I am an idea (Part 1: It's all about me/us)

I published “Everything is an Idea” on May 28th.

I published “The Idea of Bobbi,” yesterday, June 11th.

Today is my turn because I’m an idea, too.

“It’s my turn,” said the idea for this post. “I’m an idea. I exist. Whatever you are, I’m in your mind. I am in you, and you are in me. Please help me manifest myself in this post.”

“I will,” I said, and willed. “I can see that there’s more in you than I can include in this post.”

“That’s OK,” said the idea. “Do your best. Make it ‘Part 1’”

And I did. And eventually it became what it is now.

The idea of me

As I’m writing this, I have an idea of me.

“And me!” said the post.

“And you,” I answered.

An idea of me must have existed before I was born otherwise I would not exist.

“Same here,” said the post.

And many ideas of me exist now.

“I have an idea of you,” said an imaginary reader.

“You do,” I said. “And I have an idea of you. But let’s get serious. There’s something to be learned.”

“OK,” said the reader. “What’s the idea?”

Here are a few ideas

I’m approximately 81.451061 years old today. (h/t ChatGPT for doing the math)

I’m writing this blog post.

I am in Bali.

The population of Bali is approximately 4.2 million people.

Bali is an idea.

4.2 million people is an idea.

Each person is an idea.

So what?

It’s all about me—and you

Everything in the previous paragraph is about me.

I don’t mean that egotistically. I’m stating facts.

And there’s nothing special about me. Similar things are true for you.

The fact of my age is obviously about me. (Yours is about you.)

The fact that I am writing this blog post is about me. (Reading it is about you.)

Take a look; Bali is about me. (And take a look; there’s a part of this planet that’s about you.)

The 4.2 million people of Bali are about me. Some other large number are about you.

But wait, there’s more.

There are about 8.1 billion people on this planet. All about me—at different distances. And all about you.

But that’s just taking space into account.

There are 117 billion people in the space-time continuum representing the planet Earth’s journey over the 190,000 years since the origin of homo sapiens.

Here’s how ChatGPT imagines it:

The Earth's path through the Milky Way galaxy over the last 190,000 years. The image depicts the spiral arms of the Milky Way with a highlighted trajectory showing the movement of the Solar System around the galactic center, along with key celestial objects and a timeline indicating significant epochs in Earth's journey through the galaxy. The background features cosmic elements such as stars, nebulae, and other galactic features.

This is all about me, and about you, and about everyone else.

Everything is an idea, and it’s all about us.

Tomorrow: God is an idea.

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Show/Share your work (link)

I started writing this at 7:40 AM (Bali time). I finished my first draft at around 10:40 (with lots of self-interruptions). I went back and reviewed the process using Substack’s “Draft History” feature and Rewind.ai. Then tried to pull all that stuff into a Descript.com screen recording and then edit the screen recording with Descript. Hour later I decided I was trying to do too much Yak Shaving. So I quit in the middle of editing because who is going to look at this anyway?

I used ChatGPT to help with some fact checking and an attempt to fix the captions so they looked the way I wanted to. No such luck. ChattyG was confidently wrong on how to do it, because what Substack should and what Substack does do are different, and ChattyG assumed substack was doing what it should.

I wanted to share the chat session publicly, but I had generated an image, and ChattyG is not able to share conversations with images. So I used a Chrome plugin and a free service “AIArchives.org” to share how ChattyG helped me.