An Announcement for the Tired

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 end like a hand over the flame, guarding it from the wind. That rhythm became a book.

It’s called Ethicism: The Practice of Care—On Conscience, Repair, and the Quiet Work of Hope. It isn’t a sermon. It isn’t a purity test. It’s a record of learning how to remain human on purpose, when humanity is inconvenient. It’s about what happens after the noise—when the hashtags fade, when the spectacle moves on, when the world still needs someone to sweep the glass and lock up the building and check on the person who stopped texting back.

I wrote it because I kept seeing the same cycle: outrage, fatigue, forgetting. I wrote it because empathy is being turned into content and sold back to us as proof that we’re paying attention. I wrote it because so many of us are paying with our nervous systems. And I wrote it because I still believe in the kind of care that doesn’t need an audience to be real.

What the book is (and isn’t)

It’s a map, not a victory lap. The book moves through three arcs—The Descent, The Ascent, The Praxis—that mirror what so many of us have lived. First, the unraveling: how language gets poisoned, how spectacle replaces grief, how we’re taught to watch each other like wardens and call it accountability. Then, the slow rebuild: boundaries that keep kindness from drowning, silence that isn’t avoidance but recovery, a language of mercy sturdy enough to carry consequence without cruelty. Finally, practice: hope as maintenance, conscience as logistics, care as something you schedule and sustain, not just feel when the mood is right.

It’s practical, but not prescriptive. You won’t find “ten steps to save the world.” You’ll find sentences you can carry into a hard conversation, a policy meeting, or a sleepless night. You’ll find reminders that rest is part of ethics, that boundaries are the architecture of mercy, and that repair is the highest art of ethics—not because it’s flashy, but because it’s how anything decent survives contact with reality.

It’s political in the oldest sense of the word: about how we live together. If you come looking for a party platform, you’ll be disappointed. If you come looking for a way to keep your moral center when the room tilts—welcome.

It’s also not interested in sainthood. I fail in these pages, on purpose. That’s the point. Goodness that can’t survive imperfection isn’t goodness; it’s theater. This book chooses recovery over performance.

What I hope it gives you

• A way back from moral burnout. Not a pep talk, but a rhythm: feel → rest → repair → return. The book treats empathy like a muscle that needs oxygen, not an engine you can redline forever.

• A language for repair. We’ve all seen the non-apologies, the “mistakes were made.” The essays give you scaffolding for real accountability—confession without self-erasure, consequence without annihilation, mercy with teeth.

• Courage to keep caring quietly. There’s glory in a post that trends. There’s impact in a meal delivered, a boundary kept, a policy improved by one clause. The book defends the unglamorous acts that keep the species human.

• Permission to be human. To say “no” so you can keep saying “yes.” To be wrong and learn. To resist the machinery of contempt without letting it turn you into a smaller version of yourself.

The problem the book won’t solve (and why I wrote it anyway)

If you want an answer that makes despair impossible, I don’t have it. What I have is a practice that makes despair inefficient. Despair is efficient because it asks nothing of us. Hope is maintenance. It sweeps, mends, checks on, shows up, and then does it again tomorrow. The book is a companion for that kind of hope—the kind with calluses.

It also refuses the myth of “deserving.” We don’t ration compassion in these pages. That’s by design. When empathy is contingent on innocence, cruelty wins on a technicality. So we stop grading pain. We start reducing it.

What you’ll walk through, briefly

• The Descent: how clocks start striking thirteen and no one blinks; how spectacle teaches us to mourn the powerful and forget the powerless; how we became the panopticon and mistook fear for virtue.

• The Ascent: how we unlearn the reflex to punish; how boundaries make mercy durable; how silence becomes the breath before the next act of care; how language stops performing virtue and starts redistributing power.

• The Praxis: how goodness grows heavy and still returns to work; how to make compassion scalable without turning it into a brand; how hope learns logistics and becomes a system of maintenance.

And when the spiral loops—because it always does—the book meets you there. Not to scold, but to say: Begin again. Small is not failure. Quiet is not cowardice. Continuity is a moral choice.

What I’m asking of you

Nothing you haven’t already tried to give: your attention, for a little longer than the algorithm thinks you can hold it; your patience, with yourself most of all; your willingness to protect whatever tenderness you still have left, so it can keep protecting others.

If you read the book, read it slowly. Breathe between chapters. Take what helps. Leave what doesn’t. Come back later and see if something different lights up. This isn’t a spectacle. It’s a correspondence.

When it’s coming

Very soon. I’ll share details on the release date, formats, and a few small ways you can help it find the people who need it. If you’ve ever shared one of these posts, you’ve already done more than you know.

Until then, I’ll keep doing what the book asks of me: tending the small things, guarding the flame, refusing the easy cynicism that tries to pass as wisdom. If you’re tired, same. If you’re still trying, same.

We’re not here to win the news cycle. We’re here to keep the world savable.

Thanks for walking this far with me. The rest begins when you do.