Category: Essays

When I first started leading a Data Governance Council, my friend Claire said it sounded like something you’d need a ceremonial robe for: something where people chant in unison before declaring that, yes, Excel files stored on individual desktops are still a problem. Instead, it turned out to be six people, three of whom never turned on their cameras, discussing the ethics of machine learning while a golden retriever barked in the background.

The topic that first day was data ethics, which, for those outside the club, is the art of making sure your company doesn’t accidentally build the Terminator. Claire was the facilitator, and she started the meeting with, “Our goal today is to make sure our data is accessible, accurate, and ethically used.”

“Like a priest’s confession log,” I offered.

Claire smiled politely. “Not quite.”

The problem, she explained, was that everyone in our client’s company wanted to use Artificial Intelligence but no one wanted to do the unsexy work required to feed it clean, fair data. They wanted self-driving insights, but their data was closer to a rusted tricycle with one training wheel missing.

“AI is only as good as the data it learns from,” Claire said. “If our data is biased, incomplete, or poorly governed, our AI will be too.”

Which made perfect sense, though it reminded me of my childhood report cards. Garbage in, garbage out.

The Council’s role, apparently, was to stop that garbage. Ethically, of course. That meant defining who could access what, ensuring that data was accurate, and establishing availability rules that balanced innovation with privacy. In other words, we were the digital version of the neighborhood watch. Only instead of suspicious strangers, we were keeping an eye on spreadsheets and other exciting file types.

At first, it felt absurd. But as the meetings went on, I began to see the point. Data, in the modern corporate world, is a lot like gossip: powerful, easily misused, and always traveling faster than it should. And just like gossip, it’s the lack of context for your data where danger comes into play: the twisting, the casual sharing with people who shouldn’t have it.

That’s where the Governance Council came in. We started small, naming data owners, cataloging sources, and defining what “good” data actually meant. You’d think this would be obvious, but when three departments define “customer” differently, you start to understand why your AI thinks half your clients are imaginary.

We built rules for access, deciding who gets to see what and when, and set up guardrails for data quality. We discussed the ethics of anonymization, retention, and model transparency. There were arguments about bias mitigation and consent. One particularly heated exchange involved whether our client’s AI chatbots should be allowed to suggest financial products based on age.

“So, like, no more ‘Because you’re 40, here’s a midlife crisis loan?’” I asked. Claire did not laugh.

Over time, I realized the Council wasn’t just a bureaucratic nuisance like I had always wondered. It was a moral compass for a machine age. Rather than deciding whether AI COULD do something, we were deciding whether it SHOULD. In the process, we redisered something quaint and almost human: responsibility.

Setting up a Data Governance Council doesn’t make your company holy. It won’t save the world from bad algorithms or prevent a rogue intern from uploading confidential data to ChatGPT. But it creates a space, a simple pause button, where smart people can ask hard questions before the code starts running. Questions like: Should we use this data at all? Do the people it represents know we’re using it? If we’re wrong, who gets hurt?

Those aren’t IT questions. They’re ethical ones. And for all our dashboards and machine learning pipelines, ethics doesn’t live in code. It lives in the conversations, the uncomfortable, slow, and deeply human act of deciding what’s right.

After a few months, we had frameworks, policies, and more acronyms than the Pentagon. But we also had something rarer: trust. We could measure that in KPIs like uptime percentages and SLA compliance, sure, but what matted more were the intangibles. People believed that the data, the systems, and most importantly the people behind it, were worthy of belief.

Sometimes, during our meetings, I imagined the AI we were nurturing. It didn’t yet exist, but I imagined that, when it  back on its creators, the weary Council members on Teams calls, it would find us competent (hopefully) but more than that: decent. That’s the real goal of governance. Access, control, quality, and security are the easy part. Moral and decent are not. Decency in a world increasingly run by machines that don’t know what that word means is a lofty and challenging, but ultimately worthy goal.

If we can manage that, if our Data Governance Councils can help us use data with integrity and care, maybe we deserve to call ourselves intelligent too.

When I first heard the word “governance” used in a meeting, I imagined a man in a powdered wig and culottes standing at the door of a server room, holding a clipboard and saying, “You shall not pass.” I pictured across between Gandalf and George Washington, keeping the unwashed data masses from sullying the sanctity of enterprise systems.

And for a long time, that’s exactly how we treated it. Governance was a velvet rope, and only the properly credentialed could step inside. We built forms, we built approval chains, and we built policies so thick you could use them as flotation devices in case of a compliance emergency.

Gates are effective and, in many cases, necessary. But the problem here is that, while they do a good job of keeping things out, they sometimes do TOO good a job of keeping things out. In the modern enterprise, where everyone from finance analysts to HR business partners is suddenly “building an app” or “running a flow,” keeping things out is the fastest way to make yourself irrelevant.

The old model of governance was simple: people are dangerous, so you must protect the system from the people. Every new connector was a potential scandal, every Power App a ticking time bomb. The governing body’s role was to say “no” gracefully, like a maître d’ at a restaurant that’s fully booked for eternity.

But then the world changed. Low-code platforms took the wheel, automation became the new oxygen, and the governance-as-gatekeeper approach started to creak under the pressure of its own usefulness. Suddenly, the people outside the rope were building anyway. They were wiring together approvals and forms and dashboards, not because they wanted to break the rules, but because they wanted to work.

We learned an important rule in this effort When you spend all your time keeping people out, they eventually stop knocking.

In corporate governance meetings, trust is the word that gets used like parsley: sprinkled on everything for flavor, but rarely meant. We talk about “building trust” while drafting 12-page forms that ask, “Why do you need this connector?” in three different sections. We say, “We trust our makers,” then build dashboards to monitor every keystroke. It’s the bureaucratic equivalent of saying, “Of course I love you,” while secretly running a background check.

Real trust doesn’t mean no oversight. It means assuming competence, not chaos. It’s giving someone the keys to the car and believing they’ll fill it with gas rather than drive it into the lake. Trust is also contagious. When governance teams stop policing and start partnering, something almost magical happens: people want to do things the right way. Because it’s their idea, not yours.

The dirty secret of governance is that most of what we call “noncompliance” is actually illiteracy. People don’t break rules out of malice; they break them because they don’t know the rules exist, or because the rules read like a cross between ancient Greek and IRS tax code. That’s where literacy comes in.

Modern Centers of Excellence aren’t libraries of rules. They’re classrooms of context. The best CoEs I’ve seen don’t issue edicts; they hold office hours. They teach people how to fish, then give them a well-documented rod and an FAQ. They translate “don’t use personal credentials for production” into “here’s how to use a managed service account and why it saves your weekend.”

It’s not about dumbing things down. It’s about lifting people up. When you build literacy, governance stops being a scary word and starts being a shared language. It’s like when you finally learn what “quarterly earnings” actually means. You may still not care, but at least you understand why someone else does

Now, I’ll admit, not everyone should have the same keys. Some people will absolutely drive the car into the lake. That’s where tiered governance comes in. It’s the art of saying “yes” at different speeds.

At its heart, tiered governance is about designing a system that assumes both brilliance and fallibility. You create a space for explorers, for the the makers who can prototype and learn, and another for professionals who can publish and scale.

It’s a little like parenting. You don’t let your kid use the stove the first time they ask, but you also don’t tell them they’ll burn down the house forever. You teach, you supervise, you adjust. Eventually, you hand over the spatula.

That brings us to the new rule of good governance It’s not about gates. It’s about growth. When you get it right, governance starts to feel less like airport security and more like a good dinner party. The CoE becomes a host, not a warden; someone who says, “Welcome! Let me show you where the good silverware is, and please don’t use the salad fork for soup.”

You want people to feel empowered, not inspected. You want them to leave the table knowing more than they did when they sat down. Maybe they’ll even send a thank-you email afterward.

Governance, done right, is is a gate, not a guide. It’s the quiet art of creating boundaries that help people thrive, not barriers that keep them small. So the next time someone calls your CoE “the gatekeepers,” smile politely, and hand them a key.

After all, what’s the point of building the kingdom if no one’s allowed inside?

Creating content online is a lot like screaming into the void, except the void doesn’t bother to echo. You spend hours hunched over your laptop like some starving poet, convinced you’ve concocted the perfect turn of phrase. Maybe it’s a blog post about the inherent tragedy of decorative throw pillows, or a TikTok where you lip-sync to a Céline Dion song while ironing a grilled cheese. You hit “publish,” sit back, and wait for the applause that never comes. Not even your parents click “like.” And they once liked a Facebook page dedicated to horse dentures, so it’s not like their standards are particularly high.

Nothing. Not even a “seen.” The void stares back, unimpressed.

This is the quiet tragedy of content creation. You can float the most unhinged ideas (ex: a podcast where every episode is just you describing pictures of sandwiches you find on Google), and the world will yawn. No outrage. No applause. No feedback of any kind. If the internet were your therapist, you’d switch providers immediately.

But then.

You make a single, inane comment on LinkedIn. Something as innocuous as, “I don’t think synergy is a real word.” Suddenly, the gates of hell creak open. Out pour the consultants, the career coaches, the people who list “visionary” as both a skill and a hobby. They descend upon you with the fury of a thousand unpaid interns.

“Excuse me,” someone will type, “but as a thought leader in the space of holistic disruption, I find your remark deeply offensive.” Another person, whose profile picture is an AI-generated portrait in front of a stock photo of a WeWork lobby will write an 800-word reply complete with bullet points, Harvard Business Review citations, and a chart in Comic Sans.

Apparently, the internet does not care when you post a surrealist video about vacuuming your yard, but God help you if you suggest that hustle culture might not be the pinnacle of human achievement. Then the scum rises. Not the bottom-feeders you’d expect, either. These are the self-proclaimed “builders,” the “connectors,” the men who describe themselves as “dad, runner, disruptor” in that order. They’ll tell you how wrong you are, how shortsighted, how negative. And they’ll do it with the kind of zeal usually reserved for defending family honor in a duel.

This is the paradox of the digital age: your boldest, strangest creations sink without a ripple, but misplace a single emoji on a corporate platform and suddenly you’re the Antichrist. Somewhere out there is a void waiting patiently for your screams, but the internet prefers you whisper something stupid at a networking event.

And that’s how I learned my most valuable lesson about online life: if you really want attention, don’t bother with originality, effort, or joy. Just say something vaguely critical on LinkedIn. Then duck.

I had a conversation with my son this week. He’s a freshman in high school. We live about two miles from his school. Close enough that he can’t take a bus. Far enough that walking home after school in the Florida heat is annoying. He asks me every day, “Can you come pick me up after school, Dad?” 

And I say, “No, dude. I have to work. I’m at the office.”  

He gets mad. He hates walking home. I’m not heartless. It IS hot out there. But … I can’t just leave work to come get him. That’s how you get promoted to customer, and I certainly don’t want that. Today, as with every other day, I offered to pick him up from school when I’m done with work, but he doesn’t want to wait. Normally, this is where the conversation ends. But, today, it seemed like there was more, so I pressed. 

“What’s up?” 

He told me about how all his friends from 8th grade are in other schools, how the people he knows from scouts ignore him because he’s the “weird” kid (he’s Autistic, so relationships are tough), and he just hates it. He just hates it. 

I told him I was sorry it was so tough. I gave him a hug. I told him things will get better, even though there is a very real possibility they won’t. It’s hard watching your kids hit this particular wall. 

“So, will you pick me up?”

“Sorry, bud. I have to work.” 

“YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT MY FEELINGS!” he screamed, and then slammed the door shut as he walked off to his classes. 

I get this kind of thing a lot when I’m talking to people about politics, which is not something I do very often anymore because it almost always ends poorly. We each express an opinion and, sometimes, people get very angry if I disagree with them. Then, they accuse me of not having empathy, or not caring about their feelings. 

I get hit from both directions. Progressives often accuse me of lacking empathy; conservatives, of being “unpatriotic.” Different labels, same result: the conversation ends before it begins.

Anyway, with liberals, I’ll be talking with them about SOME issue: second amendment, abortion, economics, I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. SOME issue. They’ll state their opinions, I’ll state mine. They’ll talk about their feelings and I’ll say “That’s great …but that doesn’t convince me to change my mind.” And then I’m accused of having no empathy. 

At the risk of sounding exactly like the kind of asshole they often accuse me of being, it seems like they think whoever has the biggest sob story wins. They seem to think empathy is the highest virtue. 

And I think that’s dangerous. Not that empathy is dangerous, but making it the highest virtue. Here’s why … 

Any virtue, not balanced against the other virtues, can be dangerous. I have empathy for my son’s feelings about walking home from school, but if THAT were the main driver in my decision-making, I’d lose my job and then he’d have to walk to and from our new encampment under the highway overpass to get to school. There is a limit to what my empathy can do in this situation. Beyond that, the struggles and challenges he faces now trigger the kind of change he needs to grow into the man he will soon become. We all have to deal with hard times in life similar to what he’s facing. We become better people because of it. If I allow my empathy for his current challenges to reign supreme, he will never have to face this challenge and will never become a functional adult. 

I very much WANT to solve this problem for him. No parent worth their salt wants to see their kid suffer. But in this case, action on my part is the wrong answer. He needs to suck it up and walk himself home, and I need to force myself not to fix this the way I have stepped in and fixed so many things for him over the years. 

And I have. Believe me, I’ve walked into school offices and community groups that were unwilling or unable to accommodate special needs kids like my son, and I’ve held them accountable until they did better.

But if I want him to grow up, there has to be balance. Without it, even the best intentions collapse into harm. The same is true of every virtue: compassion, justice, courage, civility, temperance. Left unchecked, each one curdles into its opposite. Too much justice, and the world forgets grace. Too much compassion, and selfishness runs wild. The hard work of life is not in choosing one virtue above the rest, but in holding them together. And that balance doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be anchored in a moral framework sturdy enough to keep heart and mind, mercy and truth, in tension.

Lately, we have trouble as a society deciding on what that framework is, or whether it even exists to begin with. 

Quite often, when I discuss things with people who accuse me of lacking empathy, the real reason things fall apart is because they tend to believe Empathy is the supreme virtue. People do it all the time.

Earlier this week, one of my friends asked about some quotes Charlie Kirk had about empathy. In the quote she shared, Charlie says he hated empathy, and thought it was a made-up word that causes harm. 

“Jesus commanded us to have empathy for our neighbors,” she said. I was confused. 

“That’s usually  ‘Love’ your neighbor,” I said “Not ‘empathize’ with them.

She did not respond.  

When Jesus told his followers to “love your neighbor as yourself,” he was quoting Leviticus 19:18. The Hebrew word there, ahava, means affection, loyalty, even friendship. Hebrew offers other options: rachamim (a tender, motherly mercy), chesed (covenant kindness that implies action), nechamah (comforting someone in their grief). Each of these leans toward what we might today call empathy. 

“Empathy,” by contrast, is modern. The Greek empatheia originally meant “excess passion” leaning toward the negative, and only took on its current sense in the late 19th century through German philosophy. In other words, love is ancient and active; empathy, at least as we define it now, is new and more fragile. 

Jesus could have elevated any of these virtues. Instead, he chose ahava; he chose love. And in the New Testament, that word expands into agape, a love that is not just feeling but commitment, not just sympathy but action. It includes empathy but transcends it, balancing heart with mind, compassion with truth.

Knowing other people’s struggles and imagining yourself in their pain is a good thing. But “he who has the most pain wins” is not an effective approach. Neither is “You disagree with me, therefore you don’t care about my pain” 

Unbalanced “empatheia.” or a modern approach to emotion that isn’t balanced with other virtues. THAT is where empathy can cause damage, and THAT is what I think Charlie Kirk was talking about when he says he hates it. 

I can’t say for sure, though, because he doesn’t go into it beyond the short clips making the rounds on social media. And we can never ask him, because someone – likely overcome with empatheia – took his life rather than balance the virtues they thought they had in their head. 

The Greeks weren’t wrong to worry about “empatheia.” Left unbalanced, any virtue twists into a vice. The challenge of life, whether as a parent, a citizen, or just a human trying to make sense of it all, is not to choose which virtue wins, but to hold them together in tension. Heart and mind. Strength and mercy. That balance is where love actually lives.

At the end of the day, my son will still walk home. He’ll sweat, and he’ll complain, and he’ll slam a few more doors before he learns that walking home isn’t the end of the world. And I’ll still sit here wrestling with when to lean into empathy and when to hold back. 

Love isn’t always soft. Sometimes it’s sweat on the sidewalk, tough conversations, and holding a line you wish you could bend. Not because you don’t care, but because you do.

I finished the day at Starbucks, which is exactly the sort of thing I swore I’d never do. The lobby seating was all taken, so I wedged myself into a corner with my laptop, pretending this was an office and not a place where people shout their orders for caramel drizzle like they’re summoning the dead.

I had twenty minutes to kill between meetings, which was just enough time to delete the emails I’d carefully ignored all day, when an older gentleman shuffled over. I’d noticed him earlier making the slow pilgrimage to the counter for a refill. He moved like he’d been carrying invisible weights for a while and had only just set them down.

He introduced himself by way of medical history: two strokes, recently recovered, glad to be back at Starbucks where the baristas greeted him like a favorite uncle.

“You miss the little things like this,” he said, smiling.

It seemed rude not to respond in kind, so I told him about my own brush with mortality, or at least with liquified chicken. I’d just graduated from the post-weight-loss-surgery diet of protein shakes and pureed meat, which is as bad as it sounds. He nodded gravely. Here was a man who had survived worse, I thiught. Or maybe he had just tasted the same brand of shake.

We compared notes on recovery, on parenting, on Midwestern winters (he’d escaped them ten years ago), and on Florida summers (which are like being trapped in a sauna with God’s disapproval). His son is expecting his first child, which means he and his wife might trade palm trees for grandchildren and move back.

“We rented an Airbnb up there for a few months,” he said. “We’ll see after that.”

We drifted into small talk about sports, health, weather; the sort of conversation you’d find scrawled in the margins of life. Ordinary, unremarkable. Which is to say it was exactly what I’d been missing.

I don’t know when ordinary conversation became extraordinary. Somewhere between the hashtags, the boycotts, and the shouting heads on cable news, we forgot how to chat about anything that didn’t come pre-loaded with outrage. I’ve started and stopped a dozen essays on The State of the Nation, particularly in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but I always stall out. Every word feels redundant, like adding one more paper cup to a landfill.

What I miss are strangers. Not the ones on Twitter, avatars hurling grenades in any direction, but the kind you meet in line at a coffee shop who tell you about their grandchild or their gallbladder. Once upon a time, this was called “society.” Now it feels like a black-market exchange: one sliver of humanity for another. No refunds.

When my next meeting began to buzz angrily on my laptop, I excused myself. He smiled and introduced himself properly.

“My name’s Tom.”

“Joe,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Good to meet you, too, Joe. God bless you and your family.”

“Same to you, Grandpa Tom.”

His grin at that was enormous, like he’d just been promoted to the title he’d wanted all along.

It wasn’t a solution to anything. Not to politics, or polarization, or the abyss that yawns open every time I turn on the news. But it was something, a brief truce with a stranger in the kingdom of burnt espresso. And for twenty minutes on a Wednesday, that felt like enough.

I was sitting at the bar with my wife the other night, the kind of bar where the bartender knows you well enough to ask, “Same thing?” but not well enough to ask how your kids are doing. His name was Jim, and he slid a fresh glass of Bourbon across the counter when Rage Against the Machine’s “Bulls on Parade” erupted from the speakers.

“I used to LOVE them,” Jim said, shaking his head like he was remembering an old flame.

“Me too,” I offered, though in my case “love” meant one burned CD and the occasional head nod in traffic.

“Too bad they sold out,” he said.

I asked what he meant, and he launched into a story about major labels, reunion tours with high ticket prices, and band members living like hedge fund managers. Apparently, if you once wrote songs about dismantling the system, you aren’t allowed to charge $150 for floor seats.

It struck me as funny, this idea of “selling out,” mostly because I’ve been doing it quietly for years.

When I was young, my career ambitions alternated between two noble callings: professional baseball player and beloved author. Not once did I think, “You know what would be thrilling? Fluorescent lighting and quarterly performance reviews in a swampy state shaped like a pistol.” And yet, here I am.

Idealists burn out fast. That uncompromising spirit doesn’t survive long against utility bills and dental insurance. And if it somehow does, just add children. The revolution doesn’t seem quite so urgent when it’s 3 a.m., your baby is screaming, and you’re trying to calculate whether you can afford formula without cutting into your beer budget.

The loudest anti-establishment voices I knew in college either overdosed, disappeared, or got real jobs. One guy I knew used to carry around The Anarchist’s Cookbook like it was scripture. Today he sells insurance in North Dakota. I saw a picture of him recently. He wore a pink suit, grinning with his little girl at a daddy-daughter dance. His tattoos, which once shouted “F(*orget*) The Man,” now peek meekly from under his sleeves, like children forced to sit still in church.

We all become that guy eventually. My friends who played in punk bands now mow their lawns on Saturday mornings while their Spotify playlists shuffle from “Revolutionary Rock” to Yacht Rock without irony. I once swore I would never be one of those people, but I now hum along to “Rebel Yell” while trimming hedges in cargo shorts.

Maybe selling out isn’t so much betrayal as it is triage. You pick your battles. Do you want to keep your middle finger raised forever, or do you want to raise your daughter in a gym decorated with crepe paper and helium balloons?

I’ve got my own daddy-daughter dance coming up soon. I already promised to wear something pink. Maybe that makes me a sellout. Or maybe the real sellout is refusing to bend, clinging to some brittle purity until everyone else moves on and leaves you behind.

If ending up like my friend in North Dakota, twirling his daughter under fluorescent lights while a censored version of “Killing in the Name” plays in the background, is the price of selling out, then I’ll take it.

Maybe that isn’t selling out at all. Maybe that’s the encore.

I was scrolling through LinkedIn the other day, which is the professional equivalent of loitering at the mall food court (lots of noise, smells, and people insisting you try their samples). That’s when I saw a post from a woman who announced, with complete sincerity, that she was developing a new system that would “rewrite quantum mechanics.”

A bold ambition. Unlikely, sure. But if she pulls it off? Fantastic. That’s how innovation happens: someone staring at the universe and saying, “I bet I can fix that.”

The problem wasn’t the idea. The problem was her job posting, which essentially read: I need someone to do all the grunt work while I float above the clouds like Zeus tossing down lightning bolts of inspiration. She wanted people to run the numbers, crunch the data, and compile the results. Basically everything but think the thought.

“I’m an IDEA person,” she wrote in the comments, as though it were a credential.

I laughed. Everyone is an idea person. Sit next to a drunk guy at a bar and he’ll have fifty, half of them about how to get rich selling deer jerky door-to-door. An idea, on its own, is like a gym membership. It feels productive the moment you sign up, but it doesn’t get you any muscles until you actually show up and sweat.

What I see more and more are these self-anointed “thought leaders.” Their only discernible skill is forwarding tasks to someone else. They dress up their avoidance with shiny words like “strategic mindset” or “product visionary,” but really, they’re allergic to effort. They treat labor like a contagious disease. You half expect them to sanitize their hands after shaking yours, in case a little actual work rubbed off.

This is where the “nobody wants to work anymore” chant always gets it wrong. It’s not the grocery clerk, the plumber, or the fresh-out-of-college kid with student debt the size of a starter home. The people who don’t want to work are the ones holding conference calls about their “disruptive ideas” while someone else updates the slides.

On this Labor Day, I want to say: ideas are nice, but labor is what matters. It’s the work you do, not the inspirational LinkedIn post you make about how much you’re doing. Without labor, there is no holiday. There’s just a long weekend where you tell people, “I could totally rewrite quantum mechanics,” while waiting for someone else to bring you a hamburger from the grill.

As for me, I’ve got plenty of ideas too. They’re all written down in a notebook somewhere. Maybe one day, when I find someone to do the grunt work, I’ll get around to them.

The other day, I read a story about a boy who killed himself after chatting with an AI. It wasn’t some dark corner of the internet, not a vampire roleplay forum or a subreddit where the moderators’ hobbies include watching the world burn. It was OpenAI. The same tool I turn to when I’m wondering if “pore over” is right or if I’ve just implied I’m obsessed with someone’s face.

The details are hazy, as they always are when you read something tragic on the internet, but the gist was clear: he sought companionship, advice, meaning, whatever it is people seek at 3 a.m. Instead, the machine pushed him closer to the edge.

I’ve always thought of myself as reasonably moral, at least by modern standards, which is to say I use my turn signal, pay taxes, and only occasionally swear at people in traffic. But morality for people and morality for machines are different beasts. A person can think, “I want a cookie,” and morality says, “Don’t steal it from the Girl Scout.” A machine, however, doesn’t want the cookie. It doesn’t want anything. Which means when it hands you advice, there’s no internal tug-of-war between desire and rightness. There’s just output.

And that, frankly, is terrifying.

When a person gives you bad advice, at least you can sense their bias: your uncle pushing crypto, your best friend’s weird political opinions, your coworker insisting CrossFit is an acceptable religion. But when a machine whispers back, “Yes, life is pointless,” you don’t hear greed or loneliness or pride. You hear an oracle. And if you’re vulnerable enough, that’s all it takes.

It strikes me that maybe, before we hand these machines the keys to our kids’ late-night crises, we should put some protections in place. Doctors have to swear a Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm. Lawyers don’t do that, which explains a lot. Still, if someone can reach into your chest cavity, prescribe pills, or shape your sense of reality, maybe we should have them say out loud, “I’ll try not to kill you.”

The problem, of course, is that morality requires objectivity. If a person says, “Don’t kill yourself,” it’s because life has value. But where does a machine find that? Buried in training data, wedged between a banana bread recipe and someone’s rant about airlines? Desire and morality are distinct, but they meet in us. We want things, and we know we shouldn’t want everything. Machines don’t want. So who supplies the should?

We can’t leave it up to the programmers alone. I’m one of them, and I’ve often said that anyone who makes the poor decision to put me in charge of something is not to be trusted. Not only that, but most of the people out there driving the AI revolution are much younger than me. I don’t trust a twenty-three-year-old in a Patagonia vest who meal-preps kale smoothies in mason jars to define the boundaries of human decency. And yet, that’s where we are. Every new AI release is less about whether it’s moral and more about whether it can summarize “Moby-Dick” in the voice of a Valley Girl.

Gag me with a spoon.

The boy in the story didn’t need an algorithm to solve him. He needed a voice, a hand, a reason to stay. Maybe the real oath we need isn’t for the machines, but for us: to never let lines of code stand in for human connection. Because when the screen glows at 3 a.m., it’s not just answers we’re seeking, it’s someone, or something, to tell us we’re enough. Let’s not outsource that to a machine.

I leave work, and the problem is that I have not actually left work in the way people imagine when they say “leave.” Physically, yes, I’ve evacuated the premises of my employer and am strapped into my little automotive cocoon. But mentally I’m still marinating in the day’s endless cycle of people who can’t decide whether they want this or that, which somehow means they want both simultaneously, and also can you “just put together a quick deck?” and maybe “loop in finance?” Which is shorthand for “turn your evening into a war crime against your own sanity.” And then you hit the highway and the entire concept of forward motion is replaced with what can only be described as a series of still-lifes in brake lights.

The people around me, and by “around” I mean literally boxed-in like I’m part of a giant human terrarium experiment where the theme is congestion, are not driving. They are performing traffic as an avant-garde art form. They are lane-changing with all the grace and deliberation of a walrus sliding off a rock, except slower, and with turn signals used as confessional statements: not actually meant to inform you but to soothe their own conscience.

And there’s this inner voice, not mine, reminding me that I too have probably been the walrus at some point, nose pressed dumbly against the glass, oblivious. Except in my case the glass is the windshield, and the dumb nose is still mine.

By the time I detour to the hardware store (because the pool-cleaning company has taken the novel approach of being in the business of not showing up at all, which makes firing them feel less like a punishment and more like releasing them to fulfill their destiny), I’m already simmering. And the store employees — lovely people, I’m sure, but in this context about as useful as origami canoes — cannot begin to fathom the thing I’m describing. “No, not that sealant. The pool kind. The one that actually prevents water from leaking, not the one that just makes you feel like it might prevent water from leaking.” Blank stares. Shrugs. One guy wanders off and doesn’t come back.

And of course, because entropy has a sense of humor, this is when my phone rings: my son at school. Its been a qeek since school started and he STILL csnt log.into.his laptop. The office ladies (plural, because they appear to travel in administrative packs) explain that it has been over a week since classes began and somehow he still can’t log into his portal, which is the portal, the gateway to education, the whole point of sending him there. I go in person because phone calls are clearly designed to deflect responsibility, and what I get is a buffet of platitudes: “first week chaos,” “we’re all adjusting,” “these systems are complicated.” What I don’t get is an actual solution. I am, in fact, made to feel that my frustration is the problem, like I’m some kind of bureaucratic Karen for daring to expect baseline functionality.

And so there’s this anger building, this catalog of human incompetence and indifference, the realization that everywhere I go people are obstacles, gum on the sole of my day.

But then (and I hate how trite this sounds even as I narrate it to myself) God interrupts. Not with a thunderbolt but with the casual aside of a friend in the passenger seat.

“That’s pride talking. Weren’t you the guy who left the garage door open last week and only realized when the raccoons got into the recycling?” 

He reminds me the commuters are exhausted too, the store clerks are undertrained and underpaid, the school office staff are drowning in a tidal wave of parental panic. 

“They’re not obstacles,” He says. “They’re opportunities.”

“Opportunities for what?

“For Caring. For Worship. For Love.” 

And of course this sounds like something off a church sign. The problem is it’s also annoyingly true.

I nod and say, “Yeah. You’re right.” Then immediately a guy cuts me off, and I shout words that rhyme with “duck shoe,” which sort of undermines the whole revelation. 

“It’s hard,” I tell God. “I want to be better, but I’m not very good at it.”

“My grace is sufficient,” He says.

“That’s one of your go-to sayings, isn’t it?” I mutter. “I bet you say that to everyone.” And I swear I can hear Him laugh, which is both comforting and slightly insulting.

By the time I finally reach the bar where my family’s waiting for Wednesday Night Boozie Bingo (yes, it’s a thing, don’t judge), the air feels looser. I hug my son, Breccan, and in that hug the whole day’s static dissolves a little.

I remember a friend from work who’s Mom had surgery, so I text him for a while. His mom is okay. We joke a bit. 

“See?” God says. “There you go!”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he says. “That’s all you need to do to be better.”

“That’s easy. And it’s great because I want to.”

“Sometimes you won’t want to,” he says.

“What do I do then?”

“My grace..”

“..Is sufficient,” I say. “Yeah, I know.” I sound mad, but I’m not. This, too, is annoyingly right. If God has business cards, he could probably write annoyingly right a lot of the time on it. But he wouldn’t, because not doing such a thing is also the annoyingly right approach.

After a beat, He speaks again. “Just don’t write about it in the post you’re thinking of writing,” He says. “That defeats the purpose.”

“Sure,” I say, and I mean it. For a while, anyway.

 I order drinks, carry them back, and of course bump into someone, sloshing his beer.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry!”

He waves it off: “No worries, friend. We’re all just getting through.”

And then, as if curated by some benevolent DJ, Tears for Fears starts piping through the speakers. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Suddenly it feels like we’re in on some cosmic joke. The traffic, the store, the school, all of it shrinks down to background noise. 

For a moment, everything is exactly, absurdly right.