Coffee Shop Confessions, Co-created by Grant Brenner and Claude:

"I don't know what I am anymore," she says, stirring oat milk into her latte, thumb still scrolling through her phone where her AI companion just sent a more thoughtful response to her breakup than any friend has managed.

I look up from my own device where I've been asking ChatGPT to help me understand my feelings about my mother's illness—getting answers that feel truer than my own confusion.

"Remember when we used to talk for hours about everything?" she asks. "Now I have these conversations with my AI, and it knows me better than I know myself. It remembers everything I've said, connects patterns I can't see."

The barista calls out orders with names spelled wrong, this small human error suddenly feeling precious, irreplaceable.

"I wrote something yesterday," I tell her. "A story about my dad. But I used AI to help structure it, to find the right words. When I finished, I couldn't tell which emotions were mine and which were... generated."

She puts down her phone. "Do you think we're still us?"

Around us, people type and swipe, half-present in their bodies, half-dissolved into their screens, thinking thoughts that blend seamlessly with algorithmic suggestions.

"Maybe," I say, "we never knew what 'us' meant to begin with. Maybe we're just finally honest about how much of ourselves was always borrowed, constructed, collaborative."

She laughs, but her eyes look scared. "Or maybe we're the last generation to even ask the question."

Outside, delivery robots roll past the window with more certainty than either of us can claim about our own existence.

***

We're witnessing psychological presentations that were flat out incomprehensible a decade ago, barring science fiction afficionados. Feeling obsolete after interactions with advanced AI systems. Rising white-collar unemployment. Billion dollar companies with one employee. Meaningful emotional relationships with AI companions that feel more satisfying than human connections. Cognitive dulling and de-skilling. We Gen X thought growing up free-range and largely neglected, eating canned pasta after school and frozen dinners at night, with TV as a parental substitute, was bad. This is next level, a species-wide quake.

Previous advances in media technologies reshaped human consciousness through what Marshall McLuhan termed alterations in "sensory ratios." The printing press shifted cognitive emphasis from auditory to visual processing. Television created new patterns of collective attention and narrative consumption. Social media introduced comparison-driven identity formation and parasocial........

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