The more I write these status updates, the more and the less ridiculous it gets. More ridiculous because they amount to “I’m still here” messages sent out to the very small audience of people who read this blog and are not in regular contact with me, and there’s only so many times you can do that without feeling at least a little self conscious. I suppose I can manage one more time, at least: still here, still writing. At the very least, I’ve managed to post a few other times over the last 13 months, so that this hopefully doesn’t come across as an entirely self-absorbed exercise.

It’s less ridiculous, of course, because I’ve now hit six and a half years. When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, way back in December 2019, the doctors were, reasonably enough, not keen on talking about survivability, but everything I read suggested that I’d be lucky to reach 50 (I’d just turned 44 a couple of months before). Well, I turned 50 nine months ago, and so far my semi-whimsical strategy of sticking around long enough for medical science to figure out how to cure me is working surprisingly well. Stick around a few more years and it might prove even more successful. In the meantime, Lorlatinib serves me well, as it has for the last three years-plus.

As for happenings over the past 13 months, while the medical side of things has remained blissfully routine (given my regime of regular scans and doctor’s visits, uneventful is hardly accurate), there have been a few changes. Work, for one thing. Halfway through 2025, I took voluntary redundancy from what had been at the start a dream job in the games industry. It was absolutely an experience worth doing, and I’m not ruling out working in games again, but for the moment that seems a dream on hold: the games industry is in turmoil, spinning through a series of massive layoffs, and there’s a huge field of people with more experience than me looking for the same kinds of jobs I would be up for. Still, I’ve managed to get myself employed again, and in the current climate, I’m happy enough to be so.

In terms of travel, I had planned to take another long trip around my 50th birthday in September 2025, but being unemployed at the time (I let my redundancy package bankroll me for a few months), I decided that would be a bit extravagant. So I stuck closer to home for the most part, though I did venture to the Baltic nations in March 2026, touring from Finland south through Estonia and Latvia to Lithuania. Ticking off a few more countries on my European list and enjoying more rail travel in the hopes of longer trips to come. Up next is Bulgaria (visiting my cousin there) and the southern Balkans (ticking off a few more blank boxes) this September. Hopefully without any untoward political events intruding—some of the countries I’d most like to visit seem to be either currently or permanently embroiled in the kind of troubles that lead governments to advise avoiding them.

I do get sent abroad for work sometimes, which isn’t something I’ve run across too often in the past. Writers are not commonly required to be on the spot for content retrieval. No complaints though. I’m even hoping to get out for a run or two on my next trip. As mentioned here recently, I’ve gotten back into running, and I do feel like it’s slowly getting easier, though it’s not getting any easier to persuade myself on any given evening or morning to put on the shoes and go out into the fresh air. If the life of a hermit is one that has a perilous appeal for me, then hermits are not people who venture out from their caves (or huts, or poles) readily. I am making a serious effort not to let my social circles dwindle into nothing, but motivation, as so often, is the issue.

That question of motivation has been much on my mind lately. How do people persuade themselves to do the things they do, to make it from one day to the next in the face of a world that can vary from discouraging to actively hostile? What impetus do I use to get myself up from my chair to go for a run, or to sit down and write these words? I’m not getting paid for either, which wipes out a large chunk of the ambient motivation floating around the modern world, and while running may be good for my health and writing good for my mental health, those are pretty slender reeds to rest most of an evening on. Especially when a side effect of my medication is that I tend to sweat a lot when I’m hot or exert myself, and this evening counted for both, meaning that I was stuck in a towelling robe for an hour after my run, gently dripping into the fabric.

Having dropped that edifying image into your brain, let me pursue this thread. It would be cheaper for me to stay home, to do only enough exercise needed to keep healthy, to eat as frugally as possible. Avoid the stress of meeting new people and potentially suffering embarrassment (introvert here, most definitely). A hermit’s life, in other words. An uncomplicated life; so why do I feel the urge to mix that up? To socialise where possible, to travel now and then, to buy books I’ll only read once and games I probably won’t finish? To hook myself into the information services of the world (news, social media, podcasts, etc.) simply to learn a bit more about subjects that interest me and subjects I might not have thought about except by following a thread that started somewhere distantly connected.

All those activities are ones that bring me pleasure, in various forms. Does pursuing pleasure make me selfish? Probably a little. Is it a bad thing? Epicurus would disagree. Taking care of your own happiness is an important part of creating a life worth living. Which isn’t to say that others’ happiness should be neglected. When young, we look to our parents and try to make them happy too, a desire that never really fades away. When older, we might think of the happiness of our children and the social circle we build up, in addition to our own. There’s god too, for some, or whatever groups we sign up to. The point being that our own happiness is always involved in the happiness of others, or ought to be. If we end up serving someone else’s drives at a cost to our own happiness, that’s far from healthy.

So my main motivation in dragging myself off the couch and into the day (or night, as the case may be), is to make my life better, through indulging my own desires and engaging with the society I’ve chosen, as well as seeking out sheer novelty and education. Pleasure is a spark to make us move, and Epicurus knew that a life engaged in pleasures both simple and simple to obtain was one of the best to be had.

Which is, to take this meander to its point, one of the main reasons I remain suspicious of the current hype around “AI”. (It goes in quotation marks because while it may be artificial, it’s in no way intelligent.) Its boosters are engaged in a full-throated effort to persuade us that the various iterations of “AI” are capable of doing all sorts of things for us. Not the tedious and repetitive tasks that we’ve always been promised would one day be handed over to robotic assistants, but the creative and problem-solving tasks that make up a large part of both work and non-work life. Travel planning, e-mail composition, prototyping, etc. The idea seems to be that we should let the “AI” companies provide a rough draft of our tasks and relegate ourselves to tidying up the draft’s rough edges.

To which, two responses: first, I have no interest in further training a plagiarism machine already replete with stolen information. Second, the act of creation, whether of a work of art or a solution to a problem, is part of the experience. It’s how we express ourselves and how we learn. If I felt that “AI” was a good solution to all the ills of the world, I’d have little impetus to leave my couch, much less my apartment. The underlying technology is interesting enough, and I expect it will find its niche eventually, though it looks set to do a huge amount of damage to the economy in the process. Until then, it remains a hydra that needs to be decapitated regularly (and we need to learn how to cauterise the stumps).

As long as I’m still around, I want to keep experiencing new things, and to keep exercising this brain of mine both creatively and technically. Having been required to use “AI” via work, I don’t find much in the way of experience or expression in tweaking the parameters of a mimicry machine or smoothing the rough edges of its output, which never quite seems to get things just right. I don’t know what that implies for my long-term employment prospects, but if it’s not that good, then maybe it’s time to re-train.

So there you have it. Not only an assurance of my continued existence, but a quick peek into the issues tickling my brainstem at the moment. The odd thing is that despite (or maybe because of?) the intrusion of “AI” into every part of our lives, I’ve been more creative recently than I have in a while. Maintaining enough focus to make something more than scribbled notes of these ideas can be a bit tricky, given some of the mild side effects of my cancer medication, but I might get over that hump too. Something to look forward to over the next 13 months.