This week wasn’t just heavy — it was a steel-toed kick in the ribs.

Every year, September 11th shows up like an uninvited guest.

No matter how much time passes, it doesn’t fade, it doesn’t soften. I worked in 7 World Trade Center for years.

That morning, I walked out late for a meeting in the towers. Minutes later, I stood on the street and watched the world collapse into smoke. You don’t “move on” from that.

You just learn to carry the scar where nobody can see it.

And then, just as that fog rolls in every September, the news broke: Charlie Kirk murdered.

Let me be clear — I wasn’t a fan. I thought plenty of what he said was garbage. But that doesn’t matter. Violence doesn’t check your voter registration before it robs you. It doesn’t ask whether you loved him, hated him, or barely knew who he was. It just takes. It takes fathers, sons, husbands, friends. It takes futures. It even takes the arguments you weren’t done having.

That’s the thread connecting all of it: mortality. Fragility. The truth that everything can end in an instant.

Here’s what 9/11 taught me — and what every headline like this drives home: connection is the only thing that matters.

Not your job title. Not your valuation. Not how many “Top 40 Under 40” lists you conned your way onto. Connection.

The people who pick up the phone at 2 a.m. The people who sit with you in the hospital. The people who hug you when your world is literally collapsing.

And yet, in adland, we chase everything but that.

We chase things that don’t hug us back. Things that don’t cry when we’re gone. Things that won’t be at our funerals.

I’ve seen the hustle cult. The Cannes crowd. The guys who treat the Croisette like their personal altar, bowing to rosé and panel invites.

On paper, they look like they’ve won. The VIP badges. The rooftop parties. The “keynote” slots where they pretend they’ve reinvented adtech for the seventh time this decade.

But peel it back and it’s just loneliness in linen.

They don’t have families around them. They don’t have friendships that aren’t transactional. They don’t have trust that isn’t tied to deal flow. Strip away the stage lights and the hashtags, and you find them alone at the hotel bar with an expense account and nobody to text “come home soon.”

And here’s the most tragic act of all: the aging hustlers.

I see them every year at Cannes. Seventy years old, still wandering the Croisette like ghosts. Still showing up, still hustling, still pretending the game isn’t over. They hover at rooftop bars, desperate to make friends with the younger crowd, while clinging to the last two connections they still have from the old guard.

They yell about how “too much has changed.” They grumble that kids don’t understand the business anymore. They laugh too loud at their own jokes, trying to recapture relevance.

It’s hilarious. And it’s sad.

Because everyone can see it: they’re irrelevant, and they know it.

That’s the endgame of the hustle — not yachts and power, but irrelevance and loneliness in a linen shirt two sizes too small.

And I can’t just point the finger. I was that guy once.

After 9/11, I decided money was the cure. If life was fragile, I’d build myself a fortress of commas and zeroes. I chased the deals. I confused net worth with self-worth. I believed applause was the same thing as love.

And I won — until I lost.

It destroyed me. It destroyed my family.

Because money doesn’t hug you when you’re broken. LinkedIn claps don’t sit with you in the dark. A valuation won’t keep your marriage together.

I learned too late that chasing the hustle isn’t the same as living.

So here’s the truth nobody in this industry wants to put on a panel slide:

The tragedy isn’t just billionaires being obnoxious. It’s the rest of us buying the lie that more exits, more notoriety, more hustle will somehow fill the void. It won’t.

I’ve stood in the rubble of 7 WTC. I’ve buried too many people. I’ve watched powerful men crumble under the weight of their own egos.

And the only thing that mattered in any of it? The people who were still here.

Not the valuations. Not the IPOs. Not the Cannes panels with sad men in linen shirts congratulating themselves for saving democracy one cookie-less identifier at a time.

What mattered were the people I could call at 2 a.m. The people who showed up when everything collapsed. The people who reminded me I wasn’t just a job title, or a bank balance, or an industry talking point.

The loneliest room in adland isn’t the hotel bar at midnight. It’s the one you end up in when you realize you spent your whole life chasing clout instead of connection.

And if that stings?

Good.

Because it means you still have time to walk out.