Field notes, solidarity, and starter guides for all of us finding our footing through work and life overwhelm in the AI era. One step from greatness, one step from ruin—sometimes in the same hour. Curated and shared by a midlife, multipassionate mom with ADHD using AI to keep an endless circle of plates spinning in an accelerating world.

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The wobble point is the tension where a plate spins beautifully right before it falls.

For me, it’s both exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. Lately, I have become well acquainted with that wobble point feeling.

I was born in 1981, right in the middle of what Anna Garvey coined “The Oregon Trail” micro-generation. That is, those of us born between the mid-1970s and early 1980s who have had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood. Our first exposure to PCs was in computer labs where we learned touch typing and strived to help pioneers cross the American wilderness via the Oregon Trail game (thus the name). I suppose now you could say we are having an artificially enhanced midlife.

Technological advances have made so many aspects of daily life easier to manage in the past 45+ years. One would hope that all of this progress would have given us more hours to rest and made life more peaceful. Yet, it feels to me that life has just gotten faster and more overwhelming as time goes by.

We can accomplish tasks much faster with technology, but the number of tasks and apps we are expected to oversee increases more and more every day. We are both more productive and more busy than ever.

The Wobble Point Metaphor

I was talking about this paradox with a friend recently, and the metaphor came to mind of a circus performer in the center of a bunch of plates that she is spinning on thin sticks.

First, I picture the performer spinning the plates with ease, as I did in my analog childhood while balancing a few plates like school, friends, and activities. Like many kids, I had support from my parents to catch an occasional plate or give one a twirl so it wouldn’t hit the floor. The circus performer in this scenario is succeeding at her act and barely exerting herself in doing so.

Next, I picture the performer starting to sweat a bit as she advances and more plates get added, as I experienced in my digital adulthood. Living on my own for the first time, adulting added numerous new plates for me to juggle, like work, household logistics, finances, marriage, travel, and grocery shopping.

At this point, both the circus performer and I felt challenged, but in a (mostly) healthy way that encouraged me to grow. I dropped a plate here and there and became more aware of my weaknesses, but for the most part, I kept everything spinning capably.

For most Xennials like myself, the internet made it easier to adult with things like online bill pay and shopping. Social media and smartphones made it easier to stay connected but harder to stay focused. The system was evolving, but mostly still worked. I’m hearing the same is not the case for young adults starting out in today’s economy, but that is a topic for another day.

Finally, I picture the circus performer in the midlife, modern state in which I exist today. The number of plates she is spinning has surpassed anything she has ever encountered in practice or previous shows. She races from plate to plate, always at serious risk of losing them. Just as she gives one plate a top-off, she snaps around to catch another plate in mid-air. Then, she immediately dashes out an arm to save another plate in the nick of time.

I’m not 100% sure how AI fits into this metaphor, but I imagine it serving as an extra set of eyes alerting the performer to plates needing attention outside of her line of vision. And I imagine AI adding automation that sets the plates off spinning faster than any human can spin them, thus extending their spinning times unnaturally.

Still, even with that extra assistance, the circus performer is rapidly approaching her physical and mental limits. She is awestruck by her record-breaking achievements, but also feeling increasingly panicked because she is about to collapse on the floor from sheer exhaustion, bringing the whole set of plates crashing down on top of her.

That, to me, is The Wobble Point at its essence. That edge right between brilliance and disaster.

Lately, I feel like I have stepped into that circus performer’s shoes, and the Wobble Point has become my daily terrain.

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The Plates I’m Spinning: What We’ll Explore Here

Over the past decade, these are some of the various “plates” I’ve spun that I hope to explore with you here:

• Parenting and pet care

• Career transition, job search, and unemployment

• Networking and community involvement

• ADHD, anxiety, and burnout

• Perimenopause and midlife health, fitness, and nutrition

• Vision challenges, including dry eyes, corneal, and retinal issues

• Elder care, grief, and loss

• Cross-country moving and relocation

I do not consider myself to be an expert on any of these subject areas. You won’t hear me say, ‘I’ve figured it all out, and here’s my 5-step system to fix your life.’ I’m right here in the trenches with you in the messy middle, not lecturing from the finish line.

Nevertheless, along the way, I’m discovering resources, communities, do’s, don’ts, and AI experiments that help me navigate the overwhelm of this era. And I’m collecting lessons learned that would help me approach situations better the second time around. The Wobble Point is my attempt to share these tales and tips with you in the hope that it will make your journey less painful and more fulfilling.

I also hope this becomes a two-way street. Over time, I’d love for this space to grow into a real community—through comment threads, shared stories, and maybe even live gatherings.

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In the Works for this Substack:

• Weekly Field Note Articles. Reflections from my experience along the way. What I’ve noticed, what I’m working on, what I’ve tried lately.

• Monthly “So You’re Starting…” Guides. Collections of tips and resources from an experienced beginner, related to AI or the various plate areas listed above.

• Restacks and Linked Content. Posts, articles, videos, etc. from fellow creators who inspire me.

• Compiled Resources. Curated links to resources that have helped and inspired me along the way - e.g. books, videos, thought leaders, communities, apps, trainings.

• From the Archives. Links to selected pieces from my past 20+ year content vault, eventually including:

  • Posts from My Career Intuition: A Journey of Self-Discovery, a blog I wrote in 2011-2012 at the beginning of my 30s, shortly before becoming a mother.

  • Reflections and posts from my LinkedIn, Facebook, and previous website on a variety of topics.

  • Older videos, karaoke covers, school papers, etc.

  • Previous presentation slide decks and handouts.

  • AI-generated deep research outputs, prompt packs, and NotebookLM studio artifacts.

Key Things to Know:

Free vs. Paid Subscriptions: Initially, free subscribers will have access to everything on the site. Eventually, if this grows, I hope to add a paid tier with live monthly gatherings, community threads, and other offerings.

Affiliate Links: From time to time, I may share affiliate links to books, tools, or resources I genuinely find useful. If you purchase through one, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Any post containing affiliate links will include a clear note near those links.

How I Make This Content: I am exploring what human authorship means in the age of AI. Every piece here begins with my own ideas, lived experience, questions, and reflections. I use AI as a collaborative partner to reduce the barriers that have previously kept me from consistently sharing my ideas, learning, and AI experiments with the world. Everything on this site has ME in it: my judgment, my stories, my voice, and, most of all, my sincere hope that something I share here might make your path a little easier.

Above all, I hope The Wobble Point will help you find:

Shared by Kimberly Renee Knowles — a Human-Centered AI Enablement Strategist who has spent 20+ years helping people find their footing in systems that overwhelm them: first, students in a university, then customers in a software stack, now all of us in the AI transition.

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(Attendees to my “Beyond Productivity: Using AI to Reduce Cognitive Load in Customer Success” CuSP Lightning Talk on 7/23/2026 - the slides, sources, and prompts are linked here!)

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I’ve come to think that low hum — the sense that everything is just barely hanging on — isn’t only mine. It’s in the headlines, the weather, the job market, a body in midlife sending its own signals. The table shakes. Nobody’s hands are fully steady. I call that feeling the wobble, and this publication is my attempt to do something useful with it instead of just bracing against it.

The plate on the stick

Picture the old circus trick: a plate spinning on top of a thin stick. Hold it too still, and it falls. A little wobble is normal — that’s just what keeping it up looks like. But push past a certain point, and the whole thing comes down, and usually takes the plates next to it with it.

I’ve started calling that threshold the wobble point — the edge between stretching and crashing.

Too little tension and we stagnate; nothing is asking anything of us, and we go a bit numb. Just enough and we grow — we’re on our edge, alive, doing our best work. Too much and it all comes down at once.

Here’s the part I keep coming back to. Psychologists have understood this shape for about a century: performance climbs as pressure rises, peaks, and then collapses when there’s too much — a tidy upside-down U. The science isn’t the new part. What’s missing is language. Most of us only have words for the bottom of the curve. We say burnout. Overwhelm. “I’m drowning.” We almost never name the productive middle — the good edge, the healthy stretch where the tension is working for us. And you can’t aim for a place you can’t name. So that’s the first job of this publication: give the whole curve a name, not just the crash.

Why the plates keep multiplying

Modern life is a plate-adding machine. Every tool has a login. Every login now has a second login. The school wants a form, the form wants an account, the account wants a password you’ll never remember. Last night I was trying to order my daughter’s school supplies and ended up in the parent Facebook group asking what actually worked last year — performance shirts or cotton, and what you’re allowed to decorate lockers with when tape isn’t permitted. That’s four plates before 9 pm, and none of them were my actual work.

And now AI — which can either help me catch a falling plate or hand me eleven new ones, sometimes in the same afternoon.

I kept seeing one specific version of this. I call it the context tax: the time and attention we burn reassembling what we already know before any real work can start.

Digital workers toggle between apps around 1,200 times a day — that’s real research, not a vibe (Harvard Business Review, 2022). Each toggle is a tiny wobble. Stack enough of them, and a capable person spends the day feeling frantic and producing very little. It looks like a personal time-management failure. It’s actually structural.

The context tax is one source of wobble. There are others — caregiving, transitions, money, a world that feels like it’s hanging by a thread. But naming even one source gives you somewhere to push.

What you do at the wobble point

When I was younger, I could keep maybe three plates going, with a safety net underneath. When one started to shimmy, my mom would show up, help me reorganize, and give it a gentle twirl. Then the nets changed — my parents died, my daughter was born, the plates both multiplied and sped up. That’s the state so many of us are in: so focused on the frantic motion that we forget to ask which plates we actually need in the air.

I’ve come to lean on three things. They’re the spine of everything I’ll write here.

Courage to name the mess.

Look honestly at what’s on your plate and what your real purpose is — and decide, on purpose, what you’re willing to let fall. I used to run a blog and a women’s meetup; after my daughter was born, those plates dropped. It wasn’t a failure. It was a necessary culling. Some of the best turns in my life came from things that fell — a divorce, a job I badly wanted and didn’t get, leaving a prestigious role after my first real taste of not getting an “A.” There’s a line from Pema Chödrön I keep close: “When your heart breaks, it breaks open.” A falling plate is a small heartbreak, and sometimes the crash is what clears the noise.

Curiosity to understand it.

Get interested in the mechanics instead of being ashamed of the mess. How does your wobble work? What tips you over? What have other people tried? AI, for all its noise, has become a genuinely good partner here for me — a way to shine a light on my own patterns instead of just white-knuckling through them.

Connection, so you don’t have to navigate it alone.

This is the one I need most and reach for least. I’ve been a member of Meetup for over twenty years, and I’ve never gotten over why it was built: after 9/11, one of its founders watched New Yorkers come out of their apartments to help each other, right as the rest of us were starting to disappear into our screens. He wondered — what if we used this new thing, the internet, to bring people together instead of pulling them apart? I think about AI and the future of work the same way. It can isolate us, or we can aim it at connection. That’s a choice, not a default.

What this is (and isn’t)

The Wobble Point is not a system that will run your life on autopilot. I don’t have one of those. What I can offer is field notes from the middle of it — from someone who has spent twenty years helping people find their footing in systems that overwhelm them. First, it was students lost in a university. Then, customers lost in a software stack. Now it’s all of us, trying to find a clearer path through the AI transition. Same work, three different maps.

I’m not writing from the summit. I’m writing from the trail — a few switchbacks ahead on some things, hopelessly behind on others — turning around to say: here’s what I can see from here.

So: courage to name the mess, curiosity to understand it, and connection so none of us has to navigate it alone. Find your wobble point. Aim for the good edge. And when the plates get to be too many, let a few fall on purpose before they fall on their own.

More soon.

— Kimberly

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Came here from my “Beyond Productivity: Using AI to Reduce Cognitive Load in Customer Success” CuSP Lightning Talk? The slides, the sources behind the numbers, and sample prompts plus a Context Engine Starter Kit are all here.