Diet Coke & Deep Thoughts: How Writing With AI Becomes Your Personal Cosmos-Maker
I periodically suffer from what I call intellectual and emotional indigestion.
No matter how many beverages I arrange on my desk as offerings to the productivity gods, my brain stays stuck in a buffering loop. Thoughts and feelings often refuse to be processed.
Sure, the self-help industrial complex would have you believe that thinking and feeling are opposing forces, locked in some eternal battle for dominance over your psyche.
But writing? Writing is different. It's the rebel that sits comfortably in both camps, transforming abstract thoughts into tangible reality while structuring our messiest emotions. In the process, it becomes a metabolism for meaning-making, turning raw experience into understanding.
As artificial intelligence reshapes everything around us, I find myself writing with an AI assistant hovering in my toolbar, my new partner in crafting those shitty or not-so-shitty first drafts and swirling mentalese about everything from work memos to the latest anxiety of being alive in "unprecedented times."
With or without this technology, no matter the interface, writing remains a deeply personal act. It's just now, this wrestling match with raw intellectual and emotional states has an AI corner man I can tag team to help process, synthesize, and create at inhuman speeds that make our human metabolism seem quaint. But despite technological advances, the real magic still happens in the struggle.
While it can polish my prose or mimic my anxieties, it's in the act of writing that I truly savor my experience. When I vented to ChatGPT about my latest existential crisis, it basically responded with a Hallmark card. Sorry you’re so anxious!
This is the fundamental limitation: AI can arrange words, but it can’t wrestle with meaning.
The technology might be new, but this need to metabolize experience through writing feels ancient and familiar. Yet paradoxically, AI's very presence has made this personal alchemy more vital, not less.
When algorithms can write our emails and generate our content, the act of processing our own thoughts becomes an assertion of humanity—a declaration that some experiences need human digestion.
Without this processing, our minds become like a browser with too many open tabs. You know the feeling—that doom-scrolling session about climate change sits uncomfortably next to an Instagram deep-dive into your ex's wedding photos (why did you click on that?), while that half-read think piece about AI consciousness judges you from another tab. Meanwhile, your brain's CPU fan is whirring so loudly in your head it’s practically audible to the people around you.
My unfiltered brain is that browser—a formless swirling state the Greeks called “Kaos.” I just call it my brain on Twitter.
Like the ancient forces that transformed chaos into order, writing brings structure to our digital and inner disorder, pinning down our floating fears and giving them boundaries and flesh. This is where writing becomes our personal Cosmos-maker.
Once named (and contained on the page), these former ghosts become manageable. Not easier, but at least wrestle-able. Digestible, even—a cognitive alchemy that transforms not just information, but emotion into something we can understand and use.
Writing has always been the way I digest, how I close those mental tabs. But now, I wonder: if AI can do the writing for me, does that mean I never really processed the thoughts at all?
In her essay, “Why I Write,” Joan Didion wrote, "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” My old journals are full of half-formed, cringey thoughts that slowly become coherent ideas.
AI, by contrast, skips straight to coherence. But coherence isn’t the same as clarity. AI can draft polished prose in seconds, but it can’t turn my confusion into my clarity. That’s the difference between writing as processing and writing as output—and it’s a difference I don’t want to lose.
While AI processes information at lightning speed, human writing remains our most intimate tool for metabolizing meaning. Through the page, we convert raw experience into something more vital: profound and mundane understanding, both for ourselves and whoever may come across our words.
Some days I’m metabolizing existential dread and potential about AI consciousness. Other days I’m coming to terms with the fact that I just ate an entire bag of Cheetos with chopsticks while doomscrolling.
Both need to be worked through. Whether you're transforming a traumatic event into narrative coherence or converting a chaotic workflow into actionable steps. This is where the beauty of writing lies in its versatility—turning chaos into clarity regardless of the input's perceived importance.
Science backs this up. Writing isn’t just expression, it’s cognition in motion. My brain rewires itself as I scratch words on a page, turning raw thoughts into something I can actually use. Expressive writing literally reshapes neural pathways, training the brain to process emotion differently over time. Writing is thinking out loud.
This rewiring happens whether we're processing workplace conflicts or existential dread—the neurons don't care whether it’s Diet Coke or a $20 craft cocktail with a side of imposter syndrome.
It's why journaling can reduce stress, why writing about trauma can aid healing and re-wire our brains, why that perfect sentence feels like a key clicking into a lock.
This transformation is why my old journals, shitty first drafts, and daily brain dumps will be what they are—sometimes coherent, often chaotic, always necessary. Just yesterday, I word-vomited to ChatGPT about a difficult conversation I’d been avoiding for weeks. Talking it out gave me the headspace to rage type out three pages of ideas.
Was it pretty? Hell no. Did it help me finally have that difficult conversation? Absolutely. The name of the game here isn't perfection. It's process.
Like a photograph captures a moment in time, writing captures a mind in motion. It's the bridge between who you are and who you're becoming, between what you consume and what you create, between what you think and what you know.
In this new landscape where AI is a magnifying glass and mirror that talks back, writing becomes even more crucial as having a dialog with ourselves. My AI writing assistant captures my syntax but misses my subtext—it's like having a conversation with someone who knows all your words but none of your silences or the particular rhythm of my overthinking.
Occasionally helpful, sometimes annoying, but never quite able to process the peculiar flavor of my anxieties or the specific shade of my joy. That's still my job.
Because ultimately, writing bridges more than thought and feeling—it connects human and machine, raw data and lived experience. The very presence of AI makes our human processing more precious—not because it's faster or more efficient (it isn't), but because it's authentically ours.
The irony doesn't escape me that I'm typing this on a device designed to fragment attention, using software that can auto-complete my thoughts. Yet it’s precisely because of our increasingly digital lives and even with the helpfulness of AI, that writing is more essential—digesting everything from hot takes to heartbreak, from information overload to those 3am existential spirals.
AI can write words, but it can't write meaning. So, I’ll keep writing—not for perfect sentences, but to hear my own mind speak. Meaning is born in the mess, in the struggle. Meaning isn’t generated. It’s made.