There are weeks when life feels like a table of spinning plates — beautiful in motion, until one starts to wobble. You watch it, heart tight, wondering: Is this the moment it all comes down?
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.