Donnie’s voice is always a little ahead of him
like a video you forgot to slow down,
that banjo-quick cadence
trying to fit a whole day into one breath.
If he’s not on the forklift
he’s on the skateboard,
rolling down the long aisles
like a thought that can’t sit still.
Visitors see him blur past pallets
word balloons trailing in his wake
and think: What the hell
but we just smile.
A 1.5-speed man
in a 0.75-speed world,
trying to keep time
from catching him.
Ice on the fence.
Wind in the bones.
A long hour since the last sunflower.
We keep watch on the holy place:
the pole, the tray,
the little swinging box of mercy.
We have heard the saying:
Consider the birds —
we do not sow, we do not store,
and still we are fed.
Truly?
Then where does the love go
when ice turns minutes into hours
and the feeder hangs empty
as a promise?
Hush —
there it is — the human again,
the Large One with the Bucket.
Sound the alarm! (Not the danger one —
the food one.)
Titmouse first, bold as a rumor.
Finches like falling beads.
Chickadees stitching the air with cheers.
Cardinal on the top branch,
a red exclamation point:
Brothers! Sisters!
The generous hand has returned!
Go, tell the sparrows;
tell that nervous wren;
tell the whole freezing world —
Today, we do not starve.
Where will we find, we loneliest of the lonely, we human beings — for this is certainly what we will one day become through the aftereffects of science — where will we find a companion for the human being! Formerly we sought a king, a father, a judge for everything, because there was a shortage of proper kings, proper fathers, proper judges. Later we will seek the friend — human beings will have become self-sufficient majesties and solar orbits — but lonely. The myth-building drive will then turn outward toward the friend.
— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)
As mentioned in my last piece, I am very Mean and Bad and Not Compassionate, unlike the Goods and Empathetics of the world. As such, it should come as no surprise to you that I am tired of your mental illness.
To be specific, I am tired of your labeling of every struggle and character flaw you have as a “mental illness,” with which you will be stuck with for life, and that impedes you from doing any normal thing humans have always had to do.
…You people are pathetic and ridiculous. I’m sorry. I realize this, again, sounds mean and uncompassionate and that I will be told I just don’t understand what it’s like to struggle with ailments like not being able to get places on time (or at all) or think about what food I might eat tomorrow or the next day.
Some mental illness is devastating, disabling, and not something you can shame people out of with a brisk pep talk. But her irritation isn’t pure cruelty. It’s a reaction to a culture that has turned “mental health” into the default explanatory language for a huge range of ordinary misery, often with a tone of grave sanctimony that leaves no room for distinctions. We all know people who act like a list of diagnoses is a substitute for a personality, or an excuse for multiple failures.
But Murphy is yelling at people who, in many cases, are merely doing what humans always do: responding to incentives. They’re lonely, anxious, and trying to gain approval in a culture that rewards visible suffering with sympathy. Under this climate of opinion, the safest way to ask for attention is to frame it as a diagnosis, and the easiest way to feel special is to feel wounded in a tasteful, boutique way. Indeed, where will we self-sufficient majesties, we moderns, find “the friend”? The tragedy is that many go looking for him or her in the comment section or among the followers, where “validation” is cheap, intermittent, and addictive, and where the one thing they actually need, a real person who cares enough to stay and help through hardship, can’t be manufactured. Even if the cure is as boring as good habits, physical movement, and a fuller social life, the lesson has to arrive as friendship, not as another angry performance on the same virtual stage.
And the friend really is missing, for a nontrivial slice of the country. Pew found 8% of Americans say they have no close friends. The Survey Center on American Life reports 12% with no close friends, and notes that in 1990 it was 3%. The Surgeon General’s advisory goes even broader: it cites survey evidence that only 39% of U.S. adults felt “very connected” emotionally, and that approximately half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness. If that’s even roughly true, then a lot of what we’re calling a “mental health crisis” is also, perhaps even mostly, a friendship and connection crisis.
Many people are overdiagnosed and overmedicated, but doctors aren’t necessarily stupid or wicked; the system just runs on what scales. A quick checklist can flag “loss of interest” and “low motivation,” but it can’t tell you whether you’re clinically depressed, merely demoralized, socially starved, or trapped in a life that has become frictionless and empty. The scalable outputs are predictable: therapy referral, a prescription, symptom management. Sometimes that’s the right path. Sometimes it’s just looking for your lost keys under the streetlight blocks away because the light is better there.
Viktor Frankl should be read more widely. For a lot of otherwise comfortable people, the problem isn’t a disorder so much as a lack of meaning: the absence of projects worth suffering for, relationships that fill the days, responsibilities that make life feel necessary. When meaning is missing, people still experience the ache; they just call it anxiety. They call it depression. They call it ADHD. They call it “burnout.” Then they shop for management strategies, because management is what modern life offers.
And so we get the “worried well” as a social type: healthy, wealthy, educated people treating therapy as routine maintenance, like a dentist appointment for the soul. The married couple with two personal therapists and a marriage therapist isn’t necessarily ridiculous; it may even be helping them. But it’s also a sign of the times: friendship professionalized, conversation outsourced, meaning handled by appointment. A paid hour of attention stands in for what used to come from a circle of friends, a congregation, a club, a shared craft, a common project.
If the deepest need is “the friend,” then the remedy won’t be found in a bottle, and it won’t be delivered by a social-media lash. Pills scale. Protocols scale. Even therapy, now, is being packaged, systematized, and app-ified. I personally know of people who use chatbots for therapists. But friendship doesn’t scale. Meaning doesn’t scale. You can’t automate the one person who knows you well enough to tell you, with affection, “Stop doing that. Come on. Let’s go do something hard and worth doing. I’m here.” Nietzsche is prophetic once again: we became self-sufficient solar orbits — and then discovered that self-sufficiency is a poor substitute for a steadfast companion.
Keep calm. Gaze coldly.
Why? — Because this calm and this cold represent the durable; time disengaged from everything.
A man keeping cool is on the scale of a century. Anger and all the added emotions in the end make up a level plane. In the long run, there never was anything. Don’t lose sight of this final, solid nullity. Let some sign, — an extended, horizontal line — underpin all your secret reactions and meteoric feelings.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1
Confession. It was last year, when I was in bed at Montrozier, that I opened a Montaigne. I quickly threw it to one side. It bored me to death. Anyone can write such stuff.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1
The reader has long since realized it by this point, but Valéry confirms it in so many words: we are very far from the genial, omnivorous humanism of Montaigne here. These notebooks aren’t essays in the Montaignean sense, meant to converse with a reader. They read more like laboratory notes: a mind watching itself, trying to turn experience into an instrument — impersonal, exacting, and deliberately uncharming. Montaigne can talk about digestion and friendship, cowardice and books, and somehow it all becomes thought. Valéry wants thought without digestion — mind scrubbed of the “mere human” that makes Montaigne readable, and lovable, and (contrary to Valéry’s sniff) almost impossibly hard to imitate.
The Lady of the House says that as a toddler, when adults tried to help her, she would glare and insist: “Me do!” That’s Valéry’s attitude — except he wants to “me do” his way out of the body itself. Feelings are dangerous because they give other people leverage; ordinary reactions must be repressed; calm and cold represent “the durable.” Even his reading preferences obey the same law: he doesn’t want to be “taken up and passively lived” by novels; he likes books that stimulate him to be more himself — which is to say, more active, more in control, more irreducible. The implied ideal is almost a brain in a jar: pure potential, pure mind, exempt from the petty biological impositions that make up the bulk of our existence.
He even records, with a kind of affronted amusement, that “a Japanese professor has, apparently, made me a Buddhist” — while insisting he knows nothing about Gautama Buddha or theosophy. But the funny part is that he doesn’t merely lack the tradition; he is temperamentally opposed to it. There are doors standing open — whole libraries of people who have examined the same questions of ego and identity for centuries — but for Valéry the point is not relief from suffering, it’s authorship. He doesn’t want the solution shown to him; he wants to derive it himself. And the deeper irony is that what gets called “Buddhist” about him is usually the cool gaze and the disidentification — yet he’s using those tools not to dissolve the illusory self, but to refine it and solidify it into an untouchable “I.”
Reading the Cahiers can feel like reading out of the corner of your eye, because you know Valéry would resent your attempt to see him clearly, to get a handle on him, to catch him in a conceptual net. Naturally you still try. You wonder about youthful crises, tragic love affairs, the whole human backstory that would make him make sense in the usual way. But that reduction is exactly what he’s refusing. He vehemently rejects the idea of being reduced to a single concept, a single role. He would rather be potentially many things than certainly one thing. And then, in spite of all that refusal, he gives himself away in a single sputtering sentence: “The most infuriating thing is to see that knowledge is powerless over pain. The intelligence encompasses it, describes it, possesses it and — can do nothing. Infuriating and scandalous.” That’s the closest he comes to passion: not tenderness, not gratitude, but rage at encountering an experience his mind can’t neutralize into disinfected understanding. It’s tragic, and — though he would hate the word — endearing: the great engineer of inner sovereignty discovers the one fact that cannot be made obedient. The man who wanted to be ungraspable is, at last, grasped — by pain.
By dint of repeating my ‘ideas’ to other people, they detach themselves from me — or rather: I detach myself from them. I don’t think them any more. There’s no longer any intimacy between us and — however accurate they might have appeared to me, — I feel the need to find new ones, — even contrary ones — to replace these beloved mistresses who have turned into streetwalkers — in order to be myself.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1
Paul, buddy, you need to have your priorities straight before you join an intellectual swingers’ club. It’s not fair to freely share your ideas with other men and then coldly disown them as whores afterwards.
But seriously, though, I know what he’s getting at. So does Fernando Pessoa: “No intelligent idea can gain general acceptance unless some stupidity is mixed in with it. Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border — like a toll — most of the intelligence it contained.” Many years ago, I coined the term noospheric entropy for this phenomenon: “ideas and concepts are forever decaying into clichés, slogans and buzzwords.” I still like it. I think it describes a real thing. But if my blackest nightmare should ever come to pass, and I hear of Malcolm Gladwell or Yuval Noah Harari citing me during a Ted Talk, you better believe I would disavow it, deny paternity, and delete my blog like a man fleeing a crime scene.
What do you mean “we,” paleface? Is someone holding a gun to your head and forcing you to comment on the latest viral outrage? You chose to talk about it in order to keep up with the “discourse.” This is what you do with your own free will and free time. You could change the subject, or if that fails to take, you could walk away and do something meaningful, like fix a wobbly chair in your house. I have no patience with this disingenuous passivity. If your water tastes like urine, stop pissing into your own aquifer.
I can’t even fault a media whore like Lemon for coming up with a cynical stunt to get more attention for his new Substack career. It wouldn’t work without so many willing marks playing their part. Political discourse on social media is nothing but professional wrestling for people who are too stupid to grasp the nuances of professional wrestling. The old stereotype was the toothless yokel screaming at ringside when the heel cracks the babyface over the head with a steel chair, but it’s been common knowledge for decades that pro wrestling is scripted, and most fans now know exactly what they’re participating in. The real marks in 2026 are the ones who yell at their screens about politics with all the earnestness of yokels yelling at the referee to turn around and catch the heel in the act of cheating. They should know, on some level, that the spectacle is fraudulent, and they still behave like the most gullible fan in the arena.
The point is never the “incident;” the point is the argument it manufactures. The boring baseline facts — private property, a religious service, people trying to worship in peace — get skipped like the opening act. Instead, everyone leaps straight to the proxy argument that never ends: immigration, ICE, Trump, “fAsCiSm,” the entire omnicause. The crowd doesn’t just buy tickets; it builds the ring, provides the refreshments, and generates the “heat” for free, then calls it “staying informed.” At least wrestling has the decency to wink. This stuff demands you keep a straight face while you’re being worked — and then applaud yourself for not being the sort of person who gets worked.
My ‘scepticism’, my retreat from or disdain for real things, acts and so on, is without doubt linked to my muscular mediocrity. I’ve always had an intense dislike for any positive muscular effort and although physically fairly well-proportioned and having a certain ‘athletic’ disposition, namely a feeling for the elegance of movement — the feeling of muscular weakness, whether real or imagined, has played a significant role in my development. I’ve always attempted to replace an expenditure of energy φ by an expenditure of energy ψ.
— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 1
Many such cases. That’s a lot of fancy-schmancy words just to say, “I can’t squat 135 to below parallel.” It’s the old saw about doing vs. teaching, revised: those who can’t lift, cerebrate. Which would be harmless enough — everyone compensates somewhere — except the cerebrators so often feel obliged to moralize about it, as if the Meathead’s love of iron were a symptom of a stunted mind rather than the simple fact that some men are at home in their bodies. The propaganda runs one way because Eggheads own the printing presses: the strong are only strong because they can’t think. But the logic works in reverse too. A man who can move twice his bodyweight in plates has less need to flee into abstractions to feel potent.
From an interview with Daniel Kalder, whose Infernal Library is a hilarious book that you really should read.
I remember so many times in my younger days when I would pick up a book in a furious mood, having wasted energy on a pointless argument with someone who not only was impervious to evidence, but couldn’t even carry on a semblance of a rational debate. I read voraciously because I wanted to know. I wanted to challenge my own intuitions, and I wanted to understand the world as much as I could; I didn’t want to be one more complacent idiot, belching out vapid slogans and recycled Facebook rumors in lieu of knowledge.
One of the ironies I encountered along the way is that much of “wisdom,” to the extent that it can be reached, involves changing one’s mind and forgetting old “knowledge,” even more so than simply accumulating knowledge through reading. The more I pursued understanding, the less I could believe in the old ideal of building an impenetrable fortress of truth. I suspected I might even be going in circles, not getting anywhere in particular.
The final irony was realizing that even as I pursued personal progress in knowledge, the world as a whole was doing no such thing. Eventually you live long enough to see ideas come back into fashion, ideas which you thought “everybody knew” were wrong a few decades ago. But now you’re an old head, a living meme, and no one wants to hear what you think you’ve learned. And so the world goes on its cheerfully ignorant way, recycling one stupid, destructive idea after another.
In a new interview with The Times, Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) was asked about his thoughts on Bob Vylan’s chant, responding, “[It’s] sad and pointless. That’s just riding on the current wave of leftism, where you don’t have to think anymore. You just react with the herd. Moo!”
That would be the former frontman for the Sex Pistols, mocking today’s herd of independent minds. The trickster god, truly, he loves us and wants us to be amused.
A friend of mine grew up with punk and alternative and still plays contemporary versions on his radio show. When we listen to it, I can’t help silently thinking how safe, predictable, and boring it all is now. It’s become culture-war reenactment. Classic rock with a pink mohawk and a nose ring. The music, the politics, the moral emphases, the approved villains du jour — everything arrives in a neat bundle. You already know exactly what they think on the same narrow range of topics without having to ask. You can take it all in at a glance: rebellion that functions as a call-and-response, a membership ritual, a little communion wafer of approved outrage.
It’s especially funny when one of punk’s old high priests commits the unpardonable sin of…continuing to form his own opinions. The establishment, consisting of people desperately pretending they’re not the establishment, is scandalized as always. The heresy is refusing the mandatory chant, mocking the herd instinct, declining to treat slogans as thinking. Once a “rebellious” scene becomes an institution, it polices its borders like any institution: it starts confusing dissent with treason, and spontaneity with contamination. Poses held too long don’t stay poses. They ossify into statues.
There’s a tragedy in that arc, and it isn’t confined to punks who almost qualify for social security. A generation grew up believing that youthful attitudes and correct opinions would solve the world’s problems; then time did what time does, and they found themselves reluctantly in charge of a world with the same old problems. And so the costume gets worn long past the point of dignity, because without the costume there’s the blank fact of adulthood: maintenance, tradeoffs, partial victories, and the slow work of being responsible for something real. Meanwhile the next generation gets trained — ironically — less to think than to inherit the approved attitudes of their elders, like heirlooms.
All habituations (e.g., to a certain food, like coffee, or a certain timing) in the long run have the result of cultivating a certain kind of human being. Therefore look around you! Test the smallest thing! Where does it want to go? Does it belong to your kind, to your goal?
— Nietzsche, The Joyful Science / Idylls from Messina / Unpublished Fragments from the Period of The Joyful Science (Spring 1881–Summer 1882)
Another day, another viral video. Like a moth to a flame, someone else decides to blow up their life and career for a moment of attention on social media. I don’t believe most of these people sit down and choose ruin in cold blood. What they choose, over and over, in tiny doses, is something smaller: the little performance, the little outrage, the little “say the thing” that gets rewarded. Then one day the habit reaches its natural conclusion, and the person who hits “post” is already doomed.
Aristotle and Nietzsche agree on one blunt point: you become the kind of person you practice being. Aristotle says we become just (or not) by doing just acts (or not), until the repetition hardens into character. There’s something liberating about this. It loosens the superstitious grip of “That’s just how I am” and even “That’s what my upbringing made me.” But it also hands you the responsibility: if you can be formed, you can be reformed — and that means noticing which habits are shaping you into someone you don’t actually want to be. As Unamuno said, we should aim to be the parents of our future rather than the offspring of our past.
Nietzsche’s advice is almost insultingly practical: test the smallest thing. Not your grand ideals; your reflexes. What do you do in the ten-second gaps? What do you reach for when you’re bored, or annoyed, or lonely, or pleased with yourself? Those are not neutral gestures. They’re the training regimen.
There is little doubt A.I. will be transformative. And yet, for all the disruption it promises, I am struck by how much will remain unchanged. The most consequential decisions in business have never been about processing information faster or detecting patterns more efficiently. The most salient concerns are questions such as what kind of enterprise a firm should aspire to be, what culture it should embrace, what risks it should tolerate and how its leaders can plan when the path forward is unclear. These are questions of judgment, and judgment cannot be automated — at least not any time soon.
True. But it can be abdicated instantly, and there’s nothing people like more than handing off responsibility for judgment. They’ll love a machine that makes decisions feel inevitable. AI doesn’t replace judgment so much as provide a frictionless way to dodge it: the model recommends… and suddenly nobody is choosing, they’re “following the data.” If things go well, leadership “leveraged cutting-edge AI.” If things go badly, “the model was wrong.” Judgment won’t be automated. It will be subcontracted, with plausible deniability baked in.
Snow, then sleet: the driveway seals itself.
Seventy yards of polished “no.”
I stand with a shovel like a steel amulet,
praying for traction, bargaining with time.
The neighbor arrives; the tractor lowers its blade—
a calm solution to my private drama.
I miss my old Impreza’s cheerful grip;
I miss, most of all, being ready.
****
Forecast says doom. It delivers eight inches,
plus a neat varnish of ice on top.
Seventy yards becomes a logic puzzle:
how to get to work without a miracle.
My neighbor owns the miracle (diesel).
He clears my drive; I pay in thanks.
All year I don’t need a tractor.
All winter I want one.
My goal is not for everyone, nevertheless it is communicable, on account of similar humans as well as because those opposed will gain strength and pleasure from it to formulate their essence for themselves, too, and to realize it as working spirit. I want to help all who seek their model by showing how one seeks a model: and my greatest joy is encountering the individual models that do not resemble me. The devil take all the imitators and followers and panegyrists and admirers and devotees!
— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)
This might be easy to misread as mere hauteur: he’s “not for everyone,” he’s writing for “similar humans.” Lots of people say that and mean, “I’m for a better everyone.” Nietzsche is saying something stranger, and rarer: my aim is communicable without being recruiting. The point isn’t to gather admirers; the point is to create a kind of wake turbulence in which different types, sympathetic and hostile alike, clarify themselves. He would even prefer that those opposed to him will “gain strength and pleasure” from the encounter, because the opposition forces them to formulate their essence — to stop living on borrowed slogans and become, in his phrase, a “working spirit.” (That is: not a mere opinion-haver, but a stance that actually animates a life.) It’s a surprisingly big-picture, almost civic-minded ambition.
“The devil take all the imitators…” The disciple is the least interesting kind of agreement: it’s agreement that produces no new organism, only a photocopy. He’d rather be misunderstood by a live mind than perfectly understood by a dead one. This is why he’s so hard on evangelism. In The Will to Power he asks why idealists, the moment they find some “bizarre ideal,” feel compelled to propagandize for it, almost as if they have no right to it unless everyone else recognizes it too. The hipster and the conformist secretly shake hands. One asks the herd what to like; the other asks the herd what to like so he can like the opposite. Both are still crowd-directed.
Nietzsche’s better alternative isn’t “always be avant-garde.” That’s just a different uniform. The alternative is inner-directedness — liking what you like because it answers something real in your temperament, your needs, your curiosity, your sense of life. If it’s popular, fine. If it’s obscure, fine. If people join you, fine. If they don’t, also fine. The goal is not to found a sect of “Nietzscheans,” but to help people (including opponents) become more sharply themselves. He can sound almost Zen-master-ish — “go away ”— because he knows that the easiest way for a reader to evade the hard work is to turn the writer into an idol. The writer becomes a permission slip to stop thinking. He’d rather you take your own ideal as far as it will go, and then take heart, because others will fly even farther.
Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.
The Gospels do not present a soft, therapeutic Jesus whose entire public mission is to validate the politics of educated suburban moms. You can assemble a “nice Jesus” out of carefully chosen lines — feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, forgive seventy times seven — just as you can assemble a “hard Jesus” out of other lines: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and the blunt demand that allegiance to him outrank even family and life itself. The text is not a simple moral pamphlet. If you want to recruit it as a partisan cudgel, you can.
And if you step outside the sermon and into history, the problem gets worse. A great deal of serious scholarship situates Jesus in the world of Jewish apocalyptic expectation: the sense that the end is near, judgment is coming, and everything is about to be overturned. In that context, the radical ethic is spoken from a very different time-horizon. The ethics of someone who thinks the apocalypse is nigh are not the ethics of someone trying to raise a family, pay a mortgage, keep a business afloat, care for aging parents, and make decisions under imperfect information for the next forty years.
Too much modern moralizing is childish. Most of our ethical disagreements aren’t because one side loves cruelty and the other side loves compassion. They’re because life forces us to juggle duties: generosity versus solvency, mercy versus safety, forgiveness versus deterrence, ideals versus consequences, the immediate relief of suffering versus the slow work of building institutions that don’t collapse under the weight of good intentions. Some stances are easier when you think tomorrow won’t come. Some forms of purity are only available to people who won’t have to live with the bill.
So no, there is no pure Christianity floating above politics, untouched by human desire. There never was. There is only the hard work we can’t escape: interpreting unclear information, weighing competing goods, choosing under uncertainty, revising in light of consequences, and doing it again next week. If you’re looking for a Jesus who saves you from judgment, who issues you a laminated, unambiguous policy sheet, you’re asking for the one thing the human condition doesn’t offer. No easy answers are coming to save us. The work is the point.
In the 1989 hillbilly-revenge movie Next of Kin, Briar Gates, played by Liam Neeson (I know; I was surprised too when I looked it up) is defending his scruffy patch of rural life: “This land’s mine!… I can go out and take a piss on it in the middle of the night if I want to!” That’s how I feel about my humble little blog-property. It may not be glamorous. It doesn’t have “creator tools” or “discovery” or a TV app. But it’s mine: I can piss post whatever I want, whenever I want, in whatever awkward, unfashionable format I want — and I don’t have to audition for an algorithm or comply with a platform’s latest reinvention of “community.” A blog is land; Substack is a nice apartment in someone else’s building. Now you’ve got journalists moving in to try to recreate their glory days, and it looks like the latest renaissance of blogging will have to pick up stakes and move on again.
See, this wouldn’t keep happening if you didn’t keep chasing after “engagement” and “relevance.” To paraphrase Lt. Ronald Speirs, “You went to Substack because you think there’s still hope. But the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you’re already irrelevant. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll be able to function as a blogger is supposed to function.”
