Lightning

Lightning never strikes the same spot twice, they say. My heart begs to differ.

I have a complicated relationship with God. Having any relationship at all feels wild to me, given that I wandered fairly far down the atheist path after two years at an Episcopalian boarding school. At my next school, in the mountains of Colorado, I’m roomed with a kid who was raised religious in the wilds of Idaho. He believed in God and Jesus and that the earth was only 6,000 years old. What about the dinosaurs, I ask. He says God put those bones there as a test of our faith. What a rube, I smugly think to myself. I’ll surely never believe in God. I’m too smart for that.

Twenty years later though, I need God in my life just as much as I need oxygen, water, sunlight, love. After a series of progressively more devastating rock bottoms, along with my ongoing initiation into the 12 steps of recovery, I can plainly see that my life is far better when I’m trusting God for direction. When I believe in no power greater than myself, and put my own intelligence on a pedestal, I am bound to destroy all that is good and beautiful in my life. Happens like clockwork.

Anyhow, I’ve had a series of encounters these last three or four years, moments where some divine hand reached down and steered me in a new direction, pulling back the veil on some marvelous vision of life. I call these moments lightning strikes, because it usually feels like a surge of electricity and excitement. A parting of the clouds after a long week of rains. When I start following these cosmic nudges, it’s as if I have the wind at my back, and life begins to flow forward with an ease I’ve rarely experienced. It’s like I’ve stepped into a great river, and instead of fighting my way upstream, I choose to hop in a tube and float along with the current.

Some part of me is always distrustful of the current, though. Because I always seem to hop out of my tube and start thrashing my way back to shore. Some part of me would rather sit on the sidelines, watching life go by, stuck in my own head as I put my own intelligence back on the pedestal. I’m the one who’s in charge here. Me. And so begins another downward spiral, fighting for each step, the currents wearing me down until I have no choice but to give up once again. But God, it seems, doesn’t give up on me, and doesn’t hold a grudge when I repeatedly and stubbornly put myself back in charge. I’m always greeted with another lightning strike, often one that reveals just a little more of the path before me, a little more of the role I’m to play in the great unfolding.

This is all a little abstract, so lemme share some examples.

It’s summer of 2023, and I’m flying back from Vibecamp, an in-person get together of the eclectic and earnest twitter scene I’ve inhabited the past few years. I’m on a plane from Philadelphia to Phoenix, and the lightning hits me right in the chest as we soar over Cincinnati. It’s time for me to write my first book. A combination of memoir and manifesto about the internet, and how to be in right relationship with it. I’ve experienced both the highs of global connectivity—making new friends, meeting lovers, building businesses, expanding my sense of self—as well as many of the lows, falling into spirals of compulsive consumption, getting dragged into the culture wars, the algorithms guiding me down dark and dangerous paths.

It feels like a seed has been planted in me. Getting off the plane, I’m excited to start watering it, and write something substantial and deep after years of one-off blog posts. It’s time. But I had just joined a startup that would soon colonize all of my emotional energy, and eventually send me fleeing to France to recover. I would soon connect with The Girl (another lightning strike story for another day), and be swept into a romance wilder and more dramatic than any I’d ever known. I’d soon be back in the US, living in the RV out in my mom’s yard, feeling like I had to start making serious money in order to be a Proper Man. The dream of the book withers on the vine.

In mid-summer of 2024, lightning strikes again. I’m talking to a twitter friend who runs a growth studio for startups, looking for ways to make a living with my marketing background. We stumble onto the idea of manifestos, and I feel the excitement surging into my body. This is something I’ve been doing for myself for years. Spicy writing that metabolizes the past and imagines the future, that pulls the mask off the dysfunctional status quo, while stepping into a more beautiful story and inviting others into it with me. This is something I can do for startups. This is something I can make Real Money with. Holy shit.

I step into the current and flow along. My first manifesto is for Vibecamp, and it’s a doozy. But both The Girl and my mom express doubts about my new path. Manifestos seem too edgy and weird. Maybe I should do something a bit more buttoned down and legible. It feels especially hard coming from The Girl, whose support and validation I crave more than anything. When she and I part ways, going on one of our extended periods apart, I double back down on manifestos, and the Universe conspires to aid me once again, dropping clients and connections and opportunities into my lap. Momentum is building. I’m in the stream. And then I reconnect with The Girl and it’s like fighting against the current once again. I fall into depression. I want nothing to do with tech anymore.

Three weeks ago, a startup founder I haven’t talked to since 2021 (well before my manifesto era) booked time on my calendar. Completely unexpected and out of the blue. We jump on a call, and he tells me about his new startup, about how an investor told him he needed a rallying cry, about how he’d stumbled across my Vibecamp manifesto and was like “I know that guy!” In a season of financial desperation, when I had little sense of wanting to be “the manifesto guy” anymore, God did his thing and put me right back on the path. As part of this recent client project, I have a call with a friend of the founder, and we end up chatting about how complicated our relationship to technology has become. I get another little jolt of lighting. This is the path, Rob. You must continue to live the question of what it means to be human in a technological age, to cultivate right relationship with these tools rather than letting The Machine become your higher power. Commit.

It’s interesting. It feels like life has chosen my commitments for me, and no matter how hard I resist, or how fearful and doubtful I may be, I’m guided again and again back to the starting line. This has me wondering if there’s a distinction between commitments I make, from a place of insecurity or self-will, and commitments that life or God are asking me to make. It certainly seems to that I cannot escape certain paths, and that I must see them through. I have bodies of work that are mine to pursue. And after everything, I trust that life is better and more enjoyable when I’m flowing along with the current, rather than pushing back to feel more in control. So I guess I’ll keep re-committing to the paths laid out before me, one day at a time. Onwards.