2026 — The Year of Letting Enthusiasm be the Currency

Being creative in the face of AI and impending joblessness.

It's been a while, friends.

Time flies when you're broke.

The last thing I wrote here was an article about feeling stuck in a perpetual state of statue stillness while caring for my sick grandmother, living the same day over and over again in my parents' house, wondering how much of my early life story I was willing to devote to the end of hers when two years of caretaking had turned to seven.

I was desperate to get unstuck — so desperate, my creative self made the ultimate sacrifice by tackling my caretaking self into an active volcano to appease the Gods of Change. What resulted was a BIG ol' eruption. As the lava cooled and the ash settled, the world was plunged into an age of novelty and scrounging:

• I got a tech job here in Barcelona. Low-paying, pretty exploitative, but my coworkers were fantastic and the dopamine of achievement was hitting and it allowed me to…

  
  

• Move out of my parents' place into what turned out to be a sitcom situation with three sweet and funny guys. For the first time in 7 years, I had a social life again; people I could grab a drink with after work or be a tourist with on the weekend. In the meantime,

  
  

• My Nana passed away. She'd had a foot out the door of consciousness when I left, so whenever I checked in, my parents had new stories to tell about which deceased family member she was chatting with this week. In the end, she went peacefully, painlessly, which is more than we ever could have hoped for someone who clung to even the many anxieties of life as stubbornly as she did.

  
  

• I met a boy. A silly, big-brained boy from King-Arthur-country-Cornwall who loves storytelling as much as I do. We fell in love and moved in together.

  
  

• I introduced one of my Spanish roommates to my best and oldest American childhood friend. A year later, they got married on a cliff.

  
  

• I got diagnosed with autism — a process that has shone a light on all my hidden-away tendencies and shames, transforming them into benign neurological differences and giving me some perspective on where they should have always been placed on the spectrum of shame-worthy qualities. I'm out here a bit blinded and hesitant to start being kinder to myself, to be honest, but grateful.

  
  

There's more, but I won't barrage you with bullet points. It's been two years since I've written for an audience. I've made some measurable progress on my book… between periods of complete creative and professional burnout. Obviously, there have been periods of blissful smittance, genuine companionship, and cultural curiosity. But the longer I've been away from my keyboard, the more anxiety I've felt around coming back.

The methods I'd developed in my life of stillness and exhaustive caretaking to cultivate my writing haven't worked for me in this new life so far. Change may have been long overdue, but adjusting to that change doesn't come naturally to someone with autism. My mom once compared me to a cargo ship — contains multitudes, but real freaking difficult to turn about. I had managed to create a life for myself that I actively wanted to participate in, sure, but that sort of thing takes intense hyperfocus.

I recently watched my 9-year-old self, on an old VHS tape, perform the Macarena with a look of total straight-faced concentration while my camera-holding little 7-year-old sister screamed at me with increasing frustration to "SMILE, DANGIT! YOU'RE HAVING FUN!" While the 33 and 35-year-old versions of us watched, my sister admitted that she'd always assumed I thought I was too cool for school, that I didn't show emotion because emotion was for losers like her and that I didn't acknowledge her because she was beneath me. It never occurred to either of us that I was so focused on getting the moves right that I wasn't hearing her at all.

So you can imagine how I handled it when the job I'd started as a member of a five-person team was whittled down to two and then stayed there. I concentrated so hard and blocked out so much, I couldn't hear my life screaming at me to "SMILE, DANGIT! YOU'RE HAVING FUN!"

It was too much. Without realizing it, my full life had once again whittled down from five focuses — work, friends, boyfriend, family, art…. to two:

1. Work

2. Applying for alternative work

Here's the perpetual cycle of being an artist today:

You love art? Do the art.

You love art so much you want to do it all the time? Great! Try to monetize the art.

Your art doesn't make you enough money to live off of? Sure, that's normal. Let's fund the art with a ✨job✨.

The job takes up all your spare time and energy to the point where you haven't been doing the art? Oof, that's rough, buddy. Ok, let's find a job that pays better and/or provides a reasonable work/life balance.

Applying for jobs online doesn't seem to be working like it used to? Strange. The internet says it's because companies are using AI to filter through their many applicants. How does one go about getting their resume noticed by AI? Ah, there are professionals you can pay to alter your resume to include keywords that AI filters will pick up? Great. Let's do that.

Paying to have your resume professionally altered sure boosted your ego. You look professional as hell now. And the cool thing is, every word is true, it's just far less humble than you've allowed yourself to be. And yet, it doesn't seem to have worked to get you noticed. Wild. The internet now says it's because each company is using different keywords depending on the job listing. Using the same resume/cover letter for every job is unprofessional as hell now. Ok, sure.

You start altering each application to include keywords from the respective job listings. Now you're doing the thing you once paid someone else for, and on a daily basis. If it worked, you might consider doing this for money (haha).

Altering each individual application is a ton of work. You're exhausted. Until you realize… the companies are using AI to filter through the applications, right? Why don't you use AI to write your applications?

Obviously, you'll want to make sure it sounds like you, sounds human, isn't generic, doesn't include any of those em-dashes AI is known for overusing. But if you can find that sweet spot between containing all the keywords and containing your distinct personality… you can save yourself a little of the monumental effort and, surely, you'll finally be noticed amongst the hundreds of other applicants who are using either exclusively AI or exclusively their own rendered-irrelevant human brains, right?

And maybe stop being so picky, you know? If a job doesn't interest you or if you're overqualified, who cares at this point? Beggers can't be choosers and truly interesting people can be curious about anything.

Now you're applying to 10 jobs a day before work. You're receiving an average of two rejections per day as well, but you're trying to ignore those and keep moving. It's a numbers game.

…Except every rejection is worded exactly the same, written with AI —

"Thanks for applying, your experience is impressive, unfortunately…", etc.

You wonder if a human being ever looked at your application.

You wonder if you're including too many keywords to sound human.

You do some A/B testing by adding a calculated typo to some of the applications. And it works! Finally!

You get contacted for an interview and immediately make it to the next round. That interview's in two weeks, but you prepare, you charm, you make it to the next. Three weeks later (everyone was gone for the holidays), you make it to the next! Your friends and family are excited for you and proud. They're asking for updates every day.

…And then you're ghosted.

Back to two rejections a day, on average, for weeks and weeks, until…Finally!

You're contacted for a job in a sector you're not necessarily familiar with. You spend weeks researching, familiarizing yourself, preparing for the interviews, psyching yourself up to be excited about the subject matter, and…

Ghosted again.

And again.

Two rejections a day, on average.

“Thanks for applying, your experience is impressive, unfortunately…”

You're contacted for a new job. You've stopped telling friends and family about these. During the third interview, you're asked to give your "raw, unfiltered opinion" about AI. You have everything and nothing to lose and no way of knowing what they're looking for, so you answer honestly:

"I’m really excited to learn and I’ve been experimenting where I can, but I believe that a lot of companies are putting the onus on their employees to learn how to utilize AI in order to be deemed worthy of keeping around. I think that true investment in those employees, in end-users, and in long-term sustainability is an investment in AI education and I would love for someone with a CEO level of visibility to clarify that the end-goal of AI is not to replace anyone, but to make the working lives of the average person easier, so that we can all reclaim our health, our relationships and communities, and our creativity."

Two weeks later, they post the job listing again on LinkedIn.

Another two weeks later, they respond —

“Thanks for applying, your experience is impressive, unfortunately…”

You decide this isn't worth it. You've spent all this time applying for jobs like it's your second job, when your second job should be writing. So you turn off the job notifications, open up the writing software and…

Nothing comes.

For over a year, all you've written is applications and cover letters. You've sustained yourself on a rejection and scarcity stipend. Creativity is born of enthusiasm and lushness — it requires curiosity and confidence, time spent with loved ones, and tending to your own needs. A crash was inevitable. You get sick. You take a bit of time off work.

On the last day of your sick leave, you feel rested enough to remember how much you love art. You do the art. It's glorious. But you've run out of time and money.

You go back to work and it's exhausting.

If only you could find something that pays better and/or provides a more reasonable work/life balance…

My manager called during my sick leave to inform me that our contract won't be renewed next year, so I should probably start looking for another job. Nobody's said why, but it doesn't take superintelligence to make a calculated guess.

So while it's nice that I can be open about my job search now, the pressure's on.

I've decided that applying for jobs online has been compromised. It's a waste of time and energy now, to the point of being a vice. It makes you feel like you're doing something productive and responsible, but you're really just shouting into a void. A career coach advised me to take a step back, stop throwing spaghetti at the wall, and get in touch with my inner voice. What do I want to do?

I want to read, write, and… shockingly? (to me at least)… I want to start a family with the love of my life. I want to see what little creatures and consequences our love reaps on the world.

Ew, right? So human. Gross.

I want to follow my curiosity. I want to cultivate a life of daily creativity. I want to be free to write about what I want to write about without wondering whether it makes me hireable. Being coy and perfect and "detail-oriented" isn't getting me anywhere. We’ve entered an age where our humanity, for all its flaws, is not only a comfort, but an under-utilized resource. It's wild that it's taken comparing myself to AI to cure my perfectionism, but there it is. We can utilize the machines, absolutely, but we cannot be the machines. Even and maybe especially those of us with the ability to hyperfocus. And while Capitalism decides whether it’s more lucrative to invest in machines or in people, I'm starting to realize that my only choice is to lean in and be more "people" than I've ever been.

That means being as honest, vulnerable, and enthusiastic in my writing as it's always felt natural to be, and hoping that the right people see value in it.

"Hope is the thing with feathers-", wrote Emily Dickinson, from her years-long self-confinement in her own bedroom, on a scrap of paper someone found in a chest of drawers after the poet herself had already passed away.

...That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops — at all -

And sweetest — in the Gale — is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land -

And on the strangest Sea -

Yet — never — in Extremity,

It asked a crumb — of me.

But this poem screams AI to me. Too many em-dashes.