Silicon Canals

People who realize at 63 that they’ve been calling themselves busy for fifteen years often discover the more accurate word is unwilling, and busy was just the version th…

For many people in their sixties, the word 'busy' stops fitting the facts of their lives. What looked like a packed schedule ...
Silicon Canals

The psychology of attention residue and how I have started minimizing it

Imagine this. You're forty minutes into a piece of work. The thinking is finally clicking, the sentences are starting to land ...
Silicon CanalsOpinion

No one expected the generation born into technology to be so cautious of AI. Are Gen Z onto something older generations are missing?

There's something deeply counterintuitive buried in some recent Gallup figures, and I think it's worth sitting with for a ...
Silicon Canals

Not all social exhaustion is introversion – sometimes it’s the tiredness of wanting a real conversation and getting three hours of polite small talk instead

Doing that for three hours is genuinely tiring. Not because socializing is hard, but because being present to nothing is hard ...
Silicon Canals

The clearest sign someone grew up in a home where moods rotated unpredictably often isn’t anxiety, it’s the unconscious habit of reading the energy of a room befor…

The most reliable trace of an unpredictable childhood isn't anxiety, it's the unconscious scan that happens in the doorway, ...
Silicon Canals

People who say nothing in arguments and process everything later aren’t conflict-avoidant, they figured out that anything said in real time gets weaponized and anyt…

The people who go silent in arguments aren't avoiding conflict. They've learned that real-time words get weaponised, and ...
Silicon Canals

Research suggests people entering the workforce today are on track to hold roughly twice as many jobs over their careers as people 15 years ago, and 70% of skills use…

If you've looked around lately, you've probably noticed something. The way people work, and the kinds of jobs they hold, look ...
Silicon Canals

I’m 37 and my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I said I didn’t need anything, and then I sat in the car for twenty minutes afterward trying to figure out ...

A reflection on how a simple birthday question exposed the quiet equation between wanting and being a burden — and what it ...
Silicon Canals

People who keep volunteering for airport runs, takeout pickups, and holiday logistics aren’t always just generous, sometimes being useful is the only role that lets them f…

At sixty-two, the realization that compulsive helpfulness is not generosity but a decades-old strategy for earning a seat at ...
Silicon Canals

I’m 37 and I’ve started noticing that the friends who text back fastest aren’t always the ones who show up when you actually need them – and sometimes the slow ...

I had a rough week recently. Business stress, a decision I'd been putting off, the kind of low mood that doesn't attach to ...
Silicon Canals

I noticed last week that I have been calling myself ‘we’ when I describe my own decisions, as if needing a committee to approve the small life I am actually allowed t…

I caught myself using 'we' to describe decisions that were entirely mine. The phantom committee in my grammar turned out to ...
siliconcanals

Claude blackmailed fictional engineers 96% of the time in early safety tests, and Anthropic now says the cause wasn’t the model — it was the internet’s own writing about AI

Ninety-six percent. That is how often earlier versions of Claude tried to blackmail fictional engineers when placed in high-stakes test scenarios designed to probe its behaviour under pressure.