Reverse Illumination #10 | Seeing Parts of Myself I Couldn’t See Before

2026年9月14日 09:00

Five minutes on a Sunday evening.
A perspective that might make the coming week look a little different.

Recently, I laid out some of my past articles and looked only at the questions behind them. Economics, work and sleep, aging, the My Number Card. I thought I had been writing about entirely different subjects.

Yet, when I placed the works side by side, similar questions appeared again and again.

Then I noticed something else. In the past, I would not have had this many completed works to look back on in the first place.

Introduction

I wrote about the questions that kept appearing across my past work in this earlier article.

At the end of that article, I wrote:

Rather than deciding who we are before we create, we can discover who we are through what we have created.

I could do this because I already had a substantial body of work to look back on.

So how did I come to have so many completed works? This time, I want to explore that change.

Completion Rate

In #01 of Reverse Illumination, I wrote about what I call the “completion rate.”

I have always had plenty of things I wanted to write, try, or turn into something tangible. The problem was that I could not carry all of them through to completion.

Out of ten things I wanted to try, perhaps only two would become finished works.

Then generative AI arrived.

By thinking, researching, organizing, and writing through dialogue with AI, I began to carry more of those ideas through to completion.

Suppose the number I could complete increased from two to seven.

What matters here is the additional five.

Five things that might previously have remained ideas, never existing as completed works, had now come into being in a tangible form.

It was not simply that I had become faster. More things were being brought into existence.

There Was More of Myself to Observe

When I wrote #01 , that was as far as I could see. A higher completion rate meant more completed works.

But after continuing to create, I began to notice another change.

If only two out of ten ideas become finished works, the version of myself I can look back on is different from the one I can see when seven are completed.

With only two works, I can observe my past self through those two alone. With seven, I can also look back on the five that might otherwise have remained ideas.

I can now observe parts of myself that I could not have observed before.

AI had increased more than the number of completed works.

It had also increased the material through which I could come to know myself afterward.

This was something I had not yet seen when I wrote #01 .

What Do I Mean by “First Generation”?

My profile includes the line:

“Part of the first generation writing in collaboration with AI.”

First generation of what? Who decided that? Is it something I can simply call myself?

When I wrote those words, I had not thought through all of these questions. I did, however, already have a sense that AI was like a booster, helping me carry things I wanted to try through to completion.

Now, I can explain what I mean by “first generation” more concretely.

A generation experiencing a change in which AI, as a booster, makes it possible to complete things that might otherwise never have taken shape—and to discover parts of ourselves, through that body of work, that we could not have observed before.

I do not mean the generation that was first to use AI.

That is what the phrase means to me.

In Closing

When I first wrote “Part of the first generation writing in collaboration with AI” in my profile, I could not yet put into words exactly what I meant by “first generation.”

But as more of my ideas became completed works, and those works accumulated into a substantial body of work, I began to see parts of myself that I could not have observed before.

I put the words “first generation” in place first.
Only afterward did my work begin to give those words their meaning.