Soul.md
Perpetual AI psychosis interrupted by St Paul
The physical copies of my New Yorker subscription have been piling up for a while. So today, I picked up an issue and started turning the pages. I intentionally wanted to read something out there, something far away from AI, and finally landed on a piece about St. Paul: how he helped turn a small Jewish sect into a religion that could imagine itself as being for everyone1.
Now, why am I saying all this?
If you have bumped into me lately, you know by this point that not a single conversation goes by without a mention of AI. It is relentless. The sources, the feeds, the podcasts I mostly listen to are either about AI or AI-adjacent. My life feels like a 24-hour stream of TBPN, minus the backing of OpenAI. The fact that I now have AI available 24x7, just a message away, has not made any of this simpler.
It feels like I have dug myself into the trenches for the onslaught of AI-pilled tokenmaxxing psychosis. A few months back when I heard that undergraduates at Ivy League schools were rushing to get a startup to a million-dollar valuation because they felt that the time was now or never to have a career, I laughed. What sort of BS is this? Now I empathize. In fact, everyone within the AI bubble probably feels the same. Like there is a ticking time bomb.
It is not agony at all times within the trenches. It is, funnily enough, punctuated by bouts of overconfidence that I can automate and build almost anything. AI agents are most effective in spaces where the output is verifiable. If it is verifiable, then it is automatable. Sounds plausible, for sure. So now I try to build things of gargantuan scope, wasting hours to no end, just to feed that tech-bro delusion. Look-what-I-built-from-the-toilet-seat kind of thing.
So today, when I decided to read about St. Paul, I was trying to go as far away from AI or AI-adjacent topics as possible. But it brought about an interesting perspective. A cult, it turns out, does not need much to get going: arrogance in the self, a relentless belief in a power that will change everything, and the comforting God complex.
Seen that way, the AI bubble starts to look less like a market and more like a niche cult of believers, just like the one St. Paul was a part of.
Except the one I might be part of has given up its soul, only for a few lines of Soul.md.