We are unconsciously becoming someone else

We are unconsciously becoming someone else. We might not realise it but we are. Like when was the last time you have TRULY been yourself? I know it's a vague question so let me unpack this.

Bdw, none of the words in this post are generated or optimized by LLM. These are my own views, my own thoughts and my very words. It's also a little sad that it needs saying. Authenticity now has to be certified which is a symptom of the things I'll be talking about in this very post.

We are now living in a world of infinite information, countless options, digital characters or indentities that we are slowly forgetting who we are.

Every day we consume online content. We consume somebody else's personality. Somebody else's taste. Somebody else's way of speaking. Somebody else's relationship advice. Somebody else's lifestyle. So much so that now we no longer recognise our own identity, our own voice. And eventually the boundary between "I like this" and "I've seen enough people liking this that I now think I like this" gets blurry. We are starting to imitate and live someone else's life.

When something is trending, we are relying on it's level of popularity as a mental shortcut: if everyone is talking about it, we tend to believe there must be a reason so we end up copying other people's tastes, interests and behaviors.

It's like we are downloading personalities, behaviour and even words & phrases that are not truly ours.

And it's getting even worse by algorithms that are designed to surface more such content, eventually making it harder for us to come back to our own self.

As if algorithms were not enough now we have AI to accelerate this process of loosing our identity at a far greater speed.

We are no longer writting our emails by our hand. We are no longer relying on people for advice or questions, cause ChatGPT is just one tab away. We are not even googling anymore, we type it into ChatGPT that spits out a bunch of words in seconds. We are no longer willing to experiment, make mistakes

Before a date or a meeting we ask our AI: how should I icebreak, what are the questions I should ask, what are some interesting topics I should mug up, how should I behave smart, how can I be more interesting. Somebody asks us a question in a mid-chat, we route it to our AI and copy paste the answer. Before saying or writing anything to anyone we are first optimising it by AI. We are not just loosing our voice or identity we are also loosing our thinking capability.

Everything around us today, be it AI, social media, movies are slowly conditioning us to become someone else. And we are going with this flow unconciously. I think it's time to start paying attention and be more conscious. We need to start thinking which parts of me are actually mine and which parts did I simply pick up along the way?

And I think I know someone who can help us remember who we truly are. It's that kid inside us who still remembers the kind of questions we used to ask, things that used to fascinate us, things that made us smile, the dreams we had, the values we had while growing up and the silly character we once had. That kind had our most unfiltered character. There was no audience, we did things for ourselves. So let's not forget that kid.