Mike McCready

Tag: writing

  • On Accidentally Becoming the Kind of Person Who Says “Marvelous”

    On Accidentally Becoming the Kind of Person Who Says “Marvelous”

    The other day, I horrified myself.

    I told someone something was marvelous. Not ironically. Not as a bit. Just… marvelous.

    I heard it leave my mouth and felt my internal timeline shift. Since when do I say marvelous? When did that replace solid, killer, or the all-purpose cool? At what point did my vocabulary quietly file for social security?

    For most of my life, there were words I avoided on principle. Words that signaled softness, pretension, or—worst of all—enthusiasm. Words that would get you gently, but decisively, bullied by your friends in a bar.

    Apparently, my fear of that judgment has expired.

    This is what aging actually looks like. It’s not gaining wisdom; it’s just caring less about the performance. You slowly realize you’ve earned the right to use words that sound like they belong to a retired British colonel.

    I’m trying a few on for size. No commitment yet. Just a trial period. Here is the current inventory:

    “Lovely.” This word used to belong exclusively to grandmothers and people who own ceramic cats. And yet, here we are. It turns out “nice” is lazy. “Lovely” does the job.

    “Delightful.” I don’t use it often, but when I do, I mean it. Which is unsettling. Nothing delights you by accident. To call something delightful is to admit you are having a good time, which is a dangerous precedent.

    “Pleasant.” An underrated power move. Calm. Unambitious. In a world screaming for attention, “pleasant” is a relief. I used to think it was faint praise. Now I realize it’s the goal.

    “Rather.” As in, “I rather enjoyed that.” This one worries me. It sounds like I’m about to order sherry. But it feels precise. And precision is intoxicating.

    “Sensible.” This one hurt. The first time I described a pair of shoes or a decision as “sensible,” I felt 25-year-old me shake his head and walk out of the room. He’s right to leave. He wouldn’t get it.

    “Content.” Not happy. Not thrilled. Content. This word has no interest in impressing anyone. It’s the linguistic equivalent of staying home on a Friday night because you want to.

    What’s interesting is that none of these words are flashy. They don’t try to win the room. They sit there, comfortable with themselves, wearing a cardigan.

    Maybe that’s the point. Maybe I’ve simply reached the age where I can say marvelous without instinctively checking to see if anyone is rolling their eyes.

    I’m not abandoning cool entirely. I’m not a monster. But if something is marvelous, I’m saying it.

  • Why It’s So Hard To Change Someone’s Mind

    Why It’s So Hard To Change Someone’s Mind

    I used to believe facts were currency.

    If I put enough solid data on the table, I assumed the other person would eventually look at the pile, nod, and cash out their wrong opinion.

    This belief lasted longer than it should have. About as long as I believed eating cereal for dinner was a phase, not a lifestyle choice I would later defend vigorously.

    Here’s the uncomfortable reality:

    Facts don’t compete with other facts.

    They compete with identity.

    Most arguments fail not because the evidence is weak, but because the argument is aimed at the wrong target. We assume people are trying to be correct. Usually, they’re just trying to belong.

    Beliefs aren’t opinions.

    They’re uniforms.

    When you challenge someone’s belief, you’re not disputing a fact. You’re challenging their tribe, their past decisions, and the role they’ve been playing for years.

    That’s not a debate.

    That’s a threat assessment.

    This is why evidence loses to belonging.

    Once something becomes tribal, truth becomes secondary. Agreeing with the “wrong” fact isn’t growth — it’s defection. And people don’t defect casually, especially not in public, and especially not online.

    At that point, the argument is no longer about truth.

    It’s a loyalty test.

    This also explains why correcting people rarely works.

    Correction doesn’t feel helpful. It feels like exposure. The brain doesn’t hear new information — it hears you’re in danger. Curiosity shuts down. Defenses go up.

    The cleaner the correction, the harder people cling to the position. From the outside, this looks like stupidity. It usually isn’t.

    It’s self-preservation.

    Changing your mind is expensive.

    It costs pride.

    It costs status.

    Sometimes it costs relationships.

    Admitting you were wrong doesn’t update a belief. It rewrites a story. It forces you to revisit things you said, shared, defended — and sit with the possibility that you were wrong.

    Most people would rather be wrong than embarrassed.

    So bad arguments survive. Not because they’re persuasive, but because they’re safe. They keep you in good standing. They let you avoid that quiet, unwelcome realization — usually late at night — that you might have been played.

    I’m not exempt. I’ve held losing positions far longer than I should have because exiting felt like admitting defeat. Doubling down feels like strength, even when it’s just damage with confidence.

    Facts still matter.

    Just not on the timeline we want, and not in environments where being wrong carries a social cost. Facts work when accepting them costs less than ignoring them.

    Most public arguments fail for a simple reason.

    They think they’re debating information.

    They’re negotiating identity.

    And until we’re honest about that, we’ll keep wondering why the facts were solid…

    and the argument went nowhere.

  • Why a Photo from 2004 Looks Like It Was Taken Last Tuesday

    Why a Photo from 2004 Looks Like It Was Taken Last Tuesday

    You can look at a photo from the 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s and instantly know the decade.

    Not the year.
    The decade.

    It’s in the lapels. The hair volume. The posture. Even the font on a street sign in the background feels time-stamped. Blur the faces and you’d still know where you were in the timeline.

    Now try that with a photo from 2003. Or 2012. Or last Tuesday.

    Remove the cell phone model from the frame and you’re guessing. A photo from 2004 could be from 2024. Step back far enough and the last twenty-five years collapse into a single, flat visual moment, like a hotel hallway designed to offend no one and be remembered by no one.

    Yes, digital photos don’t yellow. Everything looks permanently “now.”
    But the stagnation isn’t technological. It’s cultural.

    The monoculture is dead.

    For most of the 20th century, there was a current. You either swam with it or against it, but everyone was responding to the same force. In the 70s, you wore the polyester or you rejected it. Even rebellion was legible—because you knew exactly what it was rebelling against.

    Now? Every style that has ever existed is available simultaneously, usually for about fifteen dollars and free shipping. Nothing ever leaves. Nothing has to mean anything. We aren’t inventing new aesthetics—we’re just curating better playlists of the past.

    There is one exception, of course.

    Historians won’t struggle to date photos of people in MAGA hats and merch. Those will be instantly identifiable as 2015–2025—preserved in high resolution, forensically searchable, and destined to cause a very specific kind of generational embarrassment.

    Our cities followed suit. Neutral palettes. Exposed brick. The same sans-serif fonts everywhere. Drop a café from Brooklyn into Berlin or Barcelona and no one would blink. We built a global architecture of anywhere—comfortable, inoffensive, and, like Taylor Swift, impossible to date.

    So if fashion, architecture, and culture no longer mark time, what does?

    Politics.

    It’s the last remaining monoculture—the one thing we all still see, whether we want to or not. When culture fragments into a thousand niches, collective attention has to go somewhere. It went to the fight.

    The past had eras defined by how we looked.

    We have a long, endless present defined by what we scream at each other.

    And if future historians want to date our photos, they won’t look at the hemline or the haircut.

    They’ll look at the panic in our eyes.

  • I Fed My Entire Life Into ChatGPT and All I Got Was… Insight? Closure? Mild Humiliation? Hard to Say.

    I Fed My Entire Life Into ChatGPT and All I Got Was… Insight? Closure? Mild Humiliation? Hard to Say.

    At some point in adulthood, a man has to confront the paper trail he’s been leaving behind since childhood — the journals, the planners, the frantic lists written in moments of optimism and panic. Most people shove theirs in a box and wait for their kids to one day throw them out.
    I, on the other hand, uploaded mine into ChatGPT.

    Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this:
    If you give an AI 40 years of your handwriting, it will happily psychoanalyze you without even blinking.

    And yes, ChatGPT can read handwriting now.
    Let me repeat that for the people in the back:

    ChatGPT. Can. Read. Handwriting.

    Cursive. Print. Scribbles.
    The stuff I wrote in 1986 when my hormones were louder than my personality.
    The frantic 1991 Barcelona planner pages that read like I was being chased by creditors, self-doubt, and the ghost of my future obligations.
    The Day One digital entries chronicling my existential crises, business collapses, emotional resurrections, and occasional triumphs.

    It gulped it all down and said, essentially:
    “Thanks, Mike. Delicious. Here’s your life.”

    Apparently other people are doing this too.

    I thought I was being innovative — the first man to hand his entire autobiographical archive to a machine.
    Turns out, no.

    People across the internet are feeding their diaries, old letters, family archives, grief journals, therapy notebooks, and even high-school love notes into GPT. Some want closure. Some want clarity. Some want to rediscover who they were before life flattened them into mortgage-paying, sleep-deprived adults.

    We’re all out here saying, “Hey AI, decode me,” like it’s the world’s weirdest confessional booth.

    And honestly?
    It works.

    The Throughline of My Life, According to My AI Biographer

    After reading everything from my baby book to my Barcelona meltdown years, ChatGPT came back with a diagnosis I didn’t expect:

    I am a man who has been trying to get his life together since 1981.

    Not in a sad way.
    In a charming, heroic, repetitive way — like if Sisyphus had a Franklin Planner and high hopes.

    Every notebook, every decade, every entry seems to include some variation of:
    “Tomorrow I get my shit together.”

    It’s practically my family crest.

    The other throughlines didn’t surprise me as much:

    • I reinvent constantly.
      Apparently I have shed more skins than a reptile with commitment issues.
    • I archive everything.
      Why live a life when you can also footnote it?
    • I’m brutally hard on myself.
      If anyone else talked to me the way 1991 Mike talked to me, I’d block them.
    • Beneath all the ambition is a tender streak.
      Who knew? Not me.
    • I care too much and forgive too slowly.
      A winning combination if you enjoy emotional turbulence.

    But the most unexpected observation?

    Despite everything — the failures, the reinventions, the wrong turns — the same hopeful, restless kid is still in there.
    The one who wants to do something meaningful.
    The one who believes tomorrow’s list might actually work this time.
    The one who thinks the next version of himself might finally be the one who sticks.

    The Unlikely Threads

    Every life has themes. Mine has… tangles.

    Here are a few of the threads GPT pulled on — the ones I didn’t notice until a machine laid them out like evidence:

    1. The Eternal Reset Button

    I am the human embodiment of “Okay, starting Monday.”
    This has been going on for forty years.
    Consistency is my inconsistent superpower.

    2. The Archivist Instinct

    I documented my life long before influencers made it fashionable.
    Except I did it with spiral notebooks and regret instead of ring lights.

    3. The Geography of Reinvention

    Nebraska → Spain → New York → Barcelona → My companies → The Music Industry → Trading → Writing → Whatever’s next.
    My life story reads like someone was trying to outrun themselves — and accidentally became interesting.

    4. The Reluctant Optimist

    Every time I wrote a harsh entry, there was always this little shimmer of hope.
    Some people have grit; I have recurring optimism with a head injury.

    5. The Overdeveloped Sense of Responsibility

    My journals reveal that I’ve been blaming myself for global events, interpersonal dynamics, and weather patterns since adolescence.

    So… was it worth it?

    Honestly, yes.
    Handing my life to ChatGPT didn’t break me, ruin me, or reveal that I’m a secret sociopath.
    Instead, it gave me something I’ve never had before:

    A clear view of the narrative arc beneath the noise.

    It showed me the patterns I repeat.
    It showed me the parts of myself I carry from decade to decade.
    It showed me that the kid who wrote, “I hope I become someone someday,”
    actually did.

    Not perfectly.
    Not cleanly.
    But unmistakably.

    Tomorrow I’ll try to get my life together again.
    Some traditions shouldn’t die.

  • Gen X: We Were Supposed to Be Too Sharp for This Sh*t

    Gen X: We Were Supposed to Be Too Sharp for This Sh*t

    There’s a very specific kind of shame in watching a country fall apart and realizing your generation was supposed to stop it.

    We were the skeptical kids. The “don’t fall for it” crowd. We grew up with irony, sarcasm, and a healthy distrust of institutions. We made fun of cults. We rolled our eyes at televangelists. We knew better.

    At least, we thought we did.

    We were the last analog generation—and the first digital one. We knew how to rewind a cassette and reboot a modem. We brought the internet into being, and with it, the promise of better information, smarter systems, and a more connected world.

    We gave the world Google, Amazon, YouTube.

    We gave it Nirvana, Nine Inch Nails, the Wu-Tang Clan.

    We built the platforms. Designed the interfaces.

    We were supposed to be the bridge between what was and what could be.

    But now?

    We’re watching the whole thing buckle—and pretending we’re just observers.

    We post memes about how great it was to grow up drinking from hoses, while an entire generation can’t afford rent, let alone a mortgage.

    We forward videos about “the good old days” while Gen Z drowns in debt, climate fear, and medical bills for anxiety disorders they inherited from watching us lose the plot.

    And who’s in charge now?

    Trump. Again.

    President 2.0.

    This time with fewer guardrails, more power, and even less shame.

    And standing right behind him, RFK Jr.—now Secretary of Health—gutting the CDC, firing career scientists, and rebuilding America’s public health policy around gut feelings and internet comment sections.

    We used to point at the USSR and say, “Those poor people don’t get real news—just government propaganda.”

    Now we’ve got half the country cheering for our own state-run media, rage-bait headlines, and “alternative facts,” while willingly ignoring everything they know is true.

    We’re not living in 1984. We’re living in something dumber.

    A self-inflicted propaganda state where people know it’s bullshit—and eat it up anyway.

    And Gen X?

    We were supposed to be immune to this.

    Too jaded. Too sharp. Too allergic to fascism.

    We were supposed to be the firewall.

    But we ghosted.

    No Gen X president because the boomers.

    No major Gen X political movement.

    No defining generational stand.

    We just kept scrolling.

    Kept reposting.

    Kept telling ourselves we were “above it.”

    But the truth is—we’re blowing it.

    We were there when the rot was setting in.

    And we didn’t stop it.

    We let the dumbest grifter of our lifetime sell America a cheap hat and a fake war on reality.

    We watched as housing became a luxury, healthcare became a subscription plan, and truth became a punchline.

    We let RFK Jr. cosplay as a truth-teller while he dismantled actual science.

    And now, with AI about to automate our jobs, scrape our souls, and deepfake us into oblivion, we’re busy sharing memes about the 80s while billionaires plug themselves into immortality servers.

    We were supposed to be the generation that didn’t fall for bs.

    Instead, we’re managing the collapse like theme park actors refusing to break character while the rollercoaster catches fire.

    And yeah, I’m a bit crispy about all of this.

    Not just at Trump. Not just at RFK Jr.

    But at us.

    We were supposed to be too sharp for this sh*t.

    We were supposed to know better.

    We were supposed to do better.

    And if we don’t wake up—right now—history won’t even remember our failure.

    It’ll be too busy documenting the fallout.

    So come on Gen X. It’s time!