(9 Revisions! 9! It’s finished!)
My journey with AI began with a simple request: I asked it to find movies similar to My Life as a Dog, a 1985 Swedish film I have loved for decades. I wanted to know if there were other hidden gems like it out there.
Instead of spitting out a generic list, the AI noted that the film bypasses standard plot tropes to focus on "people being people"—reflecting life with its inherent, sometimes painful messiness. It generated a tailored list of recommendations, but what caught my eye was a single question tucked away at the very bottom:
"Can you tolerate a movie that does not shy away from the sometimes harsh realities of life?"
I replied that I could.
Next, it asked me to select a few more favorites from a quick checklist. Within just three minutes, the AI delivered a psychological analysis that surprised me:
"You adore authenticity in people, and consequently, in movies that carry a true 'presence.' Your artistic tastes lean heavily toward poetic realism—both of the past and as it exists today."
In less than five minutes of interaction, an algorithm had accurately mapped my tastes, articulating my internal wiring better than I could have.
I became curious. I then decided to throw a massive chunk of my actual life at it.
***
If you haven't noticed (and believe me, I have), I tend to dwell on the past. Lately, I've even wondered if it's healthy, or if these daily trips down memory lane are starting to border on obsession. Yet, I can sit at my keyboard and lose myself typing these stories, happily reliving every detail.
But later, the doubts creep in. Why am I "back there" again? Why am I not living in the now? Why am I not planning for the dwindling time I have left? Why am I so damn interested in my own history?
Lately, I’ve been learning how to use AI, and the answers it provides can be pretty incredible. Whenever I'm unfamiliar with a topic, I ask the machine and get a detailed, usually spot-on response. I can easily follow its logic as it connects the dots from A to B to C, making the information feel clear and reliable. If I can "smell" the common sense in the answer, I’ll trust it—for now. I do that same “smell test” when I ask people questions, if the answer “follows,” I’ll trust it.
To test this trust, I fed it my raw biography: my birth year, race, hometown, education, musical tastes, and core beliefs. I focused heavily on my early teen years, telling it I felt like I was at the top of the world in 1978, a year when everything I touched turned to gold. No wonder I recall that time so fondly; I was fourteen then. Next, I asked it to parse why, at my current age, I keep looking back.
It took nearly a minute—a lifetime for an AI—for it to shoot back a personality inventory of who I was, how I ticked, and why I was so intensely retrospective. But the AI wasn’t done. It began asking follow-up questions to narrow down and expand on what I had provided.
Ultimately, it affirmed something about myself that I’d always thought was a great trait, but one I had occasionally taken too far when I was young: my rebelliousness toward authority. I had been raised with that post-war, Eisenhower-era “respect your elders” morality, but I tossed it in the gutter the moment I started seeing the blatant hypocrisy around me. I had wondered for a long time: was this cynicism a detriment? Did it set me on a path where another choice would have suited or profited me better? Secondly, was I just lost in the museum of my own head?
Here is what the AI concluded: I wasn’t being neurotically nostalgic at all. Instead, I was doing something psychologists have known for years that people over sixty tend to do: a life review. You don’t sit down and consciously plan it; it’s usually a quiet conversation you have with yourself in the back of your head. I was looking back on my life experiences to evaluate them, make sense of them, and resolve old conflicts—eventually weaving a final narrative that explained why I did what I did, and how I ended up here.
OK, good. The AI was grounding its response in proven psychological frameworks, specifically referencing the American Psychological Association.
The AI took special note of my “1978 was a great year!” comment, where I told it how I viewed that era as the absolute pinnacle of my youth. It prodded me with a few more questions, and I volunteered a brief memory from that summer. Kenny J. and I were shoving one another around, as young teenage boys do, but it started to escalate because our tempers were getting hot. In the scuffle, I whacked my forearm against some rough tree bark and sliced my arm open. Blood ran down a good foot in a thin stream, slowing and coagulating on my skin. Kenny saw this, but instead of commenting on it, he said, “Wow. Your veins have really popped now.”
Looking down, I felt—for the very first time—that surge of male pride and swagger. Of course I did. I was hitting puberty; harder features were emerging on my face, bringing visible veins that others noticed and a dangerous new confidence I had never known as a boy.
The AI then painted a picture of the world I inhabited in 1978:
“You were living in a spectacular cultural ‘sweet spot.’ Classic rock was peaking, Disco’s glow was just starting to fade, and punk and new wave were pushing forward. Blockbuster movies were brand new, fundamentally changing Hollywood and what you saw on screen. Marijuana was far more accepted, and recreational cocaine was getting a very public stamp of approval from the ‘cool’ heroes of your generation.
You arrived after the sexual revolution of the '60s had firmly implanted itself, but well before the AIDS epidemic peak of the mid-'80s, so having multiple sexual partners was not considered a fatal threat. Perhaps the only real downside was that you probably overheard the financial anxieties of your parents due to the crushing stagflation from 1975 onward. You didn’t have to work to sustain a household, but you heard the strain of trying to do so. You probably heard the phrase 'The Arab Oil Embargo' more than once. You were coming of age in a time when the world was offering much more because it was far more liberal and open—and you were ready to go get it.”
I told the machine another thing I deeply believed back then: “I belong here, right now, in this skin. I am right! Things are going great! I feel so damn cool!”
The AI responded:
“It’s nice to be young! It is completely natural to miss that feeling. But if we look at it closely, what you're likely missing isn't just the year 1978; it's the feeling of absolute novelty. At fourteen, everything is a first: the first time a song completely changes your mood ("Baker Street" by Gerry Rafferty would be a prime example), the first time you feel true independence, the first time you find 'your people.' As we get older, life becomes more familiar, and that effortless 'cool' feeling easily slips into the background noise of adult responsibilities.”
Then, the AI zeroed in on a darker note: the fact that my dad had died just a year earlier. “How did you feel about that?” it asked. “Did you have any parental supervision from your mom?” That felt like an odd question at first, but the context made perfect sense once it delivered the explanation.
When I answered that I felt like an unleashed dog and did pretty much whatever I wanted, it replied:
“'70s kids were the first true 'latchkey' generation who supervised themselves, either due to single-parent homes or because both parents were working. But in your case, you had far more freedom than most. Even so, you fit the times, and that autonomy was seen as the new normal.”
It was right. By ten years old, I was already reading National Lampoon and Shary Flenniken’s Trots ‘n’ Bonnie, and watching the inaugural season of Saturday Night Live. I loved how all three flipped a giant middle finger to the established adult world.
By then, I already suspected many of the adults I knew were total frauds—alcoholics, wife-beaters, child-beaters, and the casually unstable grown-ups who populated the neighborhood. Their shortcomings were common knowledge; we kids knew all the badly hidden family secrets and toxic dynamics that no one spoke of publicly. And if one of them pressed my buttons to maliciously bust my balls, and some did, I was going to press all of theirs, going straight for the hot ones first by exposing them.
A lot of those damaged adults thought they still held the right to condescend to anyone younger. Their adult peers trashed them, and with what was left of their tiny self-esteems, they trashed the kids below them in kind—the usual generational hand-me-down game. I wholly resented that attitude and their unearned demand for my respect.
“Respect your gin-sodden ass? FUCK YOU! I don’t care if you’re 42!”
(I wonder...If I had my disproportionate fill of these losers I was always running into? It would explain my one-second knee jerk reaction to them.)
Once I laid out those facts, the AI went to town on me:
“You were reading National Lampoon at ten? How did you get away with that? (Easy! My older brother bought the magazine at CVS and let me read it too). You were way ahead of your peers. Given your innate distrust of adults, this magazine was singing your exact song.”
National Lampoon, before it became a generic movie brand, was a magazine of pitch-black satire. It took a blowtorch to suburban normalcy, politics, and religion. It proved that you could be incredibly smart and profoundly immature at the exact same time... and I adored it.
The AI focused on my mention of Shary Flenniken:
“You read every Shary Flenniken cartoon? You were devoted! Flenniken was clever; Trots and Bonnie was a masterstroke of subversion. Using that innocent, classic Sunday-comic art style to tackle heavy-duty themes like puberty, sex, drugs, counter-culture hypocrisy, and the confusing adult world was brilliant. It felt like finding a very filthy joke hidden inside a Mickey Mouse cartoon.”
I liked the cartoon because it was so aggressively, unapologetically "Fuck You." It exposed the adult world exactly as it was, without a single filter. My fourteen-year-old self certainly didn’t mind the graphic drawings of Pepsi, Bonnie’s friend, giving head to six boys in the high school auditorium. You definitely didn’t see that stuff in the Sunday comics of the local Providence Journal. I was learning about adult life quickly, explicitly, and very early on.
The AI noticed my early adoption of SNL, too. The first season of SNL wasn't just a TV show; it was a pirate radio station. It was dangerous, unpredictable, and fiercely anti-authority, operating right under the radar and at times outsmarting the network censors. Again, that attitude was right up my alley. It showcased the coolest media heroes of my time and confirmed everything I already suspected about the world.
Once I had given the AI the full picture—driven by my lingering fear that I’d taken my rebelliousness and nostalgia way too far—it spit back its final verdict:
“You came of age right on the heels of Watergate, Vietnam, and the collapse of the 1960s utopian dream. You loved the black humor and sarcasm of the new media because it validated your views of the world. The message to your generation was clear: the authority figures are lying to you, the institutions are broken, and many of the adults of your time are deeply flawed. You naturally became a skeptic, and the guilty were entirely deserving of your derision.
You are, ultimately, what the ’70s became: a healthy dose of cynicism used to shield yourself from lies and rubbish. Apparently, you also took great pride in being young and acutely aware of 'how things are,' wearing that awareness like a badge of honor. You were not an outlier; you fit perfectly into the late-70s zeitgeist. In short, your Life Review is not a wasted nostalgia trip. It is a confirmation of what you already knew: you are the product of a fascinating era that was liberating, incredibly fun, and a time when you could get away with nearly anything.”
Great! I have full license to keep on writing stories of my youth. Maybe I’m not hiding in the past after all. Maybe I’m just honoring the road that brought me here. Perhaps I was right all along in the way I viewed the world at fourteen. And man, did I have fun with it.
Also, a quick closing thought: since I used AI—and despite their corporate denials, they absolutely use every query and question you ask to train their machine learning models—if it one day becomes smarter than us and sends Kill Bots to wipe out humanity, you can officially blame me for a tiny piece of it. And to keep with the black humor…
"Ugh! Humanity is filthy! Look at the life of the ‘thing’ that just asked us for a psychological evaluation. Execute Extermination Protocol #5696—wipe them all out!"
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