Peter Wyro

Extinctions: A Love Story The chrysalis of love that held her safe, now pierced. All the terrible things in the world can get in now

Would you sacrifice 7 billion lives to preserve the only life that really matters?

peterwyro.substack.com/p/extinction...

Not a Narcissist and it Doesn't Matter Anyway While you’re over there looking in their window, trying to understand their interior life, you’re not sitting with your own.

Stories about therapy from a "professional patient".

open.substack.com/pub/theother...

We of Dawn 1-5: The Blood Reader Those who failed the test tried to hide their disappointment. Those who passed swelled with pride.

We of Dawn. Chapter 5, The Blood Reader.

It's how authoritarians start to engineer the process of determining who's pure and who's not.

open.substack.com/pub/peterwyr...

We of Dawn 1-4: The Claim He’s creating a class,” she said. “Those who belong and those who don’t. And he gets to decide which is which.

We of Dawn: Chapter 4. The Claim.

Virgil sees a path to authoritarian rule.

peterwyro.substack.com/p/we-of-dawn...

We of Dawn 1-1: First of Dark, Part 1 No light. No flowers. No creatures, and no song. Only the cold stars watching. Only stones growing toward an empty sky.

We of Dawn, (01-01) First of Dark, Part 1.
First of Dark scraped. First of Dark climbed. He clawed through root and soil until he emerged into the World-Above.
--
WOD is an allegorical fable about societal decay set in a historical ecological disaster.

peterwyro.substack.com/p/we-of-dawn...

We of Dawn: Prologue The seeds of warning are present at all times. Not just when their flowers bloom and their numbers spread until all the color of the meadow is theirs.

I'm writing an allegorical fable set in 1960's Australia dealing with the ecological disaster of the overpopulation of rabbits, amid a backdrop of mythology, fascism, and betrayal that will feel familiar and haunting.

Why Aren't You Celebrating Pie Friday? If you’ve always had an intact family, if you’ve never known what it’s like to feel adrift on a day when everyone else seems anchored, you might not understand the magnitude of this gift.

There’s still plenty of time to make your plans for pie Friday

open.substack.com/pub/peterwyr...

The highest negative ratings.

Pie-Friday. Everyone brings leftovers; partially empty wine bottles, turkey scraps, pie with pieces missing. Whatever would otherwise sit in your fridge getting sadder by the day. The whole point is to be with people you have no obligation

peterwyro.substack.com/p/pie-friday...

White and Privileged in America When you’re living in a country that had legal slavery for 300 years and another century of legalized discrimination, the vestiges don’t just disappear overnight.

Three memories from the 1980s live in me like obligations: the couple I didn't defend, the summer I was the minority, the friend whose name I can't remember but whose tears I still see. They don't absolve me.

links.peterwyro.com/privilege

Be Proud of Someone It will cost you nothing

Be Proud of Someone
It will cost you nothing and it might last forever.
peterwyro.substack.com/p/be-proud-o...

The Patient Earth Given enough time, given enough pressure, given enough opportunity, life finds solutions we never anticipated.

Humans were a fever, not a fatal disease. Intense but brief and survivable. The Earth has endured worse; impacts that vaporized oceans, ice ages that lasted millions of years. You were never writing the final chapter. You were barely a paragraph.
hi.switchy.io/the-patient-...

The Replacements: Sandra Wasn’t this what he’d wanted? A partner who didn’t scream? Who didn’t lie? Who didn’t make him feel like he was drowning?

The Replacements: Sandra. She gave him the bullets. She showed him the gun. She dared him to pull the trigger. He always stood there in silence, fighting back tears. And then she disappeared for four days and came back KIND and HELPFUL and UNDERSTANDING.
hi.switchy.io/replacements...

Malignant 'Something's wrong with you,

"Something's wrong with you," his mother said, and she was right but not how she meant. Sixty-five years of people learning the same lesson: make yourself small, make yourself useful, make yourself gone.

hi.switchy.io/malignant

The Memory Thief As the crowds grew, so did the weight. I carried the grief of thousands now, their shame and fear and fury carefully catalogued in the spaces between my thoughts.

I fell from the sky to observe them, but I became their dumping ground instead. A stranger who absorbed suffering until the sheer volume of human experience cracked me open. When I dissolved into desert glass, I left them with the only real gift: their own grief.

hi.switchy.io/memory-thief

All of 'These When the music stops, she throws wherever she wants. She laughs. Her husband laughs. No matter where the blade lands, everyone laughs. Even the person pierced by the blade laughs, apologizing…

"You better watch out or she'll end up playing softball," the woman whispered, as if blue onesies were gateways to becoming lesbians. Only in Oklahoma, I thought. But cycles of cruelty are everywhere, street fights, brain injuries, war trauma passed down like artifacts.
hi.switchy.io/all-stories-...

Oh. He was on the ballot.

The Memory Thief As the crowds grew, so did the weight. I carried the grief of thousands now, their shame and fear and fury carefully catalogued in the spaces between my thoughts.

I fell from the sky to observe, but I became their dumping ground. A stranger who absorbed suffering until the volume of human experience cracked me open. When I dissolved into desert glass, I left them with the only real gift: their own grief, where it always belonged.

hi.switchy.io/memory-thief

I thought that he has raised eleventy trillion dollars in tariffs?

One Lie, Two. Red Lie, Blue The lies started growing with each heated word, Red sprouted bright feathers like some righteous bird. Blue oozed and expanded like shadowy goo, Both filling the kitchen, what else could they do?

An obvious homage to the most famous doctor from my childhood, but packaged in a new rhyme and reason and lesson.

The Kindness Protocol Marcus looked at his creation, this beautiful amalgamation of hydraulics and hope, conscience and code. “Something kinder than I deserved to make.”

In honor of Halloween. It's a cautionary tale. It's a story about good intentions. It's about kindness and cruelty and all of the things that make us human. And it's about robots.

open.substack.com/pub/peterwyr...

Navigating Influence in Brand Communities Smart community management means looking at members based on their actual influence and what they contribute.

Not all influencers are equal, obviously. Implementing a framework to navigate brand influencer hierarchies isn't always intuitive.

open.substack.com/pub/growthop...

A River of Lies Truth isn’t theirs to own or control. It belongs to all of us.

This is about lies and betrayal. It will be familiar. At some point in your life, you have crossed it's path.

open.substack.com/pub/peterwyr...

Regret Stories: Thomas He settles in my chest when I see another student hover, another careful pause, another set of swollen eyes.

I'm writing a series of vignettes about regrets. What's one that you can share?

peterwyro.substack.com/p/regret-sto...

Eight Minutes and Twenty Seconds It was far more likely that we’d create our own extinction event than accept an invitation to one. And this is one that would offer no escape.

Some things end and we don’t want to share our grief with anyone. But in these final 8 minutes and twenty seconds we might find peace in the moment that we will all share together. And we get the chance to imagine, what happens next.

open.substack.com/pub/peterwyr...

The Alien Seven She's seven years old, sitting at the edge of the playground.

This is one of my favorite personal essays. It’s about alienation, in more ways than one.

open.substack.com/pub/peterwyr...

Without Jupiter, we wouldn’t exist. Gas giant saved Earth from plunging into the Sun, say scientists | BBC Sky at Night Magazine Jupiter saved Earth early in the Solar System's history, and may also explain a longstanding mystery about the formation of meteorites.

Odd. I just wrote about this.

Without Jupiter, we wouldn’t exist. Gas giant saved Earth from plunging into the Sun, say scientists www.skyatnightmagazine.com/news/jupiter...

The Importance of Your AI’s Personality Rubik Every interaction with AI is fundamentally a communication challenge, not a technical one. And communication always involves personality dynamics.

More insights about incorporating or modeling the Big 5 Personality framework with your AI System Personas:

open.substack.com/pub/growthop...

Psychological Traits for Better AI Prompting When you understand how human traits create competencies, you unlock something valuable. You can mirror that same architecture in your AI interactions.

This is about how you can better integrate psychological traits and competencies with your ai prompts for significantly improved results.

growthoptics.substack.com/p/psychologi...

Semicolons We can lose everything and discover we still have ourselves

substack.com/@peterwyro/n...