The 220,000 to 1 Perspective

I recently read Montaigne’s last essay ‘On Experience’. Thirty pages of a man thinking on paper. Idea built upon idea. Questions asked and many left unanswered. He wrote of Aristotle, kidney stones, and of Scipio, who defeated Hannibal in Africa, and who also wrote plays with farts. His thoughts meandered in an ordered chaos only he could deliver. And as I read it, I thought this could have been written this week, although he wrote it in 1588.

‘On Experience’ revealed the perspective of a life lived. Questions, insights, and observations that only Montaigne could make. The experience of ‘On Experience’ was seeing and hearing the perspective of a man who lived over four hundred and fifty years ago and connecting with him.

How Montaigne thought, how he looked at things, arose from his lived life. This was the lens through which he peered out at life. The scope of his perspective. But what built his perspective?

We live our lives, moment to moment. Every minute, our brains receive and filter about 82 million bytes of data (about the size of a video file) down to 375 bytes (about the size of a tweet). That’s a compression ratio of about 220,000:1. That filtering is your distinctive point of view. Built over a lifetime. Moment by moment. Your compressed, filtered life is your perspective.

There’s a lot of heavy lifting going on in this real-time compression filtering. 82 million bytes of quiet meditation will hit differently than 82 million bytes of heavy rush hour traffic. And every minute, our brains work through the onslaught.

So our perspective is not a fixed thing. It is dynamic.

You stand in the spot, in history, that only you occupy. You arrived here across specific failures, convictions, lessons, experiments. Developed minute by minute from a continuous stream of raw data. When you examine your life and write from there, this is the single unique asset that builds on itself and cannot be replicated.

I know personal AIs with persistent memory and detailed biographical prompting exist now and are improving. But if you provided AI with every biographical detail of your life, it still doesn’t have the filter that compressed 82 million bytes every minute over your lifetime. Even if it has the data, it doesn’t have the compression. It doesn’t have your filter.

When it comes to writing - and we ARE talking about writing here - AI is limited. AI content is generated from modeling. From data it is given. It cannot create. It recreates from what it’s given. And it’s pretty danged good at what it does on the basis of its modeling. But it doesn’t have a filtered point of view.

Perspective is more than simply framing, which is what a prompt is doing, isn’t it? Framing is a kind of context. These are the edges. Framing establishes and limits the edges.

But our perspective doesn’t just hold up edges. It asks “why?” or asks how this relates to that, no matter how obscure the connection might be. Perspective reaches beyond the edges and looks for more.

In my first essay, I wrote the phrase “Here I Are”. It was the kind of thing I would naturally say in conversation with friends. I used wrong grammar because it rose up out of my perspective. AI would never have used it in the first place because it doesn’t have the years that made the phrase feel right to me.

I am no Luddite. I write with AI tools all the time. AI helps me with structure and organization. But it does not think for me. I bring the ideas and build upon the structure.

What if your perspective isn’t special enough for people to bother listening to? I have sometimes thought “Who cares about what I think?” That’s a hard question. My only response is “How will I know if I don’t share it?” Another question I have is “Why do their opinions scare me?”

My best answer is trust my perspective. This lifetime of building and polishing the lens through which I peer out at the world, I trust that’s enough.

So write something this week that only your specific years and failures and successes and life can produce. Leave in the line AI wants to correct out. The one that sounds like you and no one else. And if you use AI, use it to help structure your thinking and not do the thinking for you. You’re the human. Think.

You don’t need a unique idea. You need the perspective that only your life could have generated.