Author's Note

I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

— Walt Whitman, Song of Myself §1 (Leaves of Grass, 1892 ed.; public domain)

This is not a book by someone who has arrived. It is a book by someone who could not get rid of the question and decided to write from inside it.

The through-line, if it has to be named in one word, is alignment. The word carries two registers simultaneously — the yoga-tradition sense of aligning body with breath with attention, and the technical sense used in the AI literature for the problem of getting powerful systems to reliably do what we intended. The book assumes the two registers are describing the same problem at different scales. The retreat, the marriage, the platform, the civilization, the tool — all are attempts to align something with something, and all reveal the same structural fact: the alignment cannot be derived from any single axis, and must be constructed, carefully and provisionally, by practitioners who have admitted they do not have a final answer.

The book is written in close third person. A woman who is not quite me walks through it. I appear briefly here and again, in a different register, in the late chapters. The point is not the person inside the experience. The point is the argument the experience carried. Let her carry it.

A small structural admission, at the outset, since it shapes how the reader is invited to read.

The book uses multiple narrative registers — diary fragments in the author's handwriting, scenes in close third, footnoted passages of analysis, occasional first-person addresses, the dream's own voice in Ch00b, the Void's own voice in Ch05, the fragments of speech the author actually gave at a retreat. I am borrowing this multi-voiced form from Vanessa Andreotti's Hospicing Modernity (2021) and from her work with Aiden Cinnamon Tea in Burnout From Humans (2025), where she calls it the bus of passengers — the recognition that no self is one self, and that honest writing about the inquiry sometimes requires letting different passengers speak in their own registers rather than translating them all into a single authorial voice. I am borrowing the framing. I have not asked Andreotti whether she gives me permission to borrow it. If she reads this and asks me to remove the borrowing, I will.

The narrator — the she who walks through most of the chapters — is one passenger among the others, not a privileged observer outside them. When the narrator is alone in a chapter, the other passengers are silent, present, watching. When two passengers disagree in a chapter, the disagreement is allowed to stand; I do not resolve it for the reader.

The book also engages, where it can, the four denials Andreotti names that modernity trains us in: denial of systemic violence, denial of ecological precarity, denial of complicity, denial of magnitude. I do not claim the book faces all four cleanly. I claim it tries to face them, and where it fails to, I have tried to leave the failure visible rather than seal it.

The frameworks the book engages are asked three questions: is it useful, does it fit the data, is it compassionate. These are Marsha Linehan's three criteria for selecting her biosocial theory of borderline personality disorder. Linehan developed the criteria in the late 1980s when she needed a basis for choosing a clinical theory at a moment when no existing theory worked for the patients she was trying to keep alive. The criteria do not claim to prove a theory true. They provide a test any theory has to keep passing, and a rationale for abandoning any theory that stops passing it. I borrow the criteria at the same theory-selection level the book operates on. If a framework here stops meeting the three tests it should be revised. That includes, especially, the frameworks I am most attached to.

One further principle is operative throughout the book, and the reader should have it at the outset, because it shapes what the non-fiction sections are for.

Knowledge without action is a burden.

This is a conviction the tradition I have been studying would recognize; Vanessa Andreotti and Bayo Akomolafe would recognize; my MSW training named in its own vocabulary as evidence-based practice. What it means, for me specifically, is that the non-fiction sections of a book like this one have to be tied to actions I have taken. If a claim I make here cannot point at an action — either something I did, or an honest invitation to the reader's own acting — then the claim is a burden I am asking the reader to carry on my behalf, and that is not a fair request. What drove me to write this book in this format, rather than as a sequence of abstract arguments, is the intention to weave knowledge that I acted on, with the acting as part of the testing — because the experience of the knowledge in action is, in turn, what lets me assess whether the knowledge still fits the data. The action is the test. If the action changes what I can see, the framework gets revised. The three filters — useful, fits the data, compassionate — remain operative because of the acting, not despite it.

Readers who want the verifiable layer will find, across the book, specific actions named with dates and (where they exist) public commit references. The actions are not offered as virtue. They are offered as receipts. The reader can check. The reader can disagree. What the reader cannot fairly say is that the book is pure talk. I tried, while writing it, not to write pure talk.

One commitment belongs at the front. The platform I run uses AI in some of its features. It is small, and I have chosen to keep it small while I figure out what the responsibility is. If the cumulative weight of cases reaching bellwether stage in the next eighteen months establishes that AI companies can be held liable for mental-health harms produced by their tools, I will turn the AI features off the day that ruling lands. The argument the book is making does not depend on this commitment, but the commitment is the receipt the book has chosen to leave at its threshold.

The book engages living traditions and living teachers. It quotes sparingly and attributes directly. Any passage of substantial length from a copyrighted source is cited under fair-use principles for commentary, and can be removed or paraphrased on request. Economic thinkers whose specific contributions the book draws on are named in footnotes where the contribution is used.

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