New Hanover memories

“Penis salute, eyes left!”

“WTF, eddy?”

“Haaibo, you’re the one who decided to name the statue in this field on our cycling route The Penis.”

“That I did.”

eddy, my faithful 1997 steed, has a way of stating the obvious with just the right amount of cheek. He wondered aloud how hard it must have been for the poor subject the artist used to stand in a field next to the side of the road with a hard-on while the statue was being created. eddy smirked in that silent bicycle way of his.

That stretch of road will never be the same again.

Luckily we were swallowed up by a peloton calling themselves the Scotsmen. I stretched myself to stay with them. They were all thirty years younger. We cranked all the way into Mike’s van for the obligatory flat white. The talk, as usual among cyclists, was all about the latest bicycles & gear. It seems cyclists love new bikes & new accessories. From the middle of the bunch I listened. Finally I piped up:

“My eddy is from 1997 & my cycling shirt is from 1996.”

The guy grinding away at the front admitted he wasn’t even born yet.

At Mike’s the man with the expensive Cannondale in the peloton came over to look at eddy.

“Nice bike,” he said. “Vintage.”

I nodded & said thanks. His bike was upwards of R140k.

I had my flat white & fell into conversation with a fellow named Martin who sold explosives. I asked if he could help me out with an ATM withdrawal later that afternoon. We cracked up laughing. When I looked around, the peloton had upped sticks & deserted me.

I mounted eddy & started back toward Bidon. A click down the road I had to swerve for some boemelaars who were already walking & drinking quarts of beer.

eddy, that reminds me that Megs sent me a song the other day that was haunting, about a guy who boozed too much. The voice felt familiar but I couldn’t place it. A day later it hit me. The gears in my brain finally synced. It was the owner of the New Hanover Hotel. His name was Buc (I think), & my dad, Mastelek, used to sell him madumbis. His voice was a dead ringer.

The bar at that hotel was men only. No women allowed. The women had to sit on the veranda. On that veranda stood a tickey-box telephone. My dad would go into the bar for a beer & I’d sit on the veranda near that phone, eating Simba chips he’d bought me. I’d choose a different flavour each time.

Dad always made sure we left before supper. He told me that if he was late my mother would feed the supper to the dogs.

Damn. I realise now that I saw many faces, including the hotel owner’s, whose lives were quietly inhibited by alcohol. There was a farmer named Vic. His Ford was always parked at the hotel. He’d prop up the corner of the bar facing the door. I’d sit and watch legless patrons stumble to their cars, pissed, including the guy who propped up the corner. Not all of them, just some. Many others came simply for the social beer & the chat, to catch up on the district skinder.

But yes, that one who killed himself by smashing his car into the rock at Deadman’s Bend. It was probably the alcohol. I forget his name. Mastelek, my dad, once told me the story.

The hotel stood next to the post office. Inside the post office was the manual telephone exchange that connected to that tickey-box. Across the road was a grocery store I recall named Savemor. The hotel was right next to a single-lane iron bridge across the Sterk Spruit, & along the dirt road beside it stood the Agricultural Hall, the place where the community met for shows, weddings, competitions and the rest.

“Jislaaik,” said eddy. “That’s a strong memory.”

We hit Stampede Hill & cranked past all the cyclists struggling on the climb. It felt good as we finished. We were strong, alive & sucking in crisp Highveld air.

Afterwards I had breakfast: a cheese griller with onions on a roll. I clucked away chatting to the resident chicken while eddy smirked, “Parrot chicken!”

As I climbed into the car after loading eddy I mentioned there was a song that always reminded me of the late seventies in New Hanover.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

The Church of the Cradle Loop

It was a pretty ordinary Sunday crank around the Cradle Loop.

eddy, my Belgium racing bike, wolf-whistled at the Italian Bianchis as we rolled past. I clucked at the chicken pecking away under the tables at Biden. We saluted the morning glory in the field opposite Nirox. The vervet monkeys sat three abreast next to the road near Gold Mine hill, legs wide apart, proudly displaying the goods. The boemelars pushed their wheelbarrows of firewood in drunken weaves along the verge. Jehovah’s Witnesses manned their pamphlet stand next to the circle that leads to the Lion Park. In the donkey paddock one character lay flat on his back, legs in the air, looking for all the world like he’d been shot by a Lee-Enfield .303.

I even told eddy we’d indulge in chicken & mushroom pies from Maggie’s Farm afterwards for lunch.

The wind pushed us at a rapid pace towards the church. Or rather, towards my church & eddy’s home. The place were Mike parked his van serving flat whites.

I’d caught up with a guy while cranking past the caves & soon found out he was a geologist. At the van, Mike was explaining to the geologist who was riding for the first time after having had a knee operation 3 months ago, the difference between a flat white & a cappuccino. Its in the way you pour it, he demonstrated.

BS, Mike. I said. You take a cappucino, give it a moerse snotklap from the top using your hand & you have a flat white.

Mike didn’t say a word, but his eyes were throwing daggers!

A couple of guys seated on the bollards next to the van were talking about not being in church & one of them mused he’d rather be on his bike thinking about church than sitting in church wondering about his bike.

“eddy,” I said, “I have a bike & church at the same time. Diksels lucky.”

“Klipdisselboom,” replied eddy.

“Net so!”

eddy, I myself mused, it seems everyone nowadays suffers from ADHD & PTSD. ADHD has become the excuse to swallow prescription drugs at an addiction-induced pace. PTSD is the excuse to smoke dagga.

“We going there?” asked eddy. “Rather look at the red bishops & the weavers in the wetland next to Stampede Hill.”

“Well, I’ve been thinking about it.”

“I’m going nowhere,” said eddy. “You have me by the hoods & your ass on my seat.”

True enough, eddy. You are a captive audience!

I’ve been stabbed in the shoulder with a screwdriver & robbed of my phone. I was caught up in a bank robbery on the Blue Route with AK-47s popping off while I, in my Navy ice-cream suit, dived for cover below the kerb.

“Jislaaik,” said eddy. “Sounds woes.”

Not really. My mates from school who went into the infantry were in the bush war, real skop, skiet en donner. Pulling your buddy from a burning Noddy after a T-54 hit, & coming away with only his arm. Or being strafed on the dam wall at Calueque, a dozen of your mates killed on either side of you, & you walking away. That was PTSD, & we called them bosbefok. They were intense. The red mist controlled them.

I’ve seen people die. Kath & the silent scream. The Zulu whose neck was broken by a reed buck escaping a sugar-cane fire & slamming into him. That was probably the first time I watched someone die.

Those were, in their way, natural. Not a diagnosis.

I think in pictures. I’m clumsy. I don’t always pronounce my words correctly. I rub my hands together when stressed. But I’m not autistic.

I think these labels are too often adopted to justify drinking or taking drugs excessively.

“Well, here we are,” said eddy. “Two boring old farts on a highveld road talking kak.”

Yes, eddy. And that road leads us to church.

We went to buy the Chicken Pies & found a slice of Heaven.

---

There is a footnote to this ride: On the last crank up Stampede Hill I kept pace with a guy on a Look Gravel bike. He told me he was training for the Cape Epic. Bliksem, I said, thats tough.

As we passed the wetlands halfway up the hill, I recalled eddy reminding me of the birds there. I pointed out the place to my companion & highlighted the noise of the birds coming up to the road. He said he had been here many times & never noticed. As we rolled into Biden, he asked me if I was going to have a coffee. Sure, I said, but usually I just load up eddy & go home. We stood around the coffee shop for our orders. I had ordered a freezo. There was a woman standing next to me & a man approached. ”Haven’t seen you for ages”, he said. ”I don’t live here anymore”, she said. “Just visiting. We should have dinner next time I’m here in December.” ”What about sex?” he said. I did a double take. ”No”, she said. “Just dinner.” ”Is the factory closed?” he responded. ”Just dinner”, she said. “I’ll message you.” I looked at him, & he noticed. ”We just talking about sex”, he commented non-nonchalantly. I looked over at eddy & he piped up, “Short man syndrome.” I was about to admonish eddy & then I realized that no-one else could hear eddy except me. I collected my freezo, loaded eddy & sucked on the freezo on the way to Maggies Farm. A wildly weird conversation held in earshot of a dozen cyclists. eddy, I concluded, cyclists are weird. ”You telling me”, he agreed. “Its the testosterone.”

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The waves buffeting us on a Sunday

Saturday afternoon & evening delivered a proper Highveld pour. By Sunday morning the sky had cleared, the roads were still damp in places, & the air carried that clean, post-rain sharpness.

Alec messaged early: still on for the crank?

100 percent, I replied, & loaded eddy into the car.

We met at Bidon & rolled out at seven. The place was thick with cyclists in pink. Whole groups of them, all matching, all cheerful in that early-morning way.

“Heck,” I said to Alec. “Did their mothers & wives dress them today?”

eddy, never one to miss an opening, piped up: “Well, you often wear that pink shirt Kath gave you.”

Exactly.

Eventually we worked it out. There was an event on, the Pink Ride. We were sharing the roads with a small army of them.

As we cranked up Satellite Hill I held forth on the eternal truth that you can read a person’s car from his bike. Specialized riders drive BMWs because they are, by and large, assholes. Bianchi riders favour VWs. Trek & Scott tend toward Fords. Alec listened with the patience of a man who has heard many theories postulated from a bicycle’s saddle.

He dropped me on the climb up to the towers & waited at the top. A full refreshment station for the Pink Ride was set up there, tables & volunteers & the usual cheerful chaos.

Just after I arrived, Alec overheard two women in difficulty with a Specialized. The wheel wasn’t a quick-release; it needed a tool. He offered his. I stepped in, full of confidence.

“I’m good at this,” I announced. “Give me those tyre levers.”

A film crew had materialised & pointed cameras at us. The pressure was on. I approached the job the way Schumacher used to approach a Ferrari pit stop, focused, slightly theatrical, certain of my own brilliance. First attempt was messy. I reset, breathed, & went again. In my own estimation it was Formula 1 standard. The ladies seemed pleased enough.

“You were quicker putting it on than taking it off,” someone observed.

eddy pissed himself laughing & said that sounded about right. For once I was glad no one else could hear that cheeky bike.

As I mounted up again I mentioned that one of the women had invited us for beers at Syringa afterwards.

“So we going?” eddy asked.

“No. There’s a problem with the M word.”

“Masturbation?”

“No. Chop. Married.”

I told him the old story from Madison Hill, near where I grew up. The butcher found his wife in bed with another man. The interloper had to escape through the window. The version that went around the district was that he was rescued kaalgat, with shotgun pellets in his backside. Some lessons stay with you.

We continued onto the back loop. Alec announced we were doing the full fifty today, out to the caves & back.

“eddy will appreciate that,” I said. “He’ll be a happy soul, seeing his clan.”

Somewhere along the way I brought up Spinoza. The Jewish philosopher who was excommunicated for daring to say that inanimate objects had souls. A rock, a table, a plant, an animal, each has its corresponding idea, its mind, in the attribute of thought. In the Ethics he writes that all things, though in different degrees, are animated. Omnia, quamvis diversis gradibus, animata tamen sunt.

eddy, a bicycle has a soul.

Finish & klaar.

Alec considered this. “I disagree,” he said, “but I give you eddy. He is famous.”

We rolled on. At the field with the enormous concrete cock opposite Nirox I had to explain the local protocol of the penis salute. It is not a Navy-style drop of the pants. That would be sommer wrong. It is simply a tip of the cycling helmet, delivered with appropriate solemnity.

On the next hill I snuck past Alec & claimed King of the Mountains. He objected, citing Satellite & the towers. I ignored him. Titles are temporary, but while you hold them you may as well enjoy them.

We passed the fields where the donkeys usually stand. They were missing.

“Aha,” I said. “The Chinese have come to boil them for traditional medicine.”

Alec was appalled. “That is shocking. Don’t say that.”

On the way back a peloton of pink riders came past us on Stampede Hill. Alec latched on & disappeared up the road. I fell off the back, as one does.

You know, eddy, everything in nature & in life happens in waves. One moment you are King of the Mountains. The next you are sucking the hind tit of a dead donkey at the bottom of a climb. It seems so mathematically clean. Sin & Cos all over the place.

On the next wave, eddy, I’ll buy you a Bianchi to keep you warm at nights.

Jabonga, Mastelek. And you?

I’ll settle for a Scotch next to Loch Lomond & take it from there.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

My journey through time

When Time first drew the curtain wide, And set the stage where fate must bide, He came, imperial, stern of brow, The laurel ‘round his victor’s vow. By Tiber’s stream he stalked the world, With eagle crest and banners furled. Julius, dread to Gaul and Gael, He heard the cry, “The Ides prevail.” Yet Death, no end, he passed the veil, And waited in the cosmic gale.

The wheel turned on. In Spanish sun, Where Ronda’s blood-red rivers run, He rose anew, with cloak and blade, To dance where beasts and men are weighed. A matador, with eyes like steel, Who made the crimson silence real. The cheers, the clash, the fatal flight, The horn, the thrust, the bloom of night Yet when his breath did cease once more, The stars again unlatched their door.

Mid shadowed stones and mossy glades, Where whispering oak the sunblock shades, He walked the Byrne in robes of green, A Druid ‘mong the worlds unseen. He spoke to fire, and wind, and tide, To spirits bound and those who bide. He carved in ogham fate’s long rune, And vanished ‘neath the Hunter’s moon. But Time, relentless, bore him still Another soul for Earth to fill.

Beneath a sky of ancient hue, Where mammoth roared and north winds blew, He hunted, grunted, loved, and fought The last of kin, a dying thought. His hands were rough, his brow was wide, A fireless night, no kin beside. Yet in his eyes, a haunted spark Some echo of a Roman dark. Extinct? Nay, Time hath other plans For shifting souls and mortal spans.

Now saddle-worn on desert clay, Where cacti guard the break of day, He rides beneath the mesa tall, A cowboy of the Chapparral. He sings to stars, he speaks to dust, He lives by code, he dies by trust. A pistol low, a glance askance— He knows this world, he knows the dance. But when his mount grows still and cold, He wakes again, no longer old.

And lo! On ruddy Martian sand, Where none but few have dared to stand, A crimson dawn crowns helmeted brow— The second son of Southland now. He plants the flag, he speaks with Earth, A whisper of a higher birth. His mind recalls the Tiber's gleam, The bull's last breath, the Druid’s dream. Each life a verse, each death a rhyme He walks eternal, soul through time.

O Soul! O pilgrim swift and deep, Thy path is long, thy truths shall keep. Though flesh may fall and stars may die, Thy spirit climbs the endless sky. For Time shall spin and worlds may fade, Yet thou, reborn, remade, arrayed, Wilt find once more the call, the flame, And rise anew, with different name.

~Roald Bartholomew

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

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My Life as Julius Caesar

It’s strange how some affinities feel less like admiration and more like recognition. Julius Caesar has lived inside me since I was a boy in that old and dusty Oakville farmhouse, long before I had words for past lives or soul memory. I must have been seven or eight when I first saw him, not in a history book, but as a flickering image projected on the bare dining-room wall. An old reel-to-reel projector had been rigged up, and there he was: Caesar, played by Rex Harrison, commanding the screen while the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, gazed at him with a fire that burned straight through the grainy film and into my chest.

In that moment I didn’t think, “What a great leader.” I thought, “That’s me.” Not in some infantile way. It was deeper, spiritual. I knew the weight of the laurel wreath before I knew what laurel even was. I felt the Nile breeze on my face though I had never left Natal.

And to this day I still have dreams about this.

I am always in a red tunic, the dye still bright, the gold-threaded hem brushing against bronze. The segmented Roman armour, lorica segmentata, fits as though it was forged for my body yesterday. In one hand a gladius, perfectly balanced, almost weightless until it meets resistance, then suddenly alive, singing. The battles change: sometimes the forests of Gaul, mist curling between the oaks; sometimes the dust and blood of Pharsalus; once, memorably, the deck of a trireme off Actium, though history says I wasn’t there. Doesn’t matter. I’m there now.

I fight with a clarity I have never known while awake. Every parry is instinctive, every thrust economical and final. There is no fear, only purpose. Men fall, but I do not gloat; I simply move to the next threat, the next moment that must be shaped. Often I wake shouting in Latin, my voice hoarse, heart racing, sheets twisted. Yet the feeling is never distress. It is triumph, clean and ancient. I reach for my phone to check the time and its always the eleventh hour, and I smile in the dark. The sword skills I wield in dreams still seem to protect me in waking life. Debts get paid. Doors open. Enemies, seen and unseen, keep their distance.

Now, older, I understand there is richer meaning beneath the spectacle.

To dream repeatedly of being a great conqueror, especially one who was both adored & assassinated, is rarely about simple ego. The psyche chooses its symbols with precision. Caesar represents the part of the soul that refuses to accept imposed limits, the part that says, “If the world will not bend, I will cross the Rubicon and make it bend.” The red tunic is Mars, the god of war but also raw life-force. The sword is discrimination, the ability to cut through illusion, to separate what serves from what destroys. To dream of wielding it masterfully, without hesitation or wound, is the unconscious announcing: You have the power to shape your fate. You have done it before. You are doing it now.

And Cleopatra, ah, she is there too, sometimes watching from a marble balcony, sometimes fighting beside me with a dagger. She is the other half of the archetype: the feminine wisdom that knows power is not only force alone, but seduction, strategy, the long game. When Caesar & Cleopatra appear together in the soul’s theatre, they are saying: Integrate. Marry the general and the queen within you. Rule with both the sword and the serpent.

These dreams are not escapism. They are remembrance. They are confirmation that the same fire that burned in a Roman on the Ides of March still burns in this man in a quiet Douglasdale suburb, tempered now by time but no less fierce. Every time I wake with the taste of iron in my mouth and the echo of battle in my ears, I am reminded: I came back to finish what was started. The conquest is no longer of provinces, but of fear, of mediocrity, of every small voice that says stay small.

I was Julius Caesar once.

I crossed the river.

I still am.

Ronald Bartels | LinkedIn | Instagram

For as long as automation has had a sales pitch, the pitch has been the same. The machines will take the drudgery. They will fill in the forms, file the reports, chase the invoices and reconcile the spreadsheets, and in doing so they will hand back to human beings the parts of work that are interesting, creative and their own. Strategy, design, ideas. The good stuff.

A paper presented at the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, held in Barcelona from 13 to 17 April, suggests that the pitch may have the order of events backwards. Its title asks the question bluntly: “Are We Automating the Joy Out of Work? Designing AI to Augment Work, Not Meaning”. Its authors are Jaspreet Ranjit and Swabha Swayamdipta of the University of Southern California, Ke Zhou of Nokia Bell Labs and the University of Nottingham, and Daniele Quercia of Nokia Bell Labs and the Politecnico di Torino. Their central finding, in the words of the abstract, is this: “Worryingly, we find that tasks that workers associate with a sense of agency or happiness may be disproportionately exposed to AI.”

Not the tedious tasks. The ones people like.

The authors go further. A central risk of AI, they argue, is not mass unemployment but what they call mass demoralisation: “a loss of meaning and ownership in day-to-day work”. As models generate more of the early-stage output, they write, the visible creative steps can start to feel machine-made, while the human contribution becomes rushed, under-resourced and difficult to see.

That is a different kind of warning from the one that has dominated the debate about AI and jobs. It is not about whether people will have work. It is about what work will be like for the people who keep it. And it raises two questions that most organisations deploying AI have not yet seriously asked. What happens to a person's relationship with their craft when the parts of the job they found most fulfilling are the first to be handed to a machine, and what is left is the emotional and relational upkeep? And if the danger is demoralisation rather than displacement, who should decide which parts of a job get automated?

How the researchers mapped meaning onto ten thousand tasks

The study starts with the US Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network, known as O*NET, which breaks every American occupation into short task statements. The researchers narrowed this universe to tasks performed mainly on a computer, carried out daily or weekly, and ones that workers on the research platform Prolific were highly familiar with. That produced a representative sample of 171 tasks across 22 occupations.

They then surveyed two groups. The first was 202 workers who actually performed those tasks. Each rated their tasks against dimensions drawn from a scoping review of research on meaningful work: whether a task felt pointless or valuable, whether it called for novel ideas, gave them freedom or made them happy, and whether it built relationships or required emotional awareness or in-person contact. The second group was 197 developers who build AI systems, who were asked what traits they would design into an AI tool for each task.

To scale the analysis beyond 171 tasks, the team prompted language models to simulate the ratings, checked how closely the simulated ratings matched the human ones, and, finding reasonable agreement, generated annotations for 10,131 tasks across 512 occupations and 19 sectors. They report that only 0.87 per cent of tasks showed a large gap, of two points or more on a five-point scale, between model and human ratings, and that their main patterns held when they reran the analysis using only the human ratings.

To decide which tasks counted as “exposed” to AI, the researchers used a patent-based measure developed by Ali Akbar Septiandri, Marios Constantinides and Quercia, published in PNAS Nexus in 2024, which matched descriptions of tens of thousands of AI patents filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office against O*NET task statements. Tasks above a threshold on that measure were classed as likely to be exposed. Restricting the analysis to computer-based work left 3,179 tasks in the likely-to-be-exposed group and 2,349 in the comparison group.

The parts of the job that machines reach first

The comparison between those two groups is where the paper becomes uncomfortable. Tasks likely to be exposed to AI were more strongly associated by workers with novelty and creativity, with positive feelings and with autonomy. The researchers say directly that this “challenges the usual narrative that automation mainly targets routine tasks”. Tasks less likely to be exposed were associated with emotional awareness, in-person interaction, relationship building and social connection.

The sector picture sharpens the point. The heaviest exposure of creative, high-agency work fell in Arts, Architecture and Engineering, Computer and Mathematics, and the Life, Physical and Social Sciences. The examples the paper draws from O*NET are telling: an art director “formulating basic layout design”; an actuary “constructing probability tables for natural disasters”. These are first passes, the authors note, of the kind that models can now credibly generate, with humans refining the output afterwards. Meanwhile, in Education, Sales, Community and Social Services and Healthcare, the work that remained less exposed involved activities such as guiding students through tangled academic and personal problems, or “presenting offers while preserving relationships”.

The authors read this as a reversal of the expected trajectory. Generative systems, they observe, already draft text, suggest layouts, start campaigns, run simulations and infer likely emotional responses. In their data, these uses line up with tasks that workers describe as meaningful precisely because they reflect taste and authorship. AI is not confined to chores. It is becoming entangled with the moments where people feel they add something of themselves.

There is a second finding that matters for anyone building the tools. Workers and developers disagreed about what an AI system should be like. Workers wanted systems that were straightforward, tolerant and practical. Developers said they would design systems that were polite, strict and imaginative. The single biggest gap was between straightforwardness and politeness, and it was widest in Production, Architecture and Engineering, and the sciences, where vagueness can mean wasted materials or flawed data. “In high-risk contexts,” the authors write, “the ethical choice may well be the blunt one, and the useful thing to say may be short.” Developers, they suggest, tend to romanticise creativity as a frontier capability, while many workers in structured, routine jobs simply want a tool that spots anomalies and sticks to the rules.

Put the two findings together and the problem comes into focus. The AI that is arriving is being built to be imaginative, and it is landing on the imaginative parts of the job.

Why exposure is not the same as replacement

It is worth being precise about what the study measures. “Exposure” does not mean a task has been automated, or even that it will be. The authors define it as tasks that current or near-term AI could plausibly perform or substantially speed up. It is a statement about technological reach, not about deployment decisions inside any particular firm, and the paper separates automation, where AI performs a task end to end, from augmentation, where humans keep primary responsibility.

The researchers are also candid about their limitations. The study covers only US occupational tasks. Prolific participants tend to be more technologically literate than average, so low-wage and non-digital work may be underrepresented. O*NET task statements are short summaries that different workers may picture differently. The scaling to 10,131 tasks relies on language-model ratings, which the authors treat as an approximation of human responses rather than as ground truth, and which they found to be more uniform and optimistic in some sectors. Even the creativity finding has a wrinkle. When the analysis was rerun on human ratings of the original 171 tasks alone, humans and models agreed on six of the seven significant dimensions; the exception was “requires novel ideas or creativity”, where the authors suggest human annotators tended to underestimate the novelty of tasks.

None of this undoes the core pattern. But the study is best read as a map of where pressure is likely to fall, not a ledger of what has already been lost. What actually happens to people's work is decided later, by managers, vendors and product teams.

From mass unemployment to mass demoralisation

Why should the location of the pressure matter so much? Because meaning in work is not spread evenly across a job. It clusters.

The sociologist Richard Sennett, in his 2008 book The Craftsman, described craftsmanship as the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and argued that this impulse extends far beyond the workshop, to programmers, doctors and artists. Craft, in that sense, lives in the moments of making: the first sketch, the opening paragraph, the elegant solution to a modelling problem.

If those moments are exactly where AI exposure is concentrated, then a job can be automated in a peculiar way. The worker keeps the job title, the salary and most of the hours. What disappears is the part that made them want the job in the first place. In the paper's own examples, the basic layout and the first probability table are precisely the drafts a model can now produce; what is left to the human is refinement. This is the scenario Ranjit and her colleagues have in mind when they describe a loss of ownership. The creative steps that others can see now appear to come from the machine, while the human's contribution moves into the background, squeezed for time and harder for anyone to credit.

There is already experimental evidence that this dynamic has psychological costs. In a 2025 paper in Scientific Reports, Suqing Wu, Yukun Liu, Mengqi Ruan, Siyu Chen and Xiao-Yun Xie of the School of Management at Zhejiang University reported four online experiments with a total of 3,562 participants. Working with generative AI improved immediate performance on professional tasks. But that performance boost did not carry over when people subsequently worked alone, and the switch from AI collaboration to solo work was accompanied by significant decreases in intrinsic motivation and increases in boredom, even as participants' sense of control rose. The authors' summary is succinct: collaboration with generative AI “enhances immediate task performance but can undermine long-term psychological experiences of human workers.”

Creative workers are already reporting effects outside the laboratory. A survey by the Society of Authors, the UK trade union for writers, illustrators and translators, received 787 responses in early 2024. A quarter of illustrators, 26 per cent, and more than a third of translators, 36 per cent, said they had already lost work to generative AI. The survey was self-reported and drawn from a membership sample, so it cannot measure the market as a whole. But it captures the sense, among people whose identities are bound up with a craft, that the craft itself is being lifted out of their hands.

What the remaining work asks of people

If the creative core of a job is thinned out, what is left? According to the CHI study, the tasks least exposed to AI are those built on emotional awareness, in-person presence and relationship building. That might sound like a reassuring residue. Machines draft, humans connect. But it is worth looking at what those remaining tasks involve.

In 1983, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild of the University of California, Berkeley, published The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, which introduced the idea of emotional labour. Studying flight attendants and bill collectors, she described public-facing jobs in which managing feelings was part of what the employer was paying for. Flight attendants had to be, in the phrase used by her publisher, “nicer than natural”; bill collectors had to be “nastier than natural”. Hochschild's concern was that this kind of work, done for commercial purposes, could estrange people from their own feelings.

Relational work is not inherently draining. For many teachers, nurses, social workers and salespeople, the relationships are the point of the job, and the CHI data suggest that workers do regard these tasks as meaningful. The danger lies in the mix. A job that once combined making things with tending to people can become one that is mostly tending to people, with the making delegated. The remaining human work then has a distinctive profile: smoothing over the AI's output with clients, absorbing complaints, reassuring colleagues, maintaining relationships that the automated parts of the workflow no longer support. That is emotional labour, and much of it is invisible in the way that a finished design or a well-built model is not.

The Stanford University researchers behind the WORKBank database, Yijia Shao, Humishka Zope, Yucheng Jiang, Jiaxin Pei, David Nguyen, Erik Brynjolfsson and Diyi Yang, found a related signal in a 2025 study of 1,500 workers across 844 tasks in 104 occupations. Their results, they wrote, offer early signals that AI agents may reshape core human competencies, “shifting from information-focused skills to interpersonal ones.” The CHI paper adds a warning that this shift may not be benign. Among its design examples is the risk that teachers, managers and clinicians who use AI for canned replies and templated feedback end up making their communication with students, staff or patients feel more generic. If AI pushes people towards relational work while also hollowing out that relational work with templates, the worker is squeezed from both sides.

When the most fulfilling parts of a job are automated first, then, a person's relationship with their craft is put at risk in two ways. They lose authorship of the work that once expressed their skill and taste. And they are left with a larger share of work whose value is real but less visible and more emotionally costly. Whether that produces demoralisation depends on what else changes, and here a very different body of evidence becomes useful.

Lessons from people who stopped working

In September 2026, four researchers at Google DeepMind, Stephanie C.Y. Chan, Adam Bales, Katherine L. Hermann and Iason Gabriel, posted a review titled “Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures”. Their question was not what AI does to work, but what decades of research reveal about people who live without it. They drew on psychological, sociological and economic studies of the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, financially dependent spouses and citizens of Gulf states with guaranteed public-sector employment, covering OECD countries, China, India and the Gulf.

Their findings are stark in places. Involuntary job loss harms life satisfaction, mental health, physical health and even mortality, and the damage can last: some studies find psychological “scarring” that persists for years after people find work again. Yet the vast majority of lottery winners, between 85 and 89 per cent across studies of American and Swedish winners, keep working, typically using their windfall to buy flexibility rather than to quit. And retirees, who are also not working, often report high and sustained wellbeing.

The authors draw on the work of the social psychologist Marie Jahoda, whose 1982 book Employment and Unemployment, published by Cambridge University Press, argued that a job provides “latent” benefits alongside its “manifest” purpose of earning a living. Jahoda identified time structure, social contact, status and identity, regular activity and collective purpose. The DeepMind review finds that both income and some of these latent benefits matter, and adds cognitive health: retirement has been causally linked to declines in cognitive ability.

To explain why the unemployed and the retired fare so differently, the review identifies three factors that mediate the relationship between work status and wellbeing. The first is agency and choice: whether the exit from work was voluntary, and whether people retain agency over the long term. The second is the availability of alternative sources of work's latent benefits, such as volunteering, hobbies or state-provided employment. The third is social and systemic context, including cultural norms around work and the strength of safety nets.

The evidence on each is striking. Between 20 and 30 per cent of retirees perceive their retirement as forced, and across countries those who retired voluntarily report significantly better physical and mental wellbeing than those who did not, even after controlling for health, income and other factors. Volunteering confers benefits at remarkably low doses, with gains for older adults observable from about one hour a week. One study cited in the review found that plant closures produced an almost four-fold greater increase in depression among American workers than among European workers, who have stronger safety nets. And the psychological cost of losing work tends to fall harder on men, which the authors attribute to stronger social pressure to conform to norms about working.

“Many policy discussions about AI futures focus on the availability of work or the availability of resources,” the authors write. “However, these discussions overlook the fact that it matters deeply whether people get to choose their path.” Their summary of the policy lesson is equally direct: purely material interventions such as universal basic income “are valuable but highly insufficient”.

Applying the exit evidence inside the job

The DeepMind review is about people who leave work altogether. But its three factors translate remarkably well to what happens when people stay in work and lose part of it. Demoralisation, in the CHI paper's sense, is a kind of partial exit: a withdrawal not from employment but from the meaningful core of a role. Read that way, the review's factors become a diagnostic for when task automation is likely to hurt.

Start with agency. A critical determinant of wellbeing in the review is not whether people work, but whether they chose their situation. Inside a job, the equivalent question is whether workers chose which of their tasks were handed to AI. The Society of Authors survey hints at the distinction: alongside those who chose to use generative AI, 5 per cent of illustrators and 8 per cent of translators said they had used it because their publisher or commissioning organisation asked them to. The CHI paper notes that, in practice, managers, vendors and technical teams, not workers, usually decide which tasks are exposed to AI and how far automation goes. “Managers, vendors, and technical teams make these decisions before workers can consent or take part, especially in roles with low bargaining power,” the authors write. That is the workplace version of involuntary exit.

Next, alternatives. Retirees do well when they find other sources of structure, status and purpose. Workers who lose the creative core of their job need somewhere else for those things to come from: new responsibilities with real authorship, protected time for the work they value, recognition for the judgement involved in steering and correcting AI output. If the time freed by automation is simply filled with more volume, the latent benefits drain away without replacement.

Finally, context and safety nets. The review shows that the same loss lands very differently depending on norms and institutional support. Inside an organisation, the analogue is culture and protection: whether people who push back on a deployment are heard or penalised, whether those whose roles shrink are offered retraining or redeployment, and whether the organisation measures anything other than throughput.

This is an analogy, not a finding. Neither paper tested it, and evidence about the unemployed cannot be transplanted wholesale onto people still in work. But the convergence is hard to ignore. Working from inside jobs, one paper finds that agency, ownership and meaning matter; working from outside, the other finds that choice, alternatives and context matter. Both suggest the damage depends less on what is taken away than on how.

Workers already say what they want automated

The good news is that workers are not, in general, opposed to automation. They are opposed to the wrong automation.

The WORKBank study asked its 1,500 workers which of their tasks they would like AI agents to take on. For 46.1 per cent of tasks, workers expressed positive attitudes towards automation, even after being prompted to reflect on job loss and on how much they enjoyed the work. Their main motivation was to free up time for higher-value work. The researchers then compared those desires with experts' assessments of what AI could currently do, sorting tasks into four zones: a “Green Light” zone where workers wanted automation and the technology could deliver it; a “Red Light” zone where the technology was capable but workers did not want it; an R&D opportunity zone where workers wanted help that the technology could not yet provide; and a low-priority zone.

Their most pointed finding concerned where the money was going. Mapping the tasks targeted by Y Combinator start-ups, they found that 41.0 per cent of company-task mappings were concentrated in the Low Priority and “Red Light” zones. A large share of the industry's effort, in other words, was aimed at tasks workers either did not care about or actively wanted to keep.

Combined with the CHI paper's developer-worker mismatch, the pattern is clear. Workers do not resist AI. Their preferences are simply rarely the input that shapes what gets built.

A test for choosing which task clusters to automate

If the risk is demoralisation, then the usual test for automation, which asks whether a task can be done faster or cheaper by a machine, is incomplete. It needs a second question: what does this task mean to the people who do it? Drawing on the two papers and the evidence around them, an organisation could reasonably weigh at least four considerations before automating a cluster of tasks.

The first is meaning. Ask the people who do the work which tasks they find meaningful, enjoyable or expressive of their skill, and which they find pointless. The CHI study shows that this can be measured at scale with straightforward survey instruments. WORKBank shows that workers can distinguish clearly between tasks they want help with and tasks they want to keep. Tasks that workers rate low on meaning and high on tedium are the obvious first candidates. Tasks rated high on creativity, autonomy and happiness deserve a heavier burden of justification.

The second is order. The CHI authors propose that, for creative work, the sequence matters as much as the division of labour. Their design heuristics include starting creative fields empty, so that a human sketch, prompt or outline exists before AI suggestions appear; offering several alternatives rather than a single finished replacement; letting workers accept or reject AI content sentence by sentence rather than through a single “replace all”; and allowing a worker to tick a box marked “I want to do this part myself”. The question for an organisation is not simply whether AI touches a creative task, but whether the human still makes the first move.

The third is what replaces the time saved. The DeepMind review's evidence on alternative sources of meaning suggests that automation which frees time is only beneficial if that time goes somewhere that sustains structure, status and purpose. For relational work, the CHI paper suggests using AI to prepare briefs and summaries so the human arrives better informed, assigning it to silent roles such as note-taking during live interactions, and reserving protected time for direct human engagement. Its proposed measures of success are telling: workers reporting that AI helps them “show up prepared” rather than “speak for me”, and that it does not “take away the good parts” of the job.

The fourth is measurement. The CHI authors recommend tracking, during deployment, whether workers still feel in control and whether the output “still feels like my work”, alongside conventional measures of speed and quality. They also suggest logging the level of assistance AI provides, from suggestion to draft to execution, and recording who made the final decision. Over time, they argue, workers' self-reported skills and confidence in their core craft should remain stable or improve. If those indicators fall while productivity rises, the organisation has learned something its dashboards would otherwise hide.

None of this means creative tasks should never be automated. Some workers will welcome help with the very tasks others prize, and the CHI data show wide variation between sectors. The point is that meaning should be treated as a real cost in the decision, not as a sentimental afterthought.

Giving workers a binding say

That leaves the second half of the question: what voice should workers have? The CHI paper's answer is explicit. Beyond designing interfaces that let individuals retain control within a task, the authors argue that organisations should give workers some say over which task clusters are candidates for automation. Without such mechanisms, they warn, “AI exposure risks deepening existing power imbalances.” They point to remedies from research on algorithmic management: direct involvement of workers and their representatives through formal consultation and collective bargaining over AI deployments, worker or union technology representatives with access to information about how systems allocate and evaluate work, and transparency tools that help workers understand and contest automated decisions.

There are working precedents. The most prominent came from Hollywood. The 2023 Minimum Basic Agreement between the Writers Guild of America and the major studios established that AI cannot be considered a writer and that material it produces cannot be treated as literary material. Under its terms, a writer may choose to use AI with the company's consent, but the guild's own summary states plainly that “the company can't require the writer to use AI software (e.g., ChatGPT) when performing writing services.” Companies must disclose when material given to a writer was generated by AI. In effect, the writers bargained over which parts of their craft would remain theirs. That agreement has since been succeeded by the 2026 contract, ratified on 24 April 2026 with 90.38% of votes in favour and running to 1 May 2030, which “preserves all of the protections negotiated in 2023”. It adds one more: companies must give the guild written notice when they license writers' work to train a commercial generative AI system, after which the guild can request a discussion about the licence, including any payment to writers. It does not establish payment for training.

European law offers a thinner but broader floor. Article 26(7) of the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, adopted in 2024, requires that, before a high-risk AI system is put into service or used at the workplace, “deployers who are employers shall inform workers' representatives and the affected workers” that they will be subject to it. That is a duty to inform, not to consult or obtain consent, and it applies only to systems classed as high-risk. It is also not yet in force for most workplace tools: the Digital Omnibus on AI, Regulation (EU) 2026/1744, which took effect on 27 July 2026, deferred the high-risk obligations for Annex III systems, a category that includes employment and worker management, from 2 August 2026 to 2 December 2027. In Germany, works councils have long held co-determination rights over the introduction of technical systems capable of monitoring employees' behaviour or performance, a provision that lawyers widely expect to cover many AI tools. The limits are visible too: in January 2024, the Hamburg Labour Court rejected a works council's application concerning employees' use of ChatGPT, partly because staff used it voluntarily through private accounts in a web browser rather than as an employer-installed system.

These mechanisms share a weakness when it comes to demoralisation. Most were designed to address surveillance, pay or credit, not meaning. The EU provision is triggered by risk classification, not by what a task means to the person who does it. The German right is anchored in monitoring. Even the WGA's protections, including the 2026 notice requirement on training licences, focus on credit and compensation, although by keeping AI out of the definition of a writer, they also protect authorship. A workplace that took the CHI findings seriously would go further: it would give workers a formal role in deciding which task clusters are automated, informed by evidence about which tasks they find meaningful, with a right to revisit the decision once the effects are known.

That voice matters most precisely where it is weakest. The CHI authors note that the decisions about exposure are made before workers can consent, especially in roles with little bargaining power. The DeepMind review cites evidence that, where safety nets are weak, pre-existing wealth becomes a key buffer against the shock of job loss. A model of AI deployment that consults only those with strong unions would protect screenwriters and leave behind most of the people whose tasks appear in the CHI data.

What a craft needs to survive

It is tempting to treat all of this as a soft concern, a matter of morale to be fixed with a workshop. The evidence suggests otherwise. Meaning is not a perk attached to work; it is part of what makes people willing to invest skill and care, and part of what keeps them well. The DeepMind review shows how much is at stake when people lose work altogether. The CHI paper suggests a quieter version of that loss may already be underway inside jobs that look perfectly secure.

The two papers point to the same remedy from opposite directions. What protects people is not the absence of change but the ability to shape it: to choose, to find meaning somewhere else when the old sources move, and to be supported while they do. For organisations, that means treating which tasks to automate as a decision with human costs, made with the people who bear them, rather than a technical question settled by whatever a vendor's model can do.

Ranjit and her co-authors end on a note of possibility. The outcome they describe, they stress, is shaped by design choices, which can in principle be revised: systems could speed up exploration and drafting while people keep authorship, make the final judgements and sustain the relationships that make work meaningful. That is a more humane division of labour than the current pitch implies. But it will not arrive by default. Left to the logic of capability alone, AI will keep flowing towards the tasks it can reach, and those turn out to be the ones people love. Keeping the spark in work will take a deliberate decision about who gets to say which parts of a craft stay human.

References and Sources

1. Ranjit, Jaspreet; Zhou, Ke; Swayamdipta, Swabha; Quercia, Daniele. “Are We Automating the Joy Out of Work? Designing AI to Augment Work, Not Meaning.” Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '26), Barcelona, Spain, 13-17 April 2026. DOI: 10.1145/3772318.3791845. Preprint arXiv:2603.14963, 16 March 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14963 (full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.14963)
2. Chan, Stephanie C.Y.; Bales, Adam; Hermann, Katherine L.; Gabriel, Iason. “Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures.” Google DeepMind. arXiv:2609.11019, 10 September 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.11019 (full text: https://arxiv.org/html/2609.11019)
3. Septiandri, Ali Akbar; Constantinides, Marios; Quercia, Daniele. “The potential impact of AI innovations on US occupations.” PNAS Nexus, 3(9), pgae320, September 2024. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae320. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11421150/
4. Wu, Suqing; Liu, Yukun; Ruan, Mengqi; Chen, Siyu; Xie, Xiao-Yun. “Human-generative AI collaboration enhances task performance but undermines human's intrinsic motivation.” Scientific Reports, 15, article 15105, 29 April 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-98385-2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-98385-2
5. Shao, Yijia; Zope, Humishka; Jiang, Yucheng; Pei, Jiaxin; Nguyen, David; Brynjolfsson, Erik; Yang, Diyi. “Future of Work with AI Agents: Auditing Automation and Augmentation Potential across the U.S. Workforce.” arXiv:2506.06576, 6 June 2025 (revised 1 February 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06576
6. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press, 1983 (third edition 2012). https://www.ucpress.edu/books/the-managed-heart/paper
7. Jahoda, Marie. Employment and Unemployment: A Social-Psychological Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 1982. ISBN 978-0-521-28586-5. https://ideas.repec.org/b/cup/cbooks/9780521285865.html
8. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2008. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300151190/the-craftsman/
9. The Bookseller. “A third of translators report losing work to generative AI systems, SoA survey reveals.” April 2024. https://thebookseller.com/news/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-to-generative-ai-systems-soa-survey-reveals
10. European Writers' Council. “SoA survey UK AI 2024.” April 2024. https://europeanwriterscouncil.eu/soa-survey-uk-ai-2024/
11. Books+Publishing. “A third of translators report losing work due to AI.” 15 April 2024. https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2024/04/15/250317/a-third-of-translators-report-losing-work-due-to-ai/
12. Writers Guild of America West. “Know Your Rights: Artificial Intelligence.” https://www.wga.org/contracts/know-your-rights/artificial-intelligence
13. Writers Guild of America. “Summary of the 2023 WGA MBA.” https://wgacontract2023.org/the-campaign/summary-of-the-2023-wga-mba
14. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 13 June 2024 laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (Artificial Intelligence Act), Article 26: Obligations of deployers of high-risk AI systems. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/26/ (Official Journal: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1689/oj/eng)
15. Littler Mendelson. “Germany: Does the Works Council Have a Say When Employees Use ChatGPT? No, According to the Labor Court Hamburg.” 2024. https://www.littler.com/publication-press/publication/germany-does-works-council-have-say-when-employees-use-chatgpt-no
16. Bird & Bird. “First Judgement on the Rights of Works Councils when Employees use AI Systems.” 2024. https://cm.twobirds.com/en/insights/2024/germany/erstes-urteil-zu-rechten-des-betriebsrats-bei-einsatz-von-kuenstlicher-intelligenz
17. Writers Guild of America. “WGA Ratifies 2026 Minimum Basic Agreement With AMPTP.” 24 April 2026. https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/press/wga-ratifies-2026-minimum-basic-agreement-with-amptp
18. Writers Guild of America. “Summary of the 2026 WGA MBA.” https://www.wga.org/contracts/contracts/mba/summary-of-the-2026-wga-mba
19. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 amending Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (Digital Omnibus on AI), in force 27 July 2026. https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/ai-act-explorer/digital-omnibus/

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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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Normalize unscented laundry detergent and unscented cleaning products. Smell is subjective. I don’t understand why some hotels and Airbnbs wash their linens with artificially scented detergent when they are catering to a wide range of people. Many are nose-blind, but many of us are also sensitive to smells. We can’t escape smell. It’s always there. I’ve stayed at aesthetically beautiful places with linens that smelled like cheap laundromat detergent. It is inconsiderate, offensive, and untasteful. Once my body experiences that obnoxious smell, I will never return. It’s no longer a safe place for me. 

In Summary: * Moving patiently into the night meds and night prayers part of my evening while waiting for the pregame programming of tonight's college football game to fire up.

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= 214.4 lbs. * bp= 136/66 (67)

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

Diet: * 03:45 – 1 banana * 07:15 – 1 roast beef sandwich * 08:45 – garden salad * 12:50 – piece of cheesecake, 1 peanut butter sandwich * 13:30 – pizza

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 12:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 16:00 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who

Chess: * 09:05 – moved in all pending CC games, losing 2 and winning 1, and joined another CC tourney with new games starting 15 Nov.

Caw. Caw. Send the caw. My singing friends who fly with law.

Their treasures twinkle. I smile with glee. The blackened wings spark wild and free.

Spin. Spin. I welcome paths. Each step's of colors aged in wrath.

For gentle love's a roar twice-fierce whose scissors cut where schemes fail pierce.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

Hi blog friends!

Well – after less than 10 brews, the new coffee maker I wrote about last time bit the dust. We have a new pot now but didn’t for a few days, so getting our coffee drinking needs met was a little bit rough there for a bit. Unless you’re a fan of extremely bitter coffee, Great Value French Roast, although fairly good when brewed in an auto drip coffee maker, doesn’t taste at all good when made in a French press. 

R, the wheelchair tech from National Seating And Mobility, came for a visit last Thursday. Thanks to some boss over the phone help from a Quantum Rehab representative, the programming on the joystick of my new power wheelchair Q.T. (short for Quick Trip or Cutie) is more in the ballpark than it was. More torque and traction is now on the front caster tires and our turns contain much less whiplash than they did, but I still feel like I need the whiplash to be a little less in order to make a smooth natural turn.  If you’re reading this and have a Quantum R Trak power wheelchair with a smooth, natural turn, what are the settings on your joystick? Send an email to let me know. A link is at the bottom of this post. 

A new lower profile seat cushion and some guides for the outer sides of my center mount footplates have also been submitted for approval by my insurance. And R made me feel very nervous because he didn’t seem experienced or confident. He actually spent a suspiciously long time driving my new power wheelchair and spinning it around on our carpet. And he kept telling me about why my wheelchair was behaving the way it was, but he seemed reluctant to do anything to fix it. If he hadn’t called Quantum to inquire about the guides for my footplate, I don’t think the joystick to my new power wheelchair would have ever been reprogrammed. I think he was inexperienced. And I don’t think he even knew about the Quantum R Trak reprogramming app that’s on his phone. I know he didn’t have a password for it, which tells me that he hardly, if ever, uses it. 

I’m also still spending my afternoons sipping coffee, napping and watching a lot of YouTube videos. Paul and I also enjoyed the World Series and have also been enjoying Best Medicine, RJ Decker, Line Of Fire and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. We’re up to the part where Susie enjoys a Mexican dinner with her captors. 

Also tried a lower dose of estrogen patch. Still a no-go. My body just hates it – so off to another option I go.

What’s happening in your neck of the woods? What are you watching? What are you eating? Or what exciting things have you seen or done lately? Send an email, text or message to let me know. A link to email is at the bottom of this post. I found a spaghetti sauce heart after I finished a plate of spaghetti this last week.

If you’re looking to add a sweet SNAIL-TASTIC touch of whimsy, charm or cheer to your fall, winter or holiday correspondence, Cute Snail and I have some new postcards you might appreciate. Fall, winter and other coloring pages are also available as well. Pages and postcards are 100% FREE to download, coloring books and packs are pay what you want. We also have promotional postcards and fliers available for those who would like to help spread the word about our SNAIL-TASTIC creations. Oh! And digital sharing postcards are also bundled in with the printable postcards if sharing in that way is more your pleasure.

That’s it! Thanks for reading! Until Next time!

❤️ Juliet

IMAGE ID: A collage photo of the morning hubby Paul and I went out for coffee. It contains a picture of a cup that says “Have a great day!” on the lid, as well as a picture of yummy avocado toast and a breakfast salad topped with warm bacon and drizzled with warm balsamic vinaigrette. It was delicious. 😋

De Gids

Net als Suarez zet ik hier mijn tanden in ik heb er oren naar als Tyson in de knokring ik laat me niet kisten als een Kees ben voor Acda & De Munnik niet naar maaiveld geweest ik laat me ook helemaal niet op maaien Ga voor geen enkele Spielberg naar de haaien zelfs voor Finkers, Barend en Van Dorp zeg ik geen ja en geen nee ik wil niet met Ivo te kijk staan op teevee mijn geheugen lijkt een grote, lange, eindeloze tv gids sta veel maar dan ook veel langer dan Jos en Max in de Pits maar zonder schattige poezen onder een zonne paraplu ik leef in de eeuwige herhaling van Gewest tot Gewest Hier en Nu Ik kan me Bart nog voor de geest halen en ook Karel opgegraven van onder het stilstaand beeldmonument 'heren, heren' je schiet elkaar toch niet zomaar kapot de Tros en Avro tegen de tijd, de Vpro en Vara voor de tijd en de Ncrv, Kro en Eo voor god ik heb ze gezien Binnendijk, Barend en nog veel meer B & B Het wassende water, De knokploeg en Die Twee ik vraag me wel af waarom het ding er moest komen en er nog is tijdens die verre verre voorstellingen heb ik het live optreden gemist ja waarom moesten die tv en de omroepen er eigenlijk komen wie had er baat bij die voor beeldschermen geproduceerde dromen konden we niet zonder het Sportjournaal, Jiskefet, Wie is de Mol en Boer zoekt Vrouw hadden we Hollywood, Carry en Ron echt nodig om te zeggen Ik Hou Van Jou Dynasty en Dallas, As The World Turns, Goede en Slechte Uitzendtijden de glijmiddelen om boodschappen op gezette tijden naar binnen te geleiden o heerlijk beschermland van Marvel, Disney Pixar en Illumination op de bips rij ik stilstaand nooit langzaam van station naar zendstation zonder ooit ergens aan te komen schakel ik iedere dag weer in geen wonder dat ik denk net als velen met met mij wat heeft het allemaal voor zin.

Had this big guy drop two days ago to eat some apples, chase the does and then ruminate.

Diagnose : Latent Achterdochtig Van Voorbijgaande Aard

Ze hebben me in de gaten weten nu al waarover ik straks ga praten ze hebben me in de smiezen ze laten me staan voor hun menu en kiezen ze kennen me bij naam weten waarvoor ik stil blijf staan wie ik ken ze weten al waar ik heen ga nog voor ik er ben gevangen zit ik in radarbeelden zien me digitale informatie verdelen ze zien mij als bliepende punt als ik wandel van hoogtepunt naar dieptepunt ze weten waar ik heen wil hoe zwaar ik vooraf bepaalde zaken til waar ik heen vlucht als ik vrees waar ik zal zijn en waar ik ben geweest ze kunnen me nu op alles beoordelen met dna van een huidschilver een replica mij telen zodat ik mezelf overal en nergens tegenkom ze weten wat ik wanneer doe en zelfs waarom ze zitten te wroeten in mijn administratie zoeken naar een manifestatie voor rechtvaardiging van de interventie van de dienst tegen misbruik van intelligentie een mensen leven niet ingezet voor de goede zaak voor bijvallen in de zoete smaak van bundelingen van en voor omzetbare inzet ten faveure van het goede, deelbare, hard werkende net ze willen weten waarom ik hier ben waarom ik alles wat er moet zijn om me heen verzin me nooit inlaat met de eerder gevestigde orde ze beantwoorden de vraag zelf wat er van mij moet worden zoniet vandaag dan zeker wel morgen dat ik me laat omringen door gefinancierde zorgen ze kennen mijn naam, weten wat er op rekening staat wat er inkomt van wie en hoeveel daarvan er uitgaat ze willen weten in welke kasten al mijn lijken zitten met welke reden ik instituten en organisaties ontloop waarom ik de mouwen niet voor andermans talenten opstroop en of ik verschil maak tussen zwarte, rooie, gele, blauwe en witte ze hebben me in de smiezen willen me beheren, laten delen en kiezen zeten me in kwader daglicht dan ik verdragen kan ik zit klem in hun met angst en beven gemanipuleerde toestand ik probeer hier een belachelijk ingewikkeld complex op te bouwen, renoveren, slopen en weer verbouwen terwijl ik al een hele poos niemand meer kan vertrouwen ze sneupen in mijn container en de containerzakken en in mijn fysieke alsook de digitale postvakken ze rommelen wat aan in mijn marge turen 's avonds door de naden van de vitrage luisteren naar mijn zinnen op zoek naar rede voor beklag en dat alleen maar omdat ik nooit om hun barslechte grappen lach...

Again, Conference USA Football.

Thursday's college football game of choice comes, again, from Conference USA as the Florida Atlantic Owls travel to Denton, TX, to play the North Texas Mean Green in a game scheduled to start at 6:30 PM CT. It will be nice if I can stay with the game till the end, however I'll be satisfied to last to halftime before retiring for the night.

And the adventure continues.

Certaines journées ne sont vécues que pour « fonctionner ». Le sentir et le vivre sont absents.

L’aliénation est partout. Le découragement à quelques pas.

Ce n’est pas comme ça que je veux vivre.

Arriver à la fin et dire quoi ? J’ai fonctionné correctement ? Ah, qu’est-ce qui a mal tourné ?