Made-Up

When I was younger (think mid-teens), I had a season as a "poser," which was a pretty common accusation in the 90s. Basically, it meant that you were pretending to be something that you were not. 

I remember one time, I was shopping at a thrift store and ran across an old scrub top, two sizes too big for me, with "Medical Missions" embroidered on the chest pocket. This thing literally fell off my body when I tried to wear it, but I bought it anyway. It made me feel like I was part of something important. It made me feel like I could project a story bigger than the one I was actually living. It gave me this idea that maybe I could pretend to be something that someone would be proud of. 

So I wore that worn-out, two-sizes-too-big scrub top with pride. Yeah. Medical Missions. That's me. 

I was kind of disappointed that nobody ever asked me about it when I had it on. (And I was also secretly relieved that nobody ever asked me about it because I didn't actually have a story to go with it.) 

As kids, coming of age, we all kind of go through a similar period, some of us deeper into it than others. We're trying to figure out who we are in the world. We don't like our own story. We feel like we're too small for our space...or too big for it. We want to be something, someone, meaningful. We want to escape the trauma we're living with on a daily basis. There are all kinds of reasons we become "posers." 

Decades later, the internet is not helping us. 

We've been talking about the way that we curate our online presence, how we're all trying to make our lives epic in the way that we present them. How we're posting our highlight reels and pretending things are better than they are.

But now, we're in this dangerous age of AI and...let's be honest - some folks are just making it up. 

Completely. 

They're putting prompts into AI and coming out with photographic evidence of the life they wish they were living. It all started with stupid stuff like "potato yourself" (Remember that? You could upload a picture of yourself and AI would generate what you would look like if you were a cartoon potato...those were good times). Then, we started airbrushing our blemishes away. Then, we graduated to full-on filters. 

All of a sudden, we're at generated-from-nothing, completely-made-up existences. All it takes is telling a computer to make our lives better than the mirror tells us they are. 

It's sad, really. 

Because the truth is that there are a lot of things about each of our lives that are already epic, just quietly so. A lot of things we see as mundane are the very things that other folks are aching for in their own lives. 

Did you know there are folks AI generating houses? And families? And cars? And clothes? The most basic of things that seem so...ordinary to us. These things are someone else's dream life. 

I don't like AI. If you know me, you know that. I've never used it, not for anything - not even to potato myself. (A friend did send me a potato of myself. Full disclosure.) But man, it's just destroying our sense of everything. 

And every time I type "destroying," I accidentally type "destorying" first, and it's doing that, too. 

I just wonder what would happen if we lived our lives more authentically. If we gave each other the gift of being real. I think that's better than all the things we think AI is doing for us. I do. 

Maybe it's just me.