Everybody Wants to Meet Air Bud, But Nobody Wants to Be Air Bud
On the loneliness of building at full intensity, the myth of collaboration, and why the sun shines alone
Growing up, I was intensely lonely and alone. No one got me, I was weird, I was eccentric, and I was unrelatable.
Now that I am grown up, though, I have learned that no one will get me, I am still weird, I am even more eccentric, and to say I am “unrelatable” is like calling Infinite Jest “a little confusing.”
Be it maturity, transition, or simply having faced so much loss I can no longer find value in pretense, I’ve begun to accept something for the first time in my life, the ancient maxim of accepting: everybody wants to meet Air Bud, but nobody wants to BE Air Bud.
No wait! Don’t close the article; let me explain.
The Dog on the Court
In 1997, Disney released a movie about a golden retriever who plays basketball. The premise is exactly as absurd as it sounds. A kid finds a stray dog. The dog can shoot hoops. The dog joins the school basketball team. There is a climactic game. The referee checks the rulebook and discovers no rule that says a dog cannot play basketball. The crowd goes wild. Air Bud is a hero. End scene.
And everybody loved Air Bud. Kids wanted to meet him, they wanted the lunchbox, the poster, the photo op.
But, nobody wanted to be Air Bud. Nobody wanted to be the dog who spent thousands of hours learning to do something no dog was supposed to do, performing night after night for a crowd that would cheer and then go home to their perfectly normal, non-basketball-playing lives. And that is the crux of single-minded ambition. Everyone wants to meet Air Bud, but no one wants to be Air Bud.
And I think about this more than a reasonable person should.
The Dial Has One Setting
I have built a jet ski from scratch. I have renovated a 150-year-old house with my own hands. I have written several novels, one of them a 400,000-word science fiction series (because apparently I do not know how to do things at half volume). I have launched digital ventures, built an AI-powered story development platform with a crew of AI agents, started an open-source design framework, and I am developing a graphic novel and an animated show. Some would ask “why” and I don’t have an answer beyond “why not?”
I work from a hot tub with a floating laptop tray, because at some point the ergonomics of my creative life transcended any category that HR would recognize. Every single project at professional-sport intensity. Not because I choose to dial it up. Because that is the only setting the dial has. If I were to stop, the torpor and malaise sets in.
And every time, the same thing happens. People see the output and say “that is incredible.” They say “I would love to help.” They say “count me in, just tell me what you need.” And then the temperature hits, and they do not. Not because they are bad people. Not because they lied. Because they saw the court, felt the heat coming off it, and realized what playing on it actually costs. The common ethos is “I can’t do any more” and it then conflicts with my ethos of “Even if I wanted to, I can’t do any less.”
“I Would Love to Help”
Collaboration is a weird dance, and it almost requires equal partners. The conventional wisdom is compelling at face value: teams scale, diverse perspectives improve outcomes, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Every business book, every leadership talk, every conference keynote agrees: you cannot do great things alone.
And they are right. Sort of. In the way that physics textbooks are right when they describe frictionless surfaces. In practice, collaboration requires something the books rarely discuss: matched intensity. It requires two people (or more) who are willing to show up at the same temperature, at the same frequency, for the same sustained duration.
Not for a weekend hackathon. Not for a one-month sprint. For years. At the temperature where your social life evaporates and the boundary between “work” and “self” dissolves and people start asking if you are okay.
Matched intensity at that level is vanishingly rare. I have been searching for it for most of my adult life. What I have learned, slowly, at some personal cost, is that most people’s relationship to creative intensity is spectatorial. They want to watch it. Admire it. Be adjacent to it. Maybe participate for an afternoon. They want to play it safe, and for good reason. Safe is safe. Work with a net, so if you fall, something catches you.
But living at forge temperature? That is a fundamentally different proposition. And most people, wisely, reasonably, with full awareness of what it costs, say no.
This is not a complaint. It is a measurement. And it has taught me that if someone works with a net, I don’t think I can work with them beyond a certain surface-level point. They don’t have their fur in the game, Air Bud style.
The Laser and the Floodlight
Dinah Murray and Wenn Lawson developed a framework called monotropism to describe how autistic attention works. The idea is elegant: most people distribute attention like a floodlight, a wide beam that covers many things at moderate intensity. Autistic attention works more like a laser, a narrow beam that hits one thing at extraordinary depth.
This is not a deficit. It is a different allocation. Some are wired different and choice or approach are downstream artifacts of that.
When the laser locks onto something, that thing receives everything. Every cognitive resource, every waking hour, every background thread in the brain. The thing you are focused on stops being a project. It becomes a world. And the corollary is that everything outside the beam (friends, hobbies, sleep, the concept of weekends) gets almost nothing. And you are happy, only when the beam is focused. Content. Single minded.
Now, I am not presenting this as aspirational. For most people, this would be genuinely miserable, a curse of fixation. The floodlight is a perfectly good way to move through the world. You see more things. You maintain more relationships. You have the kind of life that does not alarm your friends when they hear about it. The laser is not superior, it is different. And if you happen to be wired for the laser, you do not get to choose the floodlight. You only get to choose what you aim at, and if you don’t aim it somewhere, it burns you alive.
The Ones Who Could—or Would Not—Stop
Eiichiro Oda has been writing and drawing One Piece for 27 years. Weekly publication. Over 1,100 chapters. His editors have publicly begged him to take breaks. He sleeps three hours a night during production. The manga is a global cultural phenomenon, one of the best-selling series in history, and the person behind it lives at an intensity that would make most people call a helpline.
Osamu Tezuka, the father of manga, produced over 150,000 pages in his career. His last words, reportedly, were a plea to keep working. He died with a pen in reach.
Yoshihiro Togashi draws Hunter x Hunter from a hospital bed. His body broke under the weight of the work. His drive did not.
Pictured below is the weekly schedule of Hiroshi Shiibashi, a manga author. I printed this out to inspire me. It is a death march, and having this sort of schedule is the thing I crave most.
Asimov published over 500 books spanning every category in the Dewey Decimal system. Writing was not his career. Writing was his career and his hobby and his social life and his therapy and his preferred form of breathing. He did not work to live or live to work. There was no boundary to cross because there was no boundary.
Newton locked himself in a room for 18 months and emerged having invented calculus, a theory of optics, and the law of universal gravitation. He forgot to eat. Tesla worked 21-hour days, ate alone, never married, and reportedly said his inventions were his only worthy companions.
I am not comparing myself to these people. That would be absurd (and, given the Air Bud conceit of this essay, redundantly so). The point is not the scale of the output. The point is the pattern. The pattern of creative intensity that consumes the person entirely, that runs so hot it melts the line between work and identity, that produces extraordinary things at extraordinary personal cost.
These people were not disciplined. They were compelled. The discipline was incidental. The fire was structural.
And hearing about their workloads and output, I am filled with an envy that cannot be quenched. I would dedicate my life to producing at that level if I could. Not for money, not for fame. I envy those because I have to. I want nothing more than to work 20 hours a day, sleep only when needed, and die with a pen in my hand.
I don’t chose to feel that way, I just do. I feel as if I have accomplished nothing in life, because accomplishment implies a conclusion.
You Cannot Forge at Room Temperature
Something people consistently get wrong about intensity: they think it is a choice. An ON switch you flip for the sprint and flip back for the weekend. They imagine you wake up every morning and decide to go hard, that you could just as easily decide not to. I wake up every morning and have 2 choices: go hard, or be crushed by the depression of not going hard. There is no in-between.
Because you do not decide to be a forge. You are a forge. The forge does not choose to be hot. It is hot because that is what a forge is. You cannot shape metal at room temperature. You cannot build the things that demand to be built at half intensity. The temperature is not a setting. It is a property of the material.
And this is where I punch down on myself, because it needs saying: being an eccentric autistic productivity hermit who works in a hot tub and wakes before dawn and writes novels and builds platforms and launches frameworks is not aspirational for most people. It would make most people deeply, genuinely unhappy. It makes most people uncomfortable just hearing about it.
And, and, I don’t even profit for it, I have little to show for it other than what it produced, but for me, it is an end unto itself, I don’t do it to “get rich or die trying,” the motto is just “die trying.”
That is fine. The forge does not expect the garden next door to share its temperature. The garden is beautiful and alive and full of things that would burn in a forge. The forge just acknowledges what it is and stops pretending it could be a garden if it tried harder.
Working against my nature causes me more harm than just going with it.
Wanted for Hazardous Journey
There is a recruitment advertisement attributed to Ernest Shackleton for his (doomed) 1914 Antarctic expedition:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”
Five thousand people reportedly applied. Shackleton picked 27. Most of the applicants would not have survived the first month.
What I love about this ad is its honesty. It does not promise work-life balance. It does not mention equity vesting or unlimited PTO or a ping-pong table in the break room. It says: this will be brutal, you might not come back, the only reward is the honor of having done it. Are you in? If you don’t know (spoilers), as detailed in the book about the expedition’s fate titled “Endurance” about the ship of the same, the ship was wrecked and the 27 crew spent 19 months surviving on the Antarctic ice with almost nothing.
Every single one of them survived.
That is what collaborating at forge temperature actually requires. And the reason matched intensity is so rare is not that people lack courage or commitment. It is that they have other things. Good things. Families, friendships, hobbies, rest, the full spectrum of human experience that constitutes a rich and balanced life. Choosing not to cross Antarctica is not weakness. It is sanity. But the expedition still needs to happen.
Now, AI has removed the last practical excuse for not building. Before generative AI, the argument was simple: you do not have enough hands. You need a frontend developer, a backend engineer, a designer, a researcher, a marketer. One human being cannot span all of those disciplines. The tools would not allow it, and even if you tried, time wouldn’t. You would move too slow to matter.
The tools allow it now. And that is both the liberation and the deepening of the loneliness. Because when you can produce nearly everything yourself, the absence of collaborators shifts from a bottleneck to just an absence. You do not need partners anymore. You want them. And wanting is harder than needing, because wanting requires someone to choose to match your temperature freely, not out of necessity, but out of desire.
Temperature, Temperament, Temperance
The cycle is always the same. Someone sees the work. They say something generous: “This is amazing. I want to be part of what you are building.” You take them at their word, because you want to. You invite them to join a podcast episode, or contribute to the open-source project, or start a venture. You share the vision. You open the door.
And then the temperature hits them.
They mention hobbies. Friend groups. The trip coming up. The show they need to finish. The bandwidth issue that materialized overnight. And these are not excuses. These are lives. Good, full, healthy lives that include many things at moderate intensity, as lives should. The floodlight is working exactly as designed.
But the laser cannot dim itself to meet the floodlight. That is not a capability it possesses. All or nothing, all the way, all the time.
So you say “no worries,” because you mean it. And you go back to the hot tub at 5 AM with the floating laptop tray bobbing gently, agents compiling in the terminal, the world still dark and quiet. Not for money. Not for recognition. Not to prove anything to anyone. For the art. Because the things that demand to be built have not stopped demanding, and you are the one they chose, and frankly every waking hour feels like catching up on everything you could not build in the decades before the tools caught up to the speed of your own imagination.
Why? The glib answer is “why not?” The real answer is: because not doing so creates a void where the productive energy becomes destructive, and the only target it can find is the psyche. The throttle is stuck open, so if you just red-line the engine at a standstill, it will burn itself alive. You have to put it in gear and move it and keep moving it so the air blows across the cooling fans, that is the only way the engine can survive. Peace requires movement, and contentment requires relentless, non-stop ambition.
And it is lonely, it is unfulfilling, and it is draining. But, it is the only thing that makes life feel worth living.
The Lighthouse
For a long time, I thought of myself as a lighthouse. Standing on a rock, burning, visible for miles. Ships see the light and navigate by it. People are drawn to it from a distance. It serves a purpose. It is appreciated. But nobody wants to live in a lighthouse. It’s not “fun” and it’s not a lark.
Lighthouses are cold, isolated, wind-battered, and designed for exactly one occupant. The light is for everyone else. The darkness is for you. And the ships that pass in the night, the ones that flash their lights in greeting, they are grateful the lighthouse exists. They simply have no intention of docking.
The faithful lighthouse keeper. Essential, solitary, slightly romantic in a way that looks better in photographs than in practice. But it is not quite right. The lighthouse implies duty. A service. You burn for the ships. But that is not why I build. It’s more organic than that.
I cannot exit the lighthouse because it is not a lighthouse,
It is the Sun.
The sun burns at 27 million degrees Fahrenheit at its core. It is the most intensely hot thing in the solar system by an almost incomprehensible margin. And it exists alone, in total isolation, surrounded by the cold vacuum of space. Nothing shines on the sun. The sun shines on everything else. Nothing warms the sun. The sun is what warms everything else.
Every living thing in the system depends on it. Plants grow toward it. Planets orbit around it. Entire civilizations have organized their calendars, their agriculture, their mythologies around its light. And the sun does not receive warmth in return. It only gives.
See, the lighthouse burns for the ships. The sun burns because that is what it is. Not because someone needs it to. Not because there is a coast to protect or a vessel to guide home. The burning is the identity. The fact that everything around it benefits is a consequence, not the purpose. The sun does not shine to be useful. It shines because fusion is what happens at that temperature and that pressure, and it could not stop if it wanted to. But, if it could stop, it would die, because burning is what makes it alive.
Maybe that is closer to the truth of creative intensity. You do not build at this temperature because the world needs your output (it might, it might not). You build because you are a fusion core, and fusion cores do what fusion cores do. The energy is not a sacrifice or a strategy. It is a state of being.
And the sun does not resent the planets for being cold. It does not wish they would burn hotter. It understands, in whatever way a star understands anything, that the cold is the norm and the burning is the anomaly. Most things in the universe are cold. That is not a failure of the universe. That is just physics.
That is not tragedy. That is how solar systems work. And, it is not grit, work ethic or discipline. I wish I had those things. All I have is sheer, fusion-core will that I cannot stop, or even contain.
The Dog Does Not Resent the Other Dogs
The dog who plays basketball does not look at the other dogs in the park and think: why will you not play with me? The other dogs are doing dog things. Chasing squirrels. Napping in patches of sunlight. Living perfectly good, perfectly complete dog lives. They do not need basketball. Basketball is weird. The basketball dog is the weird one. The basketball dog knows this.
But the basketball dog is not going to stop playing.
If another dog shows up one day who actually wants to play, who is willing to run the court at full speed and learn the fundamentals and practice in the rain, that would be extraordinary. That would change everything. But the basketball dog is not going to stand at the edge of the court waiting for that dog to appear before picking up the ball. The court is where the basketball dog lives. The ball is always in the air.
So.
If you are reading this and you recognize yourself in it, the forge temperature, the laser focus, the 4 AM sessions, the projects that swallow you whole, the offers that dissolve when the heat arrives, know this: you are not broken. You are burning at a temperature that most people, wisely, kindly, with good reason, do not choose to match. That is their right. And it is probably their wisdom. It is not their nature.
But, it is your nature. And mine too. And Air Bud’s. Ball is life. Life is ball.
Which means you keep shining. The sun does not get shined upon, but it has never once stopped burning because the light only travels one direction. And you keep balling, you keep dribbling, you keep shooting. And barking.
And if you see someone else’s light from across the dark, if you recognize their temperature, do not send compliments. Do not say “I would love to help” unless you mean it the way Shackleton meant it: small wages, bitter cold, safe return doubtful. Show up. With a ball. On the court. Bark. Bark. Bark.
It’s 4am. Porch light is on. Are you knocking, or sleeping?
🏀🐕