I started journalling when I was twelve. Blame the Stoics, or blame whatever it is that makes some kids turn inward instead of outward. Either way, long before this blog, or before any public-facing version of myself existed, there were notebooks. Mostly confusing and often embarrassing in hindsight, but mine. 

I’ve been reading back over things I’ve written lately and I can’t always tell anymore whether it sounds like me. Or whether ‘sounds like me’ even means anything when so much of what I’ve absorbed, what we’ve all absorbed, has been shaped in some way, shape or form by the same LLMs we’re now comparing ourselves against.

I don’t think I’m against AI. I don’t think I want to make that argument, partly because it would be dishonest. I use it, most people do. The line between tool and collaborator is already blurry and getting blurrier, and pretending otherwise feels like exactly the kind of performance I’m trying to avoid.

But something still bothers me. And I’ve been trying to figure out what.

A lot of what I’ve written here didn’t start as essays or drafts. It was the raw and ugly work of trying to translate what was happening inside into something a brain could process. The blog versions are tidier, more shaped. But the origin is the same, something felt too heavy to carry without being put into words first.

That’s not really a writing practice. It’s more like a survival mechanism that happens to produce text. And I’m not sure that’s something you can optimise in the computational sense, or that it even should be.

My later teenage years included reading Camus and Montaigne and Kierkegaard, mostly in translation, which is its own weird thing, receiving someone’s most private thinking through someone else’s version of it. But what they had in common, the thing that kept me returning to them, wasn’t that they had answers. It was that they were visibly in the middle of something.

More recently I’ve been reading John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed specifically, which is a very different kind of writing to what I grew up on, but scratches a similar itch. Green reviewing the human-centered planet on a five-star scale sounds very gimmicky until you’re three pages in and it isn’t. But what makes it work is the same thing that made Montaigne work, you can feel a specific person caring about specific things for reasons that are entirely their own.

And I wonder if that’s what I’m most afraid of losing. Not writing exactly, or even originality, which is a word that gets thrown around too easily. Just the sense that someone was actually there, that the words came from somewhere real, that there was a cost.

Because I think the cost is where the meaning lives. And this doesn’t only apply to writing.

A song that breaks something open in you does that because someone had to feel the thing first. The lyric that lands too accurately, or the melody that seems to know something about you, none of that comes from averaging across enough data. It comes from a person who needed to make that specific thing because nothing else would do. Same with art. The painting that stops you isn’t usually the technically perfect one. It’s the one where you can feel the decision-making or the uncertainty or the particular mind behind it.

When we outsource that, not just writing, but music, art, the whole texture of how humans express themselves, I think we lose something harder to name than quality. We lose the proof that someone was here. That they struggled with it. That it cost them something to make.

There’s a version of this argument that sounds precious, and I want to be careful not to make it. I’m not saying AI-assisted work is worthless, or that tools are bad, or that everything must be made in suffering to count. But there is a difference between using a tool to say something and having a tool say it for you. And I think we’re getting worse at knowing which one we’re doing.

I don’t know how to end this, which feels appropriate. I don’t think the question resolves. I think the best I can say is that I’m going to keep writing badly and slowly and in a way that probably reflects all my anxieties and influences and half-processed feelings. The alternative, something cleaner and more efficient and easier to produce, would be missing the whole point.

Or at least my point. Whatever that’s worth.