Put the screen down.
Pick yourself back up.

Twenty-five years of asking what’s at risk. Then I turned the question around.

I’m Michael Davis — trailer park to the Pentagon, with stops at Los Alamos, Boeing, and IBM along the way. Twenty-five years of doing some version of the same job: threat modeling. You look at a system and you ask three things. What does it trust by default? What is it exposing? What would it cost if that trust were broken? Then you build accordingly.

At some point I ran that assessment on myself. What does my attention trust by default? What am I exposing without ever deciding to? What would it cost if that were broken? The frameworks I’d spent twenty-five years inside had no field for any of it. Cyberpsychology did.

That’s the work now, running on both sides. At Merek Security Solutions I still do the technical half — compliance, risk, the architecture of keeping organizations safe. As a Fellow at Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, a doctoral candidate in cyberpsychology, and founder of MindfulBytes and the Center for Cybersecurity and Cyberpsychology Research, I work the other half: what the technology is doing to the people inside the system.

The newsletter and the podcast are where those two halves talk to each other. No productivity gospel. No panic about screens. Just an honest accounting of what this way of living costs — and what’s still available to you the moment you set the thing down.