We’re all thoroughly sick of this stupid war and the even more stupid “peace talks”, but something puzzles me about journalists - both American and international. I searched and searched to see if anyone had asked Trump (or one of his buffoons or lackeys), what to me, is the most obvious question.

That question is: “If Iran has been completely militarily defeated, as you have repeatedly and emphatically claimed, why do the armed forces of the United States not simply occupy the territory bordering the Strait of Hormuz and thus immediately open the strait to traffic?”

Now, I’m not so naive as to imagine that anyone in that clown car cavalcade of an administration would actually answer the question - truthfully or even at all - but the question is still worth asking, and worth asking repeatedly.

Of course anyone sentient and not in the MAGA cult already knows the answer: because Iran has not, in fact, been entirely defeated. Its manufacturing capabilities and infrastructure have been very badly damaged and its conventional military assets have been largely destroyed (although even that is a gross overstatement in some vitally important instances), but it is still fighting.

Iran has fallen back to what military experts call “asymmetric warfare”. Instead of directly opposing the US military with conventional weapons, they are using smaller and faster vessels, more mobile weapons systems, even old-school Soviet-era shoulder-launched SAMs to disrupt and damage America’s fleet and airforces without directly confronting them. This is known, in the lingo, as asymmetric area denial, and it is extremely effective.

The USA’s armed forces are conventional - they are designed to fight other armies and navies that stay on the battlefield and fight back. They are simply not designed or suited to fighting this kind of foe. A case in point is the fact that the US is shooting down cheap Iranian drones (costing less than $50,000) with THAAD and Patriot missiles that cost $12 million and $4 million each, respectively. (Yes, those are the actual costs per shot)

This should not be a surprise to the USA. It has just fought two wars, both more than 20 years long, in which asymmetric warfare was predominant. This is doubly true in Afghanistan, where the Americans themselves armed the mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979 - 1989) in order to help them to defeat the invading USSR. The Afghans, who have been masters of asymmetric warfare for literal centuries, used these weapons to defeat a superpower.

A large portion of these same mujahideen - now known as the Taliban - then took the entire country over and imposed Shariah law by force. And so, in 2001, when the USA itself invaded Afghanistan after the attack on the World Trade Center (sic) in New York, they were fighting against a force they themselves had armed. And, after 20 years, what was the final outcome?

The simple reality is that, during the post-war era (now spanning more than 80 years), the USA has never managed to achieve true regime change by bombing alone. They tried it in the Korean War, they tried it in Vietnam (dropping nearly 8 million tons of bombs), and they even tried a variation of it in the Iraq War (“Shock and Awe”), where invading troops were meant to finish off the effectively toppled regime within days.

“But what about Venezuela” I hear you cry. Poor battered and starving Venezuela is just the exception that proves the rule - Trump did not topple that regime, he simply replaced its leader with a more pliable goon. Calling that regime change is fake news, as Trump himself would say.

The only way to achieve regime change is to invade with large numbers of ground troops. This is not a theory or a guess - this is a fact bourne out by a century of modern wars. Even the Allies in World War 2 did not defeat Germany through bombing - if anything it made the Germans fight harder.

Military experts estimate that forcing regime change in Iran would require around 1 million troops and the better part of a decade. That would result in tens of thousands of US casualties (if they’re lucky) and several trillion more dollars wasted. This is why the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

So, why aren’t journalists asking Trump some variation of this simple question: “If we’ve won the war and destroyed their military, why isn’t the strait already open?” It is a bit of a “gotcha” question, I know, so perhaps this is about access but I think too many journalists assume that the public understands the context of the war, and its subtle mechanics. They need to clarify this reality, not play along with the administration by asking questions predicated on a fact that they have not forced the administration to acknowledge.

Look, nothing will break through to the MAGA crowd, even if a journalist were to get a halfway honest answer to that question from the likes of Marco Rubio. But ordinary Americans with no particular affiliation are confused and frustrated by this war. They want to know how the USA has “won” this war and yet cannot call the shots. It’s the responsibility of the press to spell this out to them by forcing the administration to explain this glaring contradiction in simple terms. At the very least they must repeatedly attempt to force an answer out of them.

Then again, maybe someone has asked and I just couldn’t find it. I don’t think so, but please do correct me if I’m wrong. Even if that is the case, I would respectfully submit that this question needs to be asked over and over until we actually get the obvious answer, or at least some grudging facsimile. It really does matter in this case.

EDIT: An earlier version referenced the first Gulf War as an example of attempting regime change by bombing, but that’s broadly inaccurate even if the war itself had some similar characteristics (i.e. they expected to win mostly by bombing but boots on the ground did the real work).

I have come to fatherhood late, at an age when wisdom is traditionally supposed to emerge and the self should be well settled. That is not the case for me. More often than not, I am rendered dumb with the ache of wanting to be more, to be better, to lift my daughters over the snares that have held me back. People tell you that children change everything, and you roll your eyes and scoff and snark, but when a piece of you is out in the world, out of sight and vulnerable to fate, every abstract calculation you’ve ever made means precisely squat.

One of my flaws, which is also paradoxically one of my strengths, is sentimentality. The flawed aspect is the tendency to wallow in strong feelings, particularly sadness. The strength is in the depth of feeling I can access when I feel strong enough to reach for it. When each of my daughters was born, this primordial well began to bubble much closer to the surface.

I know I’m just describing a variation of what billions of other fathers experience when children change their lives forever, but for me, for us, it is something so deeply elemental that I cannot help trying to knit it into words. In a world where we are increasingly cut off from the reality of our corporeal existence, our children can become a focal point for everything that matters, for every choice we make.

The most surprising aspect of fatherhood, for me, has been the degree to which all children are now more real to me - more relevant and concrete. In the second season of Breaking Bad, the episode titled “Peekaboo” revolves around Jesse Pinkman waiting for two meth heads to return to their pigsty of a house so that he can confront them over some stolen drugs. As he sits nervously on the couch, a small boy, perhaps 5 years old, appears from another room in the house. He turns on the TV and tells Jesse he is “hungwy”.

Now, I’m well aware that this is blatant heartstring-pulling, and of a piece with that grand and tragic parable of man’s selfish nature, but the first time I watched that scene it was merely affecting. The second time I watched it, not long after the birth of my first daughter, it was physically painful. That thin, filthy little boy was suddenly real to me in a way he had not been before, and his plight felt unbearably sad.

Children, paradoxically, make you aware of your own mortality. This awareness was amplified greatly by the loss of a close friend just after my eldest daughter’s second birthday. This has spurred me to make healthy and positive changes in my life, but it is also a burden you can never put down. I do not resent its weight; in fact, I welcome it as indivisible from purpose and meaning, but weight it is.

I am a fearful person, and often hew to loss avoidance at the expense of opportunity. I started my own business, now entering its second successful decade, so I must admit that I’m not entirely the miserable mollusc I sometimes feel myself to be. I also overcame addiction and started again at age 36, with very little to my name. But there is no way to be truly at peace when the creature that you helped to make, the creature that you love in a way that utterly transcends your selfish nature, is out there exposed to the pitiless universe.

This is waxing melodramatic, I know, but I must persist. I remember, more than a decade ago, reading a tweet to the effect that having children should be a prerequisite for being allowed to vote. While I disagree with that on principle, both then and now, I now grasp its emotional and ethical weight. The childless are not wrong, and do not deserve to be second-class citizens, but they do not have the same stake in the future that we have.

I have chosen my burdens, and I am glad of them. They brought a purpose and meaning to my life that I did not know was lacking. In this post-post-modern, transhumanist age, that kind of admission elicits guffaws of scorn from the denizens of Bluesky. How pathetic, how embarrassing, how shameful to admit that you need children to give you a reason to live. And yet they do.

Given my place in the world - steady, middle-class, nestled in suburban Cape Town and surrounded by a loving extended family - all of this neurotic wallowing is a bit silly. Alas, I cannot help it. As a student of history (my humble brag is that I’ve listened to all 136 hours of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), I know that the tides of that history can quickly sweep everything away and drown you in the sheer brute reality of change.

And so I grapple with that. I feel it, I see it. I know it may not happen; I may continue on this incredibly lucky streak. I do not dwell upon it every hour of every day, but it is always there. Haruki Murakami wrote that “everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come”. This beautifully encapsulates both the longing and the dread that I feel.

They’re beautiful, my girls, inside and out. Like their mother, they have a kindness of spirit baked into their very bones. They give me so much joy. I work from home, and so I am treated, often daily, to tiny slivers of peak experience. Ruby playing peekaboo for the first time, Charlie dancing like Elaine from Seinfeld. Charlie Nose and Ruby Bear. My blood, my bone, the very best of me. No burden is so heavy as to counterbalance even a tenth of that joy.

Part of my reason for starting this substack is to finally be fully honest in my writing. I’ve always been good at it, but in most cases remote, mannered, abstracted. There’s still room for that kind of writing in my life. It has its place, its value, its utility. But now, for better or for worse, I am resolved to let the real stuff out. When I write something, particularly a poem, and it makes me cry, it’s usually a sign that it’s worth other people reading it. Or it’s just self-indulgent, but who cares, and fuck it. I’m tired of being afraid. And so, with your kind indulgence, Dear Reader, here it is.

THERE BE DRAGONS

You are one of billions, child,
a legion, locusts, some say a plague,
our weight of wanting crushing all,
and yet you are my miracle, entire.

We are too many, we are too much,
we grind whole mountains into dust.
How can you stand against this tide?
And yet you do, on sturdy little legs.

We are all lost, we are all afraid,
yet when your eyes beam gamma joy,
thew and marrow feel the ache
of deepest time, of walkabout.

I dream sometimes of war,
of slogging through the frozen mud,
of carrying you upon my back,
of trading limb or life for one more chance

How terrible it is to love,
to bet life on a lonely, wandering rock,
to hope, an ember in a shaking hand,
to hold my breath, to never rest again.

I am so flawed, my little one,
so tangled up in fear.
I cannot sing the ancient songs,
but speak of clan, of oath, of place

And so I scoop you up,
warm as blood,
wriggling like a pup,
your every part a part of mine,
and know that, finally,
I am home.

The amount of money that both individual users and businesses pay for AI services is going to increase dramatically over the next six to eighteen months. The only variables, as far as I can see, are how much more we will pay, and how quickly it will happen.

There are three reasons for this:

1. Demand is rapidly outstripping supply

2. Infrastructure cannot possibly keep pace

3. AI is now a utility, not a luxury

I’ll delve into each of these factors below, but it’s worth noting that we can already see signs of this happening. Anthropic has already begun tightening usage limits for its hugely popular Claude service and most of the free AI options have inexorably shrunk the number of prompts allowed per day. We may see ad-supported options soon, but paying with your personal data is still paying.

Demand growth is geometric

Any usage graph you care to look at shows that demand for AI services is increasing geometrically – in other words the rate at which it’s increasing is itself growing more every day. This produces the classic exponential graphs that we all came to love during COVID.

An important detail here is that it’s not just human users that are driving this demand. In fact, we are likely to be a relatively small proportion of total usage. Very large businesses have already integrated AI into time-intensive back-office processes. This can result in a single large company sending millions of prompts to an AI provider every week (or even every day). Most of these prompts are far more focussed and parsimonious than a query by a human, but there are so many more of them that they add up quickly.

As the AI models keep improving (even if those improvements are slow) their utility grows. And so more and more businesses and people decide to commit money and time to said services. There is a cottage industry of articles proclaiming that AI is overblown and overhyped and isn’t making businesses any more profitable (I should know, I’ve written some of them) but that misses the narrower picture. A growing number of superusers are wiring their entire lives and every professional process into AI. These superusers alone are enough to make demand way outstrip supply, and that’s before we take into account the millions of laggards and sceptics being convinced to try AI every week.

So, TL;DR = big number go up

Supply growth is 🐌

As with every other machine ever created, AI requires resources in order to operate. In this case that means a lot of very expensive, very scarce and very inefficient computer chips, but it also means a lot of all of the things needed to run said chips: giant buildings to house the boxes that hold the chips, massive air conditioners to cool them down so they don’t literally burst into flames, staggering quantities of electricity to feed the hungry chips and air conditioners etc etc. We are now seeing shortages developing in raw copper, since it is a primary input for vital components such as high-voltage electrical transformers and high current electrical cabling.

Anyone who has not been in a coma for the past three years has read about plans to spend literally trillions (with a T) of dollars on building more of the resources mentioned above. Unfortunately the laws of both physics and municipal zoning committees are impervious to gods and men. You cannot build an AI data centre in under 18 months, and that is under absolutely ideal conditions. In many cases it will take more like five years, and the bigger the data centre, the longer it will take.

The AI services are already taking drastic steps to secure whatever spare capacity is available. OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, convinced Microsoft (one of its largest early investors) to allow it to begin renting spare capacity from hated rivals like Amazon and Google. Rumours abound of Amazon, the market leader in cloud computing capacity, gently but firmly shoving customers off their more marginal services in order to repurpose capacity to satisfy the gaping maw of demand.

What this means in practice is that, while demand is increasing exponentially, supply is barely increasing at a linear rate. In other words the rate at which supply is growing is not increasing. Supply is still being added every week, but that is just not quick enough. This will change in the next two years or so, because the hyperscalers are throwing so much cash at the problem that the throughput will begin to increase dramatically, but two years is a long time during a tech boom.

TL;DR = smol number is 🐌

AI is now a utility for a billion people

My own business and my daily tasks and concerns have changed because of AI. The technology has been an incredible force multiplier for me and my employees. We are doing things we’ve never been able to do or never been able to afford. If you were to switch off all AI services, my business would suffer. It would not fail, but it would profoundly affect our capacity and our productivity.

I am not at all unusual. I’d be surprised if a single person reading this hasn’t had some aspect of their lives substantially altered by AI. These services have gone from curiosities to toys to useful tools to vital components of life in a matter of 36 months. People joke that WiFi is the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but AI is now more like a utility than any other online service. We can do our jobs without Instagram, but take away our AI agents and we are back to square one, doing manual tasks like animals.

TL;DR = we are all addicted so we are fucked, lol

Okay Adam Smith, what now?

So we have a classic supply and demand situation here. The supply of AI services is increasing relatively slowly compared to the demand for those services. In that case the only practical remedy is to charge more for those services. That means the $30 a month package that has suited you so well for the past year or two may soon be more like $60. The services may choose the shrinkflation approach – reducing usage limits on your existing deal to below what you need – but the result is the same.

This pain will be quadrupled for businesses that have wired everything into AI engines. The sunk cost of that wiring will tend to keep businesses paying eye-watering rates in order to not have to go back to caveman times when accounting had to be done via a web interface 🤮

Even if more virtuous companies like Anthropic go out of their way not to price gouge, desperate customers will approach them and offer to pay a premium for preferential access and capacity. The most efficient way to resolve mismatches between supply and demand is price. This is so axiomatic as to be baked into our very DNA. So, prices will go up. They must.

The predictable reaction to all of this will be shrieks of outrage from the populace at large. It will look very like extortion, but people will keep paying. The damned tools are too useful to just throw away. Some purists and contrarians will swear off all AI tools, but for most mere mortals it’s going to be yet another rent extracted by the vile tech barons.

This crunch won’t last for very long. By 2030 or 2031 so much capacity will be coming online every week that a glut is more likely than a shortage. In the meantime, though, AI adoption will definitely slow. The companies currently still in wait-and-see mode will pat themselves on the back for not adopting too early, and will revel in the schadenfreude of watching their hated rivals snivelling about AI costs in their quarterly earnings. I’m sure we are all very sorry for their terrible losses.

Spare a thought as well for the shareholders of the biggest AI companies. Incinerating a trillion dollars of cash in less than five years is guaranteed to destroy some value. The bet is that said loss will be outweighed by the gains of, for example, forming their own world governments and reintroducing slavery (on a class rather than race basis, of course – this isn’t 1860!)

Whatever happens, it will be fun to watch. And of course I may be totally wrong and all five of you readers can return to this magnum opus to mock me roundly. To that I say, y tu mamá también 😤

P.S. I asked Claude to make me a lighthearted supply and demand curve to illustrate my point and, shame, it tried so hard, poor dear.

I am often driven to write by strong emotions - particularly grief and loss - and so I wrote a poem that I shared with his sister and our group of friends. I read it at his funeral, though I was so overwhelmed with tears that most of the attendees made sense of perhaps half of it.

I’ve agonised about publishing this. It’s profoundly private and I know I am indulging my ego by doing so. It’s also a poem, the form of writing most calculated to produce either cringing second-hand embarrassment or eye-rolling scorn. But it’s also one of the best things I’ve ever written, one of the most deeply felt and emotionally honest. So, here it is.

Dungeon Master

You did it properly, I hear,
painless, peaceful, a perfectionist to the last
You did things properly, I know,
You cared about the way things fit,
about the way things were,
about the way the world should be

Your were so smart, my friend
So full of lore, of arcane wonders,
of magical knowledge, and what it could unlock,
a master key to the final chest

You weren’t so very easy, I fear
Spiky, thin-skinned, stubborn as a stump
You took the world so personally
You held your ground, you said your piece,
You lived your principles and damn their eyes

You were so hella fun, my dude
Playing verbal tennis while in lane,
quoting rap lyrics and movie lines,
hitting ults and taking names,
connected, present, in our zone

You were a man apart, Herr J***
Quite unlike anyone I have ever known
You were yourself and fuck the noise
You occupied a space shaped just like you
A space in all our lives

You were so very loved, our Pretch
You were so very good at heart
You made our world a better place
You were the DM to our band of dorks
Now who will roll the dice?

Since his death I have struggled with all the usual regrets and longings of the bereaved. We were close, and I loved him unreservedly, but did I show him that enough? The last interaction I had with him was two days before he did it. I ignored a direct message in Discord, too wrapped up in whatever I was playing at the time. Too buried in my own petty shit and my own preference for avoidance over connection. That was my last chance, and I blew it.

The psychology here is painfully obvious. I’m mourning my own first contact with mortality as much as the loss of my friend. Since his death, though not entirely because of it, the Discord server that a half of dozen of our closest friends used to connect while playing co-op games has fallen mostly silent.

And so a place I had in the world, a place of comfort and connection, where I could be truly myself without the necessary masks and modes of adulthood, that place is largely gone. That place had endured for nearly a decade of my life, through some of my hardest times.

In the midst of a bad first marriage I neglected and eventually lost connection with my closest friends - the same half a dozen guys who peopled that server. After of nearly a decade of neglect, I was able to rejoin that group and was reminded of how incredibly lucky I have been in meeting all of them so early in life.

For me, who moved to Cape Town and who has been remiss in making new friends, Discord was a daily refuge and a constant comfort. A crutch, but also a place of love and fellowship and intimacy. It connected me to my favourite people in the world, the people who know all the best and worst things about me, and still love me without question.

And so, the love of my lost friend and the deepest bonds of brotherhood are tied up inextricably in that virtual space. Now those empty channels gape like rooms in an abandoned house, slowly filling with the sands of the Namib.

And yet, contrary to my sentimental wallowing, some of us have begun to meet intermittently on Sunday to play a cute little co-op and enjoy each other’s company. One of those guys, my very best friend in the world, was toying with an AI-powered music generator and did me the honour of using my words in his first attempt.

I find the result quite beautiful, although I am not exactly impartial. It was this song that made me decide, at last, to publish all of this. (Love you, Ga, you are truly the brother I never had)

In a recent interview Toni Morison advised writers “Don’t write about your little life”. She was talking specifically about fiction, but her advice holds for memoirs by the unremarkable. But now I feel I no longer have a choice. I need to start somewhere, and it seems like confessional is working for now.

At least it’s getting me to write rather than crouching in my burrow, watching the years tick by and wondering if I ever could, or ever would. I have a habit of looking up the age of writers I admire at the time they published their first work. Is it too late? Probably. Am I no good in any case? Or at least not good enough to rise above the hundred million other writers striving to be read? Perhaps, most likely, yes.

And yet, and yet, here I am. If the loss of my brother-in-arms stirs me, at long last, to simply write, and to write for once about what is real and solid, then perhaps it will be one good thing. And if, out there, on the pitiless stretches of the internet, even one stranger finds this screed and feels the touch of love and loss, then I have succeeded in a way that I have never done before. I think he would be proud of me. I hope, I hope, I hope.

*I decided to keep his last name confidential, out of respect for his family.

Look at those haircuts! Nerds for days!

Ok, Wanita is the exception, but the rest of these okes - dork central. Dudes with haircuts that terrible are not out to impress anyone. If the person managing my pension has a faux-hawk or more gel in his hair than sense in his head, I’m going to be nervous. I want someone focussed on managing my money, not impressing the other buggers at the Baron.

I’m only half joking here. So much of the world’s money is managed by relentless egotists who play poker with other people’s savings. So many of these so called money managers chase quarterly returns and put their bonus before all else. The guys at Allan Gray can be a bit stodgy, but they always deliver in the long run.

My investment style is deeply, deeply uncool. Buy early, hold long. No fads, no gold, no junk bonds, no private equity leveraged buy outs or collateralised debt obligations. No derivatives at all in fact.

I’m also a natural bear and an incorrigible contrarian. As I’ve gotten older I’ve become more risk averse as well. I’m looking for long term value, not sexy short term froth.

And that’s why this kind of analysis from Sandy McGregor (the dude is called SANDY for shit’s sake!) is such a turn on for me:

> It is no coincidence that high interest rates in the 1980s generated growth by eliminating an inefficient allocation of resources, whereas the experiment of zero rates has promoted inefficiency and has failed to generate robust growth. Since 2012 Japan has embarked on the most aggressive campaign of monetary easing ever attempted - with remarkably little effect on its real economy.

So roll on kak haircuts, I say. And cheers to Rob Dower and his band of sober Susans. The capital cowboys can masturbate with someone else’s life savings - mine are out of their reach.

At Christmas a year or two ago, an older member of my extended family noticed my belly had begun to gently stretch the buttons on my shirt. “You’re becoming corpulent!” he said. I nodded, mortified. “Smaller portions,” he intoned firmly, as if eating less was the easiest task in the world. He’s an unfailingly kind person, and so I don’t hold it against him. But the moment illustrates the way many people struggle to understand why we don’t all just pull ourselves together rather than giving into gluttony.

Most of us spend our lives chasing ideals. My bête noire is self discipline – the idea that if only I was less flaky and fearful, less scatterbrained, less weak-willed, I would be able to live up to my own expectations. I would feel comfortable, serene, like I belong in the room. We’ve all experienced being out of our depth. For me that feeling can fester for weeks and months at a time, even in domains where I am an acknowledged expert.

Over three decades of adulthood I’ve developed coping mechanisms that keep me from wallowing in self pity or freezing up in existential terror (well, most days at least). I’m exceptionally lucky in that I can afford both psychological and psychiatric care, as well as medications that help a great deal. Above all I have a supportive spouse and a close-knit, loving family.

There are few words more annoying than “neurodivergent”, but unfortunately this ugly neologism applies to me. My brain has trouble regulating neurotransmitters in general and dopamine in particular. When the molecule responsible for signalling rewards is faulty, “just stopping” can be an emotional struggle.

So now, when it comes to eating, I’m cheating. Instead of losing weight the morally correct way, I am taking the magic pills. The thing is, I am out of time. I have two daughters under six and I want to be present when they reach whatever traditional milestones remain by 2047 – at which point I will be 69 years old. There are no guarantees, but a BMI over 30 and a waist larger than 102 cm will make living past 70 a dicey prospect.

Said magic pills are working, but also have an unexpected positive side-effect: I understand what “normal” feels like for the first time in my life.

My little family eats takeaways on Friday nights. In the past, I’d have no trouble polishing off a pizza on my own and would be hard pressed to stop halfway, regardless of my best intentions. But since I started the pills, I can stop at half a pizza without a moment’s mental discomfort. My stomach’s warning that it is full is no longer swamped by the urge to soothe myself.

The thing is, no matter how valid my justifications, the niggling sense that I am taking a dishonourable short cut sticks with me. I put it down, at least in part, to the strong northern European ethos embedded in my culture and my genes. One hundred thousand years of breeding has selected for traits that eschew “cheating” in favour of doing things properly, and that hold up forbearance as one of the primary virtues.

I know I am responsible for my weight. The problem is the remedy I used to choose – to just be less flawed. I persisted for decades in imagining that I would eventually become someone else, someone stronger, someone better.

And I’m certain there are other approaches that would yield the same results over time. Meditation springs to mind, as does intensive therapy. If feelings make me overeat, probably a good idea to tackle the feelings, yes? By taking this sinful short cut, I am neglecting the straight and narrow path that truly cures me. Better Alistair is right around that next corner – this time for real.

Right now though, regardless of whether I’m cheating or not, being able to just stop doing something pleasurable halfway through feels like a revelation. As I understand it, this is how people without dopamine enthusiasm live every day of their lives. In all my years of taking psychiatric medication, I have never encountered this feeling before. It feels like a superpower.

I won’t name the medication I’m on, not because I’m ashamed, but because it feels ethically icky for me to be promoting a drug, even unintentionally. I will say that it’s not a GLP-1 agonist drug like Ozempic. Instead it acts on the brain’s dopaminergic systems to blunt the intensity of the reward signals triggered by eating. That gives the body a chance to signal satiety earlier and more urgently. It’s a neat trick – and it is working extremely well in my case.

I have decided I am secondary in this equation. I’ve had my shot at making a dent in the world and I am now living primarily for my daughters. I have enjoyed (and regretted) long stretches of selfishness in my life. Thankfully nature has won out over self regard. My own happiness still matters, of course; I’m not a martyr to parenthood. But if I have to do things I find uncomfortable or embarrassing to make my girls’ lives better, I’m going to do them, without hesitation. As we say in Narcotics Anonymous, I have not seen the light, I have felt the heat.

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