An Artistic Score Engraving update from October 2026
Dear all,
Welcome back to a new instalment of the ASE newsletter, the first one after our coming back to Italy. In the last episode our focus had been around the painful difference between intentions and facts, between planning and reality. Unfortunately, the feeling that my batteries would have not recharged enough turned out to be quite accurate, even if a short break to Berlin at the beginning of September proved crucial for sheer survival. One morning, few days before our return flight, I woke up, tried to get up, and saw everything around me moving around the z-axis, as if on a boat in the middle of a storm. For a few seconds, I lost conscious control of my body as the emergency system brought me back laying on the bed. Thinking about it a couple of weeks later, it is fascinating how our body has this kind of safety control. Had I been allowed to insist on getting up, I would have probably fallen in the room, hit something with my head, and seriously injured myself. Instead,—like you see in movies—time slowed down, and I semi-graciously fell back on the bed. I had never experienced anything like this before, and it seems it was all due to the intense exercising I am doing for my spine and to the new insoles I have to wear to improve my posture and walking stance. As I am learning every day, health is a serious thing, and we have only one. Once that’s gone, it’s gone, so please take care of it.
There is also mental health, though! The more I move forward down this freelancing path, the more I am convinced that, without some proper countermeasures, it is a one-way trip to self-destruction. The apparently positive news that, for the first part of the year, I was getting more job requests than usual, was actually a signal that the business may be going through (yet) a(nother) shift. With prices of basically everything going up, one has little choice but negotiate for better pay or refuse a job altogether and try their luck elsewhere. At the same time, I noticed prospecting customers becoming increasingly more aggressive. The patterns I see are the following:
- you need to give full priority to me (and to me alone);
- you need to stick to your original quote even if I change the details of my request;
- you have full responsibility if my project goes bad.
These are just a few examples taken from real cases in the last year alone! Oh!, and of course, since I like what I do, that’s already part of the payment, right? I am sure you have encountered some, if not all, of these cases in your freelancing life, or in your personal business relationships. But all of these together in such a short timespan? Sometimes all in a single person? This has luckily happened to me only twice in fifteen years, and twice I had to adopt the same solution: abandon ship! It is perhaps the most uncomfortable thing I have ever done in my working life, but it was either them or my health and that is something one cannot put on the plate, ever!
I can certainly hope for things to get better, but reality is that everyone is in a greater hurry, and we are losing one of our most distinctive traits: patience. I recently watched a video about the International Math Olympiads (IMO) where it was described how—while this is a human-only competition—AI had failed to solve one of the six given problems because it required patience, creativity, and a taste for beauty! Without looking for a beautiful solution, that problem was impossible. Firstly, I felt the deepest respect for the author of the problem; then I realised how patience, creativity, and beauty how we perceive it are three things AI just cannot do, and will realistically never be able to. And yet, we are being pushed to lose our humanity every day more: profit, rush, costs, consumerism, envy, wars, the list goes on …
What solution is there for all this? Perhaps getting more time for ourselves when we just do things without a goal, or when we just get intentionally bored. I really feel that: I would like to read, write, compose, study, walk, but I would also like to be able to do that without the nagging feeling that I have a hundred things to do instead. With this constant feeling, any leisure activity feels like a ‘loss of time’ and I cannot fully enjoy it. Please share your perspective on this, as I think we all need some help through these challenging and mysterious times.
Furthermore, and finally, what do you think of AI being trained to replace what we humans do best instead of what we struggle the most with? We briefly visited IFA 2026 in Berlin, attracted by the robotics section, and what we saw the most were “emotional companion” robots. Why is that? Why can’t we have cleaning, rubbish collecting, tidying, daily shopping, bureaucracy filling robots—that is, life assistants! Why are we trying to destroy ourselves?
As Oscar Wilde said:
Art is useless!
…and that’s precisely why we should keep doing it. By saying that, he was trying to save us.
Managing rubbish (!?)
Taking a tangent for a minute, I would like to ask you how recycling is being managed where you live. In our town, in NW Italy, the Bruxelles, door-to-door system is being applied:
- food, organic, metal, and glass waste can be thrown each day at any time thanks to the two containers placed in front of the building;
- plastic & miscellaneous rubbish needs to be collected into specific bags tagged with your fiscal code (your SSN, that is) and deposited in front of the building once a week between 10 PM and 6 AM the next day;
- paper & miscellaneous rubbish is managed in the same way, just on another day;
- shops get paper & plastic collection every day at 7.30 PM.
Key issues with this system:
- What if one is not home between 10 PM and 6 AM or is an early sleeper? Simple: one will throw things before 10 PM, transforming the town into a big pile of rubbish—in Bruxelles I saw plenty of mice around bags, luckily not so many here, possibly thanks to the abundance of cats.
- What if one eats a takeaway pizza the day after paper collection? Obvious: the rotting cardboard will stay in one’s house for a whole week, and most flats have not been built with a ‘rubbish room’ in mind.
- Tracking what one throws away with a code is as dystopian as one could ever imagine. And all this to avoid educating people. Much easier to punish them, right? It also fills the town’s coffers! Increase control, increase punishment, increase fear, make people fight for idiot things labelling them as heroes who are saving the planet. Yes, that is the way!
Point 3. has the added consequence that neighbours will begin spying on you to then report your wrongdoing. It was like that in authoritarian countries where those you needed to beware of the most were your neighbours as they would report you to the party at the first hint of … rebellion.
What are the possible solutions? I am aware that this system came to be in our town because people would throw anything into any container instead of differentiating rubbish properly. Instead of educating people through TV, leaflets, and all the power propaganda has to offer, they chose this system which feels very ‘1984’. In my opinion, the solution is what countries like Switzerland and Germany have adopted: every cluster of buildings has its ‘rubbish island’, that is, a woodenly walled covered space where the rubbish cans are. You go there, open the door with a card, and throw things whenever you want! Result? Their cities are a hundred times cleaner than ours, and their people are much more educated than us about this.
What is your opinion? How is rubbish collection managed in your country? What would you change and how?
A closing thought of hope …
I would like to end this month’s episode with a ray of light, a glimpse of hope after, sadly, keeping a rather negative tone for the last six minutes. A few days ago I was buying something in a shop and, on my way out, a small kid, four to five years old, was standing in the door. Seeing me approaching, he moved away to let me pass. As he did that, I told him ‘Grazie!’ (Thank you!). He looked me in amazement and, while walking away, I heard him saying this:
Mum! Mum! That man told me ‘Thank you!’
I believe, ultimately, that hope is still burning within us. We just need to nurture that flame.
Bottom Line
Thank you for reading this up to the end. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please, share with me what you think. I read everything and do my best to reply as swiftly as I can. Tune in next time when we will talk about how to deal with damaged shipments! You do not want to miss that.
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See you next month for the next ASE update. Please let me know what you are doing and where your musical adventures are bringing you.
Yours,
Michele
