Be Right Back, Moving House

Ghostpoet opens his album I Grow Tired But Dare Not Fall Asleep with a track titled "Be Right Back, Moving House." It's a mood piece—a heavy, glitchy meditation on disorientation, on fatigue, on the halfway state between breakdown and transformation. The title alone implies transition, as if one is in the midst of a move, not quite gone but no longer where they were. No answers, just the sound of someone caught in the middle of becoming.

There's a line in Ryan Holiday's The Daily Dad for June 3rd that echoes this same existential tug-of-war. Susan Straight recalls her mother's blunt words: "When you get married, you give away 50% of your life… When you have a baby, you give away the other half." It's meant to be shocking—and it is—and also a reflection of a more profound truth: love, parenting, partnership, and commitment demand something from us. They change us. And at times, they hollow us out in ways we don't expect.

But the mess isn't one of loss. Holiday reframes it: we can transcend that bitter arithmetic—not by retreating from responsibility, but by engaging more deeply with ourselves, by refusing to abandon our dreams, by refusing to disappear. As the piece concludes: To quit on ourselves is to quit on our narrator. Being mid-move, likewise, is being caught in the decision not to vanish—that he's not yet sure how to stay whole. His music resists the neat story arc of overcommitment. It's about lingering in the dissonance, honoring the reality that becoming someone new often feels like falling apart.

This is where Holiday's The Daily Stoic chimes in, with Seneca reminding us: If we cannot do one thing, we can do another. And if we cannot do that, we can still do something else. Even in defeat, dislocation, or silence, we can still be of service. Still be good. There is no shame in asking for a different role and a different scale of contribution. Abraham Lincoln's story to an assembly of Admirals and Generals near the end of the Civil War, reflecting on the man who asked him for appointments to high-level, then mid-level, and then lower-level government jobs, ends up with him just asking for a pair of pants. This reflects a Stoic ethos: adaptability is a virtue. Dignity isn't in the position—it's in the persistence.

So, what do we do when we find ourselves amid a move, emotionally or otherwise? When our house is no longer a home, when our roles shift under us when our ambitions are curtailed?

We adjust. We try something else. We hold on to the thread of our humanity, even if what's left is to offer kindness at the dinner table or to be a silent witness at the edges of chaos—it doesn't resolve the dissonance; it sits with it. But that's the most honest response to transition. Not to rush through it but to remain conscious within it.

Stoicism and parenting both offer the same insight: You may not get to keep everything you once had, but you're never without a way to live well.

And so: Be right back, we're all moving house.