The factory is running again. You can feel it. The hum behind your forehead that starts around 9 PM and increases in output as the house gets quieter and the quiet gives the factory the acoustic space it needs to run at full capacity.

 The difference between a sage and a fool. Be thankful for the difficult people you’ve encountered in life. While their actions may have caused pain or disappointment, they can also teach valuable lessons .

The factory is running again. You can feel it. The hum behind your forehead that starts around 9 PM and increases in output as the house gets quieter and the quiet gives the factory the acoustic space it needs to run at full capacity. The factory has one product. Problems. And the production line runs three shifts.

'IF YOU DON'T KNOW THE VALUE OF LOYALTY YOU'LL NEVER UNDERSTAND THE DAMAGE OF BETRAYAL.

Words In Waves. DREAM big. SPARKLE more. SHINE bright.When you loosen your grip, life surprises you in the most beautiful ways .

When you loosen your grip, life surprises you in the most beautiful ways .

The difference between a sage and a fool. Be thankful for the difficult people you’ve encountered in life. 

The difference between a sage and a fool. Be thankful for the difficult people you’ve encountered in life. While their actions may have caused pain or disappointment, they can also teach valuable lessons.

The factory is running again. You can feel it. The hum behind your forehead that starts around 9 PM and increases in output as the house gets quieter and the quiet gives the factory the acoustic space it needs to run at full capacity.

The first shift produces past problems. The conversation from March that ended without resolution. Your brain takes the conversation out of the archive, places it on the conveyor belt, adds new context that wasn't available in March, and runs the whole thing through a processing system that produces a version of the conversation that is worse than the original. Worse because the processing added footage. Facial expressions that may or may not have been present. Tones that may or may not have been intended. A subtext that was manufactured in a factory at 11 PM and filed as a memory at 11:05 PM and the filing makes the manufactured version indistinguishable from the actual version.

The second shift produces future problems. The things that haven't happened yet but might. The "what if" inventory. What if the job doesn't work out. What if they leave. What if the money runs short. What if the health thing is the thing. Each what-if is a product that rolls off the conveyor belt fully formed. Complete with a scenario that runs like a short film in your head. The film has actors and dialogue and a resolution that is always the worst possible version and the worst possible version is the only version the factory produces because the factory's quality control department only approves dark outcomes.

The third shift produces imagined problems about what other people think. The colleague who looked at you differently on Tuesday. The friend who responded with a period instead of an exclamation point. The family member who paused for half a second before answering the question you asked. Each micro-interaction is collected by the factory's raw materials department and sent to processing where the micro-interaction is inflated into a full narrative that concludes with a verdict about your worthiness that was never delivered by the person and was entirely manufactured by the machinery between your ears.

The factory is productive. You have to give it that. The output is enormous. The volume of problems produced per hour exceeds the volume of problems that actually exist by a ratio that would bankrupt any real factory operating at that level of overproduction. The inventory is full. The warehouse is overflowing. And the person responsible for managing the inventory is exhausted from managing a supply that was never driven by demand.

There is no demand. That's the audit finding. The problems being produced don't have customers. Nobody ordered them. Nobody requested the March conversation to be reprocessed. Nobody asked for the what-if film about the job. Nobody submitted a work order for the analysis of the colleague's facial expression. The factory is producing at full capacity for zero customers. The production is self-generated by a system that confuses activity with utility and utility with safety and safety with the specific feeling of control that worrying provides to a brain that learned early that unmonitored situations produce danger and the monitoring is the only thing standing between you and the danger.

The danger isn't real. Not tonight. Not at 11 PM in a quiet house where the only sound is the factory running. The house is safe. The Tuesday is over. The future hasn't happened. The colleague's face was probably just their face. The problems in the warehouse are inventory that will never be shipped because the shipping address doesn't exist because the problems don't exist anywhere outside the factory floor.

The factory has an off switch. On the wall. Reachable from where you're sitting. The switch doesn't shut the factory down permanently. It shuts it down for tonight. The machinery stops. The conveyor belt pauses. The raw materials sit unprocessed until the morning when the daylight provides enough competing input to keep the factory from restarting at full capacity.

Reach for the switch. Tonight. Before the third shift starts and the inventory gets taller and the managing gets heavier and the heaviness follows you into a sleep that isn't sleep because sleep requires the factory to be offline and the factory has been running during your sleep for months.

Turn it off. The problems will be there in the morning if they're real. The ones that aren't real will have dissolved by sunrise. And most of them aren't real.