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

The wind doesn’t sting anymore. It carries me. Healing doesn’t mean the wound disappears. It means it becomes part of the landscape — tended, known, integrated. Some days the garden smells like soil and forgiveness. Other days it smells like rain on scar tissue. But still, something grows. That’s the truest miracle: not forgetting the pain, but making beauty out of what tried to end you. We plant gardens in strange places — in the ashes of what we lost, in the hollowed-out sp

It’s easy to hate. It’s easy to call it righteous. It’s easy to look at the wreckage and think, I’ll never be like them, while clutching your own blade a little tighter. Because anger feels clean. It makes the world simple again. There’s a strange comfort in fury — in naming villains, in pointing toward what’s wrong and feeling, for once, that you’re on the side of what’s right. But I’ve learned that even righteous anger rots if you hold it too long. It starts whispering to y

They did something terrible. You don’t need me to tell you what. You already know who they are. Their face formed in your mind the moment you read that first line. Maybe it’s one face. Maybe it’s a crowd. Maybe it’s an entire belief system that moves like smoke and sounds like power. You can see their hands — the ones that did the unforgivable thing. You can hear the words they used to justify it, the way they laughed, the way the world seemed to let them walk away untouched.

His name isn’t here. It doesn’t need to be. He could have been anyone—someone’s son, someone’s favorite person, someone who carried more light than most people realize they’re capable of holding. There are people who move through the world as reminders. They don’t lecture or preach. They simply are. Their laughter softens a room, their small acts of patience change its temperature, and before you know it, they’ve quietly rearranged your understanding of what compassion means.