About

This blog about how people respond to adversity, uncertainty, and difficult circumstances, and how we find our footing, make choices, remain engaged and live as ourselves when life doesn't cooperate. This, because life is inherently challenging, unpredictable, and sometimes brutal. However, these very difficulties, the “hammers” of life, become the medium through which we may grow, discover, and forge ourselves. 

Even as this blog focuses on how we endure and grow through life’s “hammers,” it does so in full awareness that suffering is not abstract. Across the world, millions of people are displaced by conflict, and countless lives are cut short by war, violence, and instability each year. These are not distant statistics but lived realities and evidence of how harsh and unrelenting life can be. We may not all be in a position of political or social power or have the resources to influence global events or reach across continents to offer direct aid.

But we can act where we are. We can notice. We can respond. We may not be able to help many, but we can help one. When we encounter someone being hammered by life, we can choose not to look away. We may not be able to stop the blows, but we can stand alongside them, and do what is within our reach. 

This is where meaningful change could begin. It takes small, deliberate acts of care, not sweeping gestures. And if each of us commits to helping even one person, the weight of the world, though still heavy, becomes just a little more bearable to carry.

Ferenc Molnár, a Hungarian playwright and author said that, first we write for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. Money, however, creates a financial incentive that keeps a writer so busy promoting their work, their time for research, thinking and writing diminishes. Their love for writing becomes fast food for social media scrollers and skimmers – those who scroll instead of reading; who scan content to get the gist of a piece and hardly ever read from beginning to end – absorbing nothing. Feeding a snack hungry mob further detracts from interacting with readers, connecting, sharing opinions and comments.

This blog will therefore remain open and free. I love writing, and I want to help readers get through the forge stronger. 

About AI

A word about AI, because I use it in my writing and I know that makes some people uneasy.

To me, AI is like a fast and patient test reader and writing companion. I plan, research, and write my first draft. I then ask it for help in shaping an argument. I give it my one idea, and it comes back with 2 or more. Sometimes the most useful thing it gives me is something I disagree with. I like that. Sometimes I use what it gives me almost as it stands; more often, I pull it apart, rewrite it, argue with it, or change the emphasis. But I am also an editor so when it gives me slop, any LLM-drug-induced hallucination or something I don’t like, out it goes! Other times I ask it to create a first draft which I then turn into the final draft. My editing and revision skills have developed since I started using AI and I've learned to hone my thinking processes accordingly. 

By the way, writing has always involved using tools and other people's minds. We use dictionaries, editors, reference books, search engines, conversations with friends and colleagues, writing groups, and spell-checkers. AI has now become a collaborator in the toolbox. The presence of AI in my writing process says little about the care, thought or judgement that went into the finished work. 

So, I am very much involved in the gap between the first prompt and the last sentence. If an AI detector gives my work a low or high human vs AI-score, do remember the heavy human intellectual journey that produced it.

Author: Runa Prinsloo