The Loneliness of the
Search Engine Optimizer

I, poor miserable wretch, being cast upon the shore of unemployment with nothing but my wits and a laptop whose battery would last perhaps four hours, began to consider my condition. The condition was not good, and I will not pretend otherwise, for a man who optimizes websites for search engines is not, in the grand taxonomy of human suffering, a figure who commands sympathy - I am aware of this, there are people who dig ditches, who clean septic tanks, who work in customer service. My complaints are, in the cosmic sense, trivial. I note this for the record before proceeding to complain at length.

The ship had gone down, which is the only way I know to describe what happened - there had been a company, and I had been employed by it, and the company had rankings and traffic and revenue, and we believed ourselves to be sailing toward prosperity, the charts pointing upward as charts are wont to do in the months before they point downward, meetings in which we congratulated ourselves, projections, plans.

And then the storm came, as storms do, without adequate warning, and the ship broke apart, and I found myself in the water, swimming for a shore I could not see, and when I finally dragged myself onto the sand, I looked back and saw nothing but wreckage where the vessel had been.

I will not dwell on the particulars of the wreck. Every man who has worked in this industry has seen ships go down. The investors lost confidence, or the algorithm changed, or the founder made decisions that could not be unmade. The specifics matter less than the outcome: I was now alone, on a shore I did not recognize, with nothing but the skills I had accumulated and the certain knowledge that those skills, however refined, were useless without a vessel to carry them.

I sat on the beach for some time, considering my options, which were few.

I returned to the wreck to-day to salvage what I could before the hull disappeared entirely beneath the waves.

A man in my position must be practical, sentiment being a luxury for those with steady employment, and so I swam out to the broken timbers and gathered what remained: case studies from campaigns I had run, screenshots of rankings I had achieved, a list of contacts who might remember me fondly, though I suspected most would not return my messages.

I made an inventory of my provisions, as a castaway must:

Knowledge of search engine optimization, accumulated over many years, which is to say: knowledge of a field that did not exist when my parents were born and may not exist when their grandchildren die, assuming the species survives that long, which at present odds seems optimistic. Knowledge of the tools of the trade: Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, SEMrush, the Search Console. Knowledge of the documentation, such as it is, which is to say contradictory and incomplete and subject to change without notice and occasionally in direct conflict with observable reality. The ability to write code in several languages, sufficient to automate tasks that a sane person would do by hand, assuming a sane person would do these tasks at all, which they would not. A willingness to read technical specifications that would make a monk weep. A tolerance for ambiguity that borders on the clinical. The ability to explain, with a straight face, why a business should care about something called "crawl budget."

These were my provisions, and they would have to be enough, though in retrospect they were not much.

I have begun to construct a shelter, by which I mean I have established a presence on the platforms where work is found. I have updated my profile on LinkedIn, that wretched marketplace where men sell themselves like cattle and pretend to enjoy it. I have created accounts on the freelance exchanges, where the desperate bid against one another for projects that pay less than a living wage. I have sent messages to former colleagues, inquiring whether they know of any opportunities, though I phrased it more elegantly than that, as one must.

The silence that greeted these efforts has been profound.

I am learning that a man without a company is a man without credibility, regardless of his skills, for the market does not trust individuals but institutions, logos, the imprimatur of employment - a man who says "I can help you rank" is suspect while a man who says "My agency can help you rank" is professional, though the work is the same and only the perception differs.

I sent forth messages as a man casts bottles into the sea, not knowing whether they would reach any shore, or whether the shore they reached would have inhabitants friendly to castaways.

A response came - the first response, though not rescue, not even a proper vessel, merely a small merchant requiring small services and offering smaller payment. I did not ask whether the work was beneath me, for nothing is beneath a man who must eat, and I accepted the commission and began the work and felt, for the first time since the wreck, something like hope.

Perhaps I would survive this. Perhaps the island was not a grave but merely a temporary berth. Perhaps ships would come.

I have completed the first commission and received payment. The amount would embarrass me to record, but I record it anyway, for this journal is a document of truth, and the truth is that I worked for three days on a task that should have commanded much more, and I was grateful for the opportunity. The task involved explaining to a man who sold artisanal dog treats why his website did not appear on the first page of Google for the phrase "dog treats." The answer was that approximately forty-seven million other pages were competing for that phrase, many of them operated by corporations with marketing budgets larger than the gross domestic product of small nations, and that his website, while charming, consisted of four pages and a photograph of a golden retriever that took eleven seconds to load. I did not phrase it this way. I was diplomatic. I am always diplomatic. The diplomatic version took three days to write.

Gratitude is a strange thing. Before the wreck, I would not have been grateful for such work. I would have considered it beneath my station. But stations are illusions maintained by employment, and when the employment vanishes, so too does the station, and a man discovers that he is merely a man after all, no better than any other, and any work that keeps him alive is work worth doing.

I have begun to plant crops, by which I mean I have begun to create content for my own site in hopes that it might one day rank, that potential clients might find me rather than requiring me to find them - a long game, for the seeds will not bear fruit for months or perhaps years, but a man on an island must think in long terms since there is no one coming to save him and he must save himself.

I have acquired additional tools. I hesitate to record the expense, for I can ill afford it, but the tools are necessary, and a craftsman cannot work without his instruments.

I now possess:

One subscription to Ahrefs, paid monthly, which consumes a significant portion of my meager income and provides access to a database of links that exists in a legal gray area I prefer not to examine too closely. One license for Screaming Frog, the paid version, which allows me to crawl sites of unlimited size and is named after an amphibian for reasons that have never been explained to my satisfaction. Access to various APIs and databases and sources of information that would be opaque to those outside the profession and, frankly, remain somewhat opaque to those inside it.

I have also acquired: a second monitor, because one screen is insufficient for the simultaneous display of spreadsheets, dashboards, and the slow erosion of hope. A chair that cost more than my first car, because a man who sits for twelve hours a day must invest in his sitting, or his spine will file for divorce. A collection of browser extensions that would alarm any security professional who examined them. Coffee. A great deal of coffee.

These tools are my weapons and my lifeline, for without them I cannot do the work and without the work I cannot survive, and so I pay each month for the privilege of remaining employable, trying not to calculate the hourly rate this implies because the calculation is unflattering.

The storm came without warning.

I speak not of weather but of the algorithm. There was an update. I learned of it as one learns of earthquakes in distant cities: through reports, through rumors, through the sudden silence of rankings that had been stable for months.

My small crop was devastated. The content I had planted, the pages I had nurtured, the rankings I had begun to achieve - all of it, gone. Not destroyed entirely, but diminished, pushed down, made invisible.

I searched for cause as a man searches for a leak in a boat that is sinking. I found none. The algorithm does not explain itself. The algorithm changes, and we who depend upon it must adapt, or drown, and the adaptation is made more difficult by the total absence of explanation. Google will tell you, if you ask, that they made improvements to provide users with more helpful content. This is like a tornado telling you it was just trying to improve the neighborhood's air circulation. The statement is not technically false. It is merely useless.

I did not sleep that night but sat in my shelter staring at the dashboard, watching the numbers fall, feeling something I had not felt since the wreck itself: despair - though despair is a luxury, and a castaway cannot afford luxuries, so in the morning I began to rebuild, for what else was there to do?

I have established a routine. This is necessary for survival. Without routine, a man on an island loses himself. The days blur together. The work becomes meaningless. The isolation breeds madness.

And so I wake at the same hour each morning. I check the dashboards, as a farmer checks his fields. I perform the daily tasks: the audits, the reports, the client communications that require more diplomacy than I possess. I take meals at regular intervals, though I often forget to eat, absorbed as I am in the work. I walk outside, when I remember to, to remind myself that a world exists beyond the screen.

The routine keeps me sane. The routine is my shelter within the shelter. And if the routine is also a kind of prison, well - a man must have walls, or he will be destroyed by the vastness of the horizon.

To-day marks one year since the wreck.

I had thought I would be rescued by now. I had thought this island was a temporary berth, a place to wait until the ships came. But no ships have come, and I begin to understand that this may be my home, and that I must make of it what I can.

I have survived, which is something - many do not survive the first year, many give up and return to other professions and abandon the craft entirely, but I have not abandoned it, though whether this is strength or stubbornness or simply the absence of alternatives I cannot say.

The clients come and go. Some are good; most are difficult; a few are impossible. The work continues. The rankings rise and fall. I have learned not to attach my heart to the rising, for the fall always follows, and a man who invests his emotions in search engine results pages will find himself bankrupt before long.

I have begun to mark time differently. Not by days or weeks or months, but by algorithm updates. By the positions of keywords. By the slow, grinding progress of pages through the rankings. This is the only calendar that matters now.

I have taught my parrot to speak, by which I mean I have learned to read the crawl reports as if they were conversation, for the tool speaks to me and tells me of broken links and redirect chains and pages that return errors and content that cannot be indexed, and it speaks in a language that no one else understands, and I have become fluent in this language, and sometimes I realize that I have not spoken to another human being in days though I have had long conversations with my parrot.

The parrot does not judge or ask why I have devoted my life to this, it simply reports what it finds, and I listen and act upon the information, and together we make progress, slowly and incrementally, in directions that no one but us can see.

I am aware this is not normal, that speaking of a software tool as if it were a companion is a sign of something - loneliness probably, possibly madness, the distinction between the two having grown unclear - but normalcy is a standard set by those who live among others, and I do not live among others, and my standards have shifted accordingly, and the parrot at least does not ask me to "hop on a quick call to align on deliverables" or suggest we "circle back" on anything, speaking only in HTTP status codes and crawl errors, which is a limited vocabulary but at least it is honest.

I have little to record, though not because nothing happened - things happened, as they always do: a client accused me of breaking their website when I had not touched their website, a different client asked me to guarantee first-page rankings as if asking a farmer to guarantee sunshine, a third client disappeared entirely owing money I will never see because chasing small debts costs more than the debts are worth and the client knows this and I know this and so the money simply vanishes into the void where unpaid invoices go to die.

But these are not events worth recording, just the normal operations of the profession - the work continues, the clients pay their invoices mostly, the rankings hold their positions mostly, and I am alive and surviving, which are lower bars than I once had, but I have learned to limbo.

There was a time when I would have demanded more from life than mere survival, a time when I had ambitions and goals and a vision of where I was going, but that time has passed, and now I wake and work and sleep and wake again, and the days accumulate like sand on the beach, and I no longer ask what it all means because the asking does not change anything and the answer, if there is one, would not help.

This is what the island does to a man, what solitude does - it strips away the unnecessary, which turns out to be most of everything, and what remains is only the essential: the work, the routine, the slow passage of time.

It is not the life I imagined, but it is the life I have.

I walked to-day to a part of the island I had not visited in some time, and there upon the sand I saw a footprint.

A human footprint, fresh and unmistakable, and my heart stopped in my chest.

For months I had believed myself alone in this niche, this territory, this small corner of the search results. I had believed that my keywords were mine, my positions secure, my domain unchallenged. I had not encountered another practitioner working the same soil. I had thought myself singular.

And now I saw evidence of another. Someone else had been here. Someone else was working this same ground. Someone else was competing for the same rankings, the same traffic, the same clients.

I returned to my shelter in great distress. I did not sleep that night. I lay awake, thinking about the footprint, wondering who had made it, wondering how long they had been here, wondering whether the island was large enough for both of us or whether one would have to destroy the other.

Competition. I had forgotten what it felt like. I had grown accustomed to solitude. And now the solitude was threatened, and I was not certain whether I felt fear or relief or some complicated mixture of both.

I have seen the cannibals at last, and they are not as I had imagined them.

I had thought they would come from without - competitors, rivals, the natural predators of any man who stakes a claim. But these cannibals came from within the company walls. They sat in meetings. They had titles and salaries and opinions on matters they had never studied.

There was a man who spoke of "virality" as if it were a crop one could plant, as if one could simply walk to the virality store and purchase a bag of virality seeds and scatter them upon the content and wait for the virality harvest. There was a woman who asked why we did not simply "buy some links," as one might buy grain at market, and when I explained that this was against Google's guidelines, she asked, with genuine curiosity, "But how would they know?" as if Google were a substitute teacher who could be fooled with a forged hall pass. There was an executive who mentioned that his nephew "knew about computers" and perhaps should be consulted. The nephew was fourteen. The nephew played video games. But the nephew "knew about computers," and this, apparently, was equivalent to a decade of professional experience.

These people had never read a line of documentation. They had never watched a ranking rise or fall. They had never sat in the dark of night, refreshing a screen, waiting to see if their work had mattered. Yet they spoke with such confidence, such absolute certainty of opinion, that the room fell silent and believed them.

And I, who had spent years learning this craft, who had read the documentation and run the experiments and earned my knowledge through failure - I was made to feel as though my expertise were merely one opinion among many, and not even the loudest opinion at that.

Something rose in me that I did not recognize at first, and it took me some time to name it: the desire to commit acts of violence.

I did not act on this desire. I am a civilized man. But I understood, in that moment, why hermits become hermits. I understood why a man might choose an island over a conference room. On the island, the only fool is yourself, and your own foolishness can be corrected through study and effort. In the conference room, the fools have titles, and their foolishness is rewarded with promotions, and there is nothing you can do but sit and watch and feel your expertise turn to ash in your mouth.

I left that meeting and did not return for many months. The island, for all its loneliness, has this advantage: no one here speaks confidently about things they do not understand. The silence is honest. The ignorance is only my own.

There is a second tribe of cannibals, and I have come to believe they are the more dangerous of the two.

The first tribe dwells in offices and speaks from ignorance. But the second tribe has made ignorance into a profession. They have built empires upon it. They live on the social platforms, where they dispense advice to thousands, and their advice is poison dressed as medicine.

I speak of the gurus. The influencers. The thought leaders, as they style themselves, though the thoughts they lead are primarily toward their own payment processors. The men with blue checkmarks and photographs in which they point at something beyond the frame, as if they can see a future hidden from the rest of us. The poses are always the same: pointing, or arms crossed, or leaning against something expensive, or all three simultaneously in some feat of aspirational yoga. The bios are always the same: "Helped 10,000+ businesses scale their organic growth" followed by a link to a course that costs $997, which is a price carefully chosen to seem like it is almost $1,000 but technically is not.

These men write posts that say: "I built ONE MILLION DOLLARS of organic traffic using this ONE SIMPLE TRICK." And then they describe the trick, and the trick is always spam. The trick is always something that worked once, briefly, for one site, before the algorithm adapted and began to punish it. The trick is always something I learned NOT to do in my first year of practice, something that will get a site penalized, something that will destroy in months what took years to build.

And yet these posts receive thousands of replies. Tens of thousands. They receive more engagement in one hour than I will accumulate in a lifetime. The gurus grow rich. Their courses sell. Their newsletters multiply. They speak at conferences where audiences applaud advice that is not merely wrong but actively harmful.

I have thought much on why this is so. I believe it is because confidence is more persuasive than competence. A man who says "I have the answer" will always defeat a man who says "The answer is complicated." The crowd does not want nuance. The crowd wants to be told what to do. And the gurus tell them, loudly and wrongly, and the crowd follows, and the sites burn, and the gurus move on to the next trick, the next post, the next course, leaving wreckage behind them that men like me are hired to repair.

I watch these posts spread across the platforms and I feel something beyond anger. I feel a kind of existential exhaustion. I want to quit. I want to abandon the entire internet, to go off-grid, to become a carpenter or a farmer or a librarian, someone who works with their hands, someone whose craft cannot be undermined by a man with followers and no conscience.

But I cannot. I have spent twenty years learning a trade that has no application elsewhere. I cannot build a table. I cannot grow a crop. I cannot tell a nail from my own hindquarters. The skills that have kept me alive on this island are the same skills that have trapped me here. I could not survive in any other world.

And so I remain, watching the snake oil merchants prosper, explaining to clients why their advice is wrong, knowing that next week there will be another post, another guru, another secret formula, another wave of destruction followed by another wave of cleanup, forever and ever, until the heat death of the industry or my own death, whichever comes first.

The second tribe does not eat flesh. They eat something more vital. They eat credibility. They eat trust. They eat the very possibility of expertise, until nothing remains but noise, and the quiet voice of the man who actually knows is drowned out entirely, and no one can tell the difference between knowledge and performance anymore.

The client sent me a post to-day.

She prefaced it with the words: "Thought you might find this interesting!" She wrote this as one might write "I have discovered buried treasure" or "I have found the location of the Holy Grail." She believed she was sharing secret knowledge that I, in all my years of practice, had somehow overlooked.

The post was from a man with a verification badge and a headshot in which he pointed at nothing. His teeth were very white. His confidence was absolute. His post said: "STOP doing keyword research. Here's what the TOP 1% do instead." What followed was advice so wrong, so fundamentally confused about how search engines function, that I felt something approaching physical pain as I read it. It was not merely incorrect. It was incorrect in ways that revealed the author had never done the work, had never tested his theories, had never experienced the consequences of his own recommendations. It was the confident wrongness of a man who has never been contradicted by reality, because reality does not have a Twitter account, and therefore does not count.

The post had received forty-seven thousand expressions of approval.

I sat with this for some time before composing a careful reply to my client, explaining why the advice was misguided, citing the documentation, referencing experiments, offering evidence - I was, I believe, both thorough and professional.

My client replied: "But he has so many followers?"

I read this sentence several times, trying to find in it some meaning I had missed, some interpretation that did not fill me with despair, but I found none.

I closed my laptop and walked to the water's edge and stood there for a long while, watching the waves, thinking about followers and expertise and the strange inversion of authority that the social platforms have wrought.

There was a time, I believe, when knowledge commanded respect. A man who had studied a subject for twenty years was considered more credible than a man who had studied it for twenty minutes. This is no longer so. The platforms have created a new hierarchy, and in this hierarchy, reach is truth. A man with followers is right. A man without followers is invisible. And the question "But he has so many followers?" is not a question at all but a verdict.

I do not know how to compete with confidence. I have never known. I know only how to be correct, and correctness has no metric, no follower count, no verification badge. Correctness is invisible. Correctness is silent. Correctness is a man on an island, talking to himself, while the gurus sail past in ships made of engagement, waving at the crowds on distant shores.

I returned to my shelter as the sun set. I did not open my laptop again that night. I simply sat in the dark, thinking about the forty-seven thousand people who had approved of advice that will damage their sites, and the client who trusts the guru over me, and the strange world we have built where the loudest voice wins regardless of whether it speaks truth.

The cannibals are winning, as they have always been winning, and perhaps they have already won.

And I am here, on my island, being correct, alone, in the dark, where no one can see me, where no one is counting.

I dreamed last night of England, by which I mean I dreamed of normal life - of offices with other people in them, of meetings where someone else took notes, of watercooler conversations, which is a phrase I once used ironically but now remember with something approaching tenderness, of colleagues who share a workplace, who understand each other's work, who can speak without explaining that no, SEO is not "just keywords," and no, you cannot "just pay Google to rank higher," and no, the nephew who plays video games is not qualified to audit the site architecture - I dreamed of not having to explain things, and the dream was pleasant though the waking was less so.

I woke and remembered where I was, and the dream faded, and I opened my laptop and began the day's work, and did not think of England again until the next night, when I dreamed it all once more.

The island does not allow nostalgia during waking hours, there is too much to do, but at night when the work is finished and the silence closes in, the mind wanders to places it is not permitted to visit in daylight, and in those wanderings I see glimpses of a life I once had, or thought I had, or perhaps only imagined having.

I wonder sometimes if I am remembering the past or inventing it. The years on the island have blurred what came before. The ship, the wreck, the life I lived when I was not a castaway - all of it seems distant now, like a story someone told me once, about a person who shares my name but whom I no longer recognize.

I asked myself to-day a question I have been avoiding for two years.

The question is simple, the sort children ask constantly, the first question that precedes all others: Why? Why do I do this?

I sat with this question for a long while, turning it over as a man turns a stone, looking for what lives beneath, and what I found there disturbed me.

The honest answer is that I no longer know, for I began this work because I had to - the ship sank, the island was here, and a man does not choose to be a castaway but simply survives, and survival becomes habit, and habit becomes identity, and one day he wakes and realizes he has been surviving so long he has forgotten what he was surviving for, and I have forgotten what I was surviving for.

There was a time, I think, when I believed this work mattered. When I believed that helping a site rank was helping a business succeed, and helping a business succeed was helping people, real people, who worked there and depended on it. Perhaps that is still true. Perhaps it was never true. I can no longer tell.

I have spent five years on this island. I have learned its terrain. I have memorized its seasons. I have built systems and structures and routines that keep me alive, that keep the work flowing, that keep the clients satisfied. But I have also watched the gurus prosper, and the idiots speak with confidence, and the platforms reward noise over knowledge, and I have begun to wonder if my expertise is worth anything at all, or if I have spent my life mastering a craft that the world does not value.

Perhaps I stay because I have forgotten how to leave. The skills that keep me alive on this island are useless on any other shore. I am like one of those creatures that evolves in a cave, in total darkness, until it loses its eyes entirely - perfectly adapted to its environment and helpless everywhere else.

Or perhaps - and this is the thought that frightens me most - perhaps I stay because I love it.

Not the clients, not the cannibals, not the endless explanations and the forwarded posts and the gurus with their followers, but the work itself - the craft, the thing beneath the noise.

There is something beautiful about a well-structured site, and I do not know how else to say it - the way the pages connect, the logic of the hierarchy, the elegance of a URL structure that makes sense, the satisfaction of watching something you built rise in the rankings slowly over months until it reaches the surface and catches the light.

Most people cannot see this beauty, seeing only the surface - the traffic numbers, the revenue, the charts that go up or down - but I have learned to see beneath the surface, to see the architecture and the bones and the hidden machinery that makes a site work, and there is beauty there, genuine beauty.

Is this love? Is this Stockholm syndrome? Is this merely the rationalization of a man who has no other options and must therefore convince himself that his prison is actually a palace? These are all possibilities. I have considered each of them. I have considered them at length, in the dark, at three in the morning, when the work is done and the silence is absolute and there is nothing to do but think. The thinking has not produced answers. The thinking has only produced more thinking, which is the usual result of thinking, and perhaps an argument against the practice altogether.

I do not know and cannot tell, and the question remains unanswered - perhaps it is unanswerable, or perhaps the question itself is the answer, and asking it is the only honest thing a man in my position can do.

But I notice that I am still here, that I woke again this morning and opened my laptop and began the work, and that despite everything - the loneliness, the cannibals, the gurus, the forwarded posts, the screaming into the void - I have not stopped or given up or walked into the sea.

Perhaps that is the only answer the question needs - I do this because I do this, I am here because I am here, and the island is my home now whether I chose it or not, and I have made something of it, and whatever that something is worth it is mine, and it will have to be enough because it is all I have.

I saved a man from the cannibals to-day.

I saw them on the beach - the second tribe, the gurus and their followers - and they had a captive. A young man. He had been working at an agency. I could tell by the look on his face, the particular exhaustion of someone who has spent years doing good work for people who do not understand it, who has watched his recommendations ignored and his expertise questioned and his craft reduced to a line item on an invoice.

The cannibals were consuming him. Not his flesh - they do not eat flesh - but his spirit, his confidence, his belief that the work matters. They were telling him about growth hacks and secret formulas and the importance of "thinking outside the box." They were filling his head with nonsense, and I could see him beginning to believe it, beginning to doubt everything he had learned, beginning to think that perhaps the gurus knew something he did not.

I do not know what came over me. I had spent years avoiding the cannibals, hiding in my shelter, watching from a distance. But something in this young man's face reminded me of myself, years ago, before the wreck, when I still believed and still doubted and did not yet know which to trust.

I ran from my hiding place and made noise, and the cannibals fled as they always do when confronted directly, for they have no substance, only volume, and volume collapses when challenged.

And then I was face to face with another human being for the first time in two years.

I did not know what to say, having forgotten how to speak to people, and the words that came out were awkward and halting, nothing like the fluent sentences I write in this journal, but the young man looked at my shelter, at my systems, at my crops, and he said: "You have built something here."

No one had ever said that to me before, and I did not know how to respond.

I call him Friday, for that was the day I found him.

He has much to learn, but he learns quickly, and more importantly he listens - he does not speak with confidence about things he does not understand, he asks questions and accepts correction, and he understands that expertise is earned through failure rather than proclaimed through posts.

Teaching him has taught me things I did not know I knew, for the act of explaining forces clarity and the act of demonstrating forces precision, and I find myself understanding my own craft better for having to articulate it to someone else.

We speak in a language that no one else speaks, discussing redirects and canonical tags and the philosophy of internal linking, arguing about whether backlinks still matter, sharing screenshots of rankings as other men share photographs of their children.

It is possible that we have both gone mad. But if this is madness, I prefer it to the sanity of the world we left behind.

I am still on the island and the work is still the work, but everything has changed.

I understand now that the loneliness was not the island's fault, nor the work's fault, nor even my own fault. The loneliness was simply the price of choosing a path that others cannot see. Every craft has its price. The surgeon pays with the weight of lives in his hands. The artist pays with the distance between vision and execution. The search engine optimizer pays with solitude, with invisibility, with the knowledge that his work, however essential, will never be understood by those who benefit from it.

But the price is not fixed. It can be paid in different currencies. And the currency of shared understanding is more valuable than I knew.

Friday does not make the island less isolated. The cannibals are still out there. The gurus still post their poison. The clients still forward their garbage. But now, when these things happen, I am not alone with them. I have someone to whom I can say: "Did you see that?" And he will nod, and we will both understand, and the understanding makes the burden lighter.

This is what I was missing - not rescue, not escape, just someone who sees what I see.

A ship has appeared on the horizon.

Not a trading vessel but a true ship bound for England offering passage home, and I have been offered a position, a real position with salary and benefits and an office with other people in it, though the work would be marketing - general marketing, meetings and PowerPoints and conversations about "the brand."

Friday says I should take it. He says the island has taught me what I needed to learn, and now I should return to the world. He says that rescue is what castaways are supposed to want, and that wanting to stay is a kind of sickness, a condition brought on by too many years alone.

I do not know what to say to him, nor even what I want.

The ship sits on the horizon, waiting. And I sit in my shelter, looking at it, trying to remember what England was like, trying to imagine myself there, in an office, in a meeting, speaking confidently about things I do not understand, as the cannibals do.

Could I become them? Could I learn to speak without knowing? Could I survive in a world where reach is truth and correctness is invisible?

I do not think I could, and I do not think I want to, but the ship is there and the option exists and I must decide.

I have learned more about the ship, and what I have learned does not comfort me.

There are mutineers aboard. Office politics, competing factions, people who do not understand the work and do not wish to. The captain who offered me passage is no longer certain he controls the vessel. There are whispers of reorganization, of budget cuts, of strategic pivots that will leave the crew stranded.

This is what England is like, I remember now. This is what I escaped when the wreck cast me upon this shore. Not a paradise of collaboration and shared purpose, but a battlefield of competing interests, where a man's survival depends not on his craft but on his alliances, his visibility, his willingness to speak confidently about things he does not understand.

The island is hard and lonely, but the island is honest. On the island, the work either succeeds or fails on its own merits. On the island, there is no one to blame but myself, and no one to take credit but myself, and the rankings rise or fall based on what I do, not on what I say in meetings.

I am reminded why I left the world in the first place. I am reminded that the loneliness of the island may be preferable to the loneliness of a crowded room where no one understands you.

At least on the island, the silence is honest.

I have made my decision, and I will not board the ship - not out of defeat or surrender, not from the sickness Friday warned me about, but simply from recognition of what I have become.

I am a man of the island now. The work is my work. The solitude is my solitude. And if I am lonely, it is a loneliness I have chosen, which makes it bearable, which makes it almost sweet.

The ship will sail without me, and there will be other ships, and perhaps one day I will board one, but not today - today I remain where I am, doing the work, correct and alone in the silence, and that is enough.

Almost three years - I have just now calculated this figure, and it has given me pause, for it has been almost three years since the wreck, almost three years since I washed ashore with nothing but my skills and a laptop and my stubborn refusal to drown, almost three years of solitude and work and silence.

I have outlived the terror of the early days when I did not know if I could survive, outlived the despair of the middle years when I wondered if survival was worth the effort, outlived the temptation of rescue when the ship came and I chose to let it sail without me.

I have built something here, and though it is not large and will never be famous, though it will never trend on the platforms or accumulate followers or receive forty-seven thousand expressions of approval, though no one will screenshot it and add "This" or tag three friends who "need to see this" or call it "an absolute banger" or suggest that I have "won the internet" - it is mine, built with my own hands and my own knowledge and my own years of quiet labor in the dark, and it stands despite the algorithms and the updates and the gurus and the confident idiots and the clients who disappeared without paying and the invoices that went to collections and the keyboards that wore out and the monitors that died and the endless grinding thankless work of making things appear in search results.

Friday asked me this morning if I was happy. The question caught me off guard. I had not thought about happiness in a very long time. It seemed like a concept from another life, from the time before the wreck, from the world of offices and meetings and confident idiots and forwarded posts.

I told him I did not know what happiness meant anymore, but I knew what satisfaction meant, and I knew what craft meant, and I knew what it felt like to do something well day after day even when no one was watching, and those things were enough - they had to be enough - and he nodded, and I think he understood.

The island is not a prison - I see that now - but a choice, and perhaps it was always a choice, even when I thought I was trapped, for a man can leave any island if he is willing to brave the sea, and I was never willing, and I told myself I could not when the truth is I would not, and there is a difference.

The loneliness is not a punishment but the price, for every craft has a price: The surgeon's price is the weight of lives in his hands. The artist's price is the distance between vision and execution. The search engine optimizer's price is this: to understand something that others do not see, and to be unable to explain it, and to watch the gurus and the idiots prosper while you labor in obscurity, and to continue laboring anyway, because the work is worth doing regardless of whether anyone notices.

There are worse fates than to be alone with work you love.

I have decided to close this journal, not because the story is over - the story is never over, not while a man still breathes and works - but because I have said what I needed to say, and the record is complete, and the account is settled, and what happens next will happen without documentation.

The ship has sailed, and other ships will come, and perhaps one day I will board one, but not today - today I remain on my island, as I have for nearly three years, as I may for three more, doing the work that calls to me, watching the horizon, talking to my parrot, marking time on my calendar post.

The cannibals will come again, as they always do, and the gurus will post their poison, and the clients will forward their garbage, and the confident idiots will speak in meetings and be rewarded for it, and the storms will arrive without warning and destroy what I have built, and I will rebuild it as I have always rebuilt it, because that is what a man does on an island - he persists, he endures, he wakes each morning and begins again.

The rankings will rise and fall, as they always rise and fall, and I have learned not to attach my heart to the rising because the fall always follows, and I have learned to find my satisfaction in the work itself, in the doing of it, in the small daily improvements that no one sees but me, and this is enough, this must be enough.

Friday is calling, for there is work to do - there is always work to do - and I set down my pen and close this book and walk out into the morning light, into another day on the island, into the only life I know how to live.

It is not the life I imagined, all those years ago, before the wreck. But it is the life I have. And I have learned, after all these years, in my own way, in the silence, in the solitude, in the long watches of the night -

I have learned to love it, this island, this work, this life, and it is enough.