Chapter 1c: The Builder's Itch

There was, for a stretch of about three years, a particular kind of evening I knew well.

The daughter would be asleep. The apartment would be quiet in the specific way an apartment is quiet at ten at night when the dishwasher has finished and the heater has cycled off and the building has settled around the lives inside it. And I would sit at my desk, and I would open the laptop, and I would begin to design a tool.

The tool varied. For a while it was a tool that would generate bedtime stories for parents who were too tired to make up their own — stories that drew on cross-cultural arcs and would be illustrated by an AI image model and would feel, to the child, like the parent had told them. For a while it was a tool that would teach DBT skills to children through karaoke renderings of public-domain folktales. For a while it was a tool that would scaffold therapists through the supersense-protocol Francheska Perepletchikova had developed at Cornell. For a while it was a platform that would let parents share grammars of meaning — tarot, I Ching, astrology, contemplative texts — without surrendering their children's attention to the algorithms that had made them tired in the first place.

I told myself I was building these for the daughter. I told myself I was building them for the friend's son, who was eight and was spending more time alone in his room than the friend would have liked. I told myself I was building them for the parents in the WhatsApp group who had stopped reading at night because there were too many tabs open in their heads to find the page. I told myself the world needed these. The world did, in some sense, need them. That is not the question.

The question is the itch.

The itch was, on examination, the same itch the daughter had begun to report at five — the one she had been calling, with a child's plainness, my vulva itches. The itch was a body's signal that something the body had been carrying had not yet been allowed to be carried. The daughter's body was carrying intrusive thoughts she did not have a word for; my body was carrying something I had a great many words for and had been using all the words to avoid the thing the words were avoiding.

The thing the words were avoiding was that I was at an existential void and I could not climb out of it by being useful. I could not earn my way back to mattering by building. I could not make the void close by feeding it more code, more pitches, more developers in Brazil who were waiting for the next requirement document, more retreats with more teachers, more frameworks from more thoughtful thinkers, more reading lists, more Substack posts, more deck designs, more grammar JSONs.

The void did not close. The void was not the problem to be solved by the building. The void was what the building was trying not to look at.

The friend's son spent a lot of time alone in his room reading because his nervous system was registering the fact that the household was overwhelmed — three children, two careers, the usual collapse of bandwidth — and his body had found one of the few non-interruptive ways to be in a room that had no available adult. The friend told the story as proof of his son's literacy. He was proud. He had taught the boy to read. The reading was the prize for the teaching. Vanessa Andreotti would have heard the story and felt the modernity in it. Linehan would have heard the story and recognized the early shape of the invalidating environment — what you are doing is good because it is convenient for me. I did not say either of these things to the friend. He was tired. The story was the version he could hold.

I was building tools that would help that son's parents tell him better stories. I was building tools that would help the parents — myself included — be less tired. I was, on examination, building tools whose explicit purpose was to reduce the friction of being a parent in conditions that had been designed to make being a parent intolerable. The tools were not wrong. The tools were not the problem. The problem was that I was building them in the same posture the system that produced the exhaustion was operating in: optimize for measurable outcomes, reduce friction, deliver value, scale. I was, in the small, repeating the move that, in the large, had produced the exhaustion I was building tools to address.

I have, by the time I am writing this, paused several of the tools. The AI story generator for busy parents is not built. The developers in Brazil who were going to build it for me were instead paid for the time they had spent and thanked. The platform exists, scoped to grammars rather than to AI-generated content for children. I do not want my daughter trained on AI aesthetic. I do not want the friend's son trained on it either. I do not want the friend's son's literacy to be reinforced by the parental absence I would have made more efficient.

What I want is the thing I cannot quite build, because the thing I want is not a tool.

The thing I want is for the daughter, when she is reading in her room at eight years old or fifteen years old or thirty years old, to be reading because something is alive in her that the reading meets. Not because her parents were too tired. Not because the room was too quiet. Not because the algorithm has made other forms of attention difficult. Because she is alive and the reading is alive and the meeting is the life.

The Stoic version of this would say: she will read for the reasons she will read; what is up to me is how I respond. The DBT version would say: validation of her body's signal, plus skills, plus the dialectical move of accepting AND working to change the conditions. The Andreotti version would say: hospicing the cultural pattern that has made the friend grateful for his son's withdrawal, while building the prenatal care for what could come next. The Hareesh version, which the retreat administrator gave more bluntly, would say: do it for the benefit of one. The Hesse version would say: the smile is the same as the Buddha's. The Tillich version would say: the courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted, without anyone present to accept.

All five are saying something close to the same thing. The thing is: stop trying to solve the void by building. Sit with the void. The building, if it is good, will come out of the sitting. The building, if it is bad, will come out of the not-sitting, and it will be one more move in a pattern that has been producing the void for centuries.

There were nights, in the three years, when I was reading to the daughter and I could not have told you, after I closed the door, what the story had been about. I remember the body of the child against my arm. I remember the breath shifting into sleep. I remember the smell of the room and the weight of the book and the specific way the lamp lit only the page. I do not remember the words. I had been there, but the part of me that takes notes had been still.

What is that?

What is the worth of it?

I do not know. I know that the part of me that wants to build tools wants to make those minutes more efficient. The part of me that wants to build tools wants the story to be optimal, the lighting to be right, the parental nervous system to be regulated, the cross-cultural arc to be developmentally appropriate, the daughter's literacy trajectory to be reinforced. The part of me that was actually in the room, not taking notes, was not interested in any of this. The part of me that was actually in the room was making the kind of co-regulating presence Hareesh had named at the retreat without using the word — be the calmer body in the room — and the daughter was borrowing what I could offer. If I had offered something else, she would have borrowed something else.

The part of me that builds is not the same as the part of me that reads. The part of me that builds wants to be useful. The part of me that reads only wants to be present. Useful is what I have been trained to value because the culture I was raised in could not see the worth of present. The training is not personal. The training is the air everyone in this culture is breathing. It is the air I will exhale onto the daughter unless I learn to hold my breath.

The Builder's Itch is the inheritance. The pause is the practice. The sitting at the desk at ten at night designing the next tool is the inheritance asserting itself. The closing of the laptop and going to bed is, sometimes, the practice. Not always. Sometimes the tool wants to be built. Sometimes the void wants to be sat with. The discernment between them is the work.

The friend's son is now older. The friend is still tired. The daughter is no longer five. I am still at the desk at ten at night. The laptop is still open. I am no longer sure which side of the discernment I am on, in this moment, but I have noticed I am at the desk, and the noticing is the beginning of the answer.

CC BY-SA 4.0