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Lee reveals that giving a colleague a lift home exposed a further, unsuspected layer of "unfiltered Lee", which prompts Simon to suggest a set of age-rated cardboard signs to hang around his neck. Simon finds real pleasure in treating a knotty work situation as a giant puzzle made of human pieces. He also reports that this week's raid on the office chocolate cupboard turned up only waxy, orange-foiled Halloween balls. Then Simon brings in a line from Annie Duke about crediting ourselves for good luck and blaming bad luck, which leads them to effort, privilege, and what large language models might be doing to a young person's sense of agency.

Mentioned

• Microsoft Teams – the platform for a work meeting earlier in the week, which opened with a podcast-style countdown out of pure habit
• Cher – "If I Could Turn Back Time" quoted after realising 1930 is nearly a century ago, not 60 or 70 years
• 1930s BBC nativity play broadcast – a technically ambitious live broadcast from near the tip of Cornwall, now being re-performed as an immersive piece in a church by a local theatre company with research centre support; the on-air bulb blew mid-broadcast and the cast carried on regardless
• Forced Entertainment – Sheffield-based experimental theatre company; the idea of wearing cardboard signs around the neck is called "very early Forced Entertainment"
• Falmouth University – cited as the third biggest employer in Cornwall, in a discussion of universities being too important locally to fail (transcribed as "foundless")
• Marlene Dietrich – conjured as the image of the old-time nightclub where "vamping" (filling time on stage) might come from
• Coventry University – domain for an imagined "quality control" email address to complain about the downgrade in stolen office chocolates
• Annie Duke, How to Decide – book on decision-making; its line about blaming bad luck for bad outcomes while crediting ourselves for good ones prompts a conversation about effort, luck and agency at different stages of life
• Large language models – discussed as a "seismic" wildcard for students' sense of agency, compared with older forms of privilege

Get in touch with Lee and Simon at info@midlifing.net.

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The Midlifing logo is adapted from an original image by H.L.I.T: https://www.flickr.com/photos/29311691@N05/8571921679 (CC BY 2.0)