Four years ago, I disappeared.

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Four years ago, I disappeared.

I had been writing about how language was being weaponized to manipulate us. The work felt urgent then, necessary. I would sit at my desk in the early morning hours, watching the sunrise over the alpine mountains of East Vancouver, convinced I was documenting something important about the fracturing of our shared reality.

Then I went quiet.

Not because the crisis had passed, but because I realized I was contributing to the cacophony: critiquing systems I didn't fully understand, diagnosing diseases I'd never tried to cure, building nothing while deepening the divide.

I was angry, sad, and felt powerless against the forces of division that seemed omnipresent and yet intangible. I could describe them. I could fantasize about defeating them.

Or I could decline the invitation altogether and watch the adolescent harbor seals soak up the sun off the seawall and the bald eagles nesting on the spire of the arena next door.

I chose the latter.

Seal Boy (I know, not very creative) and Larry and Linda (the eagles) were ambivalent to my gaze, but they became my inspiration, my indulgence, my reason for getting up with the sun when no other remained.

And even with their playful disregard for the sparrows and crows that taunted them, and Seal Boy's "belly-up" approach to the Aquabus, I continued my struggle in stony silence to reconcile my own high standards and aggrandizing self-conception with this seemingly small, lazy, meaningless career pivot.

I was building an alcohol brand.

Shrug.

For the first time in my life, I was dedicating my time to something divorced from impact.

After years of fighting for causes, building platforms, creating movements, here I was hawking hooch.

For a "true believer," I sure wasn't "doing the work." This, I reassured myself, would be my last business venture.

We all go through moments of searching for meaning.

Some find it in parenthood.

Others find it in our work.

In the end, it was that tired cliché that brought an end to my malaise.

I found what I was looking for only when I stopped looking.

It was through, of all things, a branding experiment, something I'd done with clients a dozen times, from the smallest early-stage startups to the biggest multinational organizations, religions, and political candidates… and yet I'd never thought to apply the technique to myself.

What I’d come to believe was an eclectic or slapdash, if portrayed kindly, career trajectory revealed a common thread. I was always trying to bridge the gap between my introverted loneliness and my need for connection, my awkward nerdiness and my desire to belong, my artistic ambitions and my commercial instincts. A childhood shadowed by loss had shaped an adulthood spent searching, sometimes desperately, often clumsily, for the communities that could make me whole.

From punk rock to politics, from dive bars to synagogues, I'd been building the same thing over and over and over: spaces where regulars could become friends, where strangers could become lovers, where the distance between souls could disappear, sometimes for a night, or for eternity.

I hadn't in fact abandoned impact. I'd been healing my longing for connection by building my own communities all along.

This natural shortcoming and childhood circumstances, by luck or by fate, had come packaged alongside an insatiable desire to build. To build. To build.

A solution to a problem only just now being considered. A knack for building things that bring people together.

My generation now struggles with this. That wasn’t always the case.

We've watched our own gathering places disappear. Dive bars priced out by development, restaurants strangled by permits, nightclubs closed for noise complaints from luxury condos that go uninhabited and were built after the music had already started. We've seen what happens when the places that taught us how to be human together vanish one by one.

We've forgotten what it feels like to lose yourself on a dance floor full of strangers, to have conversations that would never happen in daylight, to discover parts of yourself that only emerge when the lights are dim and the music is loud and everyone around you is searching for the same indefinable something.

And we've allowed the very substances that have served as social lubricants since the dawn of civilization to be demonized. Spirits, which for centuries helped strangers become friends and communities crystallize around shared ritual, are now treated as moral failings rather than sacred tools for connection. Which was exactly why I had felt ashamed of what I was building. No more.

The generation coming of age now faces something far more urgent. They're inheriting a world where the infrastructure for human connection has been systematically dismantled. They think community happens in Discord servers and group chats. They believe connection means finding your exact tribe online, surrounded by people who think and look and vote exactly like you do. Like-minded individuals, they say. Through no fault of their own, they've never had the chance to learn the sacred art of sharing space with people who disagree with them, of finding common ground over shared drinks and imperfect conversations.

More than four years ago, I named this newsletter Solitary American without even knowing why. The words just felt right, the way certain truths do before you understand them. Now I see it clearly: we've become a nation of solitary individuals, cut off from the very spaces and rituals that once made us whole.

But solitude doesn't have to be permanent. Isolation isn't inevitable.

This is why I'm writing again. Not to add to the noise, but to help rebuild what we've lost. To explore how policy shapes community, how regulation either enables or destroys the places where strangers become friends. To understand what it means to design a society that brings people together instead of driving them apart.

The infrastructure of human connection is broken. But infrastructure can be rebuilt.

And that's exactly what we're going to do.