There are a few pieces of media I return to over and over again that have shaped who I am as a person. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, Charlie Chaplin's speech in The Great Dictator. What I want to talk about today, though, is Steve Jobs' Stanford Commencement Address in 2005:

Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards, ten years later. Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.

This is what I talk about when I say I only act knowing the next five feet ahead. There's no plan for me, only retrospect. The miracle of hindsight as I look back on what I've been building. We can only shape the constellations by the stars already in the sky.

In the past 140 days, I've written 120 blog posts, averaging 1,900 words per post. These have ranged from personal essay to critical thinkpiece to technical write-up. At this point, I wake up each day telling myself I can take a break. That I've deserved a week off. And yet the break never commences. I find myself back to my daily journal, writing my 750 words as though I have made a transcendental and occult bargain. But I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Is this extraordinary? I've thought hard about this question and I've come to the answer no, it isn't really. I use the simple heuristic that nobody has told me it's extraordinary. I've had seasons of depression where I did not write a meaningful word for months. And I've had fruitful seasons such as this one I'm in right now. The writing itself, I do enjoy. But I do not think it is exceptional. Nothing here would bring a person to their knees. Would alter the course of someone's life. And I'm content with that. My prolific, large volume of mediocrity read by a few hundred people.

Because mastery was never the point. The point is that I get to do this at all. There is such a deep, meaningful joy in working and then having the ability to look back and connect my dots, now. I write about a wide range of topics, but it isn't infinite. There are topics I find myself returning to:

• IndieWeb/digital sovereignty
• Indigenous writing/sovereignty (Thomas King, Greenland, my Métis identity)
• Writing life/craft (mise en place, freewriting, blogging workflow)
• Cultural criticism (commentary, platform capitalism, Substack, etc.)
• Personal essays/lyric essays and memoir (turning 30, hope, deep time, community)
• Philosophy (evil, morality, boredom, love)
• Technical (Eleventy, JAMstack, Javascript, CSS, etc.)
• Mental health/body embodiment and connection
• Political (universal progressivism, animal liberation, feminism, Palestine, COVID, Greenland)
• Pop culture (Bon Iver, the Mountain Goats, Smiling Friends, MMA, BoJack Horseman, Adventure Time)
• Tech criticism (Generative AI, Moltbook, etc.)

Throughlines

Let's go deeper. Taking a step back to examine my writing the past few months more meaningfully, I find my work circling a few specific themes and thesis ideas.

1. What do we owe each other, and how do we build the infrastructure to actually pay it? This runs through my technical write-ups as much as my philosophical essays. How owning your own domain and connecting through hyperlinks is an act of ethical community-building. Switching to AGPL licensing is a theory of the commons. Setting up a business dedicated to building accessible static sites for nonprofits is refusal of extraction. What sustainable solidarity actually looks like in practice. We must show up with our whole body for other people.

2. The commons are sacred. There are things that belong to everyone, and capital keeps trying to fence them off. The structures of the enclosures and silos must be named. We must identify who benefits, refuse to normalize it, and then build or point toward an alternative. The antidote to exploitation is abundance given freely.

3. Writing is medicine. Not content nor product. I'm not optimizing for an output. Writing is my ceremony, my medicine, the bread I bake and leave on my digital neighbour's step. The act of publishing has spiritual weight. But it must make a living, too. There must be a mutuality and reciprocity between the reader and the writer. We owe each other, and the sacred and the economic must coexist.

4. Community is the answer to the question how will civilization survive? We must get to know one another, those around us, and learn to homestead both physically and digitally. We are our relations, and we must intentionally choose to be accountable to each other directly. There is something here I do not have the answer to, which is how do communities deal with bad faith without becoming punitive? How do we have teeth without becoming what we're fighting?

5. Deep Time is the most ethical perspective. We are one generation of 12,000, countless ancestors ate and loved and grieved and left nothing we remember. 300,000 years of homo sapiens. The 1977 Voyager probe drifting past the edge of the solar system. Remembering this restores proportion and urgency at the same time. What you build right now matters more, not less. The obligation is to your moment. This is actually where Indigenous understandings and my value in the IndieWeb converge. Digital preservation is a continuity of culture problem. The same problem my ancestors faced. Who gets to determine what lasts? Who controls the archive? Who decides what gets remembered?

I am working out, in public, what it means to be a person of genuine ethical commitment in a moment of genuine civilizational fragility without burning down my health, joy, relationships, or my capacity for the sacred. I haven't finished working it out.

What's Next?

There's a part of me that wants to say that my next steps are to turn this blog, which is now sitting at over 250,000 words, and publish my next book. I published many books independently in 2024, around five or six. I published none in 2025. The truth is, while I certainly don't need it, I would love to be traditionally published. I've always wanted to be signed to Penguin Books and I have no good reason for it. I think I just like their adorable logo and mascot.

But I don't really have the luxury of time to dedicate to such a project. I'm too busy writing. Writing publicly, writing 2,000-word blog posts for free for the public instead of keeping my writing private and cultivating it into something more substantial, more braided, cohesive and richer with meaning. This is the trade-off.

Because the truth is, I can't really finish a project like another book because something new is springing up every day, I keep having more to add. There's somehow, spontaneously, always a new topic or idea or memory. I feel as though I would be disrespecting the otherworldly force gifting me this if I decided to take a break from blogging to do anything else.

I think I have a masochistic inclination to continue until I'm fully burnt-out. I am running until I can only walk, until I can only crawl. I just want to keep going like this. It's too fun, and I want to see what happens at the end with a morbid curiosity.