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[A love letter to myself]

Listen up, brother.

We need to talk. You and me. Man to man. Human to human. Whatever the fuck to whatever the fuck.

Society’s been playing three card Monte with our emotions for decades, and guess what?

The house always wins.

Always. Has. Always. Will.

You know the script…

“Be strong.”
“Man up.”
“Boys don’t cry.”
“Grow a pair.”

Then the same motherfuckers turn around and say…

“Why don’t men talk about their feelings?”
“Toxic masculinity is killing you.”
“You need to open up.”
“Be vulnerable.”

And you do. You actually do. You crack open that chest cavity like a lobster at a fancy restaurant, steam rising from your exposed soft parts, and what happens?

Bang

Those same feelings get weaponised faster than you can say “emotional intelligence”

That argument three months later? “Remember when you cried about your dad?”

That promotion you didn’t get? “Maybe you’re too emotional for leadership.”

That relationship that went sideways? “You’re too needy.”

The game is rigged, friend. The house knows all the cards because the house printed the fucking deck.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Where the real work begins.

You don’t need to play their game.

See, being a man.

A real man , not the cardboard cut out they’re selling you means understanding this fundamental truths…

You can be the rock without being made of stone. You can be the shelter without closing all the windows.

Forget the pills. Red, blue, black, purple, rainbow fucking sparkle lemonade they’re all just different flavours of the same poisoned Kool Aid.

They want you picking sides in a war where both armies are shooting at you.

You see another brother struggling? You don’t need to crack him open like a therapy piñata. You don’t need to force feelings out of him like you’re performing some form of emotional CPR.

You just… be there.

Stand next to him. Solid. Present. Available.

Maybe you’re working on a car together. Maybe you’re playing some game. Maybe you’re just sitting on a porch drinking beer and watching the world burn in that special way it burns these days.

There’s a lot of burning going on anyways…

And if he opens up? If he decides to trust you with whatever demons are eating him from the inside out?

You shut your mouth and you listen. You hold that space like you’re protecting the last clean water source in the wasteland. Because that’s what trust is in this world?

It’s scarce, precious, and easily contaminated. You see it all the time on the interwebs.

You don’t judge. You don’t fix. You don’t turn it into a TED talk about healing or chakras or star signs or any of that bullshit.

You just… witness. You bear witness to another human being’s pain without trying to own it, solve it, or compare it to your own.

That’s the job. That’s the real fucking job.

Not being invulnerable, being unbreakable. There’s a difference. Invulnerable means nothing gets in. Unbreakable means you can take the hits and keep standing.

We’re building something here. Not for us. hell, we’re already halfway cooked by this toxic soup we’ve been swimming in.

But for the kids coming up. For the boys who are watching us right now, learning what it means to be a man by how we handle our shit.

They need to see us strong AND struggling.
They need to see us fierce AND afraid.
They need to see us leading AND learning.

Because the old model? The strong-silent-suffer-in-silence-until-you-explode model? That shit’s killing us. Literally. Look at the statistics. Look at the suicide rates. Look at the addiction numbers. Look at the violence we do to ourselves and others because we’ve got nowhere else to put all this pressure.

But the new model they’re pushing? The “just be vulnerable and everything will be fine” fairytale? That’s not working either. Vulnerability without safety is just exposure and exposure in a hostile environment is how you die.

So we build something different. Something real.

We look out for each other without making it weird. We create spaces where men can just BE without having to perform masculinity OR perform vulnerability. We stop treating emotions like they’re either poison or medicine and start treating them like what they are…

Information. Data.

Signals from the meat computer that something needs attention.

You want to lead the next generation?

Start here…

Be the man who makes it safe for other men to be human.

Not safe to fall apart. Safe to be whole. All of it. The rage and the tenderness. The strength and the fear. The competence and the confusion.

Because at the end of the day, after all the shouting matches about what men should or shouldn’t be, after all the think pieces and hot takes and fucking Twitter threads and LinkedIn fuckery, we still have to wake up tomorrow and BE…

Be fathers. Be brothers. Be friends. Be workers. Be leaders. Be humans.

And we can’t do that if we’re spending all our energy performing for an audience that can’t even agree on what play we’re supposed to be in.

So fuck the script. Fuck the pills. Fuck the endless debate about who’s more oppressed or who has it harder or who needs to change first.

Just be a good human to other humans. Start with the ones who look like you, sure, because that’s where you have the most influence, the most understanding, the most ability to create change. But don’t stop there.

This is how we fix this shit. Not with grand gestures or political movements or therapy speak infiltrating every conversation.

One man at a time. One moment at a time. One “I got you, brother” at a time.

That’s the job. That’s the calling. That’s what it means to be a man in this particular clusterfuck of a timeline we’re crawling through at the moment.

ou don’t have to save everyone. You don’t have to fix everything. You don’t even have to fix yourself.

You just have to show up. Be present. Be real. Be unbreakable in your commitment to giving a shit about other people while also protecting your own capacity to keep showing up.

Because the boys are watching. The next generation is taking notes. And what they need to see is not perfect men or sensitive men or strong men or woke men or based men or any other brand of men.

They need to see WHOLE men. Complicated, contradictory, trying-their-best, failing-and-getting-back-up men.

That’s you. That’s me. That’s all of us, if we can get out of our own way long enough to remember that we’re all just trying to make it through.

So yeah. For the boys. But really, for all of us.

Because we all deserve better than what we’ve been sold.

We all deserve the chance to be human.

Even, especially, the ones who’ve been told that being human is the one thing they’re not allowed to be.

Stay unbreakable, brother.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If this hit you somewhere deep, somewhere you don’t usually let things hit? Good. Sit with that. You don’t have to do anything with it. Just know that feeling something doesn’t make you weak. It makes you alive. And alive is all we’ve got.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

That’s right.

One decision.

The decision that moves the needle forward in whatever it is you’re pursuing.

I was asked last year what it mean to me, when it came to being an artist. Now that can be a complex answer in itself. Except for me now, it’s about being able to do the type of work I love, while sharing and inspiring others to also do the same things in their lives.

You might read my emails purely for entertainment or to know that there’s someone in your corner on the days you don’t feel like existing.

Or you might read my emails in hopes of following along in your own creative pursuits to do the same.

Being able to make a bit of $ while doing art, or even turning it in to your full time gig has always been dream for a lot of us.

So I’ll let you in on the little secret they keep holding from you and it’s not really a secret, but you’ll be like “duh, why the hell didn’t I think of that in the first place???”

It’s starting. That super simple decision of just starting.

It only takes one of those moments to get the ball rolling. Yes there’s a lot of little mechanical things (That are learnable) that goes in to building a super simple system to generate a few $, but the first decision is just about doing.

You can do it. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t.

Writing, selling prints or Mongolian throat singing…

Create some work. Share the work and get people in to your world. It’s that easy. When they’re in your world give them the opportunity to buy something from you.

Prime example is fellow artist and good dude Stephen Holder Art

Now what Stephen does is what he’s learnt from another buddy of mine, which in essence is just pure old direct response marketing.

Give people the opportunity to buy something at a very low cost, to get them in to his world (aka email list) in this case. Just super cool micro prints for $5 which covers the postage.

He also gives them the chance to upscale and get bigger prints framed or not. Either way, you’ve paid a few bucks to get some really cool stuff. If you bought the upsells even better for him and for you.

Now that you’re on his list. He will do what I do and that is mail the list as often as he can with his day to day goings on. Then also give people the option to buy original work or massive scale pieces. Which in turn when they do, they become collectors of his work.

This is all fairly simple to do, but it all starts with the decision of just starting and figuring it out as you go.

TL;DR version:

Decide to start today

Make some content and pick a platform or two to go all in on

Get people on to your list

Give them the opportunity to buy

When they buy, give them something else to buy

Be a good human

Share stuff to your list about you and the things you enjoy

Rinse and repeat…

You can do it.

Start today.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Been binge watching the Fallout series and there’s this scene that made me pause mid bite of my sandwich.

I mean it was a damn good sandwich and I rarely stop when I get going…

Ella Purnell’s character Lucy.

This impossibly optimistic vault dweller…

…emerges from her underground paradise into the wasteland above. She’s been raised on corporate propaganda about how Vault-Tec saved humanity, how they’re the good guys, how everything they did was for the greater good.

Then she discovers the truth.

Vault-Tec didn’t just profit from the nuclear apocalypse (I mean of course they did lol – the videogame was pretty epic tbh)

They clearly helped cause it. They sold people safety while engineering the very disaster they claimed to protect against.

This is direct response copywriting in its purest, most terrifying form.

Think about it. Vault-Tec identified a deep human fear (nuclear annihilation), positioned themselves as the solution (underground safety), created scarcity (limited vault spaces), and drove people to take immediate action (buy now or die horribly)

Direct response 101.

Classic direct response framework. Problem, agitation, solution, urgency.

Except they were literally creating the problem they were selling the solution to.

Now before you think I’m about to launch into some ethical copywriting sermon.

I’m not.

I’m not gonna do the dance between good versus evil. I mean we’re adults. I’m sure we can think about this logically.

This is about understanding the raw psychological power of what we do.

Every piece of effective copy manipulates emotion to drive action.

The question isn’t whether you’re influencing people. Clearly you are to a degree.

The question is whether you’re using that influence to genuinely help them or just to help yourself.

Vault-Tec’s copywriters were probably the best in the business. They convinced people to abandon everything they knew for the promise of safety. They made underground bunkers seem desirable. They turned fear into profit with surgical precision.

They understood something most marketers miss.

People don’t buy products. They buy feelings. Safety, status, hope, relief, excitement, belonging…

You might think the vault dwellers were buying real estate. Except they were buying peace of mind.

The promise that someone smarter than them had thought through all the scary possibilities and created a solution.

Sound familiar?

Every successful product launch, every high converting sales page, every email that drives action is tapping into the same psychological triggers Vault-Tec used. We identify pain points, amplify the consequences of inaction, then present our solution as the obvious path to relief.

Pretty boring if you look at it from this point of view, but we’re humans and this is how we operate on a biologically and fundamental level.

If you’re selling weight loss programs that don’t work, you’re Vault-Tec. If you’re selling business courses filled with outdated tactics, you’re Vault-Tec. If you’re promising results you can’t deliver just to make the sale, you’re fucking Vault-Tec.

Then you’re just using powerful tools for good instead of evil.

The techniques work either way. The psychology is the same whether you’re saving people or screwing them. The only difference is your intention and your delivery.

Lucy’s vault kept her safe for 200 years. The problem wasn’t the marketing. It was that Vault-Tec had ulterior motives they never disclosed.

Your copy can be just as persuasive without hiding the true agenda.

If you look around the online space right now from any of the creative industries you might be in. AI is being hyped and oversold and told it’s gonna take our jerrrbs.

It’s not.

Don’t let Vault-Tec mess with your head.

If you got good stuff. Write well. Give people the information they need and give them the opportunity to buy.

It really is that simple.

Fallout is streaming on amazon prime right now but go check out the IMDB page if you reckon that’s something you can get behind. I know I’m gonna finish off the last few episodes tomorrow cause it’s my birthday and I’m getting caked and coffee and doing nothing but being a lazy couch potato or whatever.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

‘Tis my Birthday.

I’ve survived another year.

As I’ve gotten older I just have a grateful appreciation to still be here on this earth.

Today has been a day of laziness.

I waited for a few books to arrive. A nice meal to be had.

And a little later I’ll be watching The Thursday Murder Club

Maybe I’ll do a list of things equal to the number of years I’ve been alive, which tie into what people would consider life lessons…

But for now though. I’m off.

And everyone who has wished my a happy birthday. I appreciate you. You’re amazing.

Stephen Walker.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom

Sometimes the best productivity hacks come from pure accident and desperation.

Just over 12 months ago, I did something spectacularly stupid.

Closed my MacBook lid down on the charger cable. You know that satisfying click when the laptop shuts? Yeah, that turned into an expensive crunch as the screen cracked like a spider web.

Fuck.

So there I am, staring at my dead MacBook, knowing I need to keep writing but refusing to drop another two grand on a replacement.

I grab this shitty Samsung laptop from Amazon.

You just know it’s gonna be ass but hey. I’ll wait for the new M chips to land before grabbing a new MacBook.

I decide this piece of plastic garbage is going to have one job and one job only: writing. No social media. No YouTube. No seventeen browser tabs full of “research” that’s really just procrastination in disguise.

Then I do something that sounds completely insane.

I set the entire display to black and white.

No colours. No visual candy. No bright red notification badges screaming for attention.

Just words on a monochrome screen.

And holy shit, my writing productivity exploded.

Could be placebo.

Could be the fact that this laptop runs so slow that opening Chrome would probably cause it to have its own existential crisis.

Could be that black and white makes everything look serious and focused.

Don’t know. Don’t care.

What I know is that when your screen looks like a typewriter from 1952.

You stop getting distracted by shiny objects and start focusing on the only thing that matters.

Which believe it or not, as a writer means putting words on the page or a really shitty quality screen.

Just text. Black text on white background. Like writing was meant to be.

Your brain stops looking for visual entertainment and starts looking for intellectual engagement.

The quality of my copy has gone up because I’m not constantly context switching between writing and whatever dopamine hit is waiting in the next tab.

Try it. Set your laptop or phone to grayscale mode for a week. Watch how much less appealing everything becomes when it’s not designed to hijack your attention with colours that trigger your primitive lizard brain.

You might write better. You might focus longer. You might actually finish the thing you started instead of getting lost in a Wikipedia rabbit hole about 18th century farming techniques or underwater basket weaving.

Or you might think I’m completely full of shit.

Either way, let me know how it goes.

Stephen Walker.

P.S. If you curious about how horrible the writing horse is. This is it right here.

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Stephen Walker, Unit 146317, PO Box 7169, Poole, BH15 9EL, United Kingdom