Late January 2026

In late January 2026 (I know the exact date, but I’m withholding it for obvious reasons), I called my brother.

It was his birthday.

I don’t call my brother super often (I should. I’ve just been fucking slammed by everything else that’s been fucking happening lately) - but when I do, we usually talk somewhere between 1.5 hours to 2.5 hours.

He’s turned out to be a pretty good egg, as far as I can tell.

My brother is almost exactly 20 years younger than I am.

We belong to very different generations.

When I was talking to him on his birthday, he asked how the men’s mental health community thing that I was desperately trying to run was going.

I talked a bit about how the men in the community are good eggs also (by and large), but creating the content I need to really help in the exact ways that I want to help has been an enormous undertaking and I felt utterly buried underneath it all.

He asked, “Why don’t you just use AI to write your content??”

…because he is so incredibly Gen-Z.

…and I am so incredibly older-Millennial.

And also.

I’ve been writing since I was 9 years old.

I am both hyper-specific about how I want things written - down to the exact punctuation marks and word-placement - and egregiously elitist about it.

“Over my dead fucking body,” I told him.