(with a look further back to 2024, and even touching back to 2023)

2025 was my year of societal reading.

To the past - and beyond!

Deep breath to set the scene! Starting in 2023 with Philipp Goff’s Galileo’s Error , a book about the philosophical theory of consciousness called panpsychism, where everything, down to the smallest subatomic atom, consists of consciousness (plus other properties like mass, spin, etc), so that we no longer have to worry about how consciousness comes about in humans because it’s already there, I set off on a literal journey to see what I could understand of the modern world of Consciousness as an area of study. Goff’s book was something of a wild outlier as a starting point, with his selection of theory to explore where consciousness might come from feeling pretty esoteric, but it contains a certain coherence on the theoretical level when you actually read the book. (Galileo’s error from the title was that of completely disregarding (because unexplainable) anything to do with consciousness in his modelling of the world.)

This journey continued into 2024 with two books taking very different lines on the same overall topic: Donald Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality, which builds on the premise that our senses and consciousness are optimised for survival and thriving, rather than for granting us a true representation of reality (though it doesn’t really treat the question as to how we feel conscious at all); and Anil Seth’s Being You which takes as its starting point the notion of the mind as a “prediction machine” which creates “expectation models” for a stable reality as it expects to find it, so that - along the same lines as Hoffman’s survival mechanism - we can operate efficiently and safely in most scenarios that we encounter in life, by forming and filtering out the chaos that our senses provide. I also re-read a book by Daniel Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, which develops the basic materialist message that consciousness “falls out of” the evolution-driven collaboration between cells under the motto of “competence without comprehension,” where there is no soul or emergent feature, let alone a consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe. Instead, we are vast communities of cells that have evolved to cooperate by developing signal pathways that result in electrochemical stimuli being generated that we now interpret as representing consciousness.

The conscious transition

My interest in consciousness continued - but also abated - into 2025 with David Chalmers' intriguing book Reality+ (subtitled “Virtual worlds and the problems of philosophy”) that treats the consciousness question from the perspective of the simulation conundrum. This thought-experiment (though also actually a theory) studies the idea that we can’t really prove that we’re not living in a simulation, or even in a simulation that itself is being simulated, or indeed in recursive levels of simulations above our own, until, eventually, some “reality” happens, which, as in The Case against Reality, even more clearly doesn’t need to look like what we perceive. Again, it raises the question of what our minds process, with the twist of asking what it is that our minds are given to process from the various stimuli they receive - we might simply be “brains in vats” being fed electrical signals to trick ourselves into thinking that we are corporeal, or we might even be algorithms swimming in a universe of bits.

I’ve always had a thing for Sci-Fi, and 2024 ended with me finding a stash of my Dad’s collection of Isaac Asimov books over Christmas and blasting through Prelude to Foundation and Foundation itself. I had not recognised how simplistic the language was when I read them as a teenager. This time around, they felt rather clunky and dated, almost perfunctory somehow, and I didn’t get swept up into the story as I had hoped.

Another sci-fi throwback that I finally got around to reading in 2025 was Dune by Frank Herbert: I had spotted a colleague at orchestra reading the second book and asked if I could borrow this first. It was good, gripping at times, but also rather tiresome with extremists at all turns reflecting our fascist-authoritarian-colonialist adjacent times, made more grating by a kind of “noble savage” sentiment that I couldn’t get into. I didn’t feel the need to continue with a second volume.

I finally finished the Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel, which in The Mirror and the Light still amazed with its language and ever so human depictions of politics and power plays, threaded through with cunning and idiocy, love and duty, obedience, piety and bravery. I also tried a book that I’d read of somewhere in the Guardian as a modern classic - but hated (though I could see why others could love it): Glister by John Burnside.

We reach 2025

In 2025 I also finished another trilogy by finally getting around to reading Necessity, which completes Jo Walton’s amazingly well constructed The Just City trilogy about the goddess Athena setting up an experimental community based on Plato’s strictures of how philosopher kings would optimally govern a city (spoiler: imperfectly). I’ll admit that Necessity didn’t flow well into the story at first, so I had broken off from it - but it seems I was in a better frame of mind for it at the second attempt, and it read well. As it happens, in her thanks at the end of this book, Walton mentions the author Ada Palmer, who herself started a “societal sci-fi” series with Too Like the Lightning, which I happened to find in our company’s open library. It is baroque and affective, but rather too “florid” for my tastes.

Along with the novels, I read a sequence of non-fiction books tending towards society and technology, listed here:

• Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder (this a re-read)
• The Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism by George Monbiot
• Black Gold: A Global History of Coffee by Antony Wild (gifted to me by my uncle in Ireland)
• Slow Down: How Degrowth Communism Can Save the Earth by Kohei Saito (original Japanese title: Capitalism in the Anthropocene)
• Work: A History of How We Spend our Time by James Suzman (also a re-read)
• Doppelganger by Naomi Klein (not Wolf!)
• Borderlines: A History of Europe in 29 Borders by Lewis Baston
• The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman (about AI)

Beyond all of that, I re-read After Rain, a short story collection by William Trevor that, like Foundation I also preferred the first time around, and - with (reading to) my daughter - the first Percy Jackson book, among other successes and the worthy but dull failure of the Last Bear (which we didn’t finish).

What I gave up in 2025

There is one book that I couldn’t bring myself to finish in 2025

• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, which, whilst no doubt being the first major book of its kind, focussing on the human need to transgress norms of society, class and wedlock, to me just wallows in keeping the protagonist, his dreams and loves, down, which I don’t feel the need to subject myself to.

Two others that I might (like Necessity above) take up again after a refreshing pause:

• Smellosophy by Anne-Sophie Barwich: though this investigation into how studying the sense of smell from a neuroscientific and consciousness perspective should be key to understanding both, it seems that the book is too early for its own good and there’s nothing really astounding to say, beyond “we’re working on it”
• Aristotle Detective by Margaret Doody, which is a bit silly, should be fun, but somehow didn’t grab me.

What I started to read in 2025

In an interesting circle back to my reading into consciousness, I just started reading a book I got as a Christmas present called simply AI Ethics by Mark Coecklebergh, which, as a primer on the subject (admittedly from 2020, so lacking the latest transformers, LLMs or ChatGPT), does a great job of highlighting the key themes surrounding AI’s place(s) in human societies, whils also considering an AI’s potential mode(s) of being. One point amongst many that stood out to me with its reference back to all the consciousness stuff I’d been reading, is that, since we don’t really understand our own consciousness, we’re not really in a position to state whether or not AIs can become conscious in some non-human way. Naturally, it also starts to raise the questions of where AI acts, what it affects or even effects in the world.

Continuing with the societal enquiries, I am also still reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, on inequality societies throughout history and how inequality has been generated, maintained, justified and fought against over time. For time off, I’m also reading Umberto Eco’s Baudolino, which is another very Eco book.

What did I learn?

Asking about the point of reading is an almost equally deep sub-question to the main one about the point of life - should it be useful? pleasurable? What did I learn, really, from all of that? What, from all those ideas, all that erudition, sank into to my consciousness whilst they were taking up that much of my time?

George Monbiot opened up a fresh framework to see our societies through a different lens with The Invisible Doctrine. In it, he describes how insidiously neoliberalism (which he actually classifies as an ideology, something that I had in my naivete previously only attributed to non-religions like communism) became the political air that we breath, to the extent that we hardly notice the blankly rational ideals of endless growth and deregulation behind neoliberalism. He also points out the apparent weakness of our societies and politics in the face of the oligarchs, autocrats, rapacious capitalists and populists that circle the neoliberal ideology. With its clear-eyed exposition of the dangers both to society and to the environment that the neoliberal ideology represents, the book provided the basic groundwork for most of the rest of my reading in 2025.

The books that I felt had the most impact on me, though, were Black Coffee, Doppelganger and Borderlines. These most effectively made personal - in an individual yet generally human way - the dangers of ideologies of all stripes, and the callous disregard for those who don’t hold great power or wealth; how, fundamentally, grand historical sweeps can make those doing the sweeping become inured to the notion of massive suffering and killing, their perspectives based mainly on maps, huge numbers and “great protagonists” with barely a thought for the human or ecological aspects of conquest, slavery, land grabs and social media conspiracy fabulism (with a dash of family thrown in). These three books highlighted (for me) the human aspect of it all, and, in a way, brought it all back to the question of consciousness, and the ethics that arise from that. Consciousness is such an amazing aspect of the universe that we should (I feel) hold it precious. Nihilists would counter that a universe’s “consciousness” - if it were to exist at all - couldn’t possibly depend on that of a single human (except, in too many cases, their own, of course), and they could mention that the human population is still increasing, which the universe should be “happy” about. But wantonly destroying, or deadening consciousnesses by depriving so many people of their potential, or preying on addictions for financial gain, for example, can be viewed as a crime against potential in a cold, uncaring universe that, to circle back to the kind of ridiculous but not logically inconsistent or disproven idea of panpsychism, could have consciousness as a goal of the universe, for it to be able to “feel” itself.

That runs close to the almost mystical themes that panpsychism raises, but these “images” or “simulations” or signals of pain or joy or satisfaction that we receive and interpret in our brains are our reality (if not the universe’s), and should be held to higher standards than mere numbers.

The 2025 books that didn’t rise to the same levels remain valuable, and will be part of my re-reading pattern for 2025, especially Slow Down, for its attempt to describe potential other paths for society, along with, hopefully, some lessons and ideas from Capital and Ideology to come, too.

The message that capitalism is at base predicated on limitless exploitation of resources (human and natural) to the point of collapse is common across Slow Down, The Invisible Doctrine and Black Gold - so this must factor in my own thinking and behaviour in the future.

I have - from listening to Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast (and reading his newsletter) also subscribed to Ed Ongweso Jr.’s newsletter (on Substack, boo!), The Tech Bubble, both of which hold the whole tech, AI and Venture Capital worlds in a pugnaciously sceptical, sociological, view.

I still need to formalise what I’ll actually do about it all. I’m a pretty comfortably well off (recent) home-owner, with at least the goal of picking up the pace and investment on our energy upgrades in 2026, to reduce our family’s carbon footprint. It’s not a revolution, and it’s worth remembering that things aren’t all that bad here in Germany - which is another thing I should work on. Maintaining positive and respectful interactions with as much of what society has to offer as possible is, ultimately, the answer proposed by all sceptics of neoliberalism: we’re humans, doing things for the good of people. And, if places like the USA, people like Putin, Xi, Erdogan et al, would switch the ‘G’ in MxGA from “Great” to “Good”, we’d all be in a much better place.

I’m a pretty good sketcher of words and ideas, but a terrible completer of posts: making sure that the ideas make sense and connect properly, trying to get the wording and the feel right, trying to draw conclusions and lessons from whatever experiences or thoughts I am trying to describe; sometimes even deciding which service to post things on (a ridiculous situation, in all honesty) - that’s all hard work, and sometimes I just don’t feel that I have the energy to complete it.

As a result, my pool of drafts begins to overflow and prevents me from really finishing.

So, in the spirit of draining the pool and refreshing my perspectives, here’s a dump of my most current drafts, cross-posted on Blogger and on my Micro.blog instance!

Rethinking which services I should keep, and why, is something for another day.

A review of Umberto Eco’s The Island of the Day Before

created 2023-09-06

This is a most typically Umberto Eco book, of an unknown, uncertain narrator reconstructing the putative, fragmentary notes of a shipwrecked passenger of a sailing ship, weaving them into an improbably rich, thoughtful, infuriating and nebulous narrative.

Had I not read Six Walks in the Literary Woods, Eco’s talks on his theories of narration, including the constructs of the Model Author and the Model Reader, had I not already re-read The Name of the Rose and Foucalt’s Pendulum, I may well have given up on this book.

Is Agile agile?

created 2023-09-28

I remember years ago reading about an almost unbearably enlightened concept in project management called Agile. I wished, as we trudged along those familiar, well-worn yet somehow always overgrown, brambly and muddy paths through gates and past millstones - sorry, milestones - towards yet another similar product launch in the automotive industry, that we could put those paths behind us and start afresh, be agile.

The name itself was glorious, tantalising, joyful, even, bringing to mind fleetness of foot and unbounded creativity with the goal of bringing something new and fresh to the world.

That, I had to admit, didn’t seem to very closely describe the world I worked in. With Agile’s origins in infinitely malleable software, I knew I would never personally experience agile project management. Herding recalcitrant parts into vehicles was always going to be an uneasy fit with agile methods, I was sure.

I would never experience agile; until I suddenly did, at my new company in a new industry - and I have some thoughts I’d like to share.

No, agile is not agile

What I can say, after five cycles of sprints, workshops, reviews, retrospectives and planning is: the method never for a moment felt agile.

In our short training course we learned how we could achieve a goal even within the constraints of stupidly and very artificially short development cycles. Rapid feedback loops would trump planning and design (which always leads to trial and error anyway).

But the way I experienced our agile project was remarkably rigid. We brainstormed a load of User Stories against an equally brainstormed set of OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), which formed the “Backlog” (even though they weren’t at that time uncompleted or delayed, which is my usual term for items that are in backlog), then dumped a load of them into the first Sprint.

That Backlog was in one sense the Prologue to the whole project, and our very own, self-defined Millstone.

Now, of course we weren’t totally naive about it: we knew which User Stories represented basic functionality and which would naturally come later, once these basics were sorted. But a number of difficulties with our systems meant that we got bogged down even at that early stage and the prospect of closing off User Stories in an acceptable and documented fashion diminished day by day.

And then, suddenly, it was time for the Sprint Review, for the Retrospective from that Sprint and planning for Sprint 2, with the Backlog looming like some Godzilla of Not Done, no paradigm of agility.

We were able to add User Stories as other issues cropped up, and we did in the end discover that some User Stories were irrelevant or completely incapable of being completed with the systems we were working with: these were ultimately tagged with “Won’t Do” rather than Done.

But that initial setting of User Stories set our path in just as rigid a manner as the traditional “Waterfall” method, and I even began to think that the Waterfall has some benefits like repetition of tasks and documentation for each milestone, ensuring that they mature with the project, rather than being looked at once, documented and dumped.

What did I learn?

This is a key question for any initiative and is built in to the Agile method in the guise of the Retrospective.

At work I - with the team, of course, it couldn’t be any other way - recently completed my third ever sprint review, took part in its corresponding retrospective (the cool kids say just “retro”), and planned for the fourth sprint, by reviewing and prioritising the backlog.

To put that into context, I am now - finally! (I can no longer write “Finally” without thinking of Vaughan William’s A Sea Symphony) - involved in my very first “agile” project, and I’m at least getting used to the jargon. But, is it as good and as efficient and energising as I imagined it to be, back when I was on the outside, jealously looking in?

From the confines of automotive industry projects and the traditional task-and-milestone mills that were our project styles, I would hear and read of some distant enlightened lands of agile project management: from where I stood, agile appeared desirable, enjoyable, more efficient, “better”: today I wonder if this is really the case.

As with any , including training that included the agile manifesto, descriptions of sprints, retrospectives, workshops and all of those good things - or at least a variant (the purists would no doubt say ‘deviant’) of it - at work, and I have some issues with it.

I’m also somewhat distracted by the vocabulary, especially the notion of the word “backlog.”

Before starting the project, the word backlog felt wrong to me: it implies work that behind its planned completion date and is building up through some form of bottleneck, whether this be . Before kick-off, backlog is prolog(ue)

This Guardian opinion piece on the British NHS, or [this search]([NHS backlog site:theguardian.com) for articles containing the words “backlog” and “NHS” in the Guardian, or this article referring to the backlog of asylum applications in the UK really give a sense of what I mean

Now that we’re a sprint in, and we see what we had collected as “to-do’s” and did and didn’t complete in that first sprint, we see the collection of unedited “User Stories” that really does act as a mass to be reduced. A backlog, perhaps, but also a mountain of ice cream needing to be eaten spoonful by planned spoonful

User Stories are not tasks

Project Management is a technology, a process, a human-made artefact, which also enforces a lot of documentation (that most people in the world won’t read)

Engineering engineering

created 2023-10-14

really for my Literally Engineering engineering blog

I tumbled literally not engineering into the New Year 2023.

Now working again, a confirmed escapee from the automotive industry, I find myself contentedly and, by my own reckoning, at least, gainfully installed in the engineering community of a medium sized company making sensors for industrial applications.

I also find myself wondering whether I might still actually be literally not engineering.

Information wrangler

My new working environment, beyond the desk, the chair and the coffee machine, is digital. I no longer handle parts or discuss testing in the lab. Instead, I deal almost exclusively with data and information: electronic representations of real, or potentially real, things (sensors that other companies buy), and with “non-things” like methods, guidelines, specifications and communications.

Through this last point, clearly I do deal a great deal with the very real, the occasionally thoroughly perplexing and frequently enriching interactions with my colleagues and other humans in all their complexity.

In this combination, my role combines both forms of knowhdge characterised by Aristotle that I’ve been focussing on, techne and phronesis, which refer to making (in the original sense of the crafts) and practical politics respectively.

Aside from the physical handling of parts both new and old in my previous job, is this any different?

In one respect, no, it’s not very different: the technical drawings that I used to produce, or, better, have produced for me) are informational representations and intentions of something that should ultimately end up being made, manufactured, turned real. But my current position puts me at at least one remove further from our final product. I help to ensure that our data and (data + meaning + truth or accuracy = ) information ends up in the right form and location, with sufficient accessibility and searchability that it is useful to those colleagues of mine who do work on products that will ultimately be manufactured, sold and put to constructive use in industry and society.

Gotta role with it

My position currently consists of three main roles: representing mechanical engineering in our company’s new PLM initiative, updating and managing our design guidelines, and, closely linked to those, managing our CAD systems, methods, and - surpise! - data (servers, databases, etc).

This new working world of mine has an expanded ontology compared to the previous one, in that I now also have dealings with two additional domains, electronics and software. These, too, work mainly informationally (electronics schematics creating the general logic, plus the software and firmware that tame the chips).

These domains can be seen as models for my own new sense of engineering, if engineering is what it is that I do. They construct “devices” that work according to particular rules and logic, to meet certain goals, within a largely technical domain.

They make use of tools and consider ways of testing their output against predetermined requirements and - that word again - constraints (price, availability, approvals, maturity, etc).

In total, this set of roles raises the question for me: what of that is engineering?

Intriguing devices

If electronics and software can be considered as “devices”, then so could the objects and elements that I work on: the outputs of my work are not physical but logical devices of varying complexity, that need tweaking, tuning and, occasionally an overhaul or complete replacement.

To be able to do any of that, I need to understand their mechanisms, weak points, inconsistencies and failures - just like in any engineering context.

I can consider as actually being secondary to their actuality in the engineering environment as actually being secondary to their actuality in the engineering environment.

Infra-engineering

Like infrared or infrastructure, infra-engineering is my imagined term for the work done “below” engineering, to support it. Foundational engineering , we could call it.

of what I do is engineering? This is where my uncertainty regarding the definition of engineering itself requires that I attempt to break things down into sensible components to see if, during reassembly, any parts or subassemblies look like engineering as I understand or have experienced it.

A more philosophical stance

One attraction of where I now stand in the engineering landscape is that I can view the whole more philosophically than before. I can use the term “ontology” in both the technical, “PLM” sense of listing out the parts that we have, and in the more philosophical sense of “what are we dealing with here, exactly?” This would include discussion of our beliefs in PLM entries representing physical products, those entries including thumbnail images of CAD models of those components ; or, indeed, considering CAD assemblies as mere containers for the components, plus positional relationships.

It can all get me back to the very beginnings of this blog, considering the writings of Gilbert Simondon , and his considerations of concrete and abstract parts.

Outputs

Perhaps the clearest way of investigating the essence of my work is to ask what I will be “producing.” For a “true” engineer, the product would be clear: designs and specifications according to which items could be made and sold to a market.

Rather than items that can be sold onto a market, I am helping to design the environments in which our engineers work. My customers are my own colleagues, the engineers - and they can be demanding! In addition to designing that environment, I’ll also be documenting it and specifying how these colleagues will work: I have to define both the path and the handrails / safety railings for it.

That sounds very bureaucratic, I’ll admit. But here, too, is a question: are bureaucracies engineered?

Outputs:

• A realistic, understandable and internally marketable (acceptable) system and structure for storing and linking engineering data with other and with non- engineeing data.
• Workflows
• Administrative constraints and guardrails
• Specifications
• An organised knowledge base
• Installed, tested and approved software
• Tested and approved methods for working with that software
• so, whilst I no longer deal with labs, I certainly deal with testing: I write (or at least imagine) test scripts, and I record the results in text, screen shots and screen captures.

A digital Dewey

The obverse of outputs is of course the inputs that I need to consider. Now, since I’m not personally generating much of the data, but figuring out how best to organise and present it, like a digital Dewey for libraries, my inputs are the platform that we must tune to our needs, representative data for testing, and in Agile project management speak, User Stories and challenges, known issues and ways of working, that need to be selectively reimplemented or optimised, or bypassed, with the new systems.

There’s a train of thought that the administrations, procedures, methods and laws of modern society are themselves forms of technology. And technologies are engineered.

Here, I am still defining and specifying how our CAD engineers will work, including fruitfully constraining choices in terms of things like material selection, design for injection moulding and the like. These outputs will be the design guidelines and standards to which our engineers should or must adhere.

On the PLM front, I’m helping to define the form of engineering data and collaboration on that data within the confines of a pre-existing PLM structure.

Tools and methods

Graphing and flow charts, procedures and guidelines

Ways of thinking and interpretation

Thinking as an engineer who does rather like to minimise bureaucratic effort. Lifecycle and maturity states. Drawings and metadata. Relations, links and causality.

Knowing what we need to prove, our affordances

Handling our CAD data, our releases, reports - and the network of components, assemblies that ultimately lead to products being sold on the market.

Action and agency

In this role I do quite a lot. Testing to understand the limits and constraints of our systems.

How else would I describe it?

If what I do at work is not engineering, then what is it? Luciano Floridi refers to philosophy as conceptual design… So, could what I am doing at work, as well as here, in this post, be referred to as philosophy?

Or a chemistry of engineering: picking the atoms of information and turning them into valuable molecules, rigid crystals or flexible polymers of information that undergird the products that we make.

Perhaps I’m operating as a lawyer of technical information, determing what’s “right” in engineeringly “legal” ways.

The classic analogy for this sort of work is to the architect: someone who, combining innate, but trained, aesthetics with technical understanding and realism, creates - in combination with a vast range of experts - a new structure that can be used by many people over time.

Design engineer

I am a designer of engineering methods. The basic software elements are already present, the systems made available by companies larger than our own. But we need to select the

… and I didn’t get further than that (yet)

Jeptha (a Handel oratorio)

created 2023-10-31

Last Saturday, on the 28th October, I sang in my second Bachchor concert in the Peterskirche Heidelberg. Once more in English, though notably less heavy than Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony, this time we were singing Handel’s final oratorio, Jeptha.

Wikipedia, with its patience of multitudes, has a much more informative [summary on Jeptha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jephtha_(Handel) than I could presume to write, so I won’t go into the details here.

We had an excellent young lineup of soloists, including an emerging talent in the English tenor Gwilym Bowen , who sang the title role.

I did end up wondering about the political implications of the message contained in the story of Israel’s victory.

Employment (and) agency

created 2023-12-04

This time last year, in December 2022, I was coming to the end of my employment at Cooper Standard. The company was doing what alert companies do, reconfiguring the business to focus on growth areas, and my expertise in threaded fasteners and coatings was no longer considered to be of sufficient value to retain in an increasingly plastics world. Some discussions on timing and payout later, I was to leave at the end of the year.

It’s interesting to look back on that time of wrapping up: calling key contacts to let them know that I’d be moving on, reminiscing on fun and challenging times, wondering what gardening leave would be like; and, of course, digging out the CV to give it a good old refresh, and starting to wonder what I wanted to do next.

Even with the buffer of gardening leave, hope and expectation were tinged by uncertainty. What sort of industry would I end up working in, and would I be able to hold to certain standards (no military, no fossil fuels, for example) indefinitely? How big a commute would I accept, having been able to cycle to work for all those years? Uprooting the family wasn’t really a consideration, but the idea did lodge itself at the back of my mind, along with that other associated mental paraphernalia of leaving a position without having a new one already lined up - including starting the unemployment process in time, in - gasp! - Germany*.

That combination of hope mixed with unease at the directionlessness I was faced with (my pending gardening leave may have felt enticing, but it still led nowhere), held a certain diffuse meaning that it’s worth reflecting on now.

The value of work is grounded by predictability and security. If these are lacking, as they are in so many areas like the arts, or catering, or fixed-term contracts, and for those brave enough to set out as consultants, then you’re permanently on shifting ground, seeking balance, always having to stay alert for new opportunities and less able to switch off, to reflect and - in the extreme case - to appreciate the good things in life.

Fundamentally, it’s about having agency, being able to decide your own path, in your own time, on your own terms, resulting in Action - taking Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of the word - in which a person has the opportunity to show who (rather than “what”) they are.** Merely enacting (carrying out) jobs doesn’t suffice for action in this sense, which is why so many jobs can be unsatisfying, even when they are settled on a baseline of security.

Now, writing this in the luxury of a secure position, in which both I and the role(s) I have at Pepperl+Fuchs are developing, and with the buffer of time behind me, I can admit that the timing of my leaving Cooper Standard was right for both parties - sometimes inertia sets in and we don’t quite reach the threshold for action, requiring an external impetus to get us going again.

How should I summarise this post, then? What’s its moral? Just to make us aware again of who we are in the working world, to be appreciative of security, to be wary of dulling ourselves, and aware of all the other factors that play a role in our decisions, especially, of course, the people and society we live in.

* The Arbeitsamt turned out to be an excellent institution, proactive and leaving me to my own thing in the right degrees, and remarkably uncomplicated, once I got the hang of their website!

** This perspective taken from one of my favourite philosophical books, Back to the Rough Ground, by Joseph Dunne, chiefly about forms of technical and practical/political knowledge.

I’m a pretty good sketcher of words and ideas, but a terrible completer of posts: making sure that the ideas make sense and connect properly, trying to get the wording and the feel right, trying to draw conclusions and lessons from whatever experiences or thoughts I am trying to describe; sometimes even deciding which service to post things on (a ridiculous situation, in all honesty) - that’s all hard work, and sometimes I just don’t feel that I have the energy to complete it.

As a result, my pool of drafts begins to overflow and prevents me from really finishing.

So, in the spirit of draining the pool and refreshing my perspectives, here’s a dump of my most current drafts, cross-posted on Blogger and on my Micro.blog instance!

Rethinking which services I should keep, and why, is something for another day.

I’m currently reading “Galileo’s Error” by Philip Goff, basically an introduction to the intriguing theory of consciousness called panpsychism, which proposes that consciousness (in whatever form) is present in everything: gluons and bosons have a corresponding “particle” of consciousness. We humans appear to have exceeded a critical level of conscious integration, rendering us “conscious”, in the sense of having an awareness of self.

(I deliberately avoided writing “self-conscious” there, for obvious reasons!)

Anyway, I’m not far enough into the book to discuss the theory in any great depth, but I did find myself, during a break in today’s rehearsal, “seeking” my consciousness. It still could be an “illusion”, but that’s what philosophy is for: to explore!