When Every Version of My Life is Plausible

A few weeks ago, a major filmmaker I’ve always wanted to work with called me out of the blue with an idea.

He is brilliant, kinetic, and difficult to pin down. The call had the voltage of something that might become real. So I did what I always do.

I went away and built something.

Over the next two weeks, I turned that incoming conversation into a full presentation. I mapped the assets and relationships, argued for an even larger opportunity, and constructed a multiyear plan.

Then I recorded a short video.

“Ever since our call, I haven’t stopped thinking about this,” I said. “Am sending you the link and password. No rush on my end.”

The subtext was clear: I am already the guy.

Not long ago, turning a phone call into something this complete would have required a small workforce. I would have needed a data analyst, a strategist, a graphic designer, perhaps a lawyer.

Now, thanks to the machine, the opportunity had a well-honed thesis, an economic model, and the aura of a future already underway.

A week later, I showed the pitch to a mentor of mine. He is one of the few people with whom I can discuss almost any part of my life. He also knows me well enough to see the trick before I do.

“It’s very smart,” he said. “Lots of ideas.”

This was not entirely a compliment.

“Think of your favorite clothes,” he said. “They’re great because they’re lived-in, they feel like you. Your ideas need to feel lived-in too.”

“It’s tricky,” I said, “because this technology allows every single idea to have a fully fleshed-out business plan.”

I had described the deck. I had also diagnosed the problem.

Before this technology, most of my ideas and opportunities died natural deaths.

A passing curiosity stayed a passing curiosity because turning it into something coherent cost more than I could afford to give it.

That cost turned out to be a valuable form of guidance. It forced me to choose.

—

The machine is seductive.

Ask it who you are and it will offer seven plausible answers, each polished and defensible. Ask what you should build and it will return four strategies.

Over the past year, I have kept several plausible identities alive: the founder, the writer, the actor, the brand adviser, the hospitality entrepreneur, the dealmaker assembling SPVs, even the organizer of a traveling golf society.

Each has evidence behind it. That is what makes it difficult. Given enough attention, any one of them could become a life.

You’ll notice that I call it the machine. It is not my assistant or collaborator. Those words imply some loyalty to the person using them. The machine has none. It is rooting for the prompt, not for me.

It has a knack for helping the founder in me build a deck at five-thirty in the morning, then helping the writer in me explain why that founder should be allowed to disappear.

It does not care which argument wins.

But I care.

As I built the pitch to the filmmaker, I knew the likelihood that any of it would materialize hovered around five percent. I built the 90-day plan anyway.

If I’m honest, I wanted less the opportunity itself than what it might do to the rest of my life. If someone paid me enough, I reckoned, I could finally put on blinders and focus. I could say no to everything else responsibly.

Responsibly?

I was asking for more than a salary, a title, or another powerful man’s hand on my shoulder. I was asking someone else to choose my life for me so that I would not have to grieve the ones I did not pick.

What I am really waiting for is a choice without loss.

There is no such choice.

—

I have encountered this kind of waiting before. When I finally got sober, I learned that progress does not always feel like forward motion. Some things can’t be forced into resolution. They have to be waited out.

That stretch in which nothing seemed to be happening was often where the real change was taking place. Tectonic, below the level of argument and will.

Sobriety required me to stop developing one possible future: the version of myself who might someday drink differently.

That someday life kept my best arguments on retainer for years. Recovery began when I stopped advocating for it.

Surrender, I learned, is not passivity. It is the admission that you are not the only intelligence at work on your life, and that the slower one may be wiser.

Still, I am not good at waiting.

After an interesting conversation, I’ll move from the experience to analysis to strategy to follow-up without a single unobserved hour between them.

Nothing gets forgotten, slept on, or metabolized. No idea remains vague long enough to reveal whether it actually matters.

This means I am sometimes narrating my life slightly ahead of living it.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

The prevailing conversation about A.I. concerns intelligence: who has it, what happens when it becomes abundant, whether ours will decay.

I wonder if the scarce resource isn’t something else.

Devotion. The capacity to care strongly enough about one vision that other legitimate possibilities are allowed to die.

Devotion is both attention to what I have chosen and acceptance of what choosing it excludes.

Life has taught me that a person is not formed by everything he can imagine. He is formed by what he repeatedly chooses at the expense of something else.

In the end, my mentor did not tell me whether to pursue the opportunity. Instead, he suggested that perhaps this was exactly what was supposed to be happening. I was on a path. The not-knowing was part of the path.

He pointed to the life already in front of me. The house I own, full of memories. Loyal friends. My wife and daughters, all three just down the hall.

“Maybe this is as good as it gets,” he said.

All of it, I realized, was the life I kept treating as the interval before my real one began.

The machine had helped me make a five-percent future feel imminent.

My mentor returned me to the life that did not need a deck.

—

There are evenings when one of my girls is telling me a story and I feel another thought pulling at me: an unanswered message, a really good sentence I’m afraid of forgetting, some problem I’ve upvoted to an emergency.

I stay turned toward her. I nod and ask a follow-up question.

But she knows.

Her voice changes slightly. She doesn’t accuse me of wandering, but she doesn’t finish the story either.

Where have I gone? Into conversation with a man who does not exist yet, on time borrowed from someone who does.

My daughters do not experience my potential. They experience my presence or its absence.

The machine will go on spinning up other plausible lives. The one I have does not always argue for itself.

Sometimes it simply stops telling the story.

Maybe this is how a life becomes lived-in: by staying with it when another one begins to call.

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If this is your first time here, three short essays that continue the conversation:

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