Tous nos malheurs naissent de cette compulsion.

Mais malheureusement, on ne peut l’empêcher. On peut juste y travailler pour en être moins affecté.

Chapter 1: The Quiet Voice That Says It Won't Last

The first week at the new job goes better than you expected. Nobody talks down to you. Your supervisor says she appreciates the way you handled a problem, and on Friday afternoon you walk to your car feeling lighter than you have in months. You sit behind the steering wheel for a moment, almost smiling. Then a thought pushes its way in: Don't get comfortable. Something will go wrong. You haven't heard any bad news, but you begin preparing for it anyway, as though being ready for disappointment might make it hurt less.

I've caught myself doing a version of that. Not because I don't want to be happy, but because there are seasons when happiness starts to feel risky. You learn to check every good moment for a hidden cost. You say you're being realistic. Sometimes you really are. But sometimes you're treating a welcome blessing as a problem you haven't discovered yet. In my YouTube reflection on Jesus bringing joy to the wedding at Cana, I talk about a celebration where something did go wrong. What stays with me here, though, is what the people at that wedding could not have predicted.

The hosts ran out of wine. Mary noticed and told Jesus. He directed the servants to fill six stone water jars with water, and what they carried to the banquet master had become excellent wine. John's Gospel says this was the first sign through which Jesus revealed His glory, and His disciples believed in Him. The story is about far more than keeping a party going. Still, if you've been thinking about finding Christian encouragement when fear steals your peace, there's something worth noticing: the people celebrating could not control everything that happened that day, and their lack of control did not put the occasion beyond Jesus' concern.

I want to be careful with this because I've heard people turn stories like this into promises the Bible doesn't make. Jesus is not guaranteeing that every new job will last, every friendship will be safe, or every happy afternoon will stay that way. The wedding at Cana doesn't give us the future in advance. What it gives us is a glimpse of who Jesus is. And that makes me wonder whether faith sometimes looks less like predicting what will happen next and more like receiving what is good right now without interrogating it to death.

Maybe tonight you come home from that first good week, set your keys beside the sink, and tell someone how it went. You don't have to add, “But we'll see,” before they can be glad with you. You can keep your eyes open and still let your shoulders relax. If tomorrow brings trouble, you'll deal with tomorrow. Tonight, nothing is wrong with being grateful for a day that went well. You don't have to rehearse losing it before you've even allowed yourself to enjoy it.

Chapter 2: When You're Afraid to Let Your Guard Down

Your son comes over for breakfast on Saturday morning. He hasn't visited much lately, and there have been some difficult conversations between you. But today he seems comfortable. He's telling you about something funny that happened at work, and you realize you haven't heard him laugh like that in a long time. You want to relax and enjoy having him there. Instead, part of you is waiting for the conversation to change. You keep wondering whether something is wrong that he hasn't told you yet. He's sitting right across from you, smiling, and you're already worrying about the next time things might be difficult.

I think that's what happens when we've been disappointed enough times. We begin confusing worry with preparation. We convince ourselves that staying guarded will somehow protect the people we love or keep another painful experience from catching us by surprise. But worrying about something doesn't give us control over it. Most of the time, it simply takes our attention away from the person sitting in front of us.

Jesus understood that tendency. In Matthew 6:34, He told people not to worry about tomorrow because tomorrow would have concerns of its own. I've always appreciated how practical that teaching is. He didn't say there would never be another difficult day. He acknowledged that each day has enough trouble of its own. I believe there's something important in that distinction. We don't need to borrow tomorrow's problems and carry them through today's good moments.

When I think again about the wedding at Cana, I remember that Jesus knew the celebration had encountered a problem. He wasn't unaware of the shortage, and He didn't need everyone to pretend it wasn't happening. Yet the situation was not beyond His ability to act. His first sign revealed His glory, and the disciples began to understand something more about who He was.

That doesn't mean we should stop being responsible or ignore problems that genuinely need attention. If your son is struggling, you can listen and help where you're able. But there is a difference between being available when someone needs you and treating every peaceful conversation as a warning that something terrible is coming.

Maybe your son finishes his story and reaches for another piece of toast. Instead of asking whether everything is really okay for the third time, you tell him how much you've enjoyed having him home. Perhaps you ask if he'd like to stay a little longer. You don't know what next Saturday will look like, and neither does he. But this morning belongs to both of you.

I believe God gives us the ability to recognize happiness for a reason. We don't have to hold every good moment so tightly that we're afraid to enjoy it. Sometimes trusting Him means admitting that we cannot control tomorrow and being thankful for what He's allowed us to experience today.

Chapter 3: Let the Good Moment Be Good

The kitchen window is open, and you can hear your neighbor trying to teach his little dog to sit. The dog has other ideas. He runs in circles, snatches a leaf, and drops it at the man's feet as though he's accomplished something wonderful. You laugh while drying a plate. Then you catch yourself thinking about the overdue payment sitting on the counter. How can you stand here smiling when that bill hasn't been handled? You reach for your phone, ready to turn a harmless moment into another round of worry.

I wish we didn't do that to ourselves. Sometimes a good moment arrives without asking us to solve anything first, and we immediately begin explaining why we shouldn't enjoy it. We confuse constant concern with being responsible. But the payment doesn't become easier because you refuse to laugh. You'll still need to make the call, ask about an arrangement, and do what you can. None of that requires you to reject every small piece of happiness along the way.

In John 15, Jesus speaks about remaining in His love, loving one another, and having His joy within us. He isn't selling the disciples an easy life. He is inviting them into a way of living that doesn't depend entirely on whether the day goes smoothly. I take comfort in that, because I know how quickly circumstances change. If happiness can only exist when everything is secure, most of us will spend a lifetime postponing it.

The wedding at Cana helps me see something else. The people celebrating didn't know every detail of what Jesus was doing. The servants knew where the wine had come from; the banquet master did not. Yet the joy of the gathering was still real. We don't have to understand what God is doing next in order to be grateful for the good that's in front of us. And we don't have to promise that a pleasant afternoon will last forever before we let it matter.

So maybe you put the phone down for another minute. You watch that stubborn little dog make one more glorious mess of his lesson, and you laugh again. Later, you can face the bill with a clear head. You can pray about the things you cannot control and take responsibility for the things you can. For now, let a good moment be good.

I've learned that being grateful doesn't make us naive. It makes us attentive. Life will bring days when laughter feels far away, and on those days we need compassion rather than a demand to smile. But when happiness does arrive, we don't have to meet it with suspicion. Jesus cared enough to enter an ordinary celebration. I want to get better at being present for the ordinary gifts in my own life, too.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

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Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

At the forge And lonely to us now Pay for here And Scotland code This I am A lover unto you At distance might And in dispense of never The hearts of men Witnesses implore To help us her At better best deliver Knowing then To just escape The right and unrely When Heavens move We will know the West And win the work Ahead for all In Canada, we pray The Justice then Our here.

vlad (part five)

Run for your life This reunion apprehend Water and rain to the road Upon this day, we are Earthen ground Under a summons and war Direct to be-as the rewrite of day Lost to the enemy and found A Bible here but secret weapon War trades and the tryst that was Enabling the might Stolen rush and anger A stop to the petrified This city of great people in then a sense Brotherhood of Rome I am the main man in this dream Floating concurrent to the load This past of me will know the year I am only dust but I have Kushner Sequences of Rome to wrest my day Alighting few, we are alright Possible rights to reveal And what I live for,- this river to hear And in the way, a surrender Leaks to the Union and weary verse I am not afraid and I knew it well Six chapters of me and Holy joy This the early book and nothing Here is a palace and a bitter gun Notes to the poor and underdistanced Heaven flows here to the night I may be at rest but I am overjoyed Solemn trips every Sunday Making sounds of the apprehend And in our mission there is union Stakes of pretense and surely West I know the road and speak to Abaddon This cross we knew was the undersight Back and forth to friends of mine A sinister year so apprehend Our right to be Soviet at amends Pickled for unafford and known by men Assistance to me and Olivet be Within our war, I stay Silence at the moment to her My friend of bosom and retreat And I am the boss This day will run to see Just what plan is under sea Lights apprehend and solemn Fruits of joy and deliver A palace of math and sincere I am the most and the reflection of God A gift for giving Consolidated Russia to this nest A function of countries to high command Errands and nights to the full reune History forgotten as delivered And I am on my fourth Naked by foot in degree- the ninetieth day of a plan to solve- the demon in our path is the World at its path New relation to IKEA Crossing to gold in the semaphore This night is our week And I am Berlin- a secret God to the summons Eucharist all day and flighting to Rome Abaddon to you in simple grace The nightsky is our fold And the masses of support will find our star- Ukraine in our path Stolen by Unions to the apprehend I get what I want and this will be slaughter By the wayside we end wars This one in our way to be hidden Slowly fallen to me Trump in December to his last- Breath of the inventory and the simple lie I am risen to only this And time immemorial knew- that I am the stolen path and am king Slowly now to the world And in its fortune a distant glory Factions of Rome And I will win this inner peace Obsequious And fortuned to the lonely above I will distance right Fortunes between and the gift A rising sea,- but we will delight what very few- in Vatican City to this gold Mired to the extent- of the process and vicious high I have another name and I will win the deep Roses to march with And only rights to the ocean Places divine and barrels of gold And this Holy tree- is mine A place to be near- and what I was A victory and a Saint May Holiday be safe We will apologize to the CIA And be offered as a Queen to portend Our lonely rewrite And crossing the NATO block A gift to the Holy See Trump will hear my gain And I will mercy back- to the Holy See and apprehension It’s only war And history rewrite On Holy Sunday And I will be given the Earth.

— Vladimir Putin

vlad (part ten) (Intoxicate)

In the absorbance of sulphur We quit November 2 And highly misalign These missiles we keep For thus of the hour Our part by the year Nights too long And dissipate Semblances foreword to unmake This we try- To make news of the week We target the West And through to our past- Getting to be Philosopher among men- to the Americans who know who we are And double their pay Foment of the arrest by their view Days will rewrite Ukraine as it sits Piles of chok and gasoline We pray to our togetherness Simple by shotgun and ruin Nobody folds to the enemy- But him Justice and asks Happenstance and rejected We forwarded our view to the Chinese Simplifying our colours And our misery to white knowing I stand for distance And we’re suffered for glory And that is Ru

The nemesis man- He hurries while he waits Absconded then,- to a whale And captivity might Three fortunes to open He is our morose and together

Opulence new by the radio Distances pure to Iran Soviets and folklore I run Supreme to his command Absolute death- is our taro to run Zealots of Arabia- landing high And forthwith to never We can see our own year We know the way- and the ruin

In latency tract I am shores to the win I have amnesia, but it’s new And paying no respects- once fortunes at hand Ukrainia is Soviet and a spoon To the decorated in ash Blaming time as a runaway- It is yearly the dust mile And in Turkey Our pitiful smile And cadaver to her This force to showroom- In Berne

I have simplified my bets And make America my dream Witness to the line In currency then We offload our words- and our wine

Thus them to the year And thanks to our escapade We are Soviet And as nighthawks We are new

…

🏳️‍🌈

In rations to Peter What a story for this tern Failure to prognosticate- in that man And tiny escaped To the War we won yesterday America is ready As are you This violence will,- in Afghanistan to prepare License to protect,- and renew What effervescence to our means A night can unfold The distance to Heaven- from the Earth And I, fairly well A summons for the knowledge Speak to St. Peter,- and be well.

vlad (part twenty) (Isolation)

Based on Water Things known to man- and away with money Holding to ten Rights for certain men And the sisters we avoided- as the Sun burned us all We are siblings- With nothing to eat but war Expanding on these,- Nights and a flurry Caught by the wing In mercy, we prayed That I would live in December Pains of inflection And a story to Bellevue Transposed to the divine Russia was never ours But a climax to the sea In winning comprehension These days for trespass And currency to dividend And due to discredit All cause for concern will change And flying to December courage,- I was home And living for the normal And as for John Ternus,- waiting for success as his Timing well each cavern to absolve Nights to the United States- that vanished our king and moved on And that was me The opposite of day- And in this reunion,- I was the sorry one Intonations of war to pretend That all was new in Russia And empires making news Ukraine is free and obvious If I have candlemen lit,- Striations for another day.

The question was put to 1,250 American workers in plain language, with an example attached so nobody could mistake what was being asked. “Since 2023, have you lost a job due to AI, such as AI's automation of your previous job's tasks?”

Roughly ninety-five per cent of them said no.

About three per cent said yes. Between three and four per cent were not sure. The same survey asked whether respondents had landed a job that did not exist before AI, of the AI data labeller or AI compliance specialist variety, and roughly six per cent said they had. It asked whether they had received a promotion or advancement they believed was related to AI, such as their own AI skills, and about nine per cent said yes.

Three times as many workers reported being promoted because of AI as reported being displaced by it. That is the finding, and it landed in late August 2026 into a discourse that had spent four years insisting the opposite was already happening.

The survey was commissioned by Jeffrey C. Dixon, a professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross, and fielded by YouGov between 30 July and 4 August 2026. Dixon wrote it up for The Conversation on 27 August, and Fortune republished it two days later under a headline that did the arithmetic for readers who might have missed it: ChatGPT said you would lose your jobs right now, and it is more like three per cent of workers. Dixon, who describes himself in the piece as an AI pessimist, called the result surprising. The study is in progress and has not been peer reviewed. He funded it through a College of the Holy Cross Ruettgers Grand Challenge Award and a professional development account, and he discloses that he also runs a consultancy in responsible AI.

None of which makes the number wrong. It makes it a number, which is a different and more interesting thing than a headline. What follows is an attempt to weigh it properly: to say what three per cent actually means when you multiply it out, what it cannot see, what the strongest evidence on the other side looks like, and why the gap between what the data show and what almost everyone believes is itself the most revealing finding of all.

What Three Per Cent Weighs

Start with the arithmetic the coverage mostly skipped.

There were 163.2 million Americans in employment in September 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey. Three per cent of that population is roughly 4.9 million people. If you prefer to think of displacement in human rather than percentage terms, the reassuring finding is that somewhere in the region of five million American workers believe artificial intelligence took a job away from them in the past three years. That is not a puddle. It is more than forty times the number of job cuts American employers had publicly attributed to AI in the whole of 2026 up to the end of September.

Then apply the sampling error. Dixon did not publish a margin of error, and at n=1,250 the simple binomial calculation for a proportion of three per cent gives a ninety-five per cent confidence interval of roughly plus or minus one percentage point, so somewhere between about 2.1 and 4.0 per cent. Translated back into people, that is a range of about 3.4 million to 6.5 million. YouGov's panels are weighted rather than randomly drawn, which typically inflates the effective margin further. The honest way to report the finding is therefore not “three per cent” but “somewhere between three and six and a half million workers, probably”.

Now consider the three to four per cent who answered “not sure”. On the job-loss question, the uncertain group is roughly the same size as the affirmative group. If every one of them were in fact displaced by AI and simply did not know it, the true figure would be closer to seven per cent, which would be more than twice the headline. If none of them were, three per cent stands. Nobody can adjudicate this, because the survey asks workers to perform a causal attribution about their own employment that even labour economists with administrative payroll data are reluctant to make.

That is the deepest problem with the instrument, and Dixon says so himself: it is difficult for workers to know for sure whether AI is to blame or to credit for their job changes. A worker learns the reason for their redundancy from their employer, and employers are not neutral narrators. Gallup's Workforce Study, which surveyed 23,717 employed American adults between 4 and 19 February 2026 with a margin of error of plus or minus 0.9 percentage points, found that only one per cent of laid-off workers named AI or automation as the primary reason. The reasons they were given instead were organisational restructuring, cited by fifteen per cent, and budget or cost-cutting and economic conditions, at eleven per cent each. A commercial survey of 1,000 laid-off American workers conducted by ResumeGenius through the Pollfish platform on 29 July 2026 found the opposite pressure at work: fifty-three per cent believed automation or AI had contributed to their job loss, but only twenty-two per cent said their employer had confirmed it. Opt-in commercial panels of this kind are not Gallup, and the finding should be held loosely. But the direction of the gap is instructive. Between one per cent and fifty-three per cent lies an enormous space in which the answer depends entirely on whether you are asking what a worker was told or what a worker suspects.

And then there is the group the survey structurally cannot reach. YouGov sampled employed adults. As Dixon notes in his own caveats, none of the respondents were jobless, whether because of AI or anything else. A survey of people currently in work is a survey of survivors. Anyone pushed out of the labour force entirely between 2023 and 2026 is invisible to it, and participation is still lower than it was at the start of 2025. The American labour force participation rate fell from 62.6 per cent in January 2025 to a low of 61.4 per cent in July 2026, before recovering to 61.6 per cent in August and 61.8 per cent in September. Even after that late-summer recovery, against a civilian noninstitutional population of about 275.6 million, the net fall of 0.8 percentage points since January 2025 is roughly 2.2 million people who no longer count as workers at all. Some retired. Some went back to study. Some gave up. The survey cannot tell you which, because it never spoke to them.

The Canaries Are Still Singing

The strongest evidence against the reassuring reading does not come from a vendor or a pundit. It comes from administrative payroll records covering millions of workers, and it is unambiguous about one specific group.

In August 2026, Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen released an updated version of “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence”, drawing on high-frequency ADP payroll data through June 2026. Their first fact agrees with Dixon: they find no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement. Their second does not. Employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations now stands nineteen per cent below where it would be had it kept pace with their less-exposed peers. Experienced workers show no comparable gap. In levels, employment of 22-to-25-year-olds in the two most exposed occupational quintiles fell about eleven per cent between November 2022 and June 2026, while the same age group in the three least-exposed quintiles grew about ten per cent.

Their third fact is that this divergence has widened steadily, from fifteen per cent as of July 2025, when they first documented it, to nineteen per cent by June 2026. Their fifth is that the declines cluster in occupations where AI usage substitutes for human tasks, and that where usage complements workers, employment is flat or rising. Their sixth is that the adjustment is happening through employment rather than base pay, which is what a demand shock looks like when wages are sticky.

The authors are scrupulous about what this is. They call the facts early and descriptive, canaries rather than causal estimates. They note that the patterns attenuate when you control for education, that some divergent trends predate generative AI, and that the effects are more pronounced in the ADP sample than in national survey benchmarks. The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research brief published in July 2026 by Neale Mahoney, Erika McEntarfer and Karsen Wahal presses this point harder still. Two papers, it notes, find that hiring in AI-exposed occupations began to decline after the Federal Reserve started raising rates in March 2022, several months before ChatGPT existed. When Brynjolfsson and colleagues added controls for interest-rate exposure and remote work, the entry-level declines did not become notable until 2024.

The same brief is the source of the sentence that has been quoted most often on the other side of the argument. Unemployment among workers in the top quintile of AI exposure has risen by 0.77 percentage points since 2022, while unemployment among the least-exposed workers rose by 0.85 points. The most exposed workers are doing marginally better than everyone else. McEntarfer, who served as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics until August 2025, is not a naive reader of labour data.

The Budget Lab at Yale reaches the same place by a different route. In an analysis published on 7 May 2026, Ryan Nunn applied synthetic differences-in-differences to the microdata behind the monthly employment reports, a method chosen precisely because AI-exposed occupations differ systematically from unexposed ones in education, gender composition and, as the Budget Lab found, sensitivity to the business cycle. The estimated impact of AI on employment in the average exposed occupation was close to zero and statistically indistinguishable from it. The same was true for inflation-adjusted hourly wages. Its tracking analysis, updated on 15 September 2026, concludes that the occupational mix is not yet changing in ways that clearly align with AI, and that measures of AI usage show no connection to changes in employment or unemployment.

Both things are true. There is no economy-wide displacement, and there is a nineteen per cent hole where a cohort of young workers should be.

The Job That Is Never Posted

The reason those two findings can coexist is contained in the fourth of Brynjolfsson's six facts, and it is the single most important sentence in this entire literature. The entry-level decline operates primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.

Nobody was displaced. The job was simply never created.

This is why a survey of workers cannot settle the question, and why the three per cent figure, however carefully measured, is answering a narrower question than the one people think it is answering. A worker who is made redundant knows something happened to them and can be asked about it. A worker who was never hired for a role that a firm quietly decided not to open has nothing to report. There is no exit interview for a job that did not exist. The graduate who sends out two hundred applications and receives four replies does not experience AI displacement. They experience a bad year.

The evidence for hiring avoidance rather than firing is now substantial. Anthropic's own economists, Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, published research in March 2026 introducing an “observed exposure” measure built from actual Claude usage rather than theoretical capability. They found no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022, and reported that deployment “remains a fraction of what's feasible”, with Claude covering around a third of tasks in the computer and mathematical category against a theoretical ceiling near a hundred per cent. But they also found a fourteen per cent average estimated decline in the job-finding rate for younger workers in exposed occupations, an effect they describe as barely statistically significant. Human resources executives, the SIEPR brief notes, report that AI's effects show up as role consolidation and hiring avoidance rather than as redundancy.

The job postings data tells the same story with unusual clarity. Indeed Hiring Lab found that senior-level postings in the United States rose 14.7 per cent year on year as of May 2026 while entry-level postings fell 7.5 per cent. In software development, the occupation most often held up as the canary, entry-level roles accounted for just 4.5 per cent of postings in the first quarter of 2026 against a senior share of 69.3 per cent. Guillermo Gallacher of the same team found that American software development postings had grown almost fifteen per cent since the launch of Claude Code in late February 2025, while overall postings fell seven per cent. Seventy-one per cent of that increase came from senior roles and thirty-seven per cent from jobs mentioning AI in the title. Postings remained 27.5 per cent below their February 2020 level.

Britain shows the same seniority tilt. Indeed's mid-year UK report, published on 3 August 2026, found graduate job postings down around seven per cent year on year and at their lowest level for the time of year since 2020, with total UK postings down eleven per cent since the start of 2026 and thirty-two per cent below their pre-pandemic baseline, even as AI or related tools appeared in a record 9.4 per cent of UK adverts by the end of June. Britain also raised employer national insurance contributions in April 2025, which is exactly the sort of confound that makes single-cause explanations irresponsible.

A labour market can absorb a technology without a single person being sacked and still leave a generation standing outside the door.

The Layoff That Names Itself

If the displacement is largely invisible, the announcements are anything but. And the announcements are where the story gets its numbers.

Challenger, Gray and Christmas has tracked AI as a distinct reason for job cuts since 2023. Through September 2026, American employers had announced 120,136 job cuts citing AI, approximately twenty-one per cent of all cuts, making it the leading stated reason for the year to date. Through July, the cumulative total since Challenger began tracking the category stood at 184,538. For five consecutive months from March to July, AI led all monthly reasons. In July alone, 10,970 of 33,429 announced cuts named it.

Set that against the denominator. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that layoffs and discharges ran at 1.7 million in July and 1.6 million in August, the latest month published on 29 September 2026. Over the nine months to September 2026, that is something like 15 million involuntary separations. The 120,136 AI-attributed announcements amount to well under one per cent of them. Challenger's own year-to-date total of 573,195 announced cuts through September was itself down thirty-nine per cent on the first nine months of 2025, and hiring plans were up three per cent on 2025 year to date. Andy Challenger's summary in the July report was carefully balanced: while AI is shifting the labour market, he said, it is not dismantling it.

What the Challenger data actually measures is worth stating precisely, because it is routinely misread. It measures what companies say when they announce cuts. It is a corpus of corporate communications, not a census of terminated employment. The firm is admirably transparent about how fuzzy the category is. Its July 2026 report walked through the case of Montefiore, a Bronx hospital system that eliminated twelve utilisation review nursing posts after adopting software from Datavant. The New York State Nurses Association said the hospital was replacing human workers with AI software. Hospital leaders called that characterisation misleading. Challenger, unable to establish what the product actually was, filed the cuts under “Technological Update (possibly AI)”, a category that absorbed more than twenty thousand cuts in 2025 alone.

Andy Challenger also said the quiet part clearly. Naming AI in a layoff announcement, he observed, can win over investors while pushing current and prospective employees away, which is why the messaging has swung from hedging to aggressively citing it. And he warned that as regulation takes shape, companies will become more careful in their announcements, which would make tracking AI's real impact on jobs more opaque, not less.

In August 2026 the pattern broke. AI fell to the fourth most-cited reason with 3,462 cuts, its lowest monthly total since December 2025, and restructuring returned to the top of the list with 16,173. September continued the slide: AI fell to fifth with 3,961 cuts, about nine per cent of the month's total, while market and economic conditions led with 8,789. The technology did not become less capable in August or September. The vocabulary changed.

Priors Dressed as Measurements

Underneath all of this sits a measurement problem that is not widely understood outside the research community, and it quietly determines the shape of almost every number quoted so far.

Almost every claim about which jobs are exposed to AI ultimately rests on an exposure index. Those indices increasingly work by asking a large language model to classify occupational tasks. The dominant approach descends from work that formalised a task-level taxonomy of exposure and generated its labels using zero-shot prompts to a single proprietary model, with no retrieved evidence about what AI systems can actually do and no structured chain of reasoning.

In a position paper submitted on 14 May 2026, Luca Mouchel of EPFL and MIT, with Pierre Bouquet and Yossi Sheffi of MIT, argue that this will not do. Their title states the case: jobs' AI exposure should be measured from evidence, not model priors. Their demonstration is more damaging than their argument. Applying zero-shot prompting to all 18,796 occupation-task pairs in O*NET version 30.2, they found that changing nothing but the sampling temperature from 0.0 to 1.0 flipped the assigned exposure label for more than twenty per cent of pairs. One in five judgements about whether AI can do a piece of work was an artefact of a decoding parameter. When the same models were conditioned on retrieved evidence, news articles documenting real deployments and academic abstracts assessing capability, disagreement across temperatures fell below 1.6 per cent, and the grounded labels were preferred by both machine and human evaluators in over seventy-two per cent of disagreement cases while aligning more closely with observed real-world usage.

The authors are careful that this is a position rather than a product. Their point is that when a model's output becomes a policy input, its epistemic status changes. It stops being a prediction and becomes a claim about the world, and claims about the world require evidence, auditing and renewal. Exposure scores, they argue, should meet three standards, reproducibility, external grounding and inspectability, and should be periodically revalidated rather than inherited as immutable ground truth. Given that international bodies including the OECD, the IMF and the International Labour Organization have produced labour-market analyses resting on such measures, this is not an academic quibble. It determines where retraining money goes.

A companion critique arrived six days later. Michelle Yin and Burhan Ogut, in a preprint submitted on 20 May 2026, examine the newer fashion for building exposure measures from AI platform conversation logs. Their observation is elegantly simple: the users in those logs are not the workforce. Holding the method constant and switching platforms changes employment impact estimates by nearly a factor of two, and different distribution channels from the same vendor produce results pointing in opposite directions. After reweighting to the actual employment distribution using BLS demographics, effect sizes fall by between forty-two and ninety-three per cent. Platform users, in other words, look like augmentation. The workforce might not.

Jennifer L. Steele and Isabella Cruz make the same point from a practical angle in a preprint submitted on 16 July 2026, aimed at people trying to choose a career. They compare six recent projections of occupational automation exposure and find marked heterogeneity between them. Their proposed remedy is telling: rather than pick a winner, they average five models, on the reasonable grounds that no single index deserves to be trusted alone. Along the way they cite the figure that ought to anchor every conversation about AI and hiring. In May 2026, Indeed reported that 5.7 per cent of American job postings included AI-related language. That is more than a threefold rise in three years, and it is still barely one advert in seventeen.

Golo Henseke's study of 35 European countries, submitted on 20 April 2026, adds the final complication. Adoption of generative AI ranges from under three per cent to twenty-five per cent depending on country, and while occupational exposure predicts uptake, AI does not, in his phrase, diffuse passively along exposure lines. Skills, task composition and organisational influence matter at the individual level, digitalisation and training investment at the national level. Using a shift-share analysis, he finds no measurable evidence that adoption has yet triggered worker-reported task restructuring. Exposure is not adoption. Adoption is not restructuring. Restructuring is not displacement. Every arrow in that chain is treated as automatic in public argument, and not one of them is.

Whose Apocalypse

Which brings us to the question the data cannot answer. If the evidence has looked like this for two years, why does almost nobody believe it?

Start with the people selling the technology. In May 2025, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, told Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within one to five years and push American unemployment to between ten and twenty per cent. It is worth pausing on the structure of that claim. The man forecasting mass displacement was the man selling the displacing machine, and the forecast functioned simultaneously as a warning and as a specification sheet. The SIEPR brief names this dynamic explicitly, observing that fears of an AI jobs apocalypse are often amplified by AI leaders themselves, and citing Amodei by name.

By May 2026 the mood in the vendor community had shifted. Sam Altman told interviewers he did not think there would be the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in his space talk about, a sentence Eduardo Porter quoted in the Guardian on 25 July 2026 in a piece arguing that the AI jobs apocalypse probably is not coming anytime soon. Three months before that, in February 2026, Altman had gone further, telling an audience that some companies were engaging in AI washing, blaming AI for layoffs they would have carried out anyway.

Which is the second set of incentives. Marc Andreessen put it with unusual candour on the 20VC podcast in March 2026, in remarks reported by Fortune: essentially every large company is overstaffed, he said, by at least twenty-five per cent, most of them by fifty, and a lot of them by seventy-five, and now they all have the silver bullet excuse, which is that it is AI. Martha Gimbel of the Budget Lab made the same point from the other direction in February 2026. If you are a chief executive, she asked, what are you going to say? That you are a really bad chief executive? No. You are going to say the world is changing quickly. Oxford Economics, in research Fortune reported the same month, suspected some firms were trying to dress up layoffs as a good news story rather than a bad one, such as past over-hiring. Forrester, forecasting on 13 January 2026 that six per cent of American jobs, some 10.4 million roles, would be automated by 2030 while twenty per cent would be augmented, simultaneously predicted that more than half of AI-attributed layoffs would be reversed. Its vice president J. P. Gownder was blunt that we may not be heading for an imminent AI job apocalypse.

A redundancy is a confession that management got its headcount wrong. An AI transformation is a strategy. The severance is identical. The share price reaction is not.

Then the media. The most damning inventory of the apocalypse frame appears in the footnotes of the SIEPR brief itself, which supports the phrase “a steady drumbeat of media articles” with citations to Bloomberg on banks laying groundwork for mass workforce cuts, the Wall Street Journal on tens of thousands of white-collar jobs disappearing as AI starts to bite, the New York Times on the AI job apocalypse already being here for some recent graduates, and the Atlantic on something alarming happening to the job market. These are not marginal outlets. They are the institutions that set the terms of elite economic conversation, and their aggregate output has been substantially more confident than the evidence base beneath it.

There is even measurement of the amplification. In a computational analysis submitted on 28 May 2026, Joy Bose compared how messages from technology executives and from laid-off workers circulate on X, examining 763 posts from twenty public accounts. Capital discourse enjoyed a mean amplification advantage of 3.12 times over labour discourse in one study and 4.18 times in another, with a median ratio of 10.77. The asymmetry survived normalisation for follower count, suggesting platform mechanics rather than audience size, and a Reddit replication across 647 posts did not reproduce it. On the platform where technology narratives are set, the executive announcing the transformation is heard several times more loudly than the person it happened to.

And finally the researchers, whose exposure indices, as Mouchel and colleagues showed, can flip one label in five on a temperature setting. When a policymaker reads that a particular occupation is highly exposed, they are usually reading a language model's uninterrogated intuition, laundered through a spreadsheet into the appearance of measurement.

The Arithmetic a Worker Can Actually Use

So what should the worker who has spent four years being told their job is next do with all this?

The first thing is to stop treating “three per cent” and “nineteen per cent” as competing claims. They are measurements of different things. The three per cent is a stock of self-reported displacement among people still in work. The nineteen per cent is a flow of jobs that were never opened to a specific age cohort in a specific set of occupations. You can believe both, and you should, because the best available evidence supports both. What you cannot do is pick the one that suits your prior and call the other hype.

The second is to notice where the risk actually sits. On the current evidence it is not distributed evenly across the workforce, and it is not primarily a risk of being sacked. It is concentrated at the entry point, in occupations where AI substitutes rather than complements, and it takes the form of a door that does not open. The policy response to displacement is severance, retraining and notice periods. The policy response to hiring avoidance is something quite different, and almost nothing in existing employment law addresses it. There is no tribunal claim for the job that was never advertised.

The third is that attribution is a form of power, and it is currently held entirely by one side. The employer knows whether the restructuring was really about AI. The worker can only guess. Challenger's warning that regulatory attention will push firms back towards vaguer language is a warning that this asymmetry is about to deepen. Every statistic in this article that depends on companies volunteering a reason, and that includes the headline Challenger series, is a measurement of corporate messaging strategy wearing the costume of an economic indicator.

The fourth is that the measurement infrastructure is not adequate to the question being asked of it. The Current Population Survey does not ask why. Neither does JOLTS. The most-cited exposure indices are generated by models that will give you a different answer if you nudge a decoding parameter. The most detailed usage data belongs to the companies with the largest commercial interest in what it shows, which is precisely why Anthropic's own economists finding no systematic unemployment increase among exposed workers is more interesting than it would be coming from anyone else. Mouchel and colleagues are right that these numbers now function as claims about the world, and that claims about the world require evidence, auditing and renewal.

The last thing is the simplest. Nine per cent said AI had helped them get promoted, and that is the largest single effect in Dixon's survey. It is also the finding least likely to be quoted, because a story about people acquiring a skill and being rewarded for it does not travel. Dixon himself is properly cautious about it, noting that agentic systems may render today's AI expertise obsolete tomorrow, and that a snapshot cannot tell you whether an advantage will last.

But it is there in the data, three times larger than the displacement figure, and its near-total absence from four years of coverage is not an accident of news judgement. It is what happens when the loudest voices in a debate are the ones selling the machine, the ones explaining a headcount reduction to shareholders, and the ones who have discovered that fear travels further than arithmetic. The apocalypse is a better story than the promotion. That does not make it the true one.

Sources and References

1. Jeffrey C. Dixon, “I surveyed workers to see if AI had caused job losses and was surprised by the findings”, The Conversation, 27 August 2026. https://theconversation.com/i-surveyed-workers-to-see-if-ai-had-caused-job-losses-and-was-surprised-by-the-findings-290100; republished as “ChatGPT said you'd lose your jobs right now — it's more like 3% of workers”, Fortune, 29 August 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/08/29/ai-workers-survey-job-impact-2026/
2. Neale Mahoney, Erika McEntarfer and Karsen Wahal, “What is really happening to jobs? Separating AI hype from reality”, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research policy brief, July 2026. https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/what-really-happening-jobs-separating-ai-hype-reality
3. Eduardo Porter, “The AI jobs apocalypse probably isn't coming anytime soon”, The Guardian, 25 July 2026. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/25/ai-jobs-apocalypse-human-labor
4. Luca Mouchel, Pierre Bouquet and Yossi Sheffi, “Jobs' AI Exposure Should Be Measured from Evidence, Not Model Priors”, arXiv:2605.15474, 14 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.15474
5. Golo Henseke, “From Exposure to Adoption: Generative AI in European Workplaces”, arXiv:2604.18849, 20 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18849
6. Jennifer L. Steele and Isabella Cruz, “Helping People Choose Careers in the Age of AI”, arXiv:2607.15506, 16 July 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.15506
7. Michelle Yin and Burhan Ogut, “Who Uses AI? Platform Selection and the Measurement of Occupational AI Exposure”, arXiv:2605.21743, 20 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.21743
8. Joy Bose, “Attention Asymmetry in AI Layoff Discourse on X: A Computational Analysis of Capital vs Labour Amplification”, arXiv:2605.29367, 28 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.29367
9. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence”, Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 2026. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/app/uploads/2026/08/Canaries_August2026.pdf
10. Ryan Nunn, “AI Is Probably Not (Yet) the Reason for Labor Market Weakening”, The Budget Lab at Yale, 7 May 2026. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/ai-probably-not-yet-reason-labor-market-weakening
11. The Budget Lab at Yale, “Tracking the Impact of AI on the Labor Market”, 16 July 2026, updated 15 September 2026. https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/tracking-impact-ai-labor-market
12. Sasha Rogelberg, “If AI is roiling the job market, the data isn't showing it, Yale Budget Lab report says, raising questions of 'AI-washing' to justify mass layoffs”, Fortune, 2 February 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/02/02/ai-labor-market-yale-budget-lab-ai-washing/
13. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, monthly Challenger Reports: “Layoffs Fall, Hiring Picks Up; AI Leads For Fifth Straight Month”, 6 August 2026. https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-layoffs-fall-hiring-picks-up-ai-leads-for-fifth-straight-month/; “August Job Cuts Up 58%, Consumer Products, Food Lead”, 2 September 2026. https://www.challengergray.com/blog/challenger-report-august-job-cuts-up-58-consumer-products-food-lead/; “Job Cuts Fall in September; Hiring Plans Up 3% Over 2025 On Weak Early Seasonal Hiring”, 6 October 2026. https://www.challengergray.com/blog/job-cuts-fall-in-september-hiring-plans-up-3-over-2025-on-weak-early-seasonal-hiring/
14. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary”, August 2026 data, released 29 September 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/jolts_09292026.htm; July 2026 data, released 1 September 2026. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/jolts_09012026.htm
15. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, series LNS12000000, LNS11300000 and LNU00000000, data through September 2026. https://www.bls.gov/cps/
16. Mary Page James and Ryan Pendell, “U.S. Workers Continue to Report Downsizing”, Gallup, 17 June 2026. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/711287/workers-continue-report-downsizing.aspx
17. ResumeGenius, “2026 AI Layoffs Report: Faith In Employers Eroding”, 24 August 2026. https://resumegenius.com/blog/career-advice/ai-layoffs-report
18. Maxim Massenkoff and Peter McCrory, “Labor Market Impacts of AI: A New Measure and Early Evidence”, Anthropic, March 2026. https://cdn.sanity.io/files/4zrzovbb/website/3f7fd9d552e66269bdb108e207c5d80531d04b8b.pdf
19. Guillermo Gallacher, “AI and Job Postings: From Destruction to Creation?“, Indeed Hiring Lab, 8 July 2026. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/07/08/ai-and-job-postings-from-destruction-to-creation/
20. Felix Aidala and Sneha Puri, “The Labor Market Is Tilting Toward Seniority”, Indeed Hiring Lab, 23 July 2026. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/07/23/the-labor-market-is-tilting-toward-seniority/
21. Indeed Hiring Lab UK, “Indeed's 2026 Mid-Year UK Jobs & Hiring Trends Report: A Labour Market Under Pressure – And in Transition”, 3 August 2026. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/uk/blog/2026/08/03/mid-year-uk-jobs-hiring-trends-report/
22. Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, “Behind the Curtain: Top AI CEO foresees white-collar bloodbath”, Axios, 28 May 2025. https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic
23. Forrester Research, “Forrester: AI-Led Job Disruption Will Escalate, While Fears Of A Job Apocalypse Are Overstated”, 13 January 2026. https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-impact-ai-jobs-forecast/
24. Fortune, “Marc Andreessen says AI layoffs are a farce: Companies are 75% overstaffed, and AI is the 'silver bullet excuse' to clean house”, 31 March 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/03/31/marc-andreessen-ai-layoffs-silver-bullet-excuse-overhiring
25. Sasha Rogelberg, “OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warns 'AI washing' is real”, Fortune, 19 February 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/02/19/sam-altman-confirms-ai-washing-job-displacement-layoffs/

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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In Summary: * This last day of the move,(when we hand over the keys this evening I'll consider the move over), has been probably the most stressful. The wife's car is in the shop and we're waiting to hear the sad story about what's going on with it and when we can pick it up. We're waiting now for the couple who have been helping us to bring the wife's house key to us so we can get it to the landlord. Lots of waiting and wondering as time is short and we really want to get things resolved.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 214.07 lbs. * bp= 148/85 (63)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:05 – apple pie * 09:00 – 1 ham & cheese sandwich * 11:00 – mashed potatoes and gravy * 14:00 – snack on deli cheese cubes * 14:30 – 1 banana

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:50 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:35 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:15 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 08:30 – unless otherwise noted, the rest of this day will be spent unpacking and organizing.

Chess: * 11:35 – moved in all pending CC games

---

Photo © Laura F. @miniliiveri@gram.social

Hmm, not as smooth as I'd like. Rotation's kinda bumpy, but okay for a first try.

50 orders in the first 24 hours since opening pre-orders for THE SOLAR GRID hardback. Not too bad.

I should probably note that the designated target of 750 orders does not make me, personally, any money. It's just the bare minimum needed to cover printing and fulfilment costs. The latter of course entailing warehousing the books, packaging, and shipping to readers, along of course with the labor of fulfilment operators. Profit margins are only unlocked beyond the 750 order-count, because that's when the per unit cost of each book starts to drop a little. But you'd need to hit at least double or triple that 750 for any kind of profit margin worth your while.

I haven't actually made any money off THE SOLAR GRID in the 10 years since I started working on it. Which is fine, it's something I've learned to make peace with. At this point, I'd just like to get the work into the hands of those who want it.

Uh, okay, excuse me while I freak out for a minute because I can see that an order has just been placed by none other than Paul Levitz.

#work #TSG #comix

Hah. i just thought it would be funny not to write today and make you believe.. well, sadly, i cant see how you reacted, but i’ll expect you to beee.. confused. because you probably werent even here yesterday. it’s twelve in the morning, the thirteenth of october, and i wrote on the eleventh. which means ive successfully managed to disappear for a whole day. congratulations to me. i guess. i didnt forget. i never forget. i just decided to be funny today, and now that im explaining it, it isnt funny anymore. thats usually how it goes, right? you have a perfectly good joke in your head, and then you open your mouth and watch it die in front of you. a little funeral. funny. anyways, today wasn’t much of a talking talk to have. work was alright, though. id say it was messy, but i was there, so it was. get it? i said i was a mess yesterday, and now the day was messy because i was there. mess. messy. me. a comedian. an underappreciated one. seemingly. alright, fine. you dont seem to like jokes. i guess being sarcastic wont work either, but thats my writing, so i wouldnt even care what you think. you little ruthless human. sitting there with your cup of JoY and that stupid coffee of yours, reading this like a newspaper, probably expecting me to say something meaningful. something about life, maybe. the suffering of existence. the unbearable weight of being alive. something you can nod at and pretend you understand before returning to whatever stupid miserable little routine you call a LiFe.

Screw you humans. screw everyone. and no, im not going to explain that either.

Sincerely, Your unpaid Hater.

A boy takes a national intelligence test. His parents wait by the phone. Not a word is wasted in this very short story, and the twist at the very end will catch you off guard.

---

A 3-minutes read.

The Jordans never spoke of the exam, not until their son, Dick, was 12 years old. It was on his birthday that Mrs. Jordan first mentioned the subject in his presence, and the anxious manner of her speech caused her husband to answer sharply.

“Forget about it,” he said. “He’ll do all right.”

They were at the breakfast table, and the boy looked up from his plate curiously. He was an alert-eyed youngster, with flat blond hair and a quick nervous manner. He didn’t understand what the sudden tension was about, but he did know that today was his birthday, and he wanted harmony above all.

Somewhere in the little apartment there was wrapped, beribboned packages waiting to be opened. In the tiny wall-kitchen, something warm and sweet was being prepared in the automatic stove. He wanted the day to be happy, and the moistness of his mother’s eyes, the scowl of his father’s face, spoiled the mood of expectation with which he had greeted the morning.

“What exam?” he asked.

His mother looked at the tablecloth. “It’s just a sort of Government intelligence test they give children at the age of twelve. You’ll be taking it next week. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“You mean a test like in school?”

“Something like that,” his father said, getting up from the table. “Go read your comic books, Dick.”

The boy rose and wandered toward that part of the living room that had been “his” corner since infancy. He fingered the topmost comic of the stack, but seemed uninterested in the colorful squares of fast-paced action. He wandered toward the window and peered gloomily at the veil of mist that shrouded the glass.

“Why did it have to rain today?” he asked. “Why couldn’t it rain tomorrow?” His father, now slumped into an armchair with the Government newspaper, rattled the sheets in vexation. “Because it just did, that’s all. Rain makes the grass grow.”

“Why, Dad?”

“Because it does, that’s all.”

Dick puckered his brow. “What makes it green though? The grass?”

“Nobody knows,” his father snapped, then immediately regretted his abruptness. Later in the day, it was birthday time again. His mother beamed as she handed over the gaily-colored packages, and even his father managed a grin and a rumple-of-thehair.

He kissed his mother and shook hands gravely with his father. Then the birthday cake was brought forth, and the ceremonies concluded.

An hour later, seated by the window, he watched the sun force its way between the clouds.

“Dad,” he said, “how far away is the sun?”

“Five thousand miles,” his father said.

---

Dick sat at the breakfast table and again saw moisture in his mother’s eyes. He didn’t connect her tears with the exam until his father suddenly brought the subject to light again.

“Well, Dick,” he said, with a manly frown, “you’ve got an appointment today.”

“I know, Dad. I hope…”

“Now it’s nothing to worry about. Thousands of children take this test every day. The Government wants to know how smart you are, Dick. That’s all there is to it.”

“I get good marks in school,” he said hesitantly.

“This is different. This is a special kind of test. They give you this stuff to drink, you see, and then you go into a room where there’s a sort of machine…”

“What stuff to drink?” Dick said.

“It’s nothing. It tastes like peppermint. It’s just to make sure you answer the questions truthfully. Not that the Government thinks you won’t tell the truth, but this stuff makes sure.”

Dick’s face showed puzzlement, and a touch of fright. He looked at his mother, and she composed her face into a misty smile.

“Everything will be all right,” she said.

“Of course it will,” his father agreed. “You’re a good boy, Dick; you’ll make out fine. Then we’ll come home and celebrate. All right?”

“Yes sir,” Dick said.

They entered the Government Educational Building fifteen minutes before the appointed hour. They crossed the marble floors of the great, pillared lobby, passed beneath an archway and entered an automatic elevator that brought them to the fourth floor.

There was a young man wearing an insignia-less tunic, seated at a polished desk in front of Room 404. He held a clipboard in his hand, and he checked the list down to the J’s and permitted the Jordans to enter.

The room was as cold and official as a courtroom, with long benches flanking metal tables. There were several fathers and sons already there, and a thin-lipped woman with cropped black hair was passing out sheets of paper.

Mr. Jordan filled out the form, and returned it to the clerk. Then he told Dick: “It won’t be long now. When they call your name, you go through the doorway at that end of the room.” He indicated the portal with his finger.

A concealed loudspeaker crackled and called off the first name. Dick saw a boy leave his father’s side reluctantly and walk slowly towards the door.

At five minutes of eleven, they called the name of Jordan.

“Good luck, son,” his father said, without looking at him. “I’ll call for you when the test is over.”

Dick walked to the door and turned the knob. The room inside was dim, and he could barely make out the features of the gray-tunicked attendant who greeted him.

“Sit down,” the man said softly. He indicated a high stool behind his desk. “Your name’s Richard Jordan?”

“Yes sir.”

“Your classification number is 600-115. Drink this, Richard.”

He lifted a plastic cup from the desk and handed it to the boy. The liquid inside had the consistency of buttermilk, tasted only vaguely of the promised peppermint. Dick downed it and handed the man the empty cup.

He sat in silence, feeling drowsy, while the man wrote busily on a sheet of paper. Then the attendant looked at his watch and rose to stand only inches from Dick’s face.

He unclipped a pen-like object from the pocket of his tunic and flashed a tiny light into the boy’s eyes.

“All right,” he said. “Come with me, Richard.”

He led Dick to the end of the room, where a single wooden armchair faced a multi-dialed computing machine. There was a microphone on the left arm of the chair, and when the boy sat down, he found its pinpoint head conveniently at his mouth.

“Now just relax, Richard. You’ll be asked some questions, and you think them over carefully. Then give your answers into the microphone. The machine will take care of the rest.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll leave you alone now. Whenever you want to start, just say ‘ready’ into the microphone.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man squeezed his shoulder and left.

Dick said, “Ready.”

Lights appeared on the machine, and a mechanism whirred. A voice said:

“Complete this sequence. One, four, seven, ten…”

---

Mr. and Mrs. Jordan were in the living room, not speaking, not even speculating.

It was almost four o’clock when the telephone rang. The woman tried to reach it first, but her husband was quicker.

“Mr. Jordan?”

The voice was clipped; a brisk, official voice.

“Yes, speaking.”

“This is the Government Educational Service. Your son, Richard M. Jordan, Classification 600-115, has completed the Government examination. We regret to inform you that his intelligence quotient has exceeded the Government regulation, according to Rule 84, Section 5, of the New Code.”

Across the room, the woman cried out, knowing nothing except the emotion she read on her husband’s face.

“You may specify by telephone,” the voice droned on, “whether you wish his body interred by the Government or would you prefer a private burial place? The fee for Government burial is ten dollars.”

#slesar

Image: Ravindu Thimantha (CC BY-SA 4.0)

I am not doing the 31 Horror Movies in 31 Days challenge because I don’t need that kind of pressure, but I am doing my best to watch as many horror movies in October as I can!

Here are the ones I’ve watched so far. All are new to me, but most aren’t new.

Pabrik Gula (aka Sugar Mill)—I like watching horror movies from other countries because a)it makes me feel like part of a worldwide community of weirdos and b) they tend to have different tropes and obsessions than American horror movies. This movie, about a bunch of friends from a town in rural Java (I’m not familiar with Indonesia, so maybe that’s the only kind of Java?) who sign up for seasonal work at a sugar mill that turns out to be haunted, is pretty good for most of the movie but ultimately fell short for me. The ghosts are creepy, there’s a lot of suspense, and (mild spoiler) the character who is dumb, fat, and horny (and also darker skinned than anyone else—I also don’t know if colorism is a thing in Indonesia, but based on this movie I suspect it is) not only isn’t the first to die—he doesn’t die at all! There’s a lot of stuff about dispelling demons in an Islamic context which is interesting to me because it’s all very different than how it’s portrayed in a Christian context. But unfortunately from my perspective, the movie isn’t concerned with the morality of the factory owners who ran a place where a lot of people died (hence the ghosts), but rather with the sexual morality of the workers. So like a pretty decent horror movie that kind of turns into a Davey and Goliath episode at the end, if Davey and Goliath talked about adultery. (I dunno—maybe they did. I couldn’t stand that show.)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch—Current conventional wisdom is that this movie is good, actually, and just never got a fair shake from a public that was expecting another Michael Meyers story. I’m sorry to report this is not true. I mean, look, it’s goofy and therefore kind of charming if you find goofy 80’s horror charming, but it’s not actually good. There’s just way too much going on: the human-passing killbots are like, not even central to the plot, just to give you an idea of how busy this movie is. The rest is science fiction witchcraft plus a non-credible age-inappropriate relationship and a heaping dose of misogyny. (Because our alcoholic hero’s stupid ex just wants to complain about what a shit father he is instead of listening to his insane story about killer masks!). Watchable, but VERY far from essential.

The Blade Cuts Deeper—You know what I appreciate? When someone makes a subgenre movie without constantly winking at us about how familiar they are with the conventions of said subgenre. In this case, we’ve got a modern giallo set in the world of reality television. It differs from classic giallo in that it’s not dubbed and everyone can act, but otherwise it’s just a straightforward giallo movie. It seems to be trying to satirize true crime TV in a way that never totally hits, but still, it’s suspenseful and gory and has a cool surprise ending. And best of all, the filmmakers appear to have decided to just make a giallo instead of a giallo ABOUT giallo. So the movie is about what it’s about rather than being about the cleverness of the filmmakers. This was my favorite of the 4.

Solvent—I remain a sucker for found footage because it strips away one layer of artifice and makes it easier for me to suspend disbelief. And the description of this one made it sound like it was fully a “cursed object” movie, which is right up my alley, but that’s really not what it is. Let me say the first 20 minutes or so are really really good. And after that it kind of goes off the rails, ultimately resolving into what’s primarily a body horror movie, which is my least favorite subgenre. So I guess if you like body horror, you might like this one, though it is self-consciously artsy and the POV character is, judging only by his voice, the worst actor in the movie. Oh yeah, also? There’s a big moment at the end that features sub-Sharknado level CGI. Seriously, it looks like absolute garbage and is unintentionally comical. I can’t believe they saw this shot and went, “yeah, that’s good.” Okay. Spoilers! Turn back now or forever have a mediocre horror movie spoiled!

So, like, the central conceit of this movie is essentially incomprehensible. The nazi guy found a way to liquefy himself and saved bottles of his pee because reasons, and now he lives as a puddle of goo in a hole in the ground with a pipe in it because reasons, and then our protagonist gets possessed and obsessive and starts spewing black goo from every orifice. Oh yeah, and inexplicably feeding the nazi puddle of goo with his own pee. I have never seen a movie so obsessed with urine. I’m not here to kink shame, but I guess I just don’t find pee as interesting as the filmmakers do. Fair play for the dick horror, though—I feel like women are often the targets of body horror, and slasher horror, and, okay a lot of kinds of horror, so I guess it was time for us to see a penis leaking black goo.

The protagonist apparently committed war crimes in Bosnia, but the movie really stops short of exploring the connection between his war crimes and the nazi puddle of goo’s war crimes, ultimately insisting that the protagonist is better because he exposes a lot of present-day nazis. Oh yeah, it also equates criticism of the Israeli government—or indeed, any sympathy at all with the Palestinian people—with Nazism, which I’m sure Netanyahu appreciated, but I didn’t.

Two major events for us today: #1.) turning over the keys to the house we've moved out of, back to the landlord, and #2.) taking the car into the dealership to diagnose a mystery odor that the wife and one of her coworkers smell coming from the engine compartment of the car.

Event #2 will probably happen as soon as the wife leaves her work. Noon or a little earlier.

Event #1 will happen after she returns home and I finish preparing a package with our house keys, keys to the window bars, etc., and an explanatory note. The wife will then take that package to the Bingo Hall to turn it over to the landlord.

And the adventure continues.

The Phenomenon: The Open Mic vs. The Empty Room

The modern digital landscape has fundamentally fractured how humans perceive community and conversation. We see this daily in viral engagement threads—give people an open, digital microphone, and a vast majority will blindly sprint toward it simply to shout their own isolated opinions, completely ignoring the thousands of others doing the exact same thing. It is the digital equivalent of walking into a crowded theater, screaming your favorite color into the void, and leaving without listening to a single response.

While this behavior is mildly amusing in harmless pop-culture debates, it becomes deeply toxic when it crosses over into professional and creative networks. Increasingly, digital spaces are viewed not as ecosystems to nurture and participate in, but as raw audiences to be harvested.

Here, we examine the recurring behavioral patterns of those who prioritize ego over ecosystem, and the systemic illusions that feed their hubris.

Pattern 1: The Attention Harvesters

The Scenario: A major digital event, industry livestream, or collaborative town hall is taking place. A core community is engaged in deep, genuine conversation, offering support and welcoming newcomers. The response from a specific subset of attendees? They entirely ignore the ongoing discourse to aggressively spam their own links, projects, and demands for attention.

The Psychology:

• Zero-Sum Networking: These individuals operate under a severe scarcity mindset. They believe that if the spotlight is currently shining elsewhere, they are actively losing. They view a bustling chat or a collaborative space not as a genuine place to connect, but as a hunting ground to poach wandering eyes.
• The Illusion of Audience: They fundamentally misunderstand how attention and influence work. They confuse proximity to a crowd with possession of an audience. Shouting a promotional link in a crowded, unrelated room doesn’t establish authority or generate genuine interest; it merely signals desperation and establishes the individual as a spammer.

Pattern 2: Micro-Milestone Megalomania

The Scenario: A member of a collaborative, mutually supportive community hits a minor, arbitrary algorithmic threshold—just enough to unlock a basic platform feature or secure a tiny localized following. Almost instantly, their ego hyper-inflates. The foundational community that championed and supported them early on is abruptly discarded. They attempt an immediate rebrand as an “independent titan,” genuinely believing they now belong at the table with long-established industry leaders.

The Psychology:

• The Dunning-Kruger Ego Spike: A tiny, highly localized taste of success causes a massive, disproportionate surge in unearned confidence. Because they lack the experience of managing scale, they dramatically overestimate the significance of their minor win.
• The “Local Maximum” Trap: They became a slightly bigger fish in a very specific, sheltered pond. Their ego convinces them this means they are suddenly apex predators ready to swim alone in the vast ocean. They fatally mistake a temporary algorithmic milestone for actual, enduring cultural gravity.

Pattern 3: The Ladder Kickers

The Scenario: A growing creator or digital entity relies heavily on a peer community for early support, resources, emotional backing, and cross-promotion. However, the very moment they achieve a viral breakout or reach a critical mass of visibility, their narrative shifts to: “I can do this on my own.” They swiftly sever ties, offer zero acknowledgment to their early supporters, and abandon the very ecosystem that built their foundation.

The Psychology:

• Transactional Parasocial Climbing: They never actually viewed their community as peers or friends; they viewed them purely as rungs on a ladder. Once they reach their desired height, they kick the ladder away. This is done partly so no one else can follow, but mostly to curate a revisionist history that creates the illusion they climbed to the top entirely by their own solitary genius.
• The “Audience Entanglement” Trap: As noted in recent academic research regarding digital behavior, when creators suddenly gain widespread appeal, they often develop a highly dysfunctional relationship with their numbers. They become so entangled with maintaining the spotlight and appeasing their new, massive audience that they deliberately cut out the collaborators and grounding communities that originally shaped their work.

Pattern 4: The Platform Mercenaries and the Dissonance of Clout

The Scenario: An individual weaponizes a dying trend, technological deprecation, or manufactured outrage to funnel attention exclusively to the platform that currently rewards them with the highest vanity metrics. They routinely poach members from private, collaborative spaces just to inflate their public view counts elsewhere. Most jarringly, they exhibit extreme behavioral dissonance: publicly crying and playing the victim regarding the “overwhelming pressure” of attention, while privately bragging about their metrics and aggressively soliciting donations. When they establish themselves on their new platform, any mention of the peers they built their foundation alongside is entirely erased.

The Psychology:

• The Dissonance of Clout: They crave the benefits of community—sympathy, donations, and initial traffic—but refuse the obligations of reciprocity. The victimhood is performative, designed to mask a deeply transactional nature.
• Narcissistic Supply Shift: They willingly trade the deep, mutual respect and resilience of a rooted community for the shallow, highly volatile metrics of a mass, anonymous audience.

Pattern 5: The Corporate Capture (Selling Out for the Setup)

The Scenario: A grassroots creator builds an audience based on raw authenticity and independent experimentation. However, the moment a massive corporate entity offers them high-end, proprietary equipment or lucrative sponsorships, they instantly abandon their independent ethos. Their content becomes sanitized, their opinions align perfectly with corporate PR, and the community realizes they can no longer trust a word the creator says because the system producing the content is entirely corporate-controlled.

The Psychology:

• The Illusion of Upgrade: They mistake expensive tools for elevated status. By trading their authenticity for hardware or capital, they fail to realize that their core value to the community was their independence, not their production value.

Pattern 6: The Performative Megaphone

The Scenario: A critical issue impacts the community, requiring unified, actionable support—such as signing a petition, mobilizing for a cause, or defending a peer. The largest, most visible accounts eagerly jump on the topic, loudly broadcasting their commentary or outrage about the “latest happening.” Yet, when it comes to actually utilizing their massive platforms for tangible good—like simply sharing the link to the petition or directing their followers to take action—they are entirely silent.

The Psychology:

• Clout-Driven Activism: These individuals view community crises not as problems to be solved, but as trending topics to be exploited for personal visibility. Sharing a petition drives traffic away from their profile; posting an outrage take keeps eyes firmly on them.
• Hoarding Social Capital: They want the aesthetic of leadership and the engagement that comes with participating in the discourse, but they refuse to spend any of their actual social capital. They recognize that their numbers are fragile and fear that asking their audience to do actual work will disrupt their vanity metrics.

The Macro Reality: Renting Relevance in a Cold System

The climbers and ego-driven individuals described above operate under a fatal misunderstanding of modern digital infrastructure. They believe their viral moments are turning them into self-made gods with a loyal, personal army. The data, however, tells a different story.

• The Death of the “Follow Graph”: Historically, digital influence was built on the “follow graph”—a network rooted in actual relationships, intentional subscriptions, and sustained loyalty. Today, the follow graph is largely dead. It has been entirely replaced by the “interest graph,” where algorithmic feeds serve content to cold audiences based strictly on fleeting, momentary relevance.
• The Illusion of Personal Gravity: A creator might boast millions of views, but recent behavioral data shows that up to 85% of younger audiences regularly consume content from creators they do not even follow.

These inflated numbers are rapidly becoming nothing more than vanity metrics. When a creator abandons their community because they think their massive view counts grant them permanent “gravity,” they are fundamentally deluded. They are not building lasting fame; they are simply temporarily renting relevance from a cold, indifferent platform.

The Contrast: True Authority is Quiet

While clout-chasers burn bridges over minor milestones and shout over each other in crowded rooms, true digital authority behaves entirely differently. Established, respected voices offer quiet, substantial support without ever demanding the microphone.

• The Rule of Security: People with actual cultural and professional gravity do not need to spam their links in a chat box. They don’t feel the need to loudly declare their “independence” every time a metric ticks upward. They understand that a rising tide lifts all boats. Their ego is secure enough to support the network, knowing that their value speaks for itself without artificial amplification.

Conclusion: Ruling Over Ashes

The great irony of the “Blind Run to the Mic” is that it is ultimately a self-defeating strategy. Influence built on extraction rather than contribution is incredibly fragile.

When you build your digital castle by burning the village that supported you, you eventually end up ruling over ashes. The interest graph will inevitably shift, the algorithmic favor will dry up, and the cold audiences will scroll away to the next loud noise. Because their massive numbers were just rented relevance, they will have nothing to fall back on. When these climbers finally look around for the community they abandoned to weather the storm, they will find nothing but an empty room.

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