Category: Life course

Posted on

Gone Gliding

The seaside resorts offer additional experiences to people beyond swimming. Gliding on the water or in waves is an affordable exercise for everyone. It  just needs a small board and off you go. Falls are a usual part of the exercise. Beware of them if you have any prior conditions. For the 50+ generations some regular prior falling exercises are a must. Youth has the advantage of sufficient power per kg of body weight to afford repeated falls. Water and sand soften the falls. The gliding experience, however, is a great compensation for the risks taken. Not for everyone, but early experiences in or beyond schools give pupils a head start on how to balance out yourself in specific situations. Spectators and the experience to be under observation might influence your performance for the better or worse. Balance is a rather complex experience combining body and mind coordination for all ages. 

Posted on

École buissonnière

In 2026 the “École buissonnière“, the outdoor schooling has become a viable alternative to the schools that are overly hot during summer. But far beyond being an alternative out of necessity, schools as well as kindergardens adopt a form of schooling close to and in nature. It can be so much more than a simple interlude or excursion. Learning from nature is a precursor of bionics as well as compassion. After all nature offers ample examples of diversity and coping mechanisms. It is an option not only for learning purposes restricted to the young, but it is underexploited in continuous learning and lifewide experiences as well. There have been abuses also in history, most notably by Nazis in Germany for purposes of indoctrination. The learning opportunities to encourage a critical perspective of our modern, technology- and screen-dominated learning and life, are huge. They just need experienced guidance on the way of discovery, comparisons and collective experiences. Children open up and have fun, the more the pressure of classrooms is alleviated.  Learning about the importance of biodiversity from different angles is a very human value and includes our responsibility for other species.

Posted on

Ensor Home

There are few artists who stayed in their home for almost all their life. James Ensor was a personality who was profoundly attached and continually attracted to his native city of Ostend. After a short and unsuccessful spell at the Brussels art academy, he returned to his parents’ home and due to a heritage from an uncle, he could live in a nearby house, which also served him as his atelier. Although I did not come across documents that showed he had traveled a lot, nowadays his art work is spread across the globe. The seaside resort of Ostend was a real tourist destination and, therefore, many famous people of the 1st half of the century passed by and met with Ensor there. Not only fellow artists, but also scientists like Albert Einstein. Critical minds and people searching beyond the trodden paths must have been attracted to him, a personality who dared to challenge conventional painting and techniques of his time. A reconstruction of his atelier and several animations give a lively modern touch to his work and living style. My take home message from the Ensor Home: The search for inspiration might be just around the corner. 

Posted on

Autonomous Agents

We all have seen more or less autonomous robots somewhere, maybe in a garden silently doing its job or doing more demanding tasks like in playing table tennis against a human. Even the evolution of polluting fireworks to swarms of little light-emitting drones designing figures on the sky have become quite popular. The AI-world is similarly advancing rapidly and proposes more and more “autonomous agents” to assist us. It seems crucial to distinguish the 2 Ds of autonomous agents: Degrees and Dimensions. As with job quality or job satisfaction, there are several sub-dimensions, which need to be considered when dealing, in a summarizing form, with such encompassing terms.
You might allow an agent to order missing food for a meal and pay for this autonomously. You might even be assisted in financial choices to a large degree, but you might not want an autonomous agent to make far reaching decisions concerning your health or partnership(s). Besides such dimensions, the degree of autonomous decision-making needs to be calibrated according to your (perhaps changing) preferences. Booking a table in a restaurant, with a single other person, might not just be a friendly, nice assistance, but it might get you into severe trouble. However, managing conference bookings, a family event or a birthday party might allow you to concentrate on other issues or specific details. Additionally, there are underlying and cross-cutting topics like trust, risks and security that enter the “2 Ds of autonomous agents”. A 2-dimensional matrix plotting levels across dimensions might work as a behavioral guideline in the development of autonomous agents. More dimensions may be added during the implementation.

Posted on

Autonomy in Behavior

The learning capacity of humans sets them on a path to acquire and extend their autonomy in behavior. At birth, physical and emotional dependence is highest. Soon learning to handle different nutrition sources and emotional stress allows to gain more autonomy in each of these components of autonomy. Throughout later childhood and adolescence we develop various additional domains as well as degrees of autonomy.
Role-playing, enhanced motor control and interaction with others define and redefine continuously the potentials and limits of autonomous behavior. Social norms start to play an even more important role as of adulthood, just consider financial autonomy as one of the dimensions. The most distinguishing factor from robots or animals until 2026 has been the human ability to form its own autonomous judgment, where value systems and legal norms co-determine or set limits to our autonomy or behavior. Some results from neuroscience have demonstrated that our readiness to act is prefigured in our brain and additional “intelligent” mechanisms are needed to suppress or guide the otherwise autonomous, spontaneous action or reaction.
Our “free will” might not be as free as we wish it to be. Similarly our autonomy in behavior or decision-making might not be as autonomous as we tend to believe. (Image: Social cooperative gardening project, Brussels 2026-6)

Posted on

Autonomy in literature

As we might imagine, autonomy has been and is a huge topic in literature. From the foundations of democracy to the autonomous state building, historical accounts are full of treaties on autonomy. Literature has taken similar steps by asking can we really be autonomous in our decision-making as we are social beings embedded into varieties of Throne, families and networks. There are ever larger parts that we are conscious about, but the realm of unconsciousness or sleep remains substantial. Maybe in literature, the author Samuel Beckett has gone furthest in dealing with human autonomy in his writings. The search for autonomous action might lead to far-reaching inactivity in “Waiting for Godot”.
However, Beckett’s view about autonomy can also be interpreted as a continuous battle of mankind as demonstrated in the often cited expression by Beckett (“Worstward Ho”, 1983, p.7) “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Our strive for autonomy remains a lifelong struggle. The path to more autonomy is not linear over the life course. In fact, much evidence from gerontologists suggests that it might follow an inverse U-shape, being low at birth and low before death. Literature has guided us in such questions just as much as religious, philosophical, legal and social concerns enter into the underlying concept of autonomy and autonomous decision-making across the life course.

Posted on

Autonomy as Happiness

The French philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier, better known as Alain, is a proponent of a rational approach towards fundamental issues. Therefore, we should expect from the reading of “Propos sur le bonheur” a thought-based conception of happiness. In his propositions on happiness, autonomous decision-making and autonomous actions play a decisive role. Rather than writing a voluminous “treatise” on happiness, he had chosen in the 1920s, the form of 93 about 2-page long propositions about happiness. These propositions are a bit more explicit than, for example, Nietzsche’s aphorisms, but they remain short without much literary context to the kind of rational analysis based on observations and anecdotal supporting evidence.
In propositions 42 “Agir” and 44 “Diogène” he deals with autonomy as subject. “on veut agir, on ne veut pas subir” (in short, “act, not endure”, own translation), that is his quintessence. “Tous les métiers plaisent autant que l’on y gouverne, et déplaisent autant que l’on y obéit.” (44). (All professions are pleasant if you govern, and are unpleasant if you have to obey). More than 100 years later, empirical studies on job quality, job satisfaction and happiness still build on this rationale.

Posted on

China Job Quality

In a small study of 771 Chinese adults, Dong, Wu, Ni & Lu (2021) have reported on the impact of long working hours on job satisfaction. If you work few hours, job satisfaction increases as you work more hours. However, working many hours already, additional work, 40+ per week, does no longer increase work satisfaction in China. In order to preserve the recommended or communist work ethos of a “996 work schedule” (from 9 a.m to 9 p.m, 6 days a week) the authors recommend that managers support more autonomy for workers to fix their schedules as this could increase their job satisfaction. Autonomy to schedule your work and more autonomy in decision-making moderate the impact of long work hours on job satisfaction. Eventually the Chinese comrades might get satisfaction in other areas but work as well.
(Book Exhibits on Karl Marx, Museum Trier Germany Books 2023)

Posted on

Job Quality Insights

In the U.S. the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research conducts a major empirical study on job quality (Houseman et al. 2025 1st wave 18.000 respondents). The documentation and the full set of questions (Link) cover 5 dimensions of job quality: compensation and job security; work structure and autonomy; work environment; worker agency and voice; growth and development. The special merit of the survey is that it makes great efforts to cover also new forms of (precarious) self-employment (Abraham et al. 2026). The degree to which can you make autonomous decisions is of relevance to the self-employed as well as it is a part of the job quality of dependent employees in small, large or big firms.
Related to the use of AI for work purposes question 31 asks for the influence on the decision to use new technologies in your job. This is the modern version of a question, whether you have influence on how you do your job. Bullying in a job may come from supervisors, colleagues or customers and respondents report on this. Beyond the answers given for “your main job”, it is noteworthy that the inclusion of questions on a secondary job allow to identify with more precision the precarious forms of how people try to manage to make a decent living in the U.S.A.
(Image: Exhibition Fashion Council Berlin at New National Gallery 2026)

Posted on

Autonomy as Job Quality

As many labour markets have been confronted with employment and skill shortages in OECD countries, the interest in what constitutes a good job has increased. After the “decent jobs” campaigns by the ILO, it became crucial to be able to better measure what constitutes a decent job and job quality more generally. The COVID-19 crisis had pushed remote work, but the impact on job quality has been mixed.
A larger empirical effort set out to measure job satisfaction and job quality more precisely. The study funded by the Luxembourg Chamber of Labour (Steffgen, Sischka et al. 2020) puts autonomy at work in the category of “job design”. The findings suggest that autonomy has substantial correlations with almost all other measures of job quality, but in a multivariate setting work-life conflicts, job security, atypical working time, mobbing, time pressure or social demands overwrite the issue of autonomy as a statistically significant impact on general well-being. Social support, however, has the strongest positive impact on overall satisfaction. Solidarity at work drives overall well-being.
The more narrow concept of satisfaction with one’s job find autonomy just as important as career advancement on the 5% significance level. Participation in decision making, income and again social support have somewhat stronger impacts. Autonomy concerns time and tasks. Can you decide what to do, how to do, where to do and when to do your tasks?
Depending on how you answer these questions on a 1-5 scale, the more or less satisfied you are with your job. Of course, leadership styles might interfere additionally. (Image: May 1st 2026 Berlin)