telling herself not to worry, but the sentence is not working anymore. She believes in God. She has prayed. She also feels afraid.

That fear does not make her faith fake.

It makes her human.

The question is not whether she can force herself into feeling brave enough for Jesus. The question is whether she will allow Jesus into the fear she is already carrying. There is a huge difference between performing courage and practicing trust. Performing courage tries to look unafraid. Trust tells the truth about fear and still places the next step in God's hands.

Zacchaeus comes down.

That simple movement matters to me because he has no guarantee about how the crowd will treat him. In fact, Luke tells us that the people begin to grumble because Jesus has chosen to be the guest of a sinner. Their reaction reminds us that sometimes the hardest part of changing is not what God thinks about us. It is what we imagine everybody else will think.

People can become strangely attached to an old version of you.

If you were selfish, somebody may continue expecting selfishness. If you were unreliable, someone may assume you will always disappoint them. If you failed publicly, there may be people who would rather keep discussing the failure than notice the growth that came afterward. That can make change feel discouraging because you begin wondering whether any amount of progress will ever rewrite the story other people have decided to tell about you.

Jesus is not trapped inside their version of your story.

He knows what happened, but He also knows what can happen next.

That is one of the reasons I find this story so hopeful. Jesus goes to the house of a man the crowd has already categorized. While they are grumbling outside, something is changing inside Zacchaeus. He stands and says he will give half of his possessions to the poor, and if he has cheated anybody, he will repay them four times the amount.

Notice that Jesus did not have to publicly shame him into that response.

Zacchaeus encountered grace, and grace made honesty possible.

Real grace is not permission to stay dishonest, cruel, selfish, or destructive. Real grace gives us a safe enough place to tell the truth and a strong enough reason to change. When you know that Jesus sees you completely and still calls you closer, you no longer have to waste as much energy protecting an image. You can admit where you were wrong because your entire worth is not hanging on the illusion that you were never wrong.

That becomes practical very quickly.

It may mean making the phone call you have avoided. It may mean admitting to your spouse that your silence was not peaceful; it was resentment. It may mean telling your child, “I was too harsh with you, and I am sorry.” It may mean looking at the way you have handled money and deciding that something needs to change. It may mean forgiving someone without pretending what they did was acceptable. It may mean finally saying, “I need help,” when pride has kept you trying to carry something alone.

None of those things is comfortable.

But comfort and freedom are not always the same thing.

There are moments when freedom begins with the uncomfortable decision to come down from the tree.

The tree can be whatever has allowed you to watch Jesus without letting Him get too close. It can be knowledge without surrender. You can read about Jesus, listen to people talk about Jesus, debate what Jesus meant, and still keep Him safely outside the rooms where your actual choices are being made. You can know the verses and avoid the conversation you need to have. You can sing about forgiveness while holding tightly to bitterness. You can talk about trust while allowing fear to control every decision.

I am not saying that to condemn you. I say it because I have learned that faith becomes real in ordinary places.

It becomes real when the phone is in your hand and you decide whether to send the apology.

It becomes real when the bank balance makes you nervous and you still choose integrity.

It becomes real when somebody treats you unfairly and you decide not to let their behavior turn you into someone you do not want to become.

It becomes real when you are tired, nobody notices what you have been carrying, and you choose not to measure God's attention by human applause.

Those are the places where coming down from the tree begins to mean something.

There is also something almost funny about the fact that Zacchaeus had probably climbed up hoping to avoid exactly this kind of attention. He wanted a view. Jesus gave him an invitation. Zacchaeus wanted to watch. Jesus wanted relationship. He thought he had positioned himself at a safe distance, and Jesus stopped right underneath him.

God has a way of meeting us in places we thought were temporary hiding spots.

Maybe that is happening to you right now. Maybe something you have been reading, hearing, or thinking about has been pressing gently against a part of your life you have tried not to examine too closely. You do not have to panic. You do not have to repair everything before the end of the day. You do not need to create a dramatic promise you cannot keep.

You can begin with honesty.

“Jesus, this is where I am.”

That prayer does not sound impressive, but it is real. You can add whatever belongs after it. This is where I am angry. This is where I am afraid. This is where I have been pretending. This is where I know I was wrong. This is where I do not know what to do. This is where I need help changing.

Jesus already knows what comes after the sentence.

The honesty is not information He lacked. It is the door you stopped holding shut.

And once that door opens, change can happen without becoming a performance. You can take one honest step, then another. Zacchaeus did not climb down with a polished speech prepared for the crowd. He responded to Jesus, and that response eventually reached his money, his relationships, and the way he treated people.

That is what grace does when we let it come close. It starts personally, but it does not stay private. It changes the way we live.

So if you are waiting until you feel worthy enough, strong enough, clean enough, certain enough, or spiritually impressive enough to come closer to Jesus, you may be waiting for something He never asked you to produce first.

He is already beneath the tree.

The invitation is not to pretend you have become somebody else.

The invitation is to come down as the person you are and let walking with Him change what happens next.

Chapter 3: When Jesus Comes Into the Ordinary Rooms

There are evenings when you finally sit down after everybody else seems to have gotten what they needed from you. The dishes may still be in the sink. A light is on in the hallway. Your phone is charging on the counter because the battery is nearly gone, which may feel like a fairly accurate description of you too. You have answered questions, handled responsibilities, solved problems, and made decisions all day long. Now the house is quieter, and you realize you have spent almost the entire day taking care of what was necessary without thinking very much about what is happening inside you.

People who are dependable can become especially good at this. When others count on you, you learn to keep moving. You do not always have the luxury of stopping every time something hurts. The child still needs dinner. The work still has to be finished. The parent still needs a ride to the appointment. The bill still has to be paid. The dog still needs to go outside. Tomorrow morning is still going to arrive whether you feel ready for it or not.

So you handle today.

Then you handle another one.

Eventually, you may become so used to carrying responsibility that even you stop noticing the weight.

I think about that when I read what happens after Zacchaeus comes down from the tree. Jesus does not simply give him a meaningful moment in the street and continue walking. He tells Zacchaeus that He is going to stay at his house.

His house.

That changes the story for me.

The tree is public. The house is personal.

The tree is where Zacchaeus goes to see Jesus. The house is where Jesus begins entering the life Zacchaeus actually lives.

There is a difference between having a spiritual moment and allowing faith into your ordinary rooms. Most of us can identify moments when we felt close to God. Maybe it happened during a prayer, while reading Scripture, during a difficult season, in a church service, on a quiet drive, or while watching the sun come up when we desperately needed some reason to believe tomorrow could be different.

Those moments matter.

But eventually you have to go home.

Eventually the music stops. The conversation ends. The book closes. The video finishes. The car pulls into the driveway. You walk back into the rooms where the unpaid bill is still sitting on the counter, where the disagreement with your spouse has not magically disappeared, where someone you love is still sick, or where the silence feels louder than it did before.

That is where faith has to live too.

Jesus was willing to go there with Zacchaeus.

I love that because sometimes we unconsciously divide our lives into the part where Jesus belongs and the part we simply have to manage ourselves. We pray about large things, but we try to handle the smaller stress ourselves. We ask God for help with a crisis, but we do not think much about inviting Him into the resentment we carry through breakfast, the impatience that follows us to work, the financial worry we check three times before bed, or the loneliness that seems to grow stronger in a quiet room.

Yet the life Jesus came to touch is made largely of those ordinary moments.

Your life is not mostly made of dramatic spiritual events.

It is made of Tuesdays.

It is made of grocery stores, alarm clocks, traffic lights, text messages, meetings, laundry, meals, deadlines, medicine bottles, birthdays, arguments, laughter, waiting rooms, and nights when you lie awake thinking about something you wish you could control.

If Jesus matters only in extraordinary moments, then He is absent from most of your life.

But that is not the Jesus we meet in the Gospels.

He goes into homes.

He sits at tables.

He eats with people.

He attends a wedding.

He notices children.

He responds to interruptions.

He speaks with people while walking from one place to another.

He enters grief.

He deals with hunger.

He notices fear.

The life of Jesus is full of encounters that happen in places people normally live their lives.

That should tell us something.

God is not waiting for your life to become more spiritual before He becomes interested in it.

He is interested in the kitchen.

He is interested in the commute.

He is interested in what happens inside you when that person's name appears on your phone.

He is interested in the thought you have when you look at your bank account.

He is interested in the way you respond when nobody thanks you.

He is interested in the words you choose when you are tired enough to say what you really feel.

That does not mean He is standing over you looking for reasons to criticize every imperfect moment. It means those moments are not spiritually meaningless. They are part of the place where your relationship with Him becomes real.

Imagine a father sitting at a small table late at night with a calculator, a notebook, and several bills spread in front of him. Everyone else in the house is asleep. He has already checked the numbers twice, hoping they will somehow look different the third time. There is enough for some things, but perhaps not enough for everything. He feels the familiar pressure of being the person who is supposed to figure it out.

He may not describe that moment as spiritual.

It certainly does not look impressive.

Nobody is watching him wrestle with the numbers. There is no audience, no inspirational music, and no obvious miracle taking place.

But Jesus belongs at that table.

Maybe the prayer that happens there is only, “God, I need wisdom.”

That is enough to begin.

Faith does not always mean the numbers instantly change. Sometimes faith means you refuse to let fear become your master while you deal honestly with the numbers that are there. You make the phone call. You ask the question. You cut an expense. You seek advice. You take responsibility for what you can control and place what you cannot control into God's hands again.

That is not lesser faith because it looks practical.

It may be some of the most honest faith you practice all week.

Zacchaeus' encounter with Jesus becomes practical quickly. The conversation reaches his money. It reaches the people he may have harmed. It reaches his decisions about generosity and restitution. Jesus entering his house did not result in Zacchaeus floating above ordinary life. It caused him to deal with ordinary life differently.

That is what happens when faith moves from the tree into the house.

It reaches the places where your choices live.

You may discover that the patience you pray for has something to do with how you speak when you are inconvenienced. The forgiveness you ask God to help you understand may eventually touch a relationship you would rather leave untouched. The trust you talk about may be tested when you do not know what happens next. The generosity you admire in Scripture may eventually ask something from your own wallet.

Faith gets close.

Sometimes that feels beautiful.

Sometimes it feels inconvenient.

Often it is both.

Jesus coming into the ordinary rooms of your life also means you no longer have to believe that every difficult feeling needs to be hidden before you pray. If you are irritated, He knows. If you are discouraged, He knows. If you are disappointed with something you hoped He would change, He knows that too.

There is no benefit in giving God a polished version of a conversation He already understands completely.

You can speak plainly.

“God, I do not understand this.”

“Jesus, I thought this would be different.”

“I am tired of waiting.”

“I am afraid I am going to make the wrong decision.”

“I know I should forgive, but I am struggling.”

“I want to trust You, but today that feels harder than yesterday.”

That kind of prayer may not sound impressive, but relationships deepen through honesty, not performance.

Think about the people you feel safest with. They are probably not the people around whom you have to measure every sentence. They are the people you can call when the day went badly and simply say, “I need to talk.” You do not have to prepare a speech first.

Why would Jesus, who knows you more completely than any human being ever could, require something less honest?

You can bring Him the actual day.

Not the day you wish you had.

Not the faith you wish you felt.

The actual one.

Maybe today you were impatient. Bring it.

Maybe you are worried about someone you love and cannot fix the situation. Bring that.

Maybe something good happened and for once you want to enjoy it without immediately worrying about what could go wrong next. Bring that too.

Faith is not only where you take your pain.

You can take your smile there.

I think Christians sometimes forget that.

We become so serious about suffering, endurance, sacrifice, and responsibility that joy begins to feel suspicious. But Jesus was invited to meals. He participated in celebrations. Children were comfortable around Him. His presence was not limited to funerals, storms, and crises.

You are allowed to enjoy the good parts of your life.

If somebody you love makes you laugh so hard that you forget what was worrying you for a minute, enjoy it.

If the coffee tastes unusually good, enjoy it.

If you walk outside and the air feels perfect, notice it.

If you hear a song that reminds you of a good memory, smile.

If somebody sends a ridiculous message that makes you laugh at exactly the moment you needed it, maybe that small piece of joy deserves your attention too.

You do not honor God by refusing to enjoy what is good.

Sometimes gratitude begins by noticing.

Zacchaeus received Jesus joyfully. Luke gives us that detail, and I am glad he did. The crowd grumbled, but Zacchaeus was glad.

There is almost a lesson hiding in the contrast.

You can have Jesus standing right in the middle of a moment and still have one person experiencing joy while another person is complaining.

The presence of God does not automatically determine what we choose to focus on.

The crowd sees a scandal.

Zacchaeus sees an invitation.

Sometimes you and I have to decide which part of the moment we are going to live inside.

That does not mean ignoring what is wrong. It means refusing to let what is wrong become the only thing we can see.

A difficult season can still contain a good meal.

A stressful week can still contain a meaningful conversation.

Grief can still contain laughter without betraying the person you miss.

Uncertainty can still contain gratitude.

You can have questions and peace in the same day.

You can be tired and hopeful at the same time.

Human beings are capable of carrying more than one emotion, and faith does not require you to flatten your life into a single feeling.

Maybe that is another reason Jesus going to Zacchaeus' house matters.

A house contains everything.

It contains celebrations and arguments, clean rooms and messy drawers, good news and bad news, bills and photographs, laughter and tears. It is where public appearances eventually give way to ordinary reality.

Jesus willingly entered that kind of place.

So perhaps you do not need to find a special place to meet Him today.

Maybe you need to notice that He is willing to meet you where you already are.

Tomorrow morning, when your feet touch the floor, you can speak to Him before the day becomes loud.

When you sit in traffic, you can bring Him the thought that keeps returning.

When you feel yourself becoming impatient, you can ask for help before the words come out.

When something makes you laugh, you can say thank You.

When you walk through the door exhausted, you can remember that you are not entering that room alone.

There is no room in your ordinary life too ordinary for Jesus.

And perhaps the quiet surprise of faith is that once you begin inviting Him into those ordinary places, you start noticing that He was never waiting somewhere far away for you to find Him.

He was already willing to come home with you.

Chapter 4: The Kind of Change That Can Still Make You Smile

There is a moment after a difficult conversation when the room feels different, even though nothing in the room has moved. The same chair is there. The same cup is sitting on the table. The same clock is still ticking on the wall. But something has shifted because somebody finally said what needed to be said. Maybe an apology was offered. Maybe the truth was admitted without excuses. Maybe two people stopped defending themselves long enough to hear each other. The problem may not be completely solved, but there is suddenly a little more air in the room.

That is the kind of change I see in Zacchaeus.

When Jesus entered his life, Zacchaeus did not simply feel inspired for an afternoon. Something reached his choices. He began talking about giving, repairing harm, and dealing honestly with the consequences of what he had done. That matters because the most encouraging lessons from Jesus do not leave us with a warm feeling and nothing else. They give us somewhere to walk.

I think that is where hope becomes especially beautiful. Hope is not pretending the past never happened. Hope is discovering that the past does not have to make every decision about the future.

You may have things you would do differently if you could go back. I certainly understand what it means to look at parts of life and know that more wisdom would have changed some choices. Most people who have lived long enough can point to a conversation they wish they had handled better, a decision they would reconsider, a season when pride spoke louder than patience, or a moment when fear made them smaller than they wanted to be.

The trouble begins when regret stops being information and becomes identity.

There is a healthy kind of regret that teaches you. It says, “I do not want to do that again.” It can make you kinder, slower to judge, quicker to apologize, and more willing to listen. But there is another kind that simply keeps dragging an old version of you into every new day. It says, “Because you failed there, this is who you are.” That voice does not help you grow. It keeps you staring backward so long that you stop noticing the road Jesus has opened in front of you.

Zacchaeus could have stayed trapped in the argument about who he had been. The crowd certainly seemed willing to keep him there. Instead, his encounter with Jesus moved him toward what he could do now.

That is an important word: now.

You may not be able to undo what happened five years ago, five months ago, or yesterday afternoon. You can decide what honesty looks like now. You can decide how you will speak now. You can decide whether you will keep repeating the same pattern now. You can decide whether pride is going to get the final word now.

Sometimes people want a dramatic new beginning when God is offering them one faithful next step.

Those are not the same thing.

A dramatic beginning feels exciting. One faithful next step may look like returning a phone call, changing one habit, telling the truth, asking for forgiveness, keeping a promise, or choosing not to send the angry message you already typed.

That last one may be worth talking about for a minute.

Imagine someone standing in a grocery store parking lot after a frustrating exchange with a family member. The phone is in their hand. They have written a response that is technically accurate and emotionally loaded. Every sentence makes a point. Every point is sharp. Their thumb is hovering over “send,” and part of them is already imagining how satisfying it will feel to make sure the other person understands exactly how wrong they were.

Then there is that small pause.

You know the one.

The sentence inside that says, “This is probably not going to make anything better.”

That moment can become holy if you let it.

Not because the parking lot suddenly feels sacred, but because choosing a different response is sometimes what following Jesus looks like in real life. You delete two sentences. Then three more. Maybe you decide not to send anything until tomorrow. Maybe you pray before you respond. Maybe you realize the goal is not to win the exchange but to protect the relationship without abandoning the truth.

Nobody applauds that decision.

There is no photograph of it.

But something changed.

That is how transformation often works. It is less spectacular than we imagine and more practical than we expect.

Jesus changes what we do with the next moment.

I think Zacchaeus gives us another reason to smile because his story refuses to let a person's reputation be the final chapter. The crowd has a category for him. Jesus has a conversation with him. The crowd sees the man they know. Jesus sees the man standing at a turning point.

You may need that reminder if you have spent too much time worrying about what people think of you.

Some people will misunderstand your growth.

Some will not notice it.

Some may prefer the older story because it supports the opinion they already formed.

You cannot build a peaceful life around constantly editing yourself for everybody else's expectations.

There is a difference between caring how your actions affect people and living under the control of their opinions. One is maturity. The other can become a prison.

If you know you need to make something right, make it right because it is right. If you owe an apology, give it because honesty matters. If you need to change, change because you want your life to come into better alignment with what Jesus teaches. Do not make your growth dependent on whether everybody claps afterward.

Zacchaeus changed while people were still grumbling.

That detail may be more useful than we realize.

Sometimes you have to become healthier while somebody still thinks you are the person you used to be.

Sometimes you have to forgive without receiving the apology you wanted.

Sometimes you have to keep your word while somebody is still suspicious.

Sometimes you have to become more patient around people who know exactly how to test your patience.

Sometimes you have to let Jesus change you before the people around you are ready to change their opinion.

That can be difficult, but it can also be freeing.

You are not required to spend the rest of your life arguing with every old version of yourself that exists in somebody else's memory.

Live differently.

Let time tell the truth.

There is another part of this story I do not want us to miss. Jesus says that salvation has come to the house of Zacchaeus and identifies him as a son of Abraham. Then Jesus describes His mission in words that have comforted people for generations: the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

Seek.

That word changes the emotional center of the story.

Zacchaeus thought he was looking for Jesus.

Jesus tells us that He came looking for people like Zacchaeus.

Think about the difference that makes when you are tired.

Faith can sometimes begin to feel like one more thing you are responsible for maintaining perfectly. You have to pray enough, understand enough, believe strongly enough, and somehow keep yourself spiritually upright while dealing with everything else life throws at you.

But Jesus describes Himself as the One who seeks.

That does not make your choices meaningless. Zacchaeus still had to come down from the tree. He still responded. He still changed.

But the story does not begin with a perfect man successfully reaching God.

It begins with Jesus walking into town.

Maybe you have been putting enormous pressure on yourself to have everything figured out. You want to know what God is doing, why something happened, how the next year will unfold, whether the door will open, whether the person will change, whether the prayer will be answered in the way you hope.

There are questions you will not answer tonight.

That does not mean you are lost beyond God's reach.

A sheep does not understand the entire landscape when the shepherd finds it.

It simply recognizes that it is no longer alone.

There may be peace in allowing that to be enough for today.

You do not need tomorrow's strength tonight.

You need enough trust for this evening.

Tomorrow can have tomorrow's conversation with God.

Right now, perhaps you need to put the phone down, turn off the light, and let your mind stop rehearsing everything that could go wrong. Maybe you need to remind yourself that Jesus did not tell Zacchaeus, “Figure out the rest of your life while you sit in that tree.”

He said, “Come down.”

One step.

Then another.

That is manageable.

And maybe that is the smile hiding inside this whole story.

A grown man climbs a tree because he wants to see Jesus.

Jesus stops beneath it.

The crowd complains.

Jesus goes home with the man everybody is talking about.

Zacchaeus changes.

And more than two thousand years later, we are still talking about what happened because one person discovered that Jesus could see past the crowd, past the reputation, and past the branches.

I wonder how different your day would feel if you carried that with you.

When you walk into the meeting and feel unnoticed, Jesus sees you.

When the house is quiet and loneliness becomes louder than you expected, Jesus sees you.

When you are doing good work nobody praises, Jesus sees you.

When you make a mistake and wish you could disappear for a while, Jesus sees you.

When you take one small step toward becoming better than you were yesterday, Jesus sees that too.

And because He sees you, you do not have to spend the day shouting for the world's attention.

You can become quieter inside.

You can do the next right thing.

You can enjoy what is good.

You can repair what needs repairing.

You can laugh when something is funny.

You can admit when something hurts.

You can ask for help.

You can be grateful without pretending life is perfect.

You can keep walking with Jesus even when you do not know where every road leads.

That kind of faith is not flashy.

It is steady.

It is the kind of faith that can sit at a kitchen table on a difficult morning and still say, “God, I am here, and I know You are here too.”

It is the kind that can survive disappointment without becoming bitter.

It is the kind that can look at an old mistake without handing it control of the future.

It is the kind that can smile in the middle of an unfinished life because you no longer believe unfinished means forgotten.

So if you have felt overlooked lately, I hope you remember Zacchaeus.

Not because you need to climb an actual tree. Depending on your age and balance, I may strongly recommend against that.

Remember him because he thought he needed a better position to see Jesus, only to discover that Jesus already knew where he was.

You may be trying very hard to figure out how to reach God from the place where you are.

Perhaps today you can also remember that in Jesus, God came looking for you.

You are not a face buried somewhere in the crowd.

You are not the worst thing you have ever done.

You are not merely the role you perform for everybody else.

You are not invisible because somebody failed to notice you.

You are not forgotten because an answer has taken longer than you hoped.

Jesus sees you.

He knows your name.

He knows the house you are going back to when the crowd disappears.

He knows what needs healing, what needs changing, what needs forgiving, and what still makes you laugh.

And He is not afraid to enter any of it.

Maybe you do not need to solve your whole life today.

Maybe you just need to come down from the tree.

There is a life waiting for you on the ground.

There are people to love, things to repair, prayers to pray, meals to enjoy, work worth doing, laughter you have not heard yet, and ordinary days that may turn out to contain more grace than you expected.

Walk into them with Jesus.

And when you catch yourself wondering whether you matter enough to be noticed, remember the man in Jericho sitting on a branch above a crowded road.

Jesus stopped.

He looked up.

And He called him by name.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

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Years ago, Emily Schuman took a selfie in her car and posted it to Instagram. It was an unremarkable act, the kind of thing that happens several hundred thousand times a minute. In September 2026 that photograph came back to her as a sponsored advertisement in which she appeared to be holding up a vial of GLP-1 medication on behalf of a telehealth company called Gala, a business she had never heard of and had no relationship with.

Writing in the Guardian on 12 September 2026, Arielle Pardes reported that Schuman, the creator of the lifestyle blog Cupcakes and Cashmere and the holder of an Instagram audience above 500,000, had been the subject of at least three such fabrications. Alongside the weight-loss drug advertisement, a version of her with darker hair applied foundation for a cosmetics brand called Meroda, and generated images of her circulated on TikTok promoting a blood testing company called Superpower. “So violating,” she told Pardes. The synthetic versions were, in her description, “just like me, but the upside-down version.”

Her followers noticed before she did. They flooded her inbox asking about the sponsorship, because a GLP-1 endorsement did not fit the person they thought they knew. Schuman and her manager reported the advertisement to Meta. It took weeks of badgering before the GLP-1 advertisement came down. The cosmetics advertisement, according to the Guardian's reporting, was still circulating.

That sequence contains the whole economic problem, and almost every account of the deepfake crisis walks past it. The interesting thing is not that a face was copied. It is that the copy was profitable enough for someone to buy advertising inventory to distribute it, that the platform sold that inventory, that the audience did the detection work for free, and that the only party who paid to have it removed was the person whose face it was.

The Recommendation Economy Was Always Selling a Verification Shortcut

To understand what is being destroyed, you have to be precise about what was being sold.

An influencer endorsement is not, economically speaking, an advertisement. It is a transferred credibility judgement. The academic framework underpinning the entire industry is the source credibility model, which holds that persuasion depends on the perceived trustworthiness, expertise and attractiveness of the messenger rather than the message. Layered on top of that is parasocial interaction theory, the observation that audiences form one-sided relationships with media figures that function psychologically like friendships. The creator economy monetises the intersection: a viewer who feels they know someone will accept that person's product judgement at a discount to the scrutiny they would apply to a corporate claim.

The commercial scale of that shortcut is substantial and, unlike much of the surrounding statistical fog, reasonably well evidenced. In its February 2026 forecast, eMarketer revised United States social media creator marketing spending to 21.10 billion dollars for the year. Its reporting on buyer intentions found that 57 per cent of ad buyers described influencer advertisements and partnerships as their top priority for 2026, up from 48 per cent the previous year. Matter Communications' consumer research in 2025 found 71 per cent of consumers saying they trust recommendations from creators they follow more than advertisements from brands directly.

Hold that last figure loosely: it is a self-reported attitude rather than a behavioural measurement, and attitudes about advertising correlate poorly with responses to it. But the direction is not in dispute, and neither is the mechanism. Brands pay a premium over equivalent display inventory precisely because the face does verification work that a logo cannot.

Alice Marwick, director of research at the Data & Society Research Institute, made the supply-side point to the Guardian: influencers are unusually easy to replicate because they “have hundreds of hours of footage and thousands of pictures of them online”. The obligation to be constantly visible is also the obligation to furnish a training set.

Now notice what that implies. The asset was never the face. The asset was the audience's belief that the face could only appear where its owner had consented to put it. The face was merely the carrier of a scarcity assumption. Generative models did not destroy the face. They destroyed the scarcity.

The Headline Number Is Cumulative, and the Guardian Made It Annual

The figure attached to this story in almost every retelling is 3.7 billion dollars, described in the Guardian's own framing as what global consumers “may have lost as much as” to deepfake scams “in 2026”, with social media impersonation accounting for roughly half.

That framing is wrong, and the error matters because it multiplies the apparent velocity of the problem by roughly five.

The source is a research chart published by Surfshark, a company that sells virtual private network subscriptions. Its own methodology page is explicit: the 3.7 billion dollar total is cumulative, covering January 2020 through June 2026. The distribution within that window is steep. Surfshark records 83 million dollars across the whole of 2020 to 2023, 335 million dollars in 2024, 2.5 billion dollars in 2025 and 764 million dollars in the first half of 2026. Social media is the largest single origin category at 1.73 billion dollars, or 47 per cent of the cumulative total, driven overwhelmingly by criminals using synthetic celebrities to promote fraudulent investment schemes. Impersonation fraud, defined separately as bypassing identity checks or gaining access to financial services, accounts for a further 911 million dollars.

So “half of it through social media impersonation” is an elision of two different categories, and “in 2026” describes six and a half years.

There is a second problem, and it is the one that should make anyone reaching for this statistic uneasy. Surfshark's own charts do not agree with each other. An earlier chart on the same research hub, covering social media specifically, reports deepfake losses of 1.1 billion dollars in 2025, tripling from 360 million dollars in 2024 and a ninefold increase on the 128 million dollars recorded between 2020 and 2023. The later origins chart gives 2.5 billion dollars for 2025, 335 million dollars for 2024 and 83 million dollars for 2020 to 2023. These are not rounding differences. The 2025 figure has more than doubled between publications.

This is not necessarily dishonesty. The method aggregates the AI Incident Database, Resemble.AI's deepfake incident database and the OECD's AI Incidents and Hazards Monitor, counting only incidents with a documented financial loss verified in media reports. A method like that reports the growth of journalism about deepfake fraud as faithfully as it reports the growth of deepfake fraud, and it revises upward whenever reporting catches up with older incidents. Surfshark says as much: the figures are a conservative floor built from publicly reported cases.

What it means in practice is that the number cannot bear the weight placed on it. It is not a measurement of losses. It is a count of the losses that got written up. Anybody citing it as an annual total for 2026 has compounded a provenance problem with an arithmetic one.

The figures that do come from primary collection agencies are less dramatic and more usable. The United States Federal Trade Commission, publishing its Consumer Sentinel data in April 2026, reported that consumers filed three million fraud reports in 2025 with 15.9 billion dollars in losses, up from 12 billion dollars the previous year. Nearly 30 per cent of people who reported losing money said the scam started on social media, with those losses totalling 2.1 billion dollars, an eightfold increase on the 261 million dollars reported in 2020. Facebook was named in more loss reports than any other platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram distant seconds. Investment scams originating on social media accounted for 1.1 billion dollars, more than half the social media total.

In the United Kingdom, Ofcom estimated in July 2026 that around 200 million pounds is lost to fraudulent advertising annually, and that 51 per cent of online adults have encountered a potentially fraudulent advertisement, with 36 per cent seeing them frequently. These numbers are smaller than the ones that circulate on conference slides. They are also collected by bodies with statutory reporting obligations rather than by companies selling security products, and they point at the same structural fact: the losses concentrate where paid distribution and impersonation intersect.

Four Per Cent Is a Figure in Search of a Source

The same provenance problem afflicts the other statistic carried in the Guardian's framing, that virtual influencers now account for around 4 per cent of brand spending.

Trace it and you arrive at a figure of roughly 1.37 billion dollars in annual brand spending on AI-generated personas, attributed to the analytics firm HypeAuditor, expressed as 4.2 per cent of a total influencer market usually put at 32.5 billion dollars. The percentage is not a measured share. It is one company's estimate of a numerator divided by a different company's estimate of a denominator, and it propagates through a mesh of search-optimised statistics aggregators, each citing the last.

The Influencer Marketing Hub's own 2026 Benchmark Report, built on a survey of more than 600 marketing professionals and the most frequently cited primary instrument in the sector, contains no data on virtual influencers at all. Its AI findings are about workflow: 36.67 per cent of respondents use AI for creator discovery, 21.11 per cent for content generation, 13.89 per cent for brief development. Brands are using AI to find humans, not to replace them. Meanwhile Linqia's enterprise research has been reported as finding that 89 per cent of enterprise marketers avoid virtual influencers entirely.

A number can be approximately right and still be epistemically worthless, and the four per cent figure sits in that category. The honest version of the claim is narrower and more interesting: synthetic personas are a small but fast-growing slice of a growing market, disproportionately visible relative to spend, and enterprise buyers remain wary. That is a different story from an inexorable synthetic takeover, and it bears directly on the question of what happens to endorsement value, because it means the immediate threat to a creator's income is not a virtual competitor. It is a counterfeit of themselves.

The Person Whose Face It Is Pays for the Cleanup

The clearest read on where the cost lands comes from the individual who has been absorbing it longest.

The financial journalist Martin Lewis sued Facebook for defamation in 2018 over advertisements that appropriated his image, settling after Meta agreed to donate three million pounds to charity and to build a scam advertisement reporting button. In July 2023 he described what he believed to be the first deepfake video scam advertisement using his likeness, a fabricated clip in which he appeared to endorse an investment scheme branded as a project of Elon Musk's. By April 2026, as Charlotte Tobitt reported in Press Gazette, Lewis was describing the situation as “worse than ever”, a “deliberate perversion of my name, reputation and work by organised criminals around the world”.

The operational detail in that reporting is the part worth dwelling on. Of 537 reports made to Action Fraud in 2024 about advertisements misusing someone's name, Lewis's identity featured in 44 per cent. Musk featured in 40 per cent. To manage this, Lewis funds the equivalent of one full-time member of staff doing nothing but chasing fraudulent advertisements. He pays for that. “I'm not Meta, I'm not X,” he told Press Gazette. “I can't take them down.” His proposed remedy was blunt and unfashionable: “You're framing this as a technology problem. Employ people to vet every advert.”

Set that against Schuman's position and the asymmetry becomes a formula. Lewis is a nationally recognised broadcaster with a media organisation behind him and a successful defamation settlement in his history, and his mitigation strategy is a permanent salaried headcount. Schuman is a lifestyle blogger with half a million followers. Her options, as the Guardian laid them out, are to hire lawyers, which costs money and time she would otherwise spend earning, or to do nothing and watch her audience conclude she has started selling weight-loss injections. There is no third option in which someone else bears the cost.

This is the answer to the question of who pays, and it is not a satisfying one. The loss is distributed to whoever has the least ability to refuse it. Consumers absorb the fraud losses. Creators absorb the reputational damage and the enforcement labour. The platform collects the advertising revenue in both directions, from the legitimate campaign and from the counterfeit of it.

Meta Priced the Problem Internally and Decided It Could Live With It

That last sentence would be a rhetorical flourish were it not for the documents.

In November 2025 Reuters published an investigation based on a cache of internal Meta records. The headline finding was that Meta had projected its 2024 revenue from advertisements for scams and banned goods at around 16 billion dollars, roughly 10 per cent of total revenue. The category covered fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos and prohibited medical products. Meta's systems were estimated to show users around 15 billion higher-risk scam advertisements a day, generating roughly seven billion dollars in annualised sales. The company was recording around 3.5 billion dollars every six months from advertisements its own legal team had classified as carrying higher legal risk, a category that expressly included impersonating a brand or a celebrity.

Two operational parameters in that reporting explain everything about Schuman's weeks of badgering. The first is that Meta's automated systems banned an advertiser only when they were 95 per cent certain the account was committing fraud. A 95 per cent confidence threshold guarantees that a large volume of probable fraud stays live, because most fraud is not 95 per cent legible to a classifier. The second is a February 2025 document that quantified precisely how much revenue the company was prepared to forgo in order to clamp down on suspicious advertisers: 0.15 per cent of total revenue, or 135 million dollars.

Meta has contested the framing, with a spokesperson describing the 10 per cent projection as “a rough and overly-inclusive estimate” and saying the company aggressively addresses scam advertisements. Take that at face value and the structure still holds, because the structure is the enforcement threshold and the budget ceiling, not the revenue estimate.

Now compare the numbers. Ofcom's proposed fraudulent advertising code, consulted on from 10 July 2026 with a final statement promised by mid-2027 at the latest, would carry maximum fines of 18 million pounds or 10 per cent of global revenue. The 10 per cent figure is the meaningful one, because 18 million pounds is an eighth of the sum Meta had already earmarked as its acceptable annual cost of enforcement. The company is not gambling that regulators will not fine it. It is operating a system in which the fine is a line item and the revenue is the business.

Meta does run a countermeasure, and its shape is instructive. Since late 2024 it has used facial recognition to compare faces in suspected celebrity-bait advertisements against the profile pictures of enrolled public figures, blocking matches and deleting the biometric comparison data immediately afterwards. The company has reported that user reports of celebrity-bait scam advertisements, as a proportion of total impressions, fell 22 per cent globally in the first half of 2025, and that nearly 500,000 public figures are covered.

Nearly 500,000 protected public figures. Schuman has more than 500,000 followers. She was not one of them, or if she was, the system did not work. The protection is a list, and lists have edges, and the edge of this one runs straight through the middle of the professional creator population.

The Law Values Your Face at Whatever You Could Have Charged For It

Ask what legal remedy exists and you discover that the dominant frameworks were built to compensate a lost licensing fee, which is exactly the wrong instrument for a harm that destroys the licence's value.

In the United Kingdom there is no personality right and no image right. The nearest analogue is the tort of passing off, and its application to endorsement was settled in Irvine v Talksport, in which the Formula One driver Eddie Irvine succeeded against a radio station that had doctored a photograph to replace the mobile phone in his hand with a portable radio bearing the station's branding. The High Court established that no common field of activity was required and that a false message of endorsement understood by the market was actionable. The Court of Appeal then raised the damages from 2,000 pounds to 25,000 pounds, and the basis on which it did so is the point: the award represented the reasonable endorsement fee the defendant would have had to pay for lawful use.

That is the measure of loss the common law understands. What you could have charged. It works tolerably when a single brochure goes to a thousand advertising buyers. It fails completely when thousands of counterfeit endorsements are algorithmically distributed to your own audience, because the damage is not the unpaid fee. The damage is that every future fee is worth less, including the ones you did negotiate, because the signal they used to carry has been debased by forgeries you were not paid for and could not prevent.

The United States has a more developed apparatus and the same underlying logic. The right of publicity is a state-level property right in the commercial value of identity, meaning the protection tracks the market value. Recent statutes have widened it: Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed on 21 March 2024, added voice to the state's protected personal rights and criminalised unauthorised commercial voice cloning; California's AB 2602 requires contractual provisions for digital replicas to describe intended uses with reasonable specificity and to be negotiated with representation, while AB 1836 governs replicas of the deceased.

At federal level the NO FAKES Act, reintroduced as S.4591, was advanced unanimously by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026 with a coalition spanning Hollywood, the recording industry and major technology firms. It would create a federal digital replication right covering voice and visual likeness, transferable and licensable, surviving death and terminating no more than 70 years afterwards, with a notice-and-takedown regime and carve-outs for news reporting, parody and criticism.

It is a serious piece of drafting and it would materially improve the position of someone like Schuman, mainly by giving her a federal takedown channel that platforms must operate rather than a customer service queue they may ignore. But note what it is. It is a property right, descendible for seven decades, structured like copyright. The legislative answer to the collapse of endorsement scarcity is to manufacture artificial scarcity by statute and then allow it to be traded. Which tells you where the value is expected to end up: with whoever accumulates the licences.

Denmark has taken the logic furthest. Its proposed amendment to the Copyright Act, unveiled on 26 June 2025 with cross-party backing, would grant every individual copyright-style entitlements over their body, facial features and voice, enabling takedown notices, compensation without proof of reputational harm, and platform liability for failure to act. As of 2026 it awaits final parliamentary adoption. It is the first serious attempt to attach the remedy to personhood rather than to market value, which is precisely why it is difficult: a right everyone holds equally is a right that cannot be cheaply administered.

Sometimes the Forger Is the Brand You Signed With

The assumption running through all of this is that the counterfeiter is a criminal somewhere offshore. One of 2026's more uncomfortable cases suggests the risk is also internal to the commercial relationship.

On 9 June 2026, the creator Molly Tranchin, who posts as FashionVeggie, filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California against the intimate apparel company EBY Inc. She had entered a content creation agreement and produced promotional footage wearing the company's products in a modest, non-sexual manner consistent with her established brand. The complaint alleged that EBY then used AI tools to alter that footage into an explicit version exposing portions of her body not visible in the original, and published it to its Instagram account without her review or consent. She pleaded California's non-consensual deepfake statute alongside defamation, copyright infringement and breach of contract.

The case produced no ruling. Tranchin voluntarily dismissed without prejudice after the company argued the court lacked subject-matter jurisdiction, and indicated she would refile in a court of competent jurisdiction.

No liability has been established and none should be inferred. What the filing demonstrates regardless is the shape of a new counterparty risk. A creator licences footage of herself for a defined use. The licensee possesses both the raw material and the tools to extend it. The contract, drafted for an era when footage could only be cut and not continued, may not say anything useful about generation. California's AB 2602 exists precisely to close that gap by requiring specific description of digital replica uses, which is an admission that the gap was open and that standard influencer agreements were sitting in it.

Disclosure Regimes Bind Everyone Except the Forger

The regulatory response across three jurisdictions converges on transparency, and transparency has a structural flaw that is obvious the moment you name it.

Article 50 of the EU AI Act entered into application on 2 August 2026. Deployers who use AI to generate or manipulate image, audio or video content constituting a deepfake must disclose that the content is artificially generated in a clear, distinguishable and accessible manner, no later than first exposure. Providers must mark outputs in machine-readable form. Penalties reach 15 million euros or 3 per cent of worldwide annual turnover. The AI Omnibus, on which Parliament and Council reached political agreement, pushes the Article 50(2) marking obligation back to 2 December 2026, but only for generative systems already placed on the EU market before 2 August 2026, so anything released since then carries the obligation already. The deployer disclosure duty took effect on 2 August 2026 regardless and stands untouched.

In the United Kingdom, the Advertising Standards Authority has made its position clear through guidance and rulings, confirming that AI-generated imagery is judged against the CAP Code like any other imagery and that AI-generated depictions of real people, particularly celebrities, must not mislead consumers into believing a genuine endorsement exists. Liability sits with the advertiser regardless of what the tool produced. The Ofcom fraudulent advertising consultation, open until 2 October 2026, proposes close to 40 measures binding Category 1 and Category 2A services, covering paid-for advertising only and excluding user-generated content and non-sponsored search results. In the United States, the FTC's Endorsement Guides at 16 CFR Part 255 were amended in 2024 to reach AI-generated and AI-modified endorsement content, and the Commission's supplemental rulemaking to extend its impersonation rule from governments and businesses to individuals remains unfinished, the proposed means-and-instrumentalities provision having been dropped.

Every one of these instruments binds a party with a registered address, a compliance function and revenue worth taking a percentage of. None of them binds the operator who bought Instagram placement for a fabricated GLP-1 endorsement through a shell account. Fraudulent deepfakes do not carry disclosures, because the entire commercial proposition of a fraudulent deepfake is that it is not disclosed.

The predictable consequence is an inversion of the signal. Compliant advertisers label their synthetic content. Criminals do not. Over time, the presence of an AI label comes to indicate a company with lawyers, and its absence indicates nothing at all, because absence now covers both authentic human content and everything produced outside the regime. Regulation designed to help audiences distinguish real from synthetic ends up marking only the subset of synthetic content that was never the problem.

Verification Exists, and It Is Billed in Biometrics

Platforms have built the tool that would help, and the price is worth reading carefully.

YouTube's likeness detection scans uploads for altered or synthetic uses of an enrolled creator's face and surfaces matches in YouTube Studio, from which removal can be requested. In May 2026 it was extended to all creators aged 18 and over, having been expanded in March 2026 to a pilot group including government officials, journalists and political candidates. To enrol, a creator submits a facial scan and government-issued photographic identification.

TikTok has moved in a parallel direction, requiring advertisers using voice clones or digital likenesses to upload consent documentation to Ads Manager including the individual's full legal name, a description of permitted use, campaign duration and a signed release, alongside labelling obligations for realistic depictions of people that draw on C2PA Content Credentials for automatic detection. Meta's facial recognition programme, described above, works the same way: to be defended, you must first be enrolled.

So the remedy for unauthorised biometric replication is authorised biometric submission. You defeat the copy of your face by giving a platform a verified original, plus a passport. For a professional creator that may be a rational trade. It is a harder trade for a journalist in a hostile jurisdiction, or for anyone whose objection to the deepfake was always that they never wanted their face in a corporate database.

The consent question was tested at Meta in July 2026, when Creative Artists Agency publicly urged the company to make likeness protection the default in its Muse Image generator and to require documented consent before third parties use a person's name, image, likeness, voice or work. SAG-AFTRA recommended that its members opt out of the feature entirely. An opt-out recommendation from the largest actors' union is a fairly precise statement of how much confidence the represented talent has in platform-administered likeness governance.

Disclosure Devalues the Genuine Article Too

There is a final mechanism, and it is the one that determines whether the recommendation economy can price its way out of this.

The experimental literature is beginning to quantify what audiences do when synthetic origin is made explicit. A between-subjects study by Fatema Juzer Ujjainwala, published in the Journal of Marketing & Social Research in November 2025, ran 320 social media users across conditions varying influencer type, human against AI, and disclosure, explicit against absent. AI-generated influencers produced significantly lower perceived authenticity and brand trust than human ones. Crucially, explicit disclosure of AI origin intensified the negative reaction rather than neutralising it. Digital literacy moderated the effect, with more literate consumers reacting less negatively.

A single study of 320 supports directional inference, not settled fact, and will need replication. But it aligns with the Gen Z research showing human influencers rated significantly higher on authenticity, trustworthiness and parasocial interaction, and it points at something the industry's transparency advocates have not fully absorbed. Disclosure does not restore trust. It transfers the cost of synthetic content onto the disclosing party.

Combine that with an environment in which audiences have been trained by fabricated advertisements to treat any endorsement as potentially counterfeit, and you get the endorsement equivalent of the liar's dividend. Schuman's genuine partnerships now arrive in front of an audience that has recently been fooled by fake ones. Every legitimate campaign inherits a suspicion tax it did nothing to earn. The forgery does not merely steal a fee. It degrades the yield on the asset that remains.

Where the Value Migrates When the Face Stops Being Scarce

Put the pieces together and the destination becomes legible.

If a face can be printed by anyone, its endorsement value does not simply fall. It migrates to whoever can certify that a given appearance was authorised. That capability currently sits with three sets of actors, and none of them is the creator.

It sits with the platforms, which hold the enrolment databases, the facial recognition pipelines and the takedown queues, and which are already monetising verification in adjacent forms. It sits with the legislatures, through instruments like the NO FAKES Act, which convert likeness into a descendible property right that will be aggregated by the parties best equipped to aggregate rights, which is to say agencies, labels and estates rather than individual creators. And it sits with brands, for whom the rational hedge against an uncontrollable human endorser is an endorser they own outright, which is the actual argument for virtual influencers and always has been. The four per cent figure may be poorly sourced, but the strategic logic it gestures at is sound: a synthetic persona cannot be impersonated in a way that damages the brand, because the brand holds the original.

The creator, in this arrangement, moves from proprietor to tenant. They hold an asset whose value now depends on a verification service they do not control, cannot audit and did not commission, enrolled in a system that requires them to surrender the very biometric data whose misuse they are trying to prevent, with a legal remedy calibrated to the licence fee they would have charged rather than to the market they have lost.

Can the recommendation economy price verification? It can, and it is already starting to. That is not the reassuring answer it sounds like. Pricing verification means that being believed becomes a service with a supplier, a fee structure and an eligibility criterion. It means that the creators who can afford a full-time member of staff to chase counterfeits, as Martin Lewis does, retain their credibility, and the ones who cannot, as most cannot, watch it erode while their inboxes fill with followers asking whether they have really started selling injectables.

Schuman's phrase was better than she may have intended. The upside-down version is not merely a mirror image. It is the same face with the polarity of the economics reversed: all the reach, none of the accountability, the revenue flowing to a stranger and the cost flowing to her. The technology did not take her face. It took the assumption that her face meant she had agreed, and that assumption, not the pixels, was the thing she had spent a decade building and was in the business of selling.

References

1. Arielle Pardes, “Deepfakes are wrecking influencers' credibility, one fake ad at a time,” The Guardian, 12 September 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/sep/12/deepfake-influencers-ads
2. Surfshark Research Hub, “$3.7B lost to deepfakes, social media is the primary origin,” Surfshark, July 2026. https://surfshark.com/research/chart/deepfake-fraud-origins
3. Surfshark Research Hub, “Facebook led in deepfake-related fraud in 2025,” Surfshark, 2026. https://surfshark.com/research/chart/deepfake-social-media-fraud
4. Federal Trade Commission, “New FTC Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams,” FTC press release, April 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/04/new-ftc-data-show-people-have-lost-billions-social-media-scams
5. Ofcom, “Big Tech must tackle scourge of scam adverts, says Ofcom,” Ofcom, 10 July 2026. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/online-fraud/big-tech-must-tackle-scourge-of-scam-adverts-says-ofcom
6. Charlotte Tobitt, “Martin Lewis says Meta scam ads stealing his name are 'worse than ever',” Press Gazette, 30 April 2026. https://pressgazette.co.uk/news/martin-lewis-says-meta-scam-ads-stealing-his-name-are-worse-than-ever/
7. Natasha Lomas, “Martin Lewis warns over 'first' deepfake video scam ad circulating on Facebook,” TechCrunch, 7 July 2023. https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/07/martin-lewis-deepfake-scam-ad-facebook/
8. Jeff Horwitz, “Meta projected 10% of 2024 revenue came from scams and banned goods,” Reuters, November 2025, as reported by CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/06/meta-reportedly-projected-10percent-of-2024-sales-came-from-scam-fraud-ads.html
9. Meta, “Testing New Ways to Combat Scams and Help Restore Access to Compromised Accounts,” Meta Newsroom, October 2024. https://about.fb.com/news/2024/10/testing-combat-scams-restore-compromised-accounts/
10. Edmund Irvine Tidswell Ltd v Talksport Ltd [2002] 1 WLR 2355; [2003] EWCA Civ 423. 5RB Barristers case report. https://www.5rb.com/case/irvine-v-talksport-ltd/
11. United States Senate, “S.4591 NO FAKES Act of 2026,” 119th Congress. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4591
12. Munck Wilson Mandala, “AI Likeness Protections Legislative Update,” 2026. https://www.munckwilson.com/news/ai-likeness-protections-legislative-update/
13. European Parliamentary Research Service, “The Danish approach to copyright and deepfakes,” EPRS at a glance, 2026. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/782611/EPRS_ATA(2026)782611_EN.pdf
14. Bloomberg Law, “Influencer Drops Case Over Underwear Company's Explicit Deepfake,” Bloomberg Law, 2026. https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/influencer-drops-case-over-underwear-companys-explicit-deepfake
15. European Commission, “The EU AI Act's Transparency Rules: A Practical Guide to Article 50,” artificialintelligenceact.eu, 2026. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/transparency-rules-article-50/
16. Advertising Standards Authority, “AI and Deepfakes: Four Things Advertisers Need to Know Before They Hit 'Run',” ASA/CAP, 2026. https://www.asa.org.uk/news/ai-and-deepfakes-four-things-advertisers-need-to-know-before-they-hit-run.html
17. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Proposes New Protections to Combat AI Impersonation of Individuals,” FTC press release, February 2024. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/ftc-proposes-new-protections-combat-ai-impersonation-individuals
18. YouTube Help, “Likeness detection on YouTube,” Google Support, 2026. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/16440338
19. Deadline, “CAA Calls BS On Meta's AI Image Generator; Zuckerberg Pushes Back On Muse Privacy Worries,” 10 July 2026. https://deadline.com/2026/07/caa-slams-meta-muse-image-ai-1236978047/
20. Deadline, “SAG-AFTRA Recommends Members Opt-Out Of Meta's AI Feature,” July 2026. https://deadline.com/2026/07/sag-aftra-recommends-members-opt-out-meta-ai-feature-1236979025/
21. Fatema Juzer Ujjainwala, “Influence of AI-Generated Influencer Content on Brand Trust and Authenticity Perceptions,” Journal of Marketing & Social Research, 22 November 2025. https://www.jmsr-online.com/article/influence-of-ai-generated-influencer-content-on-brand-trust-and-authenticity-perceptions-438/
22. Influencer Marketing Hub, “Influencer Marketing Benchmark Report 2026.” https://influencermarketinghub.com/influencer-marketing-benchmark-report/
23. eMarketer, “Influencer ads emerge as buyers' top ad priority for 2026,” eMarketer, 2026. https://www.emarketer.com/content/influencer-ads-emerge-buyers--top-ad-priority-2026
24. eMarketer, “FAQ on influencer marketing: Why brands are betting on it in 2026,” eMarketer, 2026. https://www.emarketer.com/content/faq-on-influencer-marketing--what-how-brands-use
25. Data & Society Research Institute, “Alice E. Marwick,” datasociety.net. https://datasociety.net/team/alice-e-marwick/

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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

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Im sick. and as any other human being would say. i hate being sick unless you’re one of those pathetic people who actually anjoys having an excuse to lie around and do nothing. or find it as a free pass to be lazy. but you get it. i hate being sick i hate feeling weak, stressed and tired and somehow it irritates me more than usual, which is impressive considering im already irritated most of the time. i went to work anyway because i guess feeling sick wasnt enough of a reason to stay home. really smart. anyway eventually i stopped being cautious altogether and i dont even remember getting home. i just woke up there, so i guess my body decided it had enough and someone agreed. and the time couldnt be better becuae i have to go to the hospital tomorrow for other things. because of coruse i do. i cant just be sick once. No, there has to be something else somewhere waiting around the corner. and i hate this, i hate feeling sick and weak i hate being able to trust myself to do something as simple as go to work without eventually losing all sense of caution and waking up at home like somebody pressed the off button.

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fuck.

Sincerely, Not enjoying this.

In Summary: * A full day, this Wednesday, conducted intentionally at a more relaxed pace than otherwise culd have been the case. And I think that's a good thing. Listening now the the Texas Rangers pregame show ahead of their game tonight with the New York Mets. I'll finish up the night prayers as the game plays and head to bed when the brain starts to shut down, whether or not the game's finished.

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= 224.65 lbs. * bp= 157/88 (69)

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Chess: * 09:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Bientôt six mois que je n'ai pas composé de nouvelle entrée de ce journal accompagnant ma démarche sous Linux et un ThinkPad T480 (ou T470s). La raison est asez simple, je ne les avais pas réutilisés.

Ce soir, j'y reviens pour mettre à jour ma configuration. Cela prend évidement un peu de temps.

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L'écoystème d'Apple est très performant. Clairement.

Du côté de mon MacBook Air, il est possible d'entrer dans cette démarche. En tout cas jusqu'à un certain point. Cela explique aussi le fait que je n'ai pas utilisé mon ThinkPad durant cette période.

Ma recette est la suivante: 1° Ne pas connecter son mac à un compte Apple et notamment son Apple Store 2° Se protéger avec des solutions telles que Proton pour son mail, ses mots de passe, son VPN notamment 3° Recourir le plus possible à des solutions OpenSource. La principale est pour moi LibreOffice. 4° Se connecter parcimonieusement aux réseaux et utiliser son ordinateur hors ligne. Voir favoriser l'écriture manuscrite dans des carnets. 5° Frugalité : préférer la lecture d'un livre papier ou de la lecture de musique sur son iPod ou équivalent au visionnement de vidéos YouTube ou l'écoute en streaming (Spotify). 6° Faire des photos avec un appareil photo et non son smartphone. 7° Bouger avec ses pieds.

Tags : #AuCafé #Linux #ThinkPad #ŧ480 #t470s #Apple #MacBookNeon #MacBook