I'm People
Yes, That's My Entire Platform
Author’s Note
This piece isn’t polished. That’s intentional. In service of the emotional integrity of what I’m trying to say, I made a deliberate choice to leave my raw thoughts largely intact. What you’ll find here is talk-to-text, lightly edited for grammar and legibility, structurally organized so it holds together as writing. Everything else is exactly as it came out of me. The stumbles, where the sentence isn’t elegant, those are not failures of craft. They are the craft. They are what it sounds like when someone is telling you something true they’ve been carrying for a very long time.
I’ve also included a recording of me speaking this aloud. I’d encourage you to listen to it, not because the words are different, they aren’t, but because a voice carries things text cannot. You will hear exhaustion in it, grief, and places where something tightens I can’t fully name, but my body knows exactly how to locate it. The emotion is the point of this piece. The platform, the values, the manifesto, those are the container holding the emotion. Read it, or listen to it, either way, feel it.
This is not an attack on systems. It is a remembrance, for humanity, of where we’ve come from and what we’ve quietly surrendered to get here.
This is not a slogan for a sign or a stamp beside a signature.
This is my emotional exhaustion, expressed exactly as my empathy and my humanity demand it. If you’ve ever felt this ache and couldn’t find the words for it, I wrote this for you.
— Jeff
There was never a single moment. Not an election. Not a sermon. Not a board meeting where I finally snapped. It built the way grief builds — quietly, one small accumulation at a time, until the weight of it became something I couldn’t stand up straight inside anymore. I kept walking into different rooms and finding the same thing. Churches. Corporations. Political conversations at dinner tables. Friendships dissolving under pressure neither person wanted to name. Different rooms. Same pattern.
The pattern is this: systems eat people.
Not always with cruelty. Sometimes with genuine sorrow on the part of the people feeding them. That almost makes it worse. When you can see that someone knows what they’re doing and does it anyway because the alternative feels unsurvivable — the grief you feel is not clean. It doesn’t have a target. It just sits in your chest and asks you what you’re going to do with it.
I have spent most of my life not knowing what to do with it.
What I know is this: systems always fail, but people live on. Systems come and go. Buildings come and go. Governments come and go. Organizations, philosophies, theories — they all come and go. But people always remain. Through history, it’s been people, people, people. Ideas change and evolve and grow, but when you build a system designed around humanity and what’s best for people, this is where you find the best cultures. The best religions. The best governmental systems. The ones designed to benefit people and not the system itself.
I believe people carry the spark of the universe.
There is a connection human beings have to one another that is unlike anything else on this planet. Animals share connections. Ecosystems share connections. But human beings carry this longing — this desire for relational coherence — that drives us to congregate in ways that want to benefit a community. Whether designed by an all-powerful creator or by some underlying current pulling everything together, we were built to be relational beings. Relationality — connection to all things — is the pinnacle of what the universe is trying to show us. Everything else we’ve constructed is infrastructure in service of that.
And the infrastructure has forgotten its job.
I cannot stop seeing it. I’ve tried. It would be easier not to. But my body has never given me that option.
Structure should always serve human beings. Never itself. The moment structure serves itself, it devalues human life. Every life is still valuable. But when you make decisions that devalue other people’s lives, you are devaluing your own — because you are placing yourself above them. The value of every life and the weight of every choice can exist simultaneously. They must.
What It Costs to See It
I want to try to tell you what this actually feels like to live with. Because I think it matters. And because it’s the part that always gets left out.
I don’t have enough words to demonstrate the anguish I feel on a daily basis seeing people’s lives destroyed under the weight of the machine bearing down on them to produce more and more and more — at the cost of their own survival. The utter exhaustion of people who know their lives are in service of a machine they don’t even believe in anymore. Maybe they never did. Maybe they signed up because the system promised them that if they followed the rules, if they gave enough, if they produced enough, they would eventually get to the other side of it where the cost was worth it.
The system is very good at keeping that promise just far enough ahead that you can still see it.
What it doesn’t tell you is what you’ll have left of yourself by the time you get there. What you will have surrendered incrementally, willingly, in small enough pieces that none of them felt like the thing that broke you. Your time. Your attention. Your capacity for genuine rest. Your relationships. The version of yourself that knew what you wanted before the system told you what to want. You give those things away piece by piece inside a structure that has convinced you the giving is the path — and you wake up one day efficient and productive and completely hollowed out and the system calls that success.
That is the ache. That is the anguish I feel everywhere I look inside this capitalistic hellscape of a system we call the United States of America.
The land of the free, the home of the brave. There is truth in those words. But I’m not naive enough to believe those words have become the flagship motto of every system erected inside this country’s borders. To believe that devalues the very lives created to build them.
The machine is not neutral. And the people being ground up inside it are not simply making choices in a vacuum. They are making choices inside a system that has spent generations engineering those exact choices. That is not the same thing. Collapsing that distinction costs people something they cannot afford to lose: the ability to see themselves as something other than what the machine needs them to be.
I can be genuinely saddened that people feel they have no other choice than to sacrifice their own value in service of survival — and simultaneously enraged at the systems that force them into that binary on a regular basis. Both of those things are true in me at the same time. Neither cancels the other out.
The Survey
I see this in organizations large and small. The people who built the system become so dependent on it that they form their identities around it. They believe that altering or pivoting the structure somehow misaligns who they are as a human being. And so they maintain it — in service of their own identity, because they believe their own survival depends on it. And in doing that, we forget the humanity of the people intertwined inside these same systems. We utilize them as fodder and fuel to feed the systems of our own identity.
I was sitting in a leadership meeting. The company had sent a survey to everyone who worked there. Open-ended. Anonymous. The kind of thing organizations do when they want to believe they value honesty.
The feedback came back honest.
The answer in the room was that the feedback did not meet the standards of the company’s identity in the community. The survey needed to be redeployed with better framing so the results would reflect more favorably on the organization’s standing.
Everyone agreed. Except me.
No one was fired. No one was publicly shamed. What happened was much quieter than either of those things and much harder to fight: a room full of people looked at honest human feedback and decided the humans were the problem. The system needed different answers. The humans would be asked again until they gave them.
I sat there and felt something I’ve felt in a hundred different rooms. That ripping from the core. The physical wrongness of watching people who are not bad people make a decision that treats other human beings as variables to be managed rather than people to be heard.
I said something. It didn’t change anything. I’m long past being surprised by that.
What I’ve never gotten past is the grief of it.
I Don’t Fit in a Party
I’ve never fit inside a political party. Not because I don’t have convictions — but because my convictions don’t bundle the way platforms need them to.
Take abortion. I believe adults should have agency over their own body. I also value human life. I also believe that choices have consequences and those consequences aren’t always erasable simply because the decision was poor — possibly destroying a beautiful life in the process. And extreme circumstances exist, which is why I don’t hold a binary on it. None of those beliefs cancel the others. They live in genuine tension and I navigate that tension by asking what actually honors the human beings involved — which gives me a different answer depending on the circumstance.
The why always matters. Behavior exists on a spectrum of moral consideration, not a single line in the sand. Drawing lines in the sand only separates us more.
There are people in my life who firmly stand on one political side — not necessarily because they agree with everything on that side, but because what’s on the other side feels so much worse. And for anyone to not be on their side is seen as illogical, unethical, immoral. The demand is not just political. It’s relational. It arrives with the full weight of the relationship behind it. Whose side are you on.
My answer is the people. Not the platform. The actual human beings whose lives are shaped by whatever is being decided. That answer has cost me more than a few conversations. It will probably cost me more.
When we lose the value of human life as our bedrock, we pick up a different compass. And that compass, followed faithfully, takes us somewhere history has already been. Somewhere none of us should be in a hurry to return to. The destination doesn’t announce itself. It arrives gradually — through a series of decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time, each placing the system a little higher and the human being a little lower, until the distance between them is too great to bridge.
I know that’s not a satisfying political position. I know it doesn’t fit on a sign. But I’m not interested in the sign. I’m interested in the person standing next to it.
The Cost and the Calling
I need to say something carefully here — because getting it wrong would recreate the very binary I’m arguing against.
Sometimes people sacrifice their own value in service of someone else’s. They run toward the thing everyone else is running from. They give their body, their safety, their comfort, their life, in service of protecting or preserving someone else’s. We have words for this. Hero. Courageous. Noble. Saintly. And we feel something specific when we say those words — a recognition of the immense cost of following that kind of calling.
But I want to be precise about what we’re actually recognizing when we feel that.
We are not recognizing that those people are more valuable than the ones who didn’t make that choice. We are recognizing the cost. The weight of what was given. That is not the same as saying the people who didn’t give it are worth less. To believe that would be to build a new hierarchy on top of the one I’m dismantling — just with different criteria for who gets to be on top.
Each person must make their own choice. Some feel called to it. Some don’t. Some feel called and choose not to answer and live with that. The choice and the calling are both real — and neither of them determines the value of the life making them. What they determine is the consequence. Consequences matter enormously. But they are not the same as worth.
Mandating people toward those calls is coercion. Villainizing people for not feeling them is coercion through shame.
A doctor who chooses to save the life of an incarcerated serial killer is valuing the life outside the circumstances. The context is what gives the life its shape. Behavior can be reprehensible. Consequences are real. But the life underneath the behavior retains its value. All of those things can be true at once.
I grieve when I see people sacrifice themselves in service of systems that don’t deserve them. I’m genuinely, specifically saddened when people feel they have no other choice than to give themselves over to something that will consume them because their survival depends on it. I can hold that grief and simultaneously be enraged at the structures that put people into that position. Both of those things are true in me at the same time. Neither cancels the other out.
The People We Love
The hardest version of all of this isn’t the survey room or the political conversation. Those are painful but abstract enough that I can hold my position without losing someone’s face across a table.
The hardest version is the people I love.
Relationships build their own systems. Patterns. Structures of what gets said and what gets protected and what everyone agrees, without ever saying so, not to look at directly. And those structures can become as self-serving as any institution. The relationship starts to demand maintenance for its own sake. Conflict gets smoothed over not because anything has been resolved but because resolution would cost the structure something it isn’t willing to pay. You look away from things you know you shouldn’t because naming them would threaten the container both of you built together.
When the structure of a relationship becomes more important than the human beings inside it, something has already been lost. The question is only whether both people are willing to see it.
One of the things I value most is striving to help people become better versions of themselves. And sometimes that means I have to sacrifice the connection — in hopes that the sacrifice sets about a chain of events allowing the person to become that better version, or in protection of a better version of myself. The sacrifice is not the devaluing of their life or the relationship. It’s the separation of those ideas in service of the progress of both people involved.
Putting the system of the relationship over the valuing of the lives involved is its own form of devaluing — more insidious because it hides inside the language of loyalty.
When I’ve ignored my own integrity in service of maintaining a structure I no longer believed in, I lost something I couldn’t fully recover. The version of me the other person deserved. The version of them I could actually see clearly. The realness of it.
Ending a relationship is not abandoning a person. Sometimes it is the most complete honoring of them available.
I would rather honor the person than protect the system we built. Even when the system was built with love. Maybe especially then.
Injected, Not Invited
I was not introduced to organized religion. I was injected into it.
I have genuine respect for what religious community can be at its best. The gathering of people around shared purpose. The warmth of belonging to something larger than yourself. The infrastructure of meaning that helps human beings hold each other through the parts of life that are otherwise impossible to hold alone. That version exists and I don’t begrudge anyone who has found it and been genuinely held by it.
What I grew up inside was something else. A system so committed to its own perpetuation that the people inside it — including the children — became instruments of that perpetuation. Obedience was the currency. Questioning was the threat. And when harm happened, as harm inevitably does inside any structure dense enough and closed enough to forget what it was for, the harm wasn’t addressed. It was managed. Because addressing it would have threatened the system. And the system had long since decided it mattered more than the people it was supposed to serve.
A child inside that system learns something at a level deeper than thought. Learns it in the body. Learns that the system’s survival matters more than your experience of it. That your reality can be reframed by people with authority until it fits what the structure needs it to be. That the most dangerous thing you can do is to be fully yourself in a room that can’t hold that.
I wish someone had placed little Jeff next to organized religion. Close enough to feel its warmth, to see the genuine good of people gathering around something shared. Far enough to keep his own compass. Far enough that when the system asked him to replace his own perception with its version of events, he would have had somewhere else to stand.
Instead I was placed inside it. And the work of getting out — of keeping the love and leaving the architecture, of carrying the genuine warmth of human community forward while shedding the structure that had been eating it from the inside — that work has taken most of my adult life.
I don’t say that with bitterness. I say it because it’s true and because little Jeff deserved better and because naming it plainly is the only thing I know how to do with it now.
Still Human
I build systems. I want to say that plainly because this whole piece would be dishonest without it.
I have an elaborate internal architecture. Frameworks for understanding my own psychology. Structures for navigating my relationships. Named mechanisms for processing my body, my grief, my capacity for connection. Systems designed to give my life structure — to help me live inside the societies within my reality. They help. They serve me.
But I don’t pretend to hold those systems as absolutes over the very human being they are serving.
I’m capable of letting my own structures calcify. I’m capable of protecting a framework past the point where it still serves me — of letting the architecture become the identity, of forgetting what I built it for. The moment a system I’ve built starts to serve itself instead of me, it loses its authority. I take it apart. I’m not exempt from the pattern I’ve been describing this whole time. The difference, I hope, is that I can see it. That my body tells me when it’s happening. That I’ve learned, slowly and at real cost, to listen to that rather than override it in service of whatever the structure is asking me to maintain.
I’m a human being first. Before any framework. Before any architecture. Before any identity I’ve built from the materials of my own survival. Underneath all of it, there is just a person who believes other people are the point — who aches when they are treated as anything less — and who has never been able to convincingly pretend otherwise.
That is my entire platform. It always has been.
People over profits. People over positions. People over pride. People over power.
I’m not conservative or liberal. I’m not a doctrine or a platform or an ideology.
I’m people.
All of us are. Even the ones who have forgotten. Even the ones the machines are still working to convince otherwise.
I don’t know if any of this changes anything.
I don’t know if naming it out loud makes the machine smaller or just makes the grief of it more legible. I don’t know if writing it down and putting my voice behind it and sending it out into whatever room it reaches does anything more than confirm that one person saw it and couldn’t stay quiet. Maybe that’s enough. Maybe it isn’t. I genuinely don’t know anymore.
What I do know is that I’ve been carrying this for a long time. Long enough that it has a shape now. Long enough that I can feel the weight of it in specific places in my body when I try to set it down. Long enough that silence on it stopped feeling like an option years ago and I couldn’t tell you exactly when that happened.
So I say it. I write it down. I record my voice saying it so you can hear what it costs to carry it. Not because I have a solution. Not because I think this essay is going to dismantle anything. But because I believe — with everything I am — that the act of one human being telling the truth about what they see and what it costs them to see it is itself an act of valuing human life. It is itself the thing I’m arguing for.
This is what I have. This voice. This ache. This refusal to look away from what I see even when looking away would be so much easier and quieter and less exhausting.
That’s all this is.
One person. Still here. Still people. Still refusing to pretend otherwise.