Welcome to my Substack.

I’m interested in the hidden forces shaping our health, our attention, how we relate to one another, and our sense of what’s possible. I believe that much of what really matters has been deliberately obscured. Division is manufactured, attention is hijacked, and health is made complicated in ways that distort reality and pull us away from our own humanity. I believe that if we can see this clearly, we can change our trajectory.

I come to this work from the Midwest, where I watched the rural places my grandparents tended and loved gradually hollow out due to economic, environmental, and emotional pressures.

I’ve also spent my professional life working on environmental and public-health issues, and I’ve learned a few things along the way. First, facts alone rarely change us. Awareness does. Second, values that were once broadly shared — like clean air, clean water, and public health — have become increasingly polarized, often as part of a divide-and-conquer strategy. Movements like “Make America Healthy Again” show how legitimate concerns can be reframed in ways that fracture rather than unite.

This work is my attempt to test a different approach: messaging that doesn’t rely on facts alone, but that increases awareness of the forces making these shared concerns feel divisive and brings corruption and manipulation back into view. This Substack is an invitation to slow down and notice the water we’re swimming in, a phrase borrowed from a David Foster Wallace speech about the invisible forces that shape our lives.

At the core of this work are a few guiding principles.

First: Health is simple.
Health isn’t found in endless tracking, optimization, or products. It’s the air we breathe, the water in our wells and pipes, time to rest, strong families, and real community. Until we’re willing to name polluted environments and extractive systems as root causes of illness, we’ll keep blaming ourselves while the structures making us sick go untouched.

Second: We are not as divided as we’re told.
We are swimming in an atmosphere of fear and outrage engineered by algorithms and reinforced by powerful interests that benefit from distraction. That environment shapes how we see one another, but it isn’t reality. Once you can see that this chaos is being done to us, it becomes much harder to be controlled by it.

Third: Awareness is power.
When we understand what’s shaping us, we regain choice. Seeing clearly opens the possibility of responding differently, of writing a new story instead of staying trapped in someone else’s.

Fourth: Compassion begins with recognizing shared conditions.
We are all swimming in the same water, even if we don’t have the same equipment. Compassion isn’t agreement, but the recognition that the person across from you is shaped by many of the same pressures and systems you are. That recognition doesn’t erase responsibility or privilege (which can make the conditions much much harder for some) but it does make room for understanding and collective movement forward.

I write with the belief that most people want the same things: clean air and water, meaningful work, safety, dignity, and belonging. And that when we recognize that, we become capable of building something better together.

It seems too simple, doesn’t it? But that is the very point. The work begins with awareness. With telling the truth gently and steadily until one day we no longer have to name it out loud, because we can feel it in our bones:

This is water.