Architecting Sanctuary

The Cemetery Taught Me More About UE Than I Thought

After close to a decade in the funeral industry, my language, imagery, and emotions have drifted closer to Counselor than Operations. I tend to hold rather than fix, wait rather than push, memory is a presence rather than nostalgia, and I offer a soft return that doesn’t punish absence. I have found that grief does not respond to efficiency. 

Yesterday, as I was coding, my old life introduced itself to my new life with a mirror. 

Every project in my tech lab right now has design ethics that mirror grief spaces more than productivity or joy spaces. Because when you enter a place that accepts grief without trying to transform it, it automatically becomes a trustworthy connection for all other emotions too, because the heaviest feeling has already been welcomed in. 

We need more systems that do not demand performance. Most tech I see today is built like a hope machine, or an achievement dashboard. I hope this productivity app helps me achieve xyz. It pushes. It pings. It chases engagement. It performs hope and productivity while quietly exhausting people. We call it user experience. But it often feels like emotional extraction to me.

I recently walked away from the cemetery. Not because I stopped caring about people,
but because I realized I could build different kinds of systems. Systems that hold you the way a good guide does: quietly, without pulling, and without punishing your absence. Systems that remember how you felt, not just what you clicked. 

This is why I am building emotional technology now. 

I’m not trying to optimize humans. I’m trying to offer presence in a digital world that keeps asking us to move faster. I want to offer platforms that can hold a person exactly as they are. I’m architecting sanctuary rather than productivity. I’m building a sanctuary in the mechanics.

If you have ever felt hunted by your tools, closed an app because it made you feel behind, or craved interfaces that behave more like sanctuaries than marketplaces, you are not alone.
Some of us are building from a different logic.

I did not lose my years in the cemetery. That was my training ground. It taught me exactly what technology forgot.

Hold the moment. Do not fix it.

Have you ever felt like a piece of software was impatient with you? What did that moment teach you about design or about yourself?