(I’m looking for part-time job opportunities)
Starting the day in a panic about how I was going to bring work in next, I’ve been online all day. Luckily, I’m dog sitting in a country warmer than the UK right now, so I took the online outside.
Besides the rising cost of living and the scale and visibility of the violence in our collapsing economic system, I was also in a panic about how to articulate where I’m going, where I fit and what opportunities to even go for. Outside, I filled my ears with the online words of people braver and more articulate than me, but also people who deeply understand that their thoughts are shaped by the thoughts of many others before them and simultaneously by many others around them.
Words are so powerful in articulating our shared feelings, but that process of articulation is extremely taxing for a lot of us. Words don’t always come naturally to me, at least not at the spiralling nature of my thoughts, which makes the act of stringing them together so that another person can understand the meaning between the tangled mess that I'm simultaneously feeling, hearing, and processing, where ChatGPT comes in.
A colleague beautifully asked applicants for upcoming roles at Vouchsafe to simply share the prompts they would have used over the actual AI-generated response. I don’t know if my thoughts are organised enough for that, or if I’m brave enough so I asked ChatGPT: “Not to change it too much, just make it make sense.” And this is the product - with a bit of personality re-sprinkled back in ✨✨✨
The other reason why articulation is so taxing for so many is that it requires deep reflection. Something that, in the chaos of capitalism, feels completely at odds with the very real urgency to survive and the very absurd urgency of productivity being pushed upon us. Even so, as many of us are feeling the weight of an external value system that's completely wrong and violent, I see more and more people forcibly resisting with acts of reflection.
It was Indy Johar on **this episode** of Nadim Choucair’s wonderful Curiosity That Matters Podcast that helped me with this process of half-baked articulation in building from Stuart Kauffman’s concept of the Adjacent Possible:
an evolutionary biology theory to explain how complex systems evolve and develop, with the idea that at any given moment, the opportunities or possibilities for what can emerge or evolve are constrained by what already exists.
Indy (a previously practising architect) applied this concept to a process of exploring and understanding the world: that by following the red line through to root causes, we often end up in adjacent spaces. As we explore deeper into the reasons behind things, we discover new areas of possibility and potential.
So, I guess that’s what this is, and why I wanted to share it here in relation to my work. As I intentionally reflect and take my time exploring adjacent possibilities, I feel this urgency to connect the dots between my role as a partner with Vouchsafe, **Queer Salsa** (more info in the toggles below) and the pull I am feeling towards supporting communities. However, for now, I am keeping them slightly disparate as adjacent possibles, while also honing my focus on actively looking for work and learning experiences in community organising.
Simple answer: The revolution 💅🏻
Long answer: For me, it’s more about the ways in which we are organising grounded in care and the overarching values we are working towards.
Now as I said I’m struggling to succinctly articulate this and to be honest I don’t think this kind of work can be neatly packaged up. It’s an ongoing process of re-articulation developed through reflection and exploration as new through lines emerge.
So instead of trying to define it outright, I've gathered some of my working experiences and the threads that light me up to guide the direction(s) I would like to pursue further…