Meeting new people at 40 is not easy. You have to be deliberate about it. It becomes a thing you actually think about and actively do, which is not how it worked when you were younger and people just showed up in your life because you were in the same classroom or the same office or the same friend group.

So when the idea of a personal card popped into my head, it seemed slightly funny, slightly absurd, but maybe also a way to stand out. I sat down with Claude and designed some simple ones. A line drawing of the Colorado mountains with my van parked at the foot of them and a small motorcycle on a hitch carrier on the back. The whole image is one continuous line that never lifts off the page from start to finish. My name and a phone number along one edge. My Instagram handle along another. That is the whole card.

I have been handing them out for a few months. At motorcycle rallies, at gas stations, at the occasional bar. The handing out is funny in itself. Guy in a van with personal cards, look at this guy. The joke is partly the point. But the cards have also done something I did not expect when I made them.

When someone takes one, they have to pick. Phone or Instagram. Text me or follow me. Two options on one piece of paper, and they choose one.

I have been watching what they choose.

I handed out the first batch at Peace Love and Vans, a small overland rally in Colorado. Over the next few days a few of those people started following me on Instagram. None of them texted. And I noticed I had a small feeling about that. If one of them had texted instead, it would have meant something. Some interest. Some intent. Some willingness to skip the soft option and pick the direct one. The channel was a signal in itself, and I was reading it whether I meant to or not.

A few weeks later I met someone at a gas station. We talked for maybe ten minutes while hiding from the rain on our motorcycles, the kind of unguarded conversation strangers fall into when neither of them is in a hurry. I gave them one of my cards. They pulled out their phone and had me scan a QR code that opened a Linktree. Instagram, TikTok, phone number, email, Facebook, a website, LinkedIn. The whole menu.

I had handed them one image, one continuous line, two ways in. They had handed me back everything, all at once, every door open. The card forces a choice. The Linktree refuses to make one. They told me later that the paper card had been a unique and memorable thing, and I think that was why — it had asked something of them that the screen never does.

I drove off with a phone full of handles and an unfamiliar pull to actually reach out.

Later that day I did.

I parked somewhere outside of town that evening and pulled up their Linktree. The menu was all there. Every option. And I noticed something I had not noticed before, which is that I had a preference. An actual ranking, somewhere underneath the level of thought.

Text felt too much. There is no feed, no platform, no buffer. Just two people and a thread. A text says I want to talk to you, right now, with no pretense about it. I was not ready to say that.

Instagram DM felt too little. DMs are where the world dumps everything it does not really mean. Shallow water. A message there can sit for days and that is normal. If I reached out on Instagram I was telling them this could wait. I did not want to tell them that.

Email was too formal, the channel you use when there is a document attached. LinkedIn would have turned the whole thing into a transaction, two professionals networking, which it was not. Facebook felt like reaching out from 2014. TikTok was not even a channel I would think to use to talk to a person.

I landed on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp felt right because it sits in the middle. Direct, but not as demanding as a text. Personal, but not as shallow as a DM. A message on WhatsApp says I am reaching out to you specifically, and also, no rush. Read it when you want. That was the register I wanted.

That is the version of the choice I would give you if you asked me. The reasonable one. The one I would say out loud.

But there is another reason I picked WhatsApp and I might as well say it.

WhatsApp tells you things. It tells you when they read your message. It tells you when they were last online. It tells you when they are typing a response. A text does not do that. A DM does not really do that either. Some part of me, when I was scrolling that Linktree, picked the channel that would let me check on them later without them knowing I was checking.

I sent the message and I closed the app. Some time later, I don’t remember how much, I opened it again. The two gray check marks under the message had not turned blue. I noticed I had noticed. I noticed that part of why I had picked WhatsApp was so I could notice.

I did not plan any of that when I picked the channel. I did not sit there at the gas station thinking I want to be able to surveil this person. But the thumb knew. The thumb picked the option that left a little window open for me to look through, and a few hours later I was looking through it.

I am not sure how I feel about that.

I have since learned there is a whole body of work on this. Researchers call it polymedia: once we have a wide menu of ways to reach each other, the choice of channel itself becomes part of the message. The medium was always the message; polymedia is what happens when you get to pick the medium every single time. They got there first and went deeper. But the small version of the idea had been sitting on a piece of cardstock in my hand, and I had felt it before I had a name for it.

I still have a stack of the cards in the van. I hand them out when the moment calls for it. Someone at a gas pump, someone at a campsite, someone I end up talking to at a bar in a town I am passing through. The mountains and the van and the little motorcycle on the back, the small absurdity of giving someone a card when you do not have a business — that part still works.

But I watch the moment a little differently now. The person takes the card and their eyes do a thing. They look at the image first. Then they find the phone number. Then they find the Instagram handle. Then they look back up at me. Somewhere in those few seconds a choice is forming, and I can almost see it happening. The choice was always happening, on every phone, in every pocket, every time anyone reached out to anyone. The cards just made it visible to me.

I am in free-fall. Not the panicked kind. The other kind, where you have already stopped flailing because flailing was not going to help, and you are just there, in the air, waiting to see if you hit the ground or keep going. I am sleeping in my van in my friend’s driveway. I have been on the road for almost a year. Most of what is left of the life I was living before is in a 5x5 storage unit, next to a Miata I owned before I owned anything else that mattered. I woke up this morning from a dream I do not remember, with only the feeling left behind. The feeling of not knowing what comes next. I keep telling myself three words in Russian. По мере поступления. As it comes.

The phrase is not mine. It is my father’s. He used it often when I was growing up in Saint Petersburg, Russia in the nineties.

He was not saying it as wisdom. It was just how he moved through the world, and the world he was moving through was not a stable one. I was 5 when the Soviet Union collapsed, so I don’t remember too much. The decade that followed was the kind of decade where you did not know if the people you knew were going to be alive next week. The currency could lose half its value before the end of a workday. There were people who got into cars in the morning and did not come home. My parents went to work and did their jobs and raised a child in the middle of that, and the way they did it was by not trying to know what came next. They could not afford to. Nobody could.

По мере поступления was not a philosophy in our house. It was a posture. The thing you said when somebody asked you how you were going to handle whatever the new thing was. As it comes. We will see.

I left Russia when I was seventeen. I have lived in the United States now for longer than I lived there. And the phrase came with me. It sat in my head for two and a half decades doing nothing in particular until last year, when everything in my life came apart at once and I suddenly needed it.

It turned out my dad had handed me a tool. He just did not know it, and neither did I.

Somewhere in the middle of all this I went and got two tattoos.

One on each inner bicep. Monospace font, so they read like text on a screen. On the right arm, по мере поступления. On the left arm, rm -rf.

The Russian one is my dad’s phrase. The other one is a Unix command. For anyone who has not spent their life around computers, rm -rf is the command you type to delete a directory and everything inside it without confirmation and without the possibility of recovery. No “are you sure.” No undo. The thing is just gone. It is also the command you run by accident on something important and then sit in your chair very still for a few seconds while you absorb what you have done.

The pairing is not subtle. One arm says burn it all down without looking back. The other arm says be patient and let it come. And the joke, if you want to call it that, is that both arms are right.

I have run rm -rf on my life before. I left Russia at seventeen. I left Minnesota years later. I quit a career and spent a year driving a camper around the country before I really understood why. And most recently I closed out a seventeen-year marriage and moved into a van. Each time, the move was the same. Look at the directory of the life I was living. Decide that the only honest thing was to delete it. Type the command. Hit enter. Watch it empty out. The tattoo is not about any one of those deletions. It is about the fact that I am the kind of person who does this. Who will probably do it again.

And then the other arm. Because once the deletion is done, you cannot rm -rf your way into a new life. You cannot force the new thing into existence by deleting harder. The only move left is the one my father had been making for forty years. По мере поступления. As it comes. You wait. You stay open. You let the new thing arrive on its own schedule.

Two things can be true at the same time. You can burn it all down and you can sit patiently with what is left. You can be the person who walks away and the person who waits. The tattoos do not tell you which arm to listen to in any given moment. They just remind you that both are available.

For the last year I have been reading my way through this.

It started in the first weeks of the separation with The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. When everything in your life is on fire, you do not need Marcus Aurelius. You need a book you can read in a parking lot with your brain mostly offline. Mel Robbins handed me a phrase short enough to remember when I could not remember much else. Let them. Let people judge you. Let people leave. Let your ex wait for a response. It was the toe in the water.

The next book was The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. The thing that stuck with me was the instruction to stay open. To not close down in response to pain. Which is the opposite of what someone in the middle of a divorce wants to do.

Then came Tolle. A New Earth first, The Power of Now second. The thing that landed hardest was something Tolle says about dreams. His version is that life itself is the dream and the work of waking up is what he means by being present. I sat with that one for a while, and somewhere in the sitting it morphed into something slightly different. If life is the dream, then memories are the dream too. Just an older layer of it. Which would explain why my old life had started to feel the way it did. The house. The dogs. The marriage. All of it is still there in my head but it has gone soft at the edges, the way a dream does in the morning when you try to hold onto it and it slips through your fingers. That used to scare me. After Tolle I started to wonder if that was just what letting go looks like. You do not have to forget anything. You just have to keep living forward until the old memories settle into being what they always were. Stories the mind tells itself.

A few weeks ago I was at a work offsite. The setup was not what I expected. Instead of the usual two days of strategy decks, the whole thing had been built around a theme about being okay with uncertainty, which felt almost suspiciously well-timed for where I was personally. The keynote was by a journalist and author Simone Stolzoff. His talk was about uncertainty tolerance. He was making the case that being able to sit in the unknown without collapsing into a forced certainty is something like a skill, and that it might be the most important skill for the decade we are heading into.

It landed harder than it should have for a keynote. Because by then I had been reading the same idea for a year, dressed up in different costumes. Mel Robbins had said it. Singer had said it. Tolle had said it across two books. And now a guy on a stage at my corporate offsite was saying it, and a room full of product people, coaches, and engineers was nodding along.

Somewhere in the middle of the talk he mentioned his first book, The Good Enough Job. The title rang a bell. I opened my Kindle library right there in the conference room and there it was. I had read it a few years back when it came out. I had just never connected the name of the author to the book. His new book is called How to Not Know. The title is the entire argument. I bought it on Audible right there at my seat before he was done talking.

This is not me telling you that Simone Stolzoff is the answer. He is one more voice in a long line of voices. The point is that the line keeps getting longer. Every time I look up, somebody else is pointing at the same thing.

Every one of them, in its different way, was saying what my father had been saying for forty years. По мере поступления. As it comes. You do not have to know. You just have to be here.

The future versions of me my mind kept auditioning at four in the morning were not the ones who were actually going to have to deal with whatever came next. The ones who would deal with it did not exist yet. I did not have to be them this morning. I just had to be the version of me that is present in the now.

The free-fall has not gone away.

I still wake up some mornings with the same feeling I started this piece with. The dream that does not let go. The mind running scenarios at four AM. The versions of me that all feel equally foreign. The Miata is still in storage. The 5x5 has not gotten any smaller.

What has changed is what I do with the feeling.

I used to think the free-fall was a problem to solve. That if I could just figure out the right next move, the falling would stop. Pick the city. Pick the partner. Pick the career. Pick the version of me that comes next, and commit, and the ground would show up under my feet. That was the trap. The ground does not show up because you picked correctly. The ground shows up when you stop demanding to know where it is.

The certainty is not on offer. Not for me in my van. Not for the reader of this piece, whoever you are, sitting wherever you are sitting. The honest thing to admit is that the old contract is broken. The one where if you did the right things in the right order the future would meet you halfway. That contract is not on offer. It probably never was.

What is on offer is something smaller and harder and possibly better. You learn to live well inside the question. You burn down what needs burning. You wait for what needs waiting. You stop trying to be the version of you that does not exist yet.

I am still in my van. The coffee is still in my hand. The same three Russian words are still in my head, the ones my father said without thinking when I was a child watching a country come apart around him. По мере поступления. As it comes.

Last year I went through the end of a 17-year marriage. During the divorce I had to read a lot of legal documents. Settlement drafts. Counteroffers. Agreements with footnotes referring to other footnotes. The kind of thing that’s technically in English but not really. My attorney is excellent and I trust her, but she has dozens of clients and a few hours to spend on mine in any given week. I have one client. Me. So I started running the documents through Claude before sending notes back to her.

What it caught wasn’t Hollywood stuff. It was the boring stuff that matters. A clause in one paragraph that contradicted a clause six pages later. A definition that quietly changed between the first draft and the second. Math in a footnote that was technically correct but assumed a scenario that disadvantaged me if things went a certain way. None of it sneaky. Every lawyer is looking out for their client any way they can within the legal options available. That’s literally the job. It just means if you’re on the other side of the table, you’d better be reading carefully.

I’d never have caught most of it on my own. Not because I’m not smart enough, but because I don’t read legal documents for a living, and I’d have been reading at midnight in a van after a full day of work. The AI doesn’t get tired. It also has no feelings about the outcome, which is its own kind of useful.

That used to be the kind of help that came with a second attorney. Or a friend who happened to be a lawyer and owed you a favor. Or being rich enough that your team handled all of it before it ever got to you.

Most people I know use AI a different way. They ask it for a recipe. They have it write an email they didn’t want to write. They get it to summarize a long article. Useful stuff. Forgettable stuff. The kind of thing that makes you think of it as a slightly better Google.

That’s how I used it too at first. Then something shifted, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk about it without sounding like one of those people. I think most of us are about to be one of those people whether we like it or not, so I’m going to try.

I didn’t notice the shift when it happened. I started feeding it real context about my life and asking it real questions. At some point it stopped feeling like a search engine and started feeling like a thinking tool. Not thinking for me. Thinking with me.

I’ve been using it this way for a while now. Not as a friend. Not as a therapist. Not even as a coach, really. More like doing research, except the subject is your own life.

I know how that sounds. Guy talks to AI about his feelings. Very 2026 of me.

But that’s not what this is. I don’t feel warm and fuzzy after these conversations. I feel like I just finished reading a good article. One that happened to be about me.

Here’s the thing I keep coming back to.

This kind of help has always existed. It just cost money. A lot of money. Or power.

Kings had councils of advisors. People whose entire job was to help the king think through decisions. Some told him what he wanted to hear. Some had their own agenda. The best ones pushed back and gave honest counsel. But only the king had access to that kind of thinking support.

Fast forward, and not much changed. Rich people have therapists and executive coaches and financial advisors and lawyers on retainer. They have mentors from their parents’ network. They have consultants they can call when they need to think through a big decision. Not because wealthy people are smarter — because they can afford to pay someone to sit with their specific situation and help them think it through.

Everyone else got Google. Generic articles. Reddit threads from strangers who don’t know your life. Maybe a friend who gives you advice based on what worked for them, which might have nothing to do with what would work for you.

What I’m describing is basically what a good advisor does. Takes everything they know about your situation, combines it with broader knowledge, and helps you see options and patterns you couldn’t see on your own. Except now that process costs twenty dollars a month and is available to anyone with a phone.

Here’s a smaller version. I’ve been thinking about buying a new motorcycle. Not in the abstract — I already own two bikes I like for different reasons. The new one would mean selling at least one of them, probably both. So I sat down and walked through it the way you’d walk through it with a friend who actually knew bikes. Here’s what I ride. Here’s where I ride. Here’s what each bike is good at and what it isn’t. Here’s what the new bike would give me. Here’s what I’d be giving up.

What came back wasn’t a recommendation. It was a sharper version of my own thinking. It pointed out that two of my reasons for the new bike were the same reason said two different ways. It noticed I kept describing one of my current bikes in past tense, like I’d already decided to sell it. It asked what I’d do if I could only own one bike for the rest of my life, and wouldn’t let me dodge the question.

That’s a small example. I’ve used it for bigger ones too. There was a pattern from my childhood that had been running my adult relationships, and I couldn’t see it. Friends couldn’t see it. Books got close, but they’re written for everyone. At some point I dumped years of context into a conversation and got back something organized that I hadn’t been able to organize on my own. It wasn’t new information, exactly — the pieces were all there. But seeing them laid out did something nothing else had done. I’m not putting the specifics on the internet. The point is the help was real, and it was specific to me.

I’ve used it for other things too. A career decision. Summer living arrangements with actual costs and actual tradeoffs for my actual situation. I used it to think through this post. It helped me organize the argument and find what I actually wanted to say. You’re reading the result of that right now.

None of this felt emotional or weird. It felt like googling myself.

The AI doesn’t know me. It has data about me because I gave it context over time. It pattern-matches against that data and gives me back something organized and useful. When it gets something wrong, I tell it and it adjusts. There’s no magic. It’s a tool that processes information, and I’m the one deciding what to do with the output. I still have real people in my life for the real stuff. This isn’t replacing any of that. It’s filling a gap nothing else filled before — the gap between having all this information and experience scattered in your head and actually being able to see it clearly.

It isn’t magic, though. I want to be honest about that.

This works for me because I show up with real questions and push back when it gets something wrong. And it does get things wrong. It makes assumptions. It fills in blanks with things that sound right but aren’t. You have to catch that. Nobody else is going to catch it for you. If you go in looking for confirmation of what you already believe, it will happily give you that. If you take the first answer without questioning it, you get surface-level stuff. If you don’t know what questions to ask, you won’t get much back.

It’s more like literacy than like a pill. When writing was invented, it didn’t automatically make everyone a philosopher. It created the possibility. People still had to learn how to use it. Same thing here. The tool exists now. Learning to use it well is the actual work.

We’re maybe two or three years into this, and most people still think of AI as the thing that writes weird emails and generates pictures with too many fingers. That’s like thinking the printing press is just a faster way to copy bibles.

I don’t know exactly where this goes. Nobody does. But I know what it has been for me. A way to take a bunch of scattered thinking and finally see it from the outside. The kind of help that used to belong to kings

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