I am not a machine
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Hey Reader! Ever get an email that sounds like this? "For ten years, I chased promotions and quarterly targets. I wore burnout like a badge of honor. Sound familiar?
Then I quit — not impulsively, but intentionally. I enrolled in a massage therapy program, traded my laptop for a treatment table, and never looked back.
Every session is a chance to genuinely help someone: the nurse carrying tension from a 12-hour shift, the retiree finally sleeping through the night. This is what meaningful work feels like.
Yes, the income looks different. Yes, people questioned my sanity. But no performance review ever gave me the quiet satisfaction of making someone feel better by simply showing up fully present.
Massage therapy isn't an escape from ambition — it's a redirection of it. Toward people. Toward purpose. If you're feeling the pull, trust it.
The table is waiting."
If you identified this as soulless AI garbage, you'd be correct. And if you didn't, it's because AI's become so obnoxiously prevalent that you've become accustomed to it. There's nothing wrong with that email, per se, but it's not emotionally resonant. And, according to Gallup (among others) 70% of business decisions are made based on emotion. Which means that if you're letting AI write bland copy for you, you're not tapping into the one thing you really need in order to get people to buy from you. There's a lot of advice out there about how to push potential clients into purchasing: use urgency, show them the consequence of staying where they are right now, let them picture success, etc. And the way to do that is to make them FEEL something. Like, do we care about the masseuse in the example above? She was burned out. Yeah, so? I want to hear how that FELT: "I found myself Googling rare diseases and wondering if I could fake one long enough to take a prolonged medical leave." "I fantasized about wiping every computer in the office, forcing a month-long shutdown so I could spend my mornings people-watching in my neighborhood." "I'd leave the house later and later, convincing myself that I could make my 15 minute drive in 8 minutes. I just couldn't face going to my miserable job a minute earlier than I had to." Those are sentiments a person can relate to. 'I wore burnout like a badge of honor' is clever, but without any emotional component that paragraph reads like an Instagram caption; slickly entertaining for a second, then quickly forgotten. AI feels like it's going to be helpful, particularly if you'd rather clean the oven than face a blank page. But honestly? It's just not good. And in this current environment, when it's hard to trust what you read, and attention spans are the length of a quark, adding more bland, meaningless content to the mix is not helping spark real interest in actual people. If you're having trouble writing, don't turn to AI, turn to a human. I can write your newsletters and blog posts for you, or take what you've written and inject it with humanity, using your voice and your stories. Interested? Hit reply, and let's talk. No prompts, just conversation. Yours in keeping it human, Julia Three Days Grace knows that to be human is to feel, and so does this email. Forward it to someone who's leaning hard on the robots.
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Newsletter Therapy
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