We were promised empathy. That’s what haunts me most—not the rise of cruelty itself, but the fact that it came wearing the robes of compassion. In corners of the internet once devoted to justice, art, and peace, something colder has taken root. A fury not directed at institutions or corporations or systems, but at people. Specifically, at people who use generative AI. Not to harm. Not to exploit. Just to explore. To play. To create. And suddenly, for that alone, they are decl

You will fail at being good. That’s not prophecy — it’s arithmetic. The world is too complex, the systems too tangled, the heart too tired. But failure is not corruption; it’s curriculum. What you do after the failure decides whether conscience survives it. After Kindness Learns Its Shape , you might have felt a fragile steadiness return — that sense of rhythm between care and rest, between saying yes and saying no. But what happens when even that balance falters? When your b

A book for those who still believe kindness can survive the noise. We’re all tired. But tired isn’t the end of caring. After years of tracing what happens after outrage fades, the work finally became a book. It’s called Ethicism: The Practice of Care — and it’s out now. If this language feels like home to you, it’s waiting in print. There’s no mailing list, no campaign — just the book itself, waiting for whoever still believes care matters. Click below to get your copy: Pape

When empathy begins to fray, boundaries become the loom. After the flood of feeling, after the exhaustion of trying to care for everything and everyone, what remains is the quiet need for form. The previous chapter ended in that silence —the moment after the storm, when conscience finally breathes and asks, How do I keep caring without coming apart? That question is where this begins. Because empathy alone is not enough. It must learn its edges. Mercy without limits turns int

When you stop believing in the myth of deserving , something shifts. The moral arithmetic you were taught to trust — the idea that pain has a purpose, that goodness guarantees safety — collapses. And in the wreckage, what you’re left with is exposure. You see suffering everywhere now, stripped of its supposed lessons, scattered without logic or fairness. You see how much of the world’s pain was never earned — and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. At first, that clarity fee

We were taught that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to those who failed some invisible test. It’s a convenient lie — tidy, moral, profitable. But the truth is harder: cruelty often wins. Exploitation is scalable. Virtue is slow. And still, we cling to the myth of deserving, because it makes the chaos feel earned. But beneath every economy is a theology — a belief about who deserves care and who doesn’t. Suffering Becomes Currency showed how empathy w

In short:  I wrote a book—one that’s been years in the making—and it’s about to find its way into the world. I didn’t set out to write a philosophy originally. I set out to answer a smaller, messier question: how do you keep caring when the world keeps asking you not to? If you’ve been here a while, you know the terrain—posts that begin with a headline and end somewhere quieter, more stubborn. You know the rhythm of my essays: the way a sentence will start like a match and en

Pain has become content. It circulates like currency—mined, packaged, and sold back to us as empathy. The same systems that manufacture cruelty have learned to monetize its aftermath. Every tragedy becomes a trending topic, every wound a headline, every scream an opportunity. Someone profits. Someone disappears. And the rest of us scroll on, exhausted and complicit. This was the warning in The Machine Keeps Turning : that grief itself has become political currency. That power

There’s a loneliness that comes with doing the right thing. Not the cinematic kind — the quiet kind that settles in after everyone else has stopped pretending to care. The world rewards performance, not integrity; efficiency, not empathy. You learn to carry your conscience like contraband, aware that kindness has stopped being profitable. But goodness was never meant to make anyone rich. It was meant to make us real. You notice it first in the silence that follows a principle

The world does not change because someone writes a list of rules. It changes when enough people decide that kindness no longer needs permission. I used to think ethics was a philosophy. Something you debated, defined, then filed away under “theory.” But theory doesn’t stop a hand from shaking when it has to choose whether to help or to look away. Theory doesn’t reach across a counter, or stand between a cruelty and its next excuse. Living with conscience isn’t an idea; it’

The ruins are always quieter than you expect. After the sirens, after the statements, after the footage has been looped until meaning bleeds out of it, there’s a hush no one knows what to do with. Broken glass has its own kind of silence. Smoke drifts like a thought that refuses to finish itself. You can hear your breath again, and that can feel like treason when the world is calibrated for rage. From the beginning, the story moved like this: a shot, then a script. A body, th

It began with rage. With the mirror cracking. With the moment you realized that the monsters you condemned were human—and that meant you were, too. In Those We Call Monsters , we named what we feared. We stared into the fire and saw our reflection moving inside it. We traced the lineage of cruelty, how it feeds on righteousness, how every generation swears their violence is holy. We followed that wheel of vengeance and found ourselves standing in its center. The revelation wa

The light always feels brightest right before the fatigue sets in. After the rebuilding, after the hope, after the long nights of believing the world might actually hold—there comes the weight of continuation. The high of hope fades, and what remains is the quiet, repetitive labor of keeping it alive. That’s the test no one warns you about: not the cruelty itself, but the grind that follows survival. The long stretch of days when you’ve seen too much to be naive, but not enou

Every architecture, no matter how noble, must stand the test of night. After the blueprints are drawn, after the scaffolding of compassion begins to rise, there always comes a moment when the world feels too heavy to lift. The plans are sound, the vision true, but the light falters. You start to wonder if any of it matters—if kindness can really hold against the wind. That’s where despair waits. Not in catastrophe, but in the quiet days after you’ve tried your hardest and the

If cruelty can be organized, so can compassion. We’ve seen how systems of harm sustain themselves: through policy, through profit, through repetition. Entire empires have been built on the architecture of neglect. But if that’s possible—if indifference can be scaled and funded and codified into law—then mercy can be too. We just never built it that way. The Hands That Mend taught us what healing looks like up close: hands trembling, slow mending, no applause. But personal rep

Prefer the full essay version? Read the complete Why Before How article here. It shares the same ideas in their original form — reflective, detailed, and written to help you understand the “why” behind this guide. 1. Core Principle Every action communicates something. Behavior is never random; it’s a message about comfort, pain, or environment. The right first question isn’t “How do I stop this?”  but “Why is this happening?” This applies equally to autistic adults in residen

I keep seeing the same question in autism-parent and caregiver spaces: "How do I make their behavior better?" or, "How do I deal with their reactions to X, Y, and Z?". I know those questions come from concern, from exhaustion, from wanting life to run smoothly again. But they all start from the wrong place. They start with How. The first question should always be Why. Don’t have time for the full essay? Click here for the condensed caregiver guide — everything in this piece,

There’s a silence that follows every storm. Not peace — just the hollow stillness after the shouting stops, when the air is heavy with what’s been said and what can’t be unsaid. You can almost hear the echo of the noise that brought you here — the words, the reactions, the collisions of conscience — but now there’s only breath. Just the sound of breathing and the question that lingers in it: What now? In The Silence That Teaches, we learned how to stop. How to hold our ground

In A Language of Mercy , we learned that words can wound just as deeply as actions — that cruelty often survives through what we choose to say, and even more often, through what we don’t. But what comes after language? After you’ve learned to speak with care, to unlearn the reflex of harm — what then? Silence. Not the kind forced by fear or exhaustion, but the kind that breathes. The kind that waits. The kind that listens before deciding what it means. The modern world hates

After the wound, there is silence. After the silence, there are words. But not all words heal. You learn this quickly — that language itself can bruise. That the wrong sentence, even said softly, can reopen something you thought had already closed. That words are how cruelty survives when the blades have dulled, how hate outlives the moment it was born. The monster doesn’t always come with a weapon in hand. Sometimes it just speaks — and teaches others how. In The Garden With