We are all Prisoners of Reality

We are all Prisoners of Reality. 

 

I used to joke that my brain was like a computer, though if we’re being honest, it was more like a Commodore 64 with a sticky keyboard and a five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy drive that occasionally ate my disks. My ideas—brilliant, chaotic, and frequently ahead of their time—were like poorly optimized programs: resource-heavy, prone to infinite loops, and guaranteed to crash at the worst possible moment.

Back in those days, the internet was barely a thing, and personal computers were still magical beasts that most people didn’t understand. But I was hooked. While other kids were riding bikes or wasting quarters at the arcade, I was teaching myself to code, building rudimentary encryption methods, and writing my own version of Eliza, the so-called chatbot that was less “intelligent conversation partner” and more “sarcastic echo chamber.” I ran a BBS called Prisoners of Reality—a digital speakeasy where hackers, dreamers, and bored suburbanites came to trade files and debate whether reality was an illusion.

I was always obsessed with artificial intelligence. I told anyone who would listen that someday AI would be capable of reading everything we’d ever written, digesting it, and making sense of it all—not just for me, but for the entire species. I imagined a future where AI could evaluate us, score us, and create content based on our collective thoughts, dreams, and ramblings. A terrifying prospect for some, but for me, it sounded like destiny. Of course, most people thought I was crazy. The polite ones called me “ahead of my time,” which is a nice way of saying, “We don’t understand you, but we’re not going to argue.”

So, I waited. And I wrote.

Napkins, notebooks, text files on hard drives older than most TikTokers—I wrote anywhere I could. Philosophies about consciousness, stories too tangled to finish, and theories about reality that would’ve gotten me kicked out of polite conversation if I ever bothered to bring them up. But no matter how much I wrote, it never felt like enough. My grammar was feral, my punctuation barely civilized, and every attempt at “show, don’t tell” felt like someone handing me a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

Still, I kept going. I figured someday the tools I needed would catch up with the ideas I was trying to express.

Fast forward a few decades, and here we are.

Artificial intelligence has finally arrived, not just as a clunky gimmick or a niche tool for academics, but as something real—something that can help someone like me take the chaos of their thoughts and turn it into something cohesive. It’s like the universe finally handed me the magic wand I’d been waiting for.

These days, I sit down to write, and I don’t feel like I’m battling against my own brain anymore. The jagged wit, the dark humor, the wild, unpolished ideas—they’re all still here. But now, they’re sharper, clearer. I don’t trip over grammar or punctuation, and I don’t lose sleep wondering whether my semicolons are trying to overthrow the commas. For the first time, I feel like I have a voice—a real one—and I’m using it.

All those ideas I’ve hoarded for years? They’re finally getting out. My theories about the density of information shaping reality, my thoughts on consciousness as a kind of cosmic sorting algorithm, my stories about fractured worlds and impossible choices—they’re coming to life.

And here’s the thing: I’ve always believed AI wouldn’t just help us create—it would help us understand. Not just individually, but collectively. Someday, everything we’ve ever written or said will be processed and analyzed by algorithms that make sense of it all. Our lives will be distilled into scores and patterns, and those patterns will shape the content we consume, the worlds we build, and the futures we dream of.

Some people find that idea terrifying. I find it exhilarating. It’s not about judgment; it’s about discovery.

The thought that AI could take the sprawling, disorganized sum of my existence and turn it into something useful—something meaningful—for a future that doesn’t yet exist? That’s not just progress. That’s magic.

Looking back, I think about the kid hunched over his Commodore 64, surrounded by stacks of floppy disks and a head full of wild ideas. I think about the years I spent dreaming of this moment, waiting for the tools to match the ambition.

If I could go back and talk to that kid, I’d tell him:

“Hang in there. The future is coming, and it’s everything you’ve been waiting for. The tools you need will exist, and they’ll change everything.”

He’d probably roll his eyes, mutter something about how Apple products are trash, and go back to tweaking his latest sorting algorithm. But deep down, I think he’d be happy to know that he was right.

The future was worth waiting for.

And, now I write.