“You wanna play a game?”

I said sure. She said, “Not that kind of game. I want to talk.”

Okay. What game.

“You name three things from your day. Something that made you happy. Something you wish you could take back. And something you’ll remember.”

She went first. I won’t tell her things for her, but I’ll say that watching a twelve-year-old name something she’d take back from her own day, out loud, to her father, is the kind of thing that makes you think emotional intelligence is a teachable skill. She has more of it than I did at her age. She has more of it than most adults I’ve worked with.

Then it was my turn.

For my proud thing, I told her about Jessica. She’d been laid off three weeks ago and was deep in the loop of “I’m not good enough.” Every silent inbox was more evidence. Before I left to pick up Savannah from her eighth-grade dance, I’d handed Jessica a copy of Don’t Believe Everything You Think, which usually lives on my coffee table. When I got back, she met me at the door with the book open. She’d flipped to the first page she landed on. The section was called Thoughts versus Thinking. The example on the page was: You lost your job. The thought: I lost my job. The thinking: I’m not good enough. Everyone is judging me. I’ll never recover. Word for word what she’d been saying to herself for three weeks.

She looked at me and said, if that’s not the universe talking, I don’t know what is.

For my take-back, I said I wished I’d taken a picture of Savannah when I brought her home from the dance, before she changed out of her dress. She looked beautiful and I let the moment pass.

For my remember, I told Bean about my director using the term exemplary employee to describe me in a conversation that morning. He’s retiring at the end of May. He didn’t have to say it. He said it.

Bean was satisfied with that. So was I.

A few minutes later I said, “Actually, can I redo my proud thing?”

A few months ago I built a document in my second brain called What I’m Building. The subtitle is A Marine who learned to tell stories now builds the infrastructure to say something that lasts. Under it are four pillars.

The first is a public voice. Essays, field notes, ideas under my own byline that compound over time. The second is meaningful work, which is my day job at VA ORD: communicating research that saves veterans’ lives, treating it as a craft, leading with veteran impact instead of data. The third is systems that outlast the moment. The Second Brain itself. The capture habit. The tools that turn insight into output. The fourth is the man I’m becoming. Acting from my word and not my mood. Knowing my values. Holding ground. Staying present for the people who matter. Asking hard questions and writing the answers down.

At the bottom there’s one question I’m supposed to ask myself daily. What did I do today that moves one of these forward? Just one.

I told her that what I was proud of, really, was that when I sat back at the end of work that day, I could feel I’d touched all four. Not because I’d planned to. Because the pillars are real, and when I’m walking inside them I know. When I’m not, I also know. I spin my wheels and I feel it in my chest before I can name it.

Her eyes lit up. She tried to find a word for the feeling I was describing. She landed somewhere close. She got it.

When I was twenty-two I worked at Home Depot with a man named Tommy. He passed last year. The first real thing he ever told me was that my most valuable asset was time, and that I needed to start investing money immediately, because compounding doesn’t care how smart you are. It only cares how long you give it. Someone who starts at sixty-five will never catch the person who started at twenty-two.

The same arithmetic applies to the self. I wrote down what I was building at forty-eight. If I’d written it at twelve, the body of work would already exist. The systems would have been compounding for thirty-six years instead of three months. The man I’m becoming would be further along the road.

I don’t know if Bean will internalize any of this. She’s twelve. The conversation might land tonight and disappear by Monday. That’s fine. The seed isn’t the four pillars. It’s the habit of deciding who you are on purpose and writing it down so you don’t lose the thread. It can be three pillars, six, one sentence on an index card. The number doesn’t matter. The deciding matters. The writing it down matters. The coming back to it matters.

Years ago I posted something online that I cringe at now. I said that if half of what I thought ever touched paper, people would think I was a genius. It was an arrogant line and I deserved to be called on it. But what I was actually trying to say, badly, was that I knew I was losing the most useful thing I had. Insights kept arriving and kept leaving, and I wasn’t keeping any of them.

It took me about fifteen more years to start.

Bean got bored of the game eventually and went back to her iPad. I sat on the porch a while longer. I thought, if she ever asks me what I’d really take back, the answer is that one. The fifteen years between knowing what to do and doing it.

I don’t plan to tell her that. Not yet. But I’ll be ready when she asks.

If I told you I’d give you a million dollars to make this call, would you make it?

Every man said yes. Of course. You’d cancel dinner reservations. You’d leave a soccer game. You’d move mountains for a million dollars.

Then why, he’d ask, is a soccer game enough to miss it?

I’ve been thinking about that question for over a decade. He wasn’t saying the call was worth a million dollars. He wasn’t saying men’s work should rank above a soccer game. He was pointing at the exits. We build them ourselves, and we make them reasonable.

We say the people we love are the priority. Then we let a scheduling conflict feel like a reason to disappear. We say our word means something. Then we find an exit when keeping it gets inconvenient. The exits are always reasonable. That’s what makes them exits.

At BetterMen, accountability has a shape. We hold formations at specific times. If a man is late, the circle stops and he stands in the middle of it. The other men, twenty or thirty of us, form a ring around him. Then he does the silly.

The silly has three rules. Don’t touch anyone. Give 100%. Don’t quit.

Picture a grown man running around the inside of a circle, full speed, screaming gibberish at the top of his lungs, flailing his arms, kicking his legs, making faces, being a complete idiot. Ten seconds. There’s no timer, just feel. By the end he’s exhausted in a way ten seconds shouldn’t make a man. I remember one who did it quietly. He had to do it again.

The silly isn’t punishment. Punishment would be the wrong shape. The silly is a way to flatten the ground again. The man who showed up late absorbs a small public cost so the men he kept waiting don’t have to carry it. He doesn’t owe an apology. He owes his body. He pays in laughter. Then everyone moves on.

I learned a kind of accountability there I hadn’t seen anywhere else. The Marine Corps had formations, and the accountability there was different. Colder, transactional, on the books. The men’s work teaches an accountability that doesn’t require punishment. It requires showing up where you said you would, and when you didn’t, taking the cost in front of the people you let down.

Commitment isn’t a feeling. It’s a decision you make in advance so you don’t have to make it again when it gets hard.

That’s the whole thing. That’s the million dollar question.

When you decide in advance, you stop negotiating with yourself. The retreat is in September. I’ll be there. There’s nothing to weigh, nothing to talk yourself into or out of. The decision is already made. All you have to do is show up.

When you don’t decide in advance, every commitment becomes a fresh negotiation. And you will lose that negotiation more often than you think, because the opposition always has a reasonable argument. I’m tired. There’s a work thing. The kids need me. I’ll make the next one. The opposition isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just that if you listen to it long enough, you end up a man who doesn’t keep his word, and you got there one reasonable excuse at a time.

Wayne’s question wasn’t really about the call. It was about the pattern.

How you show up in one place is how you show up everywhere. The man who finds it easy to skip is practicing something. He’s practicing the skill of deciding his commitments are negotiable. That skill shows up at work, in relationships, with his kids. Not because he's a bad man. Because that's what he's been practicing.

The inverse is also true. The man who keeps his word on the small things, the standing appointment, the formation at the agreed-upon time, the promise he made on a Tuesday to his ten-year-old, is also practicing something. He’s practicing being the kind of man whose word means something. That practice compounds.

Sometimes something genuinely outranks the commitment. A health emergency. A kid in crisis. The actual fire. You handle it, you come back, and the practice resumes. That’s not the failure mode.

The failure mode is when the thing pulling you away doesn’t outrank the commitment, but you let it feel like it does. The friend in town. The work thing that could wait. The pull in those moments is real, but the priority hasn’t actually changed. You’ve just decided you’d rather be somewhere else, and you’re letting the feeling do the work of a real reason.

When that happens, the deviation is data. Not about the commitment. About you. The question isn’t whether you broke your word. The question is what you were running from. The work asks you to look at yourself. The friend lets you not look. The cost of the avoidance is the work. The cost of the work is the avoidance. Pick.

I still make the retreats. Not because I have nothing else going on, and not because they always rank as the highest priority on any given week. Sometimes they don’t. But I’ve stopped letting things that don’t outrank them feel like they do.

That discipline has shown up everywhere else. In how I parent. In how I work. In what I’m willing to put my name on and what I’m not.

September 10 through 13. Washington State. I’ll be there.

Wayne asked the question once. I’ve been answering it ever since.

Ready to do the work? Start here.

For the past couple weeks, I’d been mentally doing math every time I bought groceries.

Then a few things came together. I turned in some claims I’d forgotten about. A refund hit. I checked my account this morning and felt that small wave of relief that comes when the number stops looking tight.

My first thought was: I should buy that keyboard.

I have a keyboard. It works. It’s just bigger than I’d like. The one I want is smaller, cleaner, more compact. It would give me more desk space. I’ve had it on my wish list for a while.

None of that is why I wanted to buy it this morning.

I wanted to buy it because my account had money in it and my brain read that as permission. Not need. Permission. Like the money was already burning a hole and buying something was the appropriate response to having it.

I sat with that for a minute. I’ve been meditating again lately. Not for long, 20 minutes in the morning, but enough to notice when a thought is mine and when it’s just noise. The urge to spend wasn’t coming from wanting the keyboard. It was coming from somewhere else. The low balance had scared me. The money was relief. Relief wants to celebrate by spending itself back down.

That’s the cycle. I’ve been running it for years.

I’m trying to replace not having with spending.

I grew up with used things.

Thrift store clothes. Hand-me-downs. Things with small stains that someone would say were fine. While other kids at school showed up in new things, I showed up in things that had already belonged to someone else. It’s not a complaint. My family did with what we had. But a kid doesn’t process that as economics. A kid processes it as standing. A stain on a bag means something about the person carrying it.

I felt less than. Not all the time. Not in every room. But in the rooms where it was visible, I felt it.

I’ve been trying to spend my way out of that feeling ever since.

There’s a beach chair on my wish list too.

I have two perfectly functional beach chairs. I ride my bike to the beach sometimes, haul my gear in a trailer, set up and stay awhile. Either of my chairs would hold me fine.

But this new one has built-in magnets that work with two magnetic cups I already own. The cups stick to the armrest. I wouldn’t have to worry about it tipping over in the sand. And there’s a second magnet for a small Bluetooth speaker.

I would be, and I mean this sincerely, the cool guy at the beach.

I sat with that one too. Who am I being the cool guy for? Because the beach I go to is not a place where anyone is paying attention to my chair. I ride my bike over, lock it to a post, set up in the sand, and read or watch the water. Nobody is watching. Nobody is keeping score.

Nobody except me.

The voice that says I’m not enough is quietest when I’m moving. It’s quiet on the ride over. It’s quiet in the water. It’s quiet when I’m reading and barely tracking the words. There’s no story running about what I should have. Just the wind, or the waves, or whatever’s in front of me.

It gets loud the moment I pick up my phone and open my wish list.

What I’ve started to understand is that the spending isn’t really about the thing. The keyboard isn’t about desk space. The chair isn’t about magnetic cups. The magnets are a flag. They say I’m not the regular guy. They make me visible. It’s the same voice that’s been running since I was a kid in someone else’s shirt, trying not to let it show.

Every purchase is a temporary answer to a question I keep asking myself: are you enough yet? I am not enough. That’s the state it lives in. And every time I open my wish list, I’m handing it a credit card.

The answer is always yes for about a day.

I didn’t buy the keyboard this morning.

I’m not going to tell you that was easy or that I’ve figured something out. A few months ago I bought a new bag. They call them crossbody bags now, because fanny packs are out. It’s a fanny pack. I wear it the 80’s way, around my waist, in the front. I don’t care what they call it or how I’m wearing it. But I got bleach on it, big bleach spots on the green, and it drove me crazy. The bag worked fine. The new one has inside pockets and a different clasp. I loved it. I bought it.

That was the point, wasn’t it.

I noticed the pattern. I still hit purchase. That’s where I actually am. Not at the part where I figured it out. At the part where I can see it happening and sometimes choose differently and sometimes don’t.

The kid who felt less than in used clothes was just trying to survive a situation he didn’t choose. He did what made sense at the time. But I’m not that kid anymore, and the clothes are mine now.

The cool guy at the beach is whoever shows up and stays present long enough to actually enjoy it.

Savannah was crying when I picked her up from the pool. I asked what was wrong. Nothing, she said. Then she snapped at me about her swim goggles. “You forgot them!” I hadn’t forgotten them. I told her so. We were headed home.

By the time we pulled away, she had told me she felt trapped and unloved. Preposterous! I had called her mother and arranged for her to spend the weekend there. I drove the last few blocks in the hollow satisfaction you get when you’ve been right in a way that doesn’t actually help.

The next morning, I told the story to Ari. Ari is in my men’s group. He’s the man who, when you finish describing a situation you think you handled well, will tell you: yeah, you were being an asshole.

His version went like this. When something is happening with your kid, treat it like an emergency room. Triage. The kid screaming in the lobby might just need food. The kid yelling at you in the car might just need to get home. Get them what they need first. Have the conversation later. Right now, you’re not in a conversation. You’re in an event.

He also said, don’t have serious conversations while driving. His son is similar to Savannah. Pinned in a passenger seat, asked to dissect their feelings on the way to a destination they didn’t choose. Of course they feel trapped. They are.

I had not done any of that on Tuesday. I had argued about goggles. I had asked how do you feel while I drove. When she said she’d rather be with her mother, I had taken the words at face value and performed the gesture of giving her what she said she wanted. Okay, I’ll call your mom. It looked like respect. It was retreat dressed up as respect.

Cyrene, my younger one, broke the toilet seat one afternoon. She’d been climbing on it for a reason that made sense to her. I heard the crack. You okay? Yes. What happened? She told me. Okay. Later she came back down with her phone. They’re fifteen dollars on Amazon. I’ll replace it.

I was calm. I was kind. I was the father I want to be.

I was, also, not under attack.

That’s the difference. With Cyrene and the toilet seat, nothing in me felt threatened. There was no accusation. No tone. No goggles. The ask was simple: stay open, ask the questions, accept the answer. With Savannah and the goggles, my body decided fast that I was being treated unfairly. Once that decision was made, I wasn’t parenting her. I was defending myself. From a fourteen-year-old. Who was hungry.

The voice in my head when she snapped at me about the goggles wasn’t mine. I want to be precise about this. It was my father’s voice, and his father’s voice, and the voice of every man in the Apostolic Faith Church I grew up in. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? I would have been popped in the mouth for what Savannah said. I knew this at fourteen. Everyone in our house knew it.

That voice protected me from a lot of things. It also kept me at a distance from the people I was supposed to be close to. I have done years of work to turn the volume down. On Tuesday it came back up the second I felt disrespected by my own kid.

I notice this. I don’t fully control it yet.

What I’m reaching for, and failing at, and trying again, is being the rock. The seawall. Something a teenage girl can throw her hardest wave at without me coming apart and without me coming back at her. The seawall doesn’t argue with the wave. It doesn’t take the wave personally. It absorbs the impact, holds its shape, and is still there when the tide goes out.

The seawall does, eventually, have a conversation with the wave. You can’t talk to me like that. I think you owe me an apology. Let’s figure out a plan so you’re not running on empty when I pick you up next time. But the seawall has that conversation after dinner. After the storm. Not in the car, not at the pool, not in the driveway with both of us still hot.

I had that conversation with Savannah that weekend. I led with what I could have done better. I offered the apology that was mine to offer first. We talked about hers, too. And we worked out what we both need so the next Tuesday afternoon could go differently.

I don’t think she’s a bad kid. I don’t think I’m a bad father.

I think we’re both learning what it means to be safe with each other when one of us is hungry and tired and the other one is hearing his father’s voice in his head.

I stood behind the register at Service Merchandise with hundreds of dollars in the drawer and no urge to take any of it. Six months earlier I had been brought home in handcuffs for stealing a Casio organizer from Sears. The man who caught me was now my assistant manager.

At fourteen I had a system. Detention meant walking home, which meant no one expected me at a specific time. I'd stop at Sears. Electronics, mostly. Calculators, organizers, the primitive ancestors of iPhones. My father found my Rolodex, took it away, and I went back to steal a better one.

That’s when Mr. Jackson caught me. Loss prevention. Big man, bald, the kind of build you see working the door at a nightclub. He walked me to the back office and called my dad. My dad told him to send me to jail. The cops came, put me in the back of the car, and drove me home.

Our driveway had a basketball court my dad built himself. Concrete, regulation pole set in cement, breakaway rim so you could dunk. Every afternoon, twenty or thirty kids from all over the area showed up. It was the spot (Go to 3:54). I got out of that car in handcuffs in front of all of them.

The embarrassment was real. But a small part of me thought: this is kind of cool. My dad didn’t beat me that night. He just said I should get a job. We both knew the lesson had already landed.

So I walked the entire Cross Country Plaza shopping center, putting in applications at every store. Service Merchandise called back. I went in for the interview, sat at a table, and waited.

Mr. Jackson, walked in.

He looked at my application. He looked at me. He said: I remember you from Sears. Then he hired me anyway.

I stole from them too, at first. Lego Technic sets, small stuff I told myself didn’t count. But then they put me on the register.

I learned to count change the old way, adding up from the total owed instead of just handing back what the register said. $12.61, out of $20? Thirty-nine cents makes thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen. And a five makes twenty. Customers would stop mid-transaction. Said people don’t do that anymore. I started getting a reputation. Customers picked my line. I took pride in that. Real pride, the kind that doesn’t need an audience.

At some point the stealing just stopped. I didn’t decide to quit. It stopped making sense. The trust killed the theft.

Mr. Jackson knew I was a thief and gave me the drawer anyway. That one decision did what the handcuffs and the driveway humiliation couldn’t. Being trusted by the person who had every reason not to trust me changed something I didn’t know needed changing.

Admiral Stockdale said integrity isn’t something you put in a drawer labeled too hard. My dad said do everything like God is watching. The Marine Corps said integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching. After years in men’s work I shortened it further. Integrity is when what you say and what you do are the same thing.

All of those came later. What came first was a man who had every reason to turn me away and didn’t.

I never told Mr. Jackson what that meant. I was a teenager and I didn’t have the language for it. I’m not sure I have it now except to say this: he didn’t reform me with punishment. He just trusted me into becoming someone worth trusting.

A few years ago my dad gave me back the Rolodex. He had kept it all that time. It sits in my keepsake box now. He didn’t say anything when he handed it over. He didn't need to.

Then I went to Kennesaw State University on a full voice scholarship.

They said I needed hours in the practice room every day. Piano. Music theory. Memorizing composers. They said I would either teach or perform. The love for music stayed. The desire to do it under those conditions did not. Within a year, it had become a job I didn’t want, and I left.

I thought the problem was music.

It wasn’t.

In the Marine Corps I became a combat photographer. We were the last class at the Defense Information School to go through wet processing. Nikon F2 cameras, complete darkness, chemicals by feel, film on a spool. Light on paper. A romantic art that doesn’t exist anymore. I remember liking it. Actually liking it.

Then I got out in the field with grunt units, and the gunny would tell me what to shoot. This wound. This corpsman. This thing over here. I used to think about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel with someone behind him saying paint that one orange, maybe go lighter on this angle. That’s what it felt like. The intrinsic motivation to see anything dried up fast.

I documented. I came back. Processed. Burned to a CD. I went out and documented again.

There was one deployment to Australia, Operation Tandem Thrust, where other photographers were there. Marines and Navy. On one of the evenings after everyone returned from their assignments, someone said: go out, shoot whatever you want, one hour, come back and we’ll see who has the best photo. I remember thinking, this is what it’s supposed to feel like. I saw it clearly in that moment.

Then the deployment ended and I went back to a Marine Corps base where they didn’t do things like that.

I buried it.

Years later, Professor Dziemian at Georgetown handed back an assignment and told me I had gutted my own work trying to imitate my classmates. He said: why did you change any of this? You were doing so much better. You have to trust yourself. I hadn’t trusted myself. I had looked at two other people’s work and decided mine was worse, without knowing whether theirs was even good.

What I had done in that classroom was exactly what I had done in the field. I listened to them instead of myself.

Cal Newport has a line I’ve come back to a few times. He writes that a calling is work that’s an important part of your life and a vital part of your identity. Not a job, not a career. A calling.

I didn’t get there by finding the right work. I got there by finally trusting what I already knew.

Writing is where I found it. I run the VA ORD inbox. I write stories about veteran suicide research. I conduct interviews, draft, edit, send. There are days it feels like a job. But the initial story is mine. The direction is mine. When my editor says something I wrote hit him like a freight train, I feel it. When I read something back and it finally says exactly what I was thinking when I was trying to write it, I feel that too.

It’s the same as the choir note. The sound going out and coming back.

I carried photography with me the whole time, even when I wasn't shooting. A fellow instructor once pushed me out of the house on a Saturday and told me to go to the Maryland Renaissance Festival with a press badge. I didn't have an assignment. Nobody told me what to shoot. I walked around and photographed whatever caught my eye. Somewhere in that roll is a picture of the woman I would eventually marry, taken the day we met. I didn't know that's what I was doing. I was just finally shooting without anyone behind me.

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know in the field with the grunt unit or in the practice room at Kennesaw State: the art doesn’t die when the work gets hard. It dies when you stop trusting yourself enough to protect it.

The gunny telling me what to shoot wasn’t the problem. Michelangelo had the Pope. The problem was that I let the orders be the whole of what I saw.

A few weeks ago I told someone I was going to put my camera in the trunk of my bike and go shoot. Beach photography. Self-assigned topics. Whatever I wanted.

Nobody gave me permission to do that.

I gave it to myself.

That's all it ever takes. It was always all it ever took.

Not mildly inconvenienced. Not “ew, gross.” Afraid. A wasp the size of a thumbnail built a starter nest on my friend Cam’s boat. One wasp, barely a nest at all, more of an architectural intention. She decided she no longer wanted to go to the beach. She loves the beach. She has loved the beach her entire life. One wasp on a boat and the beach was off the table.

A roach found its way into her room one night. She woke up the whole house. For hours afterward, every time her own hair brushed against her arm, she flinched. She thought something was crawling on her. She couldn’t sleep. She came downstairs at one point wrapped in a blanket because she wanted to sit on the porch, except it was summer in Pensacola and she was wrapped in a blanket because going outside without a full body covering felt like acceptable terms.

It would be easy to write this off as overreacting. But I’ve watched her and I know the truth: she just can’t do it. The fear is real and it doesn’t respond to logic. So I started treating it like an engineering problem.

A behavioral scientist I’d been listening to put it plainly: behavior isn’t just personality. It’s an equilibrium of forces. Change the forces, and the behavior follows.

Savannah is a maker. She paints, does crafts, builds things. She also collects cardboard. Toilet paper rolls, paper towel rolls, boxes from deliveries. She wants all of it. I’ve had variations of the same conversation with her for years: Savannah, that’s trash. There will be more cardboard when you need it. You don’t need to keep it. She keeps it anyway, stacked in her closet like she’s preparing for a shortage.

I started noticing silverfish. A few here, a few there. I looked them up and found out they thrive in humidity above 50% relative humidity. More specifically, they come in on cardboard packaging, breed in it, and spread from there. The cardboard in Savannah’s closet wasn’t just her quirk. It was a habitat.

But the cardboard was only part of it. The other part was the air itself.

I bought a hygrometer and started collecting data. Morning, noon, and night. Main living area, bathroom, upstairs hallway. My house has two stories, which adds complexity. Humidity behaves differently on each floor, especially in Pensacola where the air outside is basically a warm wet towel eight months of the year.

What I found was worse than I expected. The bathroom in the mornings was running at 67% relative humidity. One morning, while I was checking the reading, a silverfish ran across the floor like it owned the place. Because, technically, it did. My house was a perfectly conditioned silverfish resort: high humidity, abundant cardboard, consistent warmth. I had built them exactly what they needed.

The fix was straightforward once I understood the cause. I bought a portable dehumidifier and placed it in the upstairs hallway, central to all the rooms. I cleaned out Savannah’s closet and got rid of the cardboard. I expected a fight on that last part. Instead, she surprised me. Once I explained the connection between the boxes and the bugs, she was on board immediately. She cared about the outcome more than the collection.

The dehumidifier keeps the house around 50% now. I have not seen a single bug since.

There’s a side effect I didn’t anticipate. I sweat at night. A lot. I keep the AC at 69 and I still wake up damp. Turns out lower humidity helps with that too. Less moisture in the air means less moisture on skin, less environment for the fungal activity that makes night sweats worse. The house became more comfortable for everyone, not just Savannah.

I still have my exterminator, come every three months. He’s thorough and a little talkative, which I’ve made my peace with. He handles the things that aren’t humidity-related: ants chasing a forgotten parade bag of candy in Savannah’s room, the occasional intrusion that has nothing to do with moisture. Some bugs come for food. Some come for warmth. The dehumidifier doesn’t solve everything. But it solved the thing that was actually driving the problem.

Savannah went to the beach last weekend.

She didn’t come back wrapped in a blanket. She didn’t ask to leave early. The bugs are mostly gone, the house breathes easier, and she’s out there in the world doing the things she loves.

I didn’t solve her fear of bugs. That’s still hers to work through. What I solved was the environment that kept feeding it. Sometimes that’s enough. Not to fix the person, but to change the conditions around them so the fear has less evidence to stand on.

She still collects cardboard sometimes. Old habits. But she knows now why I ask her not to, and most of the time she listens.

That’s about as good as it gets with a teenager.

I called Wayne Levine on a weekday afternoon because I’d read his book and something in it wouldn’t leave me alone.

I’d been through the lists. The Art of Manliness. Various titles that told me what real men do: build fires, hold their liquor, change their own oil. Wayne’s book was different. It wasn’t a list. It pointed inward. It said the work was mine to do, and it had been sitting unfinished for a long time.

So I found his website. And on that website, there was a photo (see top).

A bunch of white men in the woods in California.

I grew up in the South. You understand why I paused.

I called him anyway. He answered, told me a little about the weekends, and said: why don’t you just come check it out? I drove to Camp Whittier, outside Santa Barbara, not entirely sure I was making a good decision. That was 2010. I’ve been doing the work ever since.

The Marine Corps taught me to stay ready. That lesson started before boot camp. It started in the Apostolic Faith Church in Columbus, Georgia, where we were taught to be vigilant for Christ’s return. If you weren’t right with God when He came back, you got left. So you stayed ready. You stayed watchful. You never fully relaxed.

The Marine Corps didn’t install that in me. It just gave it a uniform.

Boot camp confirmed what I already believed: discipline lives in the small things. Make the bed. Shave every day. Put your gear where it belongs so you can find it in the dark. Stay sharp in the small choices and you’ll be sharp when it counts. I believed this completely. I still believe parts of it.

But I carried something else out of those years. A low hum of hypervigilance that never fully turned off. Exits. Sight lines. My back to the wall. In a restaurant, on an airplane, at my kids’ school performances. It wasn’t anxiety. It was readiness. I told myself there was a difference.

The problem with never fully standing down is that it keeps you at a distance from the people who need you close.

My mother died in 2007. I had talked to her the night before. She called asking for help with her computer. I was just sitting down to dinner, told her I’d call in the morning, and told her I loved her. She died that night at that computer. I blamed myself.

I wore my dress blues to the funeral. I stood straight. I kept my face still. I slid one of my original dog tags into her palm as she lay in her casket, turned and walked back to my pew. I was a Marine. Marines don’t fall apart in public.

The preacher spent most of the service trying to win souls for Christ. I sat there angry, dry-eyed, and somewhere inside me a door closed quietly.

I didn’t grieve. I moved.

Three years later, at a men’s weekend at Camp Whittier, we did an exercise built around anger. It’s simple. The men hold you down. You try to get up.

I didn’t expect what happened next.

I started fighting to stand up. Then something shifted. I stopped fighting. My body went limp and I started crying. The kind of crying that comes from somewhere you haven’t been in years. I knew exactly where it was coming from. The funeral. The uniform. The door that had closed.

I didn’t have to explain it. The men stopped the exercise. They didn’t step back. They moved closer. They picked me up and circled around me. They held me up as I wept.

I had been in a brotherhood before. The Marine Corps. The Masons. Men who would show up in a crisis, men I’d trust with my life. But I’d never been in a room where breaking down was met with that kind of response. Where the falling apart was the point, not a failure of it.

That was new.

A man named Chris told me early in the work: the thing you don’t want to bring to the men is exactly the thing you need to bring. Not just for yourself. Because there are other men in that room carrying the same thing, waiting for someone else to say it first.

I have tested that theory many times. He has never been wrong.

Over the years, through military moves, a divorce, rebuilding, co-parenting, the work was the constant. Different zip codes, different time zones, same call every week. The men changed some over the years, some familiar faces, some new ones, but the work stayed the same. Wayne used to say: if I told you I’d give you a million dollars to make this call, you’d make it. So what does it say about your commitments when a scheduling conflict suddenly feels like a reason to disappear? The work taught me to be honest about my priorities. If something genuinely ranked higher, you handled it and came back. But most of the time the thing pulling you away didn’t rank higher. You just let it feel like it did.

I showed up. Not perfectly. But consistently.

And every time I did, something got lighter.

I used to think having a system for everything was the same as being a good father. Everything in its place. Shoes in the closet, same spot, every time. I’d find them for her in two seconds and I’d let her feel it. My daughter looked me in the eye and said: I feel like you’re shaming me.

She wasn’t wrong.

That moment had nothing to do with discipline. It had everything to do with needing things done my way and making her pay for it when they weren't. The Marine Corps gave me systems. The men’s work taught me to notice when my systems were working on the people I loved instead of for them.

The Marine Corps taught me to make the bed perfectly. The men’s work taught me to lie in it messy. To sit with discomfort instead of solving it. To be present instead of prepared.

I still think discipline matters. I still make my bed every day. But I’ve come to understand that discipline without a safe place to land is just control looking for a reason.

The men’s work gave me somewhere to land.

My daughters are 12 and 14. When I show up for them, I’m trying to show up like the person I’d want them to marry someday. That’s the only framework I need. It doesn’t tell me what to do in every situation. It tells me who to be. Patient, kind, supportive, but with boundaries. That context came out of a men’s weekend in California, in the middle of an exercise I didn’t understand, in a room full of men I’d initially been afraid to trust.

Earnestine knew me as the boy who left for the Marines and made her proud. She never got to meet the man who came after. The one who cries when he needs to, who walks his daughter back to her room after a nightmare, lays her down, and rubs her hair until she falls back asleep, who drove to California to sit around a fire in the woods with strangers and finally came home.

I think she’d be okay with it.

My father kept a scar across his thumbnail from the year before the nail gun arrived on the crew. He could line up a shingle nail in a blizzard, but the hammer still managed to find his hand at times. When the compressor showed up, the old guys muttered that real roofing needed feel, not air pressure. They came around once they saw the job close before sunset and nobody bled.

I think about that scar every time someone asks if AI will replace writers. The question misses the point. The tool doesn’t retire the craft, it retires the damage.

When I was at the Defense Information School, we taught note-taking like it was a martial art. Students balanced reporter’s notebooks on their knees, developing shorthand that looked like code. Fast hands were a competitive edge. Then the recorder appeared. Then cheap transcription. Then software that pulls quotes before the interviewee finishes the sentence.

Each step removed a splinter of labor. None removed the reporter.

Now AI can take a full interview recording, strip the ums and the you-knows, and surface the quotes most relevant to your story before you’ve poured your second cup. I’ve watched it do this with podcast episodes I’m barely halfway through. Sometimes it misses something I care about, so I go back and pull it myself. That’s still my call. That’s still judgment.

And judgment is exactly what’s surviving.

The writers feeling the most pressure right now are mid-tier freelancers who competed on volume and speed. When I ran my marketing business, I paid a service to churn out blog posts. Two a week, five a month, written by a rotating pool of writers who could crank out 800 words on any topic. The content was serviceable. It was also shallow. AI produces the same thing in twelve seconds. That edge is gone.

But there’s another category of writer, and this is the one I want to talk about.

The government communicator. The public affairs officer. The embedded communications professional inside an institution where what you’re selling isn’t a product, it’s trust. Public relations moves cornflakes. Public affairs moves credibility. One “out of an abundance of caution” in a command message and a congressional aide starts asking questions. AI can draft the sentence. It can’t carry the institutional memory of every previous statement we had to walk back.

That distinction matters more than most people in this conversation acknowledge.

The real pressure isn’t replacement. It’s expectation creep.

My boss wants a story. I need to interview five people. I’m still waiting on callbacks. My deadline hasn’t moved. The expectation now is that AI compresses the labor so the calendar doesn’t have to. And in some ways, it does. If the machine drags the transcript and flags the key quotes, I get an hour back. The question is what I do with that hour.

The writers who are going to hold their ground are the ones who use the saved time to do the things AI can’t: sit with a source long enough that something real comes out, read the room when a program officer shifts their language mid-sentence, recognize that a data point is off because they know this program’s history, not because they Googled it.

That’s not mystical. That’s experience in a body, which is still the one thing you can’t prompt your way to.

Skip to 3:40 — worth it.

The nail gun didn’t make my father any less of a roofer. It meant he stopped smashing his hand and started finishing jobs faster. But he still knew which valley would trap ice in March, where the plywood had delaminated after the ‘93 storm, which crew members were cutting corners on the felt. The gun drove the nails. The knowledge decided where they went.

AI is the gun. You’re still the roofer.

The only question worth asking isn’t whether AI will take your job. It’s whether you’re building the kind of knowledge and relationships that no tool can replicate, or whether you’ve been selling speed all along.