Hello Reader,

I found it at Dollarama.

The World According to Tom Hanks by Gavin Edwards, tucked in among the seasonal decor and reading glasses. For a bit more than a dollar — dollar stores don't exactly live up to their name these days — I walked out with something I didn't expect: a list of ten commandments distilled from the life of America's most decent human being.

​You can see all ten here.​

I've been sitting with the ninth one ever since.

Value your friends but accept your loneliness.

Most advice stops at the first half. Build community. Invest in relationships. Show up for people. All true. All worth doing.

But the second half is where the real weight lives.

Accept your loneliness. Not fix it. Not fill it. Not replace it with a busier schedule or a fuller inbox. Accept it.

For those of us doing work that requires long, quiet stretches — the writing, the building, the thinking that only happens when the rest of the world has gone to bed — loneliness isn't the opposite of connection. It's the condition that makes certain kinds of work possible.

The tension between community and solitude doesn't resolve. It's not meant to. You can hold both, if you stop treating one as the problem the other should solve.

Value your people. Really value them. And then go do the thing that only gets done in the quiet.

The Final Flicker

Loneliness isn't always a gap to close. Sometimes it's the room where the work happens.

Let the people in your life know they matter. Then go be alone with what only you can make.

See you later,
Mike

P.S. There's something that can happen even in the quiet hours — a kind of resistance that doesn't announce itself, it just slows everything down. I'll be exploring that in a live session called The Friction Problem. If that resonates, you're welcome to join by grabbing a spot here.

Thanks for reading. Your time is valuable, and I don’t take it for granted. In a world pulling us in all directions, thanks for choosing The Lantern.