G: Yep. For four chicken thighs, if the goal is simply tender, pull-apart chicken that stays neutral enough to become tacos, sandwiches, pasta, etc. later, keep it very simple.

• 4 chicken thighs
• ½ cup chicken broth or water
• ¾ tsp salt (less if your broth is salty)
• ½ tsp garlic powder
• ½ tsp onion powder
• Optional: ½ tsp dried oregano or thyme
• Optional: 1 tbsp butter or olive oil if the thighs are skinless and especially lean

Put the liquid in, chicken on top, sprinkle everything over it. You do not need to submerge the chicken—the thighs will release quite a bit of their own liquid.

Cook LOW about 4–5 hours or HIGH about 2½–3 hours, until they're very tender and easily pull apart. For shredding rather than merely reaching a safe temperature, thighs benefit from going beyond 165°F; around 175–190°F internally tends to give you much softer connective tissue.

If you're literally walking out the door: chicken + ½ cup liquid + salt + garlic powder + onion powder → LOW → leave. That's enough.

G: Yes. Apple cider will work very well with chicken thighs.

Use about ½ cup cider for four thighs. It will give them a mild apple sweetness without locking you into an obviously “apple” dish later.

I'd do:

• ½ cup cider
• ¾ tsp salt
• ½ tsp garlic powder
• ½ tsp onion powder
• Optional oregano/thyme

For maximum versatility later, skip additional sugar or strong spices. The cider is enough flavor by itself.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. And I think the technical term you may have been reaching for is psychophysiological rather than psychosomatic.

There is documented evidence for what you're describing: a psychological event or state can precipitate, exacerbate, or sometimes contribute to the onset of a genuine physiological disorder. That's importantly different from "thinking you're sick." The downstream physical process can be objectively real. A standard psychology/medicine term is psychophysiological disorder, and the research area dealing especially with nervous-system/endocrine/immune interactions is psychoneuroimmunology. citeturn0search15turn0search13

For example, psychological stress can alter the HPA axis, sympathetic nervous system, cortisol/catecholamine signaling, inflammatory signaling, and immune function. Those pathways can then affect actual tissues. citeturn0search3 Researchers have documented this particularly well with things such as asthma exacerbations, where stress can influence inflammatory mechanisms, citeturn0search0turn0search5 and atopic dermatitis/eczema, where stress-related neural signaling can change inflammation and skin-barrier function. citeturn0search2 There is also substantial research on stress affecting gastrointestinal physiology through brain–gut interactions. citeturn0search17

There's an important distinction, though:

Psychological trigger → genuine physiological disease process
is not the same phenomenon as
psychological/neurological process → physical symptoms without the corresponding structural disease.

The latter includes things like functional neurological disorder (FND). Those symptoms are also real and involuntary, but the mechanism is altered nervous-system functioning rather than, say, psychological stress causing inflammatory damage to an organ. citeturn0search1turn0search11

And there's a third possibility: stress exposes or accelerates something already developing. In that case it isn't accurate to say the mind "created" the disease; rather, it supplied enough physiological perturbation to push a susceptible system across a threshold.

So if by "psychosomatic instigation of an actual ailment" you mean:

Could someone's psychological state initiate a biological chain of events that results in an objectively physical illness or flare, rather than merely producing the subjective sensation of illness?

Yes. That phenomenon is documented. The strength of evidence for actual initiation rather than exacerbation/precipitation varies considerably by disease, though; asthma is a nice example of that distinction, because stress-related exacerbation is well supported while claims that stress independently causes asthma to originate are much harder to establish. citeturn0search4

The word "precipitation" may actually be close to the technical word you lost: medical papers routinely talk about psychological stress precipitating an episode or illness. citeturn0search7

G: The vector I think you're after is “safe seat → captive voter → declining candidate quality.” Not “vote against Republicans,” but “being reliably Republican has removed the party’s incentive to earn your particular vote.”

Compressed versions:

• “A safe seat means they don’t have to earn your vote. It means they get to choose what you’ll put up with.”
• “If they know you’ll vote Republican no matter who they send, why would they bother sending you someone good?”
• “They call your district ‘safe.’ Safe for whom? You’re the one stuck with whoever they pick.”
• “A guaranteed vote isn’t political power. It’s permission to take you for granted.”
• “If your vote is guaranteed, your opinion is optional.”
• “They spent all that effort making the district safe for Republicans. That also made Republicans safe from you.”
• “Gerrymandering can protect your party from Democrats. It can also protect a bad Republican from Republican voters.”
• “A party that knows you won’t leave doesn’t have to listen when you complain.”
• “If you hate the guy they gave you but vote for him anyway, you’ve taught them they can give you another one.”
• “Don’t reward somebody for taking your vote for granted. Make them earn it.”

The most information-dense one for your specific argument is probably:

“They made your district safe for Republicans—and in doing so, made Republicans safe from you.”

That gets unusually close to the whole mechanism in thirteen words: gerrymandering → electoral safety → loss of voter leverage, while speaking in terms of the conservative voter's own power rather than asking them to change political identity.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. The sentiment you're adding is “I’m not asking you to betray your politics; I’m asking you not to surrender your judgment.” Research does support the underlying accountability idea that electoral incentives can affect responsiveness, though the relationship between “safe” seats and responsiveness is more complicated than a simple safe-seat = bad-representation rule. citeturn0search3turn0search5

For neutral compression of the idea—not targeted persuasion—I’d phrase the underlying propositions as:

• “You don’t owe any candidate your vote just because you owe their party your loyalty.”
• “Vote for the people you respect. Leave the rest blank.”
• “You can want your party to win without rewarding a candidate you think is an asshole.”
• “If you can’t vote for the other party, you still don’t have to vote for someone you dislike.”
• “Your party preference tells you which direction you want government to go. It doesn’t require you to endorse every person they put on the ballot.”
• “A party nomination is an option, not an obligation.”

The concept you were reaching toward with “we have goals, they have hatred” seems slightly different but compatible: political identity doesn't have to determine every individual vote. In U.S. elections, candidates also face different incentives from primary versus general-election voters, so separating “I generally belong on this side” from “this particular candidate has earned my vote” describes a real distinction in electoral behavior. citeturn0search4

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. The distinction you're identifying has an established electoral-behavior counterpart: selective abstention/undervoting. People can participate in an election while deliberately leaving an individual contest blank; political-science research treats ballot completion as a series of separate choices rather than simply “voted/didn't vote.” citeturn0search0turn0search1

So, stripped of persuasion and reduced to the conceptual core:

“Showing up doesn't obligate you to vote in every race.”

Or slightly fuller:

“Do your civic duty: show up and vote. But your duty is to make the choices you believe in—not to fill every blank.”

And the particular case you're describing:

“Vote for the candidates you actually want. If one race gives you nobody you can support, leave that race blank and keep voting.”

That last part matters because you're trying to break an implicit binary: “vote straight ticket or stay home.” Those aren't the only possibilities. A voter can support their preferred candidates for school board, sheriff, Congress, etc., while deliberately declining to endorse either candidate in another contest. Indeed, research finds that millions of Americans already leave individual contests unanswered after going to the trouble of voting. citeturn0search1turn0search17

And I think your dog-catcher example is useful conceptually because it makes the ballot feel like what it actually is: a collection of separate decisions, not one giant party vote.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes—basil pesto definitely goes with slow-cooker chicken, including thighs. There are recipes specifically built around that combination. citeturn0search0turn0search10

For your particular batch, though, I'd add it after cooking, because you wanted neutral-purpose shredded chicken. Long cooking mellows pesto and can oxidize the basil; adding it afterward preserves the brighter basil/garlic flavor. The Kitchn actually uses a hybrid approach—some pesto during cooking, then reserved pesto stirred in afterward. citeturn0search0turn0search2

And with the apple cider you already put in, I don't see a serious clash. Apple + chicken + basil is compatible; you'll just get a slightly sweet/herbal result.

So I'd do:

Shred chicken → mix in 1–2 tablespoons pesto → taste → add more if wanted.

That also lets you pesto only part of the chicken and keep the rest neutral for tacos or something completely different.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. There is research quite close to what you're describing, although I don't find a recognized diagnosis corresponding to “doesn't experience themselves as the protagonist of their own life.” The useful literature divides your intuitive idea into several measurable dimensions.

The umbrella term you were missing is probably narrative identity: the internal, evolving story through which someone relates their remembered past, present self, and anticipated future. Researchers actually talk about the person as the “autobiographical protagonist” or “narrated self.” citeturn0search8turn0search14

And one of the major variables they measure is narrative agency. That's remarkably close to your protagonist scale. High narrative agency means that, when constructing your life story, you portray yourself as someone who chooses, initiates, changes things, pursues goals, overcomes obstacles, etc. Low narrative agency means that your autobiographical self is more often someone to whom events happen, or whose life is substantially organized around other people and external circumstances. citeturn0search3turn0search11

The interesting part for your question: autism

There is now research specifically examining narrative identity in autistic people, including a 2025 study that directly compared complete life narratives rather than merely memories of individual events.

It found lower overall narrative coherence in the autistic group, especially causal-motivational coherence—roughly, connecting what happened → what I wanted/did → what resulted → how that made me who I am. The authors describe differences in self-continuity and autobiographical reasoning rather than absence of a self. citeturn0search0turn0search1

There's an older literature that gets even closer to the thing you're trying to articulate. A 2022 review describes evidence that some autistic people's autobiographical recollections contain less of a sense of the self as an agent within the remembered event. The review discusses earlier researchers' suggestion that someone can remember what happened without representing the fact that it happened to me as strongly within the construction of the memory. citeturn0search2

Another small autism study found something strikingly analogous in the social domain: autistic adolescents talked about social groups and other people, but were less likely than controls to position themselves as members of the groups they were describing, and made more references to other people. citeturn0search5turn0search13

So your intuition isn't coming completely out of nowhere.

But I would separate three axes

What you're describing doesn't necessarily mean “low self-esteem”, and it certainly isn't itself a pathology. I think your literary analogy is actually doing useful work because these things can vary independently:

Centrality: How much is the story organized around me?

Agency: How much am I represented as causing/changing what happens?

Valence: How positively or negatively do I evaluate the person who is me?

Someone could therefore be extremely central but low-agency:

“Everything happens to me. Other people and circumstances determine where my story goes.”

Or high-agency but relatively low-centrality:

“I make consequential choices, but I don't naturally organize the world as though my life were the plot around which everything else revolves.”

And somebody could be highly protagonist-centered while thinking the protagonist is awful. So “hero of your own story” unfortunately bundles several psychologically separable things together.

That's why I wouldn't jump from what you're describing to depression, personality disorder, etc. Low narrative agency occurs in several kinds of psychopathology—including depression and some personality pathology—but it isn't diagnostic of them. A nine-year longitudinal study also found that agency in people's life narratives was independently related to depression and well-being even after accounting for personality traits. citeturn0search4turn0search9

There's also a recent scholarly criticism worth keeping in the model: some researchers argue that older autism literature has too readily interpreted different forms of autobiographical/narrative selfhood as deficient or impoverished selfhood. In other words, atypical narration shouldn't automatically be converted into “autistic person has less of a self.” citeturn0search15

So if I were translating your thought into research terminology for another search, I'd call it something like:

“individual differences in autobiographical self-centrality and narrative agency.”

And your particular description—“I'm obviously the main character because it's my consciousness we're talking about, but protagonist feels like too strong a description”—makes me especially interested in centrality versus agency. Those are not necessarily the same phenomenon.

There may actually be a fourth dimension lurking in what you mean that these terms don't capture: whether you experience yourself as the subject of your life versus almost an observer/participant within a larger causal system. I found some adjacent research on that, but I don't want to collapse it into narrative agency prematurely. If you describe what makes “protagonist” feel too strong for you, I can probably identify which research construct is closest.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes — that correction changes the target substantially. I searched again specifically for self-as-protagonist / autobiographical protagonist, rather than agency.

What I find is interesting partly because there seems to be a hole in the literature almost exactly where you're pointing.

Narrative-identity theory commonly assumes that the self occupies the protagonist position. McAdams's framework, for example, distinguishes the narrating self (the autobiographical author) from the narrated self, which is explicitly described as the autobiographical protagonist. citeturn0search0turn0search2 But researchers then tend to ask things about that protagonist—How agentic is he? How coherent? Is his story redemptive? What emotions does he express?—rather than asking how strongly does the person identify themselves as the protagonist in the first place? One review of common narrative-identity measurements lists agency, communion, redemption, contamination, affective tone, and integrative complexity; degree of protagonist identification/centrality isn't one of the standard dimensions. citeturn0search8

And that's much closer to what I now understand you to mean.

Your proposed axis is different

Imagine three autobiographical statements:

A: “This is the story of me trying to accomplish X, and these are the people and circumstances I encountered.”

B: “These things happened, these people were doing these things, and I happened to be there and participated.”

C: “These things happened around me and I don't really experience them as constituting a story about me at all.”

A, B and C could contain exactly the same amount of actual agency. B could even have made more consequential decisions than A.

The difference is narrative centrality—or, if we coined a deliberately descriptive term, protagonist identification.

And I don't find a standard clinical scale that measures that cleanly.

That's especially noticeable because some theoretical literature simply builds protagonist status into the definition. One philosophical treatment says that people understand their lives as narratives in which they situate themselves as protagonists; another describes autobiographical identity essentially in terms of the character at the center of the autobiographical representation. citeturn0search2turn0search4 In other words, “the self is the protagonist” often appears as a premise rather than an individual-difference variable.

That may explain why my previous search kept collapsing your question into agency.

And you've added another separate variable: hero status

Now I think there are actually two questions in what you're describing.

Protagonist identification:
How much do I experience myself as the central character of my autobiographical story?

Moral protagonist identification:
How automatically do I identify that central character as “the good guy”?

Those aren't logically identical.

Someone could have extremely high protagonist identification and say:

“My life is absolutely my story, and I've behaved terribly.”

Or low protagonist identification:

“I'm certainly present in my life, but I'm one participant among many in a bunch of events that don't particularly seem to be about me.”

Or what you're describing as the more radical endpoint:

“I'm the viewpoint character because consciousness necessarily gives me the camera, but I don't particularly experience myself as the protagonist.”

That last distinction is the one I think I missed before.

And your fairy-tale objection demonstrates it nicely. Narrative centrality doesn't require causal agency. Sleeping Beauty can spend a substantial portion of her own famous story literally unconscious while other characters determine what happens. She's still structurally designated the protagonist. Conversely, an antagonist can exercise enormous agency without becoming the protagonist.

So agency ≠ protagonist status.

Is not being the hero pathological?

I couldn't find evidence that it inherently is.

Narrative-identity research absolutely studies pathological alterations in self-narrative—psychosis-spectrum conditions are one major example—but those involve things such as disrupted coherence, continuity, authorship and self-concept rather than a recognized disorder of “I don't cast myself as my life's hero.” citeturn0search0

In fact, there is some scholarship pushing against the stronger assumption that psychologically healthy people must experience life as one unified protagonist-centered narrative. The broader narrative-identity literature acknowledges that selves can be multiple, contextual and fluid rather than organized around one perfectly unified protagonist. citeturn0search10

So I would not presently attach a diagnosis to what you're describing.

What you've identified may instead be an under-measured individual difference:

How much narrative privilege does a person assign the self simply because it is the self?

That gets surprisingly close to your original “everyone is the hero of their own story” question without importing agency, self-esteem, depression, morality, or anything else.

And I'd actually split that into two axes now:

self-as-protagonist ←→ self-as-participant

and independently

self-as-moral-default (“good guy”) ←→ self-as-morally-unprivileged participant

Your description sounds much more like you're asking about movement along those axes than about lacking agency.

I searched specifically for those constructs, and I don't see an established diagnostic label for either one. The absence is itself interesting: psychology has done enormous work analyzing what kind of protagonist people make themselves, while apparently doing much less empirical work asking whether everybody actually makes themselves the protagonist to the same degree in the first place. citeturn0search0turn0search8

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Yes. With that clarification, existentialism is much closer to what you're describing than the clinical concepts we were looking at earlier. And I think there are actually two related ideas here that shouldn't be collapsed.

Existentialism's starting point is almost exactly the realization you describe: there is no externally supplied plot. In Sartre's formulation, “existence precedes essence”: you aren't born as a character with an assigned purpose that explains what you're supposed to accomplish. Values, purposes, and projects acquire their significance because people give them significance. citeturn0search1turn0search8

That creates a fascinating problem for the “hero of your own story” cliché.

A conventional protagonist has something an actual person doesn't necessarily have: an author. Dorothy is supposed to get home. Elphaba's actions in Wicked are significant because the story has selected them as significant. Even an evil protagonist can confidently occupy the center because the narrative itself says, this is the person whose actions matter to the story.

Existentialism removes that external author.

So you can have:

I want X → therefore I pursue X

without the additional inference:

I want X → therefore X is what my life is about → therefore my pursuit of X constitutes the plot.

That distinction strikes me as extremely close to what you're trying to identify.

There's actually a philosophical argument remarkably close to this

Galen Strawson's “Against Narrativity” attacks the assumption that people necessarily experience themselves narratively at all. He explicitly quotes theories claiming that people construct an autobiographical story in which the self is the principal character—and says the empirical assumption that everybody actually experiences themselves that way is false. He distinguishes people with a strongly temporally extended conception of themselves (“Diachronic”) from people whose experience of self is substantially less narrative and temporally continuous (“Episodic”). citeturn0search0turn0search12

Strawson's distinction still isn't exactly yours. His axis is largely temporal/narrative continuity. You're proposing something more specifically about protagonist privilege.

But importantly, he demonstrates that philosophers have challenged the premise hiding inside “everyone is the hero of their own story”:

Maybe everybody doesn't experience life as a story in the first place.

And once that premise is removed, your proposed phenomenon becomes considerably easier to describe.

I think your existential version is slightly different again

You're not necessarily describing loss of meaning.

That's important.

Suppose I decide that keeping my friend alive matters enormously to me. I act accordingly. I may sacrifice considerably for it. I possess motivation, agency, values and meaning.

But simultaneously I understand:

The universe did not assign me this task.

My friend's survival isn't objectively a chapter in some larger plot. I care because I care.

That doesn't make the motivation weaker. But it can strip away what I'd call, provisionally, narrative entitlement: the intuitive assumption that because something matters enormously to me, it therefore occupies some privileged position in the story of what is happening.

That's different from nihilism.

Nihilism might produce:

“Nothing ultimately matters.”

Your description permits:

“This matters enormously to me. I just don't mistake that fact for evidence that reality is about me.”

And classical existentialism actually leaves both possibilities open. Recognition that there's no predetermined essence or divine justification can produce anxiety and meaninglessness, but existentialists characteristically respond that people nevertheless create meaning through their commitments and choices. citeturn0search1

Which produces a distinction I like better than my previous axes

I previously suggested protagonist ↔︎ participant.

I think that's incomplete now.

There's something more like:

Experiential centrality:
Everything necessarily happens from here because this is the consciousness I occupy.

Motivational centrality:
My desires necessarily have unusual causal importance to my behavior.

Narrative centrality:
These events collectively constitute a story that is principally about me.

Teleological centrality:
There is some reason that my particular story is happening—some purpose, destiny, mission, arc, etc.

You can retain the first two completely while losing much of the latter two.

And that person wouldn't necessarily feel like a protagonist anymore.

They'd still make decisions. They could have tremendous agency. They could care passionately about outcomes. They could consider some actions morally right and others wrong.

They've just stopped adding:

“…and therefore this is what the story is about.”

That's why your point about externally uncontrolled events from the previous message now seems particularly relevant. A protagonist expects contingency to have narrative status: the setback, coincidence, triumph, catastrophe. An existentially non-protagonist conception can instead accommodate the considerably stranger proposition that some things aren't plot developments at all. They just happened.

And there's a wonderful connection here to narrative-identity psychologist Dan McAdams. He explicitly says his narrative-identity theory was heavily influenced by Sartre. He describes Sartre as suggesting that, with traditional myths no longer providing meaning, people can construct personal myths that impose order on otherwise chaotic experience. citeturn0search4

Which gives us almost the exact inverse of your hypothesis:

Existential realization: there is no supplied story.
↓
One possible response: construct a personal story anyway.
↓
Another possible response: construct purposes and values without constructing yourself as the protagonist of a story.

That third state is the one I think you've been trying to point at.

And I still haven't found a psychological construct that cleanly measures it. But we've now gotten considerably closer to locating the intellectual neighborhood: it's at the intersection of existentialism, anti-narrativity, and narrative identity—not principally agency. citeturn0search0turn0search4

Your Bloodhound Gang line—“you define what's death-defying”—actually captures the paradox nicely: the recognition that you're the one assigning significance doesn't require you to stop assigning significance. It only removes the illusion that somebody else wrote it into the script.

G: Yes. I think you've found an equivocation hidden inside the cliché.

There are at least two meanings of “protagonist of your own story”:

Narrative/structural protagonist: If I tell you what happened to me, I'm almost unavoidably the viewpoint character. “I went to the store; John said X; then Mary did Y…” organizes John and Mary relative to the speaker because that's the information channel available. Even if I think John was more important to what happened, I'm still telling my account of my experience.

Psychological/teleological protagonist: I experience my life as something whose events constitute my story: I have an arc, my objectives give events their significance, obstacles are obstacles to my journey, and so forth.

The common expression “everyone is the hero of their own story” slides very easily from the first—which is nearly trivially true—into the second, which isn't obviously true at all.

Your sensory point makes the first even stronger. Consciousness supplies something analogous to a permanently mounted first-person camera. You cannot directly experience someone else's experience. Consequently, autobiographical communication inherits an unavoidable indexical structure: I was here; that happened over there; she did that to him; I saw it. That's not necessarily psychological self-centeredness or even narrative self-conception. It's partly an artifact of where the camera is mounted.

And serial communication adds another constraint. If you're explaining why you did something, every sentence has to maintain a referential thread back to you:

I believed X → because I'd observed Y → so I did Z → which produced Q.

You become the grammatical and causal spine of the explanation even if your actual worldview is something closer to:

I'm one organism among billions reacting to circumstances that weren't arranged around anybody.

So there's a potentially important distinction between being the narrator's focal character because communication requires a focal point and experiencing oneself as reality's narratively privileged character.

That also resolves something from our earlier discussion. A person could sincerely say:

“Of course I'm the protagonist when I tell my autobiography. Who else could be? But I don't experience my life as though I'm a protagonist.”

There's no contradiction. The first “protagonist” is a property of the representation; the second is a property of the person's self-conception.

And I'd modify something I said earlier accordingly. I was treating “self-as-protagonist” as though it might straightforwardly be a psychological variable. Your argument suggests we'd first have to subtract the structural baseline created by first-person consciousness and autobiographical communication. Otherwise a questionnaire asking people about their own lives might manufacture protagonist-centeredness simply by asking them to tell stories about themselves.

That may also explain part of why the phenomenon you're interested in has been difficult to locate in the literature: the standard research instrument—asking someone to narrate their life—may partially presuppose the very thing we'd want to measure.

So I think your original question has sharpened considerably. It isn't really:

“Can someone cease being the protagonist of their own story?”

It's closer to:

“Once we subtract the unavoidable first-person structure of consciousness and autobiographical communication, how much additional narrative centrality do people assign themselves?”

That is the variable we've been circling.

G: For the four chicken thighs in the slow cooker:

• LOW: about 4–5 hours for tender, easily shredded thighs.
• HIGH: about 2½–3 hours.
• 6 hours on LOW: generally still fine, especially thighs.
• 7–8+ hours: safe if the cooker has maintained temperature, but you're increasingly likely to get dry/stringy or mushy chicken rather than nicely tender meat.

Since you put yours in around 8:20–8:30 this morning and it's now about 4:05, you're approaching 8 hours. I'd take them out now. They've had considerably more than enough time to become pull-apart tender.

G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]

G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]

G: Both are very workable. I checked the mechanics against USDA guidance and slow-cooker cooking references.

1. Turn today's juices into taco sauce

Given what you put in there—chicken drippings + cider + salt + garlic/onion—you already have the beginnings of a good sauce. The cider should have picked up chicken fat, gelatin, and concentrated chicken flavor.

I'd use a stovetop reduction + cornstarch slurry, because it's quick and lets you control the final consistency. Cornstarch slurry is a standard way of finishing watery slow-cooker juices. citeturn0search10turn0search26

Take the chicken out and:

1. Pour the liquid into a small saucepan. If there's an excessive layer of fat, spoon some off, but don't obsessively defat it—some fat is desirable for tacos.
2. Bring it to a simmer for 5–10 minutes. Taste it as it reduces. Because you salted the chicken initially, don't reduce it blindly until it's extremely concentrated.
3. Mix 1 teaspoon cornstarch + 1 tablespoon cold water in a cup.
4. Whisk that into the simmering juices.
5. Give it about 1–2 minutes. If it's still too thin, make another small slurry rather than dumping dry cornstarch into it.
6. Shred the chicken and either toss it with a little sauce or keep the sauce separate and spoon it onto the tacos.

I'd favor the latter for your batch. You originally wanted neutral chicken, and this preserves that flexibility.

Also, this is where I'd experiment with your pesto, rather than putting pesto into the entire sauce. A little pesto on one taco with that cider-chicken reduction will tell you whether you like the combination without committing the whole batch.

2. The 9-to-5 problem

You've spotted a genuine weakness of slow cookers. “Slow” and “all day” aren't necessarily the same thing, especially with chicken.

There are basically three ways of expanding the usable window.

First: choose foods whose quality window is inherently long. Tough, collagen-rich meat—pork shoulder, chuck roast, etc.—has considerably more tolerance for long cooking than chicken breast. Chicken thighs are more forgiving than breasts, but even thighs eventually deteriorate texturally.

Second: cook → automatically switch to WARM. This is probably the modern solution to exactly the hypothetical you're describing. A programmable cooker can cook for, say, 5 hours on LOW and then automatically switch to a holding temperature. USDA explicitly says WARM should not be used to cook raw food, but it can be used after the food is completely cooked; hot-held food should remain at 140°F or above. citeturn0search1turn0search5

So instead of:

8 AM → LOW → 6 PM = 10 hours of cooking

you want:

8 AM → LOW → cooked around 1 PM → WARM → you get home

The last five hours aren't intended to continue cooking at the same rate; they're principally hot holding. Quality can still gradually decline, so it isn't unlimited storage, but it's much better than cooking chicken on LOW for ten straight hours.

Third: manipulate the recipe rather than the temperature. Larger/tougher pieces, adequate moisture, recipes deliberately designed for long cooking, etc. Slow cookers retain moisture extremely well because very little escapes through the lid, which is also why simply adding lots more liquid isn't a particularly good way of doubling the cooking time. citeturn0search10

One thing not to do is what might initially seem like the obvious solution: put cold/frozen chicken in there and use a delayed-start timer so cooking begins at noon. USDA specifically warns not to delay the start with perishable ingredients, because you're deliberately leaving raw food warming through bacteria-friendly temperatures. They also recommend thawing poultry before slow cooking. citeturn0search6turn0search4

Interestingly, USDA explicitly says that cooking on LOW from the beginning is safe when you're leaving for work. citeturn0search0 The difficulty you're identifying is therefore primarily food quality and timing, not “slow cookers aren't compatible with jobs.”

So the general rule I'd keep in your head is:

Don't try to make a 5-hour food take 10 hours to cook. Make it take 5 hours to cook and safely hold it for the remaining time.

That's the feature I'd specifically want—programmable cook time followed by automatic WARM—if you start using this method regularly.