The narrator arrives last
This week I was storyboarding a short film. I’ve come to realize how much of my prior work in consulting and banking resembled this art. As I was doing the work, I realized it contained a clue about how to navigate this in-between season of life that has so many of us in its grip: slow reality down until you can see it being assembled, then speed it back up.
Here’s what I’ve noticed:
Slowed down, it goes: nothing... then something... then nothing. Sleeping, dreaming, sleeping, waking, sleeping. Frame by frame, no two are identical.
At normal speed, something else happens. The frames join into a day. The day joins into a life. And a "me" shows up at the centre, as if it had been holding the camera the whole time.
Nobody watches the joining happen. The story just arrives, finished, with a narrator already credited.
Slowed down, the frames are separate; joined, they become a day, and a “me” appears at the centre as if it had been there all along.
The edges go and the middle stays.
Three pieces crossed my path this week. Each one is a story arriving seemingly finished. Each one, read slowly, shows the seams.
The fluent surface:
"The output stays fluent while the machinery behind it is failing. Reading the words tells you nothing about what is holding them up."
Vlad Djukanovic & Arshavir Blackwell, "What Breaks First When You Damage a Language Model," October 27, 2026. Read the piece
The researchers strained a large language model (LLM) in two unrelated ways. One switched off parts of it at random. The other removed nothing and only added static. Both broke the same thing first: the model's ability to build something new. It could still repeat a made-up word, "wug." It could no longer build "wugged." The familiar held and the novel disappeared.
Under static, with nothing removed, the rare built forms at the edges fail first while the familiar middle holds.
What survives longest is the smooth voice, "because fluency is the average, and the average is what a struggling system produces."
A story can sound whole and say nothing about who, or what, is holding it up. If anything at all.
And it doesn't take damage to do this. Ask people to pick a number at random and 7 comes up surprisingly often. Many language models lean on it even harder:
"In certain experimental settings, they choose it almost every time."
Fabio Moioli, LinkedIn, October 13, 2026. Read the post
An illustration, not data: people lean toward 7, and a language model leans almost entirely on it.
Moioli also cites a study in Science Advances: generative AI "improved individual creativity in short-story writing, but the resulting stories became more similar to one another."
Each story got better… on its own. Side by side, they drifted toward the same one.
Borrow the same braider, and you get the same braid.
The same history, told one way:
"The magic of group chats is not in giving everyone a voice, but a place where you feel safe to talk."
Ben Thompson, "The End of the Internet," Stratechery, October 26, 2026. Read the piece
Thompson takes thirty years of the internet and braids them into one shape. Every time the open web got overrun, people went small. Blogs went niche. Social media went into group chats. For the AI era, he predicts the same move again: not one global market, "but infinite local ones."
It's a good story. It's also a choice. The same years could be braided into a story about consolidation, or loss, or noise.
Each version leads somewhere that feels different but with the same end result.
The braid that makes the braider:
"Like strands of rope. Each one snaps on its own. Braided together, they hold weight."
Taylin John Simmonds and Dale Pyrcz, "How I combine five different interests in one article without sounding scattered: Braided Writing," The Creative Minority, October 7, 2026. Read the piece
Simmonds offers this as a writer's method: give each interest a job inside a single piece instead of rotating through them. Then he goes further than I expected:
"Do it over months and your writing stops being scattered. Do it over years and YOU stop being scattered."
Read that slowly. The braiding comes first. The braider shows up afterward, assembled from the practice and then credited with having done it all along.
Three strands twist into one rope, and only once it is finished does a “me” appear at the knot.
Who's doing the braiding?
Stories shape our beliefs and behaviours... and the storyteller we credit with the telling is itself woven into the story. I don't want to resolve that. It's the tension this whole stack is holding.
This week, when you remember, take one moment - anything that happened - and watch the story you made of it arrive, fully formed. Then, on purpose, braid a second story from the same material. Both came from the same frames. Do a third story if it helps.
The same strands braided into a second story, with the “me” arriving at the knot again.
Notice who shows up to take credit for the telling. If you'd like to stay with that noticing, I wrote a short reflection, The Story Beneath All Stories. It follows the stories back toward the “I” at their centre.
Don't rush to settle who. No judgment. Just notice it.
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