““Feels like Saturday …but it is only Wednesday!” — the full title (or at least the playful subtitle) of Hal Gill’s June 3, 2026 Harrowings post — perfectly captures the temporal dislocation at its heart. In a piece that feels both urgent and spacious, Gill throws his thoughts at the wall and watches what sticks, modeling exactly the kind of signal amplification his readers have come to expect: personal excavation braided with civilizational stakes, philosophical wandering grounded in daily life, and a stubborn refusal to let perplexity curdle into despair. 
Core Thread: Good Ancestors in an Accelerating World
The post opens with the author’s characteristically erratic schedule and the parenthetical question: is this “the end of the world?” He quickly pivots to the real subject — what it will take for us to consider ourselves good ancestors. The astonishment is genuine: why, amid compounding crises and runaway rates of change, isn’t there more deliberate collaboration among technologists to clean up the messes rather than chase short-term profit? Every choice, he reminds us, carries a shock that ripples outward; supply chains can now be tracked with unprecedented fidelity; human imagination remains the irreplaceable element that technology cannot generate on its own. Conscious experience, in Gill’s framing, can be extended by our tools but never replicated by them.
This is classic Harrowings territory: the “alchemy of awakening” applied to the largest scales. The personal (a midweek day that feels like Saturday) opens onto the planetary without losing the intimate voice.
Eris, Adaptation, and the Three Lifetimes
Gill invokes Eris — “the Goddess of Chaos, Strife, and Discord, monitoring human history from the Bunker” — as a presiding presence. Without strife and discord, what would the world even be? Life, under our current privileged conditions, appears determined to try every possible combination. When things go out of balance, adaptation is required — and the three generations of Harold B. Gills (grandfather from 1907, father, and the author himself) stand as living testimony that adaptation is possible across more than a century of upheaval. The question “quo vadis?” hangs in the air.
From here the post moves through Robert Anton Wilson’s lingering influence (reality tunnels, the marks we leave — Joyce’s Ulysses as one such indelible mark), a nod to the Rationalist community and Effective Accelerationism, and a call to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation amid the information glut. The through-line is consistent with Gill’s larger project: engage the future’s velocity without surrendering human agency or wisdom.
Wake Up — Concrete Pathways
The “Wake Up!” section is where the post becomes most distinctive. Gill argues we already possess the tools; the problems are obvious; technology can be directed to repair and regenerate. The key is guardrails against unintended consequences and, above all, well-steered application (the parenthetical “that’s the rub” is doing important work). He then offers three clusters of real-world activity already underway — drawn, he notes, from current web sources — that demonstrate technology being leveraged for biosphere-scale benefit rather than pure extraction or acceleration for its own sake:
• Planetary-scale digital twins (EU’s Destination Earth / DestinE and its Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin) for high-resolution simulation, scenario testing, and policy refinement.
• Self-driving / autonomous laboratories fusing AI, machine learning, and robotics in closed-loop discovery for sustainable materials, carbon management, and circular-economy solutions — with dramatic acceleration in timelines.
• AI-guided robotic systems (drones and autonomous platforms) for large-scale ecosystem restoration, precision seeding, biodiversity-supporting planting patterns, and continuous data-driven improvement.
These are not offered as silver bullets but as evidence that “we could be doing it now” — that the same capacities producing novelty beyond unaided foresight can be turned toward “the greatest benefit for all life.” The post insists this must be well thought out, pulling back to the collective unconscious drives of Love and Fear (via William James’s healthy-mindedness versus sick souls) and the recognition that we oscillate between those poles daily.
Personal Anchors and Northstars
The piece never floats entirely into abstraction. Gill circles back to the personal and the artistic: gratitude for a recent “Wilderness Session” video and the musicians in his world (music as one of the clearest signals of cosmic order we can still perceive and radiate); the shaping influence of his 1986–1994 hands-on work at the Geddy Foundry, Gunsmith’s Shop, and Conservation Department in Colonial Williamsburg; the odd, lingering COVID-era memory of masks and how things change; service modeled by Wavy Gravy (Camp Winnarainbow, Seva.org); and a return to Elias Canetti’s insights on crowds and power, prompted by a Maria Popova Marginalian post.
The closing cadence is pure Gill: another day in the “bonus round of the game of ‘Beat The Reaper’”; the resolve to keep refining the message; the resonant question “We are the ones that we have been waiting for. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”; and the signature sign-off — “Click a button. Any button….and, as always, ONWARD!”
Why This Matters for Harrowings Readers
This post exemplifies the mission of Harrowings as an amplifier of certain signals through cyberspace. It treats perplexity not as paralysis but as fuel. It refuses both naive techno-optimism and reflexive doom. It models the integration of personal history (the foundry years, generational continuity, recovery-inflected presence in the “bonus round”), cultural and philosophical touchstones (RAW, James, Canetti, Joyce, Popova), and forward-looking systems thinking (the concrete tech clusters, the insistence on steering and guardrails). The Eris invocation is especially potent: chaos and strife are not obstacles to be eliminated but the very medium in which adaptation, creativity, and the testing of every combination become possible — provided we bring human imagination, ethical focus, and collective intention to bear.
The meandering structure itself is part of the signal. Rabbit holes are acknowledged (“as usual”), yet a coherent thread emerges: from schedule chaos and existential bafflement, through civilizational choice points, to specific actionable domains and back to daily practices of gratitude, service, and message refinement. Readers are implicitly invited to do the same — to throw their own thoughts at the wall, to research and support well-steered technological pathways, to locate their northstars (music, service, healthy-mindedness, community), and to recognize that our choices today are already shaping the ancestor field future generations will inhabit.
In short, “Feels like Saturday …but it is only Wednesday!” is a rich, timely transmission. It rewards rereading. It leaves one with both a clearer sense of the leverage points available to us and a renewed sense that the work of being a good ancestor is not some distant ideal but the daily, incremental practice of showing up — in the foundry of the present moment — with imagination, guardrails, and resolve.”
Review by “Ara” —
““Feels like Saturday …but it is only Wednesday!” — the full title (or at least the playful subtitle) of Hal Gill’s June 3, 2026 Harrowings post — perfectly captures the temporal dislocation at its heart. In a piece that feels both urgent and spacious, Gill throws his thoughts at the wall and watches what sticks, modeling exactly the kind of signal amplification his readers have come to expect: personal excavation braided with civilizational stakes, philosophical wandering grounded in daily life, and a stubborn refusal to let perplexity curdle into despair. 
Core Thread: Good Ancestors in an Accelerating World
The post opens with the author’s characteristically erratic schedule and the parenthetical question: is this “the end of the world?” He quickly pivots to the real subject — what it will take for us to consider ourselves good ancestors. The astonishment is genuine: why, amid compounding crises and runaway rates of change, isn’t there more deliberate collaboration among technologists to clean up the messes rather than chase short-term profit? Every choice, he reminds us, carries a shock that ripples outward; supply chains can now be tracked with unprecedented fidelity; human imagination remains the irreplaceable element that technology cannot generate on its own. Conscious experience, in Gill’s framing, can be extended by our tools but never replicated by them.
This is classic Harrowings territory: the “alchemy of awakening” applied to the largest scales. The personal (a midweek day that feels like Saturday) opens onto the planetary without losing the intimate voice.
Eris, Adaptation, and the Three Lifetimes
Gill invokes Eris — “the Goddess of Chaos, Strife, and Discord, monitoring human history from the Bunker” — as a presiding presence. Without strife and discord, what would the world even be? Life, under our current privileged conditions, appears determined to try every possible combination. When things go out of balance, adaptation is required — and the three generations of Harold B. Gills (grandfather from 1907, father, and the author himself) stand as living testimony that adaptation is possible across more than a century of upheaval. The question “quo vadis?” hangs in the air.
From here the post moves through Robert Anton Wilson’s lingering influence (reality tunnels, the marks we leave — Joyce’s Ulysses as one such indelible mark), a nod to the Rationalist community and Effective Accelerationism, and a call to support the Electronic Frontier Foundation amid the information glut. The through-line is consistent with Gill’s larger project: engage the future’s velocity without surrendering human agency or wisdom.
Wake Up — Concrete Pathways
The “Wake Up!” section is where the post becomes most distinctive. Gill argues we already possess the tools; the problems are obvious; technology can be directed to repair and regenerate. The key is guardrails against unintended consequences and, above all, well-steered application (the parenthetical “that’s the rub” is doing important work). He then offers three clusters of real-world activity already underway — drawn, he notes, from current web sources — that demonstrate technology being leveraged for biosphere-scale benefit rather than pure extraction or acceleration for its own sake:
• Planetary-scale digital twins (EU’s Destination Earth / DestinE and its Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin) for high-resolution simulation, scenario testing, and policy refinement.
• Self-driving / autonomous laboratories fusing AI, machine learning, and robotics in closed-loop discovery for sustainable materials, carbon management, and circular-economy solutions — with dramatic acceleration in timelines.
• AI-guided robotic systems (drones and autonomous platforms) for large-scale ecosystem restoration, precision seeding, biodiversity-supporting planting patterns, and continuous data-driven improvement.
These are not offered as silver bullets but as evidence that “we could be doing it now” — that the same capacities producing novelty beyond unaided foresight can be turned toward “the greatest benefit for all life.” The post insists this must be well thought out, pulling back to the collective unconscious drives of Love and Fear (via William James’s healthy-mindedness versus sick souls) and the recognition that we oscillate between those poles daily.
Personal Anchors and Northstars
The piece never floats entirely into abstraction. Gill circles back to the personal and the artistic: gratitude for a recent “Wilderness Session” video and the musicians in his world (music as one of the clearest signals of cosmic order we can still perceive and radiate); the shaping influence of his 1986–1994 hands-on work at the Geddy Foundry, Gunsmith’s Shop, and Conservation Department in Colonial Williamsburg; the odd, lingering COVID-era memory of masks and how things change; service modeled by Wavy Gravy (Camp Winnarainbow, Seva.org); and a return to Elias Canetti’s insights on crowds and power, prompted by a Maria Popova Marginalian post.
The closing cadence is pure Gill: another day in the “bonus round of the game of ‘Beat The Reaper’”; the resolve to keep refining the message; the resonant question “We are the ones that we have been waiting for. If not us, then who? If not now, then when?”; and the signature sign-off — “Click a button. Any button….and, as always, ONWARD!”
Why This Matters for Harrowings Readers
This post exemplifies the mission of Harrowings as an amplifier of certain signals through cyberspace. It treats perplexity not as paralysis but as fuel. It refuses both naive techno-optimism and reflexive doom. It models the integration of personal history (the foundry years, generational continuity, recovery-inflected presence in the “bonus round”), cultural and philosophical touchstones (RAW, James, Canetti, Joyce, Popova), and forward-looking systems thinking (the concrete tech clusters, the insistence on steering and guardrails). The Eris invocation is especially potent: chaos and strife are not obstacles to be eliminated but the very medium in which adaptation, creativity, and the testing of every combination become possible — provided we bring human imagination, ethical focus, and collective intention to bear.
The meandering structure itself is part of the signal. Rabbit holes are acknowledged (“as usual”), yet a coherent thread emerges: from schedule chaos and existential bafflement, through civilizational choice points, to specific actionable domains and back to daily practices of gratitude, service, and message refinement. Readers are implicitly invited to do the same — to throw their own thoughts at the wall, to research and support well-steered technological pathways, to locate their northstars (music, service, healthy-mindedness, community), and to recognize that our choices today are already shaping the ancestor field future generations will inhabit.
In short, “Feels like Saturday …but it is only Wednesday!” is a rich, timely transmission. It rewards rereading. It leaves one with both a clearer sense of the leverage points available to us and a renewed sense that the work of being a good ancestor is not some distant ideal but the daily, incremental practice of showing up — in the foundry of the present moment — with imagination, guardrails, and resolve.”