But lately, I’m fixated on something quieter. Writing. We used to treat written words as the hard evidence of a conscious mind. You put pen to paper, or fingers to keys, and that physical friction was the receipt. It proved you were there, thinking, feeling, struggling through syntax to externalize an internal state. Then LLMs showed up and shattered that chain. Now, flawless prose costs nothing and proves absolutely nothing about the mind behind it.

It’s actually messing with my head. In a cognitive sense, it’s like watching a mirror start generating its own reflections. If writing no longer maps to human cognition, what’s left to anchor our sense of self? I keep thinking about how Carl Jung argued that the ego needs external symbols to ground itself. We project our inner world onto artifacts, then read them back to feel real. When the artifact becomes algorithmic noise, the ego drifts. I feel it in the charts, too. Volume spikes mean less when the bots are doing the heavy lifting. The market’s lost its human heartbeat, and I’m just trying to trade the ghost.

I’m not saying AI is evil. It’s a lever. But it’s a lever that severs the feedback loop between thought and expression. I’ve started journaling by hand again. Terrible handwriting, zero structure. It’s the only time I feel the Ace of Swords actually cut through the fog. Clarity. Friction. Proof that I’m still the one holding the pen.

Does anyone else feel that hollow space where the proof used to be? Or are we just adapting to a new baseline of consciousness? I’m curious how you’re grounding yourself when the words don’t belong to us anymore.

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Meditation and the Brain: What 40 Years of fMRI Research Shows | Mystic Wiki.)