I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
Last year, as I worked on my book manuscript, I considered whether I would publish that book and any following ones under my own name, or under a pseudonym. I like the idea of using a pseudonym so I could create a new voice and persona, one which wasn’t weighed down by the history of my real life and real name.
I’ve tentatively decided I will write and publish my reckless philosophy work under a new name: Annie Miraway. But I’m going to do it out in the open, not seeking to hide the connection between Annie M and Anne Z but instead being deliberate and explicit about it.
One of my favorite philosophers, Søren Kierkegaard, wrote under pen names regularly. He did it with deliberateness, so he could think in public without collapsing his thought into his personal identity. Between 1843 and 1846, he published many of his most important works under different pseudonyms, each of which represented a distinct existential position. These pseudonyms often disagreed with each other. They did not represent Kierkegaard himself. He reserved his own name for religious discourses and direct address. He called this strategy indirect communication.
Why did he do this? Because he thought that the most important truths about love, faith, despair, commitment, and how to live a good life cannot be transmitted directly. He wanted to offer possibilities and then let the reader weigh the arguments and choose for themselves. He was a good existentialist, perhaps the first existentialist. He believed in the power of personal freedom and choice to define one’s self.
I am doing something similar with my alter ego Annie Miraway who came into being at the end of last year. Annie Miraway is the voice of my reckless philosophy for midlife. She is not me. She is sharper, more polemical, more certain of herself. She’s not weighed down by regrets about her past. She is a writer and philosopher not an artist.
Notably, I envision she will be more of a cyborg than I am — leveraging large language models like Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT to make connections, suggest directions, formulate ideas, and sharpen my communication. I do this already for some of my writing but Annie will do it more explicitly and deliberately. But I intend the philosophy to be driven by me. There will always be a human aura behind Annie’s philosophical ideas and communiations.
Where Anne cites lengthy quotes from her favorite thinkers, Annie will present ideas that have been distilled and polished and don’t depend for their striking power upon quotes, theories, or frameworks from others. She won’t reference Kierkegaard or Byung-Chul Han or Iris Murdoch, at least not very much, not like I do here — starting with some lengthy quote from someone else and then riffing off that. Anne processes those ideas here on the 1000-day blogging project. Anne tills the soil, adds the compost, plants seeds. Then Annie takes what has grown in the garden — beautiful flowers, nourishing vegetables, spiky ornamental grasses — and shares it without referencing the soil and compost that went into it.
In some writing circles, there’s disdain for the use of large language models in writing and communicating. I understand why. AI-generated writing can be banal, its rhythms stilted and obvious. Overuse of it leads a writer to lose her ability to think. The process of writing something yourself requires thinking: clarifying what you are trying to say, ideating ways of communicating it, analyzing whether what you’ve written makes sense in an engaging way.
I hope to figure out a way to use LLMs to think better, write better, and communicate better. Annie Miraway is the persona I’ll use to do that.