„The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination.“

Carl Rogers formuliert diesen Satz in On Becoming a Person. Das gute Leben ist für ihn kein Zustand, den wir eines Tages erreichen und anschliessend besitzen. Es ist ein Prozess des Werdens, geprägt von wachsender Offenheit für die eigene Erfahrung und zunehmendem Vertrauen in die eigene Wahrnehmung [1]. Der Psychologe Stephen Joseph fasst diesen Gedanken treffend so zusammen: Entscheidend ist nicht, das Glück als späteren Zustand anzustreben, sondern die Art, wie wir uns zu unserem Leben verhalten [2].

Damit beantwortet Rogers in psychologischer Sprache eine Frage, die sehr viel älter ist: Was heisst es, gut zu leben? Aristoteles und #Epikur kommen zu anderen Antworten als Rogers. Dennoch verbindet sie etwas Wesentliches. Das gute Leben muss gelebt werden. Der entscheidende Unterschied liegt weniger im Prozess selbst als darin, wer oder was diesem Prozess seine Richtung gibt. Diese Frage ist nicht nur philosophiegeschichtlich interessant. Sie stellt sich bis heute überall dort, wo Menschen über persönliche Entwicklung nachdenken oder andere dabei begleiten.

Das gute Leben muss gelebt werden

Bei Aristoteles heisst das Ziel menschlichen Lebens Eudaimonia. Die verbreitete Übersetzung mit #Glück kann in die Irre führen, weil sie leicht an einen angenehmen inneren Zustand denken lässt. Eudaimonie bezeichnet vielmehr ein gelingendes Leben als Ganzes. Aristoteles verbindet sie mit vernünftiger Tätigkeit gemäss der Tugend und betrachtet sie über die Dauer eines Lebens hinweg [3].

Damit liegt das Ziel nicht einfach am Ende eines Weges. Eudaimonie verwirklicht sich im Tätigsein selbst. Ein gutes Leben besteht nicht darin, einmal einen bestimmten Zustand erreicht zu haben, sondern darin, gut zu leben.

Epikur setzt einen anderen Akzent. Bei ihm steht mit ataraxia, der Freiheit von seelischer Unruhe, ein Ideal im Zentrum, das zunächst stärker nach einem erreichbaren Zustand klingt. Doch auch Ataraxie lässt sich nicht von der Lebensweise trennen, aus der sie hervorgeht.

Das zeigt sich besonders deutlich an Epikurs Lehre von den Wünschen. Manche sind natürlich und notwendig, andere zwar natürlich, aber nicht notwendig, wieder andere leer oder unbegründet. Philosophische Lebensführung besteht deshalb nicht darin, möglichst viele Wünsche zu erfüllen. Sie verlangt vielmehr, Wünsche zu prüfen und unterscheiden zu lernen [4]. Wer nach Reichtum, Ansehen oder immer neuen Bedürfnissen verlangt, vermehrt unter Umständen gerade jene Unruhe, von der er sich befreien möchte. Freundschaft wiederum besitzt bei Epikur einen ausserordentlich hohen Stellenwert. Sein Ideal ist kein einsamer Rückzug von der Welt [5].

Aristoteles und Epikur vertreten sehr unterschiedliche Vorstellungen des guten Lebens. Gemeinsam ist ihnen aber, dass sie nicht nur fragen, wie ein Mensch sich entwickeln kann. Sie verfügen auch über inhaltliche Massstäbe dafür, wie er leben sollte.

Pierre Hadot hat diesen Charakter antiker Philosophie mit dem Begriff der Lebensform beschrieben. Philosophie sollte ihre Schüler nicht bloss informieren, sondern formen. Lehre und Lebenspraxis gehörten zusammen [6].

Hier trennt sich Rogers von seinen antiken Gesprächspartnern.

Wer bestimmt die Richtung?

Rogers gibt keine vergleichbare Lehre darüber vor, welche Wünsche richtig sind oder welche Tugenden ein gelungenes Leben ausmachen. Seine Aufmerksamkeit richtet sich stärker darauf, unter welchen Bedingungen Menschen ihre eigene Entwicklungsrichtung erkennen können.

Dafür verwendet er Begriffe wie psychologische Freiheit, Offenheit gegenüber Erfahrung und Vertrauen in den eigenen Organismus. Wer weniger damit beschäftigt ist, Erfahrungen abzuwehren oder einem von aussen übernommenen Selbstbild zu entsprechen, kann mehr Informationen aus dem eigenen Erleben berücksichtigen. Rogers hielt diesen inneren Prozess keineswegs für unfehlbar. Gerade weil Menschen offen für die Folgen ihres Handelns bleiben, können sie ihre Entscheidungen korrigieren [1].

Diese Bewegung lässt sich aus heutiger Sicht als eine Form von Autonomie beschreiben. Der Begriff ist hier eine Zuspitzung, nicht Rogers’ eigener Oberbegriff. Gemeint ist auch keine Freiheit nach dem Muster „Alles, was ich selbst gewählt habe, ist richtig“. Rogers nimmt vielmehr an, dass Menschen unter Bedingungen grösserer psychologischer Freiheit dazu neigen, konstruktivere und stärker mit ihrer Erfahrung übereinstimmende Entscheidungen zu treffen.

Darin liegt die interessante Verschiebung gegenüber Aristoteles und Epikur. Nicht der Gedanke, dass das gute Leben ein Prozess oder eine Praxis ist, unterscheidet Rogers grundsätzlich von ihnen. Neu gewichtet wird vielmehr die Frage, woher die Richtung kommt.

Aristoteles verweist auf Vernunft und Tugend. Epikur prüft Wünsche daran, ob sie tatsächlich zu einem ungestörten Leben beitragen. Rogers vertraut stärker darauf, dass ein Mensch, der sich von fremden Bewertungsmassstäben löst und seine Erfahrung unverzerrter wahrnimmt, seine Richtung zunehmend selbst bestimmen kann.

Zwischen Orientierung und Autonomie

Für Coaching und persönliche Entwicklung ist diese Differenz mehr als eine theoretische Feinheit. Entwicklungsprozesse beginnen häufig mit Zielen: Was soll sich verändern? Was soll erreicht werden? Woran lässt sich Fortschritt erkennen?

Rogers legt nahe, davor eine andere Frage zu stellen: Ist dieses Ziel überhaupt das eigene?

Ein Ziel kann vernünftig formuliert, messbar und erreichbar sein und trotzdem hauptsächlich aus Erwartungen anderer stammen. Begleitung besteht dann nicht nur darin, einen Menschen möglichst effizient zu einem bereits bestimmten Ziel zu führen. Auch die Richtung selbst muss Gegenstand des Prozesses sein.

Hier berührt sich Rogers erneut mit Hadots Vorstellung von Philosophie als Lebenspraxis, ohne dass beides gleichgesetzt werden sollte. Gemeinsam ist ihnen der Gedanke, dass Einsicht allein wenig verändert. Ob eine Vorstellung vom guten Leben trägt, zeigt sich erst darin, wie jemand wahrnimmt, entscheidet und handelt. Auch gute Begleitung muss sich letztlich an dieser gelebten Praxis bewähren.

Aristoteles und Epikur setzen Rogers zugleich ein notwendiges Korrektiv entgegen. Autonomie allein liefert noch keinen Massstab für ein gutes Leben. Menschen können sich täuschen, widersprüchliche Wünsche verfolgen oder sich selbst und anderen schaden. Umgekehrt wird eine Lehre vom guten Leben problematisch, wenn sie die Richtung vollständig vorgibt und für die eigene Erfahrung kaum Raum lässt.

Zwischen beiden Polen bleibt eine Spannung, die sich nicht einfach auflösen lässt. Eine Vorstellung vom guten Leben braucht Orientierung, ohne den Menschen auf einen vorgegebenen Lebensentwurf festzulegen. Rogers verschiebt das Gewicht stärker zur eigenen Erfahrung, Aristoteles und Epikur stärker zu begründbaren Vorstellungen davon, was ein gutes Leben ausmacht.

Vielleicht ist deshalb nicht nur wichtig, welche #Ziele wir verfolgen, sondern auch, wie wir zu der Richtung gekommen sind, in die wir gehen. Ganz ankommen werden wir dabei nicht. Rogers würde vermutlich sagen: Das ist kein Mangel des guten Lebens, sondern eine seiner Bedingungen.

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Quellen

[1] C. R. Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Boston, MA, USA: Houghton Mifflin, 1961, insbesondere „The Good Life and the Fully Functioning Person“. Frei verfügbar: https://www.panarchy.org/rogers/person.html

[2] S. Joseph, „Do You Seek Happiness as a Direction or a Destination?“, Psychology Today, 7. Feb. 2024. Frei verfügbar: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/what-doesnt-kill-us/202402/do-you-seek-happiness-as-a-direction-or-a-destination/amp

[3] L. Evans, „Aristotle’s Guide To Living Well“, Philosophy Now, Nr. 151, 2022. Frei verfügbar: https://philosophynow.org/issues/151/AristotlesGuideToLivingWell

[4] „Ancient Ethical Theory“, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, zuletzt substanziell überarbeitet am 5. Feb. 2021. Frei verfügbar: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-ancient/

[5] D. Konstan, „Epicurus“, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, zuletzt substanziell überarbeitet am 8. Juli 2022. Frei verfügbar: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epicurus/

[6] M. Sharpe, „Pierre Hadot“, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Frei verfügbar: https://iep.utm.edu/hadot/

Bildquelle Suzanne Valadon (1865–1938): Bol de fruits, Musée de Montmartre, Paris, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde Gemini Notebook (ehem. NotebookLM) von Google verwendet.

Topic #Selbstbetrachtungen | #Philosophie

In December 2025 I sat down with Gus of The Classic Adventure Gaming Podcast to discuss our ongoing campaign Conquering the Barbarian Altanis. I was joined by four players: JP, never_plays_elves, SleazyB, and Dreadlord. We have been playing weekly since March 2022, and at the time of recording we were around 150 sessions in.

Over the years I have shared some of our experience (see Resources at the end of the post), but this was the first time I did so on a podcast. It was a lot of fun, especially since Gus was such a great host. The “panel” format with players, I think, worked well.

Since the episode is nearly two hours long, I will attempt to summarise the key points. In essence, we focus on what has and hasn't worked for us to establish, and maintain, a long running open-table sandbox campaign. The discussion is mostly centred on various techniques, strategies, mindset, and community dynamics that, we believe, contribute to the longevity of our campaign.

Some of the principles we discuss are:

• Consistent scheduling. The major enemy of working adults. We do fixed weekly slot (Mondays, 3 hours), I am always present. This builds habit, reliability, and player trust; players plan around the game.
• Open table. Multiple characters per player, anyone can join or leave. Builds resilience, accommodates real-life constraints, filters for committed players.
• A living, evolving world. I maintain strict time records, and session reports; the world evolves without players, it shapes them and is shaped by them. This creates a persistent world, makes catch-up possible, and allows for emergent situations that are not divorced from the in-game reality.
• Consequences and stakes. Characters have ultimate agency to do as they please, but freedom to act is not freedom from consequences. Lethality must be fair, and treasure must be plentiful. This helps create real stakes, rewards skill, and balances danger with opportunity.
• Minimal prep. Wilderlands setting inspires me; I use random tables, and develop elements (characters, sites, etc.) iteratively. This reduces prep burden, allows flexibility, and leads to surprising and memorable situations.
• Rules as a robust framework. I continuously study OD&D, AD&D and other old-school sources to develop deep understanding of the rules. This provides a consistent, fair, and robust framework that handles any situation.
• Community. I set clear expectations, and we do our best to maintain consistent tone, and friendly atmosphere. This creates an environment where invested players self-select. We are responsible for our shared experience and enjoyment.

We discuss a whole lot more. We did our best to share practical and actionable insight. You let us know how we did. :)

You can listen to the episode on Anchor, Spotify, Apple Play, or using the player below:

Regarding the resources I mentioned above, previously I had shared our experience in the following blog posts and essays:

• 21 Lessons learned after running 100 sessions (blog post)
• On Character Death and Long-Term Play (blog post)
• 21 Lessons Learned After 100 Sessions (essay in Fight On! #16)
• 7 Contrarian Practices for Running Online Games (essay in Fight On! #17)

We hope you find our experience helpful and inspiring to start, or improve, a sandbox game of your own. Don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions.

Fight on!

#Resource #Podcast #Reflection

I finished half of J’s Birthday present. She said that she wanted cute things or something like a candle, and so I have been learning how to sew and got all the materials to create a stuffed animal of her cats. I finished the first one and I’m really proud of myself because it took a long time, but it came out honestly pretty good and I think it’s really cute. I think it also shows a lot of effort and care, and I think those things make a really good gift. I can’t lie, though, I feel already let down for my birthday again this year. In the past, I haven’t really been able to celebrate my birthday and there has even been times where my parents have forgotten about it. I worry that I have set my expectations too high for them now, as I almost always find myself disappointed, or let down. I think just generally, this is how I feel whenever I receive presents for something like birthdays or Christmas when I do. I cherish Presents and I keep them and savor them, and I am very thankful for them, but I feel like more often than Not. It feels like I am not receiving something that has a lot of thought or Care put into it. I feel like whenever I give Presents to people close to me. I put a lot of thought and effort into them, and I feel like I set the bar for myself too high. I don’t think that’s a bar that other people really reach. And I don’t fault people for that and I think I’m saying all of this because I recognize that this is unrealistic to expect and to be upset by. I know the obvious thing here on why I am additionally feeling this way is because of my last relationship. I remember how for Christmas she got me stuff late, and she was worried about giving me presents because I had given her such good ones and I think for my birthday she had not really put a lot of thought into them. To try to make things easier for her, I said that we would both make a list of things in our discord server where we used to keep notes, and I gave her a lot of different ideas and I even bolded a couple things to try to make it even easier, to basically give a slam dunk. When we did our delayed Christmas, she gave me random things that weren’t on the list and she didn’t give me the things that I bolded. When we talked about it later, she said she just didn’t think about it and messed up. I remember she got me a random thing from an Instagram ad, which were scratcher cards for date ideas, but the problem was the dates were nothing like the kind of things that I like doing. And additionally, all of the things were available on their website, and she instead spent $50 which was half of our budget on that. She ended up taking that back and I ordered the thing that I had asked for and she sent me the money for it. I got her a lot of things for her presents, going well over the budget. I understand that this puts even more pressure on her, and I can recognize that. But one of the main things I got her, was one time when we were late on a call she was talking about how as a child in London, she got a jelly cat Collab stuffed animal that she could not find any mention of anymore, and her stuffed animal was really really beaten up. She talked about how she wished she could get it replaced or repaired. I immediately took note of that, and I ended up trying to scour the Internet as much as I could to find it, and I ended up eventually finding someone who is selling it on eBay, and I got it imported. When I finally surprised her with it, I had given her a different stuffed animal that was the same type of animal, and when she wasn’t looking, I swapped it with the real one, and she finally noticed it and broke down crying and gave me such a big hug. And I remember that later, she talked about how shit she felt because of how good of a present and how much effort I had put in compared to her. And I think that was one of the things that ultimately led to the breakup, just along with this general pattern of guilt because she felt like I was too good for her and she kept fucking up. I’m not gonna get into it, but I have a lot of different memories of things like Christmas or birthdays where I would be skipped over or forgotten, or almost purposefully excluded. And so I recognize that I am sensitive to receiving presents for things like this. But part of me is always wishing that someone would really take note and see me and get to know me in such an intimate way that they could give me a present that would hit me to the core. I guess I really want to know that I matter. And it sucks that I kind of see Presents like that.

Nothing was wrong with you. You were adapting.

Some of the most perceptive, emotionally intelligent people you will ever meet did not develop those abilities through books or meditation.

They developed them at home—during a childhood when reading the room was not a skill.

It was a necessity.

Trauma does not only wound. Sometimes it sharpens. A child growing up amid emotional volatility or uncertainty may become extraordinarily sensitive to tone, expression, silence, and the smallest changes in another person’s behavior.

From the outside, this sensitivity can look like intuition.

From the inside, it feels more like vigilance.

You enter a room and understand something about it before anyone speaks. You notice the tension held in a jaw, the pause that lasts half a second too long, the smile that never reaches the eyes. Most people wait for words. You learned to understand what was happening before the words arrived.

What others call a gift may be a habit you never chose.

You often know what people need before they know it themselves. Someone says, “I’m fine,” but you can already feel the shift beneath the sentence. You recognize what remains unspoken because, for much of your life, the unspoken carried the most important information.

You did not merely learn to read people.

You learned to survive by reading them.

That same history may explain why you become strangely calm when everything falls apart. While others panic, something in you grows quiet and strategic. You assess the danger, find the next necessary action, and begin solving the problem.

Crisis feels familiar.

And the familiar—even when painful—is something the body knows how to navigate.

What appears to others as composure may simply be a nervous system saying, I have been here before.

You may also find yourself studying people almost compulsively. You replay conversations, searching for hidden meanings. You build elaborate maps of character from a gesture, a hesitation, or a slight change in tone.

Why did they say that?

What did they really mean?

What happens next?

This is not curiosity alone. It may be the remnant of years spent trying to understand behavior that felt unpredictable. Knowing what someone might do next once made the world feel a little safer.

The habit followed you into other rooms.

So did self-reliance.

You became someone who does not expect to be rescued. You solve problems quietly. You carry more than people realize. Even when help is available, reaching for it can feel unnatural—sometimes more frightening than simply doing everything yourself.

When support was once unreliable, dependence began to resemble risk. Asking for help meant opening yourself to disappointment.

Competence became the safest place to live.

It has served you well. But it may also have kept people farther away than they needed to be.

And then there is the intensity with which you experience the world.

Music can stop you midstep. An unexpected kindness from a stranger can move you almost unbearably. Injustice does not merely offend your principles; it enters your body. Every goodbye seems to remain with you longer than it does with other people.

You do not observe life from a comfortable distance.

You absorb it.

People may have called you too sensitive. Perhaps what they meant—without understanding it—was that you were noticing more than they were.

Trust, understandably, comes slowly. Not because you are incapable of love or determined to be cynical, but because you learned early that appearances of safety could be misleading.

Your caution has cost you. There may be friendships that never deepened, tenderness you could not quite accept, and people you kept outside because you could not yet believe they meant to stay.

But when someone finally makes it through—when trust is earned rather than requested—your loyalty can be nearly unbreakable. Those relationships are often among the most honest and durable either person has known.

Stillness may be harder.

Rest ought to feel like relief, but sometimes it feels like exposure. When the world becomes quiet, your nervous system does not necessarily become quiet with it. It waits. It scans. It listens for the approaching change.

Somewhere in you remains the belief that stillness is merely the pause before something goes wrong.

Learning to rest, then, is not a matter of overcoming laziness. It is the difficult work of teaching the body that this particular silence is safe—that, at least for this moment, nothing is coming.

Perhaps the deepest result of all this is your need for meaning.

You cannot move casually through the world. Shallow answers stopped satisfying you long ago. You have looked too closely at pain—your own and that of others—and something in you refuses to let it be meaningless.

You need beauty to matter.

You need suffering to teach you something.

You need love to be more than temporary comfort.

This does not mean trauma was a gift. It does not mean the damage was necessary or that suffering should be romanticized. No child should have to become extraordinarily perceptive simply to feel safe.

But the sharpness is real.

And so was the cost.

Both truths must be held at once: the intelligence that was built and the difficulty that built it. We need not minimize the pain to appreciate the growth, nor dismiss the growth in order to honor the pain.

For years, the qualities that made you perceptive, resilient, and emotionally deep may also have made you feel as though something was wrong with you.

Nothing was wrong with you.

You were adapting.

You did it remarkably well.

The question now is not how you became this person.

The question is what you will do with the mind you built along the way.

Ever wish you could just divorce your gender?

sigh.

I’m a man. I understand how ‘no’ can feel like doing 60mph with only 40’ between your headlights and the intersection.

But knowing this only means understanding that hitting the brakes and putting the car sideways may be destructive and embarrassing, but it’s preferable to killing a young family by smashing into them full speed when you run the red light.

I don’t know where I learned to respect women, but not running red lights, my dad taught me. JaQ’uan didn’t get that chapter in his book about life.

Note: this story discusses rape, graphically describes sex, uses distasteful language and describes violence.

You’ve been warned.

The police report:

On the basis of facts developed during the investigation of this offense, it is believed that the suspect, on or about the date of November 16, 2024 committed the offense of PC 22.011(a)(1) SEXUAL ASSAULT • FI2, in Dust Meridian.

The facts of the offense are as follows: On 11-16-24 at around 1548hrs, Dust Meridian PD Officers responded to Dust Regional Hospital, in reference to a sexual assault. Officers met with Victim, Victim reported being friends with JaQ’uan (offender) JaQ’uan invited victim to his residence, on Nov 15 at around 1400hrs.

Victim reported while she was inside JaQ’uan’s bedroom, he asked to perform oral sex on her and Victim refused. Victim stated they had only been friends and Victim was only there to taik with JaQ’uan: JaQ’uan insisted and pulled Victim's pants off. Victim told JaQ’uan that she didn't want any sexual interactions with him. Victim got up to leave, but JaQ’uan forced Victim back on the bed, JaQ’uan then placed his mouth on Victim's vagina. JaQ’uan then inserted his penis, with a condom on, inside Victim's vagina. Victim kept teiling JaQ’uan to stop and that she didn't want to have sex. JaQ’uan placed his hand on Victim's neck and choked her. Victim stated she was in intense pain and was able to push JaQ’uan off. Victim then fled the residence and went to hospital.

Victim completed a SANE Exam through SANE Exam Nurses. Officers observed bruising on both sides of Victim's neck. SANE kit submitted to the TX DPS Garland Crime Lab for testing. Investigators met with Victim and went over the incident with her.

Victim reported that on the day of the sexual assault, she was going through severe depression. Victim stated when she goes through these events, she tries not to be alone. Victim stated her depression can spiral down and she can become suicidal and hurt herself.

She took JaQ’uan’s offer to go over to his residence as a friend, so she wouldn't be alone. Victim had never had sexual relations with JaQ’uan before and had only known him for a few months. Victim stated no one else was at JaQ’uan’s residence at the time of the sexual assault.

Victim provided text messages between her and JaQ’uan showing him inviting her to his residence, which he gave his address. in the text message conversation Victim messaged JaQ’uan that she was outside.

The next messages was from JaQ’uan that stated,

“U ok?, You real emotional, If u ever wanna talk im here”.

On 11-16-24, JaQ’uan sent a screen shot from a social media message thread of someone telling JaQ’uan that Victim was accusing him of rape.

JaQ’uan messaged. “Wtf.”

On 11-25-24, JaQ’uan messaged Victim asking why she was going around saying that about him and asked Victim to stop. The contact number for JaQ’uan in Victim's phone was the same number the DMPD had on file. Investigator later called the same number and spoke with JaQ’uan over the phone, which confirmed the number to be his.

Investigator received a notification from the Garland Crime Lab that male DNA was detected and analyzed from SANE kit. They ran the male DNA profile through CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) and received a match for JaQ’uan.

End of report

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Making this matter go from deplorable to horrible is the unstated detail that Victim was a sixteen-year-old.

Good grief.

How is this guy free?

Look, I’m no saint. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, some of them pretty severe (depending on who you ask). But somehow I’ve managed to exist for 5 decades without a single rape. In fact, I’d hazard that most men have.

If part one is sinister, part two is idiotic.

Open Mouth Insert Hammer

I have a friend name Gresh.

Gresh is a bear of a man, 49, well read, and an ex con.

Not a hardened gang-banger. Gresh got locked up for writing software that rounded down transactions and then deposited the ‘abandoned’ rounding into an account he controlled.

Yes, this is the plot of Office Space. Where do you think Judge got the idea for the screenplay?

So, he did 15 at a federal penitentiary and was released a better man. Sort of.

I got to know Gresh after he married a friend of ours. I grew to like him and we bonded over his love for reading.

He is highly intelligent. Though clearly he has some room for growth.

Last week, at a family BBQ, the subject of the rape came up and Gresh and his recently released cousin, D’rius, were at odds.

Gresh, for some inexplicable reason felt compelled to defend the rapist. It seemed to him that the victim had somehow entrapped JaQ’uan.

While cousin D’rius felt strongly that the young woman, a minor you will recall, had in fact, been raped.

This feels like the semi-idiomatic statement applies: When at first you set forth to defend your sanity, you have already lost the argument.

The disagreement simmered and for some reason spilled online Monday night.

It was then that Gresh, instead of calling a friend to complain and rail at the sky, decided to get in his truck and drive across town while live-streaming to Facebook a tirade of threats and some of the lowest brow trash talk I’ve ever heard.

Threats laced with that choicest of racial slurs for our dark-complected cousins, and an insistence that his (Gresh) violence was going to put D’rius in his place.

The live stream (about 15m) ends with Gresh getting out of his vehicle and berating D’rius for bringing a gun to a fist fight.

‘Oh! You tough!?! You REAL tough with that gun. You gon’ keel me!?! Imma go-rillah’, King Kong sing got shit on me!!’ Gresh shouts.

Reportedly, D’rius agreed and exchanged the weapon for a hammer.

Gresh is a large man. I learned he goes by the online pseudonym ‘silverback’ if that tells you anything.

While D’rius is built more like a man made from wire.

Very tough wire, it seems, for Gresh had his own ass handed to him.

D’rius knocked Gresh’s front teeth out and when DMPD arrived, D’rius had him pinned to the ground.

Gresh was arrested for a variety of serious crimes including making terroristic threats, traveling with the intent to do bodily harm, and about 5 other things I cannot recall.

In Gresh’s own words, ‘them PD had me layed out th’ middle o MLK blvd, like a punk.’

This has to be one of the most sinister-turned—idiotic situations I have seen since my own cousins ended up shooting each other over who misplaced the meth.

And insult to injury, neither man has any connection to the victim or the alleged rapist.

Two warriors picked a side and went to war. No questions, just piss and vinegar. Good grief.

Stupid is gonna stupid, I guess.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is my home town. The home that built me. Not really even a very good place to be from.

I’m going to try to be a better friend to Gresh. I’m going to tell him about my sister. How i greatly desired to bludgeon her husband to death after he tried to kill her and instead left her permanently disabled.

It wasn’t easy, but I offered him a Bible study.

Magnanimous, right?

Agape love in action.

Not neurons firing, adrenaline spiking, let’s smash something or someone. Preferably both.

Not how it works.

Maybe next time, he’ll call and ask me to go with him and I can ask, ’are you sure it’s with the risk of running the light instead of losing a little dignity?’

Fantastic video essay on Steven Spielberg's MUNICH, which I haven't seen since the first watch when it originally came out. Definitely due for a rewatch if for nothing else but the truly unparalleled masterful camera work alone.

Spent a full day assembling Ikea furniture and another full day breaking down all the boxes. I really hope it's the last time I crack open an Ikea box ever again as I am somewhat traumatized by the sight of anything Ikea after all the relocations made in the U.S. and the obligatory Ikea visits that would soon follow.

Though, realistically, I will soon have more Ikea in my immediate future; they somehow discovered on the day of delivery that certain items were out of stock. Items relating to some of the stuff that was actually delivered. Like say, the armchair's cushioning. I now have the frame of a chair assembled in the studio, completely unusable as a chair until its cushioning is restocked towards the end of the month, yay.

Alas, the dream of kicking back on a reading chair will have to wait for a while. Speaking of reading, I moved on to Tochi Onyebuchi's GOLIATH after dropping Iain M. Banks' USE OF WEAPONS. Paul Graham Raven sent me an article by Alan Jacobs that perfectly summarizes my feelings about the book (before even finishing it), and I suspect those same feelings are likely to be carried on throughout Banks' “The Culture Novels” were I to embark on diving into them, which I won't. I think I'm good. Unless new knowledge or insight is attained when experiencing a supposedly entertaining piece of fiction, it actually isn't all that entertaining imho.

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I can’t believe we are almost to 100 days. What have I even been doing? How am I so calm?

Today was busy again. Started off early helping my brother secure some Pokemon stuff from a drop at Target. Why? Well, why not? I waited in line, kinda made a friend, and got exactly what he was looking for. Then, I went to Orangetheory and then volunteered for a few hours.

I went home, organized my pottery notes and watched a movie. I grabbed a late, unhealthy dinner and went to glaze a couple of things. That is essentially it.

I wonder if these entries could be better or more entertaining if I didn’t just list what I did… I don’t know.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

1 September 2026

A mosquito net arcs over our bed in Seoul like an airy little mountain, or like an upright wishbone. Viewed from below while lying supine, the apex of the net appears to be descending upon you for an embrace with its central webbing stretched outwards by four limbs, almost like a flying squirrel mid-glide. At night this effect is heightened—dimmed light makes the fine netting body disappear around its structure. And the pink curtains in the room, which used to belong to Yena's grandmother, throw a rosy filter over the whole scene.

At the MMCA's Korea Artist Prize show, I spent the most time in Hong Jin-hwon's room looking at a single printed image he made of what appears to be rain and condensation on a window on a gray and gloomy day. Water droplets are foregrounded, the surface acting as the window. In the distance are two dark and blurred shapes; to me they first read as oil pumpjacks, but on closer inspection, one of them looks like a large statue of a figure pointing with an extended arm, and the other looks almost like a large abstracted kinetic sculpture of some kind. On top of all of that (visually) are scattered splotches of what looks like black paint or ink. The effect is an all-over flattening, three levels of perception compressed into an intervening barrier that is inhibiting but porous nevertheless.

alright, i was irritated yesterday. now, luck you, im frustrated. and its not even related to yesterdays topic. im talking about her again. obviously. i know what this is to me. thats not the problem. the probelm is im supposed to guess what it is to her. a relationship? something private? hell. something shes not sure about? i dont know. she doesnt seem to know either, so i guess im meant to sit here and figure it out for the both of us. i hate being a secret. i hate feeling like im something that has to be kept somewhere nobody can see. thats not how i like thins. thats not how ive ever been. and yet, surprise. im still here. it frustrates me. i keep telling myself that i should just quit her. just tell her i cant do this bullshit anymore i cant sit here and be a “secret” and leave it there. sounds easy, super easy yet i cant do it. i cant stop thinking about her, i cant stop wanting her, i cant stop missing her, her voice keeps showing up in my head, her name. dreams about her disappearing, walking away, whatever the hell my brain thinks its doing by doing that. and i cant even talk to her right now, or whenever i think i “Want to”, so.. my brain decided to give me some. options. with all this, it makes me want to go back to drinking or smoking, just to shut everything up for a while. but i havent. ive got my stupid little streak going, as what ill call it. silly me. a week or whatever of not fucking everything up. could call it a “good for you” bullshit. anyway, it still doesnt change the fact that i still want her, i want to quit this. i want to tell her im done with all of this. im done with her keeping me a secret. then i remember i dont want that. i want her. i miss her so fucking much. i want her so fucking badly. im still here for her, reckless to say, but im still alive for hher. which sounds fucked when you say it out loud, but whatever. im not intrested in making it sound suitable for you readers. and you know, im probably overreacting. probably.

ill talk to her eventually and she’ll say something, ill hear her voice, and suddenly she’ll possess my heart again and ill forget i was ever angry. so thats something to look forward to. lucky me. horaay. fuck yeah. i mean, if im being honest, it wouldnt surprise me.

Sincerely, Against all reasons. Hers.

P.S, i love that god damn woman. i’d die for her. id rip off my fucking lungs off to keep her warm and close to me. id do whatever for her. and before you start judging me, save it. you have nothing to do with whatever the fuck i say here. its my problem, my shits and my stupid fucking life. so keep your little opinions to yourself.

Alamo Square is where you take the postcard photograph. The painted ladies along the eastern edge, the skyline behind them, the lawn sloping away towards the Fillmore. On the morning of 10 September 2026, Mayor Daniel Lurie stood on that lawn and declared that San Francisco was in a rent emergency.

The numbers he brought were these. Median rents had risen roughly 26 per cent in a year, faster than anywhere else in the United States. Eviction warning notices filed with the Rent Board had climbed 44 per cent, from 1,033 to 1,488, between March 2025 and February 2026. Around two thirds of San Franciscans rent. And the industry generating the wealth bidding those rents upwards has not yet gone public. OpenAI filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June; Anthropic is reported to be aiming at the fourth quarter of this year. Whatever is happening to San Francisco rents is happening before the money is liquid.

The mayor of the richest city in the richest industry on earth stood in front of the most photographed row of houses in California and reached for the vocabulary of disaster response. Not a shortage. Not a crunch. An emergency, the word you keep for earthquakes and fires. Nine time zones away, researchers had just published a study of five million job postings in Beijing that explains, better than anything produced in California, what kind of emergency this is.

What a Rent Emergency Can and Cannot Do

Start with the mechanics, because they are humbler than the word suggests. The declaration carries no independent legal force. It does not freeze rents, suspend evictions or commandeer property. It is, in the assessment of reporters who were on the lawn, largely symbolic, a way of lending urgency to legislation that must still travel the ordinary route through the Board of Supervisors.

What travels with it is a package: six proposed ordinances and more than 30 million dollars in new spending. Relocation payments owed to tenants displaced under the Ellis Act would rise 25 per cent, roughly 3,000 dollars a tenant. Three million dollars more would fund nonprofit lawyers for an estimated 400 households facing eviction, twenty-seven million would subsidise rent for around 650 extremely low income households, and a million would pay for a Know Your Rights campaign. Supervisor Jackie Fielder wants landlords barred from evicting tenants who owe less than one month's rent. Supervisor Danny Sauter wants annual increases in rent controlled units capped at 10 per cent, closing the route by which landlords stack banked increases and capital improvement pass-throughs into one devastating letter.

“San Francisco is in a rent emergency,” Lurie said, “and as elected leaders in this city, we need to take action that meets the moment.” City Attorney David Chiu made the sharper point: “Tenant protection laws can only help if tenants know about them and they're enforced.”

Meg Heisler, policy director of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, called the package incomplete. “We can do better,” she said. “San Francisco tenants deserve more than that.”

She is right, though the reason is structural rather than a failure of nerve. Almost every lever that genuinely governs the price of a San Francisco apartment sits above the mayor's head, in Sacramento, and has for thirty years.

The Law That Turns a Boom Into an Eviction Notice

San Francisco's Rent Ordinance dates from 1979. It caps annual increases for covered tenants at a small figure tied to inflation and requires just cause for eviction, which by American standards is strong. It also contains two holes large enough for an entire industry to pour through.

The first is the date. Buildings constructed after June 1979 were exempted when the ordinance passed and remain exempt. Every tower raised in Mission Bay, Rincon Hill, Hayes Valley and SoMa across four decades sits outside it.

The second is Costa-Hawkins. The 1995 state statute bars local rent control over single-family homes, condominiums and any unit first occupied after February 1995, and guarantees landlords the right to set the initial rent for a new tenant at whatever the market bears. This is vacancy decontrol, and it converts a wage boom into a displacement event. A rent controlled flat is not permanently affordable. It is affordable only while the current tenant stays. The moment it turns over, the rent resets to 2026.

So in a city where salary aggregators put median total compensation for an OpenAI software engineer around 795,000 dollars and an Anthropic one around 600,000, every occupied rent controlled flat represents a gap between what the sitting tenant pays and what the unit could fetch. That gap is the incentive, and it widens every month the boom continues. The law supplies the tools for closing it: the Ellis Act, the 1985 statute letting an owner quit the rental business and clear a building; owner and relative move-in evictions; buyout offers; and the long grey zone of harassment and neglect that tenant lawyers call underground eviction, which appears in no dataset anywhere.

The teacher who has rented the same Mission flat for a decade is not being priced out in the ordinary sense. Her rent has risen a couple of per cent a year. What has changed is not her rent. It is the value of her absence.

Twenty-Six Per Cent Is Not One Number

Now the harder question, the one the declaration glided past. How much of this is artificial intelligence?

Begin by noticing that the figures disagree, and that they disagree inside the single most careful source anyone has. Apartment List's September rent report puts San Francisco year-on-year growth at 25.6 per cent. The same research team's July reading put it at 23.1 per cent, then the fastest in the nation, on a median of roughly 3,714 dollars across all unit sizes and 3,750 dollars for a one-bedroom. Two months apart, one methodology, nearly three points of difference. Zumper, which reports asking prices from listings rather than a mix-adjusted index, had the median two-bedroom at 6,020 dollars in July, the first time the city had crossed 6,000, and at a record 6,120 dollars in August. Apartment List adjusts for unit mix; listing platforms report whatever is advertised. The direction is unanimous. The level is not, and neither is the baseline anyone is measuring from.

The 26 per cent has at least four parents. The first is the hole the city fell into: rents collapsed more than 25 per cent by the end of 2020 and bottomed in 2021, so much of the current rise is a return to a previous peak rather than a journey beyond it. The second is the office. Return-to-office mandates began in earnest in January 2024, and the AI companies have been the most absolutist. Remote job postings in the Bay Area fell to 7 per cent in April 2026, down from 24 per cent in mid-2022. A job that can be done from Boise does not bid up a studio in the Lower Haight. A job requiring a badge swipe five days a week does.

The third is supply, and it is ugly. San Francisco permitted 705 apartments in 2024 and roughly 1,400 in 2025, against a state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation of about 82,000 units between 2023 and 2031. The vacancy rate fell from 5.1 per cent in 2024 to about 2.2 per cent by mid-2026, against a national rate above 7 per cent, and units lease in eighteen days rather than thirty. In a market that tight, a modest demand shock produces a violent price response, and the tightness is a policy choice made over decades.

The fourth is artificial intelligence, and here the evidence is genuinely strange. San Francisco is not having a hiring boom. It is having a compensation boom. In January the SF Standard reported that San Francisco and San Mateo counties lost 4,400 jobs in 2025, with the information sector shedding 4,500 positions, about 4 per cent. The sector that grew was leisure and hospitality, up 4,500, four fifths of it in food and accommodation. Ted Egan, the city's chief economist, and Enrico Moretti, the Berkeley economist who has spent a career on the geography of jobs, both feature in an account whose arithmetic is blunt: roughly 40,000 Bay Area technology workers were laid off, while OpenAI and Anthropic combined employed fewer than 10,000 people. Both firms crossed a million square feet of San Francisco office space this spring, and AI companies have taken more than three quarters of net absorption, pulling citywide office vacancy from 31.6 per cent to 27.2 per cent in a year. That is a real boom in floor space. It is not a boom in headcount.

The causal story is therefore narrower than the headlines tell. A small number of extremely well paid people, concentrated in a few blocks of SoMa and the Mission and required to be physically present, entered a market with no slack at the moment it was recovering from an artificial low. The AI boom is not the sole cause of the 26 per cent. It is the marginal bidder in a market where the margin is everything.

The eviction figure deserves the same scepticism. The Rent Board's calendar-year tallies run 745 notices in 2023, 920 in 2024 and 1,495 in 2025, steep but well below the 2,173 recorded in 2016, which complicates the claim that evictions are at a decade high. The Frisc, examining the data in July, found the increase overwhelmingly driven by nonpayment of rent, which landlords need not file with the Rent Board at all, so the true figure is higher. Nonpayment is not the signature of a landlord manoeuvring to capture AI-era rents. It is the signature of tenants who have run out of money. Both are true at once: a market pricing towards the top of the income distribution while the bottom falls behind on rent it already owes. Nobody knows the real number, as Christina Varner, the Rent Board's executive director, and the tenant lawyers quoted alongside her all concede, because different agencies count different things and the commonest form of displacement, the quiet kind, is counted by nobody.

Five Million Job Postings and the High-Skill Trap

Which brings us to Beijing, and to the most useful instrument anyone has built for thinking about what AI does to the inside of a city.

On 25 May 2026 a team led by Xiliu He, with Haoxiang Zhao, Mingyi Ma, Edward Wen Chuan Lai, Koei Enomoto, Anni Hu, Jiatong Li, Lingyun Chu and Yuan Lai, posted a paper to arXiv titled “Generative AI impacts on intra-urban inequality and skill premium in Beijing”. The dataset is 4,995,615 job postings from 2018 to 2024, mapped onto 1,383 neighbourhoods defined by Beijing's regulatory planning units.

The method matters. Rather than assigning exposure by occupation, the team decomposed postings into tasks and asked five large language models to rate each task's susceptibility to generative AI: ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GLM-4 and DeepSeek-R1. Pairwise correlations ran from 0.66 to 0.86, high enough to suggest they are measuring something real. Those scores were aggregated into a neighbourhood-level GenAI Exposure Index. The result is not a map of where AI companies have offices. It is a map of where AI-exposed work is done, block by block.

The first finding is spatial and unsurprising. Exposure concentrates ferociously in the core. Three zones form what the authors call a golden triangle: Zhongguancun Science City, Financial Street and the Guomao central business district, where scores consistently exceed 0.3, with clustering intensifying across Haidian and Chaoyang. The intra-urban AI divide, in their phrase, deepened.

The second finding should stop you. Using a difference-in-differences design centred on the release of ChatGPT, the team found that after 2023 wages in high-exposure neighbourhoods did not rise. They fell. The core estimate is a coefficient of minus 0.151, significant at the 5 per cent level, implying a decline of roughly 13 per cent. The event-study version is sharper in the first shock year, minus 0.193 for 2023, implying about 17.5 per cent, with partial recovery to minus 0.103 in 2024. Monthly wages in high-exposure neighbourhoods fell to around 13,673 yuan, narrowing the gap with lower-exposure areas from above rather than lifting anyone from below.

And those same neighbourhoods carried on attracting high-skilled workers, flowing towards places where the premium for exactly their attributes was evaporating. The authors call this the high-skill trap. Two mechanisms drive it. The first is task de-skilling: generative AI lowers the cognitive threshold for work that once required scarce expertise, coding and copywriting and data analysis among it. The interaction between exposure and education comes out at minus 1.286, meaning the wage benefit of exposure shrinks as education rises until it turns negative. The most qualified workers in the most exposed neighbourhoods fare worst. The second is crowding, for which the authors borrow the Chinese term involution: when the supply of workers in AI-exposed fields grows quickly and demand for their tasks does not, productivity gains push wages down rather than up. That interaction is minus 1.619.

This directly challenges the theory of skill-biased technological change that has organised economic thinking for forty years. That theory says new technology raises the return to skill. The Beijing data says generative AI did the opposite to the people holding the skills it touches, while continuing to draw them in.

Two Cities With the Same Geometry

Beijing is not a market-led city. Land is state-owned. Household registration governs who may settle where and access which services. Development is directed rather than discovered. If you wanted a control condition for the claim that AI-driven spatial inequality is a product of unfettered American property markets, Beijing would be a reasonable candidate.

And the spatial signature is identical. Exposure concentrates in a few core districts, high-skilled labour flows towards them, and their capacity to reward the people in them does not keep pace.

Two cities with almost nothing in common institutionally produce the same geometry. That points to something upstream of housing policy. Generative AI is an agglomerating technology. It rewards physical proximity to frontier labs, to capital, to the informal exchange of technique between people who eat lunch near each other. It concentrates in the densest, best-connected, most expensive square miles available, and keeps concentrating, because the returns to being inside the cluster exceed the returns to being anywhere else even when wages inside it stop rising.

What differs is not the force but the transmission into everyday life. In Beijing the pressure shows up in the wage data, because the state modulates who can live where and the housing market cannot express the full shock. In San Francisco it shows up in the rent, because vacancy decontrol offers a frictionless channel and nothing whatever modulates who lives where except price.

The Beijing authors' recommendations are instructive precisely because they sound nothing like American housing debate. They propose AI demonstration zones in municipal sub-centres and suburban new towns, a redirection of higher education towards complex collaboration and critical reasoning, and transition funds for highly exposed occupations. Deconcentrate the cluster, compensate the trapped. San Francisco is proposing 3,000 dollars more in relocation money for people evicted from buildings their owners are quitting the rental business to empty. These are not responses of the same order.

The Arithmetic of a Teacher's Rent

In February 2026, San Francisco's teachers went on strike. They wanted 9 per cent over two years. The district offered 6.

It lasted four days, the first strike at San Francisco Unified in nearly fifty years, and ended in a tentative agreement worth around 183 million dollars. The teachers got the equivalent of 6 per cent over two years: 2 per cent in each year, plus the equivalent of a further 1 per cent in each from two days added to the annual work calendar for training. They also won fully funded family health cover with Kaiser from 1 January 2027, with the district meeting half the cost from July 2026, and better classroom conditions in special education. They struck for nine and settled for six. Six per cent over two years is three per cent a year. Rents rose 26 per cent in one. The settlement trails the market by a factor of nearly nine, and it was the best outcome a four-day walkout could buy.

The salary schedule explains the anger better than any placard. A newly credentialed San Francisco teacher starts between 79,468 and 85,381 dollars. Tenured salaries run from 88,382 to a ceiling of 131,654, and the district average is around 103,472. Mission Local's comparison with other public employees in the same city found registered nurses earning nearly double and police officers about 30 per cent more. Jill Wynns, a former school board member, described the predicament exactly: “They're in a box. They're not in charge of their own revenue.” Unlike a city department, a school district cannot raise its own taxes.

Set that against the market. A newly qualified teacher on 80,000 dollars facing a one-bedroom at 4,000 a month is looking at 60 per cent of gross pay before a cent of tax. The standard affordability threshold is 30 per cent. She is at double it, and that is before the 26 per cent. San Francisco Unified loses roughly 10 per cent of its approximately 4,000 teachers every year: four hundred classrooms changing hands annually, in a job where continuity is the whole point.

The city tried to build its way out, and the attempt is a small masterpiece of unintended consequence. The Shirley Chisholm complex took applications from April 2024 and was ribbon-cut on district land in September 2025, 135 units financed with a roughly 48 million dollar city loan and federal low-income housing tax credits, with priority for SFUSD employees. Nine hundred people applied. Sixteen credentialed teachers live there. The rest are classified staff, because the federal credits cap eligibility at 80 per cent of area median income, which in San Francisco is 90,750 dollars for an individual. The lowest-paid tenured teacher, at 88,382, is already brushing that ceiling, and a second household income disqualifies her outright.

The city built housing for teachers and discovered that the only money available to build it with was money teachers earn too much to be allowed to live on. Dana Cuff of UCLA's cityLAB argues such projects should be called educator housing, since they will always hold more classified staff than teachers. Sara Hinkley at UC Berkeley puts the real problem where the evidence puts it: the crisis belongs to middle-income households too well paid for subsidy and too poorly paid for the market.

The Nurse, the Line Cook and the Ninety-Minute Commute

The nurse occupies a different position and illuminates the same structure. California is short something like 36,000 nurses, and the shortage has done what shortages do. Starting salaries at the major San Francisco academic medical centres now run above 170,000 dollars, with long-serving nurses approaching 227,000. A nurse can, just about, rent in the city she works in.

That is the exception proving the rule: only occupations able to bargain collectively and threaten a hospital with closure have kept pace.

The line cook has no such leverage, and works in the one sector that added jobs in San Francisco last year. This is the AI boom's actual employment footprint: not a wave of machine learning engineers but the restaurants and hotels and coffee shops that feed and house and caffeinate them. The jobs are here. The homes are not.

So people commute. A supercommute is more than ninety minutes each way. Around 3 per cent of Bay Area commuters make one, but the figure is 10 per cent in San Joaquin County, and in the Bay Area-facing towns of Tracy, Lathrop and Mountain House roughly one worker in three travels an hour or more each way. These are the people who open the kitchens, change the beds and empty the bins in a city with no room for them to sleep in. They are also the reason the 26 per cent understates the problem. The market clears not because rents found a level people could pay, but because the people who could not pay left, and kept coming back to work anyway.

A city can lose its teachers slowly, a classroom at a time. It loses its restaurant workers faster, because there is no tenure and no seniority and the commute is the first thing to break.

What the Last Two Booms Taught and Nobody Learned

None of this is new, which is the most damning fact about it.

Between 1992 and 1997, San Francisco recorded ten Ellis Act evictions. Between 1999 and 2000, at the peak of the dot-com boom, it recorded 698, with the Mission District, then predominantly Latino, showing the city's highest eviction rate. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project counts 5,549 Ellis Act evictions between 1994 and 2022, roughly 11,000 tenants removed by a law written to let landlords retire.

The second boom produced its own iconography. From late 2013 through the summer of 2014, protesters blockaded the private shuttles carrying Google, Apple, Facebook and Genentech employees down to Silicon Valley, holding placards reading Eviction Free San Francisco and Housing Is A Human Right. In 2018, voters passed Proposition C with 61 per cent support, a gross receipts tax on larger companies projected to raise up to 300 million a year for homelessness services, with the technology industry loudly divided over whether to pay it.

Three booms, three waves of displacement, three rounds of civic argument, and the underlying legal architecture unchanged throughout. San Francisco is extremely good at protesting displacement and structurally incapable of preventing it, because the instruments that would prevent it are held in Sacramento by a legislature with different constituents.

The timing of the latest proof is almost too neat. One day after the emergency was declared, on 11 September 2026, California's First District Court of Appeal struck down San Francisco's Empty Homes Tax. Proposition M, passed by 54.5 per cent of voters in November 2022, would have taxed owners leaving units vacant for 182 days or more. The court held it conflicts with the Ellis Act, which forbids any requirement that an owner offer or continue to offer accommodation for rent. In the same week San Francisco declared a rent emergency, the state told it that one of the measures its voters chose to address that emergency was illegal, on the authority of a statute from 1985.

The Money Has Not Arrived Yet

Everything described so far has happened in advance of the actual wealth event.

The compensation figures that make San Francisco engineers look like investment bankers are mostly not money. They are illiquid private equity, valued at whatever the last funding round implied. One Anthropic staff engineer reported roughly 1.25 million dollars in total compensation, of which about 843,000 was equity rather than cash. You cannot pay a deposit with a tender offer that has not happened.

A flotation converts that paper into money, all at once, for thousands of people simultaneously. This is the mechanism that produced the eviction spikes of 1999 and 2013, and it is queued up again. The question for a tenant is not whether these companies are worth what private markets say. It is what happens to a housing stock of roughly 400,000 units when several thousand people convert seven-figure paper holdings into deposits over an eighteen-month window, in a city that permitted 705 apartments in 2024.

The city has one genuine response in progress. The Family Zoning Plan, passed by the Board of Supervisors in December 2025 and in force since January under a state deadline, upzones transit and commercial corridors across the western and northern neighbourhoods, the parts of San Francisco that spent a century successfully resisting density. It is the most substantial reform in a generation, it is contested in court from both directions, and it is unavoidably slow. A building legalised in 2026 is occupied in 2030 at the earliest. The flotation window is eighteen months away.

What Actually Works and What Only Sounds Like It Does

The menu of proposals is long and the evidence behind the items is wildly uneven.

Extending rent stabilisation is the most popular idea and carries the most complicated research. The most rigorous study of San Francisco's own ordinance, by Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian in the American Economic Review in 2019, used the 1994 expansion of rent control to small multifamily buildings as a natural experiment. It found the policy worked as intended for those it covered, cutting tenant mobility by about 20 per cent and lowering displacement. It also found affected landlords reduced rental supply by roughly 15 per cent, converting to owner-occupancy or redeveloping, and that the lost supply probably raised market rents citywide in the long run. Both camps misread that result. It describes a transfer: incumbent tenants gain, future tenants lose, and the losers are invisible because they are people who never moved here. Stabilisation without supply redistributes scarcity rather than ending it.

Vacancy taxes are intuitive and, in California, apparently unlawful. San Francisco's is dead at the appellate level, so the instrument is unavailable.

Key worker housing has the Shirley Chisholm problem. American subsidised housing is financed overwhelmingly through low-income housing tax credits, and those credits cap incomes below what a mid-career teacher, let alone a nurse, earns. Jefferson Union in San Mateo County got round this by funding its 122-unit 705 Serramonte project with voter-approved bonds rather than credits, setting rents at half market and filling 60 per cent of units with credentialed teachers. San Diego Unified uses ground leases, keeping the land while a developer builds. Both found a way not to use the federal programme, which is a lesson about public land and public borrowing rather than about housing design.

Social housing at scale is on the November ballot. Proposition I, driven principally by the Democratic Socialists of America, would dedicate transfer tax revenue from properties worth 10 million dollars and above to housing production, with around 30 per cent reserved for permanently affordable, publicly or nonprofit owned homes with tenant participation in governance. Lurie calls it an unaccountable slush fund, a characterisation Ed Harrington, a former City Controller, rejects: “There are all kinds of good or bad reasons you might be for or against Prop. I. But it's not a slush fund.”

Which brings us to Vienna and Singapore, invoked in every social housing argument and understood in almost none. Vienna's Gemeindebau offers indefinite leases tenants can pass to their children; Singapore's Housing and Development Board sells 99-year leaseholds and houses roughly 80 per cent of the population. Both rest on a foundation San Francisco cannot acquire, since the state owns the land, controlling around 90 per cent of Singapore and accumulating Vienna's stock over a century from the 1920s. A critique from the American Enterprise Institute argues no American jurisdiction should try to copy the model, an ideologically motivated argument that identifies a real constraint. You cannot retrofit a century of municipal land acquisition onto a city that spent that century selling off its own.

What San Francisco does have is unused public land, untested borrowing capacity, a newly upzoned western half, and employers sitting on more cash than any private institutions in its history. Employer-linked housing is the option nobody wants to name, because the precedent is the company town, which tied a worker's shelter to her employment and turned resignation into eviction. That objection does not reach the version that matters here, which is not housing for AI employees but employer contribution to housing for everyone else, structured as land value capture: taxing the locationally specific rise in property values the cluster itself creates. The value was produced by agglomeration rather than by any landowner's effort. Proposition C was a crude version, and appetite for a better one depends on whether the industry prefers negotiating terms to having them imposed after the next eviction wave.

Who the Boom Is Built To Include

Return to the finding that makes the Beijing paper worth more than its citation count. The high-skill trap is not a description of what happens to cleaners and cooks. It describes what happens to the winners. The people flowing into Beijing's exposed core are graduates, and they are the ones whose wages fell 13 per cent while they kept arriving.

Read San Francisco through that lens and the shape changes. The frontier researcher on 800,000 dollars is not a representative member of the AI economy. She is an outlier inside a small firm inside a sector that shed more employment than it created last year. Job listings in the city are down 37 per cent from February 2020, and the boom's measured contribution to city employment was 4,500 jobs in food and accommodation, held disproportionately by people commuting from Tracy.

That is the answer to the question the emergency poses without asking. The AI economy, in the city hosting it, has room for a few thousand people at compensation levels with no precedent outside professional sport, and for a much larger number serving them at wages that do not cover the rent those levels have produced. In between, where a city keeps the people who make a place somewhere rather than a campus with weather, sits a widening gap no instrument reaches. Too well paid for the tax credit. Too poorly paid for the market. That is not a housing problem coinciding with an AI boom. It is the distributional signature of the boom itself, rendered in square footage.

The mayor's package is not wrong, and it is contemptible to sneer at it. Measured against the force arriving, it is roughly proportionate to what Beijing's researchers would call transition subsidies: compensation for a displacement the policy takes as given. The one measure San Francisco's voters chose that tried to alter the structure rather than cushion the fall was struck down twenty-four hours after the emergency was declared, under a statute older than most of the engineers whose salaries are the proximate cause.

What a rent emergency in the world's AI capital tells us is that the wealth of this industry arrives as a spatial force long before it arrives as money, that it lands on a legal architecture designed in 1979 and frozen in 1995, and that the people staffing the schools and hospitals and kitchens are not being squeezed out by an accident of timing. They are being squeezed out by a system working precisely as specified. Beijing ran the same experiment under opposite institutions and answered it by trying to move the cluster and compensate the trapped. San Francisco has answered with a press conference on a famous lawn, six ordinances, and a hope that the next boom is gentler than the last two.

It will not be. The flotations have not happened yet.

Sources and References

1. Sam Mondros, “Lurie declares rent emergency as SF housing costs surge,” The San Francisco Standard, 10 September 2026. https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/10/lurie-declares-san-francisco-rent-emergency/
2. Mission Local, “Lurie declares 'rent emergency' as S.F. rents spike due to AI boom,” Mission Local, 10 September 2026. https://missionlocal.org/2026/09/sf-rent-emergency-sf-lurie-tenants-ai-boom/
3. SFist, “SF Mayor Declares Rent Emergency, Announces Several Tenant Protection Proposals,” SFist, 10 September 2026. https://sfist.com/2026/09/10/sf-mayor-declares-rent-emergency-announces-several-tenant-protection-proposals/
4. Apartment List Research, “San Francisco's Rental Market Is Booming Again,” Apartment List, 25 August 2026, together with the same team's monthly rent reports through September 2026. https://www.apartmentlist.com/research/san-franciscos-rental-market-is-booming-again
5. Zumper, “Average Rent in San Francisco, CA and Rent Price Trends,” zumper.com, accessed 14 September 2026. https://www.zumper.com/rent-research/san-francisco-ca
6. Xiliu He, Haoxiang Zhao, Mingyi Ma, Edward Wen Chuan Lai, Koei Enomoto, Anni Hu, Jiatong Li, Lingyun Chu and Yuan Lai, “Generative AI impacts on intra-urban inequality and skill premium in Beijing,” arXiv:2605.25505, 25 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25505
7. The Frisc, “SF Evictions Are Up, No Matter Who You Ask. Then It Gets Complicated,” The Frisc, 17 July 2026. https://thefrisc.com/sf-evictions-are-up-no-matter-who-you-ask-then-it-gets-complicated/
8. San Francisco Rent Board, “Annual Eviction Report 2024-25,” City and County of San Francisco, 2025. https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/Rent_Board_Annual_Eviction_Report_24-25.pdf
9. Kevin Truong, “AI is booming. Tech jobs in San Francisco are not,” The San Francisco Standard, 28 January 2026. https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/28/ai-booming-tech-jobs-san-francisco/
10. Hughes Marino, “Q2 2026 San Francisco Office Market Report: AI Demand Pushes the Recovery into High Gear,” Hughes Marino, 17 August 2026. https://hughesmarino.com/san-francisco/blog/2026/08/17/q2-2026-san-francisco-office-market-report-ai-demand-pushes-the-recovery-into-high-gear/
11. Mission Local, “How much do S.F. teachers make vs. city workers? Much less,” Mission Local, February 2026. https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-teachers-salaries-sfusd-strike/
12. EdSource, “Tentative agreement ends San Francisco teachers strike after 4 days,” EdSource, February 2026. https://edsource.org/updates/tentative-agreement-ends-san-francisco-teachers-strike-after-4-days
13. The San Francisco Standard, “How are California school districts funding teacher housing? It really depends,” The San Francisco Standard, 10 September 2026. https://sfstandard.com/2026/09/10/school-districts-teacher-housing-financing/
14. San Francisco Chronicle, “S.F. built teachers affordable housing. But many make too much money to live there,” San Francisco Chronicle, 2026. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/sfusd-teacher-housing-21939488.php
15. Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade and Franklin Qian, “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco,” American Economic Review 109, no. 9 (September 2019): 3365-3394. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181289
16. San Francisco Chronicle, “S.F. landlords win battle over tax on empty apartments in wake of court ruling,” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 September 2026, reporting the First District Court of Appeal ruling of 11 September 2026. https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/san-francisco-vacancy-tax-ruling-22427983.php
17. California Apartment Association, “Costa-Hawkins Act,” caanet.org, accessed 12 September 2026. https://caanet.org/topics/costa-hawkins-act/
18. Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, “Ellis Act Evictions in San Francisco,” antievictionmappingproject.net, accessed 12 September 2026. https://www.antievictionmappingproject.net/ellis.html
19. The San Francisco Standard, “'We gave them hell': The people who fought Google buses remember battles won and lost,” The San Francisco Standard, 16 August 2026. https://sfstandard.com/2026/08/16/gave-hell-people-who-once-fought-google-buses-remember-battles-won-lost/
20. Ballotpedia, “San Francisco, California, Proposition C, Gross Receipts Tax for Homelessness Services (November 2018),” ballotpedia.org. https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Proposition_C,_Gross_Receipts_Tax_for_Homelessness_Services_(November_2018)
21. Mission Local, “Mayor Lurie blasts Prop. I as a 'slush fund.' His office would control the money,” Mission Local, 17 August 2026. https://missionlocal.org/2026/08/mayor-daniel-lurie-slush-fund-proposition-i-affordable-housing-social-housing-democratic-socialists-of-america-dsa/
22. Mission Local, “Board of Supervisors passes plan to upzone San Francisco,” Mission Local, 3 December 2025. https://missionlocal.org/2025/12/sf-upzoning-passes-board/
23. Levels.fyi, “Anthropic Software Engineer Salary,” levels.fyi, accessed 12 September 2026. https://www.levels.fyi/companies/anthropic/salaries/software-engineer
24. Allocations, “SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe & Databricks IPO Timeline 2026,” allocations.com, 2026. https://www.allocations.com/insights/spacex-openai-anthropic-stripe-databricks-ipo-timeline-2026
25. Edward J. Pinto and Tobias Peter, “Setting the Record Straight on the Vienna Social Housing Model,” American Enterprise Institute, September 2023. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Setting-the-record-straight-on-the-Vienna-Social-Housing-Model-final.pdf

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Chapter 1: The Thing You Keep Carrying Into Every Room

There are problems that stay politely in one part of your life, and then there are problems that follow you everywhere. You can be making coffee, answering an email, standing in the shower, sitting at a red light, or trying to fall asleep, and suddenly there it is again. The same question. The same fear. The same hurt. You may be functioning well enough that nobody around you realizes how much space it is taking up inside you. That is why I wanted to sit with you in this Christian encouragement for getting through a hard season, because sometimes the hardest part of a struggle is not what happened. It is how often it keeps happening again in your mind.

Maybe your phone is lying faceup beside you right now because you are waiting for a message that has not come. Maybe you have checked your bank account three times today even though you already know the number. Maybe you keep opening your email because one answer could change what happens next. Maybe you are trying to act normal around your family while privately wondering how long you can keep carrying this. If that is where you are, I want this reminder that God can carry you through what feels impossible to meet you before anybody tries to rush you toward a happy ending. Some things hurt for a while. Some questions stay unanswered longer than we want. Faith does not require you to pretend otherwise.

I think one of the loneliest parts of a difficult season is the fear that it will always feel exactly like this. When something is fresh, uncertain, or painful, the mind has a way of treating the present moment like a permanent address. You start imagining next month through the lens of tonight. You picture next year using the emotions you felt this morning. You quietly assume that because you do not know how this changes, it probably will not. That is not weakness. That is what pressure can do to a person when the future is hidden and the present is loud.

I have learned to be careful about making permanent predictions from temporary pain. Human beings are not very good at seeing beyond the room we are standing in. When the room is dark, we think the whole world has gone dark. When one relationship changes, it can feel as if connection itself is gone. When one opportunity disappears, it can feel as if usefulness is gone with it. When the body is tired, the mind can begin telling us that strength will never return. The problem is not that our feelings are fake. The problem is that feelings can be completely real while still being incomplete.

There is something deeply human in the way Jesus dealt with frightened people. He did not treat fear as if it made someone foolish or unworthy of His attention. Again and again, He met people in the actual condition they were in. He spoke to people who were grieving, sick, ashamed, confused, exhausted, rejected, and uncertain. He did not need them to clean up their emotions before coming near Him. That matters to me because sometimes Christian encouragement is delivered as if the goal is to get a hurting person to stop hurting as quickly as possible. Jesus often did something more patient. He entered the moment with them.

Think about the disciples when they were worried about bread in Mark 8. They had already seen Jesus feed thousands of people. They had watched scarcity become abundance right in front of them. Yet later, when they realized they had very little bread with them, anxiety took over again. Jesus responded by reminding them of what they had already witnessed. He brought their attention back to the baskets that remained after the crowds had eaten. He was not merely giving them a memory exercise. He was exposing something all of us do. We can have a history with God and still panic when the next need arrives.

That scene feels almost uncomfortably familiar to me. I can look back at situations I was certain would break me and see that I am still here. I can remember seasons when I did not know what the answer would be, and somehow life kept moving. I can remember prayers that felt clumsy, nights that felt too long, disappointments that seemed final, and moments when the future looked much smaller than it eventually became. Then a new problem shows up and, for a few minutes or a few days, I act as if I have no history at all.

You may know that feeling too. Perhaps you once lost a job and thought you would never recover financially, but eventually you found your footing. Maybe someone left your life and you could not imagine laughing normally again, yet one day you did. Maybe you went through a family crisis that consumed every conversation in the house, and now it is something you speak about in the past tense. The point is not that those experiences were easy. The point is that they became part of your story instead of the end of it.

That distinction matters. We often think overcoming means forgetting. It does not. Some things remain important because they changed us. Some losses leave a scar. Some disappointments alter the way we trust. Some seasons teach us things we would never have chosen to learn. Getting through something does not mean you wake up one morning with no memory of it. It means the thing stops controlling every room you enter.

There may be a day when you pick up your phone and realize you did not check for that message first thing in the morning. There may be a day when you drive past a place connected to the hurt and notice that your body does not tense the way it used to. There may be a day when the bill that has been sitting unopened on the counter is finally part of a plan instead of a source of panic. There may be a day when you tell the story without feeling pulled back inside it.

That kind of healing usually does not announce itself. It often arrives quietly. You notice it after the fact. You realize you slept better. You laughed without forcing it. You went several hours without rehearsing the argument. You made a decision without wondering how the person who hurt you would react. You prayed about something other than the crisis. Life had begun widening again while you were busy surviving it.

This is one reason I believe remembering matters so much in the Christian life. Not because the past is where we are supposed to live, but because memory can challenge the lie that the present will last forever. Scripture repeatedly tells people to remember what God has done. Those reminders are not sentimental. They give weight to faith when emotions are unstable. A person who can say, “I have been afraid before, and God met me there,” is not denying the current fear. That person is placing the fear inside a larger story.

Sometimes the most honest prayer you can pray is not, “God, I know exactly what You are doing.” It may be, “God, I do not understand this, but I remember that You have not abandoned me before.” That is a very different kind of confidence. It does not depend on having the outcome. It depends on knowing who is present while the outcome is still unknown.

Jesus said in John 16:33 that in this world we would have trouble, and then He told His followers to take heart because He had overcome the world. I find comfort in the order of those words. He acknowledged trouble before speaking courage. He did not ask His followers to call trouble something else. He did not promise them that faith would make life painless. He gave them a reason not to let pain have the final word.

That is what I want you to hold onto right now. Not the shallow promise that everything will work out exactly as you prefer. I cannot promise you that, and I do not think Christian faith asks us to make promises God has not made. I am saying something steadier. Whatever this season becomes, you do not have to face it alone, and the way you feel in the middle of it is not proof of how the story ends.

Maybe tonight you will still think about it when the house gets quiet. Maybe tomorrow morning the same concern will be waiting when you wake up. That does not mean nothing is changing. Healing can be happening before you can measure it. Courage can be growing while you still feel afraid. Wisdom can be forming in a season that still feels confusing. God can be at work in a life that still looks unresolved from where you are sitting.

I think of the person who is always dependable for everyone else. The one who answers the family calls, covers the extra shift, solves the practical problem, drives someone to the appointment, remembers the deadline, and rarely lets anyone see how tired they are. Eventually that person can reach a quiet moment in the kitchen after everyone else has gone to bed and think, “I do not know how much more I have in me.” There is no audience for that moment. No applause. No dramatic speech. Just a tired person leaning against the counter, trying to believe tomorrow can be carried too.

That person does not need a lecture about being stronger. They need permission to be human in the presence of God. They need to know that dependence on God is not failure. Jesus never made self-sufficiency the goal of discipleship. He invited people to follow Him, trust Him, remain in Him, and receive what they could not manufacture on their own. Sometimes the next faithful step is not finding more strength inside yourself. Sometimes it is admitting that your strength has limits and bringing those limits to Christ.

You do not need enough strength tonight for the next six months. You need grace for tonight. Tomorrow will have its own needs. Jesus taught His followers to pray for daily bread, not a lifetime supply delivered all at once. There is something merciful in that. We keep trying to solve whole seasons in one sitting. God often gives us what we need for the step directly in front of us.

So when your mind runs too far ahead, bring it back gently. You do not have to know how every conversation will turn out. You do not have to know whether every door will open. You do not have to solve next spring from this Tuesday night. You can make the call you need to make. You can get some sleep. You can pray without impressive words. You can take the medication your doctor prescribed, show up for work, apologize if you need to, ask for help, eat something, turn off the phone for a while, and let today be today.

There is a future version of you who may remember this season differently than you can imagine right now. That person may still respect what happened. They may still carry lessons from it. They may even have scars from it. But they may also have perspective you do not yet possess. They may understand that what felt like the whole story was only one chapter.

For now, you do not have to become that future version of yourself tonight. You only have to stop treating today's pain as a prophecy. You can let it be pain. You can let uncertainty be uncertainty. You can let unanswered questions remain unanswered for another day without turning them into evidence that God has left you.

The disciples worried about bread while Jesus was in the boat with them. We do the same kind of thing in a thousand modern forms. We stare at the account balance, the test result, the silent phone, the unfinished paperwork, the empty chair, or the calendar date we are dreading, and we forget that the presence of Christ is not measured by whether the problem has already disappeared.

Sometimes faith begins there, in the quiet admission that you are scared and the equally quiet decision that fear does not get to tell you what God will do next. You may not know how this season ends. You may not even know what tomorrow brings. But you have lived through days you once thought would undo you, and God is still present in the one you are living now.

Chapter 2: When Your Mind Keeps Reopening the Same Door

There are nights when nothing is technically happening, yet your mind behaves as if an emergency is underway. The house is quiet. The lights are off. The phone is charging on the nightstand. You are physically safe, but your thoughts keep returning to the same conversation, the same mistake, the same unknown. You replay what was said. You imagine what might happen next. You come up with better answers for a conversation that is already over. You try to solve a future that has not arrived. By the time morning comes, your body has been in bed for seven hours, but your mind has been working a second shift.

This is one of the hardest parts of carrying something unresolved. The problem does not stay in the place where it began. It follows you into silence. During the day, there are tasks, people, noise, and responsibilities to interrupt it. At night, there is less competition. The mind returns to whatever feels unfinished. That is why a disappointment from three days ago can suddenly feel larger at 1:30 in the morning than it did at lunch. The circumstances may not have changed at all. What changed is the amount of empty space around them.

I do not think faith requires us to deny this pattern. I think it helps us name it. There is a difference between a problem and the mental loop around the problem. The problem may be real. You may truly be waiting on a decision, grieving a relationship, facing a difficult medical appointment, or trying to repair something you damaged. But once the facts have been acknowledged, the mind can begin adding new layers that are not facts. We start predicting. We start assuming. We start attaching permanent meaning to temporary uncertainty.

A delayed response becomes rejection. A difficult week becomes a ruined future. A mistake becomes proof that we always fail. A health concern becomes the worst possible diagnosis before a doctor has even spoken. A financial setback becomes a mental movie in which every future bill goes unpaid. We do not do this because we are irrational people. We do it because uncertainty makes the mind hungry for an answer, and sometimes it would rather have a frightening answer than no answer at all.

That is where I believe Jesus offers us something deeply practical. He does not only speak to the final outcome. He speaks to the burden of trying to live tomorrow before tomorrow arrives. In Matthew 6, Jesus tells His followers not to worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will have trouble of its own. I do not hear that as a scolding. I hear mercy in it. He is drawing a boundary around the day. He is saying that you do not have to carry Tuesday's weight on Monday night.

That does not mean planning is wrong. Responsible people plan. Parents think ahead. Workers prepare. Families save. People make appointments, study reports, compare options, and take sensible steps. Jesus was not teaching carelessness. He was speaking to the kind of worry that consumes the present without changing the future. There comes a point where thought stops being preparation and becomes punishment.

You may know exactly where that line is in your own life. You have already read the email five times. You have already reviewed the numbers. You have already had the conversation. You have already made the appointment. You have already prayed. Yet your mind keeps returning to the same place as if one more round of thinking will finally produce certainty. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is recognize that there is nothing new to solve tonight.

I once heard worry described as an attempt to control the future with thought. That description has stayed with me because it feels so close to the truth. We imagine that if we think hard enough, anticipate every possible outcome, and prepare ourselves emotionally for the worst, then maybe we will not be caught off guard. But the cost is high. We end up suffering events that have not happened. We drain today's strength paying for tomorrow's imagined pain.

This becomes especially clear when regret is involved. Fear asks, “What if something bad happens?” Regret asks, “What if I had done something different?” One looks ahead and the other looks behind, but both can trap us outside the present. You may be lying in bed replaying a decision from last year, convinced that if you think about it long enough you will somehow find a version of the past where you chose differently. You will not. Reflection can teach us. Rehearsal can imprison us.

Peter knew something about regret. After denying Jesus, he did not merely have an embarrassing moment to get over. He had failed in a place where he had been certain of himself. He had promised loyalty and then collapsed under pressure. The Gospel accounts tell us that Peter went out and wept bitterly. That detail matters because Scripture does not sanitize the emotional weight of failure. Peter was not casually disappointed in himself. He was broken by what he had done.

Yet after the resurrection, Jesus did not meet Peter by making him relive the denial endlessly. In John 21, Jesus restored him through a conversation that moved Peter toward love, responsibility, and service. The past was not erased, but it was no longer allowed to be the only thing defining Peter. Jesus acknowledged the man who had failed and spoke to the man who could still be faithful.

I think many people need that distinction. There is a difference between learning from what you did and building your identity around what you did. A person can say, “I handled that badly,” without saying, “I am permanently ruined.” A person can admit, “I should have been more careful,” without deciding, “I can never trust myself again.” Repentance is meant to turn us toward God, not trap us forever in self-accusation.

Imagine someone sitting alone in a parked car outside work after making a serious mistake. They are afraid to go inside because they know a hard conversation is coming. Their stomach is tight. They have already written and deleted three versions of an apology. They are thinking about what their supervisor might say, what their coworkers might think, and what the mistake could cost them. In that moment, faith is not pretending the consequences do not matter. Faith is choosing to face what is real without adding ten imaginary disasters to it.

The person can walk inside, tell the truth, take responsibility, and accept whatever comes next. That is difficult enough. There is no spiritual value in mentally adding humiliation, unemployment, financial ruin, and lifelong failure before the first conversation even happens. God can meet us in consequences. He can teach us through correction. He can help us rebuild trust. The presence of consequences does not mean the absence of grace.

This is where the phrase “you will get over it” needs care. It can sound dismissive if spoken too quickly. Nobody wants to hear that their pain is small. What I mean is almost the opposite. I mean that pain can be real without becoming permanent. You can honor what happened and still believe it will not always occupy this much of your mind. You can take responsibility and still believe you are more than your worst decision. You can grieve and still believe grief will change shape over time.

Getting over something is not always a clean crossing from one side to the other. Sometimes it is uneven. You can have three good days and then one memory hits hard. You can feel stronger for a week and then hear a song, pass a place, open an old message, or notice an anniversary on the calendar, and suddenly the old weight returns. That does not mean you are back at the beginning. Healing is not cancelled because you had a difficult afternoon.

I think we sometimes make recovery harder by expecting it to be perfectly linear. We want evidence that every day is better than the one before it. Real life rarely works that way. A person can make genuine progress and still have moments that hurt. A person can forgive and still need time. A person can trust God and still feel nervous. A person can know the truth and still need to remind themselves of it again tomorrow.

The disciples themselves had to learn many truths more than once. Jesus repeated lessons. He corrected the same kinds of misunderstandings. He met fear more than one time. There is comfort in that because it means repetition does not necessarily equal failure. Sometimes maturity is simply returning to the truth faster than you used to.

Maybe last year a difficult thought controlled you for a month. This year it controls you for a day. That is progress. Maybe you once needed five people to reassure you before you could calm down, and now you can pray, breathe, think clearly, and call one trusted person. That is progress. Maybe you still feel the fear, but you no longer make decisions entirely from fear. That is progress too.

We tend to look for dramatic changes because dramatic changes are easier to recognize. But God often works in quieter ways. He teaches you to notice the first moment when your thoughts start running ahead. He helps you stop before sending the angry message. He gives you enough humility to apologize sooner. He helps you turn off the phone instead of checking one more time. He gives you a little more patience with yourself while you are learning.

These small choices matter because they interrupt the cycle. You may not be able to stop the first anxious thought from appearing, but you can decide what happens next. You can ask whether the thought is a fact or a prediction. You can ask whether anything useful can be done right now. You can pray honestly instead of rehearsing fear. You can write down the concern and decide to return to it in the morning. You can put your feet on the floor, drink some water, and remind your body that this moment is not an emergency.

There is nothing unspiritual about practical grounding. We are whole people. Our thoughts affect our bodies, and our bodies affect our thoughts. Elijah, after a moment of tremendous spiritual strain in 1 Kings 19, reached a place of exhaustion and despair. God's response included food, water, and rest before further instruction came. That detail is worth remembering. Sometimes the next faithful act is not finding a profound insight. Sometimes it is sleeping.

If you have been carrying the same thought for days, you may need to stop asking it to give you something it cannot give. Replaying the conversation will not change the words. Imagining every outcome will not reveal the future. Punishing yourself will not repair the mistake. Checking repeatedly will not make the answer arrive faster. There is a point where surrender is not passive. It is an active refusal to keep feeding a cycle that is taking more than it gives.

Surrender can sound abstract until you make it concrete. It may mean saying, “I have done what I can today.” It may mean deciding not to send another message. It may mean placing the paperwork in a drawer until morning. It may mean turning off the news. It may mean praying, “Jesus, I do not know what happens next, and I am done pretending I can think my way into knowing.”

That prayer may not change your circumstances immediately. It may change the room inside you. It creates a little space between you and the fear. It reminds you that uncertainty is not the same as abandonment. It returns you to the simple truth that you are here, God is here, and the next actual step will become clear when it is time to take it.

There is a humility in living one day at a time. It admits that we are not built to carry every possible future. We want complete answers, but often God gives enough light for the next few feet. We want a full map, and He gives direction for the next turn. We want reassurance about six months from now, and He meets us in this morning.

That can feel frustrating until you realize how much unnecessary weight we create by demanding certainty. Some of the peace we are waiting to feel after the answer arrives becomes available sooner when we stop requiring ourselves to know what we cannot know. Peace is not always the reward for getting the outcome you wanted. Sometimes it is the result of releasing the job of controlling the outcome.

You may still wake up tomorrow with the same unresolved situation. The message may still be unanswered. The decision may still be pending. The memory may still hurt. But you can meet it differently. You can refuse to let one unresolved thing become the lens through which you see everything else.

There is still coffee in the morning. There is still a person who loves hearing your voice. There is still work worth doing. There is still Scripture to read slowly. There is still sunlight through the window. There is still a body that needs care. There is still someone you can encourage. There is still God, present before the answer, during the answer, and after the answer.

The mind may reopen the same door tonight. When it does, you do not have to walk all the way back into the room. You can notice it. You can tell the truth about it. You can pray. You can return to the day God actually gave you. Over time, the door that once seemed to pull you in every time may become something you can pass without entering.

Chapter 3: The Morning You Notice Life Has Started Moving Again

There is a strange kind of morning that can arrive after a long season of pressure. Nothing dramatic happens. There is no announcement, no sudden answer, and no clear moment when you can say everything changed. You simply notice that you made breakfast before thinking about the problem. You realize you answered a message without first checking for the one you were waiting on. You drove somewhere and heard an entire song without your mind wandering back to the same fear. For a few minutes, life became larger than the thing that had been consuming you, and you almost missed the significance of it because healing often enters quietly.

That kind of moment can feel small, but it is not small at all. When a problem has occupied your thoughts for weeks or months, even a short stretch of ordinary peace matters. It means your mind is beginning to loosen its grip. It means the situation may still be present, but it is no longer filling every available space. You are not necessarily finished with the struggle, but you are beginning to discover that you are still a person outside of it.

This is one of the parts of recovery that people do not talk about enough. We often imagine that getting through something should feel dramatic. We picture a clear breakthrough, a powerful prayer, an answer arriving at exactly the right time, or some obvious moment when everything becomes settled. Sometimes that happens. More often, change is gradual enough that you only recognize it when you compare who you are now with who you were several weeks ago.

Maybe you used to wake up with fear sitting on your chest before your feet touched the floor. Now the fear comes later in the morning. Maybe you used to talk about the situation every time someone asked how you were doing. Now there are entire conversations where it never comes up. Maybe you still feel the loss, but it does not determine every decision. Maybe you still have unanswered questions, but you are no longer demanding answers before allowing yourself to live.

Those are not signs that the situation did not matter. They are signs that it no longer owns all of you.

I think this is where many people misunderstand what it means to get over something. They assume that if they are healing, they should no longer care. That is not true. You can care deeply and still move forward. You can remember and still be free. You can wish something had happened differently and still live a meaningful life beyond it. You can miss someone without needing them back. You can regret a decision without remaining trapped inside the version of yourself who made it.

There are parts of life that we do not recover from by returning to who we were before. Sometimes we become someone different. We gain patience we did not have before. We become more careful with other people's pain. We stop taking ordinary peace for granted. We learn how quickly circumstances can change, and that knowledge makes us hold certain things with more gratitude.

Consider the person caring for an aging parent while trying to keep a job, maintain a home, respond to family members, and make medical decisions they never imagined having to make. Their days may revolve around prescriptions, phone calls, appointments, forms, meals, and questions that have no simple answer. They may love the person they are caring for deeply while also feeling completely exhausted.

That kind of season can make life feel very narrow. Everything becomes about the next appointment, the next call, the next problem to solve. Even moments of rest can carry guilt because there is always something else that could be done. The person may stop noticing their own needs because somebody else seems to need more.

Eventually, though, they may be sitting outside a doctor's office or standing in a grocery store aisle when they realize that they laughed at something earlier that day. They may remember a conversation that had nothing to do with caregiving. They may notice that for fifteen minutes they were simply themselves again.

That does not mean the responsibility disappeared. It means their identity is beginning to expand beyond the responsibility.

The same thing can happen after heartbreak. For months, everything reminds you of the person. A restaurant, a song, a weekend routine, a photograph, a television show, or even a certain time of day can pull the memory forward. Then one day you encounter one of those reminders and notice that the emotional force has changed. The memory is still there, but you are not standing inside it anymore.

There is a difference between remembering something and reliving it.

That difference can take time to develop. You cannot always rush it. Some experiences need distance before they can be understood clearly. Some wounds need patience before they stop reacting to every touch. Some lessons become visible only after the pressure has passed.

Jesus understood that human beings often need time. When His disciples failed to understand Him, He did not discard them. When they argued, panicked, misunderstood, or acted from fear, He continued walking with them. Their growth was uneven, but it was real.

Peter did not become steady in one afternoon. Thomas did not move from doubt to confidence because someone told him he should. The disciples did not instantly understand everything Jesus had taught after the resurrection. Growth happened through encounters, corrections, remembrance, and time.

That should make us gentler with ourselves.

You are allowed to need time.

You are allowed to have days when you feel strong and days when the same issue bothers you again. You are allowed to notice progress without pretending the work is finished. You are allowed to trust God while still asking questions.

Faith is not a performance of certainty. It is a relationship with God inside uncertainty.

That matters when circumstances remain unresolved longer than expected. Maybe you thought the job search would take a month and it has taken six. Maybe you expected the relationship to repair itself, but communication is still difficult. Maybe you hoped treatment would give immediate answers, but your doctor is still adjusting the plan. Maybe the financial pressure has improved, but not enough for you to feel secure.

You can still be moving forward even while parts of your life remain unsettled.

Sometimes the progress is internal before it becomes external.

You begin responding instead of reacting. You stop making every decision from panic. You stop explaining yourself to people who have already decided what they think. You begin recognizing which conversations are worth having and which ones only reopen the same wound. You learn that you can care without chasing, hope without controlling, and love without abandoning yourself.

That kind of maturity is often born in seasons we would never have chosen.

I would rather learn patience in an easy way, but life does not always offer an easy way. I would rather learn trust while everything is going well, but trust often becomes real when something is not. I would rather learn surrender after I already know the outcome, but that would not actually be surrender.

The difficult season becomes a place where faith stops being something we admire and becomes something we practice.

Practicing faith can look very ordinary. It can mean getting out of bed when your emotions tell you to stay there. It can mean keeping an appointment. It can mean praying even when the prayer feels dry. It can mean refusing to send one more message to someone who has made their position clear. It can mean asking for help instead of pretending you are fine.

It can mean choosing not to spend an entire day trying to solve something that cannot be solved today.

There is a kind of strength in allowing yourself to live while the answer is still incomplete.

I think many of us postpone life without realizing it. We tell ourselves we will feel peaceful once the situation changes. We will enjoy the weekend once the decision comes. We will relax once the money is better. We will start again once the person apologizes. We will be ourselves again once the problem is over.

Sometimes the problem lasts longer than expected, and life keeps passing while we wait for permission to reenter it.

You do not need to wait for perfect circumstances before noticing what is still good.

You can drink coffee with someone you love while the future remains uncertain. You can watch the sunset even if the email has not arrived. You can laugh at something funny without betraying the seriousness of what you are carrying. You can plan something enjoyable without pretending the hard thing does not exist.

Joy does not mean denial.

Sometimes joy is resistance.

It is the decision that pain may be part of your life, but it will not become the only thing in your life.

Jesus spoke often about life in the middle of difficulty. He did not tell His followers that peace would become available only after every problem disappeared. He offered peace in the presence of trouble.

That changes the question.

Instead of asking, “When will everything finally be okay?” we can begin asking, “How can I live faithfully today while some things are still not okay?”

That question is smaller, but it is often more useful.

It brings us back to the actual day.

You can take care of what is in front of you. You can show kindness. You can tell the truth. You can rest when you need rest. You can ask forgiveness if you have caused harm. You can stop carrying responsibility for what belongs to someone else. You can pray for wisdom about the next step instead of demanding a complete map.

These choices do not create instant transformation, but they create movement.

Movement matters because despair often tells us that nothing is changing. It tells us that because the final answer has not arrived, no progress has been made. That is rarely true.

Maybe your circumstances have not changed, but your boundaries have.

Maybe the person is still difficult, but you are no longer letting every comment control your day.

Maybe the financial pressure still exists, but you have a plan now.

Maybe the grief is still present, but you have begun talking about something other than the loss.

Maybe you are still waiting, but waiting no longer feels like the absence of life.

That is movement.

There is one more thing I want you to remember when you think about the phrase, “You will get over this too.”

It does not mean you have to hurry.

It does not mean you have to prove how strong you are.

It does not mean you need to become emotionally detached.

It means this moment does not have the authority to define the rest of your life.

The thing that feels enormous today may eventually become something you understand differently. The person you are desperately trying to keep may someday be someone you can release without bitterness. The mistake you cannot stop thinking about may become part of the wisdom you offer someone else. The season that makes no sense may eventually become the reason you understand another person's struggle with unusual compassion.

God wastes very little.

That does not mean He causes every painful event or that every bad thing should be called good. It means He is able to work inside circumstances we would never choose. He can form something in us while we are healing from something else.

Romans 8:28 is sometimes quoted too quickly, as if it means every painful experience is secretly pleasant. That is not what the verse says. It says God works in all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.

The power of that promise is not that all things are good.

The power is that God is still working when things are not.

You may not see what He is doing yet.

You may only see the unanswered question, the empty place, the difficult conversation, or the uncertain future.

That is enough for today.

You are not required to understand the whole story while you are standing inside one chapter.

You only need to remember that chapters turn.

The night you thought would never end eventually became morning. The season you thought would destroy you became part of your history. The thing that once occupied every thought eventually became something you could discuss without losing yourself inside it.

This one can change too.

There may be a morning coming when you notice that the first thing you thought about was not the problem.

There may be an afternoon when you realize you were fully present with someone you love.

There may be a week when you look back and notice that the fear visited less often.

There may be a moment when you understand that you did not forget what happened. You simply stopped allowing it to determine who you were.

That moment will not erase the road behind you.

It will prove that the road kept going.

So keep walking.

You do not have to walk quickly.

You do not have to pretend you are not tired.

You do not have to know exactly where the road leads.

You can walk with Christ one ordinary day at a time.

There will be mornings when you need to remember what He has already carried you through. There will be nights when you need to hand the same fear back to Him again. There will be days when you feel stronger and days when you feel like you have made very little progress.

Keep going anyway.

You are not where you were.

And the thing that feels like the center of your world right now does not have to remain there forever.

One day, perhaps sooner than you think, you may look back at this season and recognize it as something that changed you, taught you, humbled you, strengthened you, and eventually released you.

You will not need to pretend it never happened.

You will simply know that it no longer owns you.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

When I was a kid I used to dislike driving up to Deltona to visit my aunt and uncle. I generally liked my aunt and uncle, so it wasn’t them. It was the Deltona area at the time that garnered my disdain.

This was the early-to-mid-90s. Deltona is an early exurb of the Orlando, Florida area, really close to Sanford. Both communities were “developed” in the 1980s as a place for “starter homes” for new families. Centex Homes billboards were a regular sight on I-4 in those days, one of the leading companies building cheap houses all over Central Florida. Eddy, who was my youth pastor growing up and a mentor figure for me for many years, was a carpenter by trade and he helped build all the houses in the Deltona area. He said that he’d hop in the back of a truck to ride to the job site, dodging rattlesnakes to then get on a roof and just hop down the line of houses, moving from roof-to-roof. He told me that guys would sometimes attempt to kill rattlesnakes from the back of the truck by using rebar like a spear and throwing it at them.

“You had one shot,” he’d tell me from the driver’s seat of his van as we drove past the Deltona exit on our way to New Smyrna to surf, “a rattlesnake has like an 8-foot striking range, so if you missed there was a real risk that the snake could bite you in the truck bed.”

This story was often accompanied by a phrase I’m sure lots of us have heard before; that, before the houses, there was “nothing out here.”

Nothing.

This was what I didn’t like about Deltona. The surrounding area felt like there was nothing. Just miles and miles of what I would later come to know as “scrub pine”—forests of tall pine trees and small palms, the ground beneath being sand littered with pine needles, cones, and dry sticks. A landscape that seemed boring and banal. Tearing it up for houses and strip-malls seemed like an absolute improvement.

The epitome of land that is “undeveloped.”

My first memories of my mom as a working person were when she worked as the bookkeeper for a real estate developer. The concept of “undeveloped land” is something I unconsciously sublimated from my earliest years.

I remember when my childhood church, the First Baptist Church of Pine Hills, was eyeing its future growth and owned a 50-acre plot of land in the Ocoee area of Central Florida. Eventually this plot of land would become my high school and the main place of worship for the church. But when I was like 8 and we went out for the ground-breaking ceremony for the building that would house classrooms and a gymnasium, the area was a seemingly endless stretch of orange trees. There was one hill, heading West on Highway 50, that when it crested you could see almost all the way to Claremont. In 1990 it was a horizon of green, a single road bifurcating fields of citrus. Everyone who grew up in Florida prior to the 2000s likely has a story about some area that “used to be nothing but orange groves.”

But, to my mind, orange trees were something. Scrub pine was, truly, nothing.

***

When I was in seminary I was first exposed to the theologians of Radical Orthodoxy that would become deeply influential to me. In particular is Catherine Pickstock. A friend of mine had given me a burned CD of an interview she and John Milbank gave (I think to the BBC) and Pickstock said something that has stuck with me ever since: all things were created to worship and so when we look at a tree and see it as a being in worship this changes our relationship with the tree—it is no longer a commodity to be used but a creature that glorifies its creator.

Like I said, I this stuck with me and I think of it often, especially now that I live in Hawaiʻi which is a place that pretty openly celebrates the fellowship and sacred participation of all creatures. In Hawaiian thinking, trees and animals are a “people” who share our spaces with us and it is our kuleana (responsibility) to care for them and treat them as part of our ʻohana (which, as Lilo all taught us, means family). The continued use of valleys and islands for live-fire drills and bombing practice, the sullying of our wai (water), the loss of indigenous agriculture to pineapple and sugar farming to export wealth out of our communities is all seen as actions that hurt our family. The ʻaina (land) is part of us, is something that participates in a sacred life. Hawaiians rightly understand that all of creation worships its creator and so we are not free to casually exploit creation and treat it as a kind of impersonal “resource” for consumption.

Calling land “undeveloped” carries with it an assumption: that turning that land into something that can be monetized is the realized telos (its end or purpose, to use an academic theological term) of that land. The assumed thinking here is that a piece of land is effectively “wasting its potential” by simply existing.

Members of the Church are not innocent here. Centuries of interpreting passages about tilling the land or our God-given “dominion” over creation as though it is our obligation to transform land into something for financial gain have their genesis in various corners of the Church. The truth is that our “dominion” is supposed to look like the Kingdom of God, which is defined by Jesusʻ own humility. A gift that indigenous Christians give back to the Church is the reminder that our relationship with the land is defined by what Hawaiians call pono, which is most closely translated as “righteousness” (but is also deeply related to the concept of sovereignty). We are stewards of a creation that is not ours, set in the midst of a worshipful mosaic of fellow creatures, expected by God to do right by them.

I’m of the mind that Christianity itself has been the victim of a kind of intellectual colonization that has caused it to lose focus on things that Jesus called to our attention. Wealth-hoarders/addicts throughout generations have the habit of forcibly wrenching religious beliefs into something that supports their exploitative vision. Jesus, ever the agrarian, repeatedly directs our attention to the created world in order to teach us about the Kingdom of God—which is to say that the exploitative impulse we see coming from Christian Nationalists and others of their ilk is not something intrinsic to the Christian faith itself, but is the result of the colonizing impulse to rework anything and everything into justifying these actions.

The “undeveloped land” mindset is subtle. What starts as “there was nothing but orange trees” can quickly turn into “there was nothing.” And of course there was never nothing.

***

When I was in Thailand in 2007 I met guys who had grown up in the US while their dads were being educated for ministry. Once they returned to Thailand they took to their Thai culture to a degree that even astounded other Thai people. I went through a similar thing when I returned to Florida after my time in Northern Virginia/DC during seminary. I became extra Floridian.

An author who was important to me at this time was Jeff Klinkenberg. His Seasons of Real Florida should be required reading for anyone moving to the state. It was him who got me to understand that scrub pine land was far from “nothing.”

Turns out that this type of land, ubiquitous and seen as the kind of bland “cookie matrix” between the chocolate chips of “civilization” (to borrow an image from Chuck Palahniuk), is a completely unique ecosystem. It’s a rare example of a “wet desert,” meaning that even though the area gets rain like 200 days out of the year (calling Florida the “Sunshine State” is just the first of many falsehoods about the state that charlatans came up with to sell land starting in the 1800s) because the ground is mostly sand, the water doesn’t stay and runs through down to the aquifer beneath the surface. There are crazy lizards that swim in the sand. And the whole thing has evolved to rely on lightning.

See, scrub pine is sandy because it used to be ocean. Florida was basically an underwater sandbar until relatively recently (in a geological sense). The plants that grow there are opportunistic plants that have adapted to eke out enough moisture from the sand to thrive. That and they can make use of the consistent rain that falls (nearly every day in Central Florida is a thunderstorm starting around 3 pm). These tall and thin pine trees are also perfect lightning rods. The lightning strikes the palms, they catch fire. The fire opens their cones and the rising heat helps carry the seeds. The fire also burns off parasitic plants and over-zealous undergrowth. With Florida being the lightning strike capitol of North America, this is ideal.

Basically, this is an ecosystem that has adapted perfectly to its environment—one could argue that it does so in worshipful response to what God has ordained it to do, moving as it does through the long evolutionary process of God’s creative act. It’s a rare and beautiful thing when one really considers it.

But, it also so happens to be flat and easily transformable land that also just so happens to exist around some of the most active tourist hotspots in the world. Which means that it is not in the best interest for the investors that we see this land for what it is and celebrate it as a means to glorify God and draw us all closer into His love. No, it has to be seen as “undeveloped.” As “nothing.”

This scenario is playing out all over the world. You’ll hear this language as the wealth-addicts eye the construction of yet another data center. Or high-rise that will never be filled. Or shopping center that will put other places out of business. Or agriculture land that will grow corn or beef to be exported elsewhere at the expense of feeding the hungry who live in the detritus of what we might call “post-developed land.”

For us Christians there can be no such thing as “undeveloped land.” No vista contains “nothing.” Rather it is all rife with the creatures of our God and King, living in uninterrupted worship of Him.

“You love all things that exist and loathe none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it.” (Wisdom 11:24, ESV)

If God loves it, then we’re meant to love it. It’s not “undeveloped.” It’s something entirely more valuable.

A pen and ink drawing of a scrub pine forest that I drew after learning to appreciate them

---

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#theology #nature #ecology #Jesus #Episcopal #Anglican #Christian #Bible

In Summary: * This has been a good Wednesday, all things considered. It started a little rough for me. I had a touch of the intestinal bug that hit the wife on Sunday, but I'm already feeling much better. And, in spite of not feeling 100% on top of my game, my meeting at the bank went well. My afternoon was spent relaxing, listening to a thirteen inning MLB game between the Minnesota Twins and the New York Yankees. The Twins finally won that game by a score of 5 to 4.

Listening now to relaxing radio music, there's nothing on my agenda other than the night prayers and meditations, and probably another early bedtime.

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= 226.97 lbs. * bp= 154/90 (60)

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

Diet: * 05:00 – 1 Reese's pb cup, nacho chips w. cheese & meat sauce * 12:15 – popcorn, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy * 16:40 -1 fresh apple, and a few more Reese's pb cups

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 03:50 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 04:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 10:30 – prep for a business meeting later today * 11:30 – business meeting at bank * 12:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvi * 13:30 – listen to radio call of MLB game, Yankees vs Twins * 16:32 – and the Twins win, 5 to 4, in the 13th inning of an overtime game. * 16:45 – follow news reports from various sources

Chess: * 09:10 – moved in all pending CC games

I’ve been remembering my dreams again. I’ve stopped falling asleep with YouTube on and blaring in my ear, and I do sleep with a notebook beside me most nights.

There are times when I won’t remember very much in the morning, but then if I concentrate hard enough, I am able to retrieve them. I usually pause and try really hard to come up with tiny elements or recall a tiny fragment—eventually, bigger chunks of the dreams emerge.

I notice that a lot of what I dream about has something to do with my every day. They don’t come from nothing. Whether it’s about eating less meat, or about my partner. All is one. Everything is connected.

Let’s do a card pull this evening: The Tyrant. Of course, I pull this one. I’ve just spent most of my day in front of the computer making graphics and working for this job that barely cares about me. I need to care about myself. In our society, where FREE love and care are so scarce.

Where money is worshiped like God, we must remember to care. To let go of all that we think we must do. What are we called to do? What am I being called to do?