Autobiography the Autobiography

Since I was a child I have had a great fear perhaps my greatest fear of living a tale that has already been told.

What use would it be to go through the motions of some same old tale yet again. What could be more incompatible with meaning and worthwhileness than to retrace steps already taken.

It is not to say that there is not wisdom in stories or that they are worthwhile themselves, but that for one's own self value consists and transcending the tale that's been told. In plotting one's own course one also creates one's self. Self is defined in opposition to everything else if it consists of copies of other things it may well hardly exist in opposition to everything else being a mere shadow of it.

In the age of LLMS this also echos. Now it is more clear than ever to many how much of what they say is predictable, work and UI are moving towards not specifying what you do or say but in specifying how what you do and say is different from what would be predicted. To write the story that's been told not a thing need be done indeed not a thing has been done. To live a story that been told is not to do a thing at all.

What would I do differently is the same question as who am I.

You may experience things again and that has some worth but of the same sort as an amnesiac learning a new fun fact for the first time for the second or fifteenth time. Endearing perhaps but enduring likely not.

Your agency is the extent to which you are the locast of your decisions, it is one thing for them to be written in the library of babel and quite another for them to be written in the New York Public Library.

To be worthy of an autobiography you must have already written your autobiography.

Fanfics may be encouraged plagiarism forbidden. Inspiration is real and taken everything is a remix, but that would be missing the point. It is not actually about living a literal story literally written in the New York Public Library it is about avoiding living a mundane or even interesting life which nonetheless is not actually interesting enough for someone to have written a book about for reason of it having been so played out on the lived pages of history.

But also don't live out a novel, few characters have no decernable flaws to fall into their follies is itself a cliche.

It is not either to say do what would make an interesting book, egregious exaggeration and floweriness is a trope at least as old as the one that got away. So is trying to imagine your life as a story some tail of glory.