Excellent read.

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I need to go to sleep so that I can be properly rested for my date tomorrow, but I guess I just wanted to mention how I was talking with J And I mentioned how if I wanted to be like unreasonable and say if she wanted to she would, there was a specific thing she could offer to do, but that was like a joke because I thought it was way too unreasonable to expect that out of someone, and when I looked at my text messages she had offered that. In the grand scheme of things it’s not like anything mind-boggling, I guess, but very much made me feel. Like I was valued and respected, and that she kind of reciprocated effort which matters so much to me. We also talked about some things about trust and how much our word means to us, and we’re both aligned there. I’m really optimistic. But at the same time, if it doesn’t work, I will live and I want to remind myself of that because I want to actively choose this person not just feel like I need a relationship and so I will take it.

The 500th milestone is still far away but I've got to get going with plans if I ever have a hope of reaching it. I may have to reach my 500th milestone by a combination of active and passive income. I don't think I'm entirely willing to devote time and energy to get a job that pays 500k per annum (and if stress doesn't get me, maybe impostor syndrome will). So here I am, taking stock of my income and expenses:

• My day job pays under 100k per year and this is all I consider to be my source of income at the moment.
• I have some shares outside of super and they are on a dividend re-investment plan. I also have no plans of selling these shares.
• I have a mortgage on a one-bedroom apartment that I bought in May this year, so I'm still clawing equity on it. I used the first home buyer super saver scheme to help me save and I really liked having the automatic deductions from my fortnightly pay (I would have spent the money otherwise).
• I spent alot of my cash on hand buying the apartment so I'm also still trying to pad out my savings again.

I don't have a partner, I have no dependents or pets, and I don't have traditional vices. I do have expensive hobbies. I travel all around the east coast of Australia alot. I also want to get a recreational pilot's license (my goal for the 30s).

Anyway, the only feasible passive income sources for my capabilities (that I can think of) is dividends and royalties if I ever decide to publish a fanfic adjacent piece of lore (fanfic is for another post).

Perhaps a 2-monthly automatic purchase of dividend focused exchange traded funds will be a start. I will put them all on a dividend re-investment plan while I'm in a gathering phase. I will report back at some point when I figure out how to automate the purchases. It needs to be automated or I will be tempted to spend the money.

Meine Steuererklärung scheitert selten daran, dass ich keine Zeit dafür hätte. Meist scheitert sie zunächst daran, dass ich keine Lust verspüre, mich einer Aufgabe zu unterwerfen, deren unmittelbaren Nutzen ich nicht erkenne. Ähnlich geht es mir bei Behördenschreiben oder administrativen Pflichten, die von aussen an mich herangetragen werden.

Mein Verhaltensmuster ist ziemlich zuverlässig: Ich verweigere zunächst den Beginn und erledige stattdessen demonstrativ etwas anderes. Natürlich handelt es sich dabei nicht um irgendeine Ablenkung, sondern um etwas vermeintlich Wichtiges. Ich beantworte E-Mails, ordne Unterlagen oder erledige eine Aufgabe, die ebenfalls schon länger auf meiner Liste steht. So kann ich mir einreden, produktiv zu sein. Erst wenn die Frist näher rückt und der äussere Druck gross genug wird, widme ich mich der ursprünglichen Aufgabe.

Lange hätte ich dieses Verhalten als mangelnde Disziplin bezeichnet. In der Typologie des Sozialwissenschaftlers Itamar Shatz [1] finde ich jedoch eine passendere Erklärung: Ich erkenne mich im „Rebellen“ wieder. Dieser schiebt Aufgaben nicht einfach aus Bequemlichkeit auf. Er wehrt sich gegen Fremdbestimmung und versucht, sich durch das Aufschieben ein Stück Autonomie zurückzuholen.

Der Rebell ist allerdings nur einer von neun Prokrastinationstypen, die Shatz unterscheidet. Dahinter steht eine wichtige Erkenntnis: Es gibt nicht den Prokrastinierer. Menschen schieben aus unterschiedlichen Gründen auf und benötigen entsprechend unterschiedliche Gegenstrategien.

Kein Mangel an Willenskraft

In meinem ersten Beitrag zum Thema habe ich #Prokrastination als freiwilliges Verzögern einer Aufgabe trotz absehbarer negativer Konsequenzen beschrieben. Entscheidend ist die Abgrenzung zum bewussten Aufschieben. Wer eine Aufgabe verschiebt, weil noch Informationen fehlen oder weil ein späterer Zeitpunkt tatsächlich günstiger ist, prokrastiniert nicht. Von Prokrastination sprechen wir, wenn wir wissen, dass uns die Verzögerung schadet, und trotzdem nicht handeln.

Häufig wird dieses Verhalten auf schlechte Planung, fehlende Motivation oder zu wenig Willenskraft zurückgeführt. Shatz hält das für eine Verwechslung von Ursache und Symptom. Hinter dem Aufschieben können Angst, Erschöpfung, Perfektionismus, geringe Erfolgserwartungen, Ablenkbarkeit oder ein Konflikt mit äusseren Erwartungen stehen. Derselbe Mensch kann je nach Aufgabe aus ganz unterschiedlichen Gründen prokrastinieren [2].

Das erklärt auch, weshalb allgemeine Produktivitätstipps so unzuverlässig funktionieren. Eine strengere Deadline kann einem leicht ablenkbaren Menschen helfen. Bei jemandem, der sich gegen äussere Kontrolle wehrt, verstärkt sie möglicherweise den Widerstand. Erholung ist für einen erschöpften Menschen notwendig. Für jemanden, der vor allem das unmittelbar Angenehme sucht, kann sie hingegen zur nächsten Ausweichhandlung werden.

In meinem zweiten Beitrag habe ich mit Skinners Gesetz einen Ansatz vorgestellt, der die Freude am Handeln erhöht oder die Kosten des Nichtstuns vergrössert. Auch solche Anreize können nützlich sein. Sie greifen aber zu kurz, wenn die eigentliche Ursache nicht erkannt wird.

Neun Typen der Prokrastination

Shatz unterscheidet neun typische Muster. Sie sind nicht als wissenschaftliche Diagnosen oder unveränderliche Persönlichkeitstypen zu verstehen. Vielmehr bieten sie ein Raster, um genauer zu beobachten, was hinter dem eigenen Aufschieben steckt.

Typ	Typisches Muster	Mögliche Ursache	Passender Umgang
Besorgter	Beginnt nicht, weil etwas schiefgehen könnte	Angst vor negativen Konsequenzen oder Bewertung von aussen	Befürchtung konkret benennen, ihre Wahrscheinlichkeit prüfen und mit einem kleinen Schritt beginnen
Erschöpfter	Fühlt sich zu müde oder ausgelaugt für die Aufgabe	Überlastung oder Stress	Erholung priorisieren, Anforderungen überprüfen und unrealistische Ziele reduzieren
Perfektionist	Beginnt spät oder wird nie fertig	Überhöhter eigener Anspruch, das Ergebnis genügt nie ganz	Vorab festlegen, was «gut genug» bedeutet, und eine unfertige erste Version zulassen
Pessimist	Erwartet, ohnehin keinen Erfolg zu haben	Geringe Selbstwirksamkeit und starke Selbstkritik	Annahmen überprüfen und sich so beraten, wie man einen Freund beraten würde
Träumer	Denkt gerne über Ziele nach, setzt sie aber kaum um	Die Vorstellung der Zukunft ist attraktiver als die konkrete Arbeit	Wünsche in beobachtbare Handlungen, Termine und nächste Schritte übersetzen
Zickzack-Typ	Springt laufend zwischen Aufgaben und Reizen	Ablenkbarkeit, fehlende Prioritäten oder eine reizreiche Umgebung	Ein Ziel schriftlich festhalten, Ablenkungen entfernen und die Aufgabe in Schritte zerlegen
Rebell	Widersetzt sich vor allem fremden Vorgaben	Bedürfnis nach Autonomie und Kontrolle	Eigenen Nutzen klären und innerhalb der Aufgabe echte Wahlmöglichkeiten schaffen
Adrenalin-Sucher	Arbeitet erst kurz vor Ablauf der Frist	Aktivierung und Spannung durch Zeitdruck	Zwischenfristen setzen und die Kosten des hektischen Endspurts ehrlich bilanzieren
Hedonist	Entscheidet sich für das, was sich jetzt besser anfühlt	Unmittelbare Belohnungen wiegen stärker als spätere Vorteile	Versuchungen erschweren und die Aufgabe mit einer zeitnahen kleinen Belohnung verbinden

Die Übersicht macht deutlich, dass eine identische Handlung sehr verschiedene Hintergründe haben kann. Zwei Personen reichen ihre Unterlagen erst am letzten Tag ein. Die eine fürchtet, einen Fehler zu machen, und kontrolliert jedes Detail mehrfach. Die andere empfindet die Aufgabe als fremdbestimmt und beginnt aus Widerstand nicht. Eine gemeinsame Deadline bedeutet noch keine gemeinsame Ursache.

Wie sich eine Ursache bei mir konkret zeigt: der Rebell und die Illusion der Kontrolle

Beim Rebellen erfüllt die Prokrastination eine besondere Funktion. Das Aufschieben vermittelt kurzfristig das Gefühl, sich einer Anordnung nicht vollständig zu unterwerfen. Ich entscheide schliesslich selbst, wann ich die Steuererklärung ausfülle. Indem ich zuerst andere Aufgaben erledige, stelle ich symbolisch meine eigene Prioritätenordnung wieder her. Das Problem liegt im Ergebnis. Was sich zunächst wie Selbstbestimmung anfühlt, führt zu immer stärkerer Fremdbestimmung. Die Frist rückt näher, der Handlungsspielraum schrumpft, und am Ende diktiert der Zeitdruck, wann und unter welchen Bedingungen ich arbeiten muss. Der Rebell verschafft sich durch das Aufschieben kurzfristig ein Gefühl von Kontrolle und verliert dadurch langfristig umso mehr davon.

Mehr Druck ist deshalb nicht unbedingt die beste Antwort. Hilfreicher ist es, den eigenen Nutzen der Aufgabe zu klären. Eine Steuererklärung bleibt eine Pflicht. Ich kann sie aber als Voraussetzung betrachten, um finanzielle Angelegenheiten abzuschliessen, Unsicherheit zu beseitigen und anschliessend wieder über meine Zeit zu verfügen. Ebenso kann ich mir innerhalb der Aufgabe Wahlmöglichkeiten schaffen: Wann erledige ich sie? In welcher Reihenfolge gehe ich vor? Welche Unterlagen bereite ich zuerst vor? Hole ich Unterstützung oder arbeite ich allein? Die Aufgabe wird dadurch nicht angenehmer. Sie erscheint aber weniger als reiner Gehorsamsakt.

Erst die Ursache, dann die Methode

Die neun Typen erklären, weshalb es keine universelle Methode gegen Prokrastination gibt. “Fang einfach an” kann dem Besorgten helfen, sofern der erste Schritt klein genug ist. Einem tatsächlich erschöpften Menschen vermittelt derselbe Rat möglicherweise nur, er müsse seine Grenzen ignorieren. Eine öffentliche Verpflichtung kann für den Zickzack-Typ eine sinnvolle Struktur schaffen. Beim Rebellen kann sie zusätzlichen Widerstand auslösen.

Vor der Wahl einer Methode steht deshalb eine genauere Diagnose des eigenen Verhaltens. Dabei helfen drei Fragen:

1. Was vermeide ich bei dieser Aufgabe konkret?
2. Welches Gefühl verschwindet kurzfristig, wenn ich sie aufschiebe?
3. Welche Veränderung würde genau diese Hürde verkleinern?

Manchmal lautet die Antwort Angst vor einem schlechten Ergebnis. Manchmal fehlt ein klarer erster Schritt. Vielleicht ist die Aufgabe tatsächlich unnötig, schlecht definiert oder unter den gegenwärtigen Bedingungen kaum zu bewältigen. Nicht jede Abneigung ist ein psychologisches Problem, das mit besserem #Selbstmanagement gelöst werden muss.

Nützliche Orientierung statt festes Etikett

Die Typologie von Shatz vereinfacht natürlich komplexes Verhalten. Menschen lassen sich kaum dauerhaft einer einzigen Kategorie zuordnen. Bei administrativen Pflichten kann ich als Rebell reagieren, beim Schreiben eines wichtigen Textes dagegen perfektionistische Züge zeigen. Erschöpfung kann Ablenkbarkeit verstärken, während Pessimismus und Angst häufig gemeinsam auftreten.

Der Wert der Typologie liegt daher nicht darin, sich selbst ein neues Etikett zu geben. Sie stellt bessere Fragen bereit. Statt mich pauschal als undiszipliniert zu beurteilen, kann ich untersuchen, welche Funktion das Aufschieben in einer konkreten Situation erfüllt. Das ist weniger moralisch, aber anspruchsvoller: Eine unpassende Gegenstrategie lässt sich leicht anwenden. Die tatsächliche Ursache zu erkennen, verlangt ehrliche Selbstbeobachtung.

Meine Steuererklärung wird durch diese Erkenntnis weder interessanter noch schneller erledigbar. Ich muss sie weiterhin ausfüllen. Ich kann jedoch darauf verzichten, mich zunächst wegen mangelnder Willenskraft zu verurteilen und anschliessend noch mehr Druck aufzubauen. Sinnvoller ist es, meinen Widerstand als Hinweis zu verstehen und die Aufgabe so weit wie möglich wieder zu meiner eigenen zu machen.

Die entscheidende Frage lautet deshalb nicht: wie diszipliniere ich mich besser? Sie lautet: warum schiebe ich genau diese Aufgabe auf?

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💬 Kommentieren (nur für write.as-Accounts)

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Fussnoten [1] R. Blakely, «Zigzagger, dreamer or rebel: what kind of procrastinator are you?», The Times, 10. Juli 2026. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://www.thetimes.com/uk/science/article/what-kind-of-procrastinator-are-you-cmqhd7zfq [2] I. Shatz, «Why People Procrastinate: The Psychology and Causes of Procrastination», Solving Procrastination. [Online]. Verfügbar: https://solvingprocrastination.com/why-people-procrastinate/

Bildquelle Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow und Schüler (1788–1862): Hölle (rechter Teil des Triptychons Fegfeuer – Paradies – Hölle), Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Public Domain.

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet.

Topic #Coaching | #ProductivityPorn

I canceled my plans today. All of them. I do feel sick, but also I don’t feel like I have energy to meet up with people. Not yet, I want to meet up with friends but it feels overwhelming for some reason. I rescheduled everything for next week so hopefully these feelings go away by then. Soon enough, my friends may get angry, or worse, worried.

My mom eventually forced me to get out of the house for just a bit and run an errand with her. I do still need to make a list and a schedule so I feel a little more on top of things. This is kind of making me realize I may not be able to run my own business when I can’t even manage my own time off right now.

Thank you for your message. I am currently out of office with no set return date. I will get back to you when the time is right.

There is a particular kind of confidence that radiates from a screen. A clinician holds a dermatoscope against a patient's skin, captures the image, and a number appears: a probability, a risk score, a clean computational verdict rendered in the universal language of decimals. The machine does not hesitate. It does not say “I am less sure about this one.” It returns the same crisp output whether the skin beneath the lens is the pale, freckled forearm of a redhead from the Scottish Highlands or the deep brown shoulder of a man whose ancestry traces to West Africa. The interface is identical. The confidence is identical. The accuracy, it turns out, is not.

This is the uncomfortable fact at the centre of a slow-building reckoning in one of medicine's most visual specialties. Dermatology was supposed to be the field where artificial intelligence would shine first and brightest. Skin is, after all, the organ you can photograph. A lesion sits on the surface, available to any camera, ready to be classified by a neural network trained on hundreds of thousands of examples. The promise was seductive: democratised expertise, faster triage, melanomas caught months earlier, lives saved in places where a dermatologist is a four-hour drive and a six-month waiting list away. And much of that promise is real. But woven through the optimism is a structural flaw that the field has known about, documented, quantified, and only partially addressed. The machines see darker skin less well. And the institutions deploying them have, for the most part, not told the patients standing on the wrong side of that gap.

The question this raises is not merely technical. It is a question about what we owe people when we ask them to trust a tool we know to be unequal. If an AI diagnostic system is understood by its makers and its deployers to perform worse on darker skin, and it is used on a patient with darker skin who is never told this, has that patient truly consented to anything at all? And what does the principle of health equity, so often invoked and so rarely operationalised, actually demand of the hospital, the clinic, or the national health service that flips the switch?

A Specialty Where Looking Is Everything

To understand why bias in dermatology AI is so consequential, you have to understand the stakes of the underlying diagnosis. Melanoma is the deadliest of the common skin cancers, and it is almost uniquely sensitive to timing. Caught early, while it is still confined to the upper layers of the skin, it is among the most survivable of all cancers. The American Cancer Society puts the five-year survival rate for localised melanoma at around 99 per cent. Allow it to metastasise, to spread to distant organs, and that figure collapses to roughly a third. Few diagnoses in medicine carry such a steep cliff between early and late, between a minor excision under local anaesthetic and a death sentence delivered in instalments.

That cliff does not fall equally across the population. The data on racial disparities in melanoma outcomes is stark and long-established. For the period from 2015 to 2021, the five-year melanoma survival rate among white Americans was about 95 per cent. Among Black Americans, it was roughly 70 per cent. The gap is not driven by biology in any simple sense; melanoma is, in absolute terms, rarer in people with darker skin. It is driven overwhelmingly by stage at diagnosis. One widely cited figure holds that around 39 per cent of Black patients present with regional or distant disease, stage III or stage IV, compared with roughly 15 per cent of white patients. By the time the cancer is found, it has often already moved.

This is the world into which dermatology AI arrives: a specialty where the central task is recognition, where the difference between treatable and fatal is measured in how early something is seen, and where the populations whose cancers are already being caught too late are precisely the populations most likely to be poorly served by a tool that struggles to see them. A technology that performs unequally across skin tones does not enter a level field. It enters a field already tilted, and it risks tilting it further.

The Number That Changed the Conversation

For years, the underperformance of dermatology algorithms on darker skin was suspected, asserted, and worried over, but rarely measured with the kind of rigour that compels institutional attention. The problem was partly circular: to test how an algorithm performs across skin tones, you need a high-quality dataset that spans skin tones, with diagnoses confirmed not by a clinician's guess but by the gold standard of biopsy. Such a dataset did not exist. The very gap in the training data made the gap in performance hard to prove.

That changed in 2022, when a team led by researchers at Stanford, including Roxana Daneshjou and Albert Chiou, published a study in Science Advances built around a resource they had assembled called Diverse Dermatology Images, or DDI. It was, they noted, the first publicly available, expertly curated, pathologically confirmed image set deliberately balanced across the full range of skin tones. The numbers behind it are worth stating plainly, because their plainness is the point. The dataset contained 656 images from 570 patients, sorted by Fitzpatrick skin type: 208 images of the lightest skin, types I and II; 241 of the middle range, types III and IV; and 207 of the darkest skin, types V and VI. Crucially, every lesion had been biopsied, so the truth of each diagnosis was not in question.

When the researchers ran state-of-the-art dermatology algorithms against this honest benchmark, the results were sobering. The models' ability to distinguish malignant from benign lesions, measured by an area under the curve, dropped sharply when confronted with images they had not been built to handle. Performance fell by figures in the region of 27 to 36 per cent relative to the algorithms' own published results, and the decline was concentrated, predictably, on darker skin and on rarer diseases. These were not obscure or amateurish systems. They were among the best in the field, the kind of models that generate excited headlines about machines outperforming doctors. Tested fairly, they faltered exactly where the human cost of faltering is highest.

The study did not end on despair, and this matters for the ethics that follow. When the team fine-tuned the algorithms on the diverse DDI images, the gap narrowed and in places vanished. Models retrained on darker skin not only closed the distance between light and dark performance but, in the case of malignancy detection on dark skin, outperformed the dermatologist raters used for comparison. The lesson was unambiguous. The bias was not an inevitable property of the technology. It was a property of the data, and data can be changed. The disparity was a choice, even if no one had consciously chosen it.

A Structural Problem, Not a Bug

If the DDI study supplied the hard number, a review published in June 2024 in the journal Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence supplied the diagnosis of the disease behind it. Written by Nazma Khatun, Gabriella Spinelli, and Federico Colecchia, the paper set out to map the landscape of technology aimed at reducing health inequality in skin diagnosis for people of colour, and it reached a conclusion that should unsettle anyone who imagines the problem can be patched with a software update.

The authors documented the human cost in unsparing terms, citing evidence that African Americans are around four times more likely to present with stage IV melanoma owing to delayed diagnosis, and approximately 1.5 times more likely to die of the disease than white patients, with five-year survival rates they put at 72.2 per cent against 89.6 per cent. Then they turned to the machinery meant to help. What they found in the training data was not a marginal shortfall but a near-absence. Studies that claimed to include people of colour, they noted, frequently included almost none. One prominent example involved a dataset in which just 2.7 per cent of participants were Fitzpatrick type V and not a single one was type VI, the very darkest category. In another instance, an algorithm reporting impressive accuracy in development correctly diagnosed only a small fraction of cases when tested against predominantly darker skin.

The review's central argument was that this was structural. The underrepresentation of people of colour in dermatology AI was not a discrete error introduced at one point in the pipeline that could be excised by a diligent engineer. It was the downstream consequence of a chain of older inequities: medical curricula that taught skin disease almost exclusively on white skin, research cohorts that skewed white, clinical photography archives accumulated in institutions serving largely white populations, and a development culture that treated representativeness as a nice-to-have rather than a precondition. Without intervention upstream, the authors warned, the systemic underrepresentation could not be solved and would only amplify the disparities already baked into care. The machines were not inventing bias. They were inheriting it, encoding it, and scaling it.

The Datasets That Will Not Say What They Contain

Here the story takes a turn that sharpens the consent question to a fine point. Even if a clinician wanted to know how a given AI tool would perform on a given patient, she frequently could not find out, because the datasets underlying these tools often do not record the one variable that matters most.

Consider the public benchmarks that dominate the field. The ISIC archive and the widely used HAM10000 dataset are foundational resources, the raw material on which a great deal of dermatology AI has been built. Analyses of these collections have repeatedly found them overwhelmingly composed of lighter skin. One assessment of the large ISIC 2020 collection and the related MILK10k set estimated that fewer than one per cent of subjects fell into the darkest Fitzpatrick categories, with the data dominated by lighter types. A benchmark with that composition cannot tell you how a model behaves on dark skin, for the simple reason that dark skin is barely present to be measured. The numbers that look reassuring in a published table describe a population that does not include the patient in front of you.

The deeper problem, surfaced in a study published in npj Digital Medicine in November 2025 by Yingjoy Li, Veronica Rotemberg, Roxana Daneshjou, Jenna Lester, and colleagues, is that many datasets do not document their skin tone composition at all. The team proposed a tool they called a Dataset Nutrition Label, a structured summary of a dataset's contents and limitations modelled loosely on the nutritional information panel on packaged food. Applying it to a large 2024 dataset of more than 400,000 lesion images drawn from total body photography, they found that it contained no skin tone documentation whatsoever. Their label flagged the omission explicitly, cautioning against deploying models trained on the data to assess individuals with darker skin and warning of hidden proxies and underrepresented populations lurking unmeasured within.

Sit with what this means at the bedside. A clinician adopting such a tool cannot consult the label, because there is no label. She cannot reason about her patient population, because the composition of the training data is undisclosed. She inherits a system whose performance on the person in her chair is, in the most literal sense, unknown and unknowable from the documentation provided. The transparency that informed consent presupposes, the idea that someone in the chain knows the relevant facts and can convey them, breaks at the source. You cannot disclose what was never recorded.

The Measuring Stick Is Also Broken

It would be convenient if the tool we use to describe skin tone were itself sound. It is not, and this is more than a pedantic footnote. The Fitzpatrick scale, the six-category system that pervades dermatology and structures nearly every dataset described above, was never designed to measure skin colour. It was devised in the 1970s to predict how skin would respond to ultraviolet light, how readily it would burn and how readily it would tan. It was, in origin, a sunburn classifier built around the responses of lighter skin, later extended to cover darker types almost as an afterthought.

A study published in npj Digital Medicine in December 2025 by Victoria Weir, Veronica Rotemberg, and colleagues compared the Fitzpatrick scale against alternatives, including the more recent Monk Skin Tone scale and objective colorimetry. The Fitzpatrick categories, they found, showed the weakest clustering when mapped against measured colour, meaning each Fitzpatrick band sprawled across a wide and overlapping range of actual skin tones. The scale, the authors observed, does not measure skin tone; it measures photosensitivity, and the two are related but not the same. The Monk scale and objective colour measurement both performed better, with the Monk scale in particular proving more reliable and more capable of revealing genuine differences in how melanoma algorithms perform across tones.

The implication compounds every problem already described. The field has been auditing its own fairness using a ruler with blurred and arbitrary markings, originally manufactured to answer a different question entirely. When a dataset reports its Fitzpatrick distribution, it is offering a coarse, contested proxy and calling it a measurement. The instrument of accountability is itself part of what needs reforming.

What Consent Was Supposed to Mean

Step back from the technical thicket and the ethical architecture comes into focus. Informed consent is one of the load-bearing pillars of modern medicine, the legal and moral mechanism by which a patient's body remains their own even as they hand themselves over to expert care. Its logic is that a competent adult is entitled to the information a reasonable person would want in order to decide whether to accept a proposed course of action, including its material risks and reasonable alternatives. The patient need not become a physician. But they are owed the facts that would matter to a sensible person weighing the choice.

The legal scholarship on whether this doctrine reaches the use of artificial intelligence is, as yet, cautious. In an analysis of AI and the law of informed consent, the legal scholars I. Glenn Cohen and Andrew Slottje concluded in 2024 that current United States law probably does not require a physician to disclose, as a general matter, that an AI system was involved in a diagnosis. The reasoning runs through the materiality standard. Under the patient-centred version of that standard, a risk must be disclosed when a reasonable person would attach significance to it in deciding on treatment. The mere fact that software assisted a clinician, the argument goes, may be no more material than the fact that the clinician consulted a textbook or a colleague.

But Cohen and Slottje also identified the precise circumstance in which the analysis shifts, and it is the circumstance this entire article describes. Algorithmic bias, they noted, can be material, particularly where training data underrepresents a patient's group in a way that predicts poorer performance for that patient specifically. That is not a textbook the clinician happened to read. That is a known, quantified, group-specific reduction in the reliability of the very tool being used to decide whether a mark on someone's skin is cancer. It is difficult to imagine a fact a reasonable patient would more plainly want to know. The commentator Emma Kondrup, writing for Harvard's Petrie-Flom Center in April 2025, pressed the broader worry that informed consent in the age of opaque, evolving algorithms risks becoming symbolic, a signature collected on a form for a process the patient cannot meaningfully evaluate. When the relevant risk is not the inscrutable inner workings of a black box but something as concrete as “this tool was tested mostly on skin lighter than yours and is known to be less accurate on skin like yours,” symbolism is not good enough.

The consent question, then, resolves into something quite sharp. Consent that conceals a material, group-specific disparity is not consent in any meaningful sense. It is the form of consent without its substance, a ritual that produces a signature while withholding the one fact that might have changed the signer's mind. And the cruelty of the arrangement is its distribution. The patients on the wrong side of the accuracy gap are disproportionately those who, in many health systems, have the least access to a specialist second opinion, the fewest resources to seek out alternative assessment, and the least standing to contest a diagnosis that arrives late. The tool performs worst for the people least equipped to notice or to challenge its failure. A disparity in accuracy lands on top of a disparity in power, and the two reinforce each other.

The British Experiment in Doing It Differently

If this all sounds abstract, Britain offers a concrete and instructive case, because the question of deploying biased dermatology AI is not hypothetical there. It is operational. An AI system called DERM, developed by the company Skin Analytics, has been used across a number of NHS England trusts to assess skin lesions, in some configurations taking patients off the urgent cancer pathway without a doctor reviewing every benign result. In May 2025, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the body that judges which technologies the NHS should adopt, issued a conditional recommendation: DERM could be used within the health service over a three-year evidence-generation period while its real-world value was assessed.

What makes the NICE decision notable for the consent debate is what it did about skin tone. Rather than wave the technology through with uniform confidence, NICE built the known uncertainty into the rules of deployment. It specified that for patients with black or brown skin, an additional healthcare professional review would take place during the evidence period, reflecting that the evidence for the tool's accuracy in those groups was less certain. The institution, in other words, did not pretend the disparity away. It acknowledged that it did not yet know how well the machine saw darker skin, and it placed a human safeguard precisely where the machine was least trustworthy.

This is, in one reading, exactly what health equity ought to require: an institution confronting a known performance gap not by hiding it but by compensating for it, allocating extra scrutiny to the patients the technology is most likely to fail. Yet it also lays the underlying problem bare. The British Association of Dermatologists has voiced the longstanding worry that the underrepresentation of darker skin in image datasets could cause AI to perform poorly on those patients, and has noted how few data exist on the technology's effectiveness on dark skin. NICE's safeguard is a tacit admission that the tool is being deployed before that uncertainty is resolved. The human second read is a patch over a gap that more representative data should have closed years earlier. It is a humane response to an inequity that better data collection might have prevented from arising at all.

There is a further, subtler point buried in the NICE arrangement. The extra review for darker skin is a form of institutional disclosure, a recognition encoded in policy that performance differs by skin tone. But the patient sitting in the clinic may never learn why their case is being handled differently, or that it is being handled differently at all. The safeguard protects the patient's body without necessarily informing the patient's mind. It is better than nothing, considerably better, but it is not yet the full transparency that meaningful consent would demand.

What the Regulators See, and What They Do Not Require

Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic have begun, haltingly, to grapple with this. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration issued draft guidance in January 2025 on the lifecycle management of AI-enabled medical devices, and its expectations now include analysis of performance across demographic subgroups, with attention to race, ethnicity, age, sex, and the equipment used to capture images. On paper, this is the regulator asking precisely the right question: does the device work for everyone it will be used on?

The gap, as ever, lies between the paper and the practice. Analyses of the transparency actually achieved by FDA-reviewed AI devices have found it wanting. One assessment found that demographic reporting in device summaries, while rising, remained low, with fewer than one in five summaries providing race or ethnicity data, and structured subgroup-level performance reporting largely absent. A substantial share of devices reported no clinical study at all, and many reported no performance metrics of any kind. The regulator is asking for the information that would make informed deployment possible. It is frequently not getting it, and it is clearing devices anyway. The result is a market in which a hospital can lawfully acquire an AI dermatology tool whose performance on darker skin is, from the published record, simply unknown.

This is where the chain of responsibility comes into focus, and where it tends to dissolve. The dataset curators did not record skin tone. The developers trained on what was available and reported what regulators minimally required. The regulators cleared the device against a framework that asks for subgroup data but does not reliably compel it. And the deploying institution acquires a tool wrapped in documentation that does not answer the one question equity demands. At each handoff, the relevant fact, “this may not work as well on darker skin,” can slip through a gap in the floorboards, until it reaches a clinician who has no way to retrieve it and a patient who is never told it existed.

What Equity Actually Requires

It is easy to invoke health equity and hard to say what it concretely obliges. The phrase risks becoming a comfortable abstraction, a value affirmed in mission statements and forgotten at procurement. So let us be specific about what it demands of an institution choosing to deploy a dermatology AI system whose performance across skin tones is unequal or unknown.

First, it demands honesty in acquisition. An institution should not deploy a tool whose skin tone performance it cannot characterise, and where the documentation is silent it should treat that silence not as reassurance but as a red flag. The Dataset Nutrition Label proposed by the npj Digital Medicine researchers exists precisely so that absence can be made visible rather than assumed away. An institution that adopts a tool with no skin tone data has not made a neutral choice. It has made a choice to operate in the dark, and it has chosen on behalf of patients who never agreed to be experimented upon.

Second, it demands disclosure to the patient. If a tool is known to perform less accurately on darker skin, the patient with darker skin is owed that information in terms they can understand, alongside the alternatives available to them, including the option of conventional assessment by a clinician. This is not a demand for a lecture on convolutional neural networks. It is a demand for one plain sentence about a material limitation, the kind of sentence consent doctrine has always required for material risks. The legal floor, as Cohen and Slottje observe, may not yet compel this in most jurisdictions. The ethical ceiling plainly does.

Third, it demands compensating safeguards where disparity is known, of the kind NICE built into the DERM deployment, with extra human review allocated to the patients the technology is most likely to fail. Equity is not achieved by treating everyone identically when the tool itself does not. It is achieved by directing additional protection towards those who would otherwise bear the cost of the tool's weakness.

Fourth, and most fundamentally, it demands investment upstream in the data itself. The DDI study proved that the gap is closable, that fine-tuning on diverse, biopsy-confirmed images can erase the disparity and even surpass human performance on darker skin. The disparity persists not because it is technically intractable but because closing it requires deliberate, funded, sustained effort to collect the images that medicine has historically failed to gather. An institution serious about equity does not merely deploy other people's tools more carefully. It contributes to fixing the foundation, because every clinic that collects diverse, well-documented images is widening the path for the next generation of fairer systems.

The Patient Who Was Never Asked

Return, finally, to the screen and its serene confidence. The machine does not know that the skin beneath the lens is dark. It does not know that the dataset it learned from contained almost no one who looked like this patient. It does not know that its certainty is, in this particular case, partly counterfeit. It simply returns its number, clean and unhesitating, and the number carries an authority it has not earned for this person.

The patient, meanwhile, knows none of this either. They were told, perhaps, that an AI system would help assess their skin, and that sounded modern and reassuring, the hospital investing in the future. They were not told that the future had been built mostly out of skin lighter than theirs. They were not offered the sentence that might have prompted them to ask for a second look. They signed, or nodded, or simply did not object, and in the eyes of the institution that counts as consent. It is consent the way a photograph of a meal is dinner: the shape is right, the substance is missing.

The reckoning underway in dermatology AI is often framed as a problem of data, and at one level it is. But beneath the data sits something older and more demanding, a question about what we owe one another when we build tools that see some people more clearly than others. The studies have done their work. The disparity is measured, the mechanism understood, the remedy demonstrated. What remains is a choice about candour, about whether the institutions wielding these systems will speak the plain truth to the patients most at risk of being failed by them, or whether they will let the machine's borrowed confidence stand in for an honesty they were never quite willing to offer. Consent that hides the thing the patient most needs to know is not a contract. It is a performance. And the people watching it most closely, though they may not yet realise it, are the ones it is least designed to protect.

References

1. Daneshjou, R., Vodrahalli, K., Novoa, R.A., Jenkins, M., Liang, W., Rotemberg, V., Ko, J., Swetter, S.M., Bailey, E.E., Gevaert, O., Mukherjee, P., Phung, M., Yekrang, K., Fong, B., Sahasrabudhe, R., Allerup, J.A.C., Okata-Karigane, U., Zou, J., and Chiou, A.S. “Disparities in dermatology AI performance on a diverse, curated clinical image set.” Science Advances, vol. 8, no. 32, 2022. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abq6147

2. Khatun, N., Spinelli, G., and Colecchia, F. “Technology innovation to reduce health inequality in skin diagnosis and to improve patient outcomes for people of color: a thematic literature review and future research agenda.” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 13 June 2024. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/artificial-intelligence/articles/10.3389/frai.2024.1394386/full

3. Li, Y., Taylor, M., Chmielinski, K.S., Halpern, A.C., Daneshjou, R., Lester, J.C., and Rotemberg, V. “Improving dataset transparency in dermatologic Artificial Intelligence using a dataset nutrition label.” npj Digital Medicine, 5 November 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-02125-9

4. Weir, V.R., Li, Y., Gillis, M.C., Kurtansky, N.R., Salvador, T., Halpern, A.C., Nelson, K.C., Lester, J.C., and Rotemberg, V. “Evaluating skin tone scales for dermatologic dataset labeling: a prospective-comparative study.” npj Digital Medicine, 22 December 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-02245-2

5. Cohen, I.G., and Slottje, A. “Artificial intelligence and the law of informed consent.” In Research Handbook on Health, AI and the Law, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK613199/

6. Kondrup, E. “Informed Consent, Redefined: How AI and Big Data Are Changing the Rules.” Petrie-Flom Center, Harvard Law School, 11 April 2025. https://petrieflom.law.harvard.edu/2025/04/11/informed-consent-redefined-how-ai-and-big-data-are-changing-the-rules/

7. American Cancer Society. “Study: Lack of Education About Melanoma May Contribute to Black-White Survival Disparities.” https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/study-lack-of-education-about-melanoma-may-contribute-to-black-white-survival-disparities.html

8. National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). “AI skin cancer detection system gets green light for conditional NHS use.” 1 May 2025. https://www.nice.org.uk/news/articles/ai-skin-cancer-detection-system-gets-green-light-for-conditional-nhs-use

9. NHS England. “AI based skin lesion analysis technology.” https://www.england.nhs.uk/elective-care/best-practice-solutions/ai-based-skin-lesion-analysis-technology/

10. British Association of Dermatologists. “Artificial Intelligence.” https://www.bad.org.uk/clinical-services/artificial-intelligence

11. Tschandl, P., Rosendahl, C., and Kittler, H. “The HAM10000 dataset, a large collection of multi-source dermatoscopic images of common pigmented skin lesions.” Scientific Data, 2018. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6091241/

12. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. “Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Device Software Functions: Lifecycle Management and Marketing Submission Recommendations.” Draft guidance, January 2025. https://www.fda.gov/media/184856/download

13. “Evaluating transparency in AI/ML model characteristics for FDA-reviewed medical devices.” npj Digital Medicine, 2025. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-025-02052-9

14. Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging, Stanford University. “DDI – Diverse Dermatology Images.” https://aimi.stanford.edu/datasets/ddi-diverse-dermatology-images

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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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * The rains have finally stopped over my little corner of God's green Earth and the drying out begins. It will still be a few days until the ground is dry enough for the lawn mower to venture out on it, but I can use the weed-eater and the manual edging tool. I used the edging tool today to remove some of the more obnoxious weed and grass patches that had creeped from the lawn out onto the sidewalk where they don't belong. Following my pattern of working for awhile then resting for awhile I put in three hours of yard work midday. And, Lord, did it ever wipe me out! I hope to do more tomorrow.

Tonight I've got a baseball game to follow and the night prayers before I put these old bones to bed.

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= 231.49 lbs. * bp= 140/84 (82)

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

Diet: * 05:00 – 1 banana * 05:55 – pizza * 09:00 – snacking on fresh pineapple chunks and fresh melon chunks * 14:30 – home made stew, fresh mango

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:35 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 07:30 – load weekly pill boxes * 10:30 – assemble lawn edge trimmer tool * 11:00 to 14:00 – yard work, mostly edging and trim on the front yard * 14:30 to 15:30 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 16:20 – listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station

Chess: * 09:30 – moved in all pending CC games

I have nothing to write tonight. I’ll just leave you with a photo:

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Calgary Stampede

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Chapter 1: The Morning You Stop Asking Yourself to Be Everything

The house is quiet, but your mind is already moving. You have not put your feet on the floor yet, and you are already thinking about what needs to be fixed, answered, paid, carried, remembered, and explained. The day has not begun, but somehow you feel behind. You may have come here looking for a Jesus-centered message for the day ahead, or you may need Christian encouragement when life feels heavy because you are tired of being the person who always seems to hold everything together.

There is a strange pressure that comes with being dependable. People trust you because you usually show up. They call because you usually answer. They hand you the hard thing because you have handled hard things before. Over time, that can become part of your identity. You stop saying, “I am carrying a lot,” and start telling yourself, “I should be able to carry all of it.”

That is where the weight begins to change. Responsibility is one thing. Believing everything depends on you is another. One can make you faithful. The other can quietly make you afraid. You begin to think that if you slow down, someone will be disappointed. If you ask for help, someone will lose confidence in you. If you admit that you are tired, the whole structure may come apart.

A woman I imagine sitting at the edge of her bed has already checked her phone twice. There is a message from work, a reminder about an appointment, and a note from a family member asking whether she can help with one more thing. None of the requests is cruel. None of them looks overwhelming on its own. But together they feel like hands reaching for pieces of her before she has had one quiet moment to remember that she is a person too.

She tells herself to be grateful. She has people who need her. She has work to do. She has a life that matters. All of that is true. But gratitude does not cancel weariness. Loving people does not mean you never need rest. Being faithful does not mean you are supposed to live as though you have no limits.

Jesus never asks people to pretend they are limitless.

That matters because many of us have built a private religion around being useful. We may believe in grace for everyone else, but not for ourselves. We tell other people to rest, then feel guilty when we sit down. We remind friends that they do not have to earn God’s love, then live as though our own value depends on how much we finish before bedtime.

Jesus speaks into that pressure with one of the gentlest invitations in the Gospels. He says, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”

He does not say, “Come to me when the list is finished.”

He does not say, “Come to me after you have solved the problem.”

He does not say, “Come to me once you have become strong enough to stop needing help.”

He says, “Come to me.”

That is the lesson at the heart of this message. Jesus does not meet you only at the end of your strength. He meets you in the middle of the ordinary morning, before you know how the day will unfold. He meets you while the phone is still full of messages, the bill is still unpaid, the relationship is still uncertain, and the answer has not yet arrived.

We often think rest means the absence of responsibility. Jesus offers something deeper. He offers the kind of rest that comes from knowing you are not carrying responsibility alone. The situation may remain real, but it no longer has to become your entire identity. The task may still need your attention, but it does not have to own your peace.

This is not an invitation to ignore what matters. Jesus is not teaching carelessness. He is teaching trust. He is showing us that faithfulness does not require panic. You can do the next right thing without pretending you control every outcome.

The woman at the edge of the bed still has to stand up. She still has to answer some messages. She still has to decide what can wait and what cannot. But before she does any of that, she can stop for one honest minute.

She can say, “Jesus, I am trying to carry more than You asked me to carry.”

That sentence may be the beginning of freedom.

Some burdens belong to the day. Other burdens come from the stories we tell ourselves about the day. We believe we must keep everyone happy. We believe one mistake will undo everything. We believe needing help will make us less trustworthy. We believe a good Christian should always feel calm, certain, and ready.

Jesus does not require that performance.

Look at the people who come to Him. They arrive with questions, fear, grief, confusion, and imperfect faith. Some ask clearly. Some barely know what they need. Some are brought by friends because they cannot reach Him alone. Jesus does not shame them for coming in weakness. Their need is the reason they come.

That is still true.

You do not need to turn your prayer into a speech. You can simply tell the truth. “I am afraid.” “I am tired.” “I do not know what to do.” “I need help with this day.”

There is strength in that kind of honesty because it places you back inside reality. You are not God. You are not responsible for holding the whole world together. You are a human being loved by God, invited to walk with Him one day at a time.

One day at a time sounds simple until you have been living three weeks ahead in your mind. Many people are not only carrying today. They are carrying tomorrow’s meeting, next month’s expense, the possible phone call, the imagined argument, and the future disappointment. Their bodies are standing in the kitchen, but their minds are already living through a dozen things that have not happened.

Jesus tells us not to carry tomorrow’s trouble before tomorrow arrives. That does not mean tomorrow is unimportant. It means tomorrow has not yet been placed in your hands.

You have this morning.

You have this breath.

You have the next faithful choice.

Maybe that choice is making the call. Maybe it is waiting before you respond. Maybe it is asking someone to help. Maybe it is saying no to one request so you can say yes to what truly matters. Maybe it is sitting quietly for ten minutes without calling the pause laziness.

The goal is not to become less caring. The goal is to stop confusing love with self-erasure.

Jesus serves people deeply, but He also steps away to pray. He responds to need, but He does not allow every demand to set His direction. He loves people without handing them ownership of His peace.

That is a hopeful lesson for those of us who are learning to live with limits. A boundary can be an act of wisdom. Rest can be an act of trust. Asking for help can be an act of humility. Slowing down can make room to hear what fear has been drowning out.

You may discover that not everything is as urgent as it feels. You may find that some people can carry more than you have allowed them to carry. You may realize that one unfinished task does not make you a failure. You may begin to see that God is still at work in places you cannot manage.

That is where hope returns, not as a sudden burst of emotion, but as a quieter understanding: this day does not belong to fear. It belongs to God.

You can enter it without having every answer.

You can enter it without proving yourself.

You can enter it knowing that Jesus is already present in the places you have not reached.

The woman at the edge of the bed finally puts her feet on the floor. The messages are still there. The appointment still matters. The family member may still need help. But she is no longer beginning the day with the belief that everything rests on her shoulders.

She whispers, “Walk with me.”

Then she stands.

That may be what you need today. Not a complete plan for the next year. Not a sudden answer to every question. Not enough strength to carry every possible future.

You may only need to remember that Jesus is not waiting for you after the day is over. He is with you as it begins.

There is still grace for this day.

And there is enough of it for the next step.

Chapter 2: The Afternoon You Stop Measuring Grace by Productivity

At 2:17 in the afternoon, the kitchen table is covered with papers. A laptop is open beside a half-finished cup of coffee. A yellow legal pad holds a list that began with six items and somehow grew to twelve. One task is crossed out. Two more have been added. The person sitting there has been busy all day, yet the only thing they can see is what remains undone.

This is one of the quiet ways discouragement enters ordinary life. It does not always arrive as a crisis. Sometimes it arrives as a list. It arrives through the feeling that you should have done more by now, answered faster, moved farther, helped better, prayed longer, or handled the day with more confidence.

We can become so used to measuring our lives by output that we begin measuring grace the same way. A productive day feels blessed. An unproductive day feels wasted. A clear answer feels like God is near. A slow season feels like He has stepped away.

But Jesus does not teach us to judge our worth by how much we finish.

He lives in a world full of work, responsibility, interruption, and need. People search for Him. Crowds gather. The sick call His name. Religious leaders question Him. His disciples misunderstand Him. There is always another person to help and another place He could go.

Yet Jesus does not live in panic.

He works with purpose, but He is not driven by the fear that everything will collapse if He pauses. He makes room for prayer. He sits at tables. He walks instead of rushing. He notices individuals in the middle of crowds. He does not allow urgency to erase presence.

That is important because many of us have been taught to admire exhaustion. We call it commitment when someone never stops. We praise the person who answers every message, accepts every request, and keeps producing while their inner life grows thin.

Jesus shows a different kind of strength. He gives Himself fully without treating Himself as a machine.

There is a moment in the Gospels when the disciples are overwhelmed by the number of people coming and going. They barely have time to eat. Jesus tells them to come away with Him to a quiet place and rest.

He does not shame them for needing a pause. He does not tell them that truly faithful people keep working until they collapse. He recognizes that tired people need more than another demand. They need space to recover.

Rest is not always sleep. Sometimes rest is the end of pretending. It is the moment you stop trying to prove that you can manage everything alone. It is the moment you let someone else know that you are struggling. It is the decision to leave one task unfinished because your body, mind, or family needs your attention.

The person at the kitchen table looks at the legal pad and feels guilty. There are still emails to answer. The laundry is waiting. Someone needs a ride later. A form is due tomorrow. The temptation is to keep pushing until every box is checked.

But there will always be another box.

If peace must wait until nothing remains to be done, peace will never come.

Jesus offers rest in the middle of unfinished life. That does not remove responsibility. It changes the spirit in which responsibility is carried. The work becomes something you do, not the judge that tells you whether you deserve to feel good about yourself.

This can be difficult to accept, especially for people who learned early that approval had to be earned. Maybe praise came only when you performed well. Maybe love felt warmer when you were useful. Maybe mistakes brought embarrassment rather than guidance. Those experiences can follow you into adulthood.

You may now be the person everyone can depend on, while secretly fearing that people will stop valuing you if you stop producing.

Jesus does not love you that way.

Before Jesus begins His public ministry, before the crowds, miracles, sermons, and long roads, He hears the Father call Him beloved. Love comes before public accomplishment.

That order matters.

Beloved first. Work second.

Many of us reverse it. We work in the hope that we will finally feel worthy of love. We perform, achieve, help, and carry, hoping that someone will eventually say, “Now you are enough.”

The message of Jesus begins somewhere else. You are invited into love before you complete the list. You are called near before you have all the answers. Grace is not a paycheck handed over after a successful day. It is the ground beneath your feet while you learn how to live.

This does not mean effort is meaningless. Work can be an expression of love. Responsibility can be holy. Finishing a difficult task can bring real satisfaction. Jesus is not asking us to become careless or passive.

He is freeing us from the belief that our productivity creates our value.

There is a father who comes home after a long day and sits in the driveway for a moment. He has unfinished work on his laptop. His mind is full of numbers, deadlines, and conversations. Inside the house, his son is waiting to show him a drawing.

The father has a choice that looks small but carries weight. He can enter the house still belonging to the office, or he can pause long enough to become present.

The work matters. The deadline is real. But so is the child holding the paper.

Sometimes the next faithful step is not doing more. It is noticing what is already in front of you.

Jesus is always noticing. He notices the woman who touches the edge of His clothing while the crowd presses around Him. He notices Zacchaeus in a tree. He notices the widow giving two small coins. He notices the person everyone else treats as background.

He is not only efficient. He is present.

That may be the lesson for this afternoon. You do not need to earn the right to be present in your own life. You do not need to rush past every small gift because a larger task is waiting.

Drink the coffee while it is still warm. Listen when someone you love is speaking. Step outside and feel the air. Let your prayer be a real conversation instead of another assignment to complete.

The day is not valuable only because of what you produce. It is also valuable because you are alive inside it.

There are people who reach the end of a busy week and cannot remember any part of it clearly. They completed many things, but they were not present for them. Their body moved through the days while their mind kept racing toward the next demand.

Jesus keeps bringing us back to the moment where love can actually happen.

You cannot encourage the person in front of you while living entirely in tomorrow. You cannot receive today’s peace while mentally rehearsing every possible problem. You cannot notice grace if you only look at what remains unfinished.

The person at the kitchen table closes the laptop for ten minutes. Nothing dramatic happens. No angel enters the room. The list does not disappear.

They stand, stretch, and walk to the window. The afternoon light falls across the floor. For the first time that day, they notice how quiet the house is. They breathe without looking at the clock.

Then they pray, “Jesus, help me live this day, not just complete it.”

That prayer changes the measure of the afternoon.

Success is no longer defined only by how many boxes are crossed out. It includes whether patience is preserved, whether love is noticed, whether truth is told, and whether the soul remains open to God.

Some tasks still need to be finished. The laptop will reopen. The form will be completed. The ride will be given. But the person returns to the work with a different understanding.

They are not working to become worthy.

They are working from the security of being loved.

That difference can change the way a whole life feels.

You may still have much to do today. Do what belongs to you with care. Let some things wait when they can wait. Ask for help where help is needed. Refuse to make urgency your master.

Jesus does not lead you by keeping you anxious enough to perform. He leads you with truth, patience, and love.

There is grace in the finished task, but there is also grace in the pause.

There is grace in effort, but there is also grace in limits.

There is grace when the day goes according to plan, and there is grace when the plan has to change.

Your life is not falling behind because you stop long enough to receive what Jesus is giving you in the present moment.

The list can remain on the table for a few minutes.

You are still loved while the ink is drying.

Chapter 3: The Evening You Let Tomorrow Wait

At 9:36 in the evening, the house has finally become still. The dishes are drying beside the sink. A lamp is on in the living room. Somewhere down the hall, a child is sleeping, and the television is playing quietly even though no one is watching it. A man sits on the couch with his phone in his hand, reading the same message for the third time. It is not bad news exactly. It is only another question that will not be answered tonight.

He has spent the day trying to be responsible. He worked, returned calls, helped someone who needed him, and handled the ordinary problems that appear without asking permission. Now the day is over, but his mind will not let it end. It has moved into tomorrow. It is trying to predict the outcome of a conversation, prepare for a bill, solve a family problem, and protect everyone from possibilities that have not happened.

This is where many people lose the rest Jesus offers. They finish today’s work, but they keep carrying tomorrow in their thoughts. The body sits in one room while the mind lives in five possible futures. None of those futures is certain, but each one feels heavy enough to steal the peace of the present moment.

Jesus speaks gently but clearly about this. He tells us not to worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will have its own concerns. He is not saying that planning is wrong or that consequences do not matter. He is reminding us that tomorrow is not ours to live tonight.

There is wisdom in preparing. There is also wisdom in knowing when preparation has become fear wearing the clothes of responsibility.

The man on the couch tells himself that he is thinking things through. In truth, he is repeating the same questions without finding a new answer. He believes the repetition may eventually give him control. It does not. It only leaves him more tired.

Jesus offers another way. He teaches us to receive life as daily bread. Not yearly bread. Not enough certainty for every possible future. Daily bread means that grace comes close to the place where we are actually standing.

This does not always satisfy the part of us that wants a complete map. We would rather know how everything turns out. We want proof that the relationship will heal, the opportunity will come, the treatment will work, the money will be enough, and the people we love will be safe.

Sometimes Jesus gives a clear answer. Sometimes He gives enough light for only the next step.

That can feel small until you realize how often life is changed by small faithful steps. A conversation begins because someone finally tells the truth. A door opens because someone sends one application. A relationship softens because one person chooses patience. A frightened person sleeps because they place the phone down and stop trying to solve tomorrow at midnight.

Hope is not always the feeling that everything will be easy. Sometimes hope is the decision to believe that God will still be present when tomorrow arrives.

That is one of the most uplifting truths Jesus gives us. He does not only promise help for this moment. He teaches us that God is already faithful in every place we have not reached. We do not have to travel into the future alone in our imagination. When the actual day comes, grace will be there too.

The man sets his phone on the table. The unanswered message remains unanswered. He does not suddenly understand what will happen. He simply realizes that no more wisdom is coming from reading the same words again.

He turns off the television and sits in the quiet. His prayer is not impressive. “Jesus, I have done what I can today. Help me leave the rest with You.”

That prayer is not surrender in the sense of giving up. It is surrender in the sense of putting down what was never meant to remain in his hands all night.

Some people fear that peace will make them careless. They believe worry proves that they care. But worry and love are not the same thing. Love can prepare, show up, listen, act, and remain faithful. Worry keeps circling after love has done all it can do for the moment.

Jesus cares deeply without becoming ruled by panic. He can sleep in a boat while a storm is moving around Him. The disciples see the waves and assume His rest means He does not care. Jesus stands, speaks to the storm, and shows them that calm is not indifference. Calm can come from knowing who remains present in the danger.

You may not feel calm tonight. That does not mean you have failed the lesson. Faith is not pretending the wind is quiet when it is not. Faith is remembering that Jesus is in the boat.

You may still feel concern about the child who is struggling, the job that is uncertain, the appointment you are waiting for, or the decision you must make. Concern can lead you to wise action. It can remind you to prepare, ask questions, or seek help. But when nothing more can be done tonight, you are allowed to rest.

Rest is not denial. It is trust practiced by the body.

You turn off the light because God does not.

You close your eyes because He remains awake.

You stop rehearsing the future because His presence is already there.

There will be mornings when you wake with strength. There will be afternoons when the list is manageable and the work feels meaningful. There will also be evenings when questions remain. None of these moments is outside the care of Jesus.

He meets you before the day begins, while the work is unfinished, and when the house becomes quiet again. His invitation remains the same: come close, receive what you need for this moment, and stop asking yourself to carry what belongs to God.

The man stands from the couch and checks the front door. He walks through the house, turns off the lamp, and pauses beside the room where his child is sleeping. He does not know how every problem will be solved. But he knows love is still present in the house. He knows he has reached the end of this day. He knows tomorrow has not been abandoned simply because he is going to sleep.

He returns to his room with less pressure in his chest. Not because every answer has arrived, but because he has stopped demanding that every answer arrive tonight.

This is what someone may need to hear today: you are not required to finish your whole future before you rest.

Jesus is not asking you to become fearless before you trust Him. He is asking you to bring your fear close enough for Him to carry it with you.

You can wake up tomorrow and take the next faithful step. You can make the call, ask the question, do the work, apologize if needed, try again, or choose a new direction. But tonight, you can let the day be complete.

There was grace in the morning when you felt behind. There was grace in the afternoon when the work remained unfinished. There is grace now, in the quiet, while tomorrow waits beyond the dark window.

You do not have to force hope to feel large. Let it be simple.

Jesus will still be with you when morning comes.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

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

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

BREAKING NEWS: Trump blasts Canada over wildfire smoke, threatens to increase tariffs.

U.S. Republican politicians from Michigan pen letter to PM Carney after wildfire smoke fills U.S. skies.

“pen letter”? wtf. lol. I have doubts.

I am not surprised that a senile dictator and his bootlicker morons are reacting to smoke like this. They are the same idiots that think democrats are capable of creating hurricanes.

Our PM can alter the jet stream and weather patterns, control wildfires, and undo decades of environmental mismanagement. I guess because he is Liberal? He just doesn’t feel like it. Would they be acting like this if we had a Conservative PM?

All the smoke from every fire in the U.S. is neatly contained within the borders of the state where the fire is occurring I guess. Just like none of their smog has ever crossed beyond the borders of the country.

Increase tariffs? Adding more tax to the things they purchase from us is a logical solution to everything! Especially as punishment for wildfire smoke! Holy smoke! The corporations love it. They will get to increase the price of everything again, and then in the end they also have a very good chance at getting all that illegal tariff money given back to them.

Texas Rangers vs Atlanta Braves

My MLB game of choice this Friday has my Texas Rangers playing the Atlanta Braves in a game scheduled to start at 6:15 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

I live on a lump of rock.

it is hurtling through the universe.

I make things.

And if i have regrets,

they are only the things

I DIDN’T do.

Her?

I don’t regret her.

She opened my heart

and mind.

And I’ll always miss her.

Always.

Dick Taat Trøm en Zijn Territorium

Een Kort Bondig Dicktaatje voor het Slapen Gaan

Nu de zon begint in te zakken komt Dick Trøm eindelijk in beweging. De hele lange lome middag had hij liggen liggen in de zon en allemaal dingen gedacht over het door hem beheersde gebied. 24 tuinen, een paar wegen, en een klein aantal gemeenschappelijke plantsoenen. Het zijn niet eens gemeenschappelijke plantsoenen! Ze kwamen op die vaste (park eer) plek dankzij een hele grote dappere groen leider op beperkt niveau, precies zoals het hoort.

Dick Taat had zijn buikje tonnetje rond gegeten maar ging ondanks dat vrij en blij op jacht naar illegalen, de muizen, vogels, die verhipte, vreselijke wilde natuur en zijn vele akelige gedrochten. Gelukkig voor de mensheid en andere katten is Dick elke nacht en vroege ochtend bezig om al het ongedierte te onderdrukken. Ergens bij een gemeenschappelijke door de grote leider met al zijn beperkingen aangelegde waterpartij had je van die wilde eenden en die dachten dat ze zomaar op Trøms terrein aan gezinsuitbreiding konden doen, mooi niet. Dicktaatje ging iedere dag kijken naar dat broeinest, bij de poel des verderfs, kikkers, insecten, smadelijke wezens, een bedreiging voor het heerlijk leven zoals beoogd, dan overdag doezelend in de schaduw van een eenzame boom, maar wel met al zijn slap hangende blaadjes, zijn ritselende assistenten, die daar staat alleen voor dit doel, schaduw bezorgen aan Dick, de werkboom en zijn blaadjes samen sudderend in de verschroeiende zon voor de hoofdpersoon van dit late avond Dick Taat. Dick alleen echt bezig in het donker en de schemer dus actief met andere heersers liggen miauwen en ravotten over wie baas is en wie van hen er node een beurt moet krijgen voor een poging tot maken van nestjes vol schattige kittens.

Het was zeker niet de bedoeling om elke nacht op zoek te moeten gaan naar naarlingen, waken, omlopen, neen, zeer vredig, nou, bevredigend, met alleen de kattenbak, voederbak en waterbak, daarin elke dag schoon, helder, fris water. Het ware Dick Taat paradijs voor het duidelijk werd dat er in dit mogelijke paradijs allerhande lelijks leeft, niet aaibaar, vlug, dartel, klein, met veren of saaie grijze huid.. en sneller wippend dan hun schaduw!

Dicktaatje liep binnen de rekbare terrein grenzen van plek naar plek en sommeerde iedereen die daar volgens hem niet thuis hoorde te vertrekken of anders, en dan ging hij een muis een uurtje martelen, zo, in het openbaar, voor de oogjes van alle andere muizen, een voorbeeld tonen. Dat was puur genot, zo zien lijden, ze waren het opeten niet eens waard. Niet zolang er zoveel geweldig blik en plastic maaltijden elke dag door zijn eigen slaven, de Hedens, aan zijn snoezige, hongerige snuitje worden geserveerd.

Zijn nobele werk werd enorm gewaardeerd, alle mensen houden van Dick Trøm dat zie je zo, en ze vrezen, ook dat is goed. Daarmee blijft iedereen op zijn vaste plek, behalve die krengen die respectloos omgaan met de toch duidelijke grenzen van hem en zijn medeheersers zoals De Gelaarsde, Adœlf de Kåt, Onstijgetje (de massa) elk hun gebied met tand en klauw verdedigen, voor melk, visbrokken, in bloed gemarineerd, en katgebonden kattenbak! Miauw!

En dan na een nacht vol wederwaardigheden en katten kwaad komt Dick Trøm terug in de eigen tuin, als ook wel een beetje die van de familie Heden, zijn mens slaven die hem, trots als ze op hem en zijn werk zijn, voeden en verschonen, het minieme smerige stukje van zijn wereld met grootse liefde. Zo, zo, en klaar is Dick, iedereen zat ook deze nacht veilig onder de beste klauwtjes, mooi. Het werk gedaan. Nou, welterusten allemaal, ik ga snoezelen, en jullie moeten aan de arbeid in een op en top beveiligd land. Tot ontsnoezelen, voor meer controle, gepast geweld, porties onderdrukking en duidelijk aanwezig beheer, ondertussen werk tuchtig en strak, ga aan de slag ploeter in geregelde vrede, Daaaaag.

Esta mañana mi hermana mandó un vídeo de Cereci J. Está de rodillas en el asiento del conductor del coche de sus padres. Suena una canción en la radio.

Esta. Concretamente:

https://youtu.be/WQ4WmzfKcFc?si=1KobIQxpPGKisDu9

Cereci J no tiene ni dos años. Los cumplirá en octubre. Se pasa todo el vídeo bailando. Cuando entran las cuerdas cambia totalmente la forma de bailar. Mueve las manos distinto. Entendiendo lo que pasa musicalmente. Intenta subir el volumen. Su cuerpo se alegra. Muchísimo.

La canción es de 1970, es alguien recordando la vida que ha compartido con su pareja. Hay fragmentos de infancia y verano. Mi sobri no entiende la letra pero desde tan chiqui entiende la canción. Su cuerpo entiende la parte que ha experimentado en estos meses escasos en el mundo. Su cuerpo reacciona a las emociones que la música quería transmitr. Es fascinante verlo.

Me ha emocionado mucho el vídeo. Me hubiera gustado estar allí. VIvirlo a su lado.

El cuerpo siempre sabe, repito cansinamente cada vez que un señor me intenta explicar que para que una música te llegue tienes que escucharla de un modo reverencial, performativo, teatral. Falso. Esforzado. Me pone frenética ese discurso de la mediocridad del canon imitánodse a sí mismo. La pre-IA de intelectualizar algo que es cultura precisamente porque nos atraviesa el cuerpo. La piel es cuerpo, el cerero es cuerpo, lo que vibra en tu oído es cuerpo, lo que se trenza con tu columna vertebral y te estremece es cuerpo. Pasa con un años y con mil. Si te dejas.

Quiero creer que esta personita seguirá conservando ese don, no lo perderá enterrado en memeces de músicos aburridos y prescriptores en nómina. Seguirá siendo capaz de dejarse sentir. Siempre. Quiero creer eso como quiero creer que seguirá disfrutando de los libros cuando sepa leer palabras. Por el mismo motivo. Porque leer por puro disfrute a mi me ha hecho más feliz y también más lista sin pretenderlo.

Porque escuchar la música conectada con tu cuerpo en vez de disociada de él tiene sus desventajas cuando pierdes de golpe una canción que fue tu vida o vas a ver a Rosalía al Movistar Arena y te defrauda porque no está ocurriendo nada.

Pero tiene muchísimas más ventajas. Te permite escuchar Luna de Cabo con 16 años y que todo se te revolucione sin entender muy bien por qué. Tener 46 y que te vuelva a poner del revés como si fuese la primera vez, de una forma completamente distinta porque eres la misma pero tienes un cuerpo que ya no es el mismo, que ganó, perdió, aprendió y no aprendió, vivió cosas. Y porque al otro lado la persona que interpreta tampoco es la misma. También tuvo una vida y dejó que empapase su música hasta las últimas consecuencias.

Todo esto solo es posible cuando a los dos lados de la magia artística hay gente entendiendo de una forma u otra que la música es cuerpo y solo se entiende de verdad, solo se disfruta de verdad, desde ese abandono que algunos olvidan cuando crecen. Que mi sobri tiene totalmente a flor de piel.

Puede que dentro de unos años no le guste nada La canzone del sole. Es altamente probable, incluso. No lo sabemos. Pero yo recuerdo perfectamente ser muy pequeña y sentir algo que no podía explicar cuando sonaba Mediterráneo de Serrat. Ahora tampoco sé explicarlo muy bien pero esa canción sigue hablando de mi.

Puede que dentro de unos años a mi sobri no le guste nada esta canción. No lo sé. De lo que estoy absolutamente segura es que, si la vida me lo permite, algún día le contaré que me emocionó un video que grabó su madre, que intentaré conservar, que me recordó que el arte es arte precisamente porque nos hace cosas en el cuerpo. Cosas que no somos capaces de fingir ni siquiera en este mundo donde todo es pose, teatrillo y discursos que no se cree ni quien los pronuncia.

Ver a mi sobri bailando a Lucio Battisti me ha dado esperanza. Todavía más fuerza para seguir oponiéndome a todos esos idiotas que intentan hacernos creer que el traje nuevo del emperador desnudo es una obra de arte y que por eso cuando suena esa música excelsa los cuerpos se marchitan, se paralizan, se bloquean, se vuelven grises y opacos. Se parecen como un huevo a una castaña a mi sobri bailando a Battisti de rodillas en un coche, emocionándose con una sección de cuerda. A mi ayer en un tren atardeciendo cuando sonó Asilo.

Quiero eso siempre. Solo eso. Esa capacidad infantil que no es infantil y es humana sin bobadas, de dejar que el arte te atraviese. Por puro disfrute y también un poco por política. Por no dejar, tampoco en esto, que ganen los malos. Los que creen que la felicidad es aburrida, el disfrute vulgar, lo popular cutre y que las uvas están verdes y por eso el zorro no se las come.

Gracias J. Tú no lo sabes, pero hoy me has hecho llorar bonito y has convertido una canción de Battisti que me daba más o menos igual en una de las canciones de mi vida. Todavía no lo sabes. Espero poder contártelo en unos años. Aunque me llames loca.

Tags: #random #música

They said remember it and don't let it happen again

But it will happen again in a remote place in a remote time

As the words have their edges and ideas have their scope while papers are crushed in the fire of oppression