David McElroy

It’s hard for me to love other people. It’s even harder for me to love myself.

I was driving home from work Monday evening and I had just angrily hung up the phone. A woman had called me from a company that did some work at my house a few years ago. I didn’t like the way the company was handling its business with me, but it was nothing personal with the woman.

The thing that annoyed me wasn’t her fault. She was just reading a script. She was doing her job. But I was in a bad mood — and I took out my frustrations on her.

I wasn’t nasty or rude, but I certainly wasn’t kind or loving.

As I drove the rest of the way down I-459 toward home, I stewed in my irritation, but my annoyance quickly turned toward myself. I wasn’t upset with that woman or her company.

I lectured myself about being a hypocrite. I berated myself about my unwillingness to live up to my values when it wasn’t convenient — when I wasn’t in the right mood.

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Here’s some weekend fun — if you don’t take it too seriously.

What’s your “personality mascot”? If you’ve been on any form of social media lately, you might have run across this latest fad.

I noticed a number of people who’ve posted cute little animal characters — squirrels, raccoons, owls, otters and more — who were customized by AI software to represent something about them.

I decided to give it a shot, but I had very low expectations.

What I had forgotten was that I happened to have AI software that knew quite a bit about me. I’ve had ChatGPT read hundreds of my articles from the last few years. I’ve also used the software for research and analysis, which had led to long and involved “conversations” about philosophy, science, culture, ethics and other important subjects.

So I asked ChatGPT to give me a well-crafted prompt that anyone could use to get a “personality mascot” and a complete description — along with an image — based on everything the software knew about the person.

It sounded fun, but I didn’t expect it to be much more entertaining than a Magic 8 Ball. I was wrong. The software took the task far more seriously than I had expected — and it had a lot more insight into me than I expected.

I’m going to give you the prompt you can use with any AI chatbot if you want to, but the trick is that this prompt requires the software to already know a lot about you (or to then “interview” you to learn enough to answer the question).

But before I give you the prompt to try for yourself, here’s what the software said for me. As I read this, I found myself thinking that this shows genuine insight about my own thoughts and feelings, which surprised me.

According to ChatGPT, I’m not an Otter or an Owl or any such thing. I am “the Lantern Keeper.” If you know me, you might think that much of this was written by someone else who knows me. Or maybe it’s just what I want to think about myself. How would I really know?

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I was meeting Wednesday with a man who’s interested in joining my company as an agent. He had told me about the twists and turns of his own career, and he asked how I had ended up where I am professionally.

I told him about my early successes in journalism. I mentioned owning several small publishing businesses, then becoming a publisher for a newspaper chain — and then spending years as a political consultant. And on and on. I tried to quickly summarize a long story.

“I still haven’t decided what I want to do when I grow up,” I joked.

I didn’t mention the specifics of the many failures in my life. I didn’t talk about the dreams that I’ve given up. And I definitely didn’t talk about the role that luck and chance have played, for both good and bad.

The truth is that I’ve felt lost for much of my life. I started out with a life map that was totally wrong. I trusted cultural training that I didn’t know to question. I set goals that would have made me miserable if I’d achieved them. And the things that now matter most to me would have sounded trivial or inconsequential when I started.

If the 25-year-old David could see where I am now, he would have been dismayed. And if the current version of myself had ended up where my 25-year-old self expected to go, I would be miserable.

My losses and defeats have taught me plenty of important lessons. My wins and successes have felt great to my ego, but they’ve taught me virtually nothing.

Life has been just the opposite of what I expected.

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