We now have AI tools that can mirror our own narratives back to us with terrifying efficiency. If you ask an LLM to validate your perspective, it will do so. It will help you polish your main character script until it shines.

But if you use AI as an intellectual partner, as a way to find the holes in your thinking, to surface the perspectives you’ve missed, and to challenge your own “stories as code”, then it becomes a tool for expansion rather than isolation.

The danger of romanticising your own life is that you eventually stop living it. You start performing it. You become a spectator of your own experience, constantly checking to see if the lighting is right and if the dialogue sounds profound. You are no longer engaged with the messy, unpredictable, beautiful reality of other people. You are just managing a brand.

Meaning is made, not found. But it is made in the space between us. If you occupy all the space with your own protagonist energy, there is no room for meaning to emerge.