notEvenOnce

The concept fits. Consider MENACE (Machine Educable Noughts And Crosses Engine).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9c-_neaxeU

If cells operate in a similar fashion, where adaptation to externalities encodes itself into a durable surface of arbitrary pockets, then we have a recipe for inert systems exhibiting variable degrees of behavior, which is capable of evolving over time.

This doesn't solve for sentience, but it does solve for expressive adaptation to fit into complex, hostile environments.

Have low aspirations, and set up camp in a boring job akin to a jail cell, in a place no one wants to be, doing something no one wants to do, and work alongside washed up people who are not inspiring to talk to, and perhaps have never had the chance to even try to become an inspiring role model for others.

Liferism looks like a DMV employee. Postal workers are often lifers, so not all lifer jobs are inherently disappointing, but certainly none are glamourous.

In the 1990's the internet introduced some existential threats to lifers working for the USPS, and since then, the USPS has weathered some rough seas. Putting yourself in the position of a lifer is not precisely enviable, since forces from beyond the protective shelter of the lifer job can still augment economic realities enough to affect such a station in life.

If you find your way into a lifer job, and you grow old while working it, should the day ever arrive that your lifer job disappears in a puff of magic smoke, you might never find comparable employment again.

(cough! cough! "scrum")

(cough! cough! "agile")

(cough! cough! "daily stand-ups")