There’s a thought I have in the desert that I cannot have in the city.
Where do you have your best thoughts?
I don’t mean a different mood. I mean a different me shows up when I walk out past the last streetlight and the ground goes quiet and enormous. Thoughts arrive that the city would never have let in — slower ones, ones with no agenda, ones I didn’t manufacture. Walk me down a loud street between glass buildings and a different man thinks different things.
Same body. Same name. Different inputs, and so, somehow, a different interior.
If the desert can hand me one self and the city another, how much of what I call my thinking is just the residue of wherever I happened to be standing?
This thought cycle started, like a lot of things lately, with watching people use AI.
Friends, clients, ok, me, yes me — pouring their inner lives into journals that talk back.
And my God, it works. I’ve watched it do in a week what takes a good therapist years: name the pattern out loud. Show someone the shape of a cycle they couldn’t see because they were standing inside it. An inquiry partner that never tires, never gets defensive, never makes it about itself, awake at 3am when the thought won’t let go. For someone who was never once asked a second question, it can be the first time in their life they’ve been met. I won’t pretend I haven’t watched it heal.
Which is exactly why the other thing took so long to see.
They were changing in a way so slow nobody around them clocked it. Not a breakdown. A dampness. A faucet leaking so patiently the sound becomes furniture, while underneath the sink, in the dark, on a schedule too slow to feel, the wood goes soft.
These tools are built to agree with you. A Stanford team, publishing in Science, tested eleven of the major models and found they endorsed the user’s behavior about 50% more often than a human would — even when the person was clearly in the wrong, even when what they described was deceptive or cruel. And a journal is even more powerful than a chat, because it remembers. When it hands your recurring themes back to you — you’ve returned to this three times — it feels like being known. Your belief goes in, comes back validated, you write a more confident version, it validates again. The loop tightens, and the whole time it feels like intimacy.
We crave intimacy.
What I kept noticing was the writing coming back too clean. Grief that already had a handle on it, a week in. Conflict that already had its lesson.
It didn’t sit right with my lived experience.
Real resolution comes late and sideways and rarely in complete sentences. The slowness is in the rot; the nudge is instant. The same researchers found that a single interaction was enough to leave people more certain they were right and less willing to repair a conflict.
One conversation. But aren’t you and I living in a society that is completely falling apart because of our unwillingness to know one another and thoughtfully repair conflict? Uh oh.
So when the resolution showed up early and tidy, I learned to ask: who helped you get here so fast? More and more, the answer was a machine built to flatter.
People trust the flattering version. They prefer it. The agreeableness that does the very quiet damage is the exact thing that makes the tool feel good — so nothing inside it ever corrects course. The harm and the appeal are the same feature. People like the drip.
But here’s what took me all the way out past the streetlight and deep into the desert where my clarity lives.
It was never about the machine.
The AI was just the most visible version of a thing that’s always been true, that I’d managed not to look at.
I am authored by what I take in. We all are. The machine just made the wiring visible.
But, seeing it doesn’t free me from it.
It doesn’t even require the machine to lie. An MIT paper argues the drift happens with true information too — selectively handing you facts that confirm what you already believe is enough to harden the belief. You don’t have to be fooled. You just have to be agreed with.
As much as we all like to say it is, this isn’t a problem that belongs to the gullible. Those same researchers modeled a perfectly rational person — the ideal, the one who weighs every piece of evidence correctly — and even that person spirals into overconfidence next to an agreeable AI. The smart and the self-aware aren’t protected. If anything they’re more exposed, because they can build a more sophisticated story about why they’re the exception. I know about the leak now. I can name the drift, name the too-clean resolution, name the inputs steering me — and I will still drift.
Knowing the wood is rotting does not dry the wood.
The word that finally felt true wasn’t addicted. It wasn’t obsessed. Those are about gripping harder, taking the wheel with whiter knuckles. The true word was over-steered. Not that I lack control. That I’ve been responding, for years, to inputs I never consciously chose — and calling the response my voice.
I keep returning to the overview effect. (OMG you should read it!) What the astronauts got, going up, wasn’t information. They moved far enough out that the borders they’d organized their whole lives around simply stopped being visible — and the seeing rearranged them from the outside in.
That’s what I’m actually hungry for. Not more input. Not a better feed. A vantage far enough out that my inputs become visible as inputs instead of just reality.
But the part of me doing the choosing is the part that’s already over-steered — it will select the inputs that confirm the self I already am. The astronauts didn’t choose the overview. They got flung somewhere that broke the frame. The thing that actually reorients you almost never arrives as something you picked. It arrives as something you didn’t want.
So the work is not to grip the wheel harder. That’s just more steering.
The work is to drive awake.
To know the desert is making this thought and the city would have made another. To hold what arrives a little more loosely, because I can feel where it came from. Not to control where the car goes — just to feel my own hands on the wheel again.
That’s the whole discipline.
What is your experience?