The Personal Myth

A few days ago I read a piece in Existential Espresso about the need to have a personal myth in the age of AI. The opening line was good: "I can focus for 12 hours per day because I'm living my myth." I understand why it travelled so well. In a time obsessed with productivity, it sounds like the ultimate trick for working longer hours, concentrating better, and winning some imaginary war against distraction. But I think that is precisely the misunderstanding. A personal myth is not there to help you produce more. Or it should not be there mainly for that. It is there so you do not live dragged along by everything that wants to think for you.

For a long time, most people did not have to invent a symbolic structure from scratch. They received one. Family, religion, country, class, trade, tradition, community. All of that could be oppressive, limited, unjust, or simply false, but it also did something we miss now: it provided a frame. It told you where you came from, what was expected of you, what failure meant, what honour meant, what you had to protect, what you had to fear, what kind of person was admirable. Many of those structures have now broken down or no longer serve us, and in principle that is good news. The problem is that emptiness does not stay empty for long. If you do not choose a story from which to look at the world, some machine will choose one for you. It may be a recommendation algorithm, a corporate culture, a bargain-bin ideology, a prefabricated identity, or that very contemporary mixture of anxiety, consumption, and moral performance that we call being informed.

AI does not create this problem. It only accelerates it. The noise was already there, but now it has an industrial capacity to adapt itself to your exact way of being distracted. Before, the world offered you too many things. Now it also learns which too many things work on you. If you want to feel outraged, it serves outrage. If you want to feel brilliant, it serves content confirming that you are. If you want to feel that you are on the verge of discovering a truth nobody else can see, there is also a machine ready to look you in the eye and say yes, you really have seen further than everyone else. That is why I am so little interested in the argument about whether AI "thinks" and so much more interested in how it makes us think. POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does. And what many of these systems do is extract attention, turn it into data, and return to us an increasingly precise version of our own inertia.

That is where the personal myth comes in. Not as motivational fantasy, not as a vision board, not as that ridiculous sentence someone puts in a bio to look more deliberate than they are. A personal myth is more like a compass than a plan. It does not tell you exactly where to go, but it helps you know when you are getting lost. It does not eliminate chaos, but it reduces the amount of chaos you accept as yours. It does not make you invulnerable, but it gives you a criterion for distinguishing between what deserves your energy and what merely knows how to capture it.

I think mine began with photography, although I did not understand it that way at the time. I have written before that I do not remember my childhood very well. Not in the way other people seem to remember theirs. I have data, loose scenes, fragments, but not that emotional continuity that turns the past into a house you can return to. For years I thought that was normal. Then I started taking photographs and understood that perhaps the camera was doing more than recording images. It was a prosthesis for memory, but also a way of reconciling myself with loss. In Japanese there is mono no aware, that melancholy before the ephemeral that is not exactly sadness, but a form of love crossed by the awareness that everything leaves. I am interested in that. Thresholds, streets, reflections, cities that refuse to be possessed, the face of someone just before the moment closes. For me, photographing is not freezing time. It is admitting that I cannot.

But if I stop there, the myth remains incomplete. Because impermanence is not only about things disappearing. It is also about who controls what remains. Where your ideas live. In which formats. Under which permissions. Who decides whether in ten years you will be able to open a document, recover a photograph, read a conversation, reconstruct a period of your life. That is why digital sovereignty, which sounds like a technical matter, is for me a natural continuation of the same thing. I do not want my memory to depend on platforms that change owner, policy, or business model every six months. I do not want to write inside boxes whose key belongs to someone else. Not out of paranoia, but out of hygiene. If something matters, it should live somewhere you can understand, move, copy, transform, and if necessary abandon without asking permission.

This also explains my rather ambiguous relationship with technology. It fascinates me, but I do not worship it. I use AI every day, build tools, automate things, talk to models, experiment with agents. But precisely because of that, I am uneasy about the ease with which we turn a tool into a replacement mythology. Some people are not using ChatGPT to think better, but to feel accompanied by an authority that never gets tired of validating them. Some people confuse verbal fluency with knowledge, simulation with experience, immediate answer with truth. And there is an entire industry delighted to feed that confusion, because a useful tool sells well, but an oracle sells much better.

I already wrote about this in The One-Person Mini-Cult, about that new form of self-deception in which a machine returns, in impeccable language, the most flattering version of a poorly checked intuition. And also in That Is Not It Either, when I tried to separate intelligence, knowledge, and consciousness. Not because LLMs are not impressive. They are. But precisely because their power makes it more urgent not to confuse them with what they are not. A hammer can change a house. That does not make it an architect, much less an inhabitant.

My personal myth, if I have to formulate it without becoming solemn, has to do with resisting that substitution. Using machines without letting them occupy the place of gods. Building tools that orbit around my way of thinking, not adapting my life to a company's workflow. Writing on my own site before the platform of the moment. Reading by RSS like someone keeping a small vegetable garden against the infinite supermarket of the algorithmic feed. Taking photographs not to win an aesthetic, but to train a gaze. Having my own archive. Returning to old texts. Distrusting revelations that arrive too conveniently. Remembering that if an idea seems written especially to confirm that I was right from the beginning, it probably deserves a second reading.

This connects with something I wrote recently about the end of one size fits all. The interesting part of AI is not that we will all use the same magical tool, but that for the first time it is reasonable to make small, personal, odd, almost domestic tools that adapt to a concrete way of thinking. The trap is forgetting that this is what they are: situated tools. When you start believing that your personal solution should become a universal platform, you are back inside the old system, only with a more modern README.

There is also something of fatherhood in all this, although I do not always name it that way. When I think about my children, I do not think so much about leaving them a doctrine as leaving them a way of suspecting. I would like them to know that almost every system they encounter will ask something of them in exchange for belonging. Attention, obedience, data, enthusiasm, cynicism, identity. Sometimes it will be worth it. Often it will not. I would like them to learn to ask what a system actually does, not what it says it does. I would like them to understand that not everything useful deserves adoration and not everything modern is inevitable. I suppose I would like to leave them a compass more than a map, because maps expire quickly and, besides, every generation has the right to draw its own.

That is why I am more interested in defining what I do not want than in designing a perfect vision of what I do want. Goals that are too closed have always seemed to me an elegant form of anxiety. Life changes, one changes, the world changes, and clinging to an overly specific image of the future usually ends in frustration or self-deception. By contrast, there are negations that do work as structure. I do not want to live renting my attention to the highest bidder. I do not want to confuse reach with value. I do not want my thinking to depend on a platform. I do not want to call a very sophisticated statistic consciousness just because it answers prettily. I do not want to turn my life into content. I do not want technology to make me less capable of being alone with a difficult idea. I do not want to look back and discover that I was present everywhere except in my own life.

That, in the end, is a personal myth. Not an epic. Not a brand. Not a list of objectives. A minimal story, but strong enough to order small decisions. What I read. Where I publish. Which tools I use. What I ignore. What I keep. What I reject. What kind of beauty matters to me. What kind of noise I no longer negotiate with. In my case, the story could be summed up like this: trying to look, remember, and build with sovereignty in the middle of impermanence, without surrendering to noise or to false technological gods.

It is not a particularly grand story. Better that way. Stories that are too grand tend to demand human sacrifices, even in their domestic version: health, family, attention, honesty, time. I prefer a smaller and more stubborn myth. One that reminds me that everything passes, that precisely for that reason it is worth looking carefully, that tools should remain tools, that memory needs infrastructure, and that freedom often begins with a boring decision: keeping your things in a format you can open tomorrow.

The article's question was what story you are living. I would change it a little. What story is using your life as material. Because there is always one. Yours, your family's, your company's, your feed's, a machine's that learned to imitate intimacy, a market's that needs you to confuse desire with urgency. Having a personal myth does not save you from all of that completely. But at least it gives you a chance to notice when you are no longer the one looking.