🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

I remember when the internet only existed in one room of the house.

A computer on a desk. Maybe in the office, maybe in a corner of the living room. Or even at a library or computer lab. But it was only accessible from very specific locations.

You sat down, you logged on, and you explored for a while. Then when you were done (yes you could actually complete the task of checking the web, there was no infinite scroll), you would log off, stand up, and walk away. 

The internet was a place we visited. 

It was not a place we lived.

That is not a small distinction. 

That is the difference between two completely different ways of being human.

My Generation

I was born in North Carolina, USA, in the year 1999, before the turn of the century. Right before the world worried that the “Y2K computer bug” might crash computer systems and cause global chaos.

That puts me in a strange little pocket of history — the "Zillennial" micro-generation that emerged between Millennials and Gen Z.

We were alive for 9/11, but too young to really remember it. We learned about it on classroom screens and by hearing teachers retell their experiences of where they were when it happened.

We witnessed Hurricane Katrina, 

the financial collapse of 2008, 

the golden age of the iPod, 

the launch of the iPhone and rise of smartphones, 

the political shifts of the 2010s, 

the COVID-19 pandemic and worldwide lockdowns of 2020, 

and now the rise of AI.

But there's something more significant that makes our generation different from the ones that came before us and the ones that arrived after us:

We were the last ones to experience the offline world.

We are The Last Offline Generation.

Old enough to remember life before smartphones. Young enough to grow up alongside them. We lived inside both worlds — and watched one become the other in real time.

We had an offline childhood and a digital adolescence.

We didn’t resist the transition. We welcomed it. Of course we did. The online world was exciting, new, and full of possibility. We grew up right alongside it.

It’s only looking back that you realize the door closed behind you.

The Offline World

In the summer, we rode our bikes and skateboards until the streetlights flickered on. We disappeared for hours without a plan, cutting through neighborhoods and woods and creeks. 

If our parents needed us, they yelled our names from the porch or drove around hoping to spot us.

There were no phones in our pockets. No location sharing. No group chats asking where we were or when we'd be home. An entire day could pass without a single message, notification, or photograph to prove it had happened.

At the time, it was ordinary. Looking back now, it feels almost impossible.

We had boredom. We had empty afternoons with nothing scheduled. We had to figure out how to entertain ourselves, how to explore, how to meet the neighborhood kids, how to solve problems without Google. 

We fell off our skateboards and got back up. We built forts in the woods. We discovered shortcuts through creeks that led to parks we'd only ever reached by car.

The offline world wasn't defined by the absence of technology. We had TVs. Game Boys. Computers. iPods. PlayStation.

The difference was that technology had somewhere to stop. The screen didn't follow you everywhere. It couldn't. You interacted with it, and then you walked away. 

It was a tool, not an atmosphere.

In hindsight, we caught an unusually narrow window of human history — the freedom and presence of the offline childhood, plus the creativity and possibility of the early internet, before the algorithms took over and turned everything into a shopping mall.

The Early Internet.

Here is something easy to forget: 

The internet used to be fun.

Much more fun and playful than it is now.

There was MySpace and the sacred Top 8. We lied about our ages (saying we were already 13) to make Facebook profiles and poke our friends. We watched Instagram launch as a simple place for personal square photos. We sent ten-second images on Snapchat that disappeared after you saw them. 

None of them had shorts, stories, DMs or most of the features we know now.

Every platform had a unique purpose. A different texture. A different reason to be there.

We had computer lab classes where we learned about this strange new digital space in its earlier days — mastering the internet while it was still young. When you went online, it was the Digital Wild West. Thousands of random little websites, each one a different personality, a different style, a different person’s vision. You could get lost exploring digital jungles that nobody had paved over yet.

And then you logged off. You went back outside. Or at least did something else in the physical offline world.

We saw the internet before it became what it is now.

The Smartphone Inflection Point

In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and introduced the iPhone.

A music player, mobile phone, and computer screen — all in one little device we could carry around in our pockets. The internet was now portable, and it could follow us into every aspect of our lives.

But the world didn't change overnight. The iPhone was just the hinge. The door took a few years to fully swing open. By the early 2010s, smartphones were becoming mainstream.

The internet stopped being a place you visited and became an atmosphere you lived inside.

Before: the internet was a destination.

After: the internet was the environment.

And my generation was right there for all of it. We watched the smartphone transform the world from the ground floor.

We saw it happen in our own backyards. Our own schools. Our own pockets.

And once the internet escaped the confines of computer room, The Online World was able to emerge.

The Online World.

For a while, it was thrilling.

New apps, new communities, new ways to connect and create.

Small creators — artists, writers, YouTubers — were building real audiences from their bedrooms. People were meeting their future partners online. 

You could access almost all human knowledge in seconds. You could talk to anyone, anywhere, for free. It felt like pure expansion. Like the world was getting bigger and more connected by the day.

And then, slowly, it wasn't.

The platforms that once felt like playgrounds started feeling like shopping malls. 

Every unique space with its unique purpose slowly became just like every other space. They would add Shorts, Stories, Advertisements, Algorithms and even Infinite Scroll. Making their own websites and apps as addicting as possible. Designed to take your time, your attention, and your data — to get you to buy things, to get you to believe things, or just to learn more about you as a potential customer.

There's a word for this now: Enshittification. Things get more corporate. More algorithmic. More branded. The soul drains away. The edges get rounded off. The weird gets smoothed into the safe. The creative becomes the commercial.

We watched the Wild West get settled. The frontiers became franchises. The weird little websites became platforms. The platforms became ecosystems. The ecosystems became machines for harvesting attention.

What used to be vast mysterious digital forests to explore have been paved into something more convenient. 

The strange, messy, human thing was paved into something more seamless, simpler, and easier to monetize.

The internet stopped being a place you went to express yourself. 

And it became a constant environment that extracts time and information from you.

We Remember Both Worlds

This is the unique position my generation is in.

We didn't read about this shift in a book. We didn't study it from a distance. 

We lived inside it. We learned about the internet as it was happening. We had computer classes about it while it was still a new frontier. We grew up alongside it.

We remember the offline world. We remember what it felt like to be unreachable. To be bored. To explore without documenting it. To have a moment that was just yours, shared between friends like a secret, with no audience and no algorithm and no need to perform it for anyone.

And we also remember the early internet. The creativity. The personal expression. The feeling that this was a tool for connection and creation, not extraction and addiction.

So we have something most generations won't: a living before-and-after.

We know what we gained. We know what we lost. And we have the memory of both worlds in our bones.

The Responsibility

You can't fix something you don't understand.

And our generation has an unusually clear vantage point on this shift — because we lived through both sides of it.

That memory is our responsibility.

It means we have a standard to hold. A reference point. A before-and-after that most people don't have. We can't unsee what we saw. We can't forget what it felt like to be unreachable, to be bored, to explore without documenting, to create without optimizing.

The world moved online, and something human got left behind. But we remember what it was. We remember what it felt like.

Maybe our generation's job isn't to tell younger people how great things used to be. Maybe it's to remember what is worth keeping.

To carry the things that matter forward with us into the future. 

To hold the higher standard when the world keeps lowering it. 

To protect the human things — attention, presence, depth, connection, boredom, creativity — in a world that keeps trying to automate them away.

The Last Offline Generation isn't just a description. It's a job.

We were there when the world went online. We know what we gained. We know what we lost.

And now we have a say in what comes next.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

– [gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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*This essay includes ideas & themes from my manuscript, The Last Offline Generation. — exploring this generational shift in full.

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🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

Why this exists:

We live in the most connected period of human history. Almost anyone can speak to anyone. A phone in your pocket carries more information than entire generations could have imagined. We can look into deep space, map the human genome, cross an ocean in a day, and watch events unfold on the other side of the planet as they happen.

And yet, for all this connection, people feel increasingly divided. For all this information, it has become harder to know what is true. For all this convenience, many of us feel distracted, lonely, cynical, and strangely removed from our own lives.

I write as an observer, a spokesman from The Last Offline Generation. I grew up in the last stretch of childhood before everyone carried the internet with them everywhere. I remember disappearing outside for hours, exploring creeks and drainpipes, skating around, and letting entire afternoons unfold without anyone documenting them.

The internet was still somewhere you visited. You sat down at a computer, logged on, and then eventually logged back off and got up to go do something else.

Then, little by little, the internet followed us into the rest of our lives.

It’s always in our pockets, our bedrooms, our friendships, our politics, and eventually our thoughts. I watched something that once felt exciting and liberating become harder to step away from. The world became faster and more connected, but not always wiser, kinder, or easier to understand.

The Online World became the new normal running in the background 24/7,

while The Offline World became harder and harder to truly reach.

I do not claim to have all of this figured out. I am someone who watched that change happen over many years and became less willing to stand by while parts of life clearly became worse.

That is why Be Greater. exists: to keep asking a question that feels increasingly absent from public everyday life:

What we inherited

Every generation is born into a world it did not build.

Language. Roads. Music. Mathematics. Medicine. Libraries. Cities. Democratic institutions. Centuries of scientific knowledge built through observation, failure, argument, and discovery.

None of it appeared on its own. Someone imagined it, built it, protected it, questioned it when it stopped working, improved it, and handed it forward.

We were born into the middle of a story already in progress. That is civilization. And for a brief stretch of time, it is ours to hold.

We can neglect what we inherited, exploit it, or allow it to quietly decay. We can also study it, repair what is broken, preserve what is beautiful, and add something worth handing forward.

That choice is happening constantly, every day, often in ways that are too small to notice… unless you know where to look.

Gratitude first

Before deciding what has to change, it is worth noticing what we have been given.

We were born into a period of extraordinary human knowledge and technological capability. Modern medicine prevents suffering earlier generations considered inevitable. Libraries hold more thought than any person could absorb in several lifetimes. Clean water reaches millions through systems most of us rarely stop to think about. Satellites connect the planet, and scientific instruments let us look into distant galaxies and the structures inside a living cell.

This world remains unequal, unfinished, and unevenly shared. Millions of people still lack safety, food, housing, healthcare, freedom, and real opportunity.

Gratitude means recognizing what is worth protecting while remaining honest about what still needs to change.

You can love your home and still notice and acknowledge when the roof is leaking. Usually, the love for the place is exactly why you fix it.

An old question in a new world

The question beneath this philosophy is not new.

Aristotle asked what it meant for a person to flourish — to develop good character and live up to their capabilities rather than merely survive.

The Stoics asked how to live with reason and integrity even when the world refuses to cooperate.

Buddhist traditions examined suffering, attachment, compassion, and what it might mean to become less controlled by the movements of the mind.

Humanism placed human dignity, reason, empathy, and shared responsibility above unquestioned dogma.

Pragmatism judged ideas partly by what they actually produced in the world.

Science developed ways of testing assumptions against reality and changing its conclusions when the evidence demanded it.

These traditions do not agree on everything, and none provides a complete instruction manual for modern life. But they keep returning to versions of the same question:

“How can people live wisely?”

Be Greater. is an attempt to bring the most durable parts of those conversations into a world their founders never saw: artificial intelligence, a warming planet, algorithmic feeds, global supply chains, nuclear weapons, and billions of people carrying access to one another in their pockets.

The questions are old. The conditions are new. It is still our turn to answer them.

Progress, in this philosophy, means more than producing faster machines, taller skylines, or newer phones. Those things can improve life, but they can also exist alongside loneliness, exploitation, distrust, and a planet being steadily depleted.

Real progress reduces avoidable suffering, protects dignity, strengthens communities, preserves the living world, and gives more people the conditions to develop their abilities.

It also has to be maintained.

Rights can expand and then be restricted again. Institutions can improve and then hollow out. Scientific knowledge can become widely available while misinformation also becomes easier to spread. Nothing good stays good automatically.

Every generation has to decide what to protect, what to repair, and what to build next.

We are capable of more than we are using

Humanity possesses extraordinary knowledge, wealth, creativity, and productive capacity.

That does not mean every resource is unlimited. Fresh water, fertile soil, stable ecosystems, housing, energy, and opportunity remain scarce or badly distributed in many places.

But we know far more than we consistently use about producing food, preventing disease, reducing pollution, building cleaner energy systems, and educating children well.

What stops us is often something else.

Some leaders benefit from distrust. Some institutions reward short-term gain over long-term repair. Power becomes concentrated. People protect what is theirs even when the cost is pushed onto someone else. Cultures normalize behavior that almost everyone privately knows is making life worse.

These are difficult problems, but they are not laws of nature.

A species capable of splitting the atom, walking on the moon, and putting remote-controlled rovers on Mars should also be capable of understanding itself well enough to continuously examine and improve the systems it created here at home.

We are an advanced species. We should start acting like one.

Most people are not deliberately trying to make the world worse. They are responding to the environments around them.

An algorithm that rewards outrage will produce more outrage. A culture that constantly fragments attention will produce people who struggle to hold a thought. Incentives that favor immediate reward will keep producing short-term decisions.

Put good people inside bad conditions long enough and their behavior will begin to reflect the conditions around them.

That is not an excuse. It means personal change and systemic change were never separate projects. They have to happen together, or neither one lasts.

Civilization should accumulate wisdom

One of civilization’s greatest achievements is that knowledge accumulates.

Each generation begins where the last one left off. We inherit discoveries that took centuries to make. We learn mathematics without reinventing arithmetic. We study diseases that earlier generations could barely name. We build on ideas, inventions, and hard-earned lessons passed down over hundreds of years.

Our moral progress should work the same way.

A peaceful society should not become a fragile one. It should produce educated, grateful, disciplined people who understand what earlier generations sacrificed and feel responsible for protecting it.

We do not have to burn everything down to rediscover purpose. We do not have to relearn every hard lesson through suffering simply because previous generations already did.

History should become a teacher rather than a cycle.

Civilization should accumulate wisdom, not only information.

Truth over tribe

Modern politics often asks people to choose a team before they have even examined the question.

Once the team becomes part of your identity, facts start to feel more negotiable. Harm gets minimized when “your side” causes it and magnified when “the other side” does. Leaders stop being public servants and become symbols of who you are.

Be Greater. rejects that order.

Evidence does not become false because it inconveniences the people we voted for. Corruption does not become acceptable because it benefits a cause we support.

You can hold real convictions and reach strong conclusions while remaining more loyal to truth, human dignity, democracy, and the future than to any party, club, corporation, or personality.

That is easy to say and difficult to practice, especially when the truth is embarrassing for a group you’ve aligned with — which is exactly when the principle matters most.

We’re sharing one home

A healthy society needs disagreement. Competing ideas expose weak spots, reveal tradeoffs, and improve decisions.

The problem begins when disagreement turns into permanent warfare.

Picture two people sharing a house. One begins repairing a room. Before anyone can even see if the repair is working, the other tears it out and rebuilds it their own way. A few years later, the first person returns and starts over again.

The house never becomes a home because nothing is allowed to stand long enough to be judged by its results, or be built upon, or left alone when it’s actually working properly.

We do not have to agree on every room of our house, but we do have to remember that we are sharing one home at the end of the day.

A society cannot build steadily if it treats its own members as “the other side” and views progress as erasing whatever “the other side(s)” have built or left behind.

Progress should be something we evaluate, refine, and build on. Our systems should reward cooperation, accountability, and durable results while preserving room to challenge what is failing.

We need disagreement in service of construction.

Attention is part of the philosophy

Older philosophies were built in a world without smartphones, infinite feeds, targeted advertising, or platforms engineered to capture attention and sell it.

That difference matters because attention is where almost everything else begins.

You need it to read deeply, listen closely, notice beauty, learn something difficult, create something original, or sit still long enough to hear your own thoughts.

What you repeatedly give your attention to, slowly becomes who you are and what you’re made of.

Protecting your attention is therefore more than a productivity technique. It is a form of self-government.

Logging off does not mean rejecting the modern world. Sometimes it is the only way to truly return to it intentionally.

Culture is made of votes

Culture can feel like something that happens above us, but it is really the accumulation of ordinary choices.

What gets rewarded grows. What gets repeated becomes normal. What gets tolerated becomes easier to repeat.

A click is a vote. A purchase is a vote. An hour of attention is a vote. Sharing something without checking whether it is true is a vote for the information environment everyone else will have to inhabit.

Reading carefully is a vote. Helping someone is a vote. Supporting meaningful work is a vote. Fixing something instead of immediately replacing it is a vote. Refusing to join a wave of cruelty is a vote.

Most of these decisions feel too small to matter, which is exactly how culture gets made.

Flourishing includes beauty

A better society is more than one with less suffering. It has more life in it.

More friendship. More curiosity. More art. More time to think. More room for children to play, explore, and become themselves. More opportunities to learn, build, love, and participate in something meaningful.

A sunset does not need to make money to matter or be meaningful.

Neither does a long conversation, a quiet stream, a skateboard rolling over the pavement at the right time of day, or a book that quietly rearranges how you see the world.

Beauty is not the reward we receive after every serious problem has been solved. It is part of why solving those problems is worthwhile.

What we keep returning to

Over time, a few standards have started to emerge. They are not commandments, and they are not principles I always live up to perfectly. They are just the ideas I want Be Greater. to keep returning to.

• Truth over tribe, even when it costs something.
  Reality does not rearrange itself around what we would prefer to believe.

• Human dignity and the reduction of unnecessary suffering.
  People are not disposable because of their usefulness, politics, wealth, nationality, or status. No society can eliminate every hardship, but it can remain honest about which forms of suffering are avoidable.

• Flourishing beyond mere survival.
  People need meaning, freedom, health, relationships, beauty, purpose, and room to grow.

• Leave it better than you found it.
  Places, relationships, institutions, communities, knowledge, and the living world should receive something from us rather than only bear the cost of our presence.

• Protect your attention.
  You cannot direct your life if you cannot direct what enters your mind and receives your limited time.

• Think like a good ancestor.
  Some of the right choices will not reward us personally. We make them anyway, for people we will never meet.

Courage, wonder, humility, and holding your own team accountable are not separate rules attached to this list. They are what it looks like to honestly try to live by it.

So is caring openly.

Caring about other people, the future, the living world, and the quality of our shared life should never be treated as embarrassing. Cynicism is often mistaken for intelligence because it asks less of us. It is easier to mock an effort than to join one, and easier to act detached than to admit that something matters.

Caring is not weakness. It is the beginning of responsibility.

Held with open hands

None of this comes from perfect certainty.

Our assumptions can be incomplete. Evidence can change. Reasonable people can examine the same problem and reach different conclusions. Some questions involve genuine conflicts between important values.

Holding a belief with open hands does not mean refusing to reach conclusions. It means allowing confidence to match the evidence instead of the volume of the argument.

It means remaining strong enough to change your mind without feeling that you are losing yourself, criticizing ideas without automatically treating every mistaken person as evil, and approaching truth as something we serve rather than something we own.

We hold our conclusions firmly enough to act and loosely enough to keep learning.

Diagnosis is not the destination

It is easy to build an identity around noticing what is wrong.

There is always more hypocrisy to expose, more damage to document, more dishonesty to uncover, and more reason to feel outraged. Some of it deserves outrage. Some harm must be named directly. Peace does not mean remaining quiet while people are being hurt.

But diagnosis was never the point. Seeing clearly matters because it changes what we do next.

Read past the headline. Learn how something works before deciding how it should change. Talk to someone instead of assuming what they believe from a post. Spend time in a public place without turning every idle second into content. Make something instead of only reacting to what someone else made. Participate in local life. Vote like it is a habit rather than an event. Admit when you were wrong. Protect something that cannot protect itself.

Hope, here, is more than blind positivity. It is what remains after you have looked honestly at what is wrong and decided to participate anyway.

The invitation

We inherited an unfinished civilization.

We are not the first people asked to carry it, and we will not be the last.

We did not cause everything that is wrong with it, but we are responsible for what we normalize, what we protect, what we improve, and what we hand forward.

We may never create a perfect world. We can still leave behind one that is stronger, wiser, kinder, and more alive than the one we were given.

Every generation inherits civilization.

Every generation decides what happens next.

This is our time.

Advance humanity.

LOG OFF. SPREAD LOVE. BE GREATER. 🌎📡

– [gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

I recently learned a visualization technique that changed the way I handle my own mind.

It’s called “Leaves on a Stream.”

If you’ve done any mindfulness work before, you might have already heard of it. I never had. But when I first tried it, something clicked that years of “just empty your mind” never did.

Here’s how it works:

Imagine you’re sitting on a soft patch of grass beside a gentle stream. The water is flowing steadily by.

Leaves are floating down the surface, drifting past you one by one.

Your mind is the stream.

Your thoughts — feelings, memories, impulses, worries — those are the leaves floating by. 🍂🍃

When a leaf appears, you don’t fight it and you don’t chase it. You don’t focus too hard on it and you don’t try to ignore it. You just notice it, and let it float on down the river.

If a leaf gets stuck on you, gently pick it up and place it back in the stream. Watch it drift until it disappears around the bend.

Another leaf comes. Simply observe it, label or identify it, and let it float away. After every leaf, return back to the present moment.

Chilling on the riverbank. Breathing fresh air. You’re fine. Happy to be alive and grateful to be here in this moment.

The whole point is: you are not the leaves, and the leaves are not you. They don’t control you. You can observe them, label them, and let the negative ones float past while keeping the good ones. The system is designed around separation. The stream flows. The leaves drift. You sit calmly on the side.

*The versions of this that I found online are slightly different from the way I practice it.

The typical exercise says you’re sitting by the stream, and there are already leaves floating in the water. When you have a thought, you mentally pick up that thought and place it on top of a leaf. The leaf carries it away.

Thoughts and leaves are separate in the original.

That version still works great. If it clicks better for you, then use it.

But in my version, the thoughts ARE the leaves. The stream IS your consciousness and the leaves on the surface are your thoughts in physical form. The separation is immediate by design — the natural order of this space is leaves floating downstream while you sit calmly on the bank. It’s less natural for a leaf to fly out of the water and latch onto you. Every time you reset, the leaves are already separate from you again. I find it easier to label them and let them go this way.

Try both. Pick whichever one gives you the cleanest separation from your thoughts. That’s the whole point.

The technique comes from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, developed by psychologist Steven Hayes in the 1980s and formally introduced to the clinical world in 1999.

It’s designed to teach cognitive defusion — separating yourself from your thoughts so you can observe them without being controlled by them.

The insight is simple: you are not your thoughts. You are the one watching them.

I’ve been doing this for a few weeks, and it’s genuinely changed how I relate to my own mind.

Now I catch myself doing it automatically throughout the day.

It works best when it’s focused and intentional — like in seated meditation. But one of the whole points of mastering that state is to learn how to apply it in our daily lives. Using it whenever you need to be calm and think clearly. Or just using it to be more present, which is just a fancy way of saying living your life more fully.

Because what I’m really doing is building a metaphysical space inside my own mind. A quiet haven that exists in the present moment. The grassy bank. The stream. The leaves. It’s always there, waiting for me to return to it.

Anytime my mind is racing. Anytime I’m stressed or spiraling about something I can’t control. I take a deep breath, and I return to the bank. I watch the leaves flow past. I don’t let them drag me down with them.

Every time I return, I’m strengthening the muscle of presence.

Learning to identify thoughts and emotions instead of being consumed by them. Training myself to respond instead of react.

And here’s the best part: you get to choose what to do with your thoughts. You don’t have to follow every leaf downstream. You can still follow the good feelings, the warm energy, the thoughts worth keeping. You just don’t have to be dragged under by the bad ones. You can let those float past without giving them power over you.

The modern world makes this harder than it used to be.

Our minds are noisier than ever. Notifications. Headlines. Algorithms. The constant drip of other people’s opinions and crises.

Your phone is a thought-generating machine. It fills your stream with leaves that aren’t even yours.

Many of us walk around reacting to everything. A negative comment sends us spiraling. A bad headline ruins the morning. The mind races from one worry to the next without ever stopping to ask whether any of it is real or useful or even ours.

That’s the lower standard — letting the stream drag you wherever it wants.

The higher standard is sitting calmly on the bank, watching the leaves, and waiting for the right ones to act on.

This isn’t about becoming numb or pretending everything is fine when something needs fixing.

It’s about agency. Choosing which thoughts get your attention and which ones get to float past. Realizing you don’t have to attend every argument your mind invites you to.

You can just sit on the grass and chill. Breathe. Feel the air. Watch the leaves go by.

So sit down. Close your eyes. Find the stream.

Create that calm space by the water. Watch your leaves (thoughts) float into view.

Then calmly observe them, and let them float by. If any start getting stuck on you, just gently pick them up, place them back in the stream, and let them go.

Whenever you’re feeling negative, or anytime you remember to, return to that space and check in with yourself. As many times as you need to. Until it becomes natural.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

– [gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

The Be Greater. Shop is Officially LIVE:

VISIT SHOP ⏩🛒

When I started Be Greater. I knew it had to eventually become something you could hold.

Not just words. Something physical. Something you could wear out into the real world — the offline world — and have someone stop and ask about.

A reminder that exists somewhere the algorithm can’t follow you. A conversation starter. A small act of spreading something positive just by showing up in it.

Because that’s how culture actually changes. Not through feeds and notifications. Through real people, in real life, making a statement with how they show up.

That’s what this is.

Thank you for being part of the movement. Enjoy the collection.

The greatest shirt. (dyed) ⏬

The greatest shirt. ⏬

Make a greater world. ⏬

Greater world. ⏬

BG book pages. ⏬

This is just the beginning.

Stay tuned for more designs, more writing, a future book, and more ways to bring this into the real world.

Thank you for being a part of the movement :)

Read it. Wear it. Live it.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

– [gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

This Substack exists as part of a bigger movement.

Be Greater. was never just a newsletter. It’s not just a website. It’s not just a clothing brand. It’s my way of life. My philosophy. My path toward a greater world.

Late in the winter of 2025, I started writing and publishing my work online. I found Substack and loved it immediately. It was actually built around writing.

By nature, the app was slower, calmer, and had an early-internet feeling of community.

But as I got further into it, wrote more, and gained some readers, I started seeing endless content about growing to 1,000 subscribers in a year, making $5k a month from paid subscriptions, and posting three or more notes a day so the algorithm would boost you. Newsletter after newsletter about how to build yourself into an online business and sell it.

There was a genuinely large market here built around something close to a pyramid scheme: many people making careers by selling detailed courses and guides to newer people, on how to make their own career by selling courses and guides to even newer people. It goes on and on.

Over those next few months, I learned a lot about writing, branding, marketing, courses, offerings, growth, algorithms. And I incorporated much of that into what I was building. I spent hours and days honing my philosophy, establishing the topics, creating the right designs to represent the message.

Laying the clear and strong foundation for the movement and getting the ideas out there.

And it worked. A lot of the philosophy is clear now for anyone who arrives and reads the About Page or the Intro piece.

The movement is official and live, and there are lots of ways to join it.

Be Greater currently has:

• a Website

• a Clothing line

• a Substack newsletter

• an Instagram page

• a YouTube channel

• a Twitter

• a TikTok

It’s all up and running. It’s beginning to capture the movement and spread the message. That’s exactly where I wanted to get.

But along the way to reaching this point, I realized I was beginning to lose sight of the purpose.

I was forcing my project, my creation, my idea, to fit into a perfect little box. We have all these validated ideas of what a newsletter should look like, what a brand should look like, what a content creator should look like. Things we understand will help us grow faster: ideal formats, consistent weekly or bi-weekly posting, studying algorithms, posting multiple notes daily.

I was playing the game. Doing what it takes to grow a presence online.

But that was pulling me away from the whole point.

The whole point from the beginning was to be more aligned with myself, with nature, the world around me, the universe. Waste less time. Spend less time online. Less social media. Less mindless consumption. More being. More presence. More mindfulness. More creating. More fun, love, positivity, and interacting with nature and people in the offline world.

I want to read more books, write more, exercise, meditate. Be a better person, a better husband, and make the world a better place.

Staying up past 2am on a Thursday night worrying about polishing my newsletter so it can go out Friday morning is not aligned with any of that.

I don’t want to worry about the ever-changing algorithm. I don’t want to force my idea to fit into some box so it will do well on a specific platform. The idea is the idea, no matter where we say it.

I had already succeeded at reaching these goals and practicing these habits in my offline life. But in creating the movement to share with the world, I was getting sucked back into the mainstream online.

I was doing what everyone else does: comparing, asking how to grow, asking how to turn this into a business.

Mainstream culture makes you feel like you’re doing something wrong by not participating in the rat race.

But it’s ingrained in the Be Greater philosophy that comparing yourself with others and believing you are better than them is wrong. It will not lead to happiness.

You can learn from anyone, but you can only be greater than yourself.

So I’m not going anywhere.

I’m still growing this movement and sharing it with the world.

This is my career. My path. Even if it never pays the bills.

I write, so I am a writer.

I designed and created a brand, so I am a designer. A creator.

Something doesn’t have to directly pay your bills to be real. These things exist whether they go viral or not. Whether they make millions or not.

If someone wants to read my work, they can.

If someone wants to wear the brand, they can.

Even if the only people wearing it are family, friends, and people I meet in person. That’s still me affecting the world around me. It doesn’t need a billboard in Times Square to count. We have to set aside the ego and the desire to be noticed.

Everything we need is already here. It always has been.

This is my way.

Whether it goes viral or not doesn’t change that.

I’m not trying to fix the whole world by posting more. I’m trying to live better, create honestly, and leave the pieces of the world I actually touch a little better than I found them.

What we allow to happen, and what we let ourselves grow comfortable with ignoring, becomes the new normal.

And I’d rather not get too comfortable with everything I’ve been seeing.

“The amount of change possible in the world is proportionate to the amount of change we believe is possible in the world.”

When we have hope, we keep going. We endure. We achieve.

When we don’t have hope, we doubt. We play it safe. We give up.

This piece is going live on The International Day of Hope.

The UN established this day to promote hope as a universal guiding principle — not as something soft or naive, but as a measurable, teachable skill that protects people against violence, addiction, and suicide.

A skill you can practice. A standard you can hold.

I genuinely didn’t plan that timing. But I guess the universe did.

Because hope has always been part of Be Greater.

Not the fake kind of hope where we pretend everything is fine. The real kind. The kind that makes you keep going, take care of your mind, treat people better, and believe the world can still become something greater than this.

And for me, part of protecting that hope means protecting my attention. My peace. My mental health. My actual life in the real world.

So I’ll be offline more.

Still writing. Still creating. Still sharing ideas, shirts, videos, photos, and updates when they are real and worth sharing.

But naturally.

Not chasing an algorithm that doesn’t care about any of us.

And not forcing the work to look like everyone else’s version of success.

In the meantime, maybe the next time you hear from Be Greater it isn’t through a screen at all.

Maybe it’s someone wearing the shirt.

Maybe it’s a park a little bit cleaner than you left it

Maybe it’s just a nice conversation in the real world

That would be pretty sick.

LOG OFF, spread love, be greater.

– [gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

Nobody really warns you about the fall.

The summer after graduation still feels normal. Summer was usually like this anyway — having time off, working a job, taking a trip, figuring things out. The freedom doesn't feel new yet because with summer, freedom was always part of the deal.

But then comes the fall.

The weather shifts. Stores put out school supplies. People post about their classes and schedules and fresh starts.

And for the first time in your life, the arrival of September doesn't automatically mean a new level.

There's no new classes. No orientation. No syllabus in your inbox. No teacher standing at the front of a room telling you what matters this year and how you'll be evaluated on it. Just another month. Just another morning where you wake up and the day is entirely yours to fill, or waste, or pass through somewhere in between.

That's when it hits.

The rubric is gone. And nobody is coming to replace it.

What School Was Actually Doing

For most of your life, somebody else set the standard.

Not always perfectly. Not always fairly. But it was always there. A grade. A deadline. A teacher telling you this was good work or you could do better. A parent asking if your homework is done. A schedule that told you exactly what you were supposed to be doing with the hours in between.

Even when you hated it — even when it felt arbitrary — the structure was doing something for you that you probably didn't appreciate until it disappeared.

It gave you a floor. A minimum you had to meet just to stay in the game. And most people, when given a solid floor, will build above it. Not because they're ambitious. Because the expectation itself pulls something out of you. The floor says "at least do this much." And something in you says "okay, I'll give you more than the minimum."

Then graduation happens. The floor disappears.

And you find out very quickly what you're made of when the training wheels are off and there's no teacher left to care if you waste your potential.

The Drift

I had my routine pretty solid in college. Then college ended. The structure was gone.

And I drifted.

Not dramatically. Not in a loud or noticeable way. But quietly, in the direction of least resistance. More scrolling. More comfort. More letting the day happen to me instead of deciding what I wanted from it. The current just took me wherever it was going and I let it, because there was no assignment due, no grade at stake, nobody watching.

This is where a lot of people get lost. Not in one big collapse. Just a slow drift toward whatever the mainstream is offering. Whatever the culture deems acceptable. Keeping up with people around you. Measuring yourself against metrics that were never actually yours — the job title, the apartment, the follower count.

Swapping the school rubric for a social one without realizing you made the trade.

The New Fake Report Cards

When the external feedback from teachers disappears, the modern world is very good at offering a replacement.

Likes. Views. Followers. Notifications. Streaks. A constant drip of external validation that feels like a grade but isn't. The phone buzzes. A like. A comment. A notification. It feels like feedback. It isn't.

The phone becomes the new report card. A post performs well and it feels like you did something right. A post gets ignored and it feels like you failed. Just like school, you start optimizing for the metric rather than the actual thing.

And it's not just the phone. The career ladder does the same thing from a different angle. Your boss can tell you if you're hitting your KPIs. They can tell you if you're on track for the promotion. But they cannot tell you if you're becoming someone you respect. You can climb the ladder for years and still be spiritually asleep. You can build a résumé you're proud of and a life you're not. And with AI coming for so much of what we currently call work, betting your entire identity on a job someone else can eliminate is not a plan. It's a gamble you didn't choose to make.

None of this is really living. It's just different kinds of homework.

That's the trap. Numbers can tell you what got attention. They can tell you what got paid. They cannot tell you if you're becoming wise. They cannot tell you if you're becoming kind. They cannot tell you if you're building a life you would be proud of if nobody ever saw it.

Your Life Becomes the Report Card

The grades stop but the feedback doesn't.

Your body gives feedback. Your energy gives feedback. Your relationships give feedback. Your attention span gives feedback. The way people feel after spending time with you gives feedback. The quiet feeling at the end of a day — whether it feels like time well spent or time that passed through you — that's feedback too.

Your actual life starts showing you what you've been practicing.

If you practice avoidance, your life starts reflecting avoidance. If you practice discipline, your life starts reflecting discipline. If you practice scrolling every time things get uncomfortable, your ability to sit with discomfort gets weaker. If you practice doing hard things, your confidence gets more real.

That's the report card now. Not a number. Not a letter.

Your life.

And you always know. You can feel when you're living below your own standard even when nobody else can see it yet. You know when your confidence is built on broken promises to yourself. You know when you're consuming more than creating, reacting more than thinking, talking more than doing.

Nobody has to grade it. You just know.

The Real Test

Graduation ceremonies are full of speeches about opportunity and dreams and the next chapter.

Nobody stands up and says: in six months you'll wake up on a day with nothing scheduled and the entire day in front of you and you'll have to decide — completely alone, with no rubric and no grade and no one watching — what kind of person you're going to be.

That open day is the real test.

What do you do when you could do anything? Do you reach for the phone? Start something you've been putting off? Let the day happen to you or do you happen to the day?

These answers accumulate into something over time. Into a life. Into a version of yourself. Into the person you are when the lights are off and nobody is watching and there's no external reason to be anything in particular.

We fall to the level of our habits. I did, and luckily my habits had a solid floor built up over years. Martial arts discipline. Gym routines from high school and college. Smart financial decisions.

These are the things classrooms rarely teach you. How to live a better life. How to navigate the modern world. How to choose a higher standard for yourself and build habits that actually hold.

Setting Your Own Standard

You build habits and systems that work for you.

Not generic ones. Not rigid ones where you make yourself feel guilty. Realistic ones. Human ones.

Stay teachable. Keep learning after no one is assigning the reading. Go looking for the things that make you want to be better. Read books that challenge you. Spend time around people doing things you admire. Travel when you can. Ask more questions than you give opinions. Set your ego aside and let the world teach you something.

The people with the most genuine wisdom rarely have the loudest social media presence. They're usually just living and doing the work, letting results speak for themselves. You often find them by being out in the world rather than observing it through a screen.

Be honest about where you're drifting. The comparison game never ends if you play it. The only rubric that actually matters is whether you're becoming the person you want to be — not the person the current is trying to carry you toward.

Am I still learning? Am I taking care of my body? Am I building something meaningful? Am I treating people with respect? Am I proud of what I do when nobody is watching?

That is the Be Greater question.

Not: did you get an A? Not: did the post perform? Not: did you get the promotion?

But: am I living in alignment with the person I actually want to become?

Nobody is grading you anymore.

That's the bad news.

It's also the best news you're going to get.

Because it means your life is yours to define. Your progress is yours to measure. And the person you become is entirely up to you.

The world will offer you a lot of fake scoreboards. Don't confuse them for the real thing.

The rubric is gone.

You get to decide what replaces it.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

– [gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in

Subscribe now

*This mixtape and post are going live on 6.30.2026

Spotify / YouTube / Apple

Happy International Asteroid Day. ☄️

Today is the anniversary of The Tunguska Event — A mysterious massive explosion that occurred over Russia on June 30, 1908 (118 years ago).

A large space rock barely missed Earth, but it entered the atmosphere and exploded from the friction and pressure, which released an estimated 10 to 15 megatons of energy. Equivalent to 10-15 million tons of TNT and 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, the explosion leveled 830 square miles of forest and flattened approx. 80 million trees.

Let this day serve as a reminder that we are all tiny in this universe. Everything we do will be erased by nature eventually.

So don’t take it all so seriously, you’ll never make it out alive.

Happy 2026. Happy 250th Birthday to America.

And a happy life to you all. Please enjoy my MIXTAPE for a Greater World:

The Be Greater. MIXTAPE

Songs for a greater world.

This is a playlist containing 29 songs from the years 1964 to 2023.

Six decades of music. Six decades of life lessons, experiences, and cultural observations condensed down into two hours of art.

I made this mixtape in hopes of inspiring people. To see the world as it is, to understand the good and the bad, accept it all, learn to love it, and still commit to making it better.

It examines the world, our search for meaning, and the collective human experience.

Turn on Do Not Disturb. Set aside any distractions.

Go for a drive. Or sit on a beach and watch the sunset.

Whatever you do, just turn up the radio, open your mind, and listen.

Here’s the tape:

Spotify — Be Greater. MIXTAPE

YouTube — Be Greater. MIXTAPE

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOOo7cI99WU

YouTube Music — Be Greater. MIXTAPE

https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBOOo7cI99WU

Apple Music — Be Greater. MIXTAPE

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/be-greater-mixtape/pl.u-r2yB16XCdb3XVo

1. Intro — The xx (2009)

No words. Just sound.

One of the most stirring pieces of music ever recorded, and it never speaks a single word. Just pure feelings.

This is two minutes of space before the story begins. Let your previous thoughts fade away, open your mind, and really listen to the message of the mixtape.

2. What’s Going On — Marvin Gaye (1971)

Marvin Gaye’s brother Frankie came home from Vietnam different. Changed in ways that were hard to describe and impossible to ignore.

Marvin was already in a dark place. His duet partner Tammi Terrell had died of a brain tumor the year before. He had stopped performing. He tried out for the Detroit Lions. He was a man lost inside his own life, unsure if he wanted to keep making music at all.

Then Frankie came home. And Marvin sat down and wrote this.

Berry Gordy at Motown refused to release it. Too political. Too heavy. Not what people wanted from a pop record. He called it the worst thing he’d ever heard.

Marvin released it anyway. It became one of the greatest albums ever recorded.

“War is not the answer,” he sang. “For only love can conquer hate.”

That was 1971. The fact that this song still feels current isn’t discouraging. It’s a reminder that the answer hasn’t changed either.

3. Where Is The Love? — Black Eyed Peas (2003)

will.i.am wrote this in his car, parked outside a studio, a year and a half after the towers fell. He had been sitting with the news, the retaliation, the racism, the way everyone was angry and nobody seemed to know where to point it.

He didn’t pick one issue and make it subtle. He named all of it. Racism. Terrorism. War. Kids failing. Communities eating themselves from the inside. Then he asked the simplest question imaginable.

Where is the love?

It hit number one in seventeen countries. Not because the song was clever. Because everyone recognized the question. Most people didn’t have an answer. But the question resonated with them all.

That’s how you know it was the right one to ask.

4. Everybody Wants To Rule The World — Tears For Fears (1985)

This one sounds like a celebration, but it isn’t.

Roland Orzabal wrote it as a warning about the human appetite for power and control. The Cold War was still running hot. The military-industrial complex was humming. And underneath all of it was this simple, ugly truth: everybody wants to be on top.

Not just nations. People. Institutions. Egos. Everybody wants dominance. And that desire, scaled up across enough people for enough time, produces the world we’re living in.

The world has a power problem. This song named it in 1985.

It still hasn’t been fixed.

5. This Is America — Childish Gambino (2018)

Donald Glover dropped this on a Saturday night in May 2018 with no warning. By Sunday morning, everyone was talking about it.

The music video became one of the most analyzed pieces of media in years. Gambino dances while chaos erupts behind him. Phones go up. People film everything. Violence happens. The beat changes. Life goes on.

That’s the mirror.

We’re the audience in the background, entertained while everything burns.

This is the sharpest cultural observation of the last decade. No other song on this playlist makes you this uncomfortable. That’s exactly why it’s here.

6. Waiting On The World To Change — John Mayer (2006)

People criticized this song for being passive. An excuse for a generation that watched and waited instead of acted.

Honestly, I think that misreads it.

John Mayer wasn’t celebrating passivity. He was documenting a feeling. The specific helplessness of watching the news and feeling like none of it responds to you. Of seeing the world move in the wrong direction and not knowing how to grab the wheel.

Most of us have been exactly there. Sitting on a couch, watching something awful happen on a screen, wanting to do something and having no idea what that something would even be.

Naming that feeling honestly is the first step out of it. You can’t fix what you won’t admit you’re feeling.

7. Pursuit Of Happiness — Kid Cudi (2009)

This song is darker than it sounds.

Cudi has been open about what this period of his life cost him. Depression, addiction, the particular exhaustion of chasing something that keeps moving just out of reach. He was also dealing with a specific loneliness — surrounded by people, isolated inside the fame, watching everyone around him chase things that made them miserable once they caught them.

The pursuit of happiness, done the wrong way, can take you apart from the inside.

He kept going anyway. And in persevering, he made something that told millions of people they weren’t alone in that pursuit.

This isn’t a pure feel-good song. It’s an honest one. And usually those are more meaningful.

8. The Middle — Jimmy Eat World (2001)

Jim Adkins wrote this watching insecure kids at shows stand in the exact center of the room, trying to be seen without committing to anything. He wanted to write something for them. Something for anyone stuck between where they were and where they were trying to go.

You’re probably in the middle of something right now.

A hard season. A transition. A question without an answer yet. Something you’re building that isn’t finished.

The middle always feels like this. That’s not a sign it’s going wrong. That’s just what the middle feels like.

9. We Didn’t Start The Fire — Billy Joel (1989)

Billy Joel wrote this after a 21-year-old told him history started with the Beatles.

He was 40 at the time.

So he sat down and listed every major world event from 1949 to 1989. Every war, every scandal, every cultural shift, every catastrophe. Three minutes and eighteen seconds of relentless history, fired off so fast you can barely keep up.

He didn’t start any of it. Neither did you. But you inherited all of it. Every generation inherits the fire from the one before.

The fire was already burning when he was born. It’ll be burning when we’re gone.

10. We Didn’t Start The Fire — Fall Out Boy (2023)

In 2023, Fall Out Boy picked up exactly where Joel left off.

Columbine. 9/11. Social media. COVID. School shootings. Climate change. Thirty-four years of events compressed into the same relentless structure Billy Joel built.

These two songs belong back to back. Joel said here’s everything that happened. Fall Out Boy says and then this happened. The form held. The content changed.

That’s not just a musical choice. It’s the message of the song playing out across decades. We didn’t start the fire. But now it’s landed in our hands.

11. Alright — Kendrick Lamar (2015)

This is the pivot point of the entire playlist.

Everything before this song is diagnosis. Everything after it is response.

Kendrick wrote “Alright” about police brutality, systemic racism, and the particular exhaustion of a community that keeps being told its pain isn’t real. He was also fighting his own battle at the time — struggling with suicidal thoughts and survivor’s guilt after friends were killed in Compton. The chant wasn’t a slogan he invented from a distance. It was something he was trying to convince himself of.

He rapped it over a Pharrell beat and somehow made a protest anthem sound like a hymn.

“We gon be alright.”

In 2015, those four words became a chant in the streets at rallies across the country. Not because the problems were solved. Because people needed something to hold onto while they kept fighting.

That’s what real hope sounds like. Not comfortable. Earned.

12. Man In The Mirror — Michael Jackson (1988)

Siedah Garrett wrote this song, not Jackson. She and Glen Ballard wrote it in one night. Jackson heard the demo and cried. He called Siedah at three in the morning. He wanted it as the closing track on Bad and he donated every dollar the single earned to charity.

The message is the oldest one in the book, and also the most ignored.

If you want to change the world, start with yourself. Not eventually. Now. Not after you’ve fixed everything else. First.

You cannot rearrange anything out there before you’ve looked honestly at what’s in here.

13. Love Yourz — J. Cole (2014)

“No such thing as a life that’s better than yours.”

In a genre built almost entirely on comparison, status, and proving you made it, J. Cole put out a song telling you your life, exactly as it is today, is enough.

No hook. No chorus. Just him talking directly to you over birdsong and rain.

Gratitude isn’t passive. It’s a discipline. And in a world that makes its money convincing you that you don’t have enough, choosing to appreciate what you have is one of the most radical things you can do.

14. Changes — 2Pac (1998)

Tupac recorded this in 1992, when he was 21 years old.

It samples Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is” — a song about systemic racism from a white artist a decade earlier. The sample wasn’t an accident. He was drawing a line from then to now.

The song wasn’t released until 1998, two years after he was killed.

He named systemic racism, drug cycles, poverty, and the structures that keep communities trapped with the clarity of someone who had lived inside them. He didn’t dress it up. He didn’t make it comfortable.

You can be grateful for your own life and still be honest about what the world looks like for other people. That’s not a contradiction. That’s what it means to actually pay attention.

15. Keep Ya Head Up — 2Pac (1993)

The same man who wrote Changes wrote this.

He dedicated it to Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl shot and killed by a store clerk in Los Angeles in 1991. The clerk received no jail time.

Tupac responded with a song about love, peace, and respect. For women especially. For communities that kept being told they didn’t matter.

Two songs. Two different temperatures. Same conviction.

That range is what made him extraordinary.

16. Price Tag — Jessie J ft. B.o.B. (2011)

B.o.B opens this song. He wrote his verse for the people going broke trying to look rich — the specific pressure to spend money you don’t have just to keep up appearances. He’d watched it happen to friends. He’d felt it himself.

Then Jessie J takes the chorus and says it even simpler: it’s not about the money.

They made a pop song that reached number one in multiple countries with a message most of us know and very few of us live like we know. We spend the majority of our lives chasing a number, a status, an image of success that was sold to us before we were old enough to question whether we wanted it.

The price tag was never the point.

17. Don’t Stop Believin’ — Journey (1981)

Jonathan Cain was broke, living in Hollywood, ready to walk away from music completely. He called his father looking for a reason to keep going.

His father said: Your blessing is right around the corner. Don’t stop believing.

Cain wrote that phrase in his notebook. Years later he brought it to Journey. Steve Perry happened to see the streetlights on Sunset Boulevard while they were writing, and “streetlights, people” went into the song.

They built one of the most recognizable songs in history around a phone call from a father to a son who was about to quit.

The song isn’t about making it. It’s about the phone call right before you quit.

When you’re on the verge of walking away, remember to give this one a listen.

18. Keep Your Head Up — Andy Grammer (2011)

When Andy Grammer wrote this, he was performing on the streets of Santa Monica. Singing on corners, passing around the hat, living in the gap between where he was and where he was trying to go.

He was literally living the message.

It’s unashamed optimism and it makes no apology for that. You’ve done the hard thinking. You’ve sat with the weight. Sometimes what you need next is someone to just say it’s going to be okay.

Because it is going to be okay.

19. The Show Goes On — Lupe Fiasco (2010)

Lupe built this track over a sample from Modest Mouse and dedicated it to everyone who was counted out.

At the time, his own record label didn’t believe in the album and refused to release it. They wanted something more commercial. Lupe fought them publicly and won.

The show went on.

For the kids who were told no. The people who didn’t have the connections or the resources or the right last name. The ones who kept showing up anyway because stopping wasn’t really an option.

The show always goes on.

20. Both Of Us — B.o.B ft. Taylor Swift (2012)

B.o.B wrote this for people who felt invisible. The ones grinding in silence, holding it together on the outside while barely keeping it together on the inside.

He’d been one of them. Sleeping on floors, working jobs that went nowhere, wondering if anyone could see how hard he was trying.

Taylor Swift came in on the chorus and turned it into something bigger — a reminder that whatever you’re carrying, someone else is carrying it too. Different life, different circumstances, but the same weights on their shoulders.

That’s not a slogan. It’s just true.

And sometimes knowing you’re not alone in it is enough to keep going for another day.

21. Imagine — John Lennon (1971)

Yoko Ono helped write this song. The structure came from her 1964 book Grapefruit, which was full of conceptual art pieces that started with the word “imagine.” John said later the song should have been credited to both of them. He gave her that credit quietly, after the fact.

Lennon recorded it in 1971 and it became the most performed peace anthem in history.

People call it naive. I think they’re afraid of it. Because it asks you to genuinely picture a world built differently from the ground up. No division used as a weapon. No greed dressed up as ambition. Just people, here, now, sharing this place.

That’s not naivety. That’s imagination. And without it, nothing ever gets built.

22. A Change Is Gonna Come — Sam Cooke (1964)

In October 1963, Sam Cooke was one of the most famous musicians in America.

He was turned away from a whites-only motel in Louisiana.

He went home and wrote about hope. But here’s what’s interesting: the song came from two places at once. The first was anger and humiliation at what happened in Louisiana. The second was hearing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” — a protest anthem by a white artist — and realizing he needed to write his own. He was inspired and frustrated at the same time.

He wrote deeply, painfully, honestly. Not the comfortable kind of hope. The kind that survives after you’ve seen what the world actually is.

He was killed in December 1964, just weeks after this song was released.

The song kept going.

That kind of hope doesn’t belong to one person. It passes forward. That’s what makes it real.

23. One Love / People Get Ready — Bob Marley (1977)

In 1978, Jamaica was in the grip of political violence. Two rival gangs, backed by two rival political parties, were killing each other in the streets.

Bob Marley organized the One Love Peace Concert and brought both political leaders on stage with him. He joined their hands above his head.

He did that with music.

One love. One heart. It sounds simple. Marley lived it as a structural belief. The idea that love could actually hold things together when everything else broke.

We could use more of that conviction right now.

24. Redemption Song — Bob Marley (1980)

His last studio album. Just Marley and an acoustic guitar.

He was dying when he recorded this. Marley was diagnosed with cancer in 1977. He knew his time was short. So the opening line — “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds” — isn’t abstract philosophy. It’s what a dying man chose to say with his remaining time.

That line comes from a 1937 speech by Marcus Garvey. Marley reached back across four decades to pull it forward.

Marley died of cancer in 1981, less than a year after recording this.

If you only take one thing from this entire playlist, take that line. The walls built inside your own mind are the ones that matter most. And only you can take them down.

25. Heal The World — Michael Jackson (1991)

Jackson said this was his favorite song he ever made.

He started the Heal the World Foundation the same year he released it. He performed it at the Super Bowl. He meant every word.

Make it a better place. For you and for me and the entire human race.

That’s not a lyric. That’s an assignment.

26. Up&Up — Coldplay (2015)

Watch the music video.

Images of a broken world and a healing one at the same time. People lifting each other. Small moments of beauty inside everything hard. The world, slowly, going up.

The song doesn’t promise perfection. It promises direction.

That’s all anyone can really offer.

27. Good Life — OneRepublic (2007)

You made it through.

Not to the finish line. There isn’t one. But to the part where you can look around and recognize something worth protecting.

Ryan Tedder wrote this after a stretch of touring that nearly broke him — sleeping on airport floors, missing his family, questioning whether any of it was worth it. Then he came home. He saw his friends. He realized the life he was so busy chasing was already happening around him.

Good friends. Good music. Good light through a window on a slow morning. Gratitude for the things we normally take for granted usually gives us the perspective we need to see that it’s not so bad.

When it comes down to it, the small things are everything.

28. What A Wonderful World — Louis Armstrong (1967)

Vietnam. Civil Rights. The country tearing at its own seams.

Louis Armstrong recorded this specifically because of the turmoil, not despite it. He wanted to remind people of what was still beautiful. The record label president, Larry Newton, hated it. He physically tried to stop the recording session. When it was finished, he refused to promote it in America.

It was a hit in England and largely ignored here. The song sat mostly unheard for twenty years.

Then it was used in Good Morning Vietnam in 1987. Then the whole world heard it.

Armstrong wasn’t in denial about what the world was. He knew exactly what it was. He was choosing to also name what else it was at the same time.

The trees. The sky. The faces of strangers. Babies who will grow up and figure things out.

“And I think to myself... what a wonderful world.”

That’s not optimism. That’s the highest form of awareness there is.

29. Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen) — Baz Luhrmann (1999)

In 1997, a Chicago Tribune columnist named Mary Schmich wrote a hypothetical commencement speech and published it in her column.

Someone emailed it around the internet and attributed it to Kurt Vonnegut. It went viral before viral was a word. Vonnegut’s wife had to issue a statement saying he didn’t write it.

Australian film director Baz Luhrmann set it to music in 1999. He hired voiceover artist Lee Perry to recite the essay over a downtempo remix of Rozalla’s 1991 dance anthem “Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good).”

This is the end credits scene. A fever-dream of a track with unique origins. A voice giving you meaningful life advice over a synth track.

Wear sunscreen. Don’t worry so much. Stretch. Do things that scares you.

Take care of yourself. Take care of each other.

Then go be greater.

That’s the end :)

I hope you enjoyed this experience.

The world has problems. That’s not new. It’s had problems since before any of us got here and it’ll have problems after we’re gone. What changes is what each generation does with the world they inherit.

This playlist is what I believe the answer looks like. Not an exact plan. Not a perfect blueprint. But a direction and a desire to get there.

A little more love. A little more honesty. A little less noise.

Put this on during a long road trip. Share it with someone who needs it.

And when the mixtape ends, go do something with it.

Take the inspiration out into the real world.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

-[gf]

Mixtape Info:

• Oldest song: A Change Is Gonna Come (1964)

• Newest song: We Didn’t Start The Fire (2023)

• Spans: 59 years of music (1964–2023)

Songs by decade:

• 1960s: 3 songs

• 1970s: 4 songs

• 1980s: 5 songs

• 1990s: 4 songs

• 2000s: 6 songs

• 2010s: 6 songs

• 2020s: 1 song

🌎📡 [ begin transmission ] :

Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

The worst bruises I can remember from martial arts didn’t happen to my body. They happened to my ego.

Making a mistake in a tournament in front of a gymnasium full of people. Dropping something during a solo performance I’ve practiced hundreds of times.

I used to let those moments haunt me for weeks. Replaying the mistake. What I should have done differently. The little voice that says everyone is watching and remembering.

But eventually I learned something.

You can sit around watching old game footage, or you can get back up and go play the game.

Don’t underestimate the sheer power of laughing through the pain. Laughing things off. Letting it roll off your shoulders.

Words, insults, fears, embarrassment — all of those bad feelings can only hurt us as much as we allow them to.

If you’re confident and comfortable in your own skin, without being perfect, then you’re good. You need to stop caring so much about how you’re perceived. Or if you’re well-liked. Or judged. Or laughed at.

Just don’t give a f anymore. It’s so freeing.

Do those people really affect your life? Do they pay your bills? Do you have to please them in order to receive your paycheck?

The answer should be no.

But here’s the thing. You can’t just decide to stop caring and have it work. That kind of security doesn’t come from a decision. It comes from somewhere.

This is why personal freedom, independence, and autonomy are so important. If you rely on someone else or something else to support you, or cheer you up, you may never feel fully secure. And if you never feel fully secure, you will always care what people think. You will always be looking over your shoulder, hoping for approval.

You are not truly free until you are the captain of your own ship. If someone else owns your boat, and someone else is deciding where you go, and you’re just along for the ride, then you’re no captain.

You’re a passenger cruising along. A crewmate in your own life.

And being a passenger brings fear and uncertainty. Because you aren’t in control. You don’t know what’s happening or how to fix it if it goes wrong. You just have to hope someone else is handling it. And that’s no way to live.

It’s definitely not being greater.

We want to be the captains of our own life, and captains need confidence.

Confidence comes from experience. Exposure. Trial and error. Many failures. Until you know what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.

Just like fear and anxiety come from the unknown. When you don’t know what’s going to happen next or how to handle it.

Ignore the imaginary fears in your head holding you back from what you want to achieve,

and just do it.

Literally just do it. Stop thinking so much. Stop imagining all the worst scenarios. Stop buying more accessories. Stop perfecting every detail.

And just do the damn thing.

You don’t have to go in blind. It’s good to be informed on the topic and how it works and what people are doing in that space.

But you want a macro-level view on it.

You want to be able to read the big picture, see the trends, and understand it so you can do it your own way.

But then the only way to truly understand it is to experience it. Over and over and over again. Put in the reps. Try different things. Get tips, advice, and inspiration from people better than you — without copying their style.

You should slowly feel like you’re getting more comfortable with it. More skilled with it. Seeing better results. But this applies to failure too.

Failure is a skill that needs to be practiced and repeated.

If you’re still terrified of failure, or you let it hold you back or cause you to quit, then you’re not failing the right way.

You have to get reallll comfortable with failure. See what you can learn from it. Do it until it becomes easy and you can do it in-stride without slowing down or letting it make you feel embarrassed. You already know who you are, and you know your failures don’t define you.

It really does come down to consistency, improvement, and dedication. You need the discipline to stick with things. To keep showing up. Don’t focus on immediate results or metrics.

You’re not comparing yourself to anyone but you.

Being carefree — having the ability to laugh things off and keep doing your thing without taking things personally — comes from being confident in yourself, your abilities, and who you are as a person.

That confidence comes from:

• Doing more things

• Actually trying and being good at something instead of worried about being “cool” and nonchalant

• Acting in a way you’re truly proud of, even when no one is watching.

Once you get enough practice with that failure skill, you humble yourself, and it helps allow you to stop taking yourself so seriously.

Because you need to be sure of yourself. You have to accept and love (or at least like) yourself first before you can expect anyone else to.

*And I’m going to keep it 100% real with you right now: It helps to be in a healthy relationship, or marriage, or family. Maybe it shouldn’t, but it does. Because it gives you that love and acceptance to just fully be your weird, unique, authentic self. And you know that you don’t have to impress anyone, because at the end of the day you’re still going home with your squad.

But me and my wife only found that type of relationship because we were already being ourselves out in the open. If we’re being honest, it can be scarier flying solo in the world. It’s more intimidating to be yourself out loud and say whatever you think without having that guaranteed safety net of a partner or family that has your back even if you fail, or everyone laughs at you, or your joke falls flat.

So I get that it can be harder out here for my solo readers in this world, BUT you’re also the ones who could benefit the most from being yourself out loud. (assuming you consider making genuine connections with people a benefit)

Because when you’re living as your authentic self, anyone who’s interested in you is interested in the real you. As opposed to an uncomfortable version of you that’s pretending to be someone else.

Sure, sometimes people achieve insane results by living a lie, and doing some deceiving, and stepping over some people.

But it’s so much more satisfying, more stable, more impressive, and more fulfilling when you achieve those insane results while being your authentic self:

• Saying what you really believe and standing by it

• Telling the truth, never hiding behind lies

• Sticking to your standards and being honorable instead of selling out and playing dirty

• While also being open-minded to new information and other ways of doing things

All of that is to say: when you live as your authentic self, and you’re improving and growing into the best version of you that you truly want to be, that’s when you can really like and accept yourself. And be proud of yourself and who you see when you look in the mirror.

And once you become that version of yourself, you don’t care what other people think.

Because you’re already exactly who you want to be.

You don’t even want to be the person that they would look up to anymore because that’s not you.

And you don’t look up to these people that are criticizing you anyway, they’re not above you, you don’t depend on their approval or support, you don’t need it.

They are just fellow people on Earth. They can do whatever they want. We aren’t worried about them.

We’re locked in doing our own thing.

Once you’re living life as the person you want to be — acting in a way where what you believe, how you feel, what you say, and what you do are aligned — then you’re good.

You have all the confidence you need to laugh off anything that doesn’t matter.

You can let it roll off your shoulders.

Then you can avoid being slowed down by getting hung up on Life’s Endless Stream of Bullshit™ or getting emotional over small things you don’t really care about that won’t matter tomorrow.

And you can focus on doing what you really want to do and enjoying your life. Being comfortable in your own skin. Chasing your goals and dreams. Changing the world.

Or whatever it is that you want to do.

Free your mind, have some fun, and just do it.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

-[gf]

[ end transmission ] .

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🌎📡 Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

The World Cup has been beautiful to watch unfold.

People from around the world — different countries, different languages, different cultures — all showing up in the same cities and stadiums to celebrate the same sport, together.

Visitors are going viral on Twitter for posting pictures and videos of their road trips across America, sharing what a genuinely beautiful place it was and how welcoming the people have been. (shoutout Freddy from Germany!)

They have been showing the world a side of our country that most people don’t get to see.

Strangers from across the globe are partying together, trading jerseys, and dancing with each other in the stands. That kind of unity doesn’t happen every day. It’s worth stopping to notice.

But something quieter stood out above all the noise.

After Japan drew 2-2 with the Netherlands in Dallas on Sunday, something happened. The final whistle blew. The stadium cheered. But instead of heading for the exits, Japan’s fans stayed behind.

They picked up trash.

Not just their own. All of it. Moving through the rows with the same blue bags they’d just been waving to celebrate, they collected what 70,000 people had left behind. Video of the moment was shared by FIFA and seen more than 6 million times.

NFL quarterback Jameis Winston, who was at the game covering for FOX, saw what the fans were doing and walked over to help. He joined in and picked up litter that so many others chose to leave behind.

Nobody asked him to. He did it because he wanted to. Because he felt like he should.

That’s what it means to be greater.

Down in the locker room, Japan’s players had done the same thing. Clothing was stacked in a neat pile in the center of the floor. Garbage was collected and bagged. They left it cleaner than they found it.

And this isn’t new. It’s a habit. In the 2022 and 2018 tournaments they also left their locker room spotless after their matches. The only things they left behind were some handmade origami cranes and a “Thank you” note.

Japan first earned global attention for this at the 1998 World Cup in France. Despite being eliminated in the group stage, their supporters stayed behind to clean up the stands. The world noticed. And at every tournament since — 2002, 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, 2022 — the same thing. It became expected. It was just who they were.

There’s a Japanese proverb behind all of this:

Tatsu tori ato wo nigosazu. / A bird leaves nothing behind.

Japanese children learn this in elementary school. One fan in Dallas put it plainly: “When we use a certain place, you have to make that place look tidier when you leave than it was when you arrived.”

He said it like it was obvious. Because to him, it was.

“We usually don’t tell children they should do it,” said another fan. “We just show our actions and behavior, and other people follow.”

And it’s not just about cleaning up. Japan’s supporters don’t chant against opposing players or teams. They try to respect them and their fans. They focus their energy into encouraging their own side. Cheering. Creating a positive atmosphere. It’s the same discipline, applied differently.

That last part is the whole thing.

This isn’t about one culture being better than another. Every culture has things it gets right and things it doesn’t.

This is about what happens when a standard becomes so deeply held that it travels with you. Across the world, into a stadium in Texas, with 70,000 people still buzzing around you.

The same blue bags they wave in the air to celebrate their goals, become the bags they use to clean up the stands after the whistle.

That’s discipline. The kind that doesn’t need a rule or reminder to show up, because it has already become engrained in who you are.

Japan has been showing us what this standard looks like for almost thirty years. To them it’s not a gesture. It’s just what you’re supposed to do.

Millions of people are seeing these videos, reading these stories. There’s no more pretending that we don’t know any better. Japan has set the bar. We can either catch up to their levels of respect and discipline, or we can fall short of the new standard.

This is what the Be Greater. movement is all about. We can choose to be comfortable and keep doing things the same way, or we can choose to be a little bit better.

Next time, fans from ALL the countries should be carrying those bags. And then fans in other sports can start doing this too. Until eventually, one group cleaning up after themselves stops being a story, because it became what everyone just does.

Until the bar gets raised again by someone new, and we all chase that.

The standard has been set. It belongs to all of us now.

Be greater.

-[gf] ⚽

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🌎📡 Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

Have you ever said yes to something and immediately felt the weight of it?

The phone buzzes. Someone close to you needs something. A favor. A chunk of your time. A problem they want you to help solve. And you say yes.

Not because you want to. Not because you have the time or the energy. But because you don’t want to disappoint them. You want to be the reliable one. The helpful one. The person everyone can count on.

So you do the thing. You show up. You help.

And at the end of the day, you sit down and realize you made no progress on your own life. Your goals didn’t move. Your project didn’t advance. Your fire got a little smaller while someone else’s got a little bigger.

I know this feeling because I lived it.

For a long time I was the person who said yes to everyone. I wanted to be a helpful, kind, available person. I thought that was just being a good guy. The nice thing to do. But at the end of the day, I was the one feeling stuck, frustrated, watching the same goals sit untouched while I helped other people close in on theirs.

I was giving away my fire. And I didn’t even realize I was doing it.

We’re all building something

Here’s one way to look at it:

We all have a fire that we’re building.

That fire is your life — Your health and well-being. Your happiness. Your projects and businesses. Your core relationships. Your future.

Some people are building massive bonfires. They gather good materials, build a strong foundation, and add to it every single day. They show up and do the work. Their fire grows, and sometimes it throws off sparks that inspire other people to build bigger fires of their own.

Some people are maintaining a decent campfire. They do what they need to do, gather what they need to get through the week, and then relax when they’ve done enough. Fair. Not everyone needs a bonfire.

And some people don’t really care. They hang out around other people’s fires while their own slowly burns out. They add some sticks to it here and there, when it’s convenient, but it’s mostly because they feel like they’re supposed to, not because they genuinely want their fire to grow.

None of this is a judgment. It’s an honest look at how a lot of people move through the world.

But here is the part that matters: you cannot build your own bonfire if you spend the daylight gathering wood for someone else.

The trap of being too nice

Helping other people build their fire is a good thing. If you have the time, energy, or money to spare and someone genuinely needs it, then sharing your flame is one of the most meaningful things a person can do.

That is being greater.

But there is a difference between helping and being used.

Some people will take your fire again and again without ever helping you grow yours. A coworker who leans on you too much and doesn’t do their fair share. A friendship where the energy only flows one direction. A family member who can never seem to build their own fire, so you keep giving them pieces of yours because you care, or because you want to be nice, or because you tell yourself next time they’ll figure it out on their own.

These aren’t one-off moments. They compound. Every day you spend your energy on someone else’s problems is a day you didn’t spend on your own life.

And the quiet truth is:

“Some people will never build their own fire as long as you keep giving them yours.”

This is not about becoming cold or selfish. It’s about recognizing that you only get one life to live, and that is your own.

At the end of the day, you’re the only one who has to live your life. Nobody else has to walk in your shoes, live in your house, or exist in your body.

If your fire goes out, you are the one who’s left sitting alone in the dark.

Learning to disappoint people

So what changed for me?

Honestly, it started with reading more books. Thinking about things differently. Gaining new perspectives. And somewhere in that process I noticed the pattern.

I wasn’t always saying yes because I wanted to help. Many times I was saying yes to things that weren’t even important just because I didn’t want to disappoint people. I wanted to be the guy that everyone could count on. And it was costing me.

My goals weren’t moving. My craft wasn’t improving. The daydreams I had for my life stayed exactly where they were: in my head.

At some point that became unacceptable.

So I had to learn to start saying “No.”

It was uncomfortable. People were disappointed. Some of them didn’t understand why I suddenly had less time for their problems. And I had to sit with that discomfort without rushing to fix it.

Because I had finally realized something: my fire had to come first. Not out of selfishness, but out of necessity. If I kept giving it away, there would be nothing left for me to build with.

So I locked in. I set boundaries. I protected my time. I got comfortable disappointing people or maybe even being the bad guy in someone else’s story if it meant I was finally the good guy in my own.

And I dedicated all that new time to figuring out what I really wanted my fire to look like. Once I had my fire properly visualized in my head, I put all my time and energy into bringing that vision into reality. Trying, failing, learning, growing.

And slowly but surely, my fire started to grow.

You’re the only one who can build your fire

Building a real fire takes longer than you think. You don’t just throw a match on a pile of logs and walk away. You start small. You protect the flame when it’s fragile. You learn what feeds it and what smothers it, and you keep showing up even when nobody is watching.

Be patient with yourself. You’re learning how to do this. Most people never even realize their fire is dying until it’s already dark.

This doesn’t mean ignoring the people you love. It means making sure your fire is strong enough that you actually have something to give them. You cannot be a good partner, a good friend, a good family member if you are running on empty.

Taking care of yourself first is not rude. It’s required for healthy relationships.

Give what you can spare. Invest the rest back into yourself: your health, happiness, projects, ideas, and your future.

Take those daydreams and make them real.

Because a fire that is barely lit cannot warm anyone else. But a burning fire built with patience, with discipline, with years of showing up, can light up a whole lot of darkness for a whole lot of people. And once your fire is solid, stable, and growing, you can share that warmth with others.

And your unique flame might even give off embers that ignite a fire in someone else.

So get out there and build your fire. Protect it. Add to it every day.

And when it gets big enough, share it freely.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

-[gf]

🌎📡 Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

As I write this, I just turned 27. 🎉

Twenty-seven laps around the sun with you all. And honestly, my generation has seen enough to justify having a pretty bleak outlook on things.

We grew up in the post 9/11 world — learning about it on classroom screens before we were old enough to understand what it really meant. We watched the following wars play out across the next two decades. We were teenagers during the 2008 financial collapse, watching stable adults lose everything while the people responsible largely walked away fine. We came of age alongside the internet and social media and we watched it transform from something genuinely exciting and fun into something addictive, extractive, and dividing.

Then a global pandemic arrived, forced the world into lockdown, and accelerated many of these negative social trends. We started spending even less time together in public and gravitated towards staying inside more. Separated. Isolated.

We’ve watched political polarization make basic conversations feel impossible. Even when we debate, it can feel pointless because what does it accomplish anyway? We’ve watched trust in institutions collapse in real time. We’ve seen blatant corruption and bribery in governments. We’ve seen powerful people and elected officials repeatedly make choices that 70%+ of the population disagrees with.

My generation has legitimate reasons to be tired, cynical, jaded, and pessimistic.

And yet, I’m not. Many of us are not.

I’m genuinely, stubbornly, optimistic about the world and hopeful for our future.

Here’s why.

Optimism as a Philosophy

A German poet named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once wrote: “When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; but when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.”

Centuries later, Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, taught and spoke of this same philosophy.

He was someone with more cause than almost anyone to abandon hope in humanity entirely.

But he didn’t.

He said:

His point was that idealists and optimists aren’t being unrealistic. Pessimists think they’re being “more realistic” about human nature — but what they’re actually doing is contributing to the very reality they claim to be describing. If you treat people like they’re selfish and broken and beyond help, you encourage more of that.

But if you hold people to a higher standard — if you genuinely believe they’re capable of more — you create the conditions for them to actually rise to it.

The ones who actually believe that something can be done are the ones who go on to make it happen. The idealist is the real realist.

That hits a little harder once you know who’s saying it. This wasn’t someone with an easy life who decided to be positive. This was someone who survived some of the worst things humans have done to each other in modern history and came out the other side still believing in human potential.

There’s no way he could be considered naive.

If he could hold that standard and remain hopeful after everything that he witnessed, then we can remain hopeful in the modern world.

What Isn’t Talked About Enough

Yes, we’ve witnessed the attacks, the wars, the crashes, the pandemic, the cultural decline. All of that is real.

But we’ve also seen the other side of things. The part that barely makes the news:

We watched scientists develop a COVID vaccine in under a year through unprecedented global cooperation — researchers in different countries sharing data in real time, racing together toward a solution instead of competing for credit.

We watched the ozone layer — once considered a catastrophic environmental disaster — begin to actually heal after nations came together, listened to scientists, and banned the chemicals destroying it. It’s on track for full recovery by mid-century.

We watched renewable energy break its own records in 2024 with the fastest growth rate ever recorded. The transition is happening — imperfectly, not fast enough, but accelerating every year.

Extreme poverty has dropped by more than half in our lifetimes. Child mortality has fallen. Literacy has risen.

It’s important to remember:

Overcoming challenges will always provide more development, growth, and wisdom than living an easy life with no meaningful obstacles to overcome.

And in the quieter corners of the world, people are choosing to be greater every single day without anyone requiring it. Volunteering after disasters. Donating to strangers. Showing up for their communities. Having honest conversations. Making real things. Helping someone whose car broke down for no reason other than they could.

That impulse hasn’t gone anywhere.

Growth and progress are quiet. Destruction and outrage are loud. But the progress is real — and it deserves the same attention we give the decline.

The Offline / Online Perspective

My generation grew up in a unique position.

We experienced an offline childhood and an online adulthood. We lived deeply in both worlds. That in-between perspective gives us something that neither pure digital natives nor people who never fully made the transition can claim — we can see both what was lost and what was gained. We’re not purely nostalgic and we’re not blindly optimistic.

We’re definitely not naive about technology. We grew up alongside it. We learned it at every new stage and development. We watched it go from something liberating to something extractive. And because we watched that transformation happen in real time, we feel and understand it in a way that people who only knew one side of it never fully will.

That understanding is our responsibility.

We are the generation that can look at what the internet has become and say — this isn’t what it has to be. We can build something better. We can bring the best parts of the offline and online worlds forward instead of just accepting what the algorithm has decided to make of things.

The question is, do we want to change things bad enough to actually do something about it?

Optimism as a Standard

Here’s what I’ve learned about hope.

It’s not just a feeling. Feelings come and go. The world will always produce enough bad news to kill the feeling on any given day if you let it.

Optimism is a mindset. A standard you set. A decision you make before the day starts, before the news loads, and before the algorithm decides what to show you next.

Because belief is a powerful thing. The ones with no hope are the ones who give up, and stop pursuing their goals. But the ones who truly believe it’s possible, or even inevitable, to reach their goals will continue chasing them for as long as they have hope.

That’s not naivety. That’s strategy.

The pessimist thinks they’re being realistic. But the person who genuinely believes in our human potential and builds their life around that belief is doing more to shape reality than anyone who just watches things decline and says they saw it coming.

In that way, the philosopher Frankl was right. The idealists are the real realists.

What I Believe

I still believe in lasting peace. Not because the wars have ended — they haven’t — but because I’ve seen what humanity is capable of when we actually work together. And I know we’re capable of accomplishing way more than anything we’ve seen so far.

I still believe in love. My parents separated before I was old enough to understand what that meant. But I still believe in commitment and partnership and building something together that outlasts whatever difficulties come. I’m married now and I want to take this all the way to the finish line and beyond. Not because it’s easy — because it’s worth it.

I believe in the people reading this newsletter. The ones who sense that something important shifted as the world moved online and want to do something about it. Who pick up trash they didn’t drop and return the cart when nobody’s watching and try to hold a higher standard even when the culture makes it easier not to. The ones out there spreading love and positivity and chasing dreams and supporting each other.

Those people aren’t naive.

They’re the bravest people in any room. They’ve seen the darkness of the world just like the rest of us — and they’ve decided to stay positive and build something better anyway.

Whether you’re 18, 27, or 80 — most of us have seen enough to be cynical.

But we choose not to be.

Not because the world has earned our optimism. But because we’ve decided that optimism is the standard we’re going to hold. With bravery, and discipline. The same way that every person who ever really changed anything held a standard that the world around them wasn’t requiring.

The world doesn’t get better because circumstances improve and then people feel hopeful again.

It gets better because people choose hope first — and then they build and work for the circumstances that justify it.

It’s not always trending, but it will always be cool to have hope.

Love you all. Thanks for reading.

Here’s to another lap around the sun. Let’s make it count.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf] 🎂

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🌎📡 Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

When was the last time you read a book?

Like actually picked out a book for yourself and read the entire thing? Not just a chapter or two — but actually finished a book?

For many of you reading this on Substack that might be a simple question. This is a platform built around reading, and people here tend to read more than most.

But for a lot of people the honest answer sounds more like: “I can’t remember the last book I finished. It’s been years since I read anything for pleasure.”

And for a long stretch after finishing school, that was my answer too.

At some point I realized something strange: I had quietly become a person who didn’t read anymore. And somehow that felt normal. I was still consuming constantly — YouTube, Reddit, social media, documentaries, endless stories and threads of things happening online. It felt like staying informed, keeping up with the world, learning new things.

But it wasn’t really reading. It was scrolling and watching and getting secondhand information. Things pre-filtered through biases, opinions, and narratives that someone else was likely trying to push.

I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling like people weren’t reading much, but I wanted to know how real this shift actually was. So I did a quick web search and found that:

Reading for pleasure has dropped 40 percent in the last twenty years.*

So it’s definitely not just a vibe, or a generational complaint. This is a documented, measured cultural shift happening in real time.

That number sounded drastic — reading decreasing by almost half just since my childhood . But data only goes so far. I wanted to know what this actually looked like in real life, so I reached out to my former teachers to ask if they had noticed the shift.

These are people who have spent decades watching different generations of students learn, focus, and struggle. If anyone would have decent insights into how this shift looked up close, it would be teachers.

And almost all of them described the same shift:

• Fewer students reading for pleasure starting in the mid-2010s.

• Shorter attention spans, more reliance on shortcuts, less independent thinking.

• Post-2020 one teacher said changing activities every ten minutes became necessary just to keep students engaged.

• Another said the second there is unstructured time, students reach for their phones — immediately, automatically, without thinking.

• Another described students asking for help the moment something gets hard instead of sitting with the discomfort long enough to figure it out.

And one line stood out above everything else:

“Students are becoming consumers instead of producers.”

That’s not just about school. That’s the whole direction culture has been drifting.

The pattern became obvious. Reading lives in unstructured time. Stillness. Quiet. Patience. Those ten seconds of peace and quiet when you can actually think straight and you get to decide what you want to do next.

And those are the exact conditions that modern life keeps eliminating — because every app on your phone, computer, and TV was designed to fill that space and grab your attention before you have time to think about what you should actually be doing with it.

A book doesn’t do that. A book doesn’t fight for your attention, notify you, or force its way into your life. It just sits there quietly, patiently, waiting for a curious mind to pick it up.

The bigger realization for me wasn’t just that I had stopped reading. It was that I had been adapting to a world designed to replace it. I was embracing the new normal — a world of distractions and consumption — without even questioning it.

So I decided to change that. I decided to start reading again.

I started small. A few pages at a time. Some nights just one or two. But a few pages was better than scrolling another evening away. At least now I was completing something. Learning something. Making actual progress instead of just consuming endless content.

I started out with physical books. Then I got an E-Reader: a Kindle Basic — no internet, no notifications, no algorithm. Just books I had chosen and downloaded, sitting on a paper ink screen. Intentional technology. Technology that benefitted me instead of taking away from me.

Then I did something that really helped me get into this new reading habit: I downloaded the Kindle app on my phone and synced all the books in my library. Then I deleted or blocked any social media and other distracting, time-wasting apps from my phone. Now whenever I pick up my phone, it shows me my current book on the lockscreen, and then again on the home screen.

My only choices became: text someone, take down a note, set a reminder, write something, or keep reading my current book. The same device I used to scroll Reddit and watch YouTube on — but now I was flipping pages of a book. Slowly the old scrolling habits got replaced. When I was bored, I started reaching for a book or even checking my to-do list instead of procrastinating.

I carried the same device around, but now I had a completely different relationship with it. My environment was now set up to guide me toward what I actually wanted instead of pulling me away from it.

That’s something we aren’t talking about enough:

The default settings on our devices are not built to serve our wellbeing.

They are built to maximize engagement. If you use the defaults, you will default into distraction. You have to design your own environment intentionally — make the thing you want to do easier to reach than the things that are trying to capture your attention.

After changing my environment and, in turn, my habits, I started to notice subtle changes. My attention and focus had honestly improved. I felt more patient. I remembered what it felt like to stay with something all the way to the end — and how different that feels compared to finishing a session of scrolling.

One teacher said something near the end of our conversations that stayed with me. She said students today are more capable than they believe themselves to be. They give up quickly not because they can’t do hard things, but because they’ve never had to practice not giving up. They’ve never sat with a difficult problem long enough to discover they could solve it — so they don’t trust themselves to.

I think that really applies to all of us these days.

Reading isn’t just about becoming smarter or looking intellectual. It’s about reclaiming something that quietly slipped away. Your attention. Your patience. Your ability to sit with a hard idea long enough for it to actually become yours — not summarized, not explained by someone else, not processed through an algorithm, but your own.

A book asks something from you that the modern world rarely does.

Stillness. Effort. Presence.

And in a world designed to replace all three of those things, choosing to read might be one of the most quietly radical acts left.

We simply can’t afford to become a culture that doesn’t read. Or worse — a culture that can’t read. It feels like we’re getting dangerously close.

The only way back is one page at a time.

So if you aren’t already — start reading books. Fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter. Pick something cool and get started.

Don’t be lazy. Every page you turn is a vote for a better version of yourself, and eventually a better world. If we want our culture to be greater, we have to build greater habits.

Read more. Think for yourself. Own your mind.

Thanks for reading B)

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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https://news.ufl.edu/2025/08/reading-for-pleasure-study/ (*)

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If you grew up in the iPod era, you remember what it felt like to own your music.

Not rent access to it, but really own it.

Albums bought one at a time. Songs synced manually. Libraries built slowly, intentionally. You knew every track because you chose every track. Your music was yours — sitting on a device in your pocket, available whether you had Wi-Fi or not, subject to nobody’s terms but your own.

Now contrast that with the present day. You open your streaming app, search for a song you’ve loved for years — one attached to a specific memory, a specific version of yourself — and it’s vanished. Removed. Unavailable. Just gone.

And you realize: it was never yours.

You were paying for access. Not ownership. The music lived on someone else’s servers, under someone else’s terms, subject to someone else’s decisions. Your library wasn’t a library, it was just a rental. And like any rental, the landlord can change the terms whenever they want.

That moment — that small, quiet shock of something disappearing from “your” collection — is worth sitting with. Because it’s not just about the music.

The Trade We Made

At some point in the last twenty years we made a trade so gradually that most of us didn’t notice we were making it.

We gave up ownership in exchange for convenience.

It started reasonably. Streaming was genuinely better than what came before. Netflix was cheaper and easier than cable. Spotify put millions of songs in your pocket for less than the price of one album a month. Each step made sense individually.

But the pattern underneath all of it was the same: we stopped owning things and started renting access to them.

Music. Movies. Software. Platforms. Audiences. Even our attention. One by one, the things we used to hold in our hands became things we pay monthly fees to borrow.

And access is a fundamentally different relationship than ownership.

When you own something, it’s yours. It stays. It doesn’t change without your consent. You can hold it, share it, keep it, give it away.

When you have access, you have it until the terms change. Until the price goes up. Until the platform pivots. Until the license expires. Until the landlord decides.

Netflix killed Blockbuster by being cheaper, easier, and better. Then once the competition was gone, the price went up, the content got thinner, and the ads came back. Now we pay cable prices for something we don’t own, can’t resell, and will lose the moment we stop paying. Spotify raised its prices too, along with almost every streaming platform that exists. And they will keep raising them, because once you’re hooked and the alternative is gone, the leverage shifts entirely to them. Your listening history is in there. “Your” playlists. “Your” library. Your algorithmic identity. Leaving means starting over. So you stay. And the price keeps going up.

This is what the ownership-to-access trade actually costs. Not just money. Leverage. The moment you stop owning things you lose the ability to walk away.

From Exploration to Platform

The early internet felt like ownership.

Your Myspace page. Your Tumblr. Your weird little blog. Your forum account. Your LimeWire downloads. Your hand-built playlists burned onto CDs nobody asked for but everyone accepted. Messy, imperfect, personal. Your own corner of something that felt genuinely open.

Then the internet became platforms.

Facebook. Instagram. TikTok. YouTube. They made it effortless to exist online — no coding required, ready-made audiences, built-in community. And in exchange, you built your presence on someone else’s land. You got the convenience of a ready-made stage and they got your content, your data, your attention, and eventually a significant piece of your identity.

The platforms start out promising. There’s community, connection, real growth. But eventually they have to grow faster and make increasingly more money and appeal to shareholders and advertisers. So the algorithm changes. The reach shrinks unless you pay. The culture of the platform shifts toward whatever drives engagement. And the version of yourself you built there — your audience, your voice, your presence — belongs to their terms of service more than it belongs to you.

One app update at a time, the platform loses its soul.

That’s part of why newsletters matter. An email list is one of the last pieces of internet real estate that actually belongs to you. Not rented reach. Not algorithmic distribution. Direct connection — yours to keep regardless of what any platform decides to do next.

The Deeper Trade

Here’s where it gets more uncomfortable.

The same trade happened with something far more valuable than our music collections.

We gave up ownership of our attention. Our taste. Our opinions. Our sense of self.

Think about how you discover music now. You don’t dig through a record store or a friend’s collection or a blog you trusted. An algorithm surfaces something and you either like it or you don’t. Your taste gets mapped, predicted, optimized. The algorithm learns what keeps you engaged and serves you more of it. Over time you stop discovering things and start being served things. The difference feels invisible but it’s enormous.

The same thing happened with news, with politics, with culture. You didn’t choose your information diet consciously — it was curated for you based on what kept you on the platform longest. Outrage kept you on longer than nuance. Confirmation kept you on longer than challenge. So the algorithm fed you outrage and confirmation and called it personalization.

And slowly, without realizing it, you rented out your mind.

Your opinions started to feel like your own but they were assembled by someone else’s system, optimized for engagement rather than truth. Your taste felt personal but it was a profile built from your behavioral data. Your sense of what matters, what’s funny, what’s scary, what’s real — shaped by feeds you never fully controlled and platforms with incentives that had nothing to do with your actual wellbeing.

We became subscribers to algorithmic versions of ourselves — and mistook personalization for personality.

What Owning Actually Looks Like

I want to be specific here because this isn’t just about buying CDs or vinyl records — though you should do that too.

Owning your world means building a relationship with things that actually belong to you. Music you purchased and can play without a subscription. Books on your shelf that nobody can delete. Videogames you can play without a subscription fee or internet connection. A newsletter where your audience is yours regardless of what any platform decides tomorrow. Opinions you formed by reading widely, sitting with complexity, and thinking things through — not ones that were served to you because they matched your engagement profile.

It means curating your own taste instead of outsourcing it. Knowing why you like what you like. Having a point of view that exists independent of what’s trending this week.

It means owning your attention — deciding deliberately where it goes instead of letting it be extracted. Reading the whole essay instead of the summary. Finishing the album instead of shuffling to the next thing. Sitting with a thought long enough for it to actually become yours.

This is the real ownership crisis. Not that we stopped buying CDs. It’s that we stopped forming ourselves independently. The higher standard isn’t nostalgia, it’s intentionality. It’s asking honestly: is this actually mine? Did I choose this or was I served this? Do I believe this because I thought it through or because my feed confirmed it a hundred times?

Own your opinions. Own your taste. Own your attention. Own your time.

Everything else follows from that.

The Pendulum Swings Back

Something is shifting though. You can feel it if you pay attention.

Vinyl record sales have been growing for nearly two decades. Physical book sales held strong through every prediction of their death. People are buying CDs again. Paying for newsletters instead of consuming free algorithmic feeds. Building audiences on platforms they control instead of renting reach from ones they don’t.

The instinct is right even when the form is different. Ownership matters. Control matters. Having something that’s actually yours — something that can’t be taken away by a terms of service update or a platform pivot or a price hike — matters more than it ever did.

We are at the beginning of a correction. The convenience-over-ownership trade is starting to show its true cost, and people are quietly, individually, starting to make different choices. Not all at once. Not with a movement or a hashtag. Just person by person deciding that renting everything isn’t actually freedom.

It just feels like freedom until the landlord raises the rent.

Own Something Today

Buy the album. Buy the book. Build the newsletter. Form the opinion. Choose the thought deliberately instead of accepting whatever gets served to you.

Not because streaming is evil or convenience is wrong. But because ownership is a fundamentally different relationship with the world than renting access. It’s permanence versus terms and conditions. It’s yours versus borrowed until further notice.

And the most important things in your life — your attention, your taste, your opinions, your sense of who you are — those especially should belong to you.

Not to the platform. Not to the algorithm. Not to the landlord.

Convenience feels like freedom until the terms change.

You are what you consume. Own what you are.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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🌎📡 Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

If you spend enough time online, you’ll eventually notice a sentiment that keeps surfacing no matter what corner of the internet you’re in.

“2019 was the last normal year.” “2016 was the peak.” “Things made more sense in 2010.” “Everything feels too fast now.” “Nothing feels real anymore.”

The details change, but the feeling doesn’t.

And it’s not just coming from one group, one generation, or one political corner. It’s coming from everywhere. People who disagree about almost everything else somehow agree on this one thing: that something shifted, something got thinner, and we haven’t found our footing since.

I don’t think that feeling is wrong. I think it’s one of the most honest things people are saying right now.

But most responses to it are incomplete.

The answer is usually one of two things: a nostalgic retreat into whatever year felt better, or a helpless shrug at forces too big to fight. Go back or give up.

Neither of those is a plan.

How We Got Here

Culture didn’t get hollow because people got worse.

It drifted because incentives changed. Attention became the most valuable commodity on Earth. Platforms were built to capture as much of it as possible. Algorithms learned that outrage and anxiety kept people scrolling longer than beauty or depth. Content got optimized for retention. Art got optimized for virality. News got optimized for fear.

Nobody optimized for meaning.

And culture is downstream of incentives. When you change what gets rewarded, you change what gets made. When you change what gets made long enough, you change people.

Here’s why that matters:

If culture drifted because incentives changed, then culture can recover when incentives change back.

And who changes incentives?

People do. One decision at a time.

Every Choice Is a Vote

This is the part most cultural criticism skips because it’s uncomfortable.

We talk about algorithms like weather — something that happens to us, outside our control, impossible to fight. We talk about the decline of reading, the rise of outrage, the death of nuance as if these are natural disasters with no human cause and no human cure.

But algorithms don’t feed themselves.

Every time you click the outrage bait, you vote for more outrage bait. Every time you stream the forgettable sequel instead of paying for something original, you vote for more forgettable sequels. Every time you scroll past the long essay to watch the thirty second clip, you vote for a world with fewer long essays and more thirty second clips. Every time you participate in a public humiliation, pile on a stranger, share the drama — you are casting a vote for the culture you claim to hate.

And every time you don’t — every time you choose differently — you cast a different vote.

Buy the album. Read the book. Watch the film that took a real risk. Pay for the writing that made you think. Recommend something worth recommending. Have the long conversation. Sit at the dinner table without your phone. Go outside without documenting it. Finish something instead of sampling everything.

These aren’t small acts of personal virtue. They are cultural signals. They are votes. And votes accumulate.

The culture is not something that exists separate from the choices of the people inside it. The culture is the choices of the people inside it.

Which means the people inside it can change it.

That includes you, and that includes me.

What Getting Better Actually Looks Like

We have to be honest about something.

Culture is not going to snap back to whatever year felt better to you. The internet is not going away. The algorithm is not going to be shut off. The pace is not going to slow down on its own.

So, nostalgia isn’t the answer. Neither is waiting for a politician or a platform or a cultural moment to fix things.

What getting better actually looks like is quieter and slower and more personal than that.

It looks like a person deciding to read more than they scroll.

It looks like a family making the dinner table a phone-free zone.

It looks like a creator making something weird and honest instead of something optimized and safe.

It looks like a 21-year-old bringing a book to the All-Star Game and actually trying to win.

It looks like someone picking up trash they didn’t drop.

It looks like returning the shopping cart when nobody’s watching.

It looks like one person, in one moment, deciding that the current standard isn’t good enough and choosing something better.

That’s how every cultural shift in history actually happened. Not with a single dramatic turning point. With an accumulation. With enough people making enough small decisions in the same direction that the new standard started to feel normal. Until what used to be countercultural became just cultural. Until what used to be unusual became expected.

We’ve seen it before. We can see it again.

The Threshold

Cultural change doesn’t happen linearly. It doesn’t improve one percent every time someone makes a better choice. It works more like a threshold — things drift in one direction for a long time, slowly, almost imperceptibly, and then something tips. A critical mass is reached. The new normal becomes the actual normal.

We are living through a drift. Most people can feel it even if they can’t name it.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: the people who are tired of it are everywhere. They’re buying records again. They’re reading physical books. They’re hosting dinners without phones. They’re going outside without documenting it. Quietly, individually, without coordination or a hashtag or a movement name, they’re making different choices.

They just don’t know how many of them there are yet.

This newsletter exists because I believe we are approaching that threshold. Because I believe the people who care about depth and standards and genuine human connection and actual effort and leaving things better than they found them — those people are not a fringe.

They are a majority waiting to recognize itself.

And movements don’t start with everyone. They start with just enough.

What You Can Do Today

Not tomorrow. Not when things calm down. Not when the culture fixes itself.

Today.

Pick one thing the current culture is offering you that you know isn’t good enough. One scroll session that leaves you feeling worse. One piece of content you engage with even though it doesn’t deserve your attention. One convenience that’s costing you something you can’t quite name.

And choose differently. Once. Today.

Then do it again tomorrow.

That’s the whole plan. It doesn’t require a platform or an audience or a grand gesture. It just requires a decision. And then another decision. And then another.

Until it becomes a habit. And that habit becomes a lifestyle.

Culture doesn’t get better because someone fixes it from the outside.

It gets better when enough people decide to be greater from the inside.

The Beats wanted depth when the world offered comfort. The Hippies wanted peace when the world offered war. The Punks wanted truth when the world offered product.

And now?

We crave something real when the world is offering us everything easy and fast and optimized and nothing true.

That desire is enough, if we act on it.

The threshold is closer than it looks.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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🌎📡 Welcome :) You’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

NBA All-Star Weekend is supposed to be the celebration of the best basketball players on the planet.

The best players of the East against the best of the West. Or in 2025, the best of America against the best of the World. Either way — The most talented players alive, all on the same floor at the same time, competing for something most players will never even get a chance to compete for.

On paper, it should be electric.

But for a while, it wasn’t.

Somewhere along the way, the NBA All-Star Game quietly became something else. Not a competition — a showcase. Players lobbing half-court shots, laughing on defense, throwing up trick passes that didn’t need to go anywhere because nothing was actually at stake. Flashy for the sake of flashy. Fun in a way that felt hollow. The best players in the world treating the biggest stage of the weekend like a pickup game at a gym that nobody really cared about.

The reasoning behind this trend made sense, technically. The ultimate goal of an NBA season is the Final Championship. One bad landing, one twisted ankle in a game that doesn’t count towards the finals, and your whole season changes. The risk-reward calculation is real and players know it.

But something was still being lost. The spirit of it. The standard of it. The idea that when you’re one of the best in the world and you’ve been given a stage, you show up fully and you give the fans something real.

That standard had been quietly lowering for years.

Then a 7-foot French kid walked into the locker room carrying a book.

Pre-game Literature

It’s February 2025. San Francisco. Victor Wembanyama is making his All-Star debut — coming off a unanimous Rookie of the Year season, already looking like something the sport hasn’t quite seen before.

And he brought a book with him.

Not a flashy watch. Not a new car to show off in the parking lot. A book. Under his arm. In the locker room before the biggest exhibition game of the year.

Nikola Jokic — three-time MVP, one of the greatest players alive — walked over and looked at him.

“You really brought a book?”

“Yeah! I read before every game,” Wembanyama said.

Jokic kind of scoffed and put his face in his hands. The whole exchange had the energy of someone watching a kid do something slightly bizarre — endearing but puzzling. Like, here? Now? At All-Star Weekend?

Yes. Here. Now. At All-Star Weekend.

Because that’s who he is. Not a performance of who he is. Not a curated image of focus and discipline that he switches on for the cameras. He reads before every game — regular season, playoffs, All-Star, it doesn’t matter. The routine doesn’t change based on whether people are watching or whether the occasion seems to call for it.

LeBron James, when asked about Wembanyama around this time, said he’d heard that nobody better call him past 9 o’clock at night because he’s either reading or he’s asleep.

“That lets you know where his mind is,” LeBron said. “That’s super cool. That’s super dope.”

It is. But it’s also more than cool. It’s a standard. A quiet, private, completely consistent standard that doesn’t bend for the moment.

Play Like You Mean It

Here’s the part that makes the story complete.

Wembanyama didn’t just bring his book and then coast through the game like everyone else. He showed up and actually played. He was dunking on people. Chasing down shots to block. Hustling. Competing. Visibly frustrated when his team lost the final.

He actually tried hard. At the All-Star Game. Even when the culture of the event had spent years slowly normalizing not trying.

Earlier that weekend he’d gotten himself and Chris Paul disqualified from the skills competition after finding what he thought was a loophole in the rules — because even in a side event on a Friday night, he was looking for an edge. Trying to win. Not because anyone expected him to, but because that’s apparently just how he’s wired.

Think about what that combination looks like from the outside. He slows down before the game. He reads. He’s in no rush. And then when it’s time to play, he plays like it means something. The stillness and the intensity aren’t opposites — they’re connected. The reading isn’t a quirk, it’s preparation. The same discipline showing up in two different forms.

He wasn’t doing it for the reaction. He wasn’t performing focus for a brand deal or a highlight package. Jokic laughed at him and he didn’t flinch. He just kept doing what he always does.

That’s the part worth paying attention to.

A Greater Influence

The 2026 All-Star Game arrived and Wembanyama showed up just like before. Same energy. Same standard. No special adjustment for the occasion.

Before the game, fellow All-Star Anthony Edwards was asked if the intensity could match the Olympics. He said flatly: No. Several stars were limited by injuries. The expectation, from the players themselves, was more of the same.

Then Wembanyama came out and scored the World Team’s first seven points right out of the gate. Playing defense like it was Game 7. Visibly frustrated when his team gave up an open three on the final play. Storming back to the bench the same way he would after a regular season loss.

And the vibe of the game shifted too.

After the game Edwards said: “I ain’t gonna lie, Wemby set the tone. He came out playing hard, so it’s hard not to match that. It woke me up for sure.” That’s the MVP of the game — a 24-year-old who’d said the night before that he wasn’t going to try — crediting one player for changing the entire energy of the evening.

The veterans felt it too. Kawhi Leonard dropped 31 points in 12 minutes. LeBron was sprinting the floor. De’Aaron Fox hit a buzzer-beater to win a game. All three opening games went down to the wire. The NBA registered its highest All-Star audience since 2011.

Before the game Wembanyama had said simply: “It’s the game I personally cherish. Being competitive is the least I can do.” And if they didn’t match his energy, he said, he’d bring it alone.

And he did. Which caused other players to follow his lead and step up to match the level of competition.

Not because of a rule change or a marketing campaign or a pregame speech from a legend. Because one player refused to lower his standard, and everyone else eventually rose to meet it.

That’s not a small thing, it’s the whole point.

When One Person Decides to Try

The All-Star Game had a problem that nobody could fix with format tweaks or rule changes. The problem was never the structure. It was the standard.

When the standard is that nobody really tries, that’s just what the game becomes. Everyone looks around, registers that this is how it’s done, and matches the energy in the room. It’s social. It’s human. We calibrate to the people around us almost without realizing it.

But that also means it only takes one person to break the spell.

One player deciding to actually compete changes what’s possible. The younger players feel the pull to match it — to prove they belong. The veterans feel it too, that instinct to show they’ve still got it. Suddenly there’s something to push against. Suddenly the game has stakes again, even informal ones.

One person raises the standard and the room recalibrates.

Wembanyama didn’t fix the All-Star Game overnight. But across two years, he brought something real into a space that had been running low on it. And that matters more than any final score.

Why This Stuck With Me

I’m a NBA fan from North Carolina who doesn’t follow the Spurs, doesn’t have a particular history with French basketball, and had no specific reason to care about Victor Wembanyama before that weekend in 2025.

But when I saw a 21-year-old show up to the most performative event of the basketball calendar with a book under his arm, do his routine exactly the way he always does it, laugh off the skepticism, and then go out and actually play — I became a fan instantly.

Not because of the athleticism, though it was extraordinary, but because of what these actions say about who he is when nobody’s requiring him to be anything in particular. What he decides to do without being told to, or required to, or even copying someone else. He’s just doing it because he feels like it’s the right thing to do.

He didn’t need the All-Star Game to feel important in order to show up fully. He brought his standard with him and applied it to whatever situation he was in. The situation didn’t set the standard. He did.

That’s rare. And it’s getting rarer.

We live in a culture that is very good at performing effort and very selective about actually applying it. We post about discipline. We quote people about hard work. We consume content about high standards while the actual standard of how we spend our days quietly drifts toward convenience, toward whatever requires the least resistance, toward matching the energy of the room even when the room isn’t trying.

Wembanyama didn’t do that. At 21, in his first All-Star Game, surrounded by the best players on earth at an event that had basically institutionalized coasting, he just did what he always does.

He read the book. He played the game. He tried to win.

The Standard

You’re not playing in the NBA All-Star Game. Neither am I.

But the question Wembanyama is quietly asking applies to everyone.

Do you bring your standard to the situation, or do you let the situation set your standard for you? Do you show up fully to the things that don’t require you to? Do you do your preparation even when nobody’s checking? Do you try in the rooms where the culture is to not try — or do you just match the energy and tell yourself it’s fine because everyone else is doing the same?

The book in the locker room wasn’t about basketball, it was about being the kind of person who has a standard and keeps it regardless of the occasion. Who doesn’t save their best self for the moments that feel important enough to deserve it — but brings that self everywhere, quietly, consistently, without needing applause for it.

And it turns out that when you do that — when you just keep your standard even when nobody else is — sometimes the whole room wakes up.

That’s what it means to be greater.

Not louder. Not flashier. Just more consistent. More intentional. And without compromise.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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🌎📡 Welcome :) you’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

Counterculture has always been simple at its core.

It’s groups of people looking at the dominant culture around them — sometimes the entire world — and saying: something about this feels off. Not always that it’s collapsing. Not always that it’s evil. Just that it’s incomplete. That something important is being traded away for something cheaper.

And if you look closely at history, you’ll see it appear over and over again — whenever the mainstream drifts too far in one direction, something rises up to push back.

Counterculture isn’t chaos. It’s correction.

The Pattern:

The 1950s looked stable on paper. Suburbs were expanding. Corporate jobs promised security. The television glowed in neat living rooms. The American Dream was clearly defined: work hard, fit in, accumulate, don’t question too much. It worked — for a lot of people. But beneath that prosperity, some felt spiritually suffocated. The “Beats” rejected suburban conformity and corporate ambition. They questioned whether climbing the ladder was the highest possible aim of a human life. They gathered in coffeehouses, wrote long restless poems, and hitchhiked across the country searching for intensity and meaning. They weren’t trying to destroy America, they were trying to feel alive within it. When success became the highest value, they went looking for depth.

By the 1960s the tension was no longer subtle. The Vietnam War escalated. Televised violence entered living rooms. The dominant culture said: this is progress. The “Hippies” disagreed. They opposed the war, rejected materialism, advocated for peace and connection in a world that felt militarized and hardened. It wasn’t just fashion — it was a moral protest. When society felt violent and mechanical, they leaned toward gentleness and meaning.

Then by the late 1970s something strange had happened. The counterculture of the 60s had started to feel aesthetic. Psychedelic rebellion showed up in advertising. The language of freedom became a marketing strategy, so the “Punk” movement emerged as a rejection of both the mainstream and the commodified version of rebellion. It was three chords, basement shows, DIY posters. It was raw and loud because culture felt too safe, too pre-packaged, too polished. It stripped everything down to something real and honest.

The pattern repeats every time. Counterculture emerges, influences the mainstream, gets absorbed, gets diluted, and then something new rises in response. Feminism. Gay rights. Meditation. Cannabis. Tech culture itself — all once considered fringe, now normalized, and in many cases monetized. The soul that once sparked the movement gets softened, and the edges get rounded off.

Counterculture is necessary. It prevents stagnation. It plays devil’s advocate. It keeps society from drifting too far in any one direction without someone noticing and pushing back. It’s like our culture’s immune system.

So what is the dominant culture today? And what is quietly rising up in response?

Culture Today:

To understand where we are, you have to understand how we got here.

In 2007, Steve Jobs stood on a stage and introduced the iPhone — a device that put the entire internet into your pocket. For the first time, the online world wasn’t something you visited at a desk and then left. It followed you everywhere. Into your bedroom, your commute, your dinner table, your last quiet moments before sleep.

For a while, this felt like pure expansion. New apps, new communities, new ways to connect and create. Small creators — artists, writers, YouTubers — were building real audiences from their bedrooms. People were meeting their future partners online. The world felt bigger and more accessible than it ever had.

But like everything eventually does, the online world fell victim to corporate takeover. The weird, diverse, human internet slowly became centralized. Platforms that once felt like open communities became advertising machines. Algorithms replaced discovery. Short-form content replaced long-form thought because it was more engaging, more addictive, easier to serve. Then in 2020 the global pandemic arrived and finished what the smartphone started — when the physical world shut down, we all migrated online full time. And when it reopened, most of us never fully came back.

Now the default state is online. Not as a choice — just as the water we swim in.

The dominant culture today is optimized for speed, engagement, visibility, and monetization. We stream instead of owning. We scroll instead of reading. We post instead of talking. We react instead of reflecting. We consume without digesting. Attention has become the most valuable commodity on earth, and an entire global industry exists to extract as much of it from you as possible — every spare moment, every idle minute, every quiet space that used to belong to your own thoughts.

And it’s working… maybe even too well.

The result is a culture that feels thin. Not collapsed, not hopeless — just flattened. Conversations that don’t go anywhere. Content that disappears before you’ve had time to feel anything about it. A constant low-grade sense that you’ve been somewhere without really going anywhere at all. Everyone online, more connected than ever, yet somehow lonelier than before.

A Quiet Resistance Forms:

Then, quietly, something started pushing back.

Not a huge trend. Not a movement with a name or a leader. Just individual people, scattered across the world, making slightly different choices. Choosing to opt-out of pieces of the dominant culture in small, private, deliberate ways.

Vinyl record sales have been growing every year for nearly two decades — outselling CDs for the first time since the 1980s. Physical book sales have held strong even as every tech company told us print was dead. Film cameras are back. Disposable cameras are back. People are buying things they could easily stream — albums, movies, games — just to own them. To hold them. To have something real.

The dumb phone movement is real and growing. People are swapping smartphones for flip phones or basic devices that just call and text and do nothing else. Not because they hate technology, but because they want their attention back. They’re tired of the pull. They want their phone to be just a phone again. They want to be somewhere without being everywhere else at the same time.

Digital minimalism has become a legitimate lifestyle philosophy. People are deleting apps, setting screen time limits, taking weekend detoxes, building analog morning routines before they ever touch a screen. They’re reading physical newspapers. Writing in paper journals. Going to bookstores on purpose. Hosting dinners where phones stay in a basket by the door.

These aren’t coordinated. Nobody is organizing this. It’s just people, independently, arriving at the same conclusion: that the frictionless, always-on, infinitely optimized online life is missing something they need. That ownership feels different from access. That silence feels different from distraction. That finishing a book feels different from finishing a scroll.

When culture becomes too thin, people start craving texture again.

This is the counterculture of our generation. It doesn’t have a name yet. It doesn’t have a uniform or a sound or a scene. But it has a feeling — the same feeling the Beats had in their coffeehouses, the Hippies had at their festivals, or the Punks had in their basements. It’s the feeling that the dominant culture has drifted somewhere that doesn’t serve human beings very well, and that it’s time to build something different.

Outside Perspective:

I’ve spent most of my life slightly outside the mainstream current.

Montessori kid. Raised by grandparents. Skater in a private school. Buddhist in the American South. A punk fan, tech enthusiast who reads physical books and owns more vinyl records than most people my age have even held. Someone who grew up online and chose to step back from it.

I know what it feels like to go against the grain, and what I’ve learned is that being outside the dominant current gives you perspective on it. You can see when things drift. You can feel when something important is being lost.

Right now, what’s being lost is depth. Attention. Ownership of your own mind. The ability to sit with a thought long enough to actually finish it.

Punk showed me that the response to that isn’t to politely suggest that people slow down. The response is to build your own thing. Make your own rules. Own your own stuff. Show up without waiting for permission.

Being offline isn’t the absence of something. It’s the presence of something the algorithm can’t give you — silence, boredom, the slow satisfaction of finishing a book, the feeling of actually owning something instead of renting access to it until the platform decides otherwise. The experience of being somewhere without documenting it, or thinking a thought all the way through without reaching for a screen.

These things used to be ordinary. Now they’re almost radical.

You don’t need a movement, and you don’t need a tutorial. You just need to make a few different choices — privately, consistently, without performing them for an audience.

That’s how every counterculture actually starts. Not with a declaration, but with a person quietly deciding that the dominant way of doing things isn’t working for them anymore.

Resist the Current:

Choose one way to go against the mainstream this week.

Buy your favorite album instead of streaming it. Read the book instead of the thread. Go for a walk without your earbuds. Write something by hand. Sit with boredom for ten minutes and see what happens.

Not because technology is bad, but because your attention belongs to you.

And in an optimized world, deciding for yourself what deserves your attention might be the most countercultural thing you can do.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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🌎📡 Welcome :) you’re reading Be Greater. Thanks for tuning in.

There’s a little hilltop spot hidden behind some trees in my neighborhood that I discovered while skating around one afternoon.

It’s nothing special on paper — just a tall grassy patch elevated above the surrounding streets and houses with a clear view of the horizon. But it became my spot. The place I’d go sometimes to sit quietly, read, think, or just watch the sun go down. In a world of screens and noise, it was a little sanctuary of peace.

There was only one problem: there was litter and trash scattered everywhere.

Every time I showed up, I would see it. Plastic bottles. Food wrappers. Random junk that had been left behind. I was trying to connect with nature, be peaceful, and enjoy the sunset, but I had to look at all this man-made mess.

And yet every single time, I walked right past it.

I always had the normal justifications in my mind:

“I didn’t put it there, so it’s not my responsibility.”

“I’m already doing the right thing by not littering myself.”

And honestly? Most people would agree with that logic. You’re not the one who made the mess. You’re minding your business, living right, not hurting anyone. That’s good enough, right?

But one evening it hit me: every time I walked past that trash, I was making a choice. Not a passive one — an active one. I had the ability to change something. I could see the problem clearly. And I decided, again and again, to do nothing.

That’s when I started to feel like “good enough” wasn’t actually good enough.

Someone wise once said: “With great power comes great responsibility.” Because here’s the thing: if you have the power to improve something and you choose not to, that’s still a choice. The outcome is still partly on you. Doing nothing is never really neutral. It’s a vote. And if you keep casting that vote — let someone else handle it, it’s not my problem, I’m already doing enough — then you are quietly contributing to the way things are.

Whether you’re a teenager visiting the usual hangout spot or a CEO making decisions that affect millions — we all have choices to make. And saying “I didn’t cause the problem” has never once made a problem smaller.

It’s hard to embrace, but I believe it’s true.

The Beginning of the Be Greater. Movement:

It’s Spring 2025, and I’ve been pulling back from the internet. Less scrolling, less streaming, less mindless consumption. More skating, more reading, more going outside and actually being somewhere. After years of absorbing so much content — endlessly consuming without really getting anything back — I felt a genuine urge to actually make something. To put something real into the world instead of just passing through it.

I’d always been a creative person. Growing up I probably started five different YouTube channels with different ideas that never quite got off the ground. But I was genuinely inspired by what YouTube used to be — this wild, personal, anything-goes place where people made stuff because they felt like it. No brand strategy. No optimization. Just people with cameras and ideas and something to say.

I grew up watching creators like Ryan Higa (@nigahiga), a Japanese American kid from Hawaii filming comedy skits with his best friend, a handheld camera, a bedroom background, and no budget. Or Sean McLoughlin (@jacksepticeye), an Irish kid uploading gaming videos from a cottage in Ireland, bursting with energy and personality.

These weren’t polished media productions. They were real people expressing themselves freely — weird, funny, silly, creative — and somehow that came through the screen and meant something. They were digital artists broadcasting their authentic personalities and visions.

None of them were “influencers.” Most of them didn’t even go by their real names. They were just people with an idea and the willingness to put it out there. That era of YouTube impacted me more than I realized at the time.

So, when I decided to start creating again, I started with a YouTube channel. I didn’t want to make a “Firstname Lastname” channel or become another face in the crowd. I didn’t want my life to be a brand or daily content. I was trying to move away from screens, not deeper into them. I wanted to spread a positive message and do it in my own way — short, personal, imperfect videos with something real behind them. I wanted to bring back a little bit of that old internet spirit.

So instead of making a “Garrett” channel, I made a “Greater” channel.

The @BeGreater YouTube Channel was born:

Now I just needed an idea for the first video.

I kept returning to my sunset spot. To the trash. To the choice I was making to walk past it.

So I made a new rule: every time I visited, I would bring a piece of trash back with me to throw away. Simple. Easy. No big commitment.

It felt good at first. I was being a good citizen. Doing my small part.

But the spot still looked the same. New litter accumulated faster than I was clearing it. My one-piece-at-a-time approach wasn’t really changing anything — it was just making me feel better about doing the bare minimum.

If I really wanted to be greater, I was going to have to do more than the bare minimum.

So I decided to clean up the entire spot.

My brain put 2 and 2 together and I decided that this little volunteer trash clean-up project would be the perfect first video for the BeGreater channel.

I went to the store and bought a pair of gloves, grabbed a trash bag, and went back to the spot. This time I cleaned the whole thing up. And I filmed a fun little video of the process with my smartphone.

That became the first Be Greater. video.

At the end of that video, I sit down and watch the sunset, with a full trash bag sitting in the newly cleaned background. And I genuinely enjoy that sunset more. Not because the view changed — but because I changed it. I did something I didn’t have to do, not for money, not for clout, but because I wanted to make that small corner of the world a little better than I found it.

That’s the whole idea behind that channel, this newsletter — Be Greater as a philosophy and a movement.

We live in a time where it’s incredibly easy to justify inaction. The world feels big and broken and overwhelming, and it’s tempting to think that nothing you do at your scale really matters. So why bother? Why go out of your way? Why do more than you have to?

But I think that logic is exactly what makes things worse. The world doesn’t improve on its own. It improves because individual people, in small moments, decide to do something instead of nothing. It’s not glamorous. Nobody’s giving out awards for picking up trash or holding a door open or showing up for someone who needed it. But it adds up. It always adds up.

And if the good people of the world allow themselves to get tired and burnt out and settle for “good enough” — well, there are plenty of people out there who are absolutely not settling for good enough. They are taking everything they can. So if the people who actually care decide to check out, the people who don’t care are left in charge. That’s how things get worse.

If we want a greater world, we have to be greater. It really is that simple.

Maybe someone out there also wants to make a difference but doesn’t know where to start. Maybe watching some dude pick up trash for a few minutes is the push they need to go do something — anything — in their own way. That would be enough for me.

Here’s the honest question worth sitting with:

If the world were watching you through a camera — not with your explanation, not your context, not your backstory, just your actual actions and their results — what would they see?

Are you proud of that person?

Is that person making changes or making excuses?

Are they spreading positivity or negativity?

Are they helping at all or just asking for help?

Do they step up or do they wait for someone else to?

Are they leaving things better than they found them?

You don’t have to change the world today. You don’t need a grand gesture or a perfect plan. Sometimes it’s as simple as picking up trash instead of stepping over it.

Start there. See what happens next.

Log off, spread love, be greater.

— [gf]

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🌎📡 Welcome :)

You’re reading Be Greater. — A publication from the last offline generation.

This newsletter is for anyone who senses that our world and culture changed as everything moved online, and those who want to reclaim their lives, attention, and meaning in order to be greater and live better in the modern world.

Thanks for tuning in.

Have you noticed that the world feels different now? Of course, it’s always changing, but I mean something feels off.

Everything is so fast-paced. Culture feels flatter. Everyone is constantly online. It’s harder to read or think quietly without reaching for a screen.

The world has been optimized, and with the rise of algorithms, our culture has become fragmented into pieces.

My name is Garrett. I grew up in the offline world, before the launch of the first iPhone. Back when the internet lived on a desktop in a computer room and didn’t follow us everywhere.

I grew up playing outside, skateboarding, exploring, being independent and just figuring things out through trial and error.

My micro-generation was alive for 9/11, but too young to remember it. We learned about it on classroom screens and by hearing teachers retelling their experiences. We witnessed Hurricane Katrina, the financial collapse of 2008, the golden age of the iPod, the launch of the iPhone, the rise of smartphones, the political shifts of the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns of 2020, and now the rise of AI.

We grew up alongside the internet. We got to live inside both worlds.

I’m not a culture expert or some guru. I’m someone who witnessed this shift firsthand and I’m doing my best to make sense of it all.

If you want to know about me:

• I was born in North Carolina in 1999.

• I graduated from East Carolina University, following in my grandfather’s footsteps (Go Pirates).

• I’m a 5th Degree Taekwondo Master.

And now, I write the Be Greater. Newsletter.

Subscribe now

What does Be Greater mean?

This publication explores what it means to “be greater” in a modern, optimized world.

It means making better choices and holding yourself to a higher standard, especially when the easier option is one tap away.

Being greater looks different for everyone. No one knows your life like you do. You have to be honest with yourself and decide which decisions are better for you and the world around you.

Being Greater could mean:

• Reading a book instead of doomscrolling

• Being more kind to the people around you

• Throwing away trash you see, even if it’s not yours

• Always returning your shopping cart, even when it’s far

• Stopping to think before reacting emotionally

• Working towards your dreams and goals instead of consuming endlessly

• Deciding not to buy junk food at the store

• Giving spare change to someone begging on the street

Or a million other things…

To put it simply: when you’re faced with a choice, choose the greater option. Not the easiest, or the most convenient, but the choice that you imagine your hero would make.

We can’t wait around for someone else to step up and fix things. We have to be our own heroes. Be the person you would want your kids and friends to look up to. Be the character you would love to be in a movie.

Live in a way that you’re proud of, even when no one is watching. Make decisions you wouldn’t feel the need to hide or explain away. Act in alignment with the type of person you want to become.

In a time where optimization and convenience are everywhere, don’t lower your standards just because it’s easier. Instead of waiting around for a hero, become the hero. Be the change you want to see. Raise your own standards and lead by example before criticizing the world.

The Modern Problem:

Our culture has migrated from the offline world to the online world.

Be Greater.

What Happened to the World?

Something feels off in the world. We can sense it, but it’s not so easy to put into words. If you’re reading this the year it was published (2026), then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vibe has shifted…

Read more

6 months ago · 9 likes · 7 comments · [garrett fowler]

That online world used to be a seemingly magical place, with diverse platforms, communities, games, channels, and niches. It was a fun place to visit, explore, connect with people, and then log off.

But over time the online world became more centralized, more corporate, more optimized.

When platforms are driven by engagement metrics to minimize risk, creativity becomes safer. Movies rely on sequels and remakes. Music gets tested and tweaked. Content is engineered for retention. Whatever is easily consumable gets amplified, and things that are strange, slow, or challenging get filtered out. This all results in safe art — passable but forgettable.

Optimization favors predictability, but soul requires risk.

It requires making something that might fail, something that not everyone understands, something created because a person felt like it had to exist, not because a market analysis said it would perform well.

At the same time, everything has become more convenient. We can give in to our habits and impulses — food, entertainment, outrage, distraction — with a few efficient taps and swipes.

When the systems and environments around us make every impulse easy to reach, the responsibility falls onto us to make better choices.

If we want to make the world a better place, we have to choose to Be Greater.

This Newsletter will Explore:

• Culture and the digital shift

• Modern counterculture

• Reading and attention

• Personal standards

• Civic responsibility

• Observations from someone living through it all

With occasional interesting essays or works related to books I am working on.

If you feel like something important has shifted in the world…

If you want to think more clearly and intentionally…

If you want to stay optimistic and live with higher standards in a world that constantly lowers them…

Then this is the place for you.

Subscribe and share. Thanks for reading.

Log off, spread love, Be greater.

- [gf]

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Something feels off in the world. We can sense it, but it’s not so easy to put into words. If you’re reading this the year it was published (2026), then you know exactly what I’m talking about. The vibe has shifted.

Subscribe now

1) Culture is feeling more hollow.

Things don’t have staying power, or stand out, or hit the same anymore. Movies, albums, trends, memes. It’s all so fast paced and fragmented into millions of different unique algorithms.

Every once in a while you get an outlier, a cultural event with enough attention to slip into the global mainstream, but even that doesn’t linger the way that it used to. People talk about it for a few days and then move on to something else.

The system moves too fast. The algorithms are optimized to encourage fast-paced, endless, and easily digestible content, but we don’t even digest the content we are consuming. We don’t stop to sit with things, or reflect on them, or analyze them.

And when we do, we look to other people’s comments, other people’s opinions, AI summaries. We are happily giving away our own critical thinking and problem solving skills without giving it a second thought. (The irony hurts.)

But what happens when things get too optimized, and we start smoothing out the texture, the grit, the human, the soul — all the things that make art and content meaningful?

Social media has become more corporate.

The music industry has become more corporate.

The film industry has become more corporate.

The internet, the online world, and in effect culture itself has become corporate — and corporate is not necessarily the birthplace of fresh art and soul. Some might even argue that corporate is where soul goes to die.

Now, the problem with corporate isn’t money or scale — plenty of great art has been made with big budgets. The problem is what happens when the primary goal shifts from making something meaningful to minimizing financial risk. Corporate structures answer to shareholders and quarterly returns, which means they optimize for what’s already proven to work. They greenlight the sequel, the reboot, the familiar face. They A/B test the album covers and sand down anything too weird, too niche, too challenging. The result isn’t inherently bad art — it’s safe art. Competent, focus-grouped, and ultimately forgettable.

Soul requires risk. It requires someone making something that might fail, that not everyone will get, something that exists because someone felt it had to exist, not because a market analysis said it should. That’s harder to do when there are investors to answer to.

Social media used to be a platform for communities and personal connection, but it has devolved into a heavily monetized, brand-driven landscape. Algorithms now prioritize professional content, ads, and influencer marketing over organic and personal posts. This shift has transformed feeds into digital storefronts, and people into brands.

2) Reading and attention spans are in a serious decline.

Our reading levels, after reaching record highs in the 2010s, have seemingly fallen back to where they were in ~2004 and ~1980. The gains we have made over recent decades are now quietly slipping away. (1)

Teachers are reporting that students can’t sit with the same material they used to. They can’t focus as long, and they struggle to read the same amount of books and literature that previous generations of students read. Many educators are even having to adapt the course work to be more easily consumable.

That is not the best solution. We can’t just lower the bar so that everyone can step over it. We need to keep holding our standards high and put in the work.

Instead of ignoring the issue, or kicking the responsibility down the road for someone else to deal with, we need to actually take the time to address this problem — that students today can’t complete the same course work as students from previous years. It’s only going to get worse if the next generation of teachers have a more surface level understanding of the course work as well.

To get some personal answers and data on this topic, I conducted interviews with many of my former school teachers, who have worked with students every year across multiple different decades and cultural landscapes.

I figured that out of all the people I could talk to, teachers would have the best vantage point on observing large amounts of students’ behaviors over many different time periods. They have the perfect perspective on whether this is just an internet trend, or if this is the real thing.

Most of the teachers that I interviewed said the same things:

In the last ~10 years:

-Far fewer students are reading for pleasure.

-Students are less focused, have more difficulty completing assigned reading.

-Students appear less mature in the classroom.

-Students are less independent in their classwork, less confident, and asking for constant feedback on their work.

-Students are increasingly on their phones, and are less social than ever. Even when they are together at lunch, they are on their phones, or discussing something they saw on their phones.

And after the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Lockdowns of 2020, these trends only accelerated. (7)

And these same trends are reflected in adults as well. People stopped spending as much time in public or “third” spaces such as coffee shops, parks, malls, bars, etc. Even six years later, recovery has been slow and uneven. Fewer people are hanging out together in the country and in the world.

It doesn’t help that politics are getting more divided and less respectful, cash influences everything, and kids who shouldn’t even know or care about the political landscape yet are being thrown into the deep end and forced to pick sides and learn new terms. It’s all just dystopian to see honestly.

I know boomers and old heads talk about a “better world” back in their day, but recently it seems like there’s finally some truth to that. This goes beyond pure nostalgia or “my generation was better” arguments. This is a documented and observed cultural shift. We can see it happening in real time.

But don’t lose hope yet.

Despite diminishing levels of social engagement and overall trust, most Americans still believe strangers would be willing to help them if they were in trouble, injured, or if their car broke down in public. (4)

And I can agree with this, because recently my car actually did break down and a nice couple helped me push my car out of the main road. We aren’t doomed, we’re just going through a confusing time.

Research generally supports the idea that people with more, or stronger social connections—including more friends—tend to have higher levels of trust in their neighbors and a more positive view of their community and country as a whole. Socially connected individuals are also generally more likely to engage in “neighborly” acts, such as helping with errands or looking after homes. (5,6)

That tells me that the distrust and division going on is a loneliness and isolation problem. We are spending less time together both in the offline and online worlds. But when we actually go out and interact positively with more people, we realize that it’s not so bad.

The problem is that now everyone lives in the online world, and much of that world has shifted from a place of community and connection into a fragmented shopping mall of distraction and division.

And when that happened, our attention also fragmented. Along with our focus, our humor, our politics, our entertainment, and our culture.

In 2007 Steve Jobs made a “dent in the universe” launching the iPhone as a breakthrough smart device that literally put the internet into your pocket. All of the information on the entire World Wide Web was now in the palm of our hands.

This was an amazing and necessary technological breakthrough, and it was also the start of the online world. The digital world that now expanded beyond our offices and desktops. A world that could now follow us everywhere we go. Now all of a sudden, people had a foot in two worlds, partially online and partially offline.

For a long time this was awesome. There were new apps, new games, new ways to connect, new business opportunities. People were making friends, communities, even meeting their husbands and wives online in different states and countries. Small scale creators: artists, writers, YouTubers were being validated by making careers out of their work. People had new opportunities to work from anywhere in the world.

But like everything eventually does, the online world fell victim to corporate takeover. Longer, more thought out, and more creative videos began being replaced by short-form content, because it’s more engaging, more addicting, and easier to share. It’s the easier content to consume because there’s less thinking and attention span required of you.

Then, as short form began dominating the internet, the pandemic introduced another big turning point. We spent month after month in a state of lockdown, wearing masks, social distancing, isolating from each other.

The lockdowns were exactly what the internet needed to complete its global takeover. When we had nothing going on in the physical world, we all migrated to the online world full-time.

This may have marked the end of the offline world. From that point forward it was clear: Sure, anyone can log off for a while, but it appears the new default state is online.

This is why there are growing trends and counterculture movements showing up online. Digital minimalism, dumb phones, analog technology, music players, eReaders. People tired of consuming who just want to enjoy owning and experiencing things again.

Social interactions, community, ownership, and reading are declining — and along with them: critical thinking, intelligence, empathy. We need an offline / reading movement now more than ever.

This is why I write. Like Steve, I also want to change the world.

I genuinely want to do my part to make it a better place. I want to inspire people to be kinder, be smarter, be more creative, be more open-minded, be greater.

And I think one of the most significant ways to truly change the world is to influence culture.

Artists, authors, creators, messages, and movements can transcend lifetimes. I believe a well crafted message or idea can influence and inspire much more significantly than if I were to attempt to force change through complex, corrupt, and inefficient political systems.

These are my observations, and you are free to disagree, but I am optimistic about the world and the people that live here. I believe we must all be ourselves and use our strengths in the best way possible.

So I choose to write. To get this message out into the world. Maybe it’s largely dismissed, but maybe it changes somebody’s life.

Maybe it even influences culture as a whole.

The world has changed, as it always does. Our culture is constantly evolving, but now we are reaching a new turning point.

We must decide what we want the future to look like. Do we just keep using screens more, and making things more convenient, and spend more time away from each other, and get more divided politically, and stop reading as much, and make school work easier?

Or do we decide to slow down? To stop and think about what we are doing and why. To make sure that we are still innovating, coming up with new ideas, staying open-minded, curious, and disciplined in working toward a better tomorrow for all of us. Do we finally decide that we need to limit spending our entire lives online — endlessly and mindlessly consuming?

We are reaching that point in history, a crucial moment where we decide what comes next, and everything we do, every action we take, is a vote on what we want the world to look like. Just like how every scroll and every click on our screens is a vote for the online world we want to see. We can choose to support quality content, spread knowledge and positivity, and lift each other up instead of tearing each other down.

Because maybe that’s all it takes to start a movement.

In a world where everything is constantly online, things are feeling uncertain, and people are reading less — maybe one kid deciding to become a writer, to become an author, to write a book, to encourage reading, is all it takes to push us in the right direction.

I don’t know if any of this will matter. Maybe this gets lost in the same algorithm I’ve been writing about, but I think about that couple who helped me push my car out of the busy street. They didn’t have to stop. Nobody made them. They just did it because someone needed help and they were there. That impulse — to show up for a stranger, to do the small good thing — hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just getting harder to see through the noise. So I write. Not because I’m certain it changes anything, but because it’s my version of stopping the car to try and help.

And maybe that’s enough.

- [gf]

*This piece uses ideas, themes, and interviews from my book. If you’re interested in this project, then subscribe to stay updated, and share. You might help me find a publisher.

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References:

National Center for Education Statistics. (n.d.). Long-term trends in reading and mathematics achievement. U.S. Department of Education. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38 (1)

University College London. (2025, August). Proportion of Americans reading for pleasure fell by 40% over 20 years. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/aug/proportion-americans-reading-pleasure-fell-40-over-20-years (2)

Macdonald, K. T., Barnes, M. A., Miciak, J., Roberts, G., Halverson, K. K., Vaughn, S., & Cirino, P. T. (2021). Sustained attention and behavioral ratings of attention in struggling readers. Scientific studies of reading : the official journal of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8411923/ (3)

Cox, D. A., & Hammond, K. E. (2025). A cultural crossroads: America’s uncertain future amid enduring discontent and rising disconnection. Survey Center on American Life. Retrieved February 12, 2026, from https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/a-cultural-crossroads-americas-uncertain-future-amidst-enduring-discontent-and-rising-disconnection/ (4)

Martino, J., Pegg, J., & Frates, E. P. (2015, October 7). The connection prescription: Using the power of social interactions and the deep desire for connectedness to empower health and Wellness. American journal of lifestyle medicine. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6125010/ (5)

Silver, L. (2025, May 8). How connected do Americans feel to their neighbors?. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/05/08/how-connected-do-americans-feel-to-their-neighbors/ (6)

Educator Interviews. Conducted by [garrett fowler], January 2026. (7)

I sat alone on the Carolina coast, in the darkness of night, watching planes fly amongst the stars above the ocean.

The beach was empty. Just me, the sound of waves crashing, and the cool wind coming off the water.

I had graduated. I was out in what people call “the real world“ now, though sitting there in the dark, staring out at an ocean I couldn’t fully see, the real world felt like an abstract thing and this—the waves, the wind, the stars—felt like the only real thing left.

The ocean in front of me was black except where the waves reflected the starlight. I couldn’t quite make out the horizon, just a vague line where the stars stopped and the void of the water began.

A plane passed by overhead, slow and silent except for the distant hum that took a few seconds to reach me. A tiny string of lights crossing from one edge of the sky to the other, carrying people I didn’t know to places I’ve never been, over water that had been here longer than the idea of places.

I started thinking about someone else—maybe in Japan, maybe in Hawaii, maybe on another beach just like this one—looking up at the same sky. Different sand, different languages, different lives. But the same moon. The same stars. The same oceans connected to the one in front of me, wrapping around the planet in one unbroken body of water that didn’t care about borders or time zones or the things people built on its edges.

The water I was looking at had been here before humans had language for it. Before we named the oceans or drew maps or built ships to cross them. It had been ice during the last glaciers. It had been rain that fell on the dinosaurs. It had evaporated and returned and evaporated again, cycling through forms we couldn’t imagine, holding everything that had ever lived and died in it or near it or because of it.

And I was just sitting there. Briefly aware. Briefly conscious. A visitor on something ancient and indifferent, watching planes carry people between places that wouldn’t exist in the way we know them a thousand years from now.

The wind picked up. The waves kept crashing. The stars kept burning, some of them already dead, their light still traveling toward me across distances I couldn’t comprehend.

I had been worried about something before I came out here. A job application, maybe. A conversation I’d had. Some decision I thought mattered. Sitting there, it felt small. Not unimportant—just small. A ripple on the surface of something so much larger and older than my entire life. Each and every life was just a brief flicker of awareness on a rock that had been spinning for billions of years and would keep spinning long after I was gone.

I could see cruise ships and cargo ships way out near the horizon, carrying people and goods between continents. They moved across the same water that had carried Viking longships, slave ships, explorers who thought they might fall off the edge of the world. The ocean didn’t distinguish. It held them all the same way it holds everything—completely, indifferently.

Somewhere out there, under the dark water, were shipwrecks from wars I’d only read about. Planes that went down during missions I’d never know the details of. Entire civilizations had risen and fallen on the coasts of this ocean, and the tide just continues coming in and going out. Twice a day, every day, for millions of years — long before the first human stood on a beach and tried to make sense of it all.

I thought about the ground I was sitting on. Sand that had been rock, then worn down by waves over vast scales of time. Somewhere under this beach were layers of older beaches, older oceans, older worlds. Fossils of things that lived and died before we had words to describe them.

And now we drive on it. Build hotels on it. Fight wars over it.

The beaches of Normandy, where thousands of soldiers died storming the shore, are now tourist destinations. People take their kids there, swim in the water, take photos at sunset. The sand still holds the memory in some chemical way we don’t talk about, but mostly it just holds the weight of families on vacation, playing in the surf like that war never happened.

In Vietnam, the jungles where soldiers fought and died and tried not to go insane are now backpacker destinations. Hostels and coffee shops built on ground soaked in history we’d rather forget but can’t fully escape because it’s still there, layered into the dirt.

You can visit the forest where Buddha sat and achieved enlightenment. You can see the small town where Jesus was born, and the lands where he was crucified. Where empires rose and fell and left behind ruins we now rope off and charge admission to see. The ground doesn’t care. It was here before the temples. It will be here after they’ve eroded into nothing.

We act like history is somewhere else. Something that happened in the past, in books, in documentaries. But it all happened here. Right here on this planet. This ground. This water. Every battle, every discovery, every moment of clarity or cruelty or love—it all took place on the same rock we’re standing on now, spinning through space at a speed we can’t feel, orbiting a star we take for granted because it’s always been there.

At least, it’s always been there for us.

Sitting there, I started to understand something I’d known intellectually but never really felt.

We’re not separate from this. We’re on it. Part of it. Temporarily conscious passengers on a rock that’s been spinning for four and a half billion years, most of that time without anyone around to notice or name it or argue about what it means.

Every person who’s ever lived—everyone who’s ever worried about anything, achieved anything, loved anyone, lost anyone—did it here. On this planet. There’s nowhere else it could have happened. No other stage. No other context. Just this one spinning ball of rock and water and atmosphere, somehow, against impossible odds, holding everything we’ve ever known or cared about.

The things we build feel permanent. Cities, monuments, systems. But they’re just arrangements of materials that were already here, briefly organized into shapes we recognize, waiting to return to the ground they came from. The Roman Empire felt permanent. Every empire does. And the earth keeps spinning.

I thought about how much time I’d spent worrying about things that wouldn’t matter in a year. Maybe not even in a week. Job applications. Social dynamics. Whether I was doing enough, being enough, moving in the right direction. All of it real, all of it important in the moment, but also—when I let myself see it from this distance—so small.

Not meaningless. Just small.

There’s a difference.

The ocean in front of me didn’t care about my plans. The stars overhead weren’t watching to see if I made something of myself. The earth would keep spinning whether I succeeded or failed at whatever I thought success or failure meant. And somehow that wasn’t depressing. It was freeing.

Because if everything is temporary—if even the ground we’re standing on is just a momentary arrangement of atoms that will eventually be something else—then maybe the point isn’t to leave a permanent mark.

Maybe the point is to just be here now. Briefly conscious. Briefly aware. Briefly able to sit on a beach and look out at the universe and feel the weight of time, lingering deeply in the moment instead of letting it quickly pass us by.

We get one chance. One brief window of awareness on a planet that’s been here “forever” and will be here long after we’re gone. Not to make a mark. Not to be remembered. Just to be here, aware and present, while we still can.

I sat there for a while longer. The waves kept crashing. The cool wind kept blowing. The stars continued burning, some of them already gone, their light just now reaching this beach on a planet they’d never know existed.

Eventually, I’d stand up, brush the sand off, and walk back to wherever I was staying. I would fall asleep, wake up, rejoin the world of deadlines and conversations and all the little things we call life.

But for now, I was just here. On the Carolina coast, in the darkness of night. Alone with the sound of an ocean that had been here long before the first human stood on a shore and wondered what it all meant.

The earth keeps spinning. The sun keeps burning…

For now.