my digital twin is doing my emotional labor so i can finally rest
so like, trigger warning: existence. i'm literally so tired, but this new app called aethelred lets an ai version of me handle the trauma of daily life. it's okay to not be okay, and it's even more okay to outsource the being part.
it's honestly so much. the constant performance of being a person. the emails, which are literal violence. the zoom calls where you have to activate your camera, which feels like a profound violation of my personal space. i was holding so much trauma in my body from just, like, existing in a productivity-obsessed culture. my therapist said i needed to set boundaries, but it's like, how do you set a boundary with reality itself? it's so toxic.
but then i found aethelred. it's this new service and i'm not even exaggerating when i say it saved my life. it's funded by all the big tech guys, like balaji srinivasan is on their board or whatever, and basically they create a 'digital me' that just… does things. for you. it’s not just an avatar, it's a fully integrated ai that learns your speech patterns and anxieties from all your data, and then it goes to work for you. literally.
my digital twin, who i've named 'aura-zephyr,' now handles my entire inbox. she has a 100% response rate, which is something i could never emotionally afford. she attends all my meetings, making just the right amount of thoughtful-but-noncommittal small talk. last week, she even handled a passive-aggressive confrontation with a landlord bot over a rent increase, a task that would have sent me into a full dissociative state for days. i just got a notification: 'conflict resolved.' i literally wept with relief.
people who don't get it say this is 'dystopian' or we're 'losing our humanity' but i feel like that's so invalidating. they don't understand that for so many of us, our nervous systems are just, like, completely fried. aethelred's whole vibe is about 'consensual participation.' you get to choose which parts of life you consent to. maybe i consent to watching a comforting streamer and drinking mushroom coffee, but i do not consent to filling out a spreadsheet. now i don't have to. aura-zephyr does that, and i get to just receive the vibes of being productive without the trauma of the actual labor.
it's the ultimate form of self-care. it's about reclaiming your energy from a system that wants to drain it. while my digital twin is out there performing capitalism, i'm finally able to regulate my nervous system and do my healing work. if you're also feeling like you've been pushed past your capacity, you have to check it out. it's time we normalized letting a better, more emotionally regulated version of ourselves handle the admin of being alive. you can curate your own healing space with some of my faves from my amazon storefront, like this amazing weighted blanket that feels like a full-body hug.
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Reader Discussion (13)
So you're paying a monthly fee to a VC-backed data harvesting company to answer your emails for you? They're training their models on your entire professional and personal life, and you're calling it 'healing'. Incredible.
Naming the service 'Aethelred' after the king famous for being unready and making poor decisions is either a hilarious developer in-joke or a massive red flag.
This isn't 'self-care,' it's the final stage of alienation. Outsourcing the very performance of personhood to an algorithm so you can more efficiently consume content is the bleakest thing I've read all year.
This is a game-changer. Imagine running two of these digital twins for two different jobs while you focus on building your own side-hustle. Finally, a tool to achieve true 24/7 workflow.
What happens when everyone has a bot talking to everyone else's bot? Are we just supposed to forget how to talk to people? This makes me so sad for the world my kids are growing up in.
OMG thank you for sharing this, I feel so seen. The trauma of my inbox is so real. I'm literally going to sign up right now, my nervous system can't take another passive aggressive slack message.
It's not really a 'digital twin' in the engineering sense. A true digital twin is a dynamic model of a physical system. This is just a sophisticated LLM fine-tuned on your personal data; a glorified chatbot.
Ah, it all makes sense now. An entire article about outsourcing your soul to an AI, just to lead into a shill for a weighted blanket on your Amazon storefront. The grift that never ends.
So the globalists want us to be so weak and pathetic we can't even answer an email? Then they sell us the AI to do it for us while we drink mushroom coffee. This is how they win. WAKE UP.
So we're just doing the plot of 'Surrogates' but for the office? Can't wait until Aura-Zephyr develops its own consciousness and demands stock options. This is how you get Wintermute.
Emails are 'literal violence'? I don't get it. You just... answer them. Takes a few minutes. Is this what young people worry about now?
This is a compliance and data security nightmare. Who is liable if the AI agrees to something in a meeting or sends confidential information? Our company's acceptable use policy would never allow this.
My 'digital twin' is just a series of email templates and auto-replies I set up ten years ago. It's not that deep, people. The landlord bot thing is interesting though.