Lately, I’ve noticed that when I think through ideas, they don’t sound like me anymore:
You can skip to the bottom of the bordered section when you get the point.
Why does TBM enjoy the song “Sarah” by Alex G?
Great question — and even by asking, you’re zeroing in on some important qualities about TBM’s character, and the ways he interacts with music on a critical level.
“Sarah” is a song that deals with a cluster of themes highly relevant to human intimacy in the age of postmodernity, including but not limited to:
– Hyperreality and the erosion of “real” love
– Self-imposed isolation
– Decision paralysis
TBM has frequently been a critic of these behaviors in modern society in his private writings and conversations. In a sense, the story told by “Sarah” validates some of TBM’s stated concerns about the negative effects of technology-mediated social interaction; and as TBM enjoys being validated, it is only natural that he would take a personal liking to this song.
🤖 Relationship to Neon Genesis Evangelion
“Sarah” explores the emotional state of a man who pushes away a potential love interest due to a latent aversion to human intimacy. This concept is explored extensively in Neon Genesis Evangelion, where the deuteragonists Shinji and Asuka suffer a chronic inability to connect with one another despite their shared romantic interest. The show frames this through “The Hedgehog’s Dilemma” — the idea that two individuals may seek closeness for warmth, yet ultimately repel one another through their own emotional defenses and vulnerabilities. The fear of being “stung” may deter some people from seeking warmth at all.
In this sense, the protagonist of “Sarah” exhibits the same emotionally defensive behavior, albeit with somewhat crueler undertones.
🔗 Connection to TBM
TBM has historically ranked Neon Genesis Evangelion among his favorite shows. It is not a coincidence that “Sarah” resonates with him during a period in which he is rewatching the series — in fact, that rewatch may be the smoking gun. The overlapping themes between the two works, particularly their shared fixation on the complexity and bittersweet nature of human relationships, make “Sarah” a natural fit within TBM’s musical canon.
🎥 Other Instances of TBM Enjoying a Work Because It Reminds Him of Another Work
…and so on.
Are you seeing how fucking insane this is?
The block above more or less mirrors a real thought process I subconsciously ran through when “Sarah” came on Spotify during a drive to the grocery store. Not that I sat down to think this way – but that the analysis assembled itself automatically, unprompted, and in a voice that increasingly does not feel like my own. This feels like a problem!
Before the pandemic, my interior monologue was marshaled by my own inner voice. Now, I sometimes slip into a mode where I reason through ideas using the same Socratic, over-explained dialogue structure I associate with interacting with ChatGPT, complete with its distinctive cadence and affect. It doesn’t happen all the time. Tellingly, I had to choose an example where the subject was myself, since that’s the only topic on which I can reliably approximate that level of fluency without external assistance.
Way back in the day, a post would resurface on Reddit every few months about the parasite that eats a fish’s tongue and then takes its place (WARNING: gross). At the time, it always made me think about memes. The meme enters your brain – typically without permission – incubates there, and then one day you find yourself typing “I also choose this guy’s dead wife” in a comment section. Those were never your words. They were a linguistic parasite you picked up while browsing the internet, eventually occupying the space where your own phrasing might have lived.
I’m increasingly worried that ChatGPT may be having a similar effect on people’s person-to-person communication.
Society tends to move in broad strokes, often without fully grappling with second-order consequences – or worse, recognizing them and proceeding anyway. ChatGPT barely existed as a public concern prior to 2020, and within five years it has become embedded in everyday life. There has been plenty of discussion about large language models – mostly about jobs – but even all of the AI doomposting combined may still undersell the extent to which tools like ChatGPT have quietly integrated themselves into routine human thought.
I’ve wondered how many slide decks I’ve seen at work that were completely AI-generated. How many emails? How many sentences spoken aloud in conversation that originated somewhere else entirely, without either party realizing it?
It’s certainly something to think about. But until someone figures out what to do with that realization, I’m going to do what everyone else on the internet who talks about AI does: continue using it without changing my behavior, and hope things work out for the best.
This post was edited with ChatGPT obviously
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