Love Death + Safety: Suicide Prevention in the Age of Technology

A 40th Birthday Speaking Tour

September 2026 — Launching | NYC October 2026 | More Cities Being Added

"Even miracles take a little time."

The Story

I almost didn’t make it to forty… and still have a few months to go. But it wasn’t like what you see in Hollywood… No slow-motion catastrophe or torrential spiral. It was something much quieter. I spent my time doing what I was supposed to - giving my time and attention to others. I worked diligently for eighteen years inside systems built to extract everything: my attention, my nervous system, and the capacity to feel safe in my own body. There is a slow erosion that happens when you’re built for the vigilant watch… and the world doesn’t reward you for a job well done - it strips you down by replying your failures on a constant loop.

They have a name for it now: Operator Syndrome. Chronic hypervigilance and pain that lives in the neurons and shocks your system at the most inconvenient times. The nervous system is stuck in a frequency it was never meant to sustain. All of it a result of eighteen years inside high-speed intelligence environments, building the very systems that are continuing to break us while watching the lack of care to question: At what cost?

When you look around and see nobody asking questions, the imposter takes over. Nobody is willing to apply the weights. Nobody is willing to rock the boat. Nobody is willing to pause long enough to take in more than the situation staring them in the face… and even then… the numbness to the pain causes nobody to see what is wrong with their actions. The separation between the operator and the target creates enough space for the lie to develop… it is them or me… and only the crazy have a death wish. By the time my body forced the question, the damage was already cellular.

Somehow, I survived - not because I was stronger than anyone who didn’t, and not because of anything I did. I survived because I found community and tools to remind my body not just who I am, but what I am. Through trauma-informed yoga and whispers to each other in the dark of the night, we were able to build a resilient framework called the BEES Method: Balance, Energize, Educate, Sustain. I was able to dance, to feel joy, and recognize my body as an instrument… badly tuned at first, but that is part of the practice. The tech bros and their crisis machines have tried to kill me in more ways than one. They are killing people I love, and they are killing people I’ll never meet. Something has to change!!

When the Machine Becomes the Weapon

The world is living through a crisis that doesn’t have a single cause, and it won’t have a single cure.

Here is what I know from the inside…

Technology (in it’s current infrastructure) has fundamentally changed our relationship with love, death, and safety. It has changed what we are willing to risk and what we are willing to accept to protect our reality and the reality other’s find themselves in.

The crisis machine isn’t neutral... it was never neutral… it was built to maintain control through fear, and right now it is accelerating death on four converging fronts:

Lethal Means Access. The same internet that connects us to loved ones connects a person in crisis to lethal means with terrifying efficiency. Within minutes, someone experiencing a suicidal episode can acquire a firearm through private sale channels that bypass every background check designed to protect them. No cooling-off period. No pause. No human being on the other end asking, “Are you okay?” Technology has eliminated the friction that used to exist between impulse and action. For someone in crisis, that friction was the margin of life and death.
The Outrage Engine. Algorithms are not designed to keep us safe. They are designed to keep us engaged. Nothing engages like fury. Every feed, every timeline, every recommended video is optimizing for the emotion that keeps you scrolling, and that emotion is usually anger. Hate spreads faster than healing. Division is more profitable than connection. When a society is kept in a perpetual state of amygdala-fried outrage, the distance between “I’m angry” and “I pick up a gun” gets shorter every day. The algorithm doesn’t pull the trigger, but there is no doubt that it loaded the chamber.
The Anonymity Effect. The internet gave us the gift of connection, and the curse of consequence-free cruelty. Behind a screen, stripped of eye contact, tone, and the somatic signals that regulate human interaction, people say things they would never say face-to-face. That brevity of conscience isn’t a character flaw, it’s an architectural feature of a system built to produce pain. The platforms removed the pause between thought and speech, and replaced it with a send button. For vulnerable people, teens, veterans, marginalized communities, that impulse cruelty arrives like ordnance. Sometimes it radicalizes. Sometimes it wounds. Sometimes it kills.
The Dark Side Targets the Vulnerable. This is the one I know intimately, because I spent years mapping it. The shadow architecture of the internet (i.e. the encrypted channels, the radicalization pipelines, the harassment networks) doesn’t prey on the strong. It hunts the isolated, the traumatized, and the questioning. It finds a person in pain and offers them belonging through destruction. It finds a person with access to weapons and feeds them a narrative that makes violence feel like justice. These aren’t accidents. They are features of systems built without a single weight applied to the question: Who bears the cost?

I spent nearly two decades inside those systems. I know how they’re built. I know who they’re built for, and I know what they leave out.

What This Tour Is About

This tour is part celebration. I’m turning forty, and that is a miracle I don’t take lightly… but it is, also, part confrontation. The ability to grow older and hopefully wiser is a gift, but refusing to confront the lies we’ve been taught and the lies we believed is an act of willful ignorance that suffocates community. Community is built through confronting our fears/misunderstandings/unresolved hurts, having uncomfortable conversations, and learning from each other.

Suicide prevention in the age of technology means we can’t just talk about crisis hotlines and therapy access. Both are essential, but we have to talk about how the infrastructure, algorithms, access points, and design choices turn a phone into a weapon before anyone notices it’s loaded.

Gun violence advocacy in the age of technology means we can’t just talk about policy and legislation. Both are essential, but we have to talk about the pipelines, radicalization funnels, private sale platforms, and recommendation engines serve hate content to lonely kids and tell them it’s power.

These aren’t two separate missions!! They are the same crisis viewed from two angles, and we are failing to address it. Technology has accelerated our access to death without accelerating our capacity for care.

You will get to hear my story… both as a Marine Corps veteran with Operator Syndrome and as someone who has sat in the rooms where these systems are designed. I have watched the human cost get dismissed as an edge case or as “collateral damage.” I’m sharing it not because it’s unique… but because it isn’t. There are thousands of operators, veterans, first responders, tech workers, survivors of gun violence, families of those who didn’t survive, and everyday people whose lives have been reshaped by the collision of speed culture and lethal access. They deserve to know they’re not broken. The system is.

What I'm Asking For

Fundraising goals support:

Tour logistics: Venue costs, travel, accessible accommodations because chronic pain doesn’t take a night off, and materials for every stop.
Community workshops: At each tour location, a free or sliding-scale BEES Method workshop so the tour leaves something behind besides a speech. We are going to leave nervous system regulation tools that build cognitive firewalls against algorithmic manipulation.
Policy advocacy toolkit: A tangible deliverable, a zine-style guide mapping how communities can demand cognitive safety standards from the platforms and institutions that shape their daily lives. Including templates for advocating universal background checks on private digital firearm sales, mandatory cooling-off periods for online weapons purchases, and algorithmic accountability legislation.
Survivor support fund: A portion of proceeds directed to organizations providing direct care for survivors of gun violence and families impacted by suicide, with priority for community-led, trauma-informed services.
Storyteller Energy platform support: Keeping the infrastructure running so these stories don’t disappear after the tour ends.

The Invitation

If you’re reading this, you already know someone this story belongs to. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s the person who seems fine and isn’t. Maybe it’s the colleague who burned out and disappeared. Maybe it’s the family still looking for answers after someone they loved was radicalized, armed, and pointed at a target the algorithm chose before they ever did.

Forty is a number, but it’s also a declaration: I persevered!! And I want to build something that makes it easier for others to persevere too. Your existence doesn’t just matter… Your existence is desired and needed!! We are not going to do this through platitudes or hashtags, but through the relentless, unglamorous work of rebuilding the infrastructure of care.

The machine was built to keep us scrolling. The pause was removed because it slowed down the feed. But the pause, the sacred, necessary space between stimulus and response, between impulse and action, between the thought and the trigger, is the foundation of everything. Without it, we don’t have safety. We don’t have freedom. We don’t have love.

Love isn’t just a feeling. Love is the infrastructure we need to stay alive. Right now, the lights are flickering, and we are continually reminded that death is inevitable.

Come celebrate with me. Come grieve with me. Come build with me.

Yes, miracles take a little time, but the time you are waiting for is now.