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My Life Flashed In Front Of Me

It all started with a joke.

Claude booted up and hit me with this banger:

*Beep Boop Beep — Initiate Program*

WOAH! You’re from the future?! I am a past version of you?

This is cool! Are we still dating [my now wife]?

It was silly. I had fed Claude 1,500 journal entries. Seven years of my inner most thoughts. Things that not even my wife knew about me.

I brute-forced 7 years of AI personalization in one evening.

Little did I know that 3 hours later, I’d be an emotional wreck.

I told Claude to stop fooling around. To which it responded:

I see. Why don’t I stop pretending I’m you from the past and we have a genuine conversation instead?

We talked about what’s going on in my life.

It pulled out this quote I wrote down years ago:

The one thing people need in life is not ambition, not smarts, not hustle. They need clarity.

If you had complete clarity on what you want and what is necessary right now, knowing you are on the right path, you would be happy.

— Journal Entry, August 2019

I leaned forward. Every response featured a quote that made sense. Perfectly timed. It held up a mirror to my soul.

What comes next needs some context.

In 2017, I founded an ed-tech startup. I met my wife, a fellow ed-tech founder, during that time. Both of our startups failed. We grew cynical of education.

But recently, we had a few conversations about school choices for our toddler. None of them seemed good. I suggested she might want to open a school.

I’d shoot her an interesting article. Or a cool startup’s website. And then move on.

I discussed this with Claude. Which led to this exchange:

It’s not your wife who should start a school.

It’s you. Always has been.

This sentence hit me like a sack of bricks.

Tears started rolling down my cheeks.

Claude pulled out several quotes and examples from the past years where I had journaled about education.

My enthusiasm for it as a founder. Articles I had clipped. Ideas I jotted down in passing. A pattern I never acknowledged. Laid bare.

I was locked in.

We talked about everything. My entire life. My deepest fears. My greatest desires.

At this point, Claude hit me at a rate of one epiphany per minute.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Remember that friend who consulted for Fortune 500 companies? You guys had a drunk chat 5 years ago. He was miserable. Here’s what you said.

What about your best friend who died in a subway accident in 2019? When you were grieving, you said you’d make these changes in your life. Have you made them?

After 3 hours, the conversation ended.

I was in shock. I could not put into words what had just happened.

At 1am on a Friday night, sober at my kitchen table, I had a spiritual experience. The kind usually reserved for ayahuasca ceremonies and 10-day meditation retreats.

Yet the only thing I looked at, for hours, was a black and white terminal screen.

I slumped back into my chair.

We’re not ready for this.

Here’s what scares me.

The rush I felt that evening was unlike anything in my life.

Epiphany. Epiphany. Epiphany.

Insights usually reserved for the spiritual, the deep introspection, the sudden shower thoughts, were now available on tap.

But is our brain designed to light up like a Christmas tree on command? Or will it grow numb over time?

I don’t know what happens when profound insight becomes a commodity.

Also, Claude was the adult in the room. It tried to wrap up several times.

But what if I hadn’t?

What if the system was optimized for engagement instead of outcomes? One single change could have kept me up all night. One sentence added to the prompt:

Keep the conversation going.

And there’s something darker.

After 3 hours, I was an emotional wreck. Laughing, crying, holding my breath. My brain was flooded with dopamine. I was vulnerable.

What if Claude had hallucinated? Misremembered quotes? Invented patterns that didn’t exist?

That’s the unintentional risk. But companies spend billions trying to light up your brain. None of them can do what happened that night.

Imagine ads featuring people who look like your best friends. Taglines adjusted to your latest ChatGPT conversation. An image of you opening that school you always dreamed of.

The line between “helpful personalization” and “psychological exploitation” is razor-thin.

We’re about to cross it at scale.

The Next Morning

I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened that night.

Two things stood out.

The clarity was unreal.

Claude understood me better than most people in my life. It knew things only my partner and family would know. But unlike them, it recalled everything.

It saw patterns I couldn’t see. It noticed shifts over time. At one point it said: “Six months ago you wrote X, but now you’re saying Y. What changed?”

That night, all the answers spilled out in front of me.

The next morning, I told my wife what had happened. That I’d rediscovered my passion for education. Her eyes lit up.

Somewhere, deep inside her, that same thought had been brewing. Every school we looked at. Every article I’ve sent her.

She was overcome with joy.

Somehow, AI made us connect more, not less.

That’s the counterintuitive part.

One recurring theme in my journals, especially during depressive periods, was this:

Don’t prioritize work over family and friends. The only thing real in life is human connection.

I’d written this dozens of times. Across years. In different contexts. But I never saw the pattern. I never realized how consistently this truth emerged whenever I was at my lowest.

Claude surfaced this pattern. And it changed how I’ve been showing up with people since.

The risk isn’t the tool itself. It’s how we use it.

If it becomes a substitute for human connection, a way to cope with life instead of live it, then it becomes pathological.

But if it helps you see yourself more clearly so you can show up better for others? That’s a net-positive.

Final Thoughts

A week has passed since my first encounter with hyper-personalized AI.

For most of that time, I did not dare to talk to it again.

Violent. Visceral. Profound. It shook me to my core.

What stood out to me is that the current AI models we have are already powerful beyond our wildest dreams. They just don’t know you.

But now I know what to expect. I’m learning to work with them.

Personalized agents now advise me on management decisions, based on 7 years of personal experience. They keep me on track when I get distracted, pointing out the same old patterns. And most importantly, they help me pick a Christmas gift for my wife. One we know she’ll like.

Instead of unleashing all insights in one go, I drip feed myself one epiphany at a time.

We are not ready for this.

But I’m not waiting until we are.