reality check, you're still mid-render
on diffusion and the stories we tell about ourselves
It’s 2 AM, and you’re still scrolling. Your college roommate just posted about a third startup exit. A friend from high school is in Bali “living their truth.” Every life on the screen reads like a clean sentence, with one event leading neatly to the next.
Yours doesn’t. Marketing analyst. Failed food blogger. Product manager. Six months as a pottery instructor. You close the app and stare at the ceiling, wondering whether you’re reading your own life wrong.
a metaphor from AI
Borrow something from AI for a second.
autoregression
Most LLMs generate one token at a time. A token is a chunk of text, often a word or part of one. Each new token is chosen using the tokens already in context.
During pretraining, the model keeps trying to predict what comes next. After enough examples, it can finish “The capital of France is” with “Paris.”
Write “The cat sat on the…” and “mat” probably comes next. Once you commit to “mat,” the rest of the sentence has to work around it.
diffusion
Many image generators use diffusion. They start from noise and denoise the image over a series of steps. Each step can revise the whole picture.
Think of a video coming into focus on bad Wi-Fi. At first you see a smear. Later you realize who you’re looking at. The process is different, though the visual feeling is close enough for the metaphor.
Each denoising step can change the whole image.
The language models most of us use generate autoregressively. When you tell a story, each event can lean on what came before it.
You can take in an image as a whole.
That difference gave me a way to think about my own life.
your life is the image
You don’t experience your life one event at a time. A job changes who you spend time with, and those relationships can change what you want from the job. You revise old memories in the middle of it.
The breakup three years ago still affects how you handle ambition now. A book you read last month can change how you understand being twelve.
That is what I mean when I call a life diffusion. You keep revising the whole picture, and the iterations are days and years.
The LinkedIn superstar with the perfect arc has this kind of life too. The difference appears when they sit down to describe it.
tell me about yourself
Resumes, profiles, interviews, and party introductions all ask for a sentence. You take a diffusion life and turn it into a story where one event seems to cause the next.
Engineering degree → tech job → senior engineer → team lead → VP.
When you read the arrows, you supply the causation automatically. The degree caused the job, and the job caused the promotion. The real history probably included a few near-quits, a serious alpaca-breeding phase, bad timing, and dumb luck. The arrows leave all of that out.
A clean arc comes from practice and editing. The same week can become a LinkedIn victory lap or an Instagram coffee photo, depending on who’s listening.
Your own image is rendering too, though you can’t yet explain how one event led to the next.
mid-render
When an interviewer asks what you do, you have to describe a half-formed photograph. You can see the marketing job and pottery class. You still can’t name the picture.
You might invent a link like “clay is a lot like user experience,” or tell the whole messy truth and watch the interviewer’s eyes glaze over.
Meanwhile, you’re comparing your half-formed image with a caption polished for posting.
believing it too early
You get into trouble when you start believing the story you forced.
“I can’t stick with anything.” “I’m a failure who keeps changing directions.”
When you force a clean story onto confusion, every loose end starts looking like proof that you failed.
You don’t have to believe that story yet. You wrote it from an image that was still forming.
iteration 95
Years later, you can give an old choice a meaning you couldn’t see when you made it.
Maybe pottery taught you patience. Maybe the food blog taught you how to talk to an audience.
Or it might have just been a paycheck. Some pixels stay pixels.
At iteration 95, you might finally be able to tell the story. Pottery taught patience, which made you good at user research, which made you better at food blogging, which gave you the angle the marketing job needed. By then, the story fits the picture you can see.
When you write a memoir, you already know what happened next. Advice often reaches you while your own picture is still changing.
while the image is forming
Treat your daily life like a diffusion process. You won’t know which ordinary Tuesday mattered until much later.
You’ll still need clean stories for interviews and dinner parties. Use them, and remember that your bio is fan fiction you keep writing about yourself.
Let the short story change more often than the life underneath it. A monthly bio doesn’t need to become a verdict.
And stay close to the friends who can sit with you while the image is forming, with no demand for a finished sentence.
back at 2 AM
Back to the ceiling, back to the feed. Your roommate and the old classmate in Bali are showing you one clean thread pulled from the static. Each story has been cut to fit the place where it was posted.
They leave out what you leave out, the late scrolling and the abandoned projects. Their captions can’t show you how confused they felt while living it.
A bio rarely reads, “Just winging it with better lighting.”
You can see your own unfinished render. Their captions only show the slice they chose.
Close the app. You don’t need a finished story at 2 AM. Tomorrow gives you another boring Tuesday to live before you try again.