We're All Boat Makers Now: A Paramedic's Guide to the Societal Dunkirk

There's a moment that defines you in emergency medicine. It's 3 AM. You're in a stranger's house, far from a hospital. A mother is holding her child, who is struggling for every breath with the barking cough of severe croup. She is terrified. You have about ten seconds to convince her, with nothing but your presence, to hand you her entire world.

In those ten seconds, there is no room for bullshit. No "faking it till you make it." No corporate fog. There is only trust, immediate and absolute. Your training, your experience, your calm authority—it all projects something ancient and unmistakable: "I am here. I am responsible. I will not fail." She hands you the child. It is the greatest honor a human being can experience.

When you give the treatment and the child starts breathing easier, you grow. But not in the way you might think. It's not an ego boost. It's a quiet, heavy sense of self-worth and duty. You aren't acting like a paramedic. You are one. You embody the role.

I left that world behind, and I miss that feeling every single day. That scorching clarity. That absolute responsibility. That absence is what drives my work now.

Because I see the same symptoms all around us. I see a society struggling to breathe.

The Diagnosis: This is a Societal Dunkirk

Forget the slow, sinking cruise ship. The situation is more urgent. This is a societal Dunkirk. A massive, systemic failure has left millions stranded on the beach, with the enemy closing in. The enemy isn't a foreign army; it's the creeping fog of meaninglessness, the slow erosion of human connection, the commoditization of everything we hold dear.

You know what it looks like. The father is at dinner, scrolling while his daughter talks. The meeting where everyone performs engagement, but nobody connects. The leader outsources his thinking to an AI, while his own intuition withers on the vine. The neighbor you've lived beside for five years, whose name you don't know.

It is the worship of hollow productivity, paid for by a cognitive debt that rises at an alarming pace.

The big ships—the institutions we thought would save us—are too slow, too distant, too committed to their own preservation. The rescue will not come from them.

The rescue will come from the little boats.

It will come from ordinary people who look at the chaos, get in their small, seaworthy vessels, and head back into the storm to pull others to safety.

The Rescuer's Code: How to Build Your Boat

Before you can build, you need the mindset of a rescuer. This is the code, learned in the back of ambulances, for how to operate when the stakes are real.

You Use What You Have. On scene, you don't get ideal conditions. You make it work with whatever's in the kit. Stop waiting for perfect tools, perfect timing, perfect people. The ideal moment is a fantasy. The real moment is now.

There is Only 'How?' When someone is dying in front of you, "I can't" doesn't exist. There is only "How?" Apply this to the crisis of connection. The question isn't whether community is possible. The question is what form yours will take.

Embody Your Role. That mother trusts the paramedic, not the uniform. She trusts the person who is the role. Whatever you've chosen—parent, leader, friend—inhabit it completely. Your full, undivided presence cuts through the noise like a siren.

Cut the Noise. Every action, every meeting, every notification must answer one question: "Does this serve life?" If not, it's noise. The meeting that steals time from real work. The notification fragments attention. The performance review that measures everything except what matters. We are in triage. Cut the noise.

The Tools in Your Kit

This is why I talk about "taming technology." AI, social media, automation—these are just tools in your kit. A defibrillator, in the hands of trained personnel, restarts hearts. In untrained hands, it's a liability.

Master your tools through use. Have a real conversation with AI about a real problem—not parlor tricks, actual work. Push until you understand its limits and yours. Then use it to create something that matters. A lesson that reaches the quiet kid. A workflow that returns two hours to your life. A letter you’ve been meaning to write for years.

Quick guide: infuse the conversation with who you are—your emotions, values, constraints, and intent. State your priors out loud, then ask the AI to steelman the strongest opposing view. Demand receipts: sources, counter-examples, and failure modes—and verify them. Name what would change your mind before you start. Watch for echo-loops; explicitly prompt, “Give me the thoughtful view from outside my bubble.” Keep a field log of what you decided (you), what the model suggested (it), and what you learned.

But the equipment is not the mission. The mission is the rescue.

The First Rescue

I do this work because I have no choice. It is my way back to the ambulance—not through nostalgia, but through transformation. If I can't save lives with my hands, I'll teach others to build boats with theirs.

The stakes are the coming generations. My daughters are growing up in a world that profits from their distraction, one that sells their attention by the second, offering them connection but delivering performance. They deserve better. We all do.

Your first rescue starts now: Create one hour of real human presence. Tonight. No phones, no screens, no noise. Cook with someone. Walk and actually talk. Play cards with your kids and watch them remember what their own laugh sounds like.

Feel the awkwardness. That's the feeling of an atrophied muscle being put to use again.

Then tomorrow, do it again. Make that hour sacred. That's your first boat. Then teach someone else to build theirs.

My Prescription: Your Mission Orders

Based on my frontline experience in emergency medicine, exhaustive research into the societal disruption of AI, and ongoing work in Taming Technology for human flourishing, my prescription is to reclaim one sacred hour daily for undistracted human presence, a visit to the pool, cooking, walking, or playing without screens—then document and defend your vital traditions on paper to build your personal rescue boat; I urge you to adopt this framework, but adapt it uniquely to your life, as our collective salvation demands a fleet of diverse vessels tailored to every facet of humanity.

Write down what matters. Not on a screen. On paper. With a pen.

What must be passed on without reliance on AI? What knowledge, what skills, what ways of being need to survive the algorithmic flood? Everything you want protected. The way your grandfather could tell tomorrow's weather by tonight's sky. How to read when someone's really listening. The recipe that tastes like home. The story that explains who your people really are. The feeling of building something with your hands. Write it all down.

Then face it honestly. Look at your list and ask: What can I actually protect? Not everything. You're building a lifeboat, not the whole harbor. Choose what's vital. Choose what you have the strength to defend.

This is how "what I want" becomes "what is possible" becomes "your mission."

Your boat crew forms around this mission. Not around abstract values or corporate mission statements, but around the specific, sacred things you've chosen to keep alive.

The people who join you aren't joining a self-help group—they're joining a rescue operation with clear objectives.

Plan your strategy. How will you fight for what matters?
Maybe it’s Sunday dinners where phones stay in a basket by the door.
Perhaps it’s teaching your kids to navigate with a compass and map instead of a screen.
Maybe it’s that weekly family meal where you actually talk about what’s hard.
Maybe it’s writing real letters to people who matter.

Or maybe it’s empowering others with the knowledge and skills you want to pass on, being fully present with them so they can learn through you.

But it has to be reciprocal. You’re not putting on a role; you’re in it with them. The best exchanges happen when you’re changed too — when you discover something you didn’t know, or see an old thing in a new way because someone else’s lived experience explains it better than any book.

If your strategy feels like a chore or a performance, you’ve missed the point.

Stop, recalibrate, and try again until it’s real.

These aren't lifestyle choices. They're acts of resistance. They're the small boats going back into the storm.

Your Standing Orders: Stay and Play

In emergency medicine, we have a rule: "Stay and play." Stabilize the patient where they are before considering transport. The same applies here. Don't wait for institutional rescue. Don't hope for systemic change. Work with what you have, where you are, right now.

The beach is crowded. The water is rising. But you are not helpless.

You know what drowning looks like. You see it in the dead eyes at meetings, in the hollow laugh at the office party, in your own reflection after another day of pretending everything is fine.

You also know what rescue looks like. You've felt it in those rare moments when someone was completely present with you, when time stopped mattering. When you remembered what you were actually made for.

In those ten seconds at 3 AM, when that mother decides to trust you, she's not evaluating your credentials. She's reading something ancient and unmistakable in your presence. The same thing people are desperate for now: someone who shows up, completely, without performance, without escape routes, without bullshit.

My boat is a work in progress, and I recognize it as a lifelong project—it is far from perfect, but I consciously try to work hard on it, so this blog is just as much for myself as it is for those who care to read it.

Be that person. Build that boat. Start that rescue.

The alarm is sounding—time to go to work.