Living on the Edge

I have absolutely no audience engagement. I'm not active on social media. I get no discussion on my Patreon which has like thirteen members. I've given up on self promotion of any kind other than my pathetic Patreon.

Nonetheless, this piece post January 7, 2026 has 152 page views. That's a lot more page views than other recent posts which also have dozens of views apiece, which is more than my thirteen Patreon members.

Why? I don't know. How? I don't know.

Presumably, someone somewhere finds that piece especially useful. 

I had a long strange relationship with a self-made millionaire and I put up with him because he "paid cash upfront." He made sure I had reason TODAY to put up with him TODAY.

He didn't make empty promises. 

We had a mutual acquaintance who was trying to push imaginary fantasy BS and wanted to promote the idea he could save me financially. That never came from him.

He was a successful business man and I know business is a creative process where you come up with answers and not everything pans out. And one of my takeaways from being acquainted with him was "Doreen, you talk too much. Don't make promises to people when you don't know when or if you can deliver."

I learned to be less sharey about my half-baked ideas and ongoing attempts to figure stuff out. For other people who have a long history of thinking I'm smart or whatever, that amounts to empty promises because they think I know what I'm doing and they think me rambling on about something is some done deal they can count on and that may well not be the case.

Prior to ever meeting him, I was already a blogger and contemplating how do you deliver value via words on a computer screen. And I've thought a lot about that for a lot of years and doubled down on certain things because I never met this man in person. I only knew him online and we rarely spoke, yet he delivered on certain things, no excuses.

And his no excuses policy included no empty promises and this meant he didn't tell me what he was doing, why he was doing it, what he hoped it would lead to if it succeeded etc. Because I was in desperate straits and also wouldn't have understood and my situation was not conducive to asking me to be patient and wait for results.

I spent years homeless and also had an interest in poverty research well before that. Wealthy people frequently have a "win the lottery" mentality.

They look at homeless people and feel like "I can't afford to pay cash for a house for them, so there's nothing I can do." It doesn't occur to them to give them five bucks or buy them a meal or tip the single-mon waitress extra big so their life is a little materially easier today because that five dollars isn't a big deal to the wealthy person, so they frequently fail to grasp that for some people that extra five bucks is a big deal.

Actually winning the lottery frequently ruins lives. Winning the lottery dramatically increases the odds of getting divorced, being murdered and all kinds of other horrible drama.

It doesn't solve all your problems. Instead, it trades poor people problems for rich people problems and the people winning it don't have coping skills suitable to rich people problems.

So it's usually ugly.

I don't recommend trying to provide dramatic "win the lottery" solutions for extremely distressed populations. Some housing first programs have had homeless people do garbage like burn the apartment down that they were given.

If you are trying to deal with Homelessness or do Development in Very Underdeveloped Areas, I strongly suggest you not talk much about your big dreams of making huge changes.

1. People with serious, intractable problems who gave up hope a long time ago will interpret that as tall tales and view you as a con artist.

2. Publicizing big plans attracts interest from people currently profiting off the suffering of others who will then try to sabotage your goals while doing all they can to maintain plausible deniability and stay off your radar so you don't know why it failed.

3. Talking about your big goals actively fosters an outcome of empty promises, both because it attracts saboteurs and because it promotes the Shirky Principle:

Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.

If your stated goal is to "help the homeless," you need to ask yourself a lot of hard problems about why that is. I spent years homeless and a lot of people in homeless services are actively perpetuating homelessness while expecting homeless people to make them feel like heroes and paragons of virtue for doing ANYTHING for them.

If your pay off is some emotional rush about being important and making a difference, odds are high you will actively and intentionally keep people trapped in misery so they can remain slaves to your warped emotional needs.

I'm not interested in "helping the homeless." I'm interested in fostering a functional society so rates of homelessness go down.

I don't WANT to be anyone's hero. I want to live in a world that has a low need for heroics.

This piece has a probably terrible explanation of my mental model of providing "Apollo 13" style solutions via blog. Presumably, someone somewhere thinks my writing does that at times because I have no other explanation for why I'm getting dozens of page views with almost zero promotion.

I began blogging because my writing was seemingly popular on a homeschooling list. My early homeschooling site attempted to provide printables so people could turn my website into a physical product in their hand.

I had printable pages for tracking your homeschooling work easily to create a portfolio and I had a template for a cardboard tool you can make to help early readers stay on the correct line.

Gifted youth who read substantially earlier than usual have a developmental challenge that their eyes aren't ready for that and their eyes can't track effectively. A simple tool makes their reading experience vastly less frustrating.

But I had no idea how you monetize a website with printables putting physical products in your hand today from my mind to your home anywhere on the planet if you own a printer. So I stopped trying to dream up better ways to give away solutions that put physical products in your home for free with no hope of making me money.

Nonetheless, my experience with online stuff suggests to me that this approach of providing actual solutions draws people who want solutions. Because actually solving a problem has been my focus, not getting paid or getting credit, and it has at times gotten me bizarre forms of abusive demand for what I have to offer, such as being asked to moderate a forum I wasn't intending to create on Cyburbia.

Everyone likes free stuff. Most fools never wonder what's in it for the people providing it and if you set a precedent that it's FREE, good luck turning that into a paid product.

I have reason to believe I do actually solve problems and reason to suspect "This is why Doreen Traylor remains a dirt poor loser."

Because rest assured people following The Shirky Principle are people prioritizing their needs and interests over that of the people they are supposedly trying to help. And that's exactly why the problems they pretend they want to solve drag on and on and on and on.

Off the top of my head, I know of one organization that actually in fact SOLVED the problem they set out to solve and that's The March of Dimes. 

They set out to eliminate polio and essentially did. And then in the parlance of startup land, they pivoted and redefined their purpose rather than dismantle the organization.

If you want to live in a better world with fewer homeless and a more functional community, be the March of Dimes or use my information but have a government job or something like that.

Don't be some asshole designing homeless services that actively make it difficult to escape homelessness.

You want to actually make a difference? Find one small thing you can do TODAY without a big budget or jumping through a lot of bureaucratic hoops. And do it without fanfare.

Make the focus actually fixing the problem and you will be shocked how much you can accomplish.

But you may not be happy about having done that because you may never be thanked or credited or get your ego stroked. If those are the things you really want, actually fixing the problem doesn't appear to be a best practice.

I've added a new tag that is the same as the title of this piece: Living.on.the.Edge. I am also trying to figure out what to tag pieces pertinent to people living in extremely cold places.

I like solving those edge cases. Those edge cases tend to be interesting and tend to be a Greenfield because other people just throw their hands up and announce "It can't be done!" before really trying.

If I had ANY sense, I would spend less time writing stupid blog posts that don't lead to money and more time figuring out how to make clothes in hopes of actually making an adequate income.