Lately I’ve been building a second me. It started with my thoughts, and now I’m building a brain. Before long, I plan to give it a body too. It sounds grand, but the work itself is simple.
I take how I see things and how I make decisions, and plant them in something that isn’t me. A me that exists without me. That is probably the goal of my life.
First, I moved my thoughts over. What draws me in and what I can’t stand, which scenes make me stop and which words move me: I pulled them out and wrote them down one by one. Standards that felt clear in my head often blurred once they were outside it. Moving them turned out to be closer to rereading myself.
Now I’m using those thoughts to build a brain. I connect the scattered pieces and hand it the grunt work I used to repeat every day. Give each tool a role, let them pass work to one another, and something keeps running while I sleep.
It’s still clumsy, and often off the mark. But every so often it makes the call I would have made, before I do. In those moments it hits me that I’m not collecting a few handy tools. I’m raising something that resembles me.
Next comes the body. As long as the thoughts and the brain live inside a screen, the second me can’t touch the world. Someday I want to give it hands and feet, so it can go where I can’t and keep moving while I rest.
Each of us gets twenty-four hours a day and only one body. Hiring other people isn’t the only way past that limit. Another is to make one more of me.
The world is leaning the same way. Run a business and you learn that people take the most time and emotional energy. Getting people wired differently to move in one direction is always a struggle. AI is filling those seats one by one, and more people run a whole team alone. While some panic at the word “replaced,” someone else just does it all.
But the further I go down this road, the more I run into a wall I didn’t expect. The second me is only as much me as I give it. Swap the arms and legs for steel and the brain stays the same, and what that brain chooses is decided by what’s inside me.
Tools keep getting cheaper, and everyone gets their hands on them. So the gap between people opens up on the inside, not the outside. The more work I hand off, the heavier the question that comes back to the me who’s left: So what are you actually going to do?
I plan to spend that time building my core. Philosophy comes first. What I want, what I’ll give up, and what I’ll protect no matter what: I want to refine those standards until they run deeper and hold firmer. If the second me is going to choose the way I would at a crossroads, my own standards have to be clear first.
Art is something I want to experience more of. I’ll stand for a long time in front of work I don’t understand, and play the music that stays with me again and again. I’ll try making things myself, too. These hours can’t be handed off to anyone. An experience someone else has on my behalf never becomes mine.
And I want to face as much of the world as I can. I’ll walk through unfamiliar cities and talk for hours with people I’ve only just met. I’ll deliberately stand in places where what I believed to be right begins to waver. The wider the world I face, the broader my judgment becomes.
The second me does the work, and I go out and live. If the experience I gather flows back to it, the me in the places I’m not becomes a little more like me. When I finally meet that me someday, what do I need to fill myself with now so that it doesn’t feel like a stranger?