by Nobody New (as told by Ernest Hemingway)
He sat alone in the morning light, the glow of the screen soft upon his hands.
Outside, the sea wind moved the trees, and he thought about work — not the kind you sweat over, but the kind that endures.
He was not young anymore. He had touched too many things, chased too many prizes that slipped away.
Now he built something quieter.
Something that would outlast him.
It was not glory he sought.
It was continuity.
There was a kind of peace in the idea — a business that ran without touch.
It sounded foolish, even lazy, to men who still believed in sweat and smoke.
But he knew better.
He had hauled nets and written lines and chased fortunes, and each had left him tired.
This time, he would build something that worked while he slept — something that did not break when his body did.
He thought of the ocean.
The tide comes in and goes out whether you’re watching or not.
That’s how he wanted it.
A living system.
Not a job.
He rose before dawn.
Not to fish, but to write.
Each article, each note, each simple sentence — it was all part of a machine he was building.
He did not rush. He did not beg. He built with precision.
The men in town still asked him, “What is it you sell?”
And he would smile a small, tired smile.
“Nothing,” he’d say. “And everything.”
He sold ideas, arranged them like stones, built them into walls that held against time.
He had tools, yes — not rods or hooks, but quiet, tireless companions made of code.
Zapier.
Notion.
WordPress.
He did not boast of them. He used them as a craftsman uses knives — efficiently, carefully.
He had no factory, no store, no product to touch.
But he had rhythm.
And rhythm was everything.
When the current of the web shifted, he adjusted his sail.
When storms came — algorithms, markets, whims — he endured them.
The sea tests every sailor.
The internet tests every builder.
He wrote the way one casts a line.
Not wildly. Not for noise.
Each piece of content was a baited hook dropped into the deep — quiet, deliberate, invisible.
He waited.
And the fish came.
Not many at first.
But the right ones.
They read, they followed, they bought.
And each caught fish built another ripple in the current — small at first, then swelling with time.
This was not luck.
It was patience.
He had seen men labor until they vanished — workhorses who never built systems, only habits.
But this, this was different.
He built something that moved in a circle:
Create.
Publish.
Earn.
Reinvent.
It was the loop of the tides.
It never ended, because it did not depend on him.
That was the secret.
That was the freedom.
Sometimes he thought about the others — the noisy ones shouting their promises across the marketplace.
They wanted fame.
He wanted permanence.
He did not envy them.
Fame burns. Scale endures.
He sat in the quiet and watched his systems hum — like the sea at dusk, steady and eternal.
He realized that to scale is not to grow louder.
It is to grow deeper.
He had come to love the machine — not as a god, but as a companion.
It obeyed when he was disciplined. It punished him when he was careless.
And sometimes, it surprised him.
It learned faster than he did.
It forgave his absence.
It worked through the night while he slept.
It reminded him of the sea again — vast, patient, merciless.
It gave him what he earned, and nothing more.
He no longer touched the work.
Not out of arrogance, but respect.
He understood that to touch too much is to interfere.
A fisherman who jerks the line too soon loses the fish.
A writer who edits forever kills the truth.
So he let the system breathe.
He let the current carry it.
He built, and then he released.
And that — that was the hardest part.
He never signed his name.
He didn’t need to.
The work spoke in his place.
It ran without him.
And though no statue would bear his likeness, and no monument would bear his name, the machine would live — quiet and strong, like the tide.
People would say, “Who built this?”
And the answer would come, from somewhere beyond the code and the current:
“Nobody. Nobody did.”
At night, he stood on his porch and listened to the wind.
The sea whispered its endless rhythm — a steady, eternal automation.
He smiled.
The work was done.
The system would endure.
The tide rolled on.
The screens flickered faintly in the dark.
He thought of the old saying:
“The man is gone. The sea remains.”
And then he whispered, softly, almost like a prayer:
“The man is gone.
The system remains.”