Work is getting faster.
Not everyone is being given a way to keep up.
We tend to build things with the intention of making life easier, more connected, more efficient, and for a while, that’s exactly what happens.
Over time, we start asking different questions about what those systems are doing to us.
I’ve been thinking about that in the context of the recent lawsuits against Meta and the way Lennon Torres at Mashable described growing up on social media as “digital nicotine.” These were tools meant to connect us, but they also changed how we interact, process information, and how much of ourselves we outsource to systems we don’t fully question or understand.
That same tension is starting to show up in how we talk about AI at work. The dominant narrative is speed, efficiency, and output, even as broader analysis from the World Economic Forum has started to warn that these systems may widen the gap between who benefits and who gets left behind.
Most leaders say the design of human-AI interaction matters, yet Deloitte’s latest Human Capital Trends report notes only 6% feel they are actually doing it well.
What I keep coming back to is the difference between using AI to support thinking and gradually or wholly outsourcing thinking to it. Those two can look very similar on the surface, especially in environments that reward speed, but they lead to very different outcomes over time. At a certain point, the tradeoff stops being about efficiency and starts shaping how we collaborate, make decisions, and evaluate work.
As output increases, the space for human judgment, collaboration, and pushback shrinks, and over time that has consequences not just for quality, but for the kind of thinking we bring into our work.
I find myself thinking about this through my own relationship with technology. I’ve always leaned in early, partly out of curiosity and partly because, as someone living with a disability, I’m constantly looking for ways to make systems work better in practice. That instinct to optimize and streamline has real value, and it also makes tradeoffs harder to ignore.
Speed is never neutral. Every system optimizes for something, and in doing so, deprioritizes something else. When speed and output become the primary measure, what often gets deprioritized is the human context that makes work sustainable.
That’s the part that feels most important to pay attention to, not just who gets left behind, but how gradually and quietly that process can happen when speed becomes the primary measure of value.
As we continue to integrate AI into how work gets done, the question that keeps coming up for me is not just what these systems allow us to do, but what kind of work and what kind of participation they are shaping in the process.
Where are you seeing that balance being handled well, and where is it starting to break down?
Inclusion Only Works When You Mean It: The Numbers Behind Disability Employment
Line chart showing disability employment declining from 38.4% in January 2026 to 38.1% in February 2026, based on U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, with note on a 0.3 percentage point drop.
Disability employment just dropped.
From 38.4% to 38.1% in one month.
That change represents hundreds of thousands of people losing ground in a single month, according to the latest nTIDE report from the Kessler Foundation based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
On paper, it looks small, just a fraction of a percentage point. In practice, it reflects movement in the wrong direction at the same time LinkedIn is full of companies talking about their commitment to inclusion.
For those of us who have been living in this space for a while, it feels predictable. This is what it looks like when inclusion is treated as messaging instead of something structural.
We get hired, and for a moment it looks like progress. Once we are inside the role, the reality starts to narrow. Job requirements that never quite made sense begin to matter, accommodations that were described as straightforward turn into drawn-out processes, and support that was implied becomes something that has to be justified repeatedly.
Over time, the system finds it easier to question us than to examine whether the environment was ever set up for success in the first place.
That is the part that does not show up in the celebration posts. It is also the part that explains the numbers. When people cannot get in, cannot stay, or cannot grow, the math does not hold.
Inclusion only works when you mean it. It does not work as a campaign or a metric. It works when leadership and infrastructure actually shift to support the people brought into the organization.
Right now, many organizations have not made that shift, and the data is reflecting that in real time. We feel it at every stage, when applications go unanswered, when more energy is spent fighting for access than doing the job itself, and when strong performance still leads nowhere.
We can continue to celebrate progress, but the numbers are telling a different story.
If inclusion begins to fall apart the moment it becomes inconvenient, what exactly are we building?
What Happens When Airlines Damage Wheelchairs? The Reality of Flying With A Disability
Every time I fly, I have to ask myself:
Will my wheelchair still work when we land?
Because airlines damage thousands of them every year.
As a wheelchair user, I’m handing over the piece of equipment that functions as my legs and hoping it comes back in one piece.
So I prepare in ways most people never have to think about. I travel with a laminated one-sheet explaining exactly how to handle my chair. I bring backups of everything. I carry a full binder for Canine Companions® Lovey, even though all of that has already been submitted ahead of time.
And even then, none of it guarantees anything.
This shows up clearly in what happened to Emily Ladau, whose $75,000 custom wheelchair was severely damaged after a Delta Air Lines flight, as reported by USA TODAY and Zach Wichter.
Stories like this feel shocking if you’re new to it. If you live in this reality, they don’t. They feel familiar.
People often point to the numbers and say about one percent of wheelchairs are mishandled, which sounds small until you actually translate what that means. Because if there were a one percent chance your legs would be broken when you got off a plane, you wouldn’t call that acceptable risk. You would question whether the system is safe at all.
Wheelchairs aren’t luggage. They aren’t interchangeable.
They are how we move through the world.
When they’re damaged, the question shifts from “how was your trip?” to “how are you going to function now?”
If you break someone’s wheelchair, you didn’t damage their property. You took away their ability to move.
The uncomfortable reality is that stories like Emily’s get traction because she has a platform. Most people don’t, which means this is happening every day to people who don’t have the visibility to force a response, and who are left dealing with the fallout on their own.
We’ve been talking about this for years. There has been real advocacy, real momentum, even policy movement. Yet the system still treats essential mobility equipment like cargo and fixes problems only after they happen.
If you knew there was a real chance your ability to move could be taken from you at the end of a flight, would you still see this as acceptable risk?
Unpaid Internships and Disability: Why 'Opportunity' Often Leads Nowehere
Bryan Rowe seen working at his internship at a waste management company.
A disabled worker spent nine months doing unpaid work and still didn’t get the job.
He did everything right, and still got rejected. Twice.
He walked away thinking he wasn’t good enough. That part hit me immediately. Because I’ve lived a version of it.
Early in my career, I took unpaid internships trying to build something out of nothing. Showing up, doing whatever was asked, hoping that if I proved myself enough, stayed long enough, it would turn into something real.
Sometimes it didn’t.
I remember what that felt like. Watching something you invested in just… stop. No explanation that made sense. No clear path forward. Just the quiet realization that effort alone wasn’t going to change the outcome.
And when you’re starting out, it’s easy to turn that inward. To assume you’re the problem. That you just don’t understand how things work yet.
This isn’t rare.
I’ve seen this happen in different places, in different ways, across roles and organizations.
People show up, do the work, prove they can contribute. And then the opportunity ends right before it becomes employment.
It’s a pattern. And for disabled workers, that pattern hits harder.
We’re already navigating systems that weren’t built with us in mind. We’re adapting constantly just to show up and do the same job.
So when someone does exactly what they’re asked to do, proves they can contribute, and still doesn’t get the job, it sends a message that sticks.
You can do everything right and still not be chosen.
Disabled people are not free labor.
We are not here to make your organization look inclusive without actually being included. We’re here to work, contribute, and build careers.
Disabled professionals bring perspective most organizations don’t have. We solve problems differently because we’ve had to. We see gaps because we’ve lived in them.
And when you leave that out, it doesn’t just impact us. It limits you.
A lot of people will read stories like this and focus on the individual. They’ll say he’ll be fine. That he’ll land somewhere better.
Maybe he will. But this isn’t about one person.
This is about a system where “opportunity” often stops right before it becomes employment.
And it happens more often than people think.
So I’ll ask this:
If your organization offers internships or entry-level roles, what do they actually lead to?
Because if there’s no real path forward, it’s not opportunity.
It’s unpaid labor with better branding.
How the SAVE Act Could Impact Disabled Voters and Access to Voting
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.), Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) (left), and Ken Cuccinelli (background), former attorney general of Virginia, hold a news conference on the House steps of the U.S. Capitol to introduce the "Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act," which would mandate proof of U.S. citizenship for voter registration in federal elections, on Wednesday, May 8, 2024.
When we talk about access to voting, we tend to describe systems as “accessible” even when they depend on help to work.
That gap becomes a lot more visible when you look at the SAVE America Act, which would require documents like a birth certificate or passport just to register to vote.
For some people, that might sound like a reasonable safeguard.
But it only feels simple if you assume those documents are easy to access.
A recent TIME piece by Naomi Hess points out that disabled voters already face significant barriers when it comes to participating in elections, and adding more documentation requirements builds on top of those challenges rather than removing them.
At the same time, we are watching national negotiations stall while tying government funding to these same voting restrictions, which shows how central this issue has become in the broader conversation about participation.
I’ve spent most of my adult life voting by mail, not because it’s easier, but because the alternative didn’t work for me. The few times I tried to vote in person, the barriers weren’t subtle. They showed up in whether I could move through the space independently, whether the layout made sense, and whether the process assumed a level of mobility I didn’t have.
But even systems that are meant to improve access come with their own conditions. Before you ever get to a ballot, you have to prove who you are, and that process assumes access to documentation, time, and energy that not everyone has.
I know how to navigate those systems. I’m organized. I’ve done it before.
And even then, it takes effort.
That’s the part that tends to get flattened in policy conversations.
We often describe something as accessible when it can work with assistance, and that distinction matters more than people realize. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to call ahead to a venue or a restaurant just to understand what “accessible” actually means in practice, and whether that access depends on someone being available to help.
Because once it does, the experience changes.
If access depends on someone else stepping in, it’s not really access. It becomes something you have to coordinate, request, and hope will be available when you need it.
When you apply that same logic to voting, the implications are hard to ignore. Every additional requirement does more than verify identity. It shapes who is realistically able to participate.
We say voting is a right, but the way we structure access to it tells a more complicated story.
So I keep coming back to this:
If the goal is participation, why are we building systems that make it harder to achieve?
Lyft Agrees On Settlement After Service Dog Ride Denials
Yesterday I joined CBS News to talk about a new Lyft settlement after Tori Andres was repeatedly denied rides because of her service dog, Alfred.
If I ever get the chance to meet her, the first thing I’d say is thank you.
Speaking up about discrimination takes courage, and it helps highlight a pattern that service dog teams have been documenting for years.
Service dogs like Alfred and Canine Companions® Lovey are our medical equipment with a heartbeat and our access partners in a world still too often built without us in mind.
Accountability like this is how change starts.
Thank you to Jennifer Williams and the entire CBS team for amplifying disabled voices and helping move the conversation toward real access and equity.
Don't Push My Wheelchair: Unsolicited "Help" At The Airport Isn't Help
Close-up of Lovey, a yellow Labrador service dog sitting calmly in an airport terminal, looking directly at the camera; a blue Canine Companions service vest and purple leash are visible, with the background softly blurred
A stranger grabbed my wheelchair at LAX.
And started pushing me.
No “Do you want help?”
No “Hey, can I give you a hand?”
Just hands on my chair. And suddenly I’m moving.
Last week, I was in LA for my best friend’s 40th.
Early. Loud. Crowded. Lines are long and everyone wants to get to their gate.
I’m in my chair. My girlfriend’s with me. Canine Companions® Lovey, is working. We have a rhythm, a pace that’s ours. I know her speed. She knows mine.
And then, it happened.
A stranger saw me pushing up an incline and decided, without asking, that they were going to “help.”
My chair isn’t a shopping cart. It’s not luggage. It’s not a stroller you can grab when you’re feeling helpful.
It’s an extension of my body.
So when you grab my chair without consent, you’re not “assisting.” You’re touching me. You’re moving me. You’re taking control of my body in public.
My body knows it before my brain finishes the sentence.
There’s this sensory shock the second someone touches my chair, especially from behind, because suddenly I’m moving at a pace I didn’t choose.
Which means Lovey is suddenly moving at a pace I didn’t choose.
Which means the most trained, steady, brilliant dog on the planet has to recalibrate in real time because a stranger decided they know better than her handler.
It’s disorienting. It’s dangerous. And yeah, it makes my blood boil.
On top of the violation, there’s the performance.
Because in that moment, I’m not just thinking:
• Stop this now
• Keep Lovey safe
• Keep myself stable
• Keep my girlfriend safe
• Don’t get clipped by the river of people rushing past
• Don’t escalate in a public space at 6 a.m.
• Don’t become “the angry disabled guy” in somebody’s little morality play about “helping”
So what did I want to say? Honestly?
What the f— are you doing? Get your hands off me.
But I don’t have the social luxury to say it the way my nervous system wants to say it. The second you push back, it becomes:
“Wow. I was just trying to help.”
And now I’m the problem.
People can mean well and still do harm. Good intentions don’t grant permission. Kindness doesn’t override consent. “Help” that takes autonomy is a takeover.
For the record, I bought my chair without handles on purpose. Years ago. Intentionally. Because I’ve lived this before. I tried to build boundaries into the design.
And still, people find a way.
The issue isn’t the handles. It’s the assumption. The entitlement that says, “I get to decide what you need.”
Here’s my ask:
If you see a disabled person struggling, ask. If you want to help, ask.
And if you don’t get a yes?
Don’t touch. Don’t push. Don’t grab. Don’t steer.
Autonomy isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole point.
When “Accessible” Isn’t Accessible: What My Hotel Stay Revealed About ADA Gaps
Close-up of a hotel entrance showing a glass door with a wheelchair accessibility symbol and a raised metal threshold that creates a small lip between the ramp and the doorway.
We booked an accessible hotel room.
The first thing I encountered was a barrier.
Over the weekend, we stayed at the Holiday Inn for a conference.
The first thing I felt when I pushed against the door wasn’t anger. It was, “I’m not even surprised.”
I’ve been disabled my entire life. I’ve learned that “accessible” means different things to different people despite the ADA has existed for basically my entire adult life. So when that door required real force—not “solid door” force, but you might need a second human force—I just thought, okay. We’re going to have one of those stays.
After a three-hour drive, all I wanted was to lie down.
Instead, from the literal threshold, I’m negotiating.
Then the shower bench. It wasn’t securely bolted. We joked that it was “spiritually bolted” to the wall. We reported it. They thanked us for being proactive. It was never fixed.
Everything after that just layered on.
Key cards replaced four times. You have to insert the key card into a slot to keep the electricity on. So when your key fails, your lights fail.
The button outside the room that said “handicap room.”
Housekeeping never came once in three days. Which, sure, maybe that’s operational chaos. But when you’re paying for a hotel because you’re conserving energy for a conference, and instead you’re managing your own environment on top of everything else, that’s another thing to carry.
That’s the part people don’t see.
Every detail required effort. Reporting the bench. Swapping the keys. Chasing down room service hours that had changed but “just weren’t updated.” Advocating for late checkout. Verifying loyalty membership.
I didn’t sleep well. I was more tired than I wanted to be at a conference I cared about. I wasn’t just attending, I was managing. Managing logistics, safety. frustration. Managing myself because Canine Companions® Lovey is always watching me, always tuned to my tension. I can’t just lose it. The leash carries that.
So I find humor first. I always do. It’s how I survive it. Underneath that humor is something else.
Accessibility isn’t a label. It’s operational, and It’s part of organizational culture and leadership.
If disabled voices aren’t present throughout all levels of your organization, these misses keep happening, not because people are malicious, but because they don’t know what they don’t know. And they don’t feel what they don’t have to feel.
A non-disabled colleague might describe that stay as “fine.” Underwhelming, maybe. But fine. For me, it was a weekend of negotiation layered on top of a professional commitment.
That’s the hidden tax.
I don’t speak for every disabled person. Our needs are different. But there should be a baseline. There should be a mechanism to correct. There should be accountability when someone says, “This isn’t safe.”
What I saw wasn’t hostility but preventable friction.
That is where leadership lives.
Accessibility Failures in 2026: The Hidden Cost of Making Disabled People “Make It Work”
An American Sign Language interpreter provides interpretation during a White House press briefing, April 2021.
A disabled woman goes into Victoria’s Secret & Co. to try on clothes, and the accessible fitting room is full of junk.
To borrow a Biden-ism: Not a joke, folks.
Staff tells her it’ll be about 20 minutes while they clear it out, and before that, they tell her the regular rooms are “big enough” and make her try to fit her wheelchair in anyway. She later says the quiet part out loud: “I felt like a spectacle and an annoyance.”
It’s not just fitting rooms, either.
USA TODAY's Zach Wichter reports In 2024, airlines transported nearly 900,000 wheelchairs and scooters—and 1.26% were reported damaged or destroyed. That’s 11,357 mobility devices. People hear “1.26%” and shrug. Disabled people hear: don’t roll the dice with your body.
Let’s talk about education.
Researchers at UCLA are warning that when federal enforcement for special education gets unstable, schools can neglect annual IEP reviews and kids fall behind with less recourse for parents.
“The one thing that the IDEA does is it allows parents to have due process,” Connie Kasari, told the Daily Bruin.
Speaking of politics, Deaf advocates are fighting for ASL interpretation at publicly announced briefings, because some people would rather argue about “image” than acknowledge access is the law. The Progressive Magazine notes the argument being made against ASL interpretation is basically: it messes with the vibe. As quoted, lawyers argued that requiring interpretation “would severely intrude on the President’s prerogative to control the image he presents to the public.” The court’s response? Excluding deaf people is a “clear and present harm.”
I keep pulling on the same thread reading all of these headlines today.
We have a legal, fundamental, human right to exist. Disabled people are 20% of the population. If that makes you uncomfortable, interrogate your ableism.
Access is a thousand small daily calculations. Where do I have the energy to pick my battles? Where do I fight? Where do I go, all right, what workaround can I make because I’m too tired? Because in addition to fighting for access, we’re still living regular lives with doctor’s appointments, body aches, aging, family, jobs, trauma, all of it. And layering access fights on top.
There are days—I shouldn’t say this out loud—where the advocacy battle is so exhausting that I don’t want to leave my house. Then I get stuck in the loop: If I stay home, is that surrender? If I push through, am I burning myself down to prove I deserve to exist?
So here’s the takeaway:
Stop treating accessibility like storage. Stop treating it like a “special request” that only becomes real when a disabled person shows up and forces you to see them.
Where in your workplace, your store, your systems are you quietly betting disabled people won’t show up? Where are you asking us to “make it work” so you don’t have to change?
Why Being Disabled Is Not A Travel Hack
Freeze frame of a TikTok video with the caption “The time me and my friends used wheelchair assistance so we wouldn’t miss our flight back into the U.S.”
Happy 2026. Feeling pumped?
Everyone’s doing their New Year reset. “We’re gonna be better.” And disabled people are waking up to TikTok's about how being disabled is a travel hack and The Wall Street Journal highlighting the miracle of ‘Jetway Jesus.’
Being disabled is not travel hack. Flying while disabled is exhausting. It’s dehumanizing. It’s expensive. And it’s layered in ways most people never have to think about.
When I travel, I don’t just show up with a boarding pass. I travel with a wheelchair, and a printed, double-sided one-sheet I hand to every gate agent explaining how to handle it. Because I’ve answered the same questions a thousand times, and I’m tired of watching people guess with equipment my body depends on.
I travel with my service dog, Canine Companions® Lovey. Which means paperwork. Digital copies. Physical copies. Backups for the backups. Because I never know who’s going to demand proof, or what form of proof will suddenly be “required” today.
That’s before I even get to my body. The pain, the fatigue. the logistics. Whether my girlfriend is with me to help. What if something breaks? Will anyone listen? Just how tired am I going to be by the time we land? How much longer am I waiting to deplane? I’ve been sitting for hours with non-accessible airplane bathrooms.
So when I see people openly bragging about faking disability for pre-boarding or using their platforms to call it a “hack”, my brain short-circuits.
This feeds a narrative disabled people have been fighting forever:
• we’re exaggerating.
• we’re gaming the system.
• we need to be watched.
And yes—non-visible disabilities are real. They are valid. We should never be policing people who need assistance but don’t “look disabled enough.”
This is people who know they don’t need it, saying so out loud, and monetizing it for clicks. And the fallout lands on us.
On the scrutiny when someone like me stands up out of a wheelchair.
On the unspoken question: Are you faking it?
So we over-perform legitimacy. We carry more documentation. We explain more than we should. We make ourselves calmer, nicer, because access feels conditional.
I don’t want to spend my energy explaining why basic decency is required.
I want to spend it reminding people that disabled folks matter. That we’re not inspiration. Not content. Not a punchline. Not a workaround.
We’re just people trying to get where we’re going.
If this is how we’re starting 2026? Arguing about whether disability is being “abused”—then yeah. I’m frustrated. And I’m not interested in pretending this is cute or funny.
So I’ll ask this instead:
Who gets believed?
Who gets blamed when systems fail?
And why is disabled existence still treated like an inconvenience people feel entitled to exploit?
Sit with that.