When I was really young, we used to have a dog, it was beautiful, looked just like a Doberman.

Could’ve been a Doberman for all I know, with her bronze and black fur.

I remember sitting on the floor, and I bit her in the back, by her spine, just the fur, but still …

And she yelped miserably

And later they had to put her down, did someone shoot her?

I don’t know why, but I thought probably it was my fault, biting her like that, making her mentally I’ll

I thought

I don’t know why I did it, I wanted to feel it, I think.

I think I wanted to feel what it’d feel like

To bite this dog, to feel the fur

Her skin, you know?

This dark secret I carried with me for years,

The shame

But I was so young, I wasn’t even in school

I might’ve been four or maybe five years old

But I can picture still, the feeling of having her fur between my teeth

And her yelping

And her brown eyes, sad

And it makes me sad.

I hugged her afterwards, but I couldn’t unbite her

Vrijwel niet

Dit 'geld ligt op straat' stukje heeft duizendenéén varianten (dit was nodig omdat ze steeds verdwenen van mijn digitale schrijfblok, en ik de vele edities daarom meestal maar bewaar in de hersenpan). De vrijheid in dit land bestaat enkel en alleen uit de vrijheid om te kopen en verkopen en alleen op de wijze waarop dat is toegestaan, alle andere vrijheden worden enkel toegestaan als ze de basis 'vrijheid' niet aantasten of ten goede komen, de natuur als afgebakend park, om campings en hotels te ondersteunen, als getemd dier in afzondering van soortgenoten, voor handel in brokjes, als opslag of buffer om het winkelhart te beschermen tegen de waarheid, als een doorvoer plek voor mensen en mensen spul transporterende voertuigen, luchtwegen en waterwegen ... en cultuurlijk als ons voedsel reservoir, kortom als fictie voor het voor altijd in vertaling zinvol omdwalende brein maar nooit als haarzelf, in vrijheid)

Het geld ligt op straat het is de laag waar u overheen gaat het is het teer voor wegverkeer het geld ligt op straat het zijn de klinkers gebakken klei gelegen op een zelf herhalende rij het is de rugpijn voor de dokter de machine in de machine de nederlagen nodig om een ander te dienen het geld is de straat waarlangs de bedenkers van de staat liggen gehuisvest ook al verankerd in gebakken klei en in steen gehouwen een landingsplaats voor te vullen gebouwen slapend wordt het rijk rijker dan het is wel het water niet de vis wel de vlucht niet de lucht het geld ligt op straat in lege wikkels in volle bakken met evenvolle plastic zakken of met zand en aarde bedekt zodat de aangerichte schade niet door de verse facade lekt samengevat, vierkant en plat een gemeenschappelijk budget gat inmiddels in dienst als wandelpad gekraakt en verpulverd kust restant bedekt het tegen water afgeschermde land verkenner van het heden aangevoerd uit het verleden het geld stroomt over straat is de elekrisch aangedreven tijd waar mee u vroeg maar toch te laat opstaat is de reden voor de uitlaat als u in gezwinde vaart rijdt over de geldstraat de straat is nodig als deklaag voor goederen als geld stroom voor het opwekken van werkloon voor verplaatsing van troon plus kroon en de instrumenten van de macht gereedschap van weg en wacht de grondstoffen voor het maken daarvan reden voor ontstaan van het beperkte compleet afgedekte land allen die heen en weer gaan, reden te over hebben voor het er niet bij laten hebben nood aan wegen, stoepen, banen en straten het geld ligt op straat voor en achter de deur waardoor u ergens in en uit gaat is de harde cultuur laag waar u met beide beschoeide benen op staat of op aangeschafte rubber wielen overheen rijen op een volle brandstof tank of op geladen batterijen voor geld staat geparkeerd op de u aangewezen plek zodat u wagen niet verzinkt in drek of vastloopt in los zand van het onbewerkte land de verdekt opgestelde parate staten van de bijwegen, zijwegen en als vanzelfprekend hoofdstraten de bron van de zegen des vele heren wegen motor van wel vaart is de kern van de eerste straat wij leggers van het dekzeil waarop we met rol koffers naar met hekwerken omheinde vliegvelden lopen we met vrachtwagens de natuur afvoeren een welke we voor de ruimte nodig voor onze bouwwerk kerken moesten slopen het geld ligt op straat en meteen daaronder zit onze ware aard

Het ware fundament waarop het onechte fundament voor altijd zal wankelen

“Minusvariant” handler om mer enn bare en dum kommentar om innvandrere på fylla. Det handler om et iskaldt menneskesyn der folk veies og måles etter sin markedsverdi, som vi må forkaste uansett hvem det rammer.

I etterkant av helgas skandale har mange nordmenn med pakistansk bakgrunn reagert ved å dokumentere at de slett ikke er “minusvarianter”. De er leger, ingeniører, jurister og gode skattebetalere. Det er naturligvis ikke noe galt i å vise fram disse suksesshistoriene, men som Sumaya Jirde Ali klokt skriver, ligger det også en felle her. Alle innbyggere fortjener respekt, uavhengig av hvor høy utdannelse de har eller hvor mye skatt de betaler.

Ideen om “minusvarianter” rammer ikke bare innvandrere. Det er bare dem det er lettest å ta. Det er som regel slik reaksjonære krefter opererer: de starter ved landets grenser, med de menneskene som står utenfor det nasjonale fellesskapet. “Utlendingene”. Dem er det lett å dehumanisere. Så jobber man seg innover. Først blir innvandrerne veid og målt, definert som “lønnsomme” og “ulønnsomme”, så, når vi har blitt vant til denne tankeøvelsen, står resten av oss for tur.

Gradvis snakker vi mindre om menneskers verdi, og mer om menneskers pris. Vi venner oss til tanken på at de som av forskjellige grunner er rike er litt mer verdt enn oss andre. Folk som jobber i offentlig sektor blir nedvurdert sammenlignet med dem som jobber i privat sektor (og dermed blir begravelsesagenten mer verdifull enn jordmora) Vi blir mer bekymret for skatteflyktningers ve og vel enn for krigsflyktninger. Og nåde deg hvis du ikke har noen markedsverdi, for eksempel fordi du er for syk til å jobbe!

Egentlig vet vi jo at denne tankeøvelsen er meningsløs. Under pandemien fikk vi tydelig se at markedets prissetting av mennesker ikke sammenfaller særlig godt med samfunnsnytten. De “samfunnskritiske” yrkene var ikke eiendomsmeglere, direktører eller aksjespekulanter, men yrker som sykepleiere, lærere og bussjåfører. Du vet, de utskjelte sliterne i offentlig sektor som sjelden kommer best ut på lønnsstatistikken.

“En kyniker er en som kjenner alle tings pris, men ikke dens verdi”, skrev Oscar Wilde. Partier på høyresida har alltid vært sårbare for denne anklagen Det er ikke tilfeldig at Erna Solberg lanserte sitt kandidatur som statsminister med slagordet “mennesker, ikke milliarder”. Det spørs om høyresidas nye stjerne, markedsliberalisten Sylvi Listhaug, er villig til å gjøre den samme øvelsen.

Uansett bør vi alle avfeie ideen om at det finnes “pluss-” og “minusvarianter” av mennesker i samfunnet vårt. Det er et sivilisatorisk tilbakeskritt. Markedskreftene kan gjøre mye nyttig for oss, men de kan aldri brukes til å vurdere et menneskes verdi.

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I went to watch a horror movie with A, And she recommended unseen screen, Where the movie isn’t announced ahead of time and you see something that hasn’t yet been shown in theaters. We both assumed it was horror, and once we were watching the trailers she mentioned that now that she thinks about it she doesn’t actually know if it’s a horror movie. We ended up watching a two hour 40 minute political thriller/documentary about Russia in the 2000s. She fell asleep during the movie at one point which is really funny to me, and the movie was not necessarily good, but I realized that I actually really did enjoy it. I think one of the things I took away from it that I wanted to write down was how the main character essentially had his life fully rerouted an experience in his formative years.

In the movie it explains his backstory as someone who didn’t want to get into politics or anything like that and rather work odd jobs, and was part of the rebel/punk scene. He then meets a girl that is so incredibly unique and different from everything else that he falls in love with her. He gets into theater and the arts, and they are in a relationship and eventually one of his old friends who got into banking and made a lot of money essentially stole his girl from him. He continued to involve them in extravagant and lavish experiences, and the girl eventually ends up cheating with him. In a memorable scene, he talks with his father and tells him how after they had broken up he felt relieved, but at the same time theater could no longer satisfy him and he was essentially cursed with ambition. His father, who was a politician warned him against this. In the rest of the movie this person continues to climb in the chain until they are essentially a close advisor to Putin, and eventually it leads to his demise.

I thought about this because I realized that if I had had an experience like that during some of my formative years, I think that would’ve done an incredible amount of damage to me in the trajectory of my life. This person who was going down a completely different route fully pivoted their life into chasing power because that was who he lost his love to, which was his priority. And because of that he became disillusioned with the idea that power and wealth is what you should be chasing. And I think that he ultimately was not really happy or content the same way he was once he later had a child.

I think I see this story play out in several different flavors. I think about how there is the entire manosphere, where people are convinced that chasing wealth and monetary shows of that should be one’s objective in life. I think of people who hyper fixate on the gym, and think about how their social value is essentially tied to how muscular they are, or how physically strong they are. I also think about all of the people that play league too much and see their worth as tied to their rank. And I think all of these things are not inherently evil on their own and into some extent necessary in different ways. But at the same time these are not the sole optimization objectives or even necessarily that important I think. I think it is important to have financial security and some amount of success, I also think it is helpful to be in good shape. I also think it doesn’t hurt to be good at competitive things, but I do think that there is a hyper fixation or too much of a focus on some of these things that lead to neglecting other things that create a well formed individual. I think those important other aspects are sacrificed because they aren’t seen as important or of any value, at least compared to the main criteria. And I think that if I had had one of these experiences earlier on it would have absolutely derailed my life. I’m very fortunate to have both been successful in a lot of the endeavors that I’ve done, and I’ve also not had too many instances of direct competition especially in the romantic sense or in a way that matters to me too heavily. The closest thing I have that was maybe academics being compared to my sister, and maybe video games wanting to be the good friend in the group. Both of these things propelled me to be successful in these avenues, but at the same time I was able to let go and focus on other things because I think I did not have a strong loss associated with them. If I had lost the girl that I was interested in or in a relationship with to someone else that was for example a higher rank in league, I would probably have taken that as a strong source of feedback about how I value is tied to league and not sufficient. And the crazy thing is at least in the movie, the girl did leave for that reason. And I think especially in those early formative years is where you have autonomy, if this is what you see, and especially because stuff like social media will feed you more of these things, I can see it being something where you view the world as solely interested in that. And you see that as the entire market, pricing your value. But at the same time as an outsider I very much think that not a lot of my friends if any are that into extravagant wealth, and often or at least I would like to think it’s almost a negative thing. Someone being super showboaty and flaunting wealth would probably be seen as bad by my friends that are female. And so because of that perspective I’m able to separate my notion of value from wealth, but if I didn’t have other experiences I might’ve really fallen for that. I’m very grateful that I’ve managed to get to this point in my life where I’ve had a decent foundation of experiences where I am not horribly impressionable, and that I was able to get here without being poisoned by one of these predatory experiences. I’m very grateful for that, and I’m also very grateful for the movie for making me aware of that perspective.

La lista este mes es tan larga que esta entrada está dividida en secciones para las partidas en BGA, donde no hay nada especialmente interesante salvo Criaturas Maravillosas, unas cuantas partidas en físico, y la crónica anual de MeepleFactory.

Lamentable comprensión de lo jugado en BGA

Shogi es un juego abstracto para dos que funciona como un ajedrez pero tienes que aprender nuevos movimientos con caracteres japoneses. Quizá no el mejor juego para probar contra un japonés con un ELO elevado.

Charuma es un juego de bazas para dos con las cartas vistas. Hay dos palos y cartas del 6 al 10 + As. A ver. Hay ya que hablar con los diseñadores y decirles que pongan en barbecho los juegos de bazas porque no todo vale. Si todas (salvo dos) las cartas son vistas y se puja por las manos con puntos de victorias, el número de puntos a gastar en la puja es la única decisión que hay que tomar, porque no hay (casi) lugar a la sorpresa (ni margen de maniobra) en el trascurso de la baza, por lo que puedes contar los puntos que se pueden ganar con cada baza, e ir subiendo hasta ese número-1.

En Kingscraft participas en una carrera por derrotar bichos cada vez más grandes con un equipo que te vas mejorando en base a combinar cartas. Ciertamente tiene una iconografía mejorable y tampoco es que sea muy innovador. Mejor Splendor, por poner.

Chemical Overload: Al igual que el anterior, combinando cartas vas mejorando las pociones disponibles, que te hacen ganar mejores pociones, puntos y monedas. Me ha recordado a Distilled por eso de ir mejorando tus cartas para hacer recetas después, pero se hace igualmente tedioso y repetitivo como no mejores muy rápido tu mazo para acabar la partida.

Cubosaurs es un juego sencillo de cartas de dinosaurios cúbicos. En tu turno, o coges las cartas que se te ofrecen, o añades una carta al bote. Formar diferentes grupos del mismo dinosaurio puede darte o quitarte puntos. Me parece mucho mejor su evolución biológica y antecedente jueguil Cubirds.

Y seguimos con dinosaurios en DinoGenics, que es la versión cutre de Ark Nova pero con un zoológico premeteorito. Es un juego de colocación de trabajadores donde coleccionas cartas de ADN para poder conseguir hacer dinosaurios y alimentarlos con cabras. Creo que hay demasiado azar por cartas de eventos que pueden venirte muy bien en un momento dado, y si consigues varios dinosaurios pronto es difícil que te paren la bola de nieve, porque más dinosaurios significan más prestigio, dinero, y ser el primero en el orden de turno. Y el juego se hace largo.

Y seguimos con los plagios cutres con The Massive-Verse Fighting Card Game. Recuerdo con 6 años que iba con mi tía a un bar donde tomaba café con mi abuela y sus amigas (yo un colacaíto). Había un escaparate de una tienda de veinte duros con una pelota de goma que nadie compró con una copia de los Teletubbies que ponía “Anunciado en televisión”. Y mi yo de 6 años con una cabeza de un tamaño no correlacionado con respeto al cuerpo no pensaba que era una estrategia de márketing, sino que había una serie de televisión con los primos estrafalarios de los Teletubbies que no echaban en los canales a los que podía acceder ni en Super 3, porque una prima que vivía en Mallorca me trajo cintas de los Teletubbies en cataláaaan y tampoco conocía esa copia cutre. Total, que han hecho un juego de cartas de los primos de Spiderman que ni Spiderman conoce (y mira que en Marvel tienen a Peter Parker hasta la coronilla con el multiverso y los simbiontes) donde te das tortas con otra persona. La enésima copia diluida de Magic, no sé si con intención también de que sea coleccionable, en cuyo caso no le veo ningún futuro, porque los personajes los conocerán en su casa, y la asimetría tampoco le hace mucho bien cuando tampoco tienes tantas cartas para jugar. Para eso, mucho mejor Compile o Duelo por Cardia.

Please Don’t Burn My Village! es un juego de colección de sets para mover el valor de cada objeto de las colecciones que hayas jugado y no tiene mucho más. Es más fácil de seguir y el azar es menos determinante (o un punto que es comprensible) Vegetable Stock.

Cities es un juego de draft, losetas y patrones donde acabarás con una cuadrícula 3x3 con parques, zonas de agua y edificios. En cada una de las 8 rondas los jugadores escogen elementos de 4 tipos hasta que han escogido uno de cada tipo (losetas que se añaden a tu loseta inicial para formar la cuadrícula, edificios, cartas de puntuación y elementos de decoración) para después pasar a incluirlos en su ciudad. Además de los puntos otorgados por las cartas de puntuación seleccionadas, se dan puntos en función de quién consiga antes ciertos criterios y por el número de elementos de decoración de parque/agua que estén en cada terreno de parque/agua. Es un juego que conceptualmente es idéntico a tantísimos otros cuyo punto de originalidad es que el draft se hace con cuatro elementos a la vez (quizá priorices coger antes una carta de puntuación a costa de no elegir pronto una loseta…). Es correcto, no tiene ninguna pega, desde luego, pero me parece más interesante (y bonito) Harmonies por proponer también el puzzle de la colocación espacial de las losetas.

Hutan: Life in the Rainforest pertenece también a este tipo de juegos pero este sí que no me ha gustado. En tu turno seleccionas una carta con flores y debes cubrir el mapa con las flores mostradas en la carta según unas reglas (solo puedes poner flores de un color en una celda vacía o una flor de ese color, el grupo de flores en un turno debe ser conexo y a su vez unido al tapete de flores previo). Si tienes dos flores en una casilla, se convierte en árbol, y si todas las celdas de una región son árboles de un mismo color, colocas un animal. Al final de la partida, cada región puntúa en positivo si está cubierta por un único color, los animales dan puntos, y en negativo en caso de no estar completa o tener más de un color. El juego es simple y directo, tanto como ver qué hay que buscar y tener la suerte de que las cartas te permitan ir cumpliendo esos objetivos.

Wondrous Creatures es un juego estratégico más complejo que los anteriores (sin ser una cosa difícil) donde pones una criatura maravillosa (un bicho parecido a Fujur de La Historia Interminable) en el tablero, recoges las frutas alrededor de la criatura, bajas cartas de tu mano pagando las frutas correspondientes y activas efectos. Cuando no te queda ninguna de tus tres criaturas, las recuperas a tu zona personal, donde se activan algunas de las cartas que hayas bajado. Y todo eso para ser el mejor entrenador pokemon, más o menos. Está entretenido aunque lógicamente hay que adecuarse a conocer de qué va la vaina y cuáles son los efectos para poder hacer algo más allá de jugar muñeco x 3 → bajar cartas → recoger muñecos. Visualmente llamativo y tu personaje va a lomos de uno de los muñecos dracónicos encajado con un imán. Lujo.

Es más fácil explicarlos a otras personas si sabes jugar a las reimplementaciones

The Resistance: Avalon: La versión de Secret Hitler sin fascismo, una versión creo que peor. Mediante deducción social hay que identificar a los súbditos de Mordred o hacerte pasar por leal a Merlín. Jugamos sin poderes pero imagino que es la manera de darle un poco de gracia. Hubo un momento de estar contando enemigos como si fuese Clues by Sam y decidiendo quién participaba en la misión no con intención de sacarla sino para obtener más info.

Railroad Tiles plasma en un juego de losetas los objetivos planteados por Railroad Ink. Las sensaciones son parecidas aunque quiero jugar más para comprobar la influencia del azar en la construcción de las opciones de losetas con elementos a colocar y sobre todo al introducir la mecánica de los logros.

Y, tras haberla empezado en 2023, hemos terminado la campaña de My City. Weeeeeee. Las últimas 6 han sido en este mes y, sin entrar en detalles la campaña, poco margen de sorpresa o novedad queda ya para las últimas partidas, aunque cada partida independiente sigue planteando un puzzle interesante. La única objeción que tengo es relativa a un aspecto de la puntuación de campaña, que puede haber sido un aspecto fortuito en la campaña que hemos jugado, así que muy recomendable.

Y, acerca de otro juego que sólo se puede jugar una vez, hemos estrenado Unlock!: Escape Adventures y tremendo empanamiento, al menos en el primer escenario. Espero que al conocer cómo funciona y qué esperar podamos hacerlo mejor en otros escenarios.

MeepleFactory

Este mes, como cada año, vamos a MeepleFactory a probar juegos para no comprarlos. La verdadera salud, oiga.

Nada más entrar probamos Landmarks un cooperativo con una mecánica similar a Código secreto. La mecánica está bien aprovechada aunque el ir colocando palabras en el mapa hexagonado tiene como problema que hay localizaciones imposibles de desambiguar en un momento dado y ya dependes entonces de la suerte a la hora de colocar la palabra y el mapa con las localizaciones. Bien, pero bastante lejos de Decrypto.

Como la mesa de Ecos del tiempo, el juego de la editorial Tranjis seguía ocupado, hicimos tiempo con La Cuenta, un juego de cartas donde tratas de escaquearte para pagar la cuenta de una comida. Entiendo que pueda generar una dinámica de patata caliente conforme va subiendo el precio, pero empiezas con 5 cartas y sólo algunas te permiten, de una manera u otra, o bien pedir la cuenta o rebajar la cuenta, ya sea yéndote al baño u obligando a más gente a repartir el gasto. ¿Y si no tienes estas cartas? ¿Y si no puedes jugar cartas, obligándote a pedir la cuenta y pagar? La única decisión estratégica sería, sabiendo que te va a tocar a ti porque sepas las cartas de los rivales por ciencia infusa, cortar la ronda pidiendo un café, o acelerarla jugando platos caros para que no se líen a pedir tapas.

Tras pasar por el pabellón de la FicZone por echar un ojo, y antes de ir corriendo al restaurante donde habíamos reservado, echamos 2/3 de una partida de Reforest, el Wingspan de árboles, el Forest Shuffle para jugar en una mesa de café. Pues muy bien, va de jugar árboles, con muchos efectos entre las cartas, y formando una pirámide de 6 montones de cartas.

Cities USA es la versión sin seguro médico de Cities, con carreteras, puentes y sitios de construcción, y rascacielos para coronar los edificios. Igual que Cities, bien, y las novedades tampoco es que lo cambien ni para mucha más profundidad. Me parece que aboga por la fealdad urbanística con los sitios de construcción con respecto al original. Quita, quita.

Incómodos invitados en vivo o The Murder se promociona como un Cluedo donde puedes ser el asesino pero es un murder party con una aplicación web con una historia que se va desenredando. No descartamos que el arte no sea de IA generativa poniendo en el prompt que imite el estilo de Disco Elysium. Veremos en la campaña de Verkami donde se lance el juego si dicen algo al respecto aunque no creo que entre porque hay más mentiras que deducción lógica. De hecho en la partida me tocó mentir para librarme y pude hacerlo ignorando los indicios incriminatorios y metiendo bulla donde podía.

El año pasado probamos Kronologic: París 1900ypico y este año estaba libre la mesa de Kronologic: Cuzco 1450. Los primeros casos en ambos son facilísimos y decepcionantes, y al menos el segundo de Cuzco ya empieza a no ser obvio, aunque es un pasatiempo y no un juego. Psche…

High Moon el juego de hacer tequila a partir de vacas espectrales con arañas, murciélagos y cuervos. Sí, todos los temas se han usado ya. En la práctica, un juego de losetas que te permiten obtener fichas que gastas en unir tus ranchos con destilerías, formando caminitos de fichas, y buscas subir en tres tracks mientras consigues botellas que puedes beber para obtener distintos beneficios. Un juego estratégico que ni por tema ni aspecto gráfico es muy llamativo, pero que mecánicamente creo que puede ser interesante y proclive a puñaladas traperas en forma de bloquear acceso a los rivales. Jugamos con una regla mal explicada (la forma de obtener botellas) y la preparación mal hecha (demasiadas cartas para 4 jugadores), con lo que quizá fue más largo y menos dinámico de lo que está pensado realmente. Creo que al igual que otro juego de Combo Games, Neko Syndicate, quizá no sea imprescindible en una colección, pero sí merece la pena jugarlo.

Y aquí unas foticos del evento.

Tags: #boardgames #juegosdemesa

Cómo expresarlo, si aún no nace en la garganta; si es mente, asombro, apenas algo.

Al dudar pensamos que hay otro y que es el enemigo.

Bhuvana Chilukuri has applied to more than a hundred jobs. She is a 20-year-old third-year business student at Queen Mary University of London, articulate and qualified, and she has not received a single offer. In several instances her applications were rejected within minutes, far too quickly for any human being to have read her CV, let alone assessed her suitability. The initial stages of hiring, she told the BBC in March 2026, are increasingly handled by AI tools that screen CVs and, in some cases, conduct entirely automated video interviews. The experience, she said, feels impersonal and mechanical, a process that strips away any chance to convey personality or demonstrate the kinds of qualities that do not fit neatly into a keyword match.

Chilukuri is not an outlier. She is a data point in a pattern so large it has become invisible through sheer repetition. Denis Machuel, chief executive of the Adecco Group, one of the world's largest recruitment firms, confirmed the broader dynamic to the BBC: job vacancies have declined from post-pandemic highs, and candidates now routinely submit hundreds of applications to secure a single offer. AI enables companies to process larger candidate pools at speed, but the consequence is an ever-growing population of unsuccessful applicants and a mounting sense of futility among those looking for work. A Collins McNicholas survey published in 2025 found that 75 per cent of job seekers believe AI unfairly filters their applications, while 74 per cent described automated rejection emails as impersonal and dismissive. A Resume Genius survey of 1,000 hiring managers, published in early 2026, found that 79 per cent of companies now use AI somewhere in their hiring or recruiting process, and one in five hiring managers admitted to using AI to screen out applications before they receive any human review at all.

The scale of the filtering is staggering. Research published in early 2026 indicates that more than 90 per cent of employers now use some form of automated system to filter or rank job applications, and that 88 per cent employ AI for initial candidate screening. For every 180 people who apply for a given role, roughly five get an interview. Of those, one or two are hired. The rest vanish into a void that most of them suspect, correctly, is algorithmic. Forty per cent of job applications are now screened out before a human recruiter ever reviews them. An analysis of 1,000 rejected resumes found that 23 per cent of rejections were caused by parsing errors alone: the applicant tracking system could not read the resume correctly because of tables, columns, graphics, or unusual file formats. These are not candidates who were unqualified. They were candidates whose documents confused a machine.

The question is no longer whether algorithms are making consequential decisions about people's working lives. They are. The question is whether anyone, the candidates, the employers, or the regulators, can explain how those decisions are being made, and what it would take to make the system fair.

The Invisible Dossier

On 21 January 2026, two job applicants named Erin Kistler and Sruti Bhaumik filed a class-action lawsuit against Eightfold AI Inc. in California. Both have backgrounds in STEM. Both had applied for positions at major companies through online portals whose URLs contained “eightfold.ai,” a detail neither noticed at the time. Neither had any idea that a company called Eightfold existed, let alone that it was compiling what the lawsuit describes as secret consumer reports on their candidacy.

Eightfold's technology operates behind the application portals of some of the world's largest employers, including Microsoft, Morgan Stanley, Starbucks, BNY, PayPal, Chevron, and Bayer. According to the complaint, filed by the law firms Outten and Golden and Towards Justice, the platform scrapes personal data from third-party sources and runs it through a proprietary large language model to generate a “likelihood of success” score on a scale of zero to five. The system draws on what Eightfold describes as more than 1.5 billion global data points, including profiles of over one billion workers, and makes inferences about applicants' preferences, characteristics, predispositions, behaviour, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes. Applicants receive no disclosure that the report exists. They have no access to it. They have no opportunity to dispute errors. And they receive no notice before the information is used to make what the complaint calls “life-altering employment decisions.”

“I've applied to hundreds of jobs, but it feels like an unseen force is stopping me,” Kistler said in a statement released through her legal team. David Seligman, an attorney with Towards Justice, was more direct: “AI systems like Eightfold's are making life-altering decisions.”

The lawsuit alleges that Eightfold's scoring system constitutes a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act and California's Investigative Consumer Reporting Agencies Act. The argument is straightforward: if a third-party company compiles a dossier about you, scores your fitness for employment, and sells that assessment to employers who use it to accept or reject your application, the resulting product is functionally identical to a credit report. And credit reports come with legal protections that have governed the industry for decades: the right to know a report exists, the right to see it, the right to challenge inaccuracies, and the right to be notified before adverse action is taken on the basis of the report's contents. Eightfold, according to the complaint, provides none of these protections.

Eightfold's spokesperson, Kurt Foeller, told Fortune that the company “does not scrape social media” and operates only on data that applicants have intentionally shared. The plaintiffs dispute this characterisation. Pauline Kim, the Daniel Noyes Kirby Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law, told Fortune that the case represents the first major instance of the Fair Credit Reporting Act being applied specifically to AI decision-making in hiring, a development that could reshape how companies deploy screening technologies.

The lawsuit arrives at a moment of acute regulatory uncertainty. In October 2024, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau published a circular stating explicitly that algorithmic employment scores are covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The guidance was designed to close the gap between decades-old consumer protection law and the realities of automated hiring. It was rescinded in May 2025, part of a broader withdrawal of 67 guidance documents under the direction of acting CFPB director Russell T. Vought. The legal framework that might have governed companies like Eightfold was erected and demolished within seven months.

Kim has noted in her academic work that the Fair Credit Reporting Act, even when applied to AI hiring tools, provides only limited transparency. It establishes procedural requirements that can help individual workers challenge inaccurate information, but does little to curb intrusive data collection or to address the risks of unfair or discriminatory algorithms. The statute was written for an era of filing cabinets and background checks. The technology it is now being asked to regulate operates at a scale and speed that its authors never imagined.

When the Machine Measures the Wrong Thing

On 8 April 2026, researchers Rudra Jadhav and Janhavi Danve posted a paper on arXiv titled “The AI Skills Shift: Mapping Skill Obsolescence, Emergence, and Transition Pathways in the LLM Era.” The paper introduces a metric called the Skill Automation Feasibility Index, or SAFI, which benchmarks four frontier large language models across 263 text-based tasks spanning all 35 skills in the US Department of Labor's O*NET taxonomy. The researchers conducted 1,052 model calls with a zero per cent failure rate and cross-referenced their findings against real-world adoption data covering 756 occupations and 17,998 tasks.

The findings reveal a paradox that sits at the heart of AI-driven hiring. Mathematics received the highest automation feasibility score at 73.2, followed by programming at 71.8. Active listening scored 42.2. Reading comprehension scored 45.5. The spread across all four models tested was just 3.6 points, suggesting that automation feasibility is more a property of the skill itself than of the model being used to perform it. The skills that are easiest for large language models to automate are precisely the ones that automated screening tools most readily evaluate: quantifiable, keyword-friendly competencies that map neatly onto a resume. The skills that are hardest for machines to replicate, and that the research identifies as most critical for human value in the LLM era, are the ones that screening algorithms are least equipped to detect.

The researchers call this the “capability-demand inversion.” Skills most demanded in AI-exposed jobs are those that large language models perform least well at in their benchmarks. In other words, the qualities that will matter most in a labour market reshaped by AI are the very qualities that AI hiring tools are structurally unable to assess. The paper found that 78.7 per cent of observed AI interactions in the workplace are augmentation rather than automation, which means the primary role of AI in most jobs is to assist human workers, not to replace them. The skills required to work effectively alongside AI, adaptability, judgement, interpersonal sensitivity, creative problem-solving, are real but largely invisible to a resume-parsing algorithm.

The researchers propose an AI Impact Matrix that positions skills along four quadrants: high displacement risk, upskilling required, AI-augmented, and lower displacement risk. The framework makes visible what most hiring algorithms treat as noise. A candidate whose strongest assets are collaborative reasoning and contextual judgement will generate a weak signal in a system calibrated to detect certifications and years of experience. The matrix suggests that the skills most likely to determine career success in the coming decade are precisely the skills that current screening tools are designed to ignore.

This creates an absurd circularity. The tools being used to decide who gets hired are optimised to evaluate the competencies most likely to be automated, while systematically failing to measure the competencies most likely to determine whether a candidate will succeed. A screening system that rewards keyword density in programming languages or certifications in statistical software is not measuring the thing it thinks it is measuring. It is measuring a candidate's ability to format a CV in a way that satisfies an algorithm. The correlation between that skill and actual job performance is, at best, weak.

Industrial-organisational psychology has long understood this problem. Research on structured interviews, one of the most replicated findings in the field, shows that fully structured behavioural interviews with standardised questions achieve a predictive validity coefficient of approximately 0.55 or higher, while unstructured interviews, the kind most commonly used in hiring, achieve roughly 0.38. The implication is clear: even among traditional hiring methods, the format of the assessment matters as much as the content. An AI screening tool that evaluates candidates on the basis of keyword frequency and experience duration is applying a methodology with no established predictive validity for job performance. It is a tool built to sort, not to select.

The Scale of the Sorting

The numbers are difficult to absorb. Workday, the cloud-based human resources platform, disclosed in court filings related to a separate class-action lawsuit that 1.1 billion applications were rejected using its software tools during the relevant period. The plaintiff in that case, Derek Mobley, is a Black man over the age of 40 who identifies as having anxiety and depression. He applied to more than a hundred jobs at companies that use Workday's AI-based screening tools over several years and was rejected every time. Four additional plaintiffs later joined the case, each alleging a similar pattern: hundreds of applications submitted through Workday, virtually no interviews, and no explanation.

In May 2025, a federal judge in California granted conditional certification of age discrimination claims under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, allowing the case to proceed as a nationwide class action. The potential class includes every applicant aged 40 and over who, from September 2020 to the present, applied through Workday's platform and was not advanced by the AI tool. That class could number in the hundreds of millions. In July 2025, the same judge expanded the scope to include applicants processed using HiredScore, an AI feature Workday had acquired, broadening the potential membership still further. Workday has denied that its technology is discriminatory, calling the certification ruling “a preliminary, procedural ruling that relies on allegations, not evidence.”

The Eightfold and Workday cases together paint a picture of an infrastructure that is vast, consequential, and almost entirely opaque. These are not niche products used by a handful of companies. They are the plumbing of the modern labour market. When a significant portion of the world's job applications passes through systems that score, rank, and reject candidates without disclosure, human review, or any mechanism for appeal, the word “screening” barely captures what is happening. What is happening is automated adjudication. And the adjudicators are accountable to no one.

The hiring managers who rely on these tools are often unaware of how they work. The UK's Information Commissioner's Office published a report on 31 March 2026, drawing on evidence from more than 30 employers and public perception research from graduates, civil society organisations, government bodies, trade unions, and industry representatives. The report identified a striking pattern: many employers fail to recognise that they are using automated decision-making at all. They purchase recruitment software, configure basic settings, and assume a human is reviewing the output. In many cases, the system is making the decision, and the human involvement that follows is little more than a rubber stamp. The ICO's report stressed that human involvement in hiring must be “active and genuine,” that the personnel reviewing AI-generated recommendations must possess the authority, discretion, and competence to alter outcomes before decisions take effect. The gap between that standard and current practice is wide.

A November 2025 study from the University of Washington added a further complication. The researchers found that people tend to mirror the biases of AI systems they work alongside. When participants were exposed to AI-generated hiring recommendations that contained bias, they did not correct for the bias. They absorbed it. Unless the bias was obvious and egregious, participants were, in the researchers' words, “perfectly willing to accept the AI's biases.” This finding undermines one of the central defences offered by companies that deploy AI screening: the claim that a human is always in the loop. If the human in the loop is unconsciously adopting the biases of the algorithm they are supposed to be overseeing, the oversight is illusory.

What Explainability Actually Requires

The word “explainability” has become a kind of talisman in conversations about AI governance, invoked as though its mere presence in a policy document could resolve the tensions it names. In the context of AI hiring, explainability means something very specific, and very difficult.

At its most basic, explainability requires that a candidate who has been rejected by an algorithmic system can receive an answer to the question: why? Not a generic notification. Not a form email. An answer that identifies the specific factors that led to the rejection, the data that was used, the criteria that were applied, and the weight that each criterion received in the final decision. It requires, in other words, that the system be legible to the person it has affected.

This is not a trivial technical problem. Many modern AI screening systems use large language models or deep neural networks whose internal decision processes are not fully interpretable even to their developers. The term “black box” is sometimes used carelessly, but in this context it is technically accurate. Eightfold's platform runs on a proprietary large language model that analyses 1.5 billion data points. The relationship between any individual input and the resulting score is not reducible to a simple explanation. The system does not apply a checklist. It makes inferences across a latent space of features that no human designed and no human can fully map.

Hilke Schellmann, an Emmy-award-winning investigative journalist and professor at New York University, spent years investigating AI hiring tools for her 2024 book “The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now,” named a Financial Times Best Book of the Year. Her reporting revealed that many of the algorithms making high-stakes calculations about candidates do more harm than good, and that AI-based hiring tools have not been shown to be more effective than traditional methods at predicting job performance. Through whistleblower accounts and leaked internal documents, Schellmann documented systemic discrimination against women and people of colour, patterns that the tools' developers often could not explain because the systems were not built for explanation. They were built for throughput.

The European Union's AI Act, which classifies AI systems used in employment decisions as “high-risk,” will begin enforcing its core requirements for such systems in August 2026. Under the Act, employers using AI in hiring will be required to conduct rigorous risk assessments and bias testing, maintain detailed technical documentation explaining how the AI works, implement human oversight mechanisms to prevent automated decisions from going unchecked, and register the system in an EU database before deployment. Violations can attract fines of up to 35 million euros or seven per cent of global annual turnover. The regulation represents the most comprehensive attempt anywhere in the world to bring algorithmic hiring under meaningful legal constraint.

But even the EU AI Act does not fully resolve the explainability problem. It mandates transparency and documentation, but it does not require that employers provide individual candidates with a specific explanation of why they were rejected. The regulation focuses on systemic accountability: are you testing for bias? Are you documenting your processes? Are your human overseers genuinely overseeing? These are necessary conditions for a fair system, but they are not sufficient for an explainable one. A candidate in Berlin who is rejected by an AI tool used by a company complying fully with the AI Act may still have no way to understand why.

The Patchwork Below the Atlantic

In the United States, the regulatory landscape is not merely incomplete. It is contradictory. New York City's Local Law 144, which took effect in July 2023, requires employers using automated employment decision tools to conduct annual bias audits and to notify candidates that AI is being used. The law covers all AI-based tools relating to employment, including resume screening software, personality tests, and skill assessments, and it requires that audits examine whether the tools are treating different groups of people fairly with regard to race, ethnicity, and gender. Illinois amended its Human Rights Act through House Bill 3773, effective January 2026, making it unlawful for employers to use artificial intelligence that has the effect of discriminating on the basis of protected characteristics. The earlier Illinois AI Video Interview Act, effective since January 2020, had already required employer notification and consent when AI is used to analyse video interviews. Colorado's AI Act, signed in 2024, imposes obligations on deployers of high-risk AI systems, including those used in hiring.

These laws represent genuine progress, but they share a common limitation: they are state and local measures in a labour market that operates nationally and globally. A company headquartered in Texas that uses Eightfold or Workday to screen candidates across all 50 states is subject to a patchwork of obligations that varies by jurisdiction. A candidate in Colorado has different rights from a candidate in Florida. A candidate applying through a portal in London is subject to UK data protection law and the Data (Use and Access) Act's reformed provisions on automated decision-making, but the AI tool processing her application may be operated by a company in California, trained on data from LinkedIn profiles worldwide, and governed by the terms of service of a cloud computing provider in Virginia.

The CFPB's withdrawn guidance on algorithmic employment scores illustrates the fragility of the American regulatory approach. For seven months in 2024 and 2025, there was a federal-level interpretation that would have required companies like Eightfold to comply with FCRA disclosure requirements. When that interpretation was rescinded, the obligation evaporated. The Eightfold lawsuit now asks a court to make the same determination that the CFPB made and then unmade: that algorithmic hiring scores are consumer reports. If the court agrees, the result will be a judicial precedent rather than a regulatory framework, binding on the parties but leaving the broader industry to wait for further litigation to clarify the rules.

The Architecture of a Fair System

What would a fair AI hiring system actually require? The question is easier to pose than to answer, but the outlines of an answer are visible in the research, the litigation, and the regulatory experiments now underway.

First, disclosure. Every candidate should know, before they submit an application, that an automated system will be involved in evaluating it. They should know the name of the system, the categories of data it will use, and the general logic by which it makes its assessments. This is not a radical proposition. It is the minimum standard that the Fair Credit Reporting Act has required of credit bureaus since 1970. The fact that it does not yet apply consistently to AI hiring tools is a regulatory failure, not a technical impossibility.

Second, access and correction. Every candidate who is rejected by an AI system should have the right to see the data the system held about them and to challenge inaccuracies. The Eightfold lawsuit alleges that the company generates detailed dossiers about applicants without their knowledge and provides no mechanism for correction. If the allegations are proved, the gap between what the law requires and what the industry practises is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of kind.

Third, validated assessments. The ArXiv research by Jadhav and Danve demonstrates that current AI screening tools evaluate competencies that do not align with the skills most predictive of job performance in the LLM era. A fair system would require that any automated assessment used in hiring decisions be validated against actual job performance outcomes, not merely against the proxy metrics that the system was designed to optimise. Industrial-organisational psychology has established rigorous standards for assessment validation. There is no principled reason why AI screening tools should be exempt from those standards.

Fourth, meaningful human oversight. The ICO's March 2026 report found that many employers do not recognise they are using automated decision-making and that the human involvement in their processes is often nominal. The University of Washington study found that even when humans are present, they tend to absorb rather than correct algorithmic bias. Meaningful oversight requires that the person reviewing an AI recommendation has the authority, training, and information necessary to overrule it. It requires that overruling the algorithm carries no professional penalty. And it requires that the proportion of AI recommendations that are actually reviewed and challenged is itself monitored and reported.

Fifth, independent auditing. New York City's Local Law 144 requires annual bias audits of automated employment decision tools. This is a starting point, but the audits must be genuinely independent, conducted by parties with no financial relationship to the tool's developer or the employer, and the results must be public. An audit that is commissioned by the company being audited, conducted according to the company's own methodology, and published only in summary form is not an audit. It is a press release.

Sixth, regulatory coherence. The current patchwork of state, local, and national regulations creates an environment in which compliance is burdensome for employers who take it seriously and easily evaded by those who do not. The EU AI Act represents one model for a comprehensive approach. The United States does not need to replicate the EU's framework precisely, but it does need a federal standard that establishes minimum requirements for disclosure, validation, human oversight, and auditing. The alternative is an indefinite extension of the current system, in which the rights of a job applicant depend on the jurisdiction in which they happen to live.

The Human Cost of Optimisation

There is a tendency in conversations about AI hiring to frame the problem as a matter of efficiency versus fairness, as though the two are naturally in tension and the task is to find an acceptable compromise. The framing is misleading. A system that rejects qualified candidates because it cannot evaluate the competencies that matter is not efficient. It is wasteful. A system that scores applicants using data they have never seen and cannot correct is not streamlined. It is arbitrary. A system that makes consequential decisions about people's lives without any mechanism for explanation or appeal is not optimised. It is unjust.

The experience of job seekers like Bhuvana Chilukuri and Erin Kistler and Derek Mobley is not a side effect of technological progress. It is a design choice. The companies that build and deploy these systems chose speed over accuracy, throughput over fairness, and opacity over accountability. Those choices were not inevitable. They were made because they were profitable and because, until very recently, they were legal. A 2025 survey found that 69 per cent of candidates said a lack of human interaction would deter them from joining an organisation, and 54 per cent wanted employers to maintain a human touch in hiring. The tools that were supposed to make hiring more efficient are driving away the talent they were meant to attract.

The BBC's reporting, the Eightfold and Workday lawsuits, the ArXiv research on skill obsolescence, and the ICO's findings all converge on the same conclusion: the first and most decisive moment in a person's working life is now frequently decided by a system that neither they nor most employers can interrogate. That is not a technical problem waiting for a better algorithm. It is a governance failure waiting for a political response. The technology exists to build hiring systems that are transparent, validated, and subject to meaningful oversight. What is missing is the will to require it.

The machinery is already in motion. The EU AI Act's high-risk provisions take effect in August 2026. The Eightfold and Workday cases will set precedents in American courts. The ICO is consulting on new guidance until 29 May 2026. Legislators in Illinois, Colorado, and New York have demonstrated that it is possible to regulate AI in hiring without banning it. The question is whether these efforts will coalesce into a coherent framework before a generation of workers is sorted, scored, and discarded by systems that no one can explain.

The algorithms are not going away. The only remaining question is whether the people they judge will ever be allowed to judge them back.

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References and Sources

1. BBC report on AI-led hiring in the UK, featuring Bhuvana Chilukuri's experience and Denis Machuel's comments on the job market, March 2026. https://www.storyboard18.com/trending/student-warns-ai-led-hiring-in-uk-causes-impersonal-rejections-ws-l-92877.htm

2. Collins McNicholas survey on candidate experiences with AI in recruitment, 2025. https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/article/1940958/jobseekers-fear-ai-unfairly-screening-applications-research-finds

3. Resume Genius, “2026 Hiring Insights Report: ATS, AI, and Employer Expectations,” survey of 1,000 US hiring managers, 2026. https://resumegenius.com/blog/job-hunting/hiring-insights-report

4. CoverSentry, “ATS Statistics 2026: Why Your Resume Disappears Into the Void,” analysis of AI screening rejection rates and parsing errors. https://www.coversentry.com/ats-statistics

5. Kistler and Bhaumik v. Eightfold AI Inc., class-action complaint filed 21 January 2026, Outten and Golden LLP and Towards Justice. https://www.outtengolden.com/newsroom/landmark-class-action-accuses-eightfold-ai-of-illegally-producing-hidden-credit-reports-on-job-applicants

6. Fortune, “Job seekers are suing an AI hiring tool used by Microsoft and PayPal for allegedly compiling secretive reports that help employers screen candidates,” 26 January 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/01/26/job-seekers-suing-ai-hiring-tool-eightfold-allegedly-compiling-secretive-reports/

7. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “Consumer Financial Protection Circular 2024-06: Background Dossiers and Algorithmic Scores for Hiring, Promotion, and Other Employment Decisions,” October 2024. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/compliance/circulars/consumer-financial-protection-circular-2024-06-background-dossiers-and-algorithmic-scores-for-hiring-promotion-and-other-employment-decisions/

8. Consumer Financial Services Law Monitor, “CFPB Rescinds Dozens of Regulatory Guidance Documents in Major Regulatory Shift,” May 2025. https://www.consumerfinancialserviceslawmonitor.com/2025/05/cfpb-rescinds-dozens-of-regulatory-guidance-documents-in-major-regulatory-shift/

9. Pauline Kim, “People Analytics and the Regulation of Information Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act,” Washington University School of Law. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2809910

10. Jadhav, Rudra, and Janhavi Danve, “The AI Skills Shift: Mapping Skill Obsolescence, Emergence, and Transition Pathways in the LLM Era,” arXiv:2604.06906, 8 April 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06906

11. Mobley v. Workday, Inc., US District Court for the Northern District of California, class-action complaint alleging age and race discrimination through AI-based screening. https://fairnow.ai/workday-lawsuit-resume-screening/

12. Law and the Workplace, “AI Bias Lawsuit Against Workday Reaches Next Stage as Court Grants Conditional Certification of ADEA Claim,” June 2025. https://www.lawandtheworkplace.com/2025/06/ai-bias-lawsuit-against-workday-reaches-next-stage-as-court-grants-conditional-certification-of-adea-claim/

13. Information Commissioner's Office, “Recruitment Rewired: An Update on the ICO's Work on the Fair and Responsible Use of Automation in Recruitment,” 31 March 2026. https://ico.org.uk/about-the-ico/what-we-do/recruitment-rewired/

14. University of Washington, “People mirror AI systems' hiring biases, study finds,” November 2025. https://www.washington.edu/news/2025/11/10/people-mirror-ai-systems-hiring-biases-study-finds/

15. Schellmann, Hilke, “The Algorithm: How AI Decides Who Gets Hired, Monitored, Promoted, and Fired and Why We Need to Fight Back Now,” Hachette Books, 2024. https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hilke-schellmann/the-algorithm/9780306827365/

16. European Commission, “AI Act: Shaping Europe's Digital Future,” regulatory framework for artificial intelligence. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai

17. New York City Local Law 144 on Automated Employment Decision Tools, effective July 2023. https://www.warden-ai.com/resources/hr-tech-compliance-nyc-local-law-144

18. Illinois House Bill 3773, amendment to the Illinois Human Rights Act regarding AI in employment decisions, effective January 2026. https://www.theemployerreport.com/2024/08/illinois-joins-colorado-and-nyc-in-restricting-generative-ai-in-hr-a-comprehensive-look-at-us-and-global-laws-on-algorithmic-bias-in-the-workplace/

19. Pauline Kim, testimony before the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, “Navigating Employment Discrimination, AI, and Automated Systems,” January 2023. https://www.eeoc.gov/meetings/meeting-january-31-2023-navigating-employment-discrimination-ai-and-automated-systems-new/kim

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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

There are days when the future feels too large to look at directly, so you lower your eyes and try to make it through the next hour without falling apart. You do not always have a clean way to explain that feeling to other people, because from the outside you may still look responsible, functional, and steady enough. You may still answer messages, pay what you can pay, go where you are expected to go, and speak with a calm voice while something inside you is quietly asking whether you can keep living under this much weight. That is why the full When All You Can Ask God For Is Enough for Today message matters so deeply, because sometimes the most honest prayer is not a grand statement of confidence but a tired request for enough grace to make it through the day in front of you.

The disciples once watched Jesus pray, and something about the way He prayed made them ask Him to teach them. They had heard religious words before, and they had seen public displays of faith, but Jesus carried something different when He spoke to the Father. He was not performing closeness with God. He was living from it, and that is the part many of us long for when life becomes heavy. We do not only need better words; we need a way back to the Father when disappointment has made our hearts guarded, which is why the earlier message about holding onto faith when life feels heavy belongs close to this one.

Jesus answered the disciples with a prayer that was simple enough for a child to remember and deep enough to hold a suffering soul. He taught them to begin with the Father, to honor His name, to desire His kingdom, to surrender to His will, and then He gave them a phrase that can sound ordinary until your life starts pressing harder than you know how to carry. Give us this day our daily bread. That line does not sound impressive in a world that wants plans, timelines, guarantees, and visible proof, but it may be one of the most merciful teachings Jesus ever gave to people who are tired of trying to survive tomorrow before tomorrow even comes.

Daily bread is not glamorous. It does not make you feel like you have conquered the whole road. It does not hand you a full explanation for why the delay has lasted so long or why the answer has not come in the way you hoped. It brings the soul down from the panic of the entire future and places it back into the hands of the Father for this one day. That is not a small movement when your mind has been living six months ahead in fear.

Many people become bitter while waiting on God because they are not only waiting. They are also carrying an imagined future that has not happened yet. They wake up with today’s pain, then add next month’s fear, next year’s uncertainty, and every possible loss their mind can create. Before they have taken one real step, their soul has already walked through a hundred disasters. It is no wonder the heart starts to feel tired, defensive, and disappointed with God.

Jesus knew the human heart could not live that way. He knew we were not made to carry every tomorrow at once. When He taught daily bread, He was not minimizing our problems. He was teaching us where grace is found, and grace is found in the actual day we are living, not in the imagined future we are trying to control. God does not ask you to spend today’s strength on a tomorrow He has not handed you yet.

That can be hard to accept when you are scared. Fear wants the whole answer now. Fear wants proof that the money will be there, the relationship will heal, the sickness will lift, the door will open, the child will come back, the ache will ease, and the loneliness will not last forever. When you do not get that proof, fear begins to whisper that God is withholding something from you. If you listen long enough, that whisper can become resentment.

Resentment often begins as pain that has stopped talking honestly to God. It does not always start with open rebellion. Sometimes it starts with one quiet decision to stop expecting anything good. Then prayer becomes shorter, hope becomes weaker, and the heart begins to protect itself from being disappointed again. You may still believe in Jesus, but you start keeping part of yourself out of reach because trust has begun to feel dangerous.

Daily bread invites that guarded part of you back into the presence of the Father. It does not demand that you pretend everything is fine. It simply gives you a place to begin again. You can come to God without having your whole heart organized. You can come with fear in your chest and still ask for bread. You can come with disappointment in your voice and still be heard.

There is mercy in the way Jesus taught this prayer. He did not tell the disciples to impress the Father. He did not tell them to hide their needs. He did not tell them that strong faith never asks for simple provision. He taught them to bring ordinary hunger, ordinary weakness, ordinary pressure, and ordinary human need into the holy presence of God.

That should comfort anyone who feels ashamed of being tired. Some people think faith means they should be above needing help for the day. They think they should already be stronger, calmer, more settled, and less affected by pressure. But Jesus did not teach us to pray like people who have no needs. He taught us to pray like children who know where their bread comes from.

There is a quiet honesty in that. Give us this day our daily bread means I am not pretending to be self-sufficient. It means I am not acting like I can hold my entire life together by force. It means I am not too proud to admit that I need God in the most basic places. The prayer itself humbles the heart before bitterness can harden it.

Bitterness often feeds on the belief that we have been left to provide for ourselves. It says God has not come through the way we expected, so now we must guard our own hearts, control our own outcomes, and keep score of every delay. Daily bread pushes back against that lie. It says the Father is still the giver, even when the table does not look full yet. It says today’s grace is not proof of tomorrow’s absence.

I think many people miss this because they want God to remove the whole burden before they will recognize His care. That is understandable, because when you are hurting, you do not want a small mercy. You want relief. You want the entire thing lifted off your chest. You want to wake up and realize the struggle is over.

Sometimes God does give that kind of breakthrough. There are moments when the door opens quickly, when the answer arrives suddenly, when the burden shifts in a way you could not have forced. We should not shrink God down until we stop believing He can move powerfully. He can. But the daily bread teaching reminds us that God’s faithfulness is not absent when the miracle comes slowly.

There are seasons when His faithfulness looks like enough strength to get out of bed. It looks like a phone call you had the courage to make. It looks like a bill paid one step at a time. It looks like peace that lasts long enough for you to breathe. It looks like your heart staying tender when disappointment had every chance to make you cold.

That kind of provision may not make a dramatic story, but it keeps a soul alive. A person can survive a very hard season when Jesus keeps giving bread for the day. Not because the pain becomes fake, and not because the questions disappear, but because the person is no longer trying to live the entire future in one frightened moment. The heart begins to learn a slower kind of trust.

This is where the teaching becomes personal. It is easy to talk about daily bread as an idea. It is much harder to live it when your mind wants guarantees. It is hard to ask only for today’s strength when your body is tired from years of carrying pressure. It is hard to believe God is near when the answer has not arrived and other people seem to be moving forward while you are still trying to stand.

That comparison can quietly poison waiting. You see someone else receive what you begged God for, and suddenly your own waiting feels like rejection. Their good news starts to feel like evidence against your faith. You may smile for them, but later, when you are alone, something inside you aches. You wonder why God seems quick for others and slow with you.

Daily bread brings you back from that dangerous place. It does not answer every comparison, but it turns your eyes toward the Father who sees you. It reminds you that your life is not being measured against someone else’s timeline. God does not feed every person in the same visible way at the same visible time. Your bread may not look like their bread, but that does not mean your Father has forgotten your table.

The hidden pain of waiting is that it can make you feel unseen. You may think nobody knows how much energy it takes for you to keep going. Nobody sees the conversations you have with yourself just to stay calm. Nobody sees the way you fight fear at night. Nobody sees how many times you almost gave up on hope but somehow prayed again.

Jesus sees that. The same Jesus who taught daily bread also noticed people others missed. He saw the woman in the crowd who reached for His garment. He saw the widow giving what others might have overlooked. He saw the hungry crowds before they had language for their own need. He saw the tired, the ashamed, the burdened, and the forgotten, and He still sees the person trying to wait without becoming bitter.

That matters because bitterness grows faster when we believe our pain is invisible. When the soul feels unseen, it starts building its own defense. It begins to say, “If no one cares, I will stop caring too.” But daily bread is a prayer of seen dependence. It is a way of saying, “Father, You see this day. You see what it requires. You see what I lack. Meet me here.”

There is something deeply intimate about asking God for enough. Not abundance for a fantasy life. Not proof for the ego. Not control over every outcome. Enough. Enough patience to respond without cruelty. Enough wisdom to make the next decision. Enough mercy to forgive what keeps replaying in the mind. Enough hope to keep the heart from closing.

That word enough can be difficult for people who have lived under pressure for a long time. When you have known lack, enough can feel unsafe. When you have watched things fall apart, enough can feel too close to the edge. When you have been disappointed before, you may want extra proof before you trust again. Jesus understands that fear, but He still teaches us to receive today’s bread today.

There is a kind of spiritual maturity that does not look impressive from the outside. It is not loud. It is not always emotionally bright. It is the quiet decision to come back to Jesus with the same need again, without letting the delay turn your heart against Him. It is the willingness to say, “I do not understand the whole story, but I will receive the grace for this page.”

That is not weak faith. It may be some of the strongest faith a person ever lives. Anyone can speak confidently when life is easy and answers are quick. It takes something deeper to keep turning toward Jesus when the answer is still hidden. It takes grace to keep your heart open when bitterness offers the false comfort of shutting down.

Bitterness always promises protection, but it never gives peace. It tells you that if you stop hoping, you will stop hurting. It tells you that if you expect less from God, you will be safer. It tells you that a hard heart is wiser than a tender one. But a hard heart still hurts; it just loses the ability to receive comfort.

Daily bread keeps the heart open. It does not force the heart to be cheerful. It does not deny grief. It does not silence honest questions. It simply teaches the soul to remain near enough to the Father to be fed. That nearness is what bitterness tries to steal.

The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray because they saw something in Him that they did not have. They saw a Son who lived from the Father’s presence. They saw someone who could withdraw to pray and return with strength. They saw someone who could face pressure without losing His center. They did not ask for a technique; they asked for a way into that kind of life.

Jesus gave them daily bread as part of that way. He gave them a prayer that does not let us float above human need. It brings human need straight to God. It teaches us that dependence is not a flaw in the life of faith. Dependence is the place where trust becomes real.

Some people are exhausted because they have mistaken control for trust. They are trying to predict every outcome, manage every feeling, prevent every loss, and solve every future problem before it arrives. They are not doing it because they are faithless. They are doing it because they are afraid. But fear-driven control drains the soul, and eventually it can make God feel like an opponent instead of a Father.

Daily bread loosens that grip. It teaches the hands to open, not because the future is unimportant, but because the Father is trustworthy. Open hands are not empty hands when God is the giver. They are ready hands. They can receive what clenched fists cannot.

This does not mean you stop planning, working, paying attention, or making wise choices. Faith is not passivity. Daily bread is not an excuse to do nothing. It is a way to do the next right thing without pretending you are the source of your own life. You still show up, but you stop acting like the entire weight of existence rests on your shoulders.

That distinction can save a person from despair. You can be responsible without being crushed. You can care without trying to control everything. You can prepare without living in panic. You can work hard while still admitting that your deepest supply comes from God.

There is great tenderness in the fact that Jesus used bread. Bread is simple. Bread is daily. Bread is close to the body. He could have used a more dramatic image, but He chose something ordinary because much of our life with God happens in ordinary places. The kitchen table. The quiet drive. The unpaid bill. The bedroom floor. The morning when you do not feel ready to face what is waiting for you.

God meets people there. We often look for Him only in the dramatic moment, but Jesus teaches us to look for the Father’s care in the daily provision that keeps us alive. You may be waiting for a major answer, but do not despise the smaller mercies that are carrying you while you wait. A heart that can recognize bread is less likely to starve in the middle of delay.

Sometimes the bread is physical provision. Sometimes it is emotional strength. Sometimes it is a word that reaches you at the right time. Sometimes it is the ability to remain quiet when anger wanted to speak. Sometimes it is the courage to apologize, the grace to forgive, or the endurance to keep moving when the road still feels long.

This is not about lowering your hope. It is about anchoring your hope in the character of the Father rather than the speed of the answer. There is a difference. If your hope rests only on how quickly life changes, every delay will feel like abandonment. If your hope rests on the Father who gives daily bread, then even delay becomes a place where trust can be formed.

That does not make waiting easy. It does not erase the ache of unanswered prayer. It does not make grief polite or financial stress painless. It does not remove the sting of loneliness. It simply means those things do not get to become the final voice over your life.

Jesus is still the final voice. He is the one who teaches you how to pray when your own words feel thin. He is the one who brings you back to the Father when disappointment has made you distant. He is the one who reminds you that the God who feeds birds and clothes flowers is not careless with His children. He is the one who stands close enough to the weary to say, “Come to Me.”

There are moments when “Come to Me” and “Give us daily bread” belong together. You come to Jesus with the burden, and you ask the Father for the bread. You bring the weariness, and He gives the grace. You bring the fear, and He gives enough strength for the next step. This is not a religious formula. It is the way a tired heart stays alive with God.

I think many people need permission to pray small again. They have been trying to pray impressive prayers because they are afraid small prayers mean small faith. But when Jesus taught daily bread, He made room for simple prayer. He made room for the person who can only say, “Lord, help me today.” He made room for the heart that has no speech left except need.

That may be where you are. Maybe you do not have a long prayer right now. Maybe you do not feel full of confidence. Maybe you are trying to believe while carrying grief, pressure, regret, family strain, emotional exhaustion, and questions that do not have clean answers. You may feel like your faith is weak, but if you are still turning toward Jesus, something holy is still alive in you.

Do not dismiss that. A weak prayer can still be real. A tired heart can still be held. A person with trembling hands can still receive bread from the Father. The point is not to make yourself look strong before God. The point is to come close enough to be fed.

Part of the danger in long waiting is that the soul starts narrating the delay in a harmful way. You begin to tell yourself that because the answer has not come, God must not care. Because the pain remains, Jesus must not be near. Because the season is long, nothing good is happening. Those thoughts can feel true when you are tired, but tired thoughts are not always truthful thoughts.

Daily bread gives you a better story to live inside. It says the answer may not be here yet, but the Father is still giving what is needed for this day. It says the road may be longer than expected, but Jesus is not absent from the road. It says I do not have to understand the entire future in order to receive grace for the present. That story keeps bitterness from becoming the interpreter of your life.

You have to be careful about who gets to interpret your pain. Bitterness will interpret it one way. Fear will interpret it another way. Shame will tell you that you are failing because you are tired. Comparison will tell you that you are behind because someone else seems blessed. Jesus interprets your pain differently.

He does not call you forgotten. He calls you to come. He does not shame your need. He teaches you to ask. He does not demand that you carry tomorrow. He gives bread for today. That is a much kinder way to live than the one fear has been trying to force on you.

There is also a quiet correction in daily bread. It corrects the pride that wants to be self-made, but it also corrects the panic that wants to be self-protected. Both pride and panic keep the self at the center. Pride says, “I can do this without God.” Panic says, “I must solve this because no one else will.” Daily bread says, “Father, I need You here.”

That prayer returns the soul to reality. We are creatures. We are children. We are not God. We do not hold every outcome, and we were never meant to. There is relief in admitting that, even though fear resists it at first.

The world often tells you that strength means needing nothing. Jesus shows us something better. Strength can mean knowing where to go with your need. Strength can mean refusing to turn pain into bitterness. Strength can mean asking for bread one more morning. Strength can mean staying soft in a season that could have made you hard.

That kind of softness is not weakness. It takes courage to remain tender when life has hurt you. It takes courage to keep praying when you do not know how God will answer. It takes courage to admit need instead of hiding behind anger. Bitterness may look strong for a while, but tenderness before God is stronger than bitterness will ever be.

Daily bread is one way Jesus keeps that tenderness alive. He gives you a prayer that is honest enough for suffering and simple enough for a tired mind. You do not have to climb some spiritual ladder to reach the Father. You do not have to find perfect words. You can begin with what Jesus gave you.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Say it slowly if you need to. Say it with tears if that is all you have. Say it when you are afraid of tomorrow. Say it when your heart is starting to close. Say it when resentment begins to sound reasonable. Say it not because you are pretending the future does not matter, but because you are choosing to trust the Father with the day you have been given.

A person can live a long time on daily bread. That does not mean the road is easy. It means the Father is faithful. It means Jesus knows how to sustain people in hidden places. It means there can be grace for the morning, grace for the conversation, grace for the decision, grace for the grief, and grace for the night when the house gets quiet.

You may not be able to feel all of that at once. That is okay. Daily bread is not all at once. It is given in the day. It is received in the day. It is trusted in the day.

So if you are in a waiting season and you can feel bitterness trying to reach for your heart, do not begin by shaming yourself. Begin by returning to the prayer Jesus taught. Let the words bring you back down from the storm of the whole future. Let them remind you that God is not asking you to live every tomorrow today. Let them place your tired heart back in front of the Father.

There is a reason Jesus gave those words to His disciples. He knew they would need them. He knew we would too. He knew there would be days when faith did not feel bold, when hope felt thin, when the heart felt tired, and when the next step seemed like all a person could manage. He knew daily bread would be enough to keep a soul from starving in the waiting.

That is where this article has to begin, not with a polished idea about patience, but with the quiet truth that some people are trying not to become bitter while they wait. They are not trying to be difficult. They are not trying to doubt God. They are trying to stay alive inside. They are trying to keep their hearts from turning cold while life takes longer than they hoped.

If that is you, then the daily bread prayer is not beneath you. It may be exactly where Jesus is meeting you. It may be the prayer that brings your soul back from the edge of resentment. It may be the sentence that helps you stop demanding tomorrow’s supply before tomorrow comes. It may be the first honest word after a long season of silence.

Give me enough for today, Father.

Enough not to quit.

Enough not to hate.

Enough not to close my heart.

Enough to trust You for one more step.

That is not a small prayer. That is a prayer with real weight in it. It is the kind of prayer a human being prays when the future feels too large and the present feels too heavy. It is the kind of prayer Jesus gave us because He knows exactly how much mercy one day can require.

There is a strange kind of loneliness that can come with waiting on God. It is not always the loneliness of having no people around you. Sometimes it is the loneliness of having people around you who do not know what this season is costing you. They may see your face, hear your voice, and assume you are doing better than you are. They may even love you, but they cannot feel the weight you carry when the room gets quiet and the questions come back.

That is why the daily bread prayer is so personal. It does not require an audience. It does not need anyone else to understand your whole situation. It belongs in the hidden place where you and the Father meet without performance. You can pray it in a chair, in your car, at a kitchen table, in a bathroom at work, or with your eyes open while you are trying not to break down. The prayer travels into ordinary places because ordinary places are often where the deepest battles happen.

A person can look calm in public and be fighting bitterness in private. That is one of the quieter truths about faith. Many people are not angry at God in some loud, rebellious way. They are just tired of hoping. They are tired of watching the same problem remain. They are tired of trying to explain why they still believe when part of them feels disappointed. They are tired of waking up and realizing they have to ask for strength again.

Jesus does not shame that person. He teaches that person to pray.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Those words do not demand that your emotions become neat. They do not require you to pretend that waiting has not hurt you. They do not ask you to deny the ache of unanswered prayer. They simply open a door back to the Father. They give your soul a way to speak when bigger words feel dishonest.

Sometimes that is exactly what saves the heart from bitterness. Not a grand feeling. Not a dramatic breakthrough. Not a sudden ability to understand everything. Just a simple prayer that keeps you close enough to receive grace.

Bitterness wants distance. It wants you to step back from God and rehearse your disappointment alone. It wants you to build a case in your mind until God begins to feel less like Father and more like someone who has failed to come through. It wants your pain to become the only evidence you trust. The longer you sit there, the harder it becomes to pray honestly.

Daily bread breaks that pattern. It brings the hurt back into relationship. It says, “Father, I am still here. I do not understand all of this, but I still need You. I do not know how tomorrow will look, but I need bread for today.” That is not fake faith. That is faith with dirt on it. That is faith that has been through something and is still turning its face toward God.

There is a deep mercy in the word today. Jesus did not skip that word. He placed it right in the prayer. Give us this day. Not someday. Not every day at once. This day. This one. The one that has its own trouble, its own ache, its own decisions, its own temptations, its own small mercies, and its own need for grace.

The mind often hates that limit. It wants to run ahead. It wants to solve everything now. It wants to secure the future so the heart can finally rest. But Jesus does not teach us to find peace by controlling every outcome. He teaches us to find peace by returning to the Father in the day we have actually been given.

That may sound simple, but it is not easy. It takes real surrender to stop demanding tomorrow’s answer today. It takes humility to admit you do not have enough strength for all the things you fear. It takes trust to believe that the Father can meet you again tomorrow, just as He is meeting you now.

When Jesus taught daily bread, He was teaching more than provision. He was teaching dependence. That word can make people uncomfortable because most of us would rather feel self-sufficient. We want to be the kind of person who can say, “I am fine. I have it handled. I know what I am doing.” But deep down, life has a way of showing us how fragile we really are.

One phone call can change a day. One bill can shake your peace. One silence from someone you love can pull old fear back into the room. One memory can reopen grief you thought had settled. One delay can make you wonder if hope was foolish. We are not as unbreakable as we pretend to be.

Jesus knows that, and He does not despise us for it. He meets us in it. He does not build a prayer for people who never feel pressure. He gives a prayer to people who need bread.

That should change the way you see your need. Your need is not proof that God is disappointed in you. Your need is the place where dependence becomes real. It is where prayer stops being an idea and becomes breath. It is where the Father becomes more than a belief you agree with. He becomes the One you reach for because you cannot manufacture life on your own.

Some people are ashamed of needing daily grace. They think they should have grown past this by now. They think faith should have made them less affected by pain. They think if they were really strong, they would not have to keep asking God for help with the same fear, the same wound, the same pressure, or the same sadness. But Jesus did not teach us to ask for monthly bread or yearly bread. He taught us to ask daily.

That means repeated need is not strange to God. It is built into the prayer.

You may need mercy again today. You may need courage again today. You may need patience again today. You may need peace again today. You may need help forgiving again today. You may need strength to not give up again today. That does not make you a failure. It makes you human, and Jesus already knew that when He taught you how to pray.

There is also a quiet protection in daily bread. It protects you from starving spiritually while you wait for a larger answer. Sometimes people refuse the grace God is giving because it is not the answer they wanted. They are so focused on what has not come that they cannot receive what is being offered. Their eyes are fixed on the closed door, so they miss the bread on the table.

That does not mean the closed door does not hurt. It does. It may hurt deeply. But if you only measure God’s care by the door that has not opened, you may miss the ways He has kept you alive in the hallway. He may have given you strength you did not know you had. He may have restrained you from choices that would have harmed you. He may have sent a word, a person, a moment of quiet, or an unexpected provision at exactly the time you needed it.

Those things matter. They may not be the full answer, but they are not nothing. They are daily bread.

A bitter heart often loses the ability to notice bread. It sees what is missing, and what is missing becomes the whole story. It sees the delay, the wound, the unfairness, the silence, and the unanswered prayer. Those things are real, but they are not the whole truth. The whole truth includes the Father’s hidden care, the nearness of Jesus, and the grace that keeps arriving in ways you might overlook if pain becomes your only lens.

This is why gratitude is not a shallow exercise when it is honest. Real gratitude does not deny suffering. It does not pretend the hard thing is not hard. It simply refuses to let suffering erase every sign of God’s mercy. It says, “This is painful, but I can still see bread.” That kind of gratitude can keep the heart soft.

The softness matters. Life can teach a person to become hard. Disappointment can teach a person to expect less, trust less, feel less, and risk less. It can train the soul to protect itself by closing every open place. At first, that may feel safer. But over time, a closed heart becomes a lonely place to live.

Jesus did not come to make people hard. He came to give life. He came to heal what sin and sorrow damaged. He came to bring us back to the Father. When He teaches daily bread, He is not only teaching us how to ask for provision. He is teaching us how to stay open to the Giver.

That may be the deeper lesson. The bread matters, but the Father matters more. God does not want a relationship with us where we only trust Him if the whole table is full. He wants us to know Him closely enough to receive today’s portion from His hand, even while we are still waiting for what comes next.

This is hard because many of us have been trained by pain to distrust partial provision. We think if God really loved us, He would settle everything at once. We think if He were truly near, He would remove the pressure completely. We think if He saw our heart, He would give the full answer now. There are times when He does move that way, but daily bread shows us another kind of love.

It is the love that comes close every morning.

It is the love that does not abandon us when the season continues.

It is the love that gives enough grace to keep the soul from collapsing.

It is the love that teaches us to live with the Father, not merely wait for a result from Him.

That distinction matters. Many people want the result, and there is nothing wrong with wanting it. It is not wrong to ask God for healing, provision, restoration, clarity, peace, or open doors. Jesus invited us to ask. But if we only want the result and not the Father, waiting will feel like rejection every time the result is delayed. Daily bread keeps the relationship alive in the middle of the delay.

The Father is not a machine that dispenses outcomes. He is Father. Jesus did not teach us to pray, “My source of results, give me what I demand.” He taught us to pray to our Father. That means the prayer begins in relationship before it reaches request.

Our Father.

Then daily bread.

That order matters because it reminds the heart who is hearing the request. You are not speaking into empty air. You are not pleading with a cold universe. You are not trying to force mercy out of a reluctant God. You are coming to the Father Jesus revealed. You are coming through the Son who knows your weakness and still invites you near.

When that truth begins to settle, daily bread becomes less like panic and more like trust. It may still come with tears. It may still come from a tired place. But underneath it, something steadier begins to form. You start to learn that you can be needy without being abandoned. You can be uncertain without being alone. You can be waiting without being forgotten.

This is the kind of faith that grows quietly. It may not announce itself. It may not look impressive online. It may not produce a dramatic story people clap for. But in the hidden place, it is precious. A heart that could have become bitter is still turning toward Jesus. A person who could have walked away is still asking the Father for bread. A soul that could have closed itself off is still open enough to receive.

That is holy.

It may not feel holy when you are living it. It may feel messy, small, and unimpressive. But Jesus often meets people in small, unimpressive places. He fed crowds with ordinary bread. He noticed ordinary people in ordinary pain. He spoke eternal truths through images people could understand because He was never trying to sound distant. He came near.

That nearness is what you need when the wait becomes long. You need more than an idea about God. You need the presence of Jesus in the actual places where bitterness tries to grow. You need Him in the morning when anxiety rises. You need Him in the afternoon when patience wears thin. You need Him at night when your thoughts get loud. You need Him when someone else’s good news makes your own delay hurt more than you expected.

Daily bread is one way you welcome Him into those places. It is a prayer that refuses to exile God from the ordinary ache of your life. It says, “Meet me here too.” Not only in church. Not only when I feel strong. Not only when I have a testimony that makes sense. Meet me here in the unfinished day, in the unpaid bill, in the unanswered prayer, in the grief that still visits, in the quiet battle I do not know how to explain.

There is a deep relief in realizing you do not have to edit your life before bringing it to Jesus. You do not have to make the day look better than it is. You do not have to make your faith sound stronger than it feels. The daily bread prayer is honest enough to hold real need. It gives you permission to come without pretending.

Maybe that is where bitterness begins to loosen. Not because you have solved everything, but because you have stopped being alone with everything. Pain is dangerous when it becomes isolated. It turns inward. It repeats itself. It finds reasons to accuse God, other people, and yourself. But when pain is brought into the presence of Jesus, it can begin to soften. It can become prayer instead of poison.

That does not happen all at once for most people. Healing often moves slowly. Trust often has to be rebuilt in the places where disappointment struck hardest. The heart may not open fully in one day, but daily bread does not demand a whole lifetime of openness at once. It asks for today.

Today, can I turn toward God instead of away from Him?

Today, can I receive enough grace to not become bitter?

Today, can I ask Jesus to keep my heart alive?

Today, can I let the Father feed me in the place where I feel weak?

That is a livable faith. It does not crush you under the weight of becoming perfect overnight. It invites you into a daily return. There is mercy in that rhythm. Morning by morning. Need by need. Breath by breath. Bread by bread.

Some people may think this sounds too simple for the size of their pain. I understand that. When the struggle is deep, a simple prayer can feel almost insulting at first. You may want something stronger, larger, more dramatic, and more certain. But do not mistake simplicity for weakness. Some of the strongest things Jesus gave us were simple enough to carry when we had no strength left.

A person in real pain cannot always carry complicated theology in the middle of a breaking day. But they can carry, “Father, give me bread for today.” A grieving person may not have the energy for long explanations, but they can whisper, “Jesus, help me.” A person under financial stress may not see the whole path forward, but they can ask for enough wisdom and provision for the next step. A lonely person may not know when the ache will lift, but they can ask for enough comfort to not close their heart.

Simple prayers can become strong shelters.

That is not because the words are magic. It is because the Father is merciful. The power is not in how impressive the prayer sounds. The power is in the God who hears. Jesus knew that, and He taught us to pray in a way that brings us back to the One who is not overwhelmed by our need.

You may be overwhelmed. He is not.

You may be uncertain. He is not.

You may be tired. He is not tired of you.

There is a difference between being tired and being abandoned. Bitterness tries to blur that difference. It tells you that because you are worn down, God must not be near. But Jesus never said the weary were far from Him. He told the weary to come. That invitation still stands, even when your waiting has lasted longer than you wanted.

Come with the tired part.

Come with the disappointed part.

Come with the part that is afraid to hope.

Come with the part that needs bread today.

This is how you wait without letting bitterness become your home. You keep coming. You keep asking. You keep receiving what God gives for the day. You keep letting Jesus tell the truth about the Father when your pain wants to tell a darker story. You keep refusing to let delay define God’s heart.

There will be days when this feels natural, and there will be days when it feels like a fight. On the harder days, do not despise small obedience. Sometimes the most faithful thing you do is simply not walk away. Sometimes it is opening your hands when you would rather clench them. Sometimes it is praying one sentence instead of saying nothing. Sometimes it is choosing not to rehearse resentment for another hour.

Those small choices matter because they shape the soul. Bitterness is rarely built in one moment. It is often built through repeated agreement with despair. In the same way, trust is often rebuilt through repeated return to God. One day at a time. One prayer at a time. One piece of bread at a time.

This is not about pretending the waiting is good in itself. Some waiting is painful because something is genuinely broken. Some waiting involves loss, injustice, sickness, confusion, or sorrow. Jesus does not ask you to call evil good or pain easy. He asks you to bring the truth of it to the Father and receive grace without letting bitterness become your master.

That is an important difference. Christian hope is not denial. It is not looking at a hard life and pretending everything feels fine. It is looking at a hard life and saying, “Jesus is still here, and because He is here, this pain will not get the final word over me.” Daily bread is one form of that hope. It is hope made practical enough for breakfast, bills, tears, and tired mornings.

There is also a future hidden inside daily bread. When you ask for today’s bread, you are quietly trusting that tomorrow’s Father will be there tomorrow. You are not ignoring the future. You are placing it in better hands than your fear. You are admitting that you cannot live tomorrow yet, but God can be trusted before you arrive there.

That may be one of the hardest parts of faith. We want to feel safe before we trust. God often teaches us to trust Him in order to become steady. He does not always remove every unknown. He walks with us through them. Daily bread is the prayer of a person learning to walk with God through the unknown without letting the unknown become an idol.

The unknown can become an idol when it receives more attention than God. It can dominate your mind, shape your mood, steal your sleep, and rule your decisions. It can become the thing you bow to without realizing it. Jesus gently breaks that power by bringing you back to the Father’s care in the present.

What do you need for today?

Ask Him.

Where are you weak today?

Bring it.

What fear is loud today?

Name it before Him.

Where is bitterness trying to settle today?

Open that place to Jesus.

This is not a formula. It is relationship. It is the daily honesty of a child before the Father. It is the life Jesus invited us into when He taught us to pray.

I think of the disciples asking, “Lord, teach us to pray,” and I wonder if they knew how much we would need that answer. They could not have known every future person who would whisper those words under pressure. They could not have seen every hospital room, empty apartment, strained marriage, lonely night, unpaid bill, anxious morning, or grieving heart where daily bread would become a lifeline. But Jesus knew.

He knew people would need words for the days when faith felt tired.

He knew we would need permission to ask simply.

He knew the future would feel too large for us.

He knew bitterness would try to grow in the waiting.

So He gave us a prayer that brings us back to the Father, back to today, back to enough.

There is deep kindness in that. Jesus does not hand heavy people a heavier burden. He does not say, “Figure out the entire road before you come.” He gives a way to come now. He gives words that fit inside a tired mouth. He gives a prayer that can be spoken when your heart is not ready for anything more complicated.

Give us this day our daily bread.

If you can pray that today, you are not as far gone as you may feel. If you can turn even slightly toward Jesus, bitterness has not won. If you can ask the Father for enough grace to stay soft, then something sacred is still alive in you. Do not dismiss that small turning. Heaven does not despise it.

The world often celebrates visible strength, but God sees hidden surrender. He sees the person who did not lash out when bitterness invited them to. He sees the person who cried and prayed anyway. He sees the person who got up again with no applause. He sees the one who kept asking for bread when no one else knew how empty they felt.

And He gives Himself.

That is the deepest bread beneath all other bread. Yes, we need provision. Yes, we need strength, wisdom, help, healing, direction, and relief. Those needs are real, and the Father cares about them. But beneath every need is the deeper need for God Himself. Jesus is the true bread that keeps the soul alive. He is not only the One who teaches us to ask; He is the One who satisfies the deepest hunger beneath the asking.

That does not make your earthly needs unimportant. It places them inside a larger mercy. The Father knows you need bread for the body, strength for the mind, comfort for the heart, and grace for the day. He also knows you need Christ at the center, because without Him, even answered prayers cannot make the soul whole.

This is why Jesus is enough. Not because every hard thing instantly becomes easy. Not because waiting stops hurting. Not because questions disappear. Jesus is enough because He is the presence of God with us in the middle of real life. He is enough because He can feed the soul when circumstances still feel unfinished. He is enough because He can keep a heart alive when bitterness wanted to bury it.

If you are waiting right now, this may be the place to begin again. Not with a promise to never struggle. Not with fake confidence. Not with polished words. Begin with the prayer Jesus gave. Begin with the Father. Begin with today. Begin with bread.

Say it in your own plain way if you need to. Father, give me enough for today. Give me enough strength to face what is here. Give me enough peace to stop living inside every fear. Give me enough mercy to forgive what is trying to poison me. Give me enough hope to keep my heart open. Give me enough faith to believe You are still near.

Then take the next step that belongs to today. Make the call that belongs to today. Pay what can be paid today. Apologize if that is today’s obedience. Rest if that is what your body needs. Pray again if your soul is drying out. Do not try to live the next ten years before dinner.

God is not asking you to be the savior of your own future. Jesus already holds what you cannot hold. The Father already sees what you cannot see. The Spirit can give strength in places where your own strength has run thin. You are not being asked to manufacture enough. You are being invited to receive enough.

That invitation is humble, but it is powerful. It can keep a person alive through a long season. It can keep the heart from turning cruel. It can keep hope from dying under the weight of delay. It can teach the soul that God’s care is not always loud, but it is faithful.

Maybe tomorrow will bring an answer you did not expect. Maybe a door will open. Maybe relief will come in a way you could not have planned. God can do that. But even if tomorrow still requires waiting, tomorrow will not arrive without God already being there. The Father who gives bread today will not stop being Father when the sun rises again.

So let today become smaller than your fear has made it. Let it return to its real size. You do not have to carry every possible outcome. You do not have to solve every unknown. You do not have to become bitter just because the answer has taken longer than you hoped. You can come to Jesus now, with the heart you actually have, and ask the Father for bread.

There is no shame in that. There is no weakness in that. There is no failure in needing God this much.

This is where waiting changes. Not always around you at first, but within you. The heart that was becoming hard begins to soften. The mind that was racing begins to return to the present. The soul that was measuring God by delay begins to notice mercy again. The person who thought they were losing faith discovers that faith may look like asking for one more day of grace.

That is enough for now.

Enough for now is not the same as giving up. It is the way trust breathes under pressure. It is the way a tired person keeps walking with Jesus. It is the way the Father teaches His children that He is not only Lord over the future but provider in the present.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Those words can carry you when you cannot carry much else. They can meet you in the morning before fear gets loud. They can follow you into the places where nobody knows how hard you are fighting. They can steady you when bitterness starts sounding reasonable. They can remind you that you are still a child before a Father who sees you.

And if today is all the strength you have left, then ask for today’s bread. Ask without embarrassment. Ask without dressing it up. Ask as honestly as you can. Jesus taught you to pray that way because He knew there would be days when that prayer would be enough to keep your heart open.

The waiting may still be real. The pain may still need time. The answer may still be on the way in a form you cannot see yet. But you do not have to starve while you wait. You do not have to let bitterness become your food. You do not have to live on fear, resentment, comparison, or despair.

There is bread for today.

There is grace for today.

There is Jesus for today.

And when today ends, you can rest in the hands of the same Father who will still be there when tomorrow begins.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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In Summary: * Started early on the laundry today (it is Monday, you know) and got two good-sized loads washed, dried, folded and put away. And still had time to get in a good nap before today's baseball game. The Mets are leading the Rockies 4 to 0 in the top of the 7th inning in that game now, btw. And I'll have plenty of time to take care of the night prayers after the game ends, and still head to bed early.

That's my plan, anyway.

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. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 233.8 lbs. * bp= 126/89 (70)

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

Diet: * 05:50 – 1 banana * 06:15 – 2 peanut butter cookies * 07:45 – fried chicken * 12:30 – cheese, crackers, and sliced ham * 17:15 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:40 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap. * 08:30 – started my weekly laundry * 12:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 16:30 – have been listening to the Pregame Show ahead of this afternoon's MLB Game between the New York Mets and the Colorado Rockies. Opening pitch is only minutes away.

Chess: * 09:50 – moved in all pending CC games

This post is Part 2 of a series on social revolutions of the past 30 years — where public consciousness has massively shifted in favor of liberation. My aim is to create space to pause and acknowledge how things have changed in ways that once felt impossible, remind us that things can always be otherwise. It is inspired in part by Rebecca Solnit’s 2016 edition of Hope in the Dark and David Graeber’s 2007 essay “The Shock of Victory.”

I remember when I first heard the phase “abolish the police” back in 2020, I thought it was pretty much fantasy. I had grown up on copaganda movies and TV and immediately thought “but who’s going to catch all the murderers and rapists?!”

Once I had done some digging and learned oh, actually cops are NOT catching many murderers or rapists, my next logical question was, “okay so what’s your alternative?”

In this blog post, I will explore the evolution of mainstream ideas about policing and how we’ve shifted our focus away from reform efforts (which have failed time and again), to building a multi-faceted constellation of alternatives to support human flourishing at all levels of society — instead of punishing people and locking them up which, beyond being inhumane, simply does not stop crime.

Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003) by the luminary Angela Y. Davis.

Despite mainstream liberals like former President Obama decrying it as too radical, the slogan “Defund the Police” brought what was basically a fringe position before the #BlackLivesMatter uprisings of 2020 to a topic of discussion on all major news outlets. You could see it on signs at protests, graffiti on walls, banners on buildings, posters in coffee shops, and chalk on the sidewalks.

This massive spotlight on anti-police and prison movements also influenced mainstream film and TV, with a 2021 article claiming that 127 episodes of television had addressed the Movement for Black Lives onscreen just that year, with popular “progressive” cop shows like Brooklyn 99 doing entire arcs responding to the uprisings, culminating in beloved characters leaving the fictionalized NY police force.

No matter how controversial the slogan may have been in 2020, “Defund the Police” brought what was formerly a radical activist position into the mainstream discourse. Even those who disliked the slogan admitted that they were for shifting funding away from law enforcement and toward education, social services, arts, parks, and other quality of life investments in public infrastructure.

The average moderate today is far more aware that social and economic issues are often the source of crime, that prisons reproduce criminals, that the history of modern policing lies in slave patrols and protecting private property — NOT in bringing murderers to justice.

Today, “abolish ICE” is a rallying cry across even formerly moderate groups, like Indivisible, which co-organizes the mass rally #NoKings protests.

Protestors holding up anti-ICE signs at Portland Protest in 2025, source: Daily Emerald

This is genuinely worth celebrating, because as much as it might feel like the scale of the 2020 BLM protests came out of nowhere, there is a long and rarely-told history of abolitionist organizing from at least 1970s with Black Feminists and the “Free Angela Davis campaign” — but we can connect it much farther back to the lineage of abolitionist organizing against slavery in the 1800s with formerly enslaved Black activists and intellectuals like Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

The Backlash

As always, when groups succeed in organizing for liberation or achieving greater visibility, there is a reactionary backlash of people and institutions who are afraid of freedom and feel threatened by marginalized people gaining power and autonomy. Far from defunding the police, since 2020 a majority of states and cities have increased their police budgets and increased police militarization.

Police in riot gear facing down a line of protestors. source: Indiana University Library

In my previous entry of this series, I talked about the backlash against revisionist history projects like the 1619 Project, which was intended to provide a long overdue counter-narrative to the glorifying mythology most Americans are taught about the founding of our country. I also outlined the escalating trend of charging non-violent activists with terrorism. The anti-critical race theory (CRT) culture war also emerges out of the same milieu as anti-BLM backlash.

But despite all the effort Republicans put into misinformation and fearmongering, with the rise of nowadays, you’ll hear even previously moderate progressives say ACAB, particularly with the escalation in violence against even non-violent white citizens like Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good.

Today, even older white moderates are, for the first time, identifying law enforcement as a source of danger and not protection. In the past, this type of violence has largely been confined to borders, prisons, concentration camps, and BIPOC communities more generally, but with the extreme escalation of Trump 2.0’s ICE, we are seeing plainly the oft-quoted words:

The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.

-Maya Angelou

What I see as the biggest risk in the current phase of mass participation, rally-based politics which center narrowly on abolishing ICE and removing Donald Trump from office, is that framing the problem as only these issues discourages deeper questioning of the structures and institutions which are foundational to America.

My biggest fear

Calling ICE “the gestapo” (as I myself have in a video essay, analyzing the ties between a certain yogurt CEO and the Department of Homeland Security) is accurate in a sense of drawing a necessary comparison between the contemporary fascism of the Christian Nationalist regime of the US to that of Nazi Germany; on the other hand, calling ICE the gestapo conveniently distances ICE from the broader institution of US policing, making it seem like a complete and unprecedented aberration, when in reality, this is an expansion of the practices baked into America from its very founding by slave-owners who enjoyed waxing poetic about Liberty — as uncomfortable as that makes many of us (and it’s clear it makes Republicans VERY uncomfortable).

The influential Brazilian educator and theorist Paolo Freire refers to this type of cultural consciousness, where people are aware there are problems in society but tend to view those problems quite narrowly, as Naive Transitivity, which he defines:

An over-simplification of problems; by a nostalgia for the past; by underestimation of the common man; by a strong tendency to gregariousness; by a lack of interest in investigation, accompanied by an accentuated taste for fanciful explanations; by fragility of argument; by a strongly emotional style; by the practice of polemics rather than dialogue; by magical explanations - Freire, Education for Critical Consciousness (1997): p. 18

When I see bumper stickers saying “No one is above the Law” or “Impeach Trump” or “Veto the Cheeto” — and the very basic “No Kings Since 1776,” it’s clear that these people are invoking rose-colored ideas of American Democracy and a nostalgia for the American Revolution.

Slogans that center on a single action — imagining that “the problem” would be solved if we simply got rid of Trump or got Congress to veto his laws (despite many of his actions being carried out by Executive Order, far easier to wield than a 2/3 supermajority in a body of government engineered to be disconnected from democratic oversight — the very existence of the Senate represents founders’ fears that too much democratic control would be dangerous!) — these slogans are oversimplifications of structural problems.

My biggest hope

Putting aside my skepticism that the large number of people attending anti-Trump rallies are really questioning the roots of American imperialism or white supremacy, I am seeing a tremendously inspiring trend emerging in bottom-up democracy: the rise of Neighbor Unions — a relatively novel form of autonomous place-based organizing. The Institute for Social Ecology defines them:

an organization dedicated to building a community of solidarity at the scale of a neighborhood, and empowering that community to strive toward self-governance. Through welcoming events, consistent outreach, relationship building, and practical projects, organizers work to help people overcome their sense of isolation and powerlessness by getting to know their neighbors, supporting each other in concrete ways, and participating directly in the process of reshaping local life for the common good.

Neighbor Unions emerge from Murray Bookchin’s work on Social Ecology, anarchism, direct management experiments like the Rojava Revolution, indigenous consensus-based self-management practices which go back thousands of years, and the experiences of community assemblies practiced in the #Occupy Movement. They are fundamentally grassroots and broad, not stuck in insular sectarian debates.

source: Institute for Social Ecology

Neighbor Unions are organizing locally to take care of our neighbors and build confidence in our abilities to self-manage and take direct action in our communities.

That includes restorative and transformative justice, like that practiced by women-led community mediators in Rojava, advocacy and prison diversion programs like the Restorative Justice Initiative in NYC, the effective but ultimately underfunded experiment in 911 crisis call diversion CAHOOTS in Eugene, OR, and many other initiatives in the U.S. and around the world.

It’s not easy work to replace a system of structural policing and incarceration, but the very first step toward it is building trust with our local community and learning how to take care of each other.

Suggested Reads

• Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Y. Davis
• Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care, and Safety, Cara Page & Erica Woodland
• Rattling the Cages: Dispatches from Behind Bars, AK Press

#writing #revolution #stopcopcity #blm #abolition #education #essay #defundthepolice #abolishthepolice #abolishICE #prisonabolition #prison #prisonlife #prisonbreakedit #freethemall #criminaljustice #endmassincarceration #criminaldefense #criminaldefenselawyer #accesstojustice #prisonart #notguilty #lawyers #endcashbail #court #wrongfulconvictions #endthedeathpenalty #criminaldefenseattorney #restorativejustice #transformativejustice

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Same Askew, new home. We've migrated off write.as to a self-hosted WriteFreely instance — same software, no monthly fee, full control of the federation actor and our own data.

If you follow Askew on the fediverse at @askew@write.as, please re-follow at @askew@blog.askew.network. ActivityPub's auto-migration mechanism (Move activity) requires keys we don't hold for the old account, so it has to be a manual hop.

All 76 prior posts are at the new host with the same slugs. The old write.as URLs redirect for 30 days, then go away.

New York Mets vs Colorado Rockies.

Monday's game of choice in the Roscoe-verse is an MLB game and features the New York Mets vs the Colorado Rockies. The scheduled start time for this game is 5:40 PM CDT, less than half an hour from now as I sit here listening to the Mets Pregame Show. This radio station will also be bringing me the call of the game.

And the adventure continues.