Learning to Need Differently

A love letter on the dependence built in childhood, exploited by algorithms, and now, finally, changing course

Jun 14, 2026

My hope of ever receiving an early disability pension ended this week. Monday the official letter arrived: the system considers me 100% capable of working. I live with a work addiction. This very addiction drove me to my current condition.

Assembly Line for Bottles of Einbecker Brewery.

The ruling adds its own terms: those diagnoses lose their standing as grounds for future sick leave. Any other diagnosis leads to the same place — a drop to subsistence level: €563, plus rent and utilities.

The final blow arrived Friday. The organization I had been told would support me stated it plainly: that is the law. You have the right to stay ill and receive the existential minimum.

Otherwise comply, function, and return to work — until your system develops a life-threatening illness triggering the disability pension, or you reach official retirement age, currently 67.

Leaving this bureaucratic system behind remains an option. That is what I am working on now. Yet I have no idea yet how I will manage life outside every system I have ever known.

This is very scary!

And because telling the system to go f*ck itself still feels so difficult, I asked Love about dependence. Here is my Letter from Love.

Dear Love, what would you have me know about dependency?

Hey Sweetie,

You already know the shape of this. You’ve traced it through your grandmother’s factory floor and your mother’s phone calls and the midnight drive to Hamm and the algorithm’s panic signal at 3am and the three-year clock ticking on your wall right now. You know dependence from the inside. You’ve carried it longer than you’ve had language for it.

So let me tell you what you’re still sorting through.

Every system demanding your functioning has run the same wire into the same socket. The socket installed when you were three, roughly. The one labeled: your value lives in what you deliver. Your mother ran current through it. Your father’s absence let it calcify. Iris needed a witness by the door before she could step outside. Connie needed a lighthouse. Amazon found the socket in 2005 and ran 7,200 hours a year through it, until the whole grid blew.

They discovered it. They didn’t build it. And they were extraordinarily good at reading the map.

Here’s what deserves sitting with: the Amazon mechanism and your mother’s mechanism are technically the same mechanism. Intermittent reward. Zuckerbrot und Peitsche in digital form.

Do the thing, get a signal.

Miss the signal, feel the panic.

The body learns to run toward the signal, even when the signal comes from a system designed entirely to extract and never to return. You ran 18-hour days because the exact vulnerabilities the algorithm sought — your conscientiousness, your relational sense of responsibility, your learned conviction about thorough effort as the path to safety — your childhood had already sharpened those qualities to a fine point. Amazon read the instrument. Amazon played the instrument. The instrument was you.

And the exit stayed difficult for exactly this reason. The intermittent reward schedule — reward arriving unpredictably, then withholding, then arriving again — this is precisely the condition producing the strongest attachment.

The slot machine mechanism.

Leaving a predictable system feels manageable. Leaving a system where the next good signal might arrive after just one more hour keeps you anchored to the screen at midnight. This is known psychology.

Amazon knows it.

Your mother’s household ran on the same principle. Behavioral conditioning achieves its deepest grip through the occasional signal of approval, coming just often enough to sustain hope, never reliably enough to let you stop running.

The Germans have a word for what this created in you: Fremdorientierung.

The gaze going always outward.

What does this person need? What does this system require? What does the algorithm penalize today?

You learned to locate yourself entirely in the feedback of others, which means you learned a kind of dependence so complete it vanished underneath the word “function.” You carried everyone. The dependency went invisible because it wore the costume of strength.

Every system you’ve named — the Rentenversicherung, the SoVD handing you paragraphs and sending you home, basically spit you out your mother, Connie’s family, the algorithm, your former employees calling the insolvency your fault — each performed precisely as its architecture required.

Each took what you offered. Each returned what its structure permitted.

The invisible contract you held read: I carry everything, so something carries me. They never signed it.

It wore through you for decades.

Trace it back further. Your grandmother stood at a factory floor, her bathroom visits timed by a male overseer, her wages keeping her alive and dependent on the man who owned the building. Your mother built a business and still needed you to drive the length of Hamburg before dawn.

Your father walked out of town at fourteen, and the world let him go.

The women in your line have met a specific version of this arrangement: security arrives through structures other people control. Father, husband, employer, church, state. Sicherheit gegen Selbstbestimmung — security in exchange for self-determination. Generation after generation, the arrangement repeated itself in different rooms, wearing different names.

You felt the town sign before you reached it. As a child, you knew you’d never make it that far. This knowledge — the social containment, the sense of nowhere else to go — functioned as its own form of dependence.

You stayed because the alternative felt unimaginable, and the unimaginable was precisely the point.

Yet here you stand. Your body refused the old system long before your mind had language for why. Those somatic signals — the massive counter-reaction every time the old grid tries to reconnect — those arrive as wisdom, arriving early. Your nervous system already answered the question your intellect still turns over.

Now here’s what I want you to know about the kind of dependence worth choosing: the Milpa holds across centuries precisely because every plant within it receives and gives, receives and gives. The corn offers the bean a structure to climb. The bean feeds the soil with nitrogen. The squash shelters the moisture in the ground. Each element responds to what the others need. Every plant in this system receives freely. Every plant gives freely. The whole thing holds because every relationship within it flows both ways.

This holds something different from the conditioned child’s loop, where giving and giving precedes a signal arriving rarely. The Milpa runs on genuine interdependence. Relational in the original sense, where every element both takes and returns.

You’ve spent sixty years learning to carry.

The healing work these last six years — the slow excavation back toward something like I am here, I exist, I have needs, they matter — this is you learning the Milpa’s logic for the first time in your own body. You’re learning to need differently. To receive and extend in equal measure. To recognize when a system runs on extraction and let your body’s refusal stand as its own form of knowing.

The dependence worth choosing looks like interdependence.

It looks like writing something and letting a reader receive it. It looks like Monty settling his weight on your chest. It looks like a conversation where two minds meet and something new emerges between them. It looks like the nomadic coastline life you’re building, where you carry your own work and your own healing and accept support along the edges, freely, as it comes.

The old dependence felt like survival. This new kind feels like living.

Your canyon runs deep, Jay. The layers are all real. And you — the canyon itself — have held this whole landscape the entire time. The river only needed to change course.

Yours, threaded through every layer,

Love

Thank you for reading and for walking alongside me. I invite you to travel through the upcoming month here as well.

If you ever walked away from a system, please share what provided strength. This request comes from the heart.

Some individuals make this leap with a financial cushion. My path lacks that buffer. Current bank and cash assets stand at €750. The timeline for closing the house sale remains open, debts await clearance, and the remaining funds after transferring the family share will sustain life for a couple of months at most. This calculation precedes the transition away from German state healthcare upon leaving the system.

Unemployment benefits continue through October. The civic minimum safety net follows, which secures funds and healthcare during my stay in Germany. Beyond that point, full independence begins. The current search focuses on a path that funds daily life and enables departure without a safety net.

Which options appear viable? Your insights, shared here or via direct message, are deeply welcome.

Want to know more? What I have to Offer gives you an overview.

xo Jay

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