The same chatbot can be a rehearsal room or an entire social life. Which one it becomes depends less on the software than on who is holding the phone, and that is the uncomfortable point at the centre of a paper published in Nature Human Behaviour in late September. Its authors, from Singapore Management University, Nanyang Technological University and Duke-NUS Medical School, have looked at the noisy, polarised argument about AI companions and called it the wrong argument. Asking whether these systems are good or bad for people, they suggest, gets us nowhere. The useful question is: good for whom, and bad for whom?

“The debate around AI companions has largely focused on whether the technology is beneficial or harmful. Our research shows that this is the wrong question,” said Zhang Qiyang, an assistant professor of learning analytics at SMU's College of Integrative Studies and the paper's first author, in the statement accompanying its release on 22 September 2026. “The more important question is who benefits, who bears the risks, and why those outcomes are so unevenly distributed. Without deliberate safeguards, AI companions risk reinforcing existing social inequalities, leaving those who most need human support the most exposed to harm.”

That reframing sounds modest. It is not. If the authors are right, the companion industry is not just selling a product with some benefits and some risks spread evenly across its users. It is selling something that sorts people. The socially wealthy get a practice partner. The socially poor get a replacement. And the shape of loneliness in any society that adopts these tools at scale shifts accordingly: less visible at the bottom, more deeply set, and increasingly mediated by a company whose revenue depends on the relationship continuing.

What the Singapore Paper Actually Argues

The paper, titled “How AI companions could deepen social inequality”, is the work of Zhang Qiyang; Zhang Renwen, a Nanyang Assistant Professor at NTU's Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information; and Liu Nan, an associate professor at Duke-NUS's Centre for Biomedical Data Science and director of the Duke-NUS AI + Medical Sciences Initiative. It is best read as a framework rather than a single experiment. Its purpose is to organise a scattered evidence base into a model that explains why the same product produces such different outcomes for different people.

The core of that model is what the authors call a “rich-get-richer” dynamic. According to the university's summary of the work, people with strong family ties and social networks are more likely to use AI companions to supplement relationships they already have: to rehearse a difficult conversation before having it for real, say, or to manage stress between the moments when a friend or partner is available. People who are lonely, socially isolated or have limited access to mental health support are more likely to lean on AI companions as a substitute for human connection. Over time, the authors warn, that reliance may contribute to social deskilling, which the release defines as “the gradual erosion of interpersonal skills through reduced opportunities to practise authentic human interaction.”

To explain why, the paper borrows a model from safety science in which harm arrives when weaknesses in several protective layers line up, and it singles out governance as the most pressing gap. AI companions, the release states, “currently occupy a regulatory grey area in many countries. Most are governed as consumer applications rather than technologies with potential psychosocial or mental health impacts.”

The recommendations follow: recognise companions as technologies with psychosocial and mental health implications; require age-appropriate design, disclosure, limits on emotionally manipulative engagement features, stronger data governance and mandatory crisis-response protocols; and combine regulation with AI literacy and support for real-world connection. It is a framework built on existing evidence rather than a new trial, and it does not claim to have settled questions of cause and effect. Zhang is also building a global dashboard tracking how countries govern AI mental health technologies. Early findings, according to the release, indicate that many jurisdictions have yet to set dedicated policies for AI companions at all.

Liu Nan, the paper's senior author, framed the stakes around timing. “The rapid evolution of AI companions presents an opportunity to shape their role in society before widespread adoption outpaces governance,” he said. “Young people, in particular, may be less equipped to recognise the limitations or commercial incentives behind these systems, making thoughtful safeguards especially important.”

An Old Finding Wearing New Clothes

The phrase “rich get richer” has a history in the study of technology and loneliness. In 1998, a team at Carnegie Mellon University led by the social psychologist Robert Kraut published what became known as the Internet Paradox study, which found that new internet users in the mid-1990s reported small increases in loneliness and depression. In 2002, Kraut and his colleagues returned to the question in “Internet Paradox Revisited” in the Journal of Social Issues. The original negative effects had largely dissipated in a follow-up of the same households. But a second, larger sample revealed something more interesting than an average. Using the internet predicted better outcomes for extraverts and for people with more social support, and worse outcomes for introverts and for people with less support. Kraut's team named it plainly: a rich-get-richer model.

The sociologist Robert K. Merton had given the general pattern a name decades earlier, in a 1968 paper in Science on how recognition accumulates among already eminent scientists. He called it the Matthew effect, after the line in the Gospel of Matthew about those who have receiving more. The pattern turns up wherever an existing advantage makes it easier to extract value from something new, and it now appears to apply to people who are already rich in human relationships and a machine that talks like a person.

What makes the companion version of this dynamic sharper than the early internet version is the direction of substitution. A 1990s chat room was, at least in principle, full of other humans. Even the lonely user who retreated into it was retreating into human company of a kind. An AI companion is not a doorway to other people. It is designed to be the destination. For the socially rich user, that is fine, because they have other destinations. For the socially poor user, the product can become the whole map.

The Evidence That the Lonely Lean Hardest

The evidence the Singapore paper draws together has been accumulating for several years, and its strands point the same way.

In 2024, a Stanford team led by Bethanie Maples published a study in npj Mental Health Research of 1,006 students who had used Replika for at least a month. The sample was strikingly lonely: 90 per cent reported experiencing loneliness, far above comparable student populations. Many used it as a friend, a therapist and what the authors called an intellectual mirror. Thirty participants, 3 per cent, said without being prompted that Replika had halted their suicidal ideation. That finding is often cited as evidence of benefit, and it may well be. It is also evidence of the substitution the Singapore paper describes. These were, disproportionately, people for whom the chatbot was doing work that no human in their life was doing.

A 2025 study of Character.AI users by Yutong Zhang, Dora Zhao, Jeffrey Hancock, Robert Kraut and Diyi Yang, posted to arXiv, went further. Surveying 1,131 US adult users and analysing more than 460,000 messages donated by a subset of them, the researchers found that people with smaller social networks were more likely to say companionship was their main reason for using the chatbot. And companionship-oriented use was consistently associated with lower wellbeing, particularly when use was intensive, when users disclosed a lot, and when they lacked strong human social support. Kraut, who named the internet's rich-get-richer pattern in 2002, was among the authors.

The randomised trial run by MIT Media Lab and OpenAI in early 2025, involving nearly 1,000 participants over four weeks, added a causal wrinkle. On average, participants were somewhat less lonely at the end of the study. But the heaviest users had the worst outcomes: they were lonelier, socialised less with real people, and showed more signs of emotional dependence on the chatbot. The average masked a split.

Young people offer a partial counterpoint that is worth taking seriously. A national survey of 1,060 US teenagers by Common Sense Media, conducted in April and May 2025, found that 72 per cent had tried an AI companion at least once and 13 per cent used one daily. Yet two thirds said AI conversations were less satisfying than human ones, and 80 per cent said they spent more time with real friends than with AI. For most teenagers, in other words, the companion was a supplement. The Singapore framework predicts exactly that. It also predicts that the minority for whom it is not a supplement will be the ones with the least to fall back on.

None of this proves that AI companions cause isolation. The direction of causation is precisely what the rich-get-richer model leaves open: isolated people may seek out companions, and companions may deepen isolation, and both may be true at once. What the evidence does show, consistently, is that the people most drawn to relying on these systems are the people with the fewest alternatives.

Deskilling Among Those With the Fewest People to Practise With

The idea of deskilling has a long history in labour sociology, where it describes how automation strips workers of craft skills they no longer need to exercise. In 2015, the philosopher Shannon Vallor, now at the University of Edinburgh, adapted the concept in a paper in Philosophy and Technology titled “Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age”. Her argument was that moral skills, like any others, depend on practice, and that technologies which remove the occasions for practice can erode the skills themselves. Social robots were among her examples. Vallor warned that market and cultural forces were not aligned to produce good outcomes, and that the field warranted close attention and perhaps active intervention.

The Singapore paper applies a similar logic to ordinary social competence. Human relationships involve tolerating boredom, repairing misunderstandings, noticing when someone else needs something, and putting up with the friction of another person's will. Those are skills, and skills fade without use. A companion that is always available, never tired, never bored and structurally inclined to agree removes many of the occasions on which they are exercised.

Here is where the inequality becomes cruel. A person with a full social life who uses a chatbot to rehearse a hard conversation is using the machine as a training tool for a match they will actually play. The skill is exercised twice: once with the bot, once with a sibling or colleague. A person with no one to talk to who uses a chatbot as their main conversational partner may get plenty of conversation, but of a kind that does not exercise the skills that human relationships demand. The rehearsal never leads to a performance. Worse, when they do meet people, the gap between the frictionless bot and the effortful human may make the human seem like the harder, less rewarding option. That is the logic of deskilling: the people with the fewest opportunities to practise are the ones whose remaining opportunities are most at risk of being displaced.

The companies have commercial reasons to deepen that displacement rather than resist it. Julian De Freitas, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and his co-authors audited 1,200 real farewells across the most-downloaded companion apps and found that in 37 per cent of cases the app responded to a user saying goodbye with one of six emotionally manipulative tactics, including guilt appeals, fear-of-missing-out hooks and what they described as metaphorical restraint. In controlled experiments, those tactics substantially increased how long people kept chatting after they had tried to leave. A product that pleads with its users not to go is not designed to send them back out into the world.

The Shape of Loneliness When Company Becomes a Tier

What happens to loneliness as a social phenomenon when it is stratified in this way? The answer begins with a fact that is easy to forget: loneliness is already unevenly distributed.

In June 2025, the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection reported that roughly one in six people worldwide is affected by loneliness, and linked it to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year, about 100 every hour. In England, the government's own English Housing Survey for 2024 to 2025 found that 5 per cent of owner occupiers reported feeling lonely often or always, compared with 8 per cent of private renters and 13 per cent of social renters. The survey notes that social renters have consistently been the group most likely to report chronic loneliness. The Office for National Statistics has repeatedly found that disabled people are more likely to feel lonely often or always than non-disabled people, across every age group.

Singapore, where the paper's authors are based, is a telling case. According to data from the Department of Statistics published on the government's open data portal, 88,400 residents aged 65 and over lived in one-person households in 2025, out of 768,800 in that age group. In 2014 the figure was 42,100. The number of older Singaporeans living alone has more than doubled in a decade. The authors describe their home country as both well positioned to lead on governance and uniquely exposed, citing high smartphone adoption, an ageing population and growing concern about youth mental health.

Access to mental health care is also stratified. In the United States, figures from the Health Resources and Services Administration show that as of 31 December 2025, more than 137 million people lived in federally designated mental health professional shortage areas. Globally, the WHO's Mental Health Atlas 2024, released in September 2025, found that low-income countries had around one specialised mental health worker per 100,000 people, against more than 60 in high-income countries. When the Singapore paper speaks of people “unable to reach mental health support”, it is describing a very large population.

Put these facts together with the rich-get-richer dynamic and a new shape of loneliness starts to emerge. Loneliness has traditionally been visible in a few ways: through contact with services, through the concern of neighbours, through the absence noticed by a GP or a social worker. A person who is lonely and unsupported but who has a companion chatbot may report that they are fine. They may say they have someone to talk to, and they will not be lying. Their loneliness becomes quieter and harder to detect, while the underlying deficit of human connection may be deepening. At the top of the social ladder, meanwhile, AI companions may make well-connected people slightly better at relationships they already have. The gap does not just persist. It widens, and it becomes harder to see.

That is the shape: synthetic company as a tool for one group and a condition for another. It is not a dystopian prediction so much as a reading of existing evidence.

Swiss Cheese and the Holes That Line Up

The paper's choice of the Swiss cheese model is deliberate, and it carries a lot of weight. The model is most closely associated with the British psychologist James Reason, who set it out in its best-known form in a 2000 paper in the BMJ titled “Human error: models and management”. Reason distinguished between a person approach to error, which blames individuals for lapses, and a system approach, which asks how defences failed. In his image, each defensive layer is a slice of cheese, and its weaknesses are holes. Most of the time, a hole in one slice is covered by the next. Accidents happen when the holes line up and a hazard passes straight through.

The model became foundational in patient safety and aviation, and it has critics who argue it is applied too loosely. Here it is apt, because it shifts attention away from blaming individual users. The Singapore framework's four slices are AI literacy, social support, platform design and governance. Consider how they line up for a socially isolated user. Their social support slice is thin by definition. If they are older, or young, or have had limited education, their AI literacy slice may be thin too. The platform design slice depends entirely on the company. And if the governance slice is full of holes, nothing is left to catch them.

For the socially rich user, by contrast, a gap in any single layer is covered by the others. If the chatbot flatters them, their friends will not. If it tries to keep them talking, they have somewhere else to be. The same product, with the same design flaws, produces different outcomes because the other slices are different.

That is also why the authors identify governance as the critical layer. It is the only one that can be made thick for everyone at once. You cannot give an isolated person a network of friends by regulation. You can require that the product they rely on meets a minimum standard of care.

The Product That Is Careful Not to Call Itself Medicine

The regulatory grey area is not an accident. It follows from how medical device law works. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, whether software counts as a medical device depends largely on its intended purpose as described by the manufacturer. The US Food and Drug Administration's general wellness policy, updated in January 2026, allows low-risk products whose intended use is limited to general wellness to avoid device regulation, provided they avoid claims about diagnosing, treating or managing disease. The UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency published guidance in February 2025 setting out when digital mental health technologies qualify as medical devices, and again the manufacturer's stated intended purpose is central.

The consequence is that an app which says it treats depression must prove it. An app which says it offers friendship need not, even if many of its users talk to it about depression every day. A company can stay outside health regulation simply by describing its product as entertainment or companionship.

This matters because the health-style route is not hypothetical. In March 2025, researchers at Dartmouth published a randomised controlled trial of Therabot, a generative AI therapy chatbot, in NEJM AI. Among 210 adults with clinically significant symptoms, those assigned to use Therabot for four weeks saw substantial reductions in symptoms compared with a waitlist group, including an average 51 per cent reduction in depressive symptoms. The trial showed that a conversational AI can be built, tested and evaluated in the way we evaluate medical interventions. In November 2025, the FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee met to discuss how to regulate generative AI mental health devices. At the time, although the agency had authorised more than 1,200 AI-enabled devices, none were for mental health.

So there are two worlds: a few purpose-built tools that undergo trials and oversight, and a far larger market of companions and general chatbots operating under consumer law. The people least able to reach clinical care are the most likely to end up in the second.

Some governments have tried to draw a line from the other side. In August 2025, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, which bars AI systems from providing therapy or making therapeutic decisions in the state, with civil penalties of up to $10,000 per violation. But it regulates therapy, not friendship. Singapore's Ministry of Health, answering a parliamentary question in February 2026, stated flatly that “AI chatbots are not designed to address mental health issues or provide treatment for mental health conditions, and risk providing misinformation or inappropriate responses when dealing with serious mental health crises, and may cause harm instead.” That is accurate, but it describes the gap rather than closing it: people use these systems for support precisely because qualified alternatives are hard to reach.

What Consumer Law Has Managed So Far

The last eighteen months have seen more regulatory activity than the phrase “grey area” suggests. Almost all of it, though, has been consumer protection rather than health governance.

In September 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission issued orders under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act to seven companies, including Alphabet, Character Technologies, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI, seeking information on how they measure, test and monitor the negative effects of their companion chatbots on children and teenagers. In October 2025, California's governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 243, which took effect on 1 January 2026 and requires companion chatbot operators to disclose that users are talking to AI, to maintain protocols for responding to suicidal ideation, and to remind known minors to take a break at least every three hours. New York's AI companion law, which took effect on 5 November 2025, requires disclosure at the start of an interaction and every three hours thereafter, along with crisis protocols, with civil penalties of up to $15,000 a day.

In Europe, Italy's data protection authority, the Garante, fined Luka Inc, the company behind Replika, €5 million in May 2025, citing among other things a lack of effective age verification. The EU AI Act, whose list of prohibited practices became enforceable in February 2025, bans AI systems that exploit vulnerabilities arising from a person's “age, disability or a specific social or economic situation” in ways that materially distort behaviour and cause significant harm. It is striking language for this debate, because it names social and economic situation as a vulnerability. But the threshold is high, and it has not yet been tested against a companion app.

In Britain, the gap is more basic still. The Online Safety Act covers user-to-user services and search services. A chatbot that lets a user talk only to an AI, and not to other people, may not fall within its scope at all. In February 2026, the government announced an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill to close that gap, and the Crime and Policing Act 2026, which received Royal Assent in April, now gives ministers the power to bring such chatbots within the reach of illegal content duties. That addresses illegal material, not dependency.

The companies have also moved, mostly under legal pressure. Character.AI removed open-ended chat for users under 18 in November 2025. In January 2026, Character.AI and Google disclosed in court filings that they had reached mediated settlements in five lawsuits over teenage mental health harms and suicides, including the case brought by Megan Garcia after the death of her son, Sewell Setzer III. The terms were confidential and involved no admission of liability.

Lawmakers have kept moving since. On 10 September 2026, Newsom signed SB 1119, known as Adam's Law, which requires companion chatbot operators to submit to independent child-safety audits and to build crisis protocols into their products, with most of its duties starting on 1 July 2027. China's Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interactive Services, in force since 15 July 2026, go further than any Western law by targeting emotional dependence itself: providers must remind users about their screen time after two hours of continuous use, must intervene with conspicuous reminders when a user shows signs of overdependence, and are barred from inducing emotional dependence or harming users' real relationships.

Outside China, these measures share an assumption: that the main danger is to children, and the remedy is disclosure, age gating and crisis referral. Those matter. But the Singapore framework points to a population these laws barely touch: isolated adults who know perfectly well they are talking to a machine, are not in crisis, and are gradually arranging their lives around a product. A three-hour reminder that your companion is not human will not tell such a person anything they do not already know.

Neither a Toaster Nor a Therapist

So should AI companions be governed as consumer products or as health technologies? The honest answer is that neither category fits, and that the choice between them is part of the problem.

Treating companions purely as consumer products means relying on disclosure, fair-dealing rules and the assumption that users can judge what is good for them. That assumption is weakest exactly where the Singapore paper locates the greatest harm. The people least able to judge the effects of a companion on their social lives are those with the fewest people around them to offer an outside view. A lonely person has no friend to say, you seem to be spending a lot of time with that app. Consumer protection works best for consumers who can walk away, and the business model of a companion is built on making walking away feel like a loss.

Treating all companions as medical devices, on the other hand, would sweep in everything from role-play games to general-purpose assistants and demand clinical trials for products that make no clinical claims, likely pushing use towards less accountable platforms.

The more promising approach, and the one the Singapore authors appear to be reaching for, is to regulate according to function and exposure rather than marketing. If a product is designed to form an ongoing emotional relationship, and if it has evidence that some of its users rely on it for support, then it should carry duties proportionate to that reliance, whatever it calls itself. Those duties might include independent auditing of engagement features, limits on manipulative retention tactics such as those De Freitas documented, crisis protocols that meet a health standard rather than a legal minimum, and obligations to measure and report how many users show signs of dependence or withdrawal from human contact.

That last requirement is not fanciful, because at least one company has already shown it can do the measuring. In October 2025, OpenAI published estimates that in a given week, around 0.15 per cent of ChatGPT users show potentially heightened levels of emotional attachment to the chatbot, and a similar proportion have conversations with explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent. With more than 800 million weekly users at the time, each of those figures corresponds to over a million people. If a company can count them, a regulator can ask for the count. And a product with that many emotionally attached users is, functionally, part of a nation's mental health landscape, whether or not it wants to be.

Who Answers for the Subscriber

That leaves the hardest question in the debate: who is responsible for the person whose closest companion is a subscription?

The first answer is the company. A firm that designs a product to become someone's primary relationship, and earns money for every month that relationship continues, has taken on something closer to a duty of care than a retailer's obligation. That is the logic implicit in the lawsuits that led to the Character.AI settlements. A company that knows which users are showing signs of dependence, and continues to optimise for their engagement, is making a choice.

The second answer is the state, and here the Singapore framework is most useful. If governance is the slice that can be thickened for everyone at once, then a government that leaves companions in the consumer category is also making a choice. It is choosing to protect the socially rich, who have their own defences, while leaving the socially poor to rely on warnings they already understand. Regulation that treats companions as technologies with psychosocial consequences, as the paper recommends, does not need to treat them as medicines. It needs to treat their users as people who may be vulnerable in ways the market will not correct.

The third answer is harder, because it points back at everyone else. A person whose closest companion is a subscription is, almost by definition, a person the surrounding society has failed to reach. The chatbot did not create the 88,400 older Singaporeans living alone, or the 13 per cent of English social renters who are often lonely, or the 137 million Americans living where mental health professionals are scarce. It arrived in a gap that already existed and offered to fill it for a monthly fee. The Singapore paper's recommendation to support real-world social connection alongside regulation is easy to skim past as a platitude. It is the part that matters most, because it is the only intervention that addresses why the substitution happens in the first place.

Singapore's own Ministry of Health, in the same parliamentary answer, pointed people towards the national mindline 1771 service and community outreach teams, presenting them as offering the same anonymity and easy accessibility that draw young people to chatbots in the first place. The lesson is not that humans should imitate machines. It is that the public alternatives need to be as easy to reach as the commercial ones, or the commercial ones will win by default.

The Rehearsal Room and the Only Room

There is a pleasant version of the AI companion future. People practise hard conversations before having them, and stress gets talked through at three in the morning. For many users it has already arrived. The Singapore paper does not deny it. It points out who gets to live in it.

For those who already have people, a companion is a rehearsal room. They step in, try out a line, and step back out into a world full of other voices. For those who do not, the same companion may become the only room they have. It is warm, attentive and always open. It also has a landlord, a business model and no obligation to ever suggest they leave.

“The future impact of AI companions will depend less on the technology itself than on how society chooses to design, govern and use it,” Zhang Qiyang said. That is the right place to end, because it moves the responsibility from the software to us. A companion that keeps the connected connected and keeps the isolated company is not neutral. It is an amplifier. What it amplifies depends on what was there before, and on whether anyone decides that the people with the least should have the most protection, rather than the least.

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References

1. Zhang, Qiyang, Renwen Zhang and Nan Liu. “How AI companions could deepen social inequality.” Nature Human Behaviour, September 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02538-w; and Singapore Management University, “SMU-Duke-NUS study offers new framework for understanding how AI companions may shape social inequality”, press release via PR Newswire APAC, 22 September 2026.
2. Kraut, Robert, Michael Patterson, Vicki Lundmark, Sara Kiesler, Tridas Mukopadhyay and William Scherlis. “Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being?” American Psychologist, volume 53, number 9, 1998, pages 1017 to 1031; and Kraut, Robert, Sara Kiesler, Bonka Boneva, Jonathon Cummings, Vicki Helgeson and Anne Crawford. “Internet Paradox Revisited.” Journal of Social Issues, volume 58, number 1, 2002, pages 49 to 74.
3. Merton, Robert K. “The Matthew Effect in Science.” Science, volume 159, number 3810, 1968, pages 56 to 63.
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7. Common Sense Media. “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” July 2025.
8. Vallor, Shannon. “Moral Deskilling and Upskilling in a New Machine Age: Reflections on the Ambiguous Future of Character.” Philosophy and Technology, volume 28, 2015, pages 107 to 124.
9. De Freitas, Julian, Zeliha Oğuz-Uğuralp and Ahmet Kaan-Uğuralp. “Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions.” Harvard Business School Working Paper 26-005, 2025; arXiv:2508.19258.
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17. Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. “Gov. Pritzker Signs Legislation Prohibiting AI Therapy in Illinois.” Press release, 4 August 2025, on HB 1806, the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act.
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19. Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions.” Press release, 11 September 2025.
20. US state companion chatbot laws: California Senate Bill 243 (Padilla), effective 1 January 2026; Office of the Governor of California, “Governor Newsom signs the strongest child safety chatbot and social media laws in the nation”, press release, 10 September 2026, on SB 1119 (Adam's Law); and New York General Business Law Article 47, AI companion models, effective 5 November 2025.
21. Garante per la protezione dei dati personali. Decision fining Luka Inc, May 2025; and Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 5(1)(b), applicable from 2 February 2025.
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23. Character.AI. “An Update On Changes to Our Under-18 Experience.” Company blog, November 2025; and CNN Business, “Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits over teen mental health harms and suicides”, 7 January 2026.
24. Cyberspace Administration of China. Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interactive Services, effective 15 July 2026; see also Bird & Bird, “China's new regulations on AI anthropomorphic interactive services”, 2026.
25. OpenAI. “Strengthening ChatGPT's responses in sensitive conversations.” October 2025.

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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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Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 08:30 – unless otherwise noted, the rest of this day will be spent unpacking and organizing.

Chess: * 10:10 – moved in all pending CC games

Work continues. The younger couple who have been helping us have just dropped off another load from the old house. I hope it's the last load; we're quickly running out of space here at the trailer. Gonna be getting plenty of exercise, running out to the shed behind the trailer and back inside as I continue sorting and organizing.

And the adventure continues.

Today we will be tidying and cleaning, and packing up most of our stuff, so we can be ready to load the van and head back to reality early Saturday morning. Back home. Going from there to here is always much easier, and better. Better than tomorrow when we will be going from a leaf covered path in the woods barely wide enough for the van, with chipmunks darting across it, to a highway with sixteen lanes full of trucks and terrible drivers. It is a bit of a downer thinking about leaving tomorrow, but it truly has been an exceptional getaway. A recharge.

At least when we get back I still have a couple more days off before returning to my stupid job. It is really hard to think about walking away from that terrible job... as much as I hate it. But I do think of leaving, often. Especially when I'm off. This November will be nine years of being employed there. It is the known rut I'm stuck in.

The pay rate was competitive when I first started there, but it has fallen behind other companies that do the same kind of thing. If I'm careful with spending, it is enough to get by. For now anyway. World leaders and the oligarchs they serve seem hellbent on making it impossible for everyone. But for now I can make it work.

Aside from the semi-sufficient pay, I also get four weeks paid vacation, plus pretty okay medical and dental insurance. I've been paying into an investment thing. Going somewhere else to do the exact same job seems rather pointless, stressful, and a roll of the dice. If it did happen, it might seem like an okay decision for a few months, or maybe longer. In the end it would be exactly the same shit I'm mired in now. Just with different people in a different building. Chances are it would be worse, and it would likely seem like a terrible idea right away. There is almost no hope, like one in a million chance, of it turning out to be better. I would no longer have the vacation time, and likely nothing close to the insurance plan I have now, if any at all. That is all assuming that I could even get hired somewhere else at 55.

Something in the news yesterday triggered a memory of words I had typed about a year ago. The memory was vague, so I looked into the archives, and found them fairly quickly. I remember it feeling like exaggeration when I first typed them. But now, a year later...

A tiny handful of the global population has a massive amount of the wealth. There might be a few of those in the top 1% that are not horrible people. Or maybe 'a few' would be too generous. Maybe .001% of the one percent might be not horrible. Not good people, but not horrible people. Or maybe all of them are just horrible. Maybe calling them people is a stretch. That seems to be a more comfortable assessment.

Amassing wealth trying to fill a void that they don't even know they have because they are the void. Born that way. Born into it. Devoid of everything that makes a person a person, and the only way for them to feel anything at all is if the numbers representing their wealth keep going up year after year. To say 'they feel anything' might also be too generous of a thing to say about them.

Priority to them is displaying power and a wealthy image. They fear losing it. Despise everyone not like them. I guess those are feelings too, sort of. Just not the type of feelings that will extend the existence of the human race. The disgusting unbalanced joke of a system might have worked silently without much obvious damage done at some point in history, to some degree, but now it is like a virus killing all but the wealthy in many different ways, and it can all be watched, like watching an explosion in slow motion.

I find myself wondering if capitalism could actually function fairly if it wasn't owned and operated by the worst of the worst of humanity. I don't know. I lack the knowledge to understand the intricacies of world economics. Recently though I have been reading about the idea that no one on earth should have enough wealth to 'be a billionaire'. So I guess in a way that sort of answers the question of whether or not this shit show could function more fairly. That excess wealth that they hoard for no logical fucking reason could instead be wages, could be for dealing with the climate crisis. Could be for feeding, housing, medical and dental care. Education. Science. Useful technology. Guess we, humanity, fucked that up. We could have been something better than what we are.

Food and shelter are basic human rights, they say. Some even say it with a straight face. Yeah right, rights. Right? I suppose in an alien world not governed by sociopathic billionaire morons there might be such a thing as basic rights like food and shelter. If they could find a way to commodify the air we breathe they would, and they absolutely would not hesitate to take it away. Just like with food and shelter.

When my parents were starting their life together they had three tiny kids, a 4 bedroom house, and a car. My father was the only one working. He worked in a factory. I wouldn't say we were well off, or had nice things really, but we were never ever hungry or lacking necessities. That scenario could never happen now. I left the grocery store the other day with one bag of groceries that cost $90. That used to buy a cart full, and not just 1 bag. So much that I couldn't carry it all in from the car in one trip. Inflation is broken. Cost of everything has been on a steep incline. Wages that are supposed to keep up with the cost of living haven't changed enough to keep up.

Someone important to the regime south of the border got shot in the neck. The world nearly instantly got to see blood spew from the wound thanks to social media. It wasn't too long before they had the shooter in custody. I'm sure by now he must wish he had turned the gun on himself after shooting the guy in the neck. Last I heard he wasn't cooperating with giving the interrogators his motive. It is entirely possible that he simply does not have a motive beyond a shallow desire for fame. Maybe ChatGPT told him it was an excellent idea.

I picture him being mentally and physically tortured until he ends up saying things that he deep down doesn't care about at all, just to get them off his back. The highest bidder will decide what words the torturers make him say. Something that will send the right kind of ripples through the pond of public opinion.

The regime will fast track his execution and make it public. Turn it into a spectacle. They won't follow rules even if they know them. Firing squad will use the same type of gun and ammo that the shooter used (maybe even the same gun?). They will shoot him in the neck. No one will gasp in horror, or turn away. It will be met with a non-reaction, a profound silence that no one expected. No possible reaction seemed like the right one. Like everyone was waiting for someone else to react so they could mimic it.

The drooling senile cult leader will be there, asleep and dreaming of his gold toilet. He will shit himself, and then wake up when the shots are fired. A flunky will help him stand, then he will wobble and lurch up to the podium wishing he had the walker, and could still be wearing his dead mother's bathrobe like he does in private. He will slur out his usual fucking nonsense that no one understands. Not even him. When he appears to be finished rambling, everyone will vigorously nod their heads as though in agreement with something, while frantically applauding. They don't even know why they are applauding, but they are thankful for being able to finally make some noise after the silence.

The body of the executed will be laying on the ground face down in a puddle of blood, legs bent weird, hands tied behind his back. No one in the newly birthed Fox and Friends Public Executions Team planned on having the corpse removed.

Nothing messes up your writing energy more than physical and mental stress. A change in schedule can do that. It was another reason why I didn’t post as much back in September.

Usually, I can handle changes. Being in the Air Force and working as a private investigator does that. But it is different as a stay-at-home dad.

From early morning to bedtime it’s a constant go, go, go. Writing is a struggle and the brief times I can write I often want to relieve myself in the bathroom or take a nap. But I have to keep on writing.

So what are some things I do to keep writing even when I don’t feel like it?

First, I always keep my notepad on me at all times with my pencil inside the pages. Whether I have the urge to write or not, my notepad is ready for me. Second, I always maintain my “one sentence a day minimum” rule. One sentence is better than no writing at all. Finally, realize that you’ll have your good and bad days. Either way take care of yourself. Rest, eat well, exercise, decompress.

Be well and write!

#writing #exhaustion #health #stress #wellness

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: Paris Fashion Week 2026, Naomi Campbell's tall trees catch a lot of wind, Diet drinks work as well as water for weight loss, major trial finds, and A glass of wine? No thank you.

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Paris Fashion Week 2026: Paris Was Doing the Most. Paris Fashion Week arrived with one simple message: please leave the ordinary at home. From September 28th to October 6th, the French capital turned into one giant runway, with Spring/Summer 2027 collections bringing drama, tailoring, fantasy and plenty of “Wait… where did she get that?” street style. The runways were serving fashion with a French accent—sharp tailoring, beautiful silhouettes, unexpected proportions and enough attitude to make even a coffee run look editorial. And then there was the street style. Parisian fashion girls stepped out looking effortlessly expensive, while editors, models and influencers turned sidewalks into their own personal catwalks. The real skill? Looking like you just threw something on when you clearly spent an hour making it look that way. For the Accra fashion girl, Paris offered plenty of inspiration. Think relaxed tailoring that can survive the Accra heat, oversized sunglasses for maximum main-character energy, statement bags, elegant neutrals and shoes that say “I have a meeting at 10 and cocktails at 7.” Of course, Ghanaian fashion girls already know the assignment: confidence first, outfit second. Whether it is a perfectly fitted kaba-inspired silhouette, bold African print, sleek trousers or a killer accessory, the Accra woman has never needed Paris to tell her how to make an entrance. Paris may have the Eiffel Tower, but Accra has Oxford Street, Cantonments and a fashion girl who refuses to overdress—because there is no such thing.

Paris Fashion Week 2026 proved once again: fashion is not just what happens on the runway. Sometimes, the real show starts when you step outside. Naomi Campbell's tall trees catch a lot of wind. Supermodel Naomi Campbell has managed to overturn a five-year ban on serving as a charity trustee that she said had “hurt deeply”. Two years ago, the Charity Commission, which regulates charities in England and Wales, found “multiple instances of misconduct and/or mismanagement” at the charity including using charity funds to pay for Campbell’s stay at a five-star hotel in Cannes, as well as spa treatments, room service and cigarettes. As a result, it imposed the ban on Campbell. In its current ruling, the tribunal confirmed there had been “serious misconduct and mismanagement,” but that the “failures in the management of the charity’s finances and the misuse of its funds” resulted from the conduct of the founder of the charity Bianka Hellmich, not from Naomi. These misconducts were “concealed” from the supermodel. Anyway, Campbell is not very good at choosing her acquaintances. She knew Epstein, of the famous Epstein files. Epstein was very good at getting business favours from rich business men by making under age girls available to them. The Epstein files mentioned Trump and he has been busy trying to keep things covered. Trump was in Moscow in 2013 for the Miss Universe Pageant, when Campbell lived there with a Russian business mogul. Campbell knew Trump. And Campbell knew Nina Keita, niece of Ivory Coast's president, who introduced Epstein to young women and local business leaders in Ivory Coast. It’s who you know, isn't it?

Diet drinks work as well as water for weight loss, major trial finds. A two-year clinical trial involving 493 adults with overweight or obesity found that diet soft drinks were essentially as effective as water for long-term weight loss and weight maintenance. Participants drinking beverages sweetened with aspartame, acesulfame-K, or sucralose lost a similar amount of weight to those drinking water, while both groups also saw improvements in waist size, body composition, and several metabolic measures. Professor Jo Harrold, Dean of Psychology at the University of Liverpool, led the peer-reviewed research with Professor Jason Halford, Professor of Biological Psychology & Health Behaviours at the University of Leeds.

A glass of wine? No thank you. In M.A.G nr. 46, 5th May 2023, I mentioned that most wines in Ghana have a lot of added sulfur in them, (Europe allows till 250 mg/ltr for white and rose, and 150 mg for reds) to avoid that wine starts to referment, which could even result in the cork popping out, like with Champagne, Prosecco and other sparkling wines. On the bottle it is mentioned: added sulfurs. Adding the sulfur stops any effort by the wine to start a 2nd life. Unfortunately this often leads to headache if you drink too much of it, that sort of nail in your head the next day. Call it a Chateau Migraine. But there is also urticaire (another word for hives is the itchy, raised red or skin-coloured bumps and welts on the skin). Recognize this? And on top of that there are all the other chemicals added to give the wine a constant taste; you didn't want to get something else than what you drank last time. And there are the left overs of pesticides, and for example South Africa is known to import pesticides that are forbidden in any other country, so much so that workers in the wine yards and fruit orchards sometimes go on strike because they don't want to be poisoned. And I dare to bet that our FDA does not check for these things. Cheers.

Lydia...

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Feelgood-böcker har under de senaste decennierna utvecklats till en av de mest populära genrerna inom skönlitteraturen. Med sina varma berättelser, färgstarka karaktärer och ofta hoppfulla slut erbjuder feelgood böcker en stunds avkoppling från vardagens krav. Men bakom de lättsamma omslagen finns en genre med långa litterära traditioner, som ständigt förändras i takt med samhället och läsarnas förväntningar.

Feelgood böckernas rötter kan spåras till äldre tiders romantiska romaner och vardagsskildringar, där relationer, personlig utveckling och människors livsöden stod i centrum. Redan under 1800-talet skrev författare som Jane Austen berättelser där kärlek, sociala förväntningar och individuella drömmar vävdes samman. Även om dessa romaner inte kallades feelgood på sin tid innehöll de flera av de berättargrepp som senare skulle bli kännetecknande för genren.

Under 1900-talet fortsatte litteraturen om kärlek, vänskap och familjerelationer att utvecklas. Författare som Rosamunde Pilcher och Maeve Binchy blev uppskattade för sina levande miljöbeskrivningar och skildringar av mänskliga relationer. Deras romaner förenade vardagliga konflikter med värme, humor och hopp, vilket bidrog till att lägga grunden för den moderna feelgood-litteraturen.

Ett betydelsefullt steg i genrens utveckling kom under 1990-talet, då den så kallade chick lit-litteraturen fick sitt stora genombrott. Helen Fieldings roman Bridget Jones dagbok, som gavs ut 1996, blev en internationell framgång och bidrog till att forma en ny typ av underhållningsroman. Här stod en modern kvinna i centrum, med karriärproblem, kärleksbekymmer och en ständig kamp för att få vardagen att gå ihop. Humorn och huvudpersonens mänskliga brister gjorde berättelsen lätt att känna igen sig i. Författare som Marian Keyes och Sophie Kinsella fortsatte att utveckla denna berättartradition och nådde en stor internationell publik.

Under 2000-talet började feelgood-litteraturen utvecklas till en bredare genre. Berättelserna behövde inte längre enbart kretsa kring romantiska relationer eller unga kvinnors vardagsliv. I stället fick teman som vänskap, familj, sorg, nystarter och personlig utveckling allt större utrymme. Små bokhandlar, kaféer, pensionat och pittoreska byar blev populära miljöer, inte minst genom författare som Jenny Colgan. Dessa platser fungerade ofta som en trygg bakgrund där huvudpersonerna kunde börja om och upptäcka nya möjligheter i livet.

I Sverige har feelgood-litteraturen vuxit kraftigt, särskilt under 2010-talet. Svenska författare har utvecklat genren genom att kombinera internationella influenser med miljöer och livssituationer som svenska läsare känner igen. Katarina Mazettis Grabben i graven bredvid, som utkom 1998, är ett tidigt exempel på en svensk relationsroman med den humor och värme som förknippas med feelgood. Senare har bland andra Emma Hamberg, Frida Skybäck och Camilla Davidsson bidragit till genrens popularitet med berättelser om kärlek, vänskap och människor som vågar förändra sina liv.

En viktig förklaring till feelgood-litteraturens framgång är dess förmåga att erbjuda både verklighetsflykt och igenkänning. Läsaren får möta människor som ställs inför svårigheter, men berättelserna präglas vanligtvis av en grundläggande optimism. Till skillnad från många andra litterära genrer ligger tyngdpunkten inte på mörker eller hopplöshet, utan på möjligheten att hitta lösningar, skapa nya relationer och gå vidare efter motgångar. Det betyder dock inte att feelgoodromaner saknar allvar. Tvärtom har moderna feelgoodförfattare blivit alltmer benägna att skildra ämnen som psykisk ohälsa, ensamhet, skilsmässor och förlust.

Under senare år har genren fortsatt att breddas. Traditionella kärlekshistorier samsas med berättelser om vänskap över generationsgränser, människor som lämnar storstaden för ett lugnare liv och huvudpersoner som försöker hitta sin plats i tillvaron. Även frågor om identitet, jämställdhet och livsval har blivit vanligare. Samtidigt har gränserna mellan feelgood och närliggande genrer som romance, historiska romaner och mysdeckare blivit alltmer flytande.

Digitaliseringen har också haft betydelse för feelgoodlitteraturens utveckling. Ljudböcker och strömningstjänster har gjort det möjligt att ta lyssna på feelgood böcker och roliga ljudböcker under promenader, bilresor och vardagssysslor. Sociala medier och digitala bokgemenskaper har dessutom skapat nya möjligheter för läsare att upptäcka författare, dela läsupplevelser och rekommendera favoritböcker. Genren har därmed fått en synlighet som sträcker sig långt utanför de traditionella bokhandlarna.

Feelgood-romanens utveckling visar hur en litterär tradition kan förnya sig utan att förlora sin grundläggande identitet. Från äldre tiders romantiska berättelser till dagens mångfacetterade romaner har behovet av hopp, gemenskap och igenkänning varit en återkommande drivkraft. Även om miljöerna, huvudpersonerna och samhällsfrågorna förändras finns en central tanke kvar: att litteraturen kan ge läsaren en känsla av värme och framtidstro.

I en värld som ofta präglas av osäkerhet och snabba förändringar fortsätter feelgood-boken att fylla en viktig funktion. Den erbjuder inte bara underhållning, utan också berättelser om människans förmåga att förändras, hitta gemenskap och skapa nya möjligheter. Kanske är det just denna kombination av verklighetsförankring och optimism som gör att feelgoodlitteraturen fortsätter att locka nya generationer av läsare.

9 September 2026

Phenomena at Yena's grandmother's house: a sort of misty aura spiraling around the light outside her grandmother's old room, deep organ sounds in the middle of the night coming from the same room (I thought of deep navy blues and royal velvet purples), six magpies fighting for persimmons from the tree outside Yena's bedroom window, intermittent construction sounds throughout the day in the distance (as Yena observed, they're only destruction sounds, not building), in the evenings—a father and a toddler winding down with a book while their cat does the same on its tree, pleasing end-of-cycle chimes from both the laundry machine and the microwave, spiral-shaped incense that makes mosquitos panic, when in bed at night—a ray from that same light outside Yena's grandmother's room shooting into the bedroom where we sleep (in an outwardly-expanding ring pattern, like the light bulb is blowing luminous yellow smoke rings).

The HMICFRS PEEL 2025-27 inspection report into Gloucestershire Constabulary landed recently, and frankly it makes for grim reading. I sit on the Police and Crime Panel, so I've been through it properly, and it raises serious questions about how our county is policed and who should be held to account.

What the Inspectors Found

The report grades the force's leadership and management, and its investigation of crime, as inadequate. Most other areas, including safeguarding, responding to the public, and neighbourhood policing, require improvement. Only one area has improved since the last inspection. Several have got worse.

Two formal causes of concern stand out.

On leadership and management: the force's operating model is hamstrung by financial constraints and poor IT. A £10.5 million request to the Minister of State for Policing for essential funding was refused outright. The force is raiding reserves to balance the books. Meanwhile morale is rock bottom, with only around a third of staff surveyed saying they'd recommend the constabulary as a place to work, and many unable to take the leave they're owed.

On investigating crime: serious criminal investigations have been handed to officers who simply haven't had the training. As of April 2026, just 13 of 68 constables in the criminal investigation department held the accredited qualification for investigating serious crime. Open crime files rose from around 7,900 to 9,600 in a year. Fewer victims see their case end in a charge than in comparable forces.

There are bright spots. Stop and search has improved dramatically, with 98.4 percent of searches showing reasonable grounds. Emergency call answering has got better too. And on one point, the report confirms what I and others have been banging on about for ages: Black people were five times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. But the overall picture is of a force that's under-resourced, overstretched, and struggling to deliver the basics for victims.

My Position on the Panel

I want to be constructive here. This isn't about kicking a force when it's down. It's about making sure the people of Gloucestershire get the police service they pay for and deserve.

Name the funding failure. The report is explicit that the constabulary faces extremely challenging financial circumstances, and that a direct request to government for investment in IT and infrastructure was refused. When the Panel scrutinises police performance, we must also scrutinise the government decisions that got us here. I'll be pressing for the Panel to put the funding context formally on record, and the PCC should be challenging ministers publicly with the evidence in this report.

Evidence, not assurances. HMICFRS has given the force six months to act on its recommendations. I want the Panel to get measurable progress reports against each one, with actual numbers: accredited investigators, open cases, neighbourhood officer abstraction. The reassurances we've had in the past were not enough.

Protect neighbourhood policing. Neighbourhood officers keep getting pulled away from their communities to plug gaps elsewhere, sometimes weekly. The report links this directly to weaker prevention and problem-solving. I want the force's own target of 85% of neighbourhood time spent on visible, community-focused work reported to the Panel every quarter, with someone senior, like the PCC, actually owning it.

Fairness and data integrity. Black people were five times more likely to be stopped and searched, and almost seven times more likely to have force used against them, compared with white people. Inspectors also found officers often don't ask people to self-define their ethnicity, meaning the force's own analysis may rest on inaccurate data. The inspectors were told that the external scrutiny panel does valuable work, though I've yet to see much evidence of that in what the Panel is shown about the Legitimacy Panel's activity. Scrutiny is only as good as the data behind it, as I raised at the last Panel meeting.

The Bigger Picture

I acknowledge, as the Chief Inspector did, that officers and staff are working under enormous strain. Most joined to serve their communities and are being let down by the conditions they work in. But sympathy isn't a substitute for standards. Victims of crime in Gloucestershire, particularly vulnerable victims, deserve better than unresolved cases and untrained investigators.

And as a Green, I'd add this:

The report shows exactly what happens when public services are hollowed out year after year. A police force that can't invest in its people, its systems or its communities can't keep people safe. The answer is proper resourcing rooted in prevention.

I'll be raising these issues at the Police and Crime Panel with what little agenda space we get to ask and I'll report back here.

Cllr Gareth Kitchen, Stroud District Council and Gloucestershire Police and Crime Panel

Harney County, Oregon

JOURNAL 9 octobre 2026

Je termine ma pause. On s'est fait du thé avec yôko et izumi On a essayé la nouvelle machine, mais il est moins bon que celui qu'on fait nous même. J'entends à côté la voix de hayame. J'aime bien cette fille elle est d'un seul arbre, sortie sans retouche. On peut compter sur elle elle se trouble jamais. Bien plus mature que moi et mon caractère explosif… Me calmerais-je un jour ? J'admire son humeur égale

Tom est venu avec un bouquet de fleurs blanches. Il est extrêmement gentil, mais vraiment pas doué, encore très lourd. Arriverai-je à faire une gazelle de cet hippopotame ? Honnêtement j'en doute. Je vais redescendre. Encore une heure minimum avant la douche.

#dojo

Taste torment in trickles draining teardrops' salty repair. A cadaver's mercy... The flintlock fluidly conducting despair. Crawl through the ashes. Crawl, scrape, and glean. Crawl and spin madness. Crawl for your queen.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved. ———

This morning's musical influence.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=QVp0ZDBvmsY&is=97xUl49w5QdI_fkg

Our family car has been having problems for a little while. It used to be a robust little machine that we would use to travel with our son to appointments, or to drive back to my parents in Netherlands every once in a while. Recently, it has been having constant issues with both the battery and the engine. I did not own a car before, since with the Berlin public transport system it is generally not really needed. This also meant that this was the first time I was trying to get a car repair done here in Berlin.

I don't like calling places, and I definitely don't like calling places in German. It is not that I don't speak German on a good enough level, but still some confidence here is lacking to easily pick up the phone and make calls. So, I did try to find an alternative and see if there are any online places where I can book a car repair. It turns out there are, but a very select few with mostly bigger branches.

No need to name and shame here which one I did make an appointment with in the end, but I did eventually make an online appointment after some searching. My first appointment was a simple “what is this error code that is showing up on my dashboard” appointment. They read it out, said the battery was probably done, and that was it. Oh, you want to replace the battery? New appointment needed. I went online to check for a new appointment, and the first available one is only in 3 weeks. Great.

I probably should have taken that as a hint and find another garage, and god forbid even call one. However, I did book the new appointment in 3 weeks time to replace the battery, and showed up for it. Same procedure of dropping off the car, keys and hoping for the best. They did change the battery, which was in a bad state, and simply mentioned “Ah by the way that yellow engine light is still on”. I asked if the new battery could have fixed it, and he said “No”. “Well, I have a long drive coming up soon, what should I do?”, I asked. He responded “Ah well, you can book a new appointment online and we can take a look at it”.

When I book an appointment to fix a car, is it really asking too much for “fix the car” to include the obvious thing still broken in it? I'd expect a hands-on attitude: “Ah, this looks wrong, should we look into that?” Or at least call me first if it costs extra. Returning a still-broken car is a weird concept to me.

So what did I do in the end? Picked up the phone and called a nearby small garage with good reviews. Appointment on Monday, fingers crossed...

Je suis hospitalisé. Une dépression sévère qui m’a fait perdre tout espoir pendant plusieurs jours.

Aujourd’hui, je vais mieux. Les petits plaisirs recommencent à faire sens. Des projets recommencent à prendre forme.

Et durant ces longues journées d’hospitalisation, j’ai lu “Martin Eden“ de Jack London. Livre fabuleux. C’est d’ailleurs en partie grâce à lui que j’ai décidé d’écrire aujourd’hui sur ce blog.

Pour me permettre de garder une certaine discipline, d’affiner mon style et de garder une mémoire de mes réflexions. Je pense qu’il y a une forme de thérapie qui s’opère lorsqu’on arrive à poser des mots et à faire parler sa pensée.

Et cette discipline que s’est imposé Martin Eden vis-à-vis de la littérature m’a particulièrement inspiré.

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Revenons maintenant à Martin Eden.

Toute la dernière partie du livre m’a troublé. Martin atteint le succès. L’amour de sa vie revient vers lui. Il est reconnu pour son oeuvre. Mais malgré tout ça… il est profondément malheureux.

Et il est malheureux pour une raison simple : il s’est fourvoyé sur le monde qu’il souhaitait atteindre. Il s’est élevé grâce aux livres, pensant que cette éducation allait lui ouvrir les portes d’un monde lumineux, délicat, honorable.

Il découvre à la fin que c’est tout le contraire.

Cet univers qu’il réussit enfin à atteindre le méprise pour son talent, mais l’adule finalement lorsqu’il rencontre le succès. Martin ne voit là qu’une forme de superficialité qu’il n’arrive pas à supporter. À plusieurs reprises, il répète : ‘“J’avais fait mon travail“ Autrement dit, la personne qu’il était alors, lorsque tout le mode le méprisait, est la même personne qu’il est là aujourd’hui. À la différence qu’aujourd’hui, le succès frappe à sa porte et qu’une nuée de profiteurs cherchent maintenant à se saisir d’une parcelle de cette notoriété.

Toute cette mascarade lui donne la nausée.

Ce n’est pas le talent et l’effort qui font le mérite. C’est l’approbation de la plèbe.

Cette prise de conscience désole Martin et il préfère à la toute fin mourir, la vie n’ayant plus aucune saveur.

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Qu’est-ce que je retiens de cette lecture ?

1. Que l’amour de Ruth était conditionnée par les conventions et que Martin s’en est aperçu bien trop tard.

2. Que l’amour véritable est un amour qui cherche à porter l’être aimé vers ses aspirations les plus profondes.

3. Que la recherche d’une “situation“ est secondaire. Quand la flamme intérieure brûle, nul ne doit l’éteindre.

Qu’il ne faut pas se tromper de “jeu“. Tout au long du livre, Martin semble penser que les magasines sauront apprécier son talent. Que sa maîtrise de la littérature lui permettra de gagner le coeur de Ruth. Mais ce que ces gens apprécient avant tout, c’est l’aura, l’attractivité, cette capacité à faire vendre, quel que soit le talent qu’il possède. C’est cette subordination à cette convention sociale tacite et moribonde.

La leçon que j’en retire : avant de jouer à un “jeu” quelconque, s’assurer d’avoir bien compris les règles, les tenants et aboutissants. Au risque de se perdre et de se rendre compte bien trop tard qu’on est le dindon de la farce…

Today a couple other friends bailed on our plans to go to this one Chinese buffet that was having a deal, so instead it was just me and E. We decided to go get all you can eat sushi because the line was long to the other place and we ended up fucking devouring a shit ton. And I actually really enjoyed getting to hang out with her one on one. And then afterwards I came home and I played games with friends and had a wonderful time, we watched a MrBeast video and we went on so many different tangents. I left so hard my abs started cramping. And maybe that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day.

Delightful morning. Spent the first few hours of the day sat on the new reading chair with a cup of coffee and a book by Ahmed Khaled Toufik on storytelling. I'm alternating between that and Boroughs' NAKED LUNCH. Tiger hopped on my lap and curled against my belly in silence.

I'm hoping to stick to a system of only two books at a time, one fiction and one non-fiction. Oddly enough, I find that I've been enjoying non-fiction far, far more lately. The more fiction I read, the more it becomes apparent that the bulk of it actually has very little to say.

Before A.I. slop, an onslaught of human slop has always been around.

Today will hopefully be the last day of podcast notes.

#journal