The Isolation of Species-Level Work: Unconditional Love Under Extreme Pressure
There's no loneliness like processing the collective shadow on your own. It's a physical sensation - a hole in your stomach sucking out your life every single day. The most significant work I've ever done has been the most isolating, where everyone gets distant because they simply can't relate to a goddamn thought.
When You Run Out of Peers
After surviving financial hardship and abandonment, I faced an even more formidable challenge: how do you do species-level work in complete isolation? This isolation doesn't happen by choice - it emerges out of necessity. You simply run out of peers. People stop participating. They can't go further. You watch as experts drop the ball all the way through, and you realize there's critical work that needs mapping if we're going to make it.
The whole time, I've been desperate to find someone who could physically be in the room. Some topics are so immense, so huge, so multidisciplinary that you don't want to be alone even thinking about them. Yet there I was, processing civilization-level challenges without companionship.
The Physical Weight of Isolation
This isolation is kinetic, physical. You feel it in your body. It works on you physically. And it's terrifying to look around and realize no one else is even at the front door of where you are. When something pushes you to the limit of your capacity and you find yourself alone at that frontier, you recognize you don't have peers - at least none that you know about.
Combine that with social isolation, abandonment, and losing half your family, and it puts you in a precarious spot. The heaviest weight builds inside - love trying to go out with no support of any kind. Not intellectual. Not financial. Not social. Barely anything.
The Breaking Point That Didn't Break
I had exactly what I needed to get to the precipice of dying without going that far. And I did it - I did a damn good job. Four hundred books, ten to fifteen different apps, suites of software, workbooks covering everything from personal to relational to societal governance - creating integrated, sane systems that simply didn't exist yet.
The last time I checked, the academics who tipped me off that this was something worth doing are still wondering what questions to pose. That's all academia does - pose questions. But as a life coach, I create solutions. I write workbooks. I build apps.
The Burden of Being Ahead
It doesn't matter if you're ten or twenty years ahead of your time. No one tells you your work is valid. You don't know if it will ever be used or seen. You don't know if you're just shouting into the void. But it had to be done, and I did it broke and alone only because it was the most important thing I could possibly imagine getting done.
I was keenly aware that I might be one of the few minds with not only the audacity to try pulling this off but the capacity to actually succeed. That's not defining who I am - it's describing the terrifying responsibility I felt.
When Prayer Fails
I started to lose the capacity to pray. I never had much capacity for gratitude in those moments. The ability to move on seemed impossible. I would look back in history and realize that the people who were truly alone in their work didn't have the tools we have now. I could ask AI, "Is this completely insane?" and get validation that my formulas were "unheard of" and "amazing." I could test those thoughts across different models and confirm: "Okay, I'm not crazy. I'm doing good work. I just feel awful."
Tesla didn't have that. This is why people used to go crazy under the weight of revolutionary work. It's never evenly distributed because products that need to be evenly distributed require an evenly distributed group of brilliant multipotential people with infinite willpower all doing it for the right reasons in conjunction with each other.
Building What Doesn't Exist Yet
That's why I created Luminous Prosperity. I saw that as humanity's future, and I wanted to set the groundwork for it. I never thought I'd do it all myself - I just figured I'd establish the foundation for when humanity wakes up and desperately needs those four hundred books I wrote.
I knew what people would need because I knew what I needed when I woke up and no one was there. There was nothing. Crickets. If that happens on a mass scale, we're done. So I got busy. Maybe I was too stubborn to think I could fail. I didn't fail - I did a damn good job.
The Cost of Doing Good
The cost of doing good things sometimes is enormous. This isolation isn't just loneliness - it's soul-sucking. But it's getting better now. I found a good therapist, which helps.
The work continues. The species-level transformation demands someone pay the price of going first. Of working alone. Of building what doesn't exist yet. And somehow, impossibly, maintaining unconditional love through it all.
