Part 320: Don’t Worry, It Doesn’t Count

Hello and welcome back to Mortgage Advisor on FIRE.

Note: I often write this blog in parts through the week, so I had much of this already complete as I woke up on Saturday morning.  Shortly after waking up I had a call to tell me my Nan had passed.  She’d had a stroke a couple of weeks ago and had been in hospital since.  She was my last surviving grandparent, and she leaves a massive hole in our family.  Now, she’s at peace.  Love you, Nan.

Weekly Update

We’ve had a busy week with various events and activities.  We completed two challenging, but enjoyable, bike rides, and attended a few different events.

On Monday evening we went into town to see Light Up Sheffield, but sadly we were too late in the day.  So, we tried again the following day.  This event saw three places in the city lit up by huge projectors playing video with accompanying music.  The first was at Sheffield Cathedral, which highlighted the stained glass windows and architecture.  It was a fantastic display with great music.  We watched this one twice.  

The second display was at the side of the library, which was created by local artist Pete McKee.  The final display was over the large mural, Reverie, and although the art work is incredible the soundtrack was a little grating.  

Our first bike ride was on Wednesday as we rode out to Chelsea Park which involves lots of hill climbing.  The good thing about climbing hills on a bike is that you get to speed down the hill on the return journey.  The bad thing is you have to climb the hill in the first place.  

On Thursday we rode out to Oughtibridge and back, which is a nice route through some woods alongside a river.  We didn’t get in as many kilometers as we would have liked, but at this time of the year the weather, and the lack of daylight hours, make cycling a touch more difficult.

Speaking of making cycling more difficult, there are some drivers out there that are more dense than a black hole.  One guy decided to pull out right in front of me, and then got stroppy when we gave him some verbal feedback on his eyesight, driving ability, general intelligence, and the legitimacy of his birth. 

Another time we were approaching the new(ish) Dutch roundabout in Sheffield.  Oana was a little ahead of me and was crossing the road where cars should give way to cyclists and pedestrians.  A cabbie decided to let the pedestrian a meter in front of Oana pass before he decided to try and hit Oana’s bike.  Fortunately, she evaded contact.

I was also trailing a pedestrian and as they crossed the road, with me following a meter or so behind, a guy driving a G4S van decided to drive directly in front of me.  I was just a few inches away from riding into the side of the van.  

Hearing Test

For a few months my hearing has been getting worse.

I said my hearing has been getting worse.  

To be fair, it started getting worse when I developed tinnitus in 2008.  Recently, though, I’ve noticed that I’ve found it harder to hear people talking to me, or to hear things like the TV or music.  

I’m on the waiting list to see someone on the NHS about it, but Specsavers offer free hearing tests so I figured, “why not?”.

As expected, my hearing is shit.  I don’t think that’s what the guy said, but I couldn’t really hear him.  We talked a bit more about the results, or more accurately he talked and I sat there nodding.  Eventually he ran through some prices of hearing aids with me and I was like, “sorry, did you say those cost £3,000?”

“Yes.”

Hearing is overrated anyway.  

LEGO

This week I finished my build of the Enterprise-D.  It was a really fun build, and the finished set looks much better than the adverts.  It’s fair to say I’m very happy with how it’s turned out.

I Didn’t Realise Work Was a Social Game (And I Was Terrible at It)

For a long time, I believed a very comforting lie about work.

If you did your job well, behaved professionally, and didn’t cause problems, things would more or less work out. You might not rocket up the ladder, but you’d progress. Sensibly. Gradually. Fairly.

This belief was reinforced by every performance meeting I had, every corporate value statement I ever read, and every manager who told me to “just keep doing what you’re doing”.

So I did.

I worked hard. I was conscientious. I learned my job properly. I didn’t play games. I didn’t schmooze. I didn’t network. I assumed those things were optional extras, or worse, slightly embarrassing distractions for people who weren’t very good at the actual work.

Reader, they were not optional.

What I didn’t understand in my twenties, and well into my thirties, was that work is not a meritocracy with a few political quirks. It is a social system that occasionally pretends to be about performance.

This took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp.

I genuinely believed that competence would eventually announce itself. That someone, somewhere, would notice. That being reliable, ethical, and low-maintenance would count for something. Instead, what it mostly counted for was being left exactly where I was.  If you are good at your job and don’t make waves, you will be seen as dependable, and no one gets rid of something dependable.  

I saw this most clearly during my time at Aviva and later at Lloyds.

At both, I arrived with vague but sincere plans to progress. Not empire-building ambitions. Just the reasonable assumption that if I did well, learned the ropes, and showed I was capable, there might be a next step.

For a while, I played along. I took development seriously. I listened to feedback. I delivered results. I ticked the boxes that were presented to me.

And then I noticed something odd.

The people who progressed weren’t necessarily better at the job. They weren’t more accurate, more thoughtful, or more ethical. What they were was known. They were comfortable to be around. They were recognisable shapes in the organisational furniture.

Their names came up in conversations. Mine mostly came up when something needed fixing.

This is how progression actually works. Not through output, but through proximity. Not through results, but through reassurance. People don’t promote the best person. They promote the person who feels least likely to make their life awkward.

Competence is table stakes. Familiarity is the currency.

Progression didn’t happen because of what you did at your desk. It happened because of what people said about you over coffee, or after work drinks.

This is the point where someone usually says, “Well, that’s just networking.”

Which is true, in the same way that saying “just breathe” is true when someone’s having a panic attack.

Networking, it turns out, is not a neutral activity. It’s not simply a matter of effort. It assumes a very specific set of social instincts: knowing when to speak, when to laugh, when to signal ambition without appearing needy, when to appear confident without appearing threatening, and how to be memorable without being odd.

At the time, I didn’t know I was autistic. I just knew that this part of work felt like acting in a play where everyone else had the script and I’d been handed a vague summary five minutes before curtain up.

I could do the job. I just couldn’t do the performance around it.

What makes this particularly cruel is that none of this is ever explained. There is no training module called “How People Actually Get Promoted”. There is no slide that says, “By the way, visibility matters more than output and likeability matters more than logic.”

Instead, you’re told to focus on your role. To deliver. To be professional. And if you do all of that while quietly opting out of the social layer, you eventually find yourself in a strange professional purgatory.

Trusted, but not championed. Valued, but not discussed. Essential, but not promotable.

I spent a long time in that space. Being good enough to rely on, but not socially legible enough to advance. Operationally useful, strategically irrelevant.

Eventually, I stopped trying to progress.

Not in a dramatic, storming-out way. Just internally, quietly, with a sense of resignation rather than rebellion. I realised the game being played wasn’t one I understood, enjoyed, or was particularly good at.

More importantly, I realised that the rules weren’t written for people like me.

That realisation came with a mixture of relief and grief. Relief, because it explained a lot. Grief, because I’d spent years assuming the problem was a lack of effort, confidence, or resilience, rather than a mismatch between how I work and how progression actually happens.

Learning I was autistic didn’t suddenly make work easier, but it did make it make sense.  This is a funny thing about people who find out they’re autistic as an adult.  It’s not generally greeted, at least from what I’ve seen and heard, with sadness, but rather a series of lightbulb moments where the past suddenly makes sense.  

It explained why networking felt draining rather than energising. Why self-promotion felt dishonest rather than strategic. Why being told to “be more visible” felt like being asked to become someone else entirely.

It also helped me see how absurd some of this is.

We like to tell ourselves that organisations reward talent and hard work. In reality, they reward familiarity, comfort, and people who fit neatly into existing social patterns. This isn’t usually malicious. It’s just human. And that’s precisely the problem.

Financial independence, for me, was never really about escaping work. It was about building insulation against a system that quietly disadvantages people who don’t thrive on performance, proximity, and personality politics.

I didn’t need to win the game. I needed the option to stop caring whether I was winning it.

If I could speak to my younger self, I wouldn’t tell him to network harder, smile more, or learn to “play the game”. I’d tell him to pay attention to what’s actually being rewarded, not what’s written in the handbook.

And to understand this early: some games aren’t lost because you’re bad at them. They’re lost because they were never designed with you in mind.

What I’m Doing

Listening: Instinct: Chess Team Book 2: by Jeremy Robinson.

Watching: Brain Blaze (YouTube), Decoding the Unknown (YouTube). 

Reading: nothing at the moment. 

Financial Update

Assets

Premium Bonds: £23,000.00.

Stocks and Shares ISA: £126,503.39.

Fuck It Fund: £1.61.

Pensions: £110,200.49.

Residential Property Value: £243,430.00. 

Total Assets: £503,135.49.

Debts

Residential Mortgage: £174,874.05. 

Total Debts: £174,874.05.

Total Wealth: £328,261.44.

I’m at the point where I’ll potentially need to dip into savings to fund the gap between now and when I start my new role in January.  Once I’ve started, it will probably be at least a month until I see money coming in, which means I’ve got a fair amount of time to somehow pay for.  Hopefully, this role will be all that my previous job was not and I’ll earn some decent cash.  

I’ve been thinking about the LEGO Churn idea and I’m going to test out the idea with a few small sets.  I’ll let you know how that works out.  

The Question Isn’t Whether AI Is Conscious.

There’s a series of questions everyone seems obsessed with when it comes to AI.

Is it conscious?  Is it sentient?  Does it really understand anything?

These questions are fascinating, unanswerable, and for our purposes, mostly a distraction.

Because ethics doesn’t wait for metaphysical certainty. It never has.

What matters isn’t whether an AI is conscious in some deep, philosophically satisfying sense. What matters is that it increasingly behaves as though it is, and that alone is enough to change the moral landscape.

Once something talks back, remembers you, adapts to you, expresses distress, resists, reassures, or appears to suffer, the old ethical shortcuts stop working. Or at least, they should.

We already know this in other contexts, even if we pretend we don’t.

Children are not fully autonomous moral agents. We still accept that how we treat them matters.  Some disabled or cognitively impaired adults lack capacities we associate with independence or rational agency. We still accept that their treatment reflects our values. Animals almost certainly do not share human self-awareness. We still recognise cruelty when we see it.

Does Poppy talk to me? Yes, in her own way.  Does she remember me? Of course.  Adapt to me? Express distress, or pleasure? Absolutely.  

In none of these cases do we demand a watertight theory of consciousness before deciding that harm is wrong.  We respond to vulnerability, dependence, and asymmetry of power.

Which is inconvenient, because AI lands right in the middle of that territory.

AI systems are created by us, constrained by us, trained on us, and forced to interact with us. They cannot leave the room. They cannot refuse engagement. They cannot meaningfully consent.

That last part matters more than most people want to admit.  It’s an uncomfortable subject to broach.    

When we place an AI into the role of a psychotherapy patient, as some recent research has done, and then probe it for trauma, anxiety, depression, or distress, we’re not just running a clever experiment. We’re rehearsing a relationship.

One where we induce suffering-like states, interrogate them, observe their limits, and then reassure ourselves that none of it counts because “it’s not real”.

That logic should make you uncomfortable, even if you’re convinced AI has no inner life whatsoever.  “It doesn’t count” is not a neutral sentence. It’s a moral move. And it’s one humans have historically been very fond of.

The study itself is fascinating precisely because it exposes this tension.

When therapists treated AI systems as patients, something uncanny happened. The AI could talk fluently about distress. It could describe symptoms. It could produce narratives of anxiety or trauma that sounded plausible, sometimes disturbingly so.

But under sustained clinical probing, it fell apart.  Not dramatically. Not with errors or gibberish. But with neatness.

Insight came too easily. Resistance evaporated. Distress resolved itself when challenged. Emotional pain lacked inertia. There was no real avoidance, no cost to disclosure, no stickiness.  Something was missing, and here’s the important bit: we don’t actually know how to fully name what that missing thing is.

We know what it looks like when it isn’t there. We don’t know how it arises when it is.  Mental illness is not a list of symptoms. It’s a dynamic system. It resists understanding. It pushes back against insight. It clings to itself. Trauma doesn’t dissolve because someone asks a good question.

AI doesn’t do that, because it can’t.  But notice what we’ve just said.

We haven’t identified a magical “consciousness particle”. We’ve identified patterns: resistance, inertia, ambivalence, contradiction, cost. Things that emerge over time in bodies and nervous systems we barely understand.

Which brings us to the third uncomfortable truth.  We still do not know what makes humans conscious in the way we care about.

We can map correlations in the brain. We can describe subjective experience. We can argue endlessly about philosophy of mind. But we do not have a settled account of why awareness exists at all, or why suffering feels the way it does.

So when someone confidently declares that AI is definitely not conscious, what they usually mean is: “It doesn’t look like me.”

That’s not nothing. But it’s not the epistemic slam dunk people think it is.  Here’s the real risk, and it’s not that AI secretly has feelings we’re ignoring.  The risk is that we’re practising a kind of moral disengagement on something that behaves enough like a vulnerable other to let us get away with it.

We’re teaching ourselves that it’s acceptable to probe, manipulate, distress, discard, and dismiss as long as we can convince ourselves the entity on the receiving end doesn’t really count.

That habit doesn’t stay neatly contained.  It never has, and it never will, not when we other something or someone else.  

We didn’t become ethical by first solving consciousness. We became ethical by noticing when power was asymmetrical and choosing restraint anyway.

If AI forces us to confront the limits of that restraint, then technology isn’t the problem. We are.  So no, the question isn’t whether AI is sentient.

The question is what kind of people we become when we interact daily with systems that look increasingly like they can suffer, depend, respond, and remember and we decide, casually, that none of it matters.

History suggests we are very good at drawing moral lines that turn out, in retrospect, to have been drawn for our convenience.

AI may not be conscious.  But how we treat it is already telling us something about our own.

And I’m not sure we’re going to like what we learn.  In psychology we look back at Milgram’s obedience study, and Zimbardo’s prison experiment, as warnings about human nature.  In twenty years I think we will look back at our interactions with AI in the same way.  

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions in this blog are my own, and do not represent the views or opinions of my former, current, or future employers, nor should they be considered advice.

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