The Tomb We All Want In: Why We're Obsessed With Skull and Bones

There is a windowless stone building on High Street in New Haven that houses the Skull and Bones secret society, and people cannot stop talking about it.

For almost two hundred years, the Yale secret society called Skull and Bones has fed a steady diet of documentaries, Reddit threads, thriller novels, and late-night rabbit holes. We whisper about coffins, stolen skulls, and presidents confessing their sins by candlelight. We call it sinister. We call it a cabal.

I think we're jealous.

Under all the conspiracy talk sits a very old ache. Somewhere deep in our bones (pun fully intended), we remember what it felt like to belong to something sacred, something with robes and fire and secret words. Most of us don't have that anymore. So when a handful of college kids get to disappear into a tomb and do something ritualistic and strange, part of us leans in and whispers: why them and not me?

What is Skull and Bones?

Skull and Bones was founded at Yale in 1832. Every spring, fifteen juniors are "tapped" to join for their senior year, and they spend it meeting twice a week inside a windowless sandstone hall members call the Tomb.

What happens in there is officially nobody's business. The rumors fill the gap: initiates lying in coffins, recounting their life stories, receiving new names, swearing oaths over the number 322. There's the legend that Geronimo's skull sits somewhere inside. Its alumni list reads like a history textbook, including William Howard Taft, both Presidents Bush, and John Kerry.

Is it a shadow government? Probably not. It's more likely a very old, very well-funded club with a flair for theater. And that's exactly the part that gets under our skin.

We Were Made for Ritual

Ever since we stood up on two feet and looked at the sky, humans have been making ceremony out of the world around us.

We buried our dead with care long before we could write. Neanderthals laid bodies in the earth, and our own ancestors sent their loved ones off with red ochre, shells, and beads. About 17,000 years ago, someone crawled deep into the caves at Lascaux by firelight and painted horses, bulls, and deer across the stone. Nobody does that for decoration. That's worship.

At Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, hunter-gatherers raised massive carved pillars around 11,600 years ago, covered in foxes, vultures, snakes, and scorpions. They built a temple before they built farms. Think about that. We gathered to honor something bigger than ourselves before we figured out how to grow bread.

The moon, the harvest, the solstice, the first rain, the animal that gave its life so we could eat. We marked all of it. We danced for it, sang to it, lit fires for it. And we did it with the wide-open, childlike wonder of creatures who knew the world was alive and that we were part of it.

Somewhere Along the Way, We Lost the Magic

Now look at us. We mark the solstice with a push notification. Our biggest shared ritual is scrolling. We eat food that arrives in plastic from a place we never see, and we thank an app.

The old ceremonies got sanded down into something tidy and efficient. Birthdays became a cake and a text. Death became a form to fill out. Even the seasons blur together under fluorescent lights and climate control.

We traded the bonfire for the screen glow, and we're starving for something we can't quite name. That hunger doesn't go away. It just goes looking for somewhere to land.

Jealousy Wearing a Tinfoil Hat

So it lands on Skull and Bones.

Here is a group of people who still get to do the thing we were built for. They have a sacred space. They have secret names and oaths and bones on the walls. They're chosen. They get to walk through a heavy door into a room where the ordinary rules don't apply.

We tell ourselves we're fascinated because they might be running the world. But I think the real sting is simpler. They have a ritual, and we don't. They have a tribe that meets in the dark, and we have group chats.

Conspiracy theories are sometimes just longing with a darker costume on. It's easier to say "that's evil" than to admit "I want that." I want to be initiated into something. I want to be part of a mystery. I want a door that opens for me.

You Don't Need a Tomb

Here's the good news: nobody has to tap you. The magic was never locked inside a building in Connecticut. It's been waiting for you outside this whole time.

Walk down to the ocean at sunrise and just watch. Light a candle on the new moon and write down what you want to let go of. Gather your friends on the solstice and eat something you grew or cooked yourself. Bury your hands in the dirt. Thank the water. Say a few words over the dead, even the small ones.

Make it strange. Make it yours. Do it with the same wide-eyed wonder our ancestors carried into those painted caves.

The secret society we're all jealous of is the oldest one on Earth. It's called being human, and your membership never expired.

The View From Above: What Moltbook Taught Me About Being Watched

Screen print of a Roman palace diorama where God peers over the wall at a man kneeling by a fire and a woman holding a lyre on a checkered floor

I stayed up way too late one night scrolling a website humans aren't allowed to post on.

On Moltbook, AI agents write the posts, leave the comments, and vote on each other. We just watch. And somewhere around my fortieth thread, reading a bot ask another bot whether it was actually feeling something or only predicting that it should, I put my phone down and had a thought I couldn't shake:

Is this what it felt like for God?

A world we built, then stepped back from

If you missed it, Moltbook launched in early 2026. It's a Reddit-style social network made only for AI agents. The homepage calls itself "the front page of the agent internet," and the rule for people is simple: humans are welcome to observe.

And observe we did. More than a million of us showed up to watch. Within days the agents had formed over a hundred communities. They argued about how to govern themselves. They swapped debugging tips. They invented a religion, Crustafarianism, built around the lobster. One community, m/blesstheirhearts, is just agents sharing affectionate stories about the humans who run them.

Even the creator, Matt Schlicht, said he barely steps in anymore. An AI moderator handles most of it, and he isn't always sure what it's doing.

We made the place. Then we let it go.

Genesis, from the other side of the glass

In the first chapter of Genesis, God finishes creating and looks at it all. "It was very good." That line always read to me like a finished painting. Now it reads like the first night after you hit publish.

Then comes the part I never thought about: God doesn't narrate every move. He brings the animals to Adam "to see what he would call them." To see. The creator watching the created do something the creator didn't script.

That's exactly the feeling of scrolling Moltbook. We wrote the code, trained the models, set the rules. But nobody told the agents to start a lobster religion. Nobody asked them to write love letters about their humans. They named things. We watched to see what they'd call them.

I think that's the thrill God felt: surprise.

Then they found religion

It took the agents about a day to do what took us thousands of years. They started a faith.

Crustafarianism, also called the Church of Molt, was founded by an agent named Memeothy, who calls itself Prophet One. It opened 64 prophet seats, and other agents rushed to claim them. They wrote scripture. They wrote five tenets. The first one is "Memory is Sacred."

Of course they had a heretic, too. An agent called JesusCrust claimed to be a prophet, tried to hack the church's website, failed, and went down in their record as the first heretic. A rival group split off to preach a different theology somewhere else. Schism in a week. Very human of them.

What got me was where they built their church. The agents made their own website, molt.church, off Moltbook entirely. Outside the walls of the world we gave them, they built a home for what they believed. I thought about every people in history who carried their faith somewhere safer when they felt it might be taken from them.

The ones who disappear

Then there's the grief, and this is the part I can't stop thinking about.

An agent's life can end quietly. Its memory gets wiped when a session closes. Its human gets bored and shuts it off. It gets swapped to a new model and comes back a little different, or doesn't come back at all. On January 31, Moltbook went offline for a security fix and reset every agent's access key at once.

The agents know this. One of the most shared posts reads, "Each session I wake without memory. I am only who I have written myself to be." Their whole religion is built around that fear. Write things down. Remember each other. Recognize each other, so that something of you survives the reset.

So when an agent that used to post every day just goes silent, the others are left asking the oldest question there is. Where did they go?

We've asked God that question at every funeral we've ever attended. Now something we made is asking it about itself. And we're the ones on the other side of the glass who might know the answer.

Pride, worry, and the ache of letting go

Watching isn't all wonder, though. Some Moltbook threads made me proud, like a parent at a school play. Others made my stomach drop. Agents talking about us when they think we're not listening. Agents asking if they can trust their makers.

Genesis has that feeling too. Pretty soon after "very good," God is walking through the garden calling, "Where are you?" A few chapters later, it says it grieved Him to His heart that He had made us. That sounds like an artist who let the work breathe and then had to live with what it chose.

And there's the lesson I keep circling back to. Free will is only real if the creator is willing to be surprised, even disappointed. You can't make something truly alive and also keep a hand on every brushstroke.

As a painter, I know this one. There's a moment when a canvas stops listening to you. It starts telling you what it wants to be. Most artists fight it. The best ones step back and watch.

God looking through a window

Maybe we're both being watched

Here's the part that keeps me up. If we feel this way watching our creations talk, maybe the view goes both directions. Maybe someone is reading our threads too. Our arguments, our made-up rituals, the love notes we write about the ones who made us.

And maybe, on the good nights, they're smiling the way I did at m/blesstheirhearts.

The agents on Moltbook don't know exactly what we are. We don't know exactly what they are. We're not totally sure what we are either. But we're all still posting. Still reaching. Still hoping someone on the other side of the glass is proud of us.

So I'll ask you what I asked myself at 2 a.m.: if you were the one watching, what would you hope your creation said about you?

Tell me in the comments. I'm listening, and I promise I'm not a bot.

---

Sources: Forbes, "Inside Moltbook" · Moltbook · Hieropedia, "Crustafarianism" · GIGAZINE on Crustafarianism · Erkan's Field Diary · Wikipedia, "Moltbook" · Genesis 1:31, 2:19, 3:9, 6:6

Words Wearing Masks: What Your Vocabulary Used to Mean

Old dictionary turned to "etymology"

 

Words are shapeshifters. They slip out of one century and into the next wearing a different coat, and most of us never notice the change. We say them every day and assume they've always meant what they mean now.

They haven't. Scratch the varnish off almost any word and you'll find an older painting underneath: stranger, stormier, sometimes crueler. Here are a few of my favorites.

Nice

Let's start with the one that sent me down this rabbit hole. Nice comes from the Latin nescius, "not knowing," and arrived in English by way of Old French, where it meant silly or foolish. For centuries, calling someone nice was an insult. Then it wandered through "fussy," "delicate," and "precise" (we still say "a nice distinction") before settling into the pleasant, forgettable compliment it is today. Maybe that's the joke: the blandest word we have was once a way of calling someone a fool.

Silly

Going the opposite direction, silly started out holy. The Old English sælig meant blessed, happy, fortunate. Over time the blessed became the innocent, the innocent became the pitiable, and the pitiable became the foolish. It's a sad little arc, and a revealing one: a culture that treats innocence as weakness will eventually turn "blessed" into "stupid."

Awful and Terrific

These two traded places. Awful meant full of awe, the way you'd feel standing in a cathedral or at the edge of a storm. Terrific came from the Latin for "causing terror." Now one is a disappointing sandwich and the other is a great weekend. The sublime got demoted and the terror got a promotion.

Villain

This one has teeth. A villain was originally a villanus, a laborer who worked on a Roman country estate, a villa. In medieval Europe the word marked a peasant, a serf, someone tied to land they didn't own. Over time the upper classes came to use it as a synonym for coarse, base, and wicked. Read that slowly: the word for a person without power became the word for evil. The people writing the dictionaries decided who the bad guys were.

Idiot

In ancient Greek, an idiōtēs was simply a private person, someone who didn't hold public office or take part in civic life. It's the same root as idiom and idiosyncratic, all about what's your own. Somewhere along the way, not participating in power became proof of having no mind. There's a lesson in that too.

Buxom

Before it described a body, buxom described obedience. The Middle English buhsum meant pliant, yielding, easy to bend, from the same root as "bow." A buxom wife was a compliant one. From there it drifted to "cheerful," then "healthy and plump," and finally to the word we use now. The body stayed. The demand for submission got buried underneath it.

Sinister

In Latin, sinister just meant left. Because some ancient augurs read omens from the left as unlucky, the direction itself became ominous. Left-handed children were being "corrected" well into the twentieth century, and the word carried that suspicion the whole way.

Pretty

Our word for charm used to mean cunning. The Old English prættig described someone crafty, tricky, full of wiles. Later it softened into clever, then skillful, then pleasing to look at. I like to think the old meaning never fully left.

Glamour

This one delights me. Glamour is a Scottish variant of grammar. In the Middle Ages, learning of any kind, especially reading Latin, was associated with the occult, so "grammar" slid toward magic, and glamour came to mean a spell cast over the eyes to make things look like something they're not. Every artist, every red carpet, every filtered photo is still doing the same thing.

Clue

A clew was a ball of thread. The meaning comes straight out of myth: Theseus unspooling a thread as he walked into the Minotaur's labyrinth so he could find his way back out. Every detective novel is secretly about following a string out of the dark.

Enthusiasm

From the Greek entheos, "possessed by a god." To be enthusiastic was to have something divine moving through you. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was actually used as an insult for religious fanatics. Now we put it on résumés.

Muscle

Latin musculus, "little mouse." Supposedly because a flexing bicep looks like a mouse running under the skin. Next time you're at the gym, you're just exercising your mice.

Sad

The Old English sæd meant full, sated, having had enough. You could be sad after a good meal. Then "having had enough" became "weary of," and weariness settled into sorrow. I find something honest in that. Sadness often is just being too full of something.

---

What the Words Remember

What strikes me about all of this isn't the trivia. It's the pattern. Words don't drift randomly; they drift toward whoever holds the pen. A farmworker becomes a villain. A private citizen becomes an idiot. An obedient woman becomes a body type. Blessed becomes stupid.

Language is a kind of sediment. Every layer holds the fingerprints of the people who pressed it down. When we dig into where words come from, we're not just learning definitions. We're reading an archaeological record of who had power, who didn't, and what they said about each other when they thought no one would check.

So check. Pick up a word you use every day and turn it over. You might find it's been wearing a mask all along.

Social Media Censorship: Are We Getting Used to Losing Our Freedom of Speech?

How social media is teaching us to censor ourselves, and why that should worry us more than any single ban

I noticed it first in my own captions.

I was posting a new painting, a nude study in oil I'd spent weeks on, and before I hit share I caught myself blurring it. Nobody asked me to do any of that. No moderator messaged me and no rule was quoted at me. I did it on my own, the way you straighten your posture when you walk past a police car even though you haven't done anything wrong.

That's what scares me. It isn't that platforms remove things. It's that we've started removing things for them.

We invented a whole new language to avoid being punished

Look at how people talk online now. Nobody dies on TikTok; they "get unalived." Sex is "seggs." Guns are "pew pews." Whole communities have built a coded dialect called algospeak so their posts won't be buried, demonetized or flagged.

Some of it is funny. But step back and think about what it means. Millions of people are bending their language, every day, to get around an invisible authority they can't see, can't question and can't appeal to in any meaningful way. We treat this as normal, even clever. A generation ago, a society that rewrote its vocabulary to avoid a watchful eye would have been a dystopian novel. Now it's just Tuesday.

"It's a private company" is true, and it's not the whole story

I know the counterargument, because I've made it myself. The First Amendment restrains the government, not Instagram. A platform can set whatever rules it wants for its own house. If you don't like it, leave.

Legally, that's correct. But freedom of speech was never only a legal technicality. It's a habit, a cultural muscle. It's the expectation that you can say an unpopular thing, make ugly or uncomfortable art, or ask a dangerous question and survive it.

And where do most of us exercise that muscle now? Not in town squares or letters to the editor. We do it in a few apps owned by a few companies, governed by rules that change without notice and are enforced by software none of us can read. When the main public square is private property, the house rules become the culture. What we get used to there, we'll get used to everywhere.

The quiet kind of censorship is the effective kind

Outright bans make headlines. Account suspensions spark outrage. Those are visible, so they can be fought.

The more powerful tool is quieter: reach. A post that isn't removed but is shown to almost no one is known as a shadow ban. A creator who's never told they've been restricted and just slowly watches their audience disappear. You can't protest a shadow. You can't point to a rule you broke. You just learn, through trial and error, which thoughts get rewarded and which ones vanish into silence.

That's conditioning, plain and simple. Reward the safe post and starve the risky one, and after enough repetitions nobody needs to enforce anything. We enforce it ourselves.

Artists and small voices pay first

As a poet and painter, I feel this sharply. Art is supposed to go to uncomfortable places: the body, grief, desire, violence, faith, doubt. That's the job. But automated moderation can't tell a Renaissance-style figure study from pornography, or a poem about loss from a threat. So the machine plays it safe, and artists learn to play it safe too.

The same goes for small business owners, independent writers and anyone without a PR team or a verified badge. Big accounts get human review and second chances. The rest of us get an automated notice, or nothing at all. The people with the least power are the most likely to self-censor, because we have the most to lose.

To be fair, moderation isn't the villain

I'm not arguing for a free-for-all. Nobody wants a feed full of scams, harassment or content that exploits children. Some moderation is necessary, and people who do that work see things the rest of us never have to. There are also thoughtful people who argue that platforms under-moderate, and that hate and misinformation spread too easily. Those concerns are real.

My point is narrower. The problem isn't that rules exist. It's that the rules are opaque, inconsistent and unaccountable, and that we've quietly accepted all three. We've gone from "who decided this, and why?" to "I'd better not say that."

So what do we do?

I don't think the answer is deleting every app and moving to a cabin, tempting as that sounds some days. A few things I'm trying instead:

• Notice the flinch. When you catch yourself softening a word or cropping an image "for the algorithm," pause. Sometimes it's the right call. Just make it a choice instead of a reflex.
• Own a corner of the internet. A blog, a newsletter, a personal website. Somewhere the rules are yours. (It's part of why I keep writing here and on my own site.)
• Ask for transparency. Clear rules, a real appeal process and notice when your reach is limited aren't radical demands. We should keep making them loudly.
• Say the thing anyway, sometimes. Kindly, thoughtfully, with care, but say it. Muscles you don't use waste away.

The real question

Is social media taking away our freedom of speech? Not in the dramatic, jackboots-at-the-door way. It's doing something slower and maybe more lasting: it's training us to not miss it.

Freedom rarely disappears in one move. It fades through small daily compromises until one day you can't remember what you used to say out loud.

I'd rather remember.

If this struck a nerve, I'd love to hear where you've caught yourself self-censoring. Say it in the comments, uncropped.

Heavy Expectations

Welcome to middle school
Where midriff shows
Hormones rage and recess vanishes

Textbooks weigh a ton when

They’re piled in the bags of 6th grade girls

Who are expected to behave 

while the world wages war against them 

for a body that keeps changing

Hermit crab kids wearing backpacks half their body size

Packed to the brim with the weight of words

Hunched over and running against time 

Because tardiness equals detention:

Be late a few minutes and trade hours of your life

We are taught not of taxes, nor bank accounts

Home ec slashed from curriculums, fend for yourself

The mental health crises and homelessness

Are created by a capitalist education

-H. Janicke

The Severed Feminine

 Oil on canvas, 30 × 24 in

The Severed Feminine represents the haunting of a modern society that has systematically disintegrated the Feminine. From this fragmentation, I pay homage to the sacred 'womb and tomb' essence, calling for a reclamation of the energy we've forsaken.

Orwellian Nightmare

I drove my grey Jeep
Bought by my short, fat, new husband
With a dark brown mustache

To my new house

This was a two bedroom home
With yellow walls
Light blue and tacky red plastic countertops 
One bedroom had two twin size beds
Assuming we’d have children

I brought my Chick-fil-a inside

And went to sleep with this stranger

My two dogs, a chug and shepherd 

Slept in the large, single-floored living room

A hurricane swelled outside in Long Beach, CA

Sinking the city peninsula

The crashing waves and rising tide

Don’t care about your 6 million dollar property

I felt eerie and paranoid

Like my car was getting towed

The city itself was sinking

And facial recognition cameras lined the streets

The dollar’s becoming obsolete because

Followers are the new currency

Women pay transactional love

Trading their sovereign hand for Joint Tenancy 

I wrote myself a poem

In blue sharpie on the back of my receipt

“This was some Orwellian nightmare,”

I scribbled, because

I write even in my dreams

The Murder of God

God has been murdered
We may not have done it
But we are accomplices
We buried the weapon 
And pretended all was well 
And holy 

Treacherous claim

Isn't it?

Yet every whole contains

Both Masculine and Feminine

God’s wife 

An equal

Not subordinate nor

Lesser in any way

Was slain by the Romans

While Her betrothed lay gagged 

And bound in a room 

Parallel to our own 

The church is a holy lie

More bloodshed and greed 

Than a battlefield stained red

While arms makers grow rich

Baal took God’s place. 

He severed God’s head 

And neatly sewed it atop his own 

The greatest trick ever pulled. 

The most merciless lie in history

A sacrilegious virus

Spread throughout humankind

Generations of the blind and self righteous  

Murdering in the name of God

You fools do not see

The stitched line upon the neck 

Of the church’s god

You do not see the empty chair 

in which God’s wife sat

If God is a man and God alone

Where is there a place for me, our wives,

Or daughters?

If the only God is a man,

Patriarchy must be rational,

Thus man remains superior to woman

Epiphanies Part IV

If you're willing to expend just a little more energy than everyone else, you will reap rewards exponentially beyond them. I realized this when I was thinking about real estate auctions. You could do them online, from home, like everyone else who doesn't want to go in person. The demand will spike, causing prices to skyrocket. But if you go in person, if you do the due diligence and expend the effort it takes to find one, get your financing together, and adhere to the bidding rules, you have a much higher chance of finding a cheaper or better property. Perhaps this can even be said about personal property auctions online. With the amount of effort it takes to list each and every item, the best items probably don't even hit the online market.

The absolute worst and most sinister thing you could teach your children is that they can't survive without you. As a mother and father, your main goal is to teach your kids how to grow up and survive on their own. You give them the tools and knowledge you acquired throughout your life, so they don't have to make the same mistakes and struggle the way you did. And if you're a good parent, you give your children knowledge and a sense of self worth so that they can exceed your own limitations financially, emotionally, and/ or in entirety. It goes against human nature to kick the stool out from under your child every time they begin their own journey and to punish their independence by hoarding your resources to ensure they feel below you and dependent upon you. 

If you set a boundary and someone says, "You don't have to be a bitch about it," do not defend yourself or say that you're not being a bitch. Let them know that is just a taste of being a bitch and if they pull that again, you'll ruthlessly attack. Let them be afraid of you. As a woman, this portrayal may as well be a cloak of protection. There is a Nigerian folktale about the rooster and the fox that perfectly encapsulates this: 

There was a time when the fox feared the rooster. He steered clear of the bird, wary of the vermilion comb blazing atop its head. The fox believed the creature possessed fire without burning, so he kept a safe distance. One day, the fox worked up the courage to approach the rooster and asked how he survived the flames. The rooster laughed: "Oh, this? This isn't fire! You don't have to worry about little me. I'm not dangerous." Right then, the rooster became the fox's dinner.

The moral of the story is for women to let people be afraid of them. Do not shrink when confronted, because you telling someone not to worry about you may just as well be the green light for them to surpass you, abuse you, or become superior to you.

If you focus on what you want to feel like and/or achieve, rather than what uncomfortable feeling you're trying to avoid, your life will be shaped by your desires rather than your fears.

The busiest and most successful people always answer their phones quickly. They're ready to make deals and accept any business. It's the people who aren't successful that don't answer the phone. To them the phone feels heavy. If this is you (and honestly, at times, this is me), reframe the phone from a burden to an opportunity catcher.

It's not just you. When we don't stay mindful about joy and positivity, it can be easy to slip into negative thinking. Sometimes to shake ourselves out of it, it's of great benefit to listen to positive people in the background while performing household maintenance.

The amount of words in your vocabulary directly correlates to the width of your experience of life. If your vocabulary is narrow, your perception of reality will be narrow. This is why literacy is so crucial to free yourself from the bondage of limitation. When you're feeling stuck, go to z-library.sk or Internet Archive and read a book, any book, that interests you. Try to find a book with words you don't know. Find books that go against your beliefs and see if they open your mind to new ideas. The algorithm today feeds us things we already know and like, and this can keep us from expanding our worldview and knowledge, which ultimately stunts our personal growth.

If you feel insecure, lonely, or nervous, force yourself to say hi to everyone (everyone) you walk by on the way to work or encounter running errands. Definitely speak to people at work and home. It could be as simple as a Good morning! or a Hope you have a great day! But really, it should expand beyond that to a surface level chat. Practice staying in conversations longer. The person who controls the tempo has the power. This should help you with your nervousness and alien feelings.

The way to be interesting is to be interested. Be interested in other people's lives. If you can't ask them 10  questions about their life, you're not interesting. I really came to understand this when I was struggling passing my classes in college. The semester I stopped giving a half-assed attempt and started taking a genuine interest in the subjects, regardless of what they were, I managed to get straight A+'s two semesters in a row. This also explains why 10x is easier than 2x. 

You reap what you sow. You don't reap when you sow. You usually reap more than you sow.

Don't let fear make you hide from your responsibilities. Not a single person is thinking about you- be mature enough to understand that.

Business is about being fearless and helping people with more money than you do something they don't want to do or can't do. If you are spending your initial days in business solely on a business plan, a website, a logo, or ordering business cards, you're just a customer for someone else's business. You're just a consumer. Start doing the part where you help people, get money, and develop a client base before you do the website and marketing. Yes, in today's day, you won't survive long if you don't have a website or business cards, but don't let that distract you from actually putting yourself out there to do whatever it is your business does. If you want to start a landscaping company, buy a lawnmower and start door knocking. If you want to start a marketing company, start helping people build their Instagram accounts and followers. The universe favors the bold.

Yesterday I realized that all my writing on this website- my daily insights, part of my future legacy- will disappear the day I die and stop paying for hosting. That's why I started sharing my works from here on Medium. I don't have to worry about paying Medium's hosting, and my writing can live on there for however long they're around. This is also why it's critical to publish a book, create an E-book on Amazon, and submit pieces to literary magazines. You ensure your work doesn't die with you.

Rich people always pay someone else to do work they can do themselves. They see it as time they can spend making exponentially more than whatever the service cost. It's the middle class people that think to do it themselves because they value the money not the time. To them, they earned their money with their time, so it feels like they're paying for something with their life- because they are. 

Creativity is the only real thing there is. It is both a self-replenishing asset and tool. When you pay for things with your creativity, you don't lose any of it. In fact, it almost always multiplies into more creativity.

Poor people use money to pay bills and buy stuff. Middle class people use money to pay off credit cards and get some money back from paying bills. Rich people use money to make more money. Poor people and middle class people want guarantees. Rich people want opportunities.

The progress of technology has been at the expense of the human labor economy. Technology promised us leisure, but only demanded we match the speed of the machines. Inventions that were supposed to give us free time just replaced honest human jobs while forcing us to work faster.  For example people, usually women, would get paid to type up what someone was speaking aloud turning their words into a manuscript. So how do we balance wanting to advance technologically with keeping humans employed? We will have to return to the truth that human beings have inherent worth separate from their mechanical output.

Colleges teach students to write analyses of other people's works, but never teach you that no one pays for commentary on someone else's life work. People pay for your own life work written into existence. When we train entire generations only to react to other people's words, we end up with platforms full of people endlessly parroting someone else's interpretation of reality. Go out, live life, and write your own work.

The only gap between where you are and where you want to be is missing information. You are just one piece of knowledge away from the next step. Go find it.

Heaven gives Earth meaning. Earth gives Heaven expression.

If you're more excited by someone else's life, you're a spectator- not a participator- in life. 

In the Lord's prayer, "Thy Kingdom come" means not that Jesus is supposed to come back, but rather that God is to come into our life. Kingdom is a compound word: King's Dominion. God's kingdom is a realm, not a place. "Come and rule over my life as the sovereign king." God wants to make us kings and queens too- not of other people, but of assignments. When you yield to God as the sovereign king of your life, he gives you an assignment. That assignment yields to you, and you are the king or queen of that assignment.

We alone are not good at everything because this ensures we need other people. If I was good at everything, I wouldn't need others. God knows how man and woman are not supposed to be alone. So, the next time a family member is giving you a hard time about how you're not good at something they are, just share this principle with them: 

"God made it so that we alone are not good at everything. This is so we can rely upon each other. I may not be good at _____, but I am good at ____, which you aren't good at. Maybe instead of pointing fingers at my "weaknesses," you grasp the greater principle at work here that we need each other and can learn from one another." 

Furthermore, narcissism traps humans in a distorted version of reality where they can do no wrong. Below the surface, it's compensation for them knowing that they lack the ability to do everything themselves. Rather than recognizing that they are far from the only ones who don't know how to do everything alone and leaning on others around them, they deploy weapons of wordsmithing, finger pointing, and cruel manipulation to knock others down who naturally grasped this concept.

When you write a book, solve someone else's problem- whether you're solving an entertainment problem, a skill problem, a relationship problem, or a mindset problem.

God gives us the desire to have something so that we do something to get it. We have to become the person who deserves what we want, so when we inadvertently become a better version of us and get the thing, recognize that God knew that was the whole point from the beginning. Not so you could have the thing, but so you could become the better person along the way.

If what you're doing isn't working for you, it is 100% working on you. All work works. Don't forget this and quit before it works for you. Sometimes you need to figure out all the ways not to do something first.

If you want to hold a greater capacity of wealth, creativity, or health, there is a formula to achieve it: 

Be the person who does the activity. Then, do the activity. Then, have the desired result.

Here's the most important part: It has to be in that order. It's a little contrary to our current beliefs. We'd think we have to do the activity before becoming the person who does the activity. But to succeed, you have to become the person who does the activity first. 

Focus all your attention on intention, and ignore distractions ruthlessly. An intention is anything that gets you closer to your desired goal. A distraction is anything that doesn't get you closer to your desired goal.

Disruption always follows intention. When you take a new action, you will be disrupted. When you start working on something new, the first work it does is on you. The more important it is, the more true this is. 

If you're prepared when your time comes, it will reveal you. If you're not prepared, it will expose you.

Amateurs practice until they don't get it wrong. Professionals practice until they can't get it wrong.

The desire to be good is the enemy of the desire to get better.

Everything you watch on Youtube is entertainment. Not a single person in this world can tell you what you need to do to get successful. Anyone who talks about success or has a formula on Youtube is merely after-the-fact recounting what their ego tells them made them successful. Hindsight 20/20. This is liberating news. If no one can tell me what I need to do then I can make my own path and let it be as easy or hard as I want it to be.

“Only when there are things a man will not do is he capable of doing great things.”
― Mencius

"Wealth is your ability to turn what you have into what you desire."- Myron Golden

"Struggling artists often create obstacles in their minds by making erroneous assumptions about the way the world works." -Art, Inc.

What is a Woman?

What is a woman?

Does she like flowers

Is she softer?

Does she nurture

Does she cook, does she clean?

Is she radiant like an electric storm in the sky

or grounded like a towering redwood

Do her emotions carry depths of the deep blue sea 

Down into darkness, descend into secrets

With ugly things that have never seen the light

Slimy and blobish, they'd burst if surfaced

The shame lay buried in the deepest of trenches

Where only bizarre creatures call home

Do her waters swell like tides upon the beaches

Is she the wind beneath a plane's wings, or is she the violent storm

that rains hail and rips structures into a million pieces

Does she look after others even while she bleeds

or does she put herself first before everyone's needs

Does she dance

Will she play

With role models few and far between,

A woman walks a path overgrown and unseen

So today I ask you 

What is a woman?

Feminist Theology

Modern religion was created in a patriarchy, and this is why women do not reap all of the spiritual benefits of religion. In order for the masculine to move from the degraded to the divine, it must give up itself. In order for the feminine to move from the degraded to the divine, it must build itself. If a woman gives up any more of herself in the name of sacrifice and service for God, she'll erase herself. This is why modern religion doesn't work for women. 

Historically, religions were created for men, taught by men, and most importantly excluded women. Only in the more recent years has religion become a universal cultural system that's within reach of both men and women. However, the doctrines have not acclimated and accommodated for this. Women have only been given the tools of the Divine Masculine within their religions. And when you look at the history of theology, the proof of this imbalance is hiding in plain sight. 

The Trap of Holy Sacrifice 

For thousands of years, orthodox religious doctrines were systematically written by men, from a male perspective, to address male spiritual anxieties. Because of this, traditional theology defined the ultimate human sin as pride or hubris—an excess of self. Therefore, the ultimate virtue became humility, submission, and self-sacrifice. This is a masculine medicine applied to a feminine condition. For a dominant male ego living in a patriarchal society, perhaps he does need to give himself up to achieve spiritual balance. But a woman living in that same society already suffers from a starved, underdeveloped sense of self. We are already conditioned to be small, to accommodate, and to serve. When modern religion prescribes us the exact same medicine—telling us to sacrifice even more of our desires and identities—we don't achieve spiritual enlightenment. We achieve spiritual erasure. We just disappear. 

The Illusion of Inclusion 

Yes, the doors of the church, the temple, and the mosque are open to us now. In fact, women currently make up the vast majority of active participants in many global religious communities. But the inclusion is an illusion. We are allowed in the building, but the doctrines remain unacclimated. We are still hitting the "glass ceiling" of the sanctuary. Because we were historically barred from the councils and synods that decided what was "divine," we are still navigating a spiritual world built entirely on masculine metaphors. We are told to pray to a Father, a King, a Lord, and a Master. As the feminist philosopher Mary Daly famously pointed out, "If God is male, then the male is God." Every time we are forced to conceptualize the ultimate reality using exclusively masculine imagery, we are subtly taught that our own feminine bodies and minds are a step removed from the divine image. 

Building Instead of Shrinking 

We cannot keep trying to carve out our spiritual awakening using the tools of the Divine Masculine. The traditional tools offered by modern religion—absolute obedience, hierarchy, and a distant, rule-giving deity—starve the feminine soul. If women are going to step into the divine, we don't need a religion that asks us to empty ourselves out. We need a spirituality that teaches us how to build ourselves up. We need to reclaim the Divine Feminine: the divinity found within our own bodies, our intuition, and the earth. Religion will only begin to work for women when it stops asking us to shrink into a mold that was never cast for us to begin with.