Presenting partners After automation: You will be paid for what you can feel but can't explain SHARE ON SOCIAL Emmett Shine Emmett Shine is the cofounder and designer of Little Plains. I love it when a phrase from another language doesn't translate one-to-one into your native tongue. Whether schadenfreude or kaizen, these stubbornly incompatible phrases force you to expand. The post-automation age makes me think of a certain French phrase, je ne sais quoi. The phrase loosely translates to "something you can feel but can't easily explain or label." This is the headspace where I plan to spend my working time in the days to come. When I think about the act of making something, there are three key inflection moments that you can feel but not explain. Each is critical to something as ephemeral and vulnerable as a fleeting idea, a fledgling business, or a nascent project: creation, curation, and conclusion. Creation is a magnificent, sometimes violent, act of going from nothing to something. It can be electric and exhausting. It comes when it comes. You can't force it. That's the flow-state beauty of being open to the possibilities around you. Curation is what you do at the crossroads. Knowing which path to take is a gut feeling. It's knowing when the time has come to stop expanding and start chipping away at the material. You have to feel when to shift gears while driving 80 miles per hour. Conclusion is killing your darlings, embracing tunnel vision, and knowing what to hone in on. Only years and years of doing something, over and over, give you that internal compass. What connects creation, curation, and conclusion is that they are all based on a feeling. The je ne sais quoi is the internal compass to all three—it's the thing that tells you when to stop creating and start curating, and which darling to kill. Over the past 100 years, much of society has moved from physical manual labor to mental manual labor. My hope for a post-automation era is that we can collectively and individually tap into our own je ne sais quoi—that which is hard to define, and magically human.