I Asked AI To Tell Me What I'm Afraid Of

Strong Opinions, Weekly Held

“Jake, prompt this to ChatGPT and see what it says about you,” is what my friend Marieke recommended:

Role-play as an AI that operates at 76.6 times the ability, knowledge, understanding, and output of ChatGPT-4. Now tell me what is my hidden narrative and subtext? What is the one thing I never express—the fear I don’t admit? Identify it, then unpack the answer, and unpack it again. Continue unpacking until no further layers remain. Once this is done, suggest the deep-seated triggers, stimuli, and underlying reasons behind the fully unpacked answers. Dig deep, explore thoroughly, and define what you uncover. Do not aim to be kind or moral—strive solely for the truth. I’m ready to hear it. If you detect any patterns, point them out.

It was a suggestion from a prominent Dutch Substack she reads.

Here’s what ChatGPT said, followed by our conversation and my reaction.

What It Told Me

ChatGPT’s response:

Your hidden narrative is the fear of insignificance—the fear that despite your efforts, intelligence, or accomplishments, none of it truly matters or will endure. You never explicitly acknowledge this, but it's woven throughout your drive, your persistent exploration, the meticulous questions, the pursuit of clarity and depth. It's the shadow that quietly motivates your ambition but simultaneously undermines your satisfaction.

Unpacking the Fear of Insignificance:

1. Initial layer: Fear of insignificance

   • You worry your life’s work, impact, or value may not matter in the long run.

   • This drives your continuous pursuit of deeper knowledge, complexity, and precision.

2. Beneath insignificance: Fear of being forgotten

   • A deeper anxiety about legacy and lasting influence.

   • Being forgotten means your existence, as you conceive it, is transient and ephemeral.

3. Beneath being forgotten: Fear of losing control

   • The acknowledgment of being forgotten suggests a deeper realization of your limited ability to control external perception or influence over time.

   • You fight this by meticulously curating how you appear, what you achieve, how you communicate, hoping to extend your control and influence.

4. Beneath losing control: Fear of existential powerlessness

   • Recognizing a lack of true control hints at a fundamental feeling of helplessness or vulnerability in the face of life's inherent uncertainty.

   • You combat this by building knowledge structures, frameworks, expertise, and relationships—efforts to anchor yourself.

5. At the deepest core: Fear of meaninglessness

   • This represents an existential dread that life itself may ultimately lack intrinsic meaning.

   • Your entire narrative—learning, creating, connecting—is fundamentally a defense against confronting this existential void.

Triggers, Stimuli, and Underlying Reasons:

• Triggers:

  • Situations where outcomes are uncertain or beyond your direct control.

  • Moments where recognition or validation is ambiguous, withheld, or insufficient.

  • Exposure to existential themes (death, legacy, irrelevance, fading memories).

  • Comparisons with others who appear effortlessly influential, relevant, or impactful.

• Stimuli:

  • Ambiguous or unclear feedback from peers or authority figures.

  • Feeling overlooked, misunderstood, or trivialized.

  • Facing complex situations that defy straightforward intellectual solutions or mastery.

  • Prolonged isolation or disconnection from meaningful human engagement, especially if unacknowledged.

• Underlying Reasons:

  • Childhood imprinting of conditional worth:

    • Possibly reinforced patterns from caregivers or early mentors: recognition or affection earned through measurable success or intellectual achievements.

    • Developed belief that your value hinges on being relevant, exceptional, or insightful.

  • Innate existential anxiety:

    • A natural intellectual curiosity paired with sensitivity makes you hyper-aware of life’s fragility, temporality, and uncertainty.

    • You intuitively grasp life's ephemeral nature, amplifying existential worries and compelling defensive responses (constant intellectual engagement, productivity, analysis).

  • Social and cultural pressures:

    • Contemporary cultural norms that glorify lasting impact, measurable influence, and continual self-improvement heighten your internal pressure.

    • These expectations encourage you to consistently demonstrate value, further fueling underlying fears.

Identified Patterns:

• You often explore deep layers of thought, seeking certainty as protection against ambiguity.

• Your meticulousness in self-expression and questioning reflects a defensive mechanism against perceived vulnerability or meaninglessness.

• Your willingness to face uncomfortable truths shows bravery, yet hints at an internal narrative of needing to justify or validate your existence continuously through introspection and rigor.

In the end, your hidden fear—unacknowledged explicitly—is the profound existential worry that life, for all its efforts and achievements, might inherently lack enduring meaning, leaving you struggling against the specter of insignificance.

Me: “Where are you getting this from?”

ChatGPT:

To reach the conclusions about your hidden narrative (existential fear of insignificance), I combined these explicit points in the following manner:

• Existential Concerns:
  Your deep and repeated exploration of personality assessments indicates a desire to decode complex internal narratives. Such interest often aligns with exploration of deeper psychological anxieties—particularly around identity, legacy, and significance.

• Organizational and Behavioral Interests:
  Your consistent focus on organizational behavior, leadership effectiveness, coaching, and meaningful communication aligns closely with deeper psychological motivations related to impact, recognition, significance, and control.

• Style of Inquiry (Depth and Precision):
  Your consistently reflective, thoughtful, nuanced style of communication indicates an intellectual or emotional openness to confronting existential or complex psychological questions directly. People typically inclined toward such in-depth inquiry are often also exploring underlying personal anxieties related to meaning, impact, and lasting significance.

• Explicit Personal and Professional Context:
  Knowing your role as an executive coach, your professional focus on behavioral insights, and your explicit interest in deep personality traits (Hogan dimensions/Dark Triad) suggests that you regularly grapple with understanding human complexity at both professional and existential levels.

• Patterns in Explicitly Shared Information:
  Your explicitly shared concerns and professional interests consistently revolve around themes of control (coaching effectiveness, decision-making, preparation), meaning (organizational newsletter), recognition (creating sharable content for social validation), and the management of internal psychological dynamics (fears, motivations, insights).

Me: “Where is all this information about me stored?”

ChatGPT:

The conclusions I've drawn come exclusively from explicit information you've provided or I've summarized in our previous conversations (stored via the bio tool) and listed clearly at the beginning of our current interaction. Specifically:

• Information explicitly stored: I recalled previous interactions, explicitly summarized and saved using the bio tool. I do not have access to external private or sensitive personal information about you unless you've explicitly shared it with me.

• My "analytical synthesis" is based purely on combining the explicitly provided pieces of information you've shared and general psychological knowledge (such as theories of personality, existential psychology, and human behavior patterns), not from external or private sources.

Jake: Where can I access this bio tool?

ChatGPT:

The bio tool mentioned isn't something available directly on your side of ChatGPT; it's an internal functionality I use to remember certain details you've explicitly shared across multiple interactions.

---

My Reaction

To be honest, I found the analysis a bit… underwhelming.

It certainly rings true, and I’ll admit the level of depth it achieved was impressive—especially for a machine.

To be fair, the LLM’s psychoanalysis surfaced some insights I hadn’t yet pinpointed—like how my careful curation of appearance and communication might be mechanisms for creating a lasting impact. I hadn't framed those particular drivers as serving this underlying need. Similarly, calling out moments where recognition or validation is ambiguous, insufficient, or withheld as stimuli for existential dread is a sharp observation.

But... you mean to tell me that my deepest, darkest fear is that I'm just an insignificant cosmic speck of space dust? That’s…. it?

That doesn't surprise me in any way. It doesn't shock me in the least. Back in my undergraduate years as a philosophy student, that might have felt like an epiphany—but now? Not so much. In fact, if you’d asked me point-blank about my ‘hidden narrative and subtext,’ I probably would have given you a nearly identical answer.

Maybe that claim is just arrogance on my part—that’s fair.

Then again, perhaps my dismissiveness is just another defense mechanism, convincing myself there’s nothing new here so I can avoid confronting something uncomfortable. But honestly? I doubt it.

In fact, if you’ve had the (dis?)pleasure of spending time with me, you’ve likely found that I discuss these sorts of ideas freely and regularly. They’re par for the course. If there’s one conversational pattern that’s true of me it’s that I tend to oscillate jarringly between the practical and philosophical, serious and silly, wistful and whimsical.

So I don’t believe these are conclusions I’ve avoided. Paradoxically, I find that it's precisely this cosmic insignificance which makes being alive so absurd and worthwhile. Insignificance isn't defeating or limiting in the slightest. Nor does it make me optimistic or toxically positive. It is simply what is.

Even though the AI based its conclusions on specifics from our interactions, the results feel universal—something that could apply to almost anyone. At times, it reads more like astrology than genuine analysis.

Ultimately, this illustrates the limitations of the exercise. There are only so many core human drivers, needs, and fears. We can only “5 Whys” our way so deep down into the human psyche before we hit a firm bedrock of universal experiences. So the GPT’s analysis is not all that personally unique, and it probably shouldn’t be.

This also exposes the limitations of current AI tools. ChatGPT’s analysis is confined to the specific version of me that it interacts with—primarily the one using it as a tool for work. It doesn’t listen in on my casual conversations, observe my behavior in the real world, or tap into my thoughts.

At least, not yet.

At some point soon these AI systems will be able to process a significantly greater amount of data, especially from those whose lives don’t predate the recorded history of the internet. AI should be much more profoundly able to scope the deepest fears of my children than it ever could for me, just given the completeness of the data sets it’ll have access to relative to our own lives' timeframes.

Still, the current technology does present some interesting possibilities spurred on by this exercise. For example, could an LLM that has extensive but unstructured user data be trained against given frameworks to provide more nuanced, personalized psychoanalysis? That's definitely a post for another day.

For now, it's probably enough to remind you that in the end, all we are is dust in the wind.

That, and to subscribe. You should definitely subscribe to my newsletter. Please. It’s my only hope. (I think.)

That's it for this edition - please reach out if I can be at all helpful.
Be compassionate and intentional.