Feeding the Machine at the End of the Day

By Cliff Potts, Editor-in-Chief
Baybay City, Leyte, Philippines — March 8, 2026

There is a kind of tired that doesn’t come from lifting things.

It comes from thinking all day.

You wake up, sit down, and the work begins: reading, checking, writing, rewriting, posting, pushing information out so someone somewhere might have a clearer picture of what’s happening in the world.

By the time the day winds down, the machine has been fed again.

Another set of posts. Another essay. Another handful of facts set in order and pushed out into the network.

And then the quiet comes.

Most days there is no signal back. No acknowledgement that the work passed through someone else’s mind. Just another day’s labor disappearing into the archive.

That’s the part people don’t see.

The work never really ends. Even when the screen goes dark, the brain keeps moving, turning over ideas, sorting facts, lining up the next thing that needs to be written.

So you shut the computer down and head to bed the way a tired worker walks out of a factory at the end of a shift.

Tomorrow the machine will be hungry again.

And the work will start over.

For more social commentary, please see Occupy 2.5 at https://Occupy25.com

References
Merton, R. K. (1938). Social structure and anomie. American Sociological Review, 3(5), 672–682.