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Stop Treating Your Family Like a Subscription Service

The duty of the unchosen bond, and why your “chosen family” will eventually fail you.

I’ve watched people brush off a difficult phone call with a parent the same way they’d unfollow an account that annoyed them. No conversation, no attempt to repair it — just distance, dressed up as self-care.

That’s the trend I want to talk about: “chosen family,” the idea that if your biological relatives are difficult, you simply replace them with a curated group of friends who feel easier.

For a small number of people, this isn’t a trend — it’s survival. Someone who left a genuinely abusive or dangerous home needed somewhere else to turn, and the community they built saved them. That’s real, and it deserves respect, not a footnote.

But that exception has quietly become the rule for something much more ordinary: ordinary friction, ordinary disagreement, ordinary discomfort. And when the exception swallows the rule, we lose something worth protecting.

The Illusion of Unconditional Friendship

Friends matter. A well-lived life needs them. But let’s be honest about what friendship actually is: voluntary, and therefore conditional. We choose friends because they agree with us, share our interests, and make us feel good.

So what happens when you stop making them feel good? During a long illness. A financial collapse. A stretch of life where you’re simply hard to be around.

Often, “chosen family” quietly disbands right when it’s needed most. There’s no foundational obligation holding it together — because it was never built to hold weight, only to feel good while things were easy.

Biological family, at its best, works differently. It carries an inherited sense of duty that doesn’t evaporate the moment things get inconvenient. Not because it’s always pleasant — but because showing up isn’t optional in the way it is with friends.

The Duty of the Unchosen Bond

There’s a quiet strength in dealing with the family you actually have, instead of the one you’d have designed. You don’t choose your parents or your siblings. That lack of choice is part of what gives the bond its weight.

Learning to love, tolerate, and stay in relationship with people you didn’t pick builds something friendship rarely demands: real patience, real resilience, real duty. When we surround ourselves only with peers who think, look, and act like us, we build a comfortable echo chamber — and we lose the muscle for working through conflict with someone we can’t just block or ghost.

A Foundation Worth Rebuilding

“Often, ‘chosen family’ quietly disbands right when it’s needed most. There’s no foundational obligation holding it together — because it was never built to hold weight, only to feel good while things were easy.”

None of this means biology is destiny, or that walking away is never justified. It means we’ve stopped distinguishing between needing to leave and finding it easier to leave. Those are different situations, and they deserve different responses.

Let’s stop pretending family is only as strong as its ability to keep us comfortable. Value friendship for what it is — real, but conditional. And save the word “family” for the bond that’s supposed to hold even when it’s hard.

If there’s one thing worth trying this week: before you write someone off for a rough conversation or an old disagreement, ask whether the relationship actually failed — or whether it just got difficult. Those aren’t the same thing, and mistaking one for the other is how we lose people we didn’t need to lose.

I’m a DAD, an uncle, a cousin a son, a nephew and grandson those relationships I’m obligated to that’s part of my family.

The cosmos are within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself." — Carl Sagan

For centuries, humanity has stood on a "mote of dust," staring into the abyss of the night sky, looking for a reflection. We’ve built massive telescopes, solved impossible equations, and mapped the geometry of the dark void—all to answer a single question: What is our place in all of this?

But what if the telescope is looking the wrong way?

Think of the human body not as a simple vessel, but as a microcosm of something massive. Your neural pathways perfectly mirror the vast cosmic filaments of the galactic web. The same laws of motion that pull a ball to the earth are the exact mechanics swinging planets around the sun. The iron in your blood, the calcium in your teeth, and the salt in your tears aren't just biological necessities—they are a direct inheritance from ancient, collapsing supernovas.

When you look up at the stars and wonder about the beginning of time, it isn't just you asking a question. It is a piece of the cosmos itself, waking up and wondering about its own origin.

KEEP READING: "The Universe Within: From Galileo's Alphabet to the Stars in Our Veins" on Medium →.

An Arizona drought is killing a town

The Town That Runs Out of Water in 66 Days — And the 1935 Law That Says They Can't Save Themselves

On Mother's Day, a town of 2,000 is counting the days until the faucets go silent — and the answer may have been buried since 1935.

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There is a swimming pool in Kearny, Arizona that hasn't been filled in years.

I know because I helped build it. Twenty years ago, I worked alongside Ken Piggott and the Leslie's Pool Supply commercial crew to remodel the town pool — the one where kids launched cannonballs in the summer heat and mothers sat in plastic chairs watching their babies learn to float. That pool was the heartbeat of a town that never had much but always had enough.

Today the mothers of Kearny are filling jugs. Not pools — jugs.

An 85% water cut is already in effect. The Gila River, which has sustained this copper mining community since before Arizona was a state, is being rationed under a legal decree written in 1935 — a year when nobody imagined that "drought" could last a quarter century. Under the Globe Equity Decree, Kearny holds junior water rights. That means when the river runs low, Kearny drinks last. And this summer, hydrologists are projecting a "zero water day" by mid-July.

No car washes. No gardens. No pools. Families timing their showers to the second. Mothers choosing between laundry and cooking. This is not a developing nation. This is an American town in 2026.

▶ Watch: Kearny's Water Crisis — FOX 10 Phoenix

This is a Black Swan.

Not the kind Wall Street talks about — not a market crash or a pandemic. This is the original meaning. An event so outside the frame of normal planning that the system has no mechanism to survive it. The 1935 decree was brilliant for its time. It allocated a river among farmers, miners, and tribes with surgical precision. But it was designed for a world where droughts lasted seasons, not generations. It never accounted for a climate that would simply stop cooperating.

And here is the cruel irony: every attempt Kearny makes to save itself — drilling a new well, tapping a new source — gets legally classified as a "diversion from the Gila River." The decree doesn't just limit the town's water. It criminalizes the search for more.

So what do you do when the law says you cannot look forward?

You look down.

That is Project 88.

Beneath the shallow alluvial sand and gravel that the 1935 court adjudicated — the subflow, the water legally tied to the river — there exists a deeper geology the lawyers never thought to write against. Granite-vault aquifer formations. Crystalline rock fracture zones that held stable hydrostatic pressure for centuries before anyone built a canal or filed a water right. USGS well-log archives confirm it. Arizona Department of Water Resources drilling records show it. Pre-industrial static water levels in these formations held consistent for decades, undisturbed by surface drought, because confined aquifers in deep granite do not evaporate. The sun cannot reach them. The heat cannot touch them. They are, by the laws of geology, drought-proof.

Project 88 proposes to recharge and repressurize these formations using Managed Aquifer Recharge and Storage — a proven technology already deployed by Salt River Project and the City of Chandler less than 90 miles from Kearny. We are not inventing anything. We are applying what already works to a town that has run out of legal options on the surface.

But here is what makes this more than an engineering project.

The partners are already at the table. ASARCO — whose Ray Mine has operated in the Kearny basin for over a century — needs water stability for its next hundred years. Resolution Copper, one of the largest proposed mining operations in North America, needs a community that is still alive to support its workforce. The Gila River Indian Community and the San Carlos Irrigation Project have been in negotiations with Kearny since last August. The willingness to collaborate is real. What has been missing is the architectural layer that makes collaboration permanent.

A one-time water transfer is a gesture. A recharged granite aquifer is a covenant.

Imagine the tribes, the corporations, and the town — three entities with a complicated, sometimes painful shared history — coming together not around a short-term deal but around a geological promise. Water stored in rock that will outlast every contract, every board of directors, every election cycle. Water that belongs to no one's politics and everyone's grandchildren.

The family trees growing in Kearny are not metaphorical. They are the cottonwoods along the river, the mesquite in the yards, the actual bloodlines of families who have been born, married, and buried in this town for four generations. Those trees need roots that reach deeper than a 1935 ruling.

Project 88 is not asking Kearny to hope for rain. It is asking Kearny to look at what was always underneath — stable, silent, waiting — and build a future the Black Swan cannot reach.

The pool is still standing. I'd like the town around it to be standing in fifty years.

The Chain is Forged in the Dark

The Chain is Forged in the Dark

It is a profound and heavy thing to feel the weight of an anchor without being able to trace the iron links that hold you to it. That sensation — of being grounded by something you cannot name — is not a lack of faith. It is often the purest form of it.

The most resilient part of a chain isn't the part catching the sun at the surface. It's the part submerged in the deep, cold water where sight fails.

You do not need to see the chain to be held by it. You never did.

"Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." — Hebrews 11:1

The storms don't break the chain. They forge it. The silence isn't absence. It's an invitation. And the thief that scrolls through your phone at 2AM — comparison — has been digitized and sold back to you as being social.

Solomon saw it three thousand years before the first screen was ever lit: "A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones."

Stop watching their highlight reel. Your behind-the-scenes footage is where the real story is being written.

Read the full article → webelievenyou.com/the-chain-is-forged-in-the-dark.html

Ask what truly matters → Seek The Living Word

Built on the foundation at the mountain top. Heaven is where you prepare it.

Powell Parker

Believe In Yourself

The Most Powerful Belief System In Existence

There is a belief system more powerful than any self-help book ever written. More ancient than psychology. More proven than modern neuroscience.

It doesn't come from a guru. It doesn't cost $997.

It lives in you. Placed there before you were born. It's called EMET — in Hebrew, Truth.

Marcus Aurelius searched for it. The Bible already had the answer.

"Better a patient man than a warrior, one with self control than one who takes a city." — Proverbs 16:32

God calls on each of us to fulfill our own destiny. The blueprint exists. The anointing is real. The only step left is yours.

Read the Full Article

Believe In Yourself →

Ask What Truly Matters

Seek The Living Word →

Built on the foundation at the mountain top.

Heaven is where you prepare it.

Social media isn't just wasting your time. It's chemically rewiring your brain.

Every scroll. Every like. Every notification. Your dopamine is being hijacked — on purpose.

Here's what's really happening inside your head, and exactly how to take it back. 👇

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The Next Chapter

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"Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out."

It is a monumental day for our family. My sister-in-law, Davina (Joel’s wife), has reached a massive milestone in her medical journey.

She has officially MATCHED with the prestigious Vanderbilt College of Medicine to specialize in Pathology!

The road to a doctorate is long and demanding, but Davina has handled it with grace and grit. We couldn't be more proud to see her hard work recognized by one of the top programs in the country. Nashville isn't ready for her!

Congratulations, Dr. Davina! 🥂

Try the Chillin & Grilling mix!

At Rightful Returns Recovery, we spend our days helping families reclaim money that's legally theirs. But recovering what's rightfully yours doesn't stop at real estate. Sometimes it means knowing where to look when the pharmacy bill is quietly bankrupting the household next door.

That's why we want to talk about Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company. This isn't a political statement; it's about making sure no American has to choose between heart medication and rent.

HOW TO GET STARTED:

Search the catalog at costplusdrugs.com.

When calling your doctor, provide the NCPDP ID: #5755167.

Ask them to send the prescription to "Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co."

We can't fix the entire system, but we can point people toward the door that's already open. Share this. Print it out. Read it to a neighbor. That’s community.

Written with care for our community,

Powell Parker

Managing Member, Rightful Returns Recovery Phoenix • Dallas • Atlanta rightfulreturnsrecovery.com • 480-788-2320

Written with care for our community,

Powell Parker

The first thing a man does in the morning is to find out where the train is, and the next thing is to find out where he is~Mark Twain

Title: The American Abundance: How Natural Gas Vehicles Can Solve the Global Energy Puzzle

The statistics are clear: the United States is sitting on a massive, clean-burning energy gold mine. As I mentioned in my recent discussion on crude oil versus natural gas, the USA is the world leader in gas production. But the real question is: Why aren't we using more of it to power our transportation?

Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs) aren't just a "future" concept; they are a ready-made solution for energy independence and economic stability both here in the USA and abroad.

1. Economic Freedom and Lower Costs

We have an abundance of natural gas that keeps prices stable compared to the volatile global oil market. For fleet owners and everyday drivers, switching to Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) or Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) can lead to significant savings at the "pump." By using what we produce here, we keep our energy dollars at home.

2. A Cleaner Path to Sustainability

NGVs emit significantly fewer greenhouse gases and pollutants compared to traditional diesel or gasoline engines. It is the perfect "bridge fuel" that allows us to reduce our carbon footprint immediately using existing internal combustion engine technology.

3. Solving the Infrastructure Gap Abroad

While the US has the supply, many developing nations have the need. By exporting our NGV technology and surplus gas, the USA can help other countries move away from more expensive, dirtier fuels, creating a more stable global energy market.

4. Performance and Reliability

Modern NGVs are just as reliable as their gasoline counterparts. From long-haul trucks to local delivery vans, the technology is proven, safe, and ready for a nationwide (and global) scale-up.

The Bottom Line: We don’t need to wait for a miracle technology to solve our energy problems. The answer is already under our feet. It’s time to lean into the American abundance. There is a proven 100 year surplus of CNG that is 50% cleaner energy over traditional gas.

What I'm doing now.. helping people recover from foreclosure and tax liens. The government is holding over $70Billion dollars in excess funds. I'm working in Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Florida.