I remain optimistic. I mean, look - we know that the cruelty is optional. We know that brutality and deprivation won't get anyone back to the office. We know that when rents go up, people move in together or move out of town.

David Rosenberg is fond of saying "the cure for high prices is high prices." Nothing we're doing right now is steady-state; on Mother's Day we went for a walk in a neighborhood I love and I realized I hadn't seen a single house for sale in there for the duration of the pandemic. Everybody there decided it was a great place to hunker down and that if they sold at a profit, they'd have to buy somewhere else and no thanks. If you can sit this bullshit out, you are sitting this bullshit out. I haven't been on a plane since February 2020 and that's not by accident.

I've been rearranging everything I can to help our employees do more with less. Online scheduling, online billing, infrastructure changes, etc. It's not just because I can't hire my way out of the problem, or the fact that I'm too cheap to give everyone raises (when your income is determined by insurance company contracts that change every five years, inflation is a problem). It's that everyone's patience is hanging by a thread, our capacity to be kind to others has been exhausted and people suck right now and I don't see it getting better any time soon.

But I mean look. If you can do your job remotely, why not move to rural Kentucky? Maybe vote out Mitch McConnell while you're at it. There's a real network effect to metropolises but it's too expensive right now, and if you set up somewhere else you get to be a big fish in a small pond.

I think things will get better. Historically? They always do. That's just reversion to the mean. It just sucks living through history.