Not because I wanted to.
Because creditors don’t accept Venmo requests to the universe.

Here’s what nobody on this platform will tell you about unemployment:

It has a liquidation schedule.

Week 1-4 : You sell the easy stuff.
The monitor you weren’t using. The old iPad.
You tell yourself you’re “decluttering.” 🧹
It feels *productive*.

Month 2-3 : You sell the good stuff.
The collectibles. The tools.
The things you were saving “for the right project.”
You tell yourself you’re “being strategic.”

Month 4-6 : You sell who you are.
The equipment that makes you *you*.
The things that took 20 years to accumulate
and 20 minutes to list on Facebook Marketplace
for a third of what they’re worth.

Month 7+ : “Hmm… that’s not bolted down…”
Nobody talks about this.

They talk about “upskilling.” 🚀
They talk about “pivoting.” 🔄
They talk about “networking.” 🤝

Nobody talks about the spreadsheet
where you rank your possessions
by how much they’ll bring
versus how much it’ll hurt.

Nobody posts about pricing their identity
at 30 cents on the dollar
because the buyer knows you can’t wait.

So the next time someone posts
“I’m thrilled to announce” 🎉

Just remember:

Somebody else just posted a Marketplace listing
that started with “Moving, must sell”
when they’re not moving anywhere…
They’re just trying to hold onto that last shred.

NOTE: inspired by the flood of contacts I’ve received from my last post as well as personal anecdotes. … image inspired by the story of Vivian Maier.

Don’t be lazy. Don’t forward ChatGPT’s hot take on someone’s deck. Good advice.

But it misses the real problem: ** nobody’s reading anymore **.

They’re pasting your document into their model of choice and asking if it contains anything worth knowing. You’re lucky if you get a reply from a human at this point.

I commented this on a recent post by Eytan Buchman and he replied: “Feedback prompt injection! Genius!”

He’s right. That’s exactly what I’m doing.

As a side hobby I’m working on a technical research project with a large document set: architecture specs, design rationale, experimental results. I sent the bundle to an engineer colleague for review.

He didn’t read it. His Claude session did.

He pasted the entire thing into his own AI session, which produced a summary and a prototype. A human never read my documents. The model was the actual reader.

This wasn’t laziness. This is what competent professionals do now. But I saw this coming a good year ago.

That’s when I pivoted. I shifted to writing my long-form documents for model consumption first. Not dumbed down… structured for accurate distillation. With correctives embedded in the text that keep a summarizing model on track.

Three things I learned the hard way:

1️⃣ **One word can change everything**: A single word in my docs (“reference” instead of “experimental”) changed how every model interpreted the project’s authority level.

2️⃣ **Framing is fate**: I described decisions as design choices. Every model helpfully suggested alternatives.

3️⃣ **Models skip to the interesting parts**: When I published the full doc set, models skipped the foundational work and went straight to whatever sounded like the hot topic.

I called this “semantic collapse”… accurate transmission of the what, silent replacement of the how and the why.

Your reader has perfect recall, zero judgment, and will confidently summarize what it thinks you said regardless of whether it caught the point.

Write for that reader. The humans will get the message once the model delivers it.

Full breakdown with more examples in the article “Feedback Prompt Injection: Writing for the Robot in the Room“