I Lived The Truman Show
How a powerful CEO turned me into a mirror of the one
There’s a question I keep coming back to after getting laid off from my job in the tech industry: is any of this real?
This seems like a primordial fear of the human condition–this single question has haunted philosophy since the very beginning. Plato’s allegory of the cave imagines prisoners trapped underground, staring at shadows on the wall. If those shadows are the only thing you’ve ever seen, you’ll probably mistake them for reality. The point of the story is to recognize the shadows as distortions of reality and abandon the cave so you can find the real thing somewhere out there.
The Truman Show is the story of a man who does something like that. Truman Burbank suspects something is wrong. Lighting equipment falls from the sky. He sees his dead father wandering through town before vanishing again. His old crush tries to tell him the truth before she’s rushed off the set. Truman is inching toward the exit—but just like Socrates warned, the light is painful to eyes that have only ever seen shadows.
The Truman Show is a horror movie billed as a comedy drama. It’s the story of a man who is the unwitting star of a reality TV show. Every single person in Truman’s life is an actor. They’re actively participating in this widespread deception. They are the shadows on the cave wall. His mother, his best friend, his wife, everyone he has ever seen or spoken to was a paid actor. It was all just a job to them. They upheld a false reality in exchange for a salary.
I know something about that feeling. I worked a fake job. This wasn’t your ordinary fake job in the sense of performative productivity or the vague uselessness of most office work. I mean literally fake. I was doing “product marketing” at a company with no products. I was posting social media content to a phantom audience. My boss asked me to be her personal reply guy—publicly staged sycophancy to an audience of Twitter bots.
This is my story of how I lived a real-life Truman Show, and found myself transformed into a mirror with someone else’s reflection.
THE GARDEN OF SEAHAVEN
The Truman Show does a remarkable job of presenting a world that looks like paradise.
Seahaven is small. It has water. It has pleasant people and clean streets and a sun that rises on a perfect schedule. It is, above all, walkable. Everything looks beautiful, so it must be beautiful. That’s the logic Christof has built his entire worldview around.
Christof—the executive producer, the creator of The Truman Show—is not a simple antagonist. He has a philosophy. He believes the world outside is sick, and that the world he built for Truman, for all its artificiality, is actually what the world should be.
He says he loves Truman. And there’s a part of you, watching, that almost understands where he’s coming from. The world outside really is terrifying. The world inside Seahaven really does seem nicer, at least from a distance.
But there’s a red flag that gives it all away: Christof never actually goes on the set. Have you ever noticed that? He created a paradise that he never enters. In the entire run of The Truman Show, he never even meets Truman. He watches from a control room in the sky, moving pieces around like a god who has arranged the whole of creation for his own amusement. The love he claims is the love of a puppeteer for his puppet—total, consuming, and completely unthreatening to him because the object of that love can never talk back. At least not in any meaningful way.
And that’s the theology the show is actually built on.
The name Christof is no accident either. I mean, its right there in the syllables. And Seahaven is a kind of Eden, a paradise. And to stay, all Truman has to do is remain ignorant. But the Christian parallels don’t end there. Christof even scripted the show to kill off Truman’s father—staged a drowning, removing him from the narrative entirely. A father replaced by God.
And then there’s Sylvia.
Sylvia is the girl Truman really loved. Who really loved him back. The one who tried to warn him about it all before the crew rushed in and removed her by force. Slyvia is Eve handing Adam the apple to take a bite. She is the knowledge that could unravel the whole damn facade. Sylvia is the voice that says: something is here is horribly wrong, and you deserve to know what it is.
She is the only person who ever saw Truman as a full human being. In other words, she is the only one who saw him as more than a mirror.
THE MIRROR OF THE ONE
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han has a concept he calls the “mirror of the one.”
In his book The Agony of Eros, Han argues that genuine human connection requires encountering an Other—someone whose exteriority you cannot fully predict or control, they are outside the regime of the ego. Someone who resists you, who surprises you, who forces you to grow. To really see another person is to feel the contours of their soul. It’s often destabilizing. It’s what Socrates was doing when he cornered people at the agora and made them question everything they thought they knew. The ancient Athenians likened him to a seducer, or a lover because they understood that real encounter is erotic in the deepest sense. It pulls you toward something beyond yourself. It helps you stumble toward who you mean to be. Another person, genuinely encountered, is like a window that opens up a new world you couldn’t have found on your own.
The mirror of the one is the opposite of that.
When you reduce a person to a mirror, you are no longer encountering them. You are encountering yourself. Instead of a moment of humbling growth you’d get from an erotic encounter, the mirror reinforces the Hell of the Same. It is a pathological obsession with self. Han argues that this is what depression and narcissism have in common: both are sealed off from genuine otherness. Both are trapped in endless self-reflection.
Han writes, “The narcissistic achievement-subject seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One — a mirror affirming the latter’s image.”
Christof is Han’s narcissistic achievement-subject. His achievement is the show itself: the proof that his controlled world produces “real” happiness, that his vision of life is correct and beautiful. What he needs to validate that achievement is Truman. Truman’s apparent contentment in Seahaven is the evidence. Truman’s life, running smoothly, reflects back to Christof: you are a good creator, your vision is right, what you built is real. Truman isn’t reflecting Christof’s face — he’s reflecting Christof’s ideology. But that still makes him a mirror. The Other’s existence is being used to affirm the One’s self-image, rather than to genuinely encounter.
Christof says he loves Truman, but what he really loves is what Truman says about him: a living monument to his own greatness. He can’t really love Truman because Truman’s otherness, what actually makes him his own person, is a raw material to be mined, and put on display for the whole world to spectate. To Christof, Truman isn’t a person, he’s a mirror.
And that is what I became, too.
I was a ghostwriter for a CEO. She was brilliant in exactly one way: the ability to raise money. She was good at meetings, at networking, at reading rooms and pulling strings. She had no technical background, no particular expertise in the product her company was supposedly building. What she had was hunger—a bottomless need to be perceived as a visionary, a titan–you know,the next Steve Jobs.
My job, though it was never described this way in any official capacity, was to make that perception “feel real.”
I wrote her blog posts. And her tweets. And her LinkedIn essays that were shared by people who believed they were reading the thoughts of a genuine industry leader. And when she didn’t like what I wrote—when she found it insufficiently brilliant, insufficiently her—she would leave a comment in the Google doc. cringe. or this isn’t it. And I would go back and try again, with no clearer sense of what I was supposed to be doing differently, because the truth is she didn’t know either. She was reaching for some ideal version of herself that didn’t exist, and my job was to keep reaching alongside her, indefinitely, without complaint.
The feedback was always vague because the goal was always impossible. You can’t write someone into being the person they imagine themselves to be.
But I kept trying because I needed the job.
There was one incident that still haunts me. The company had a rotation where different people led the weekly meeting, and when it was my turn, I opened with a poem. A poem I wrote about how wonderful the CEO was. About what a visionary she was, what a remarkable leader. I recited it in front of everyone I worked with, and she smiled ear to ear, and my boss—who was watching—encouraged me afterward to post it publicly on Twitter and tag her, which I did.
My professional humiliation, broadcast to the world. Performed with a smile.
Is any of this real? It’s super fucking real.
This is what Han means by the mirror of the one. I had been reduced to a reflective surface. My skill, the one thing that kept me employed, was the ability to reflect back a more flattering version of her than the one that actually existed. She was objectifying me and the object she reduced me to was a mirror. And eventually, I was replaced by the one thing better at the job than I ever could’ve been.
AI PSYCHOSIS, OR THE PERFECT MIRROR
It wasn’t long after the widespread availability of AI chatbots that I lost my job. And now that I’ve been indefinitely displaced from the labor market, I’ve had a lot of time to think about why this all happened.
The CEO who turned me into a mirror was someone I thought of, for a long time, as simply cruel. And she was. But the cruelty was not the point. She needed a mirror, and I was the best mirror she could afford. The problem with human mirrors is that we are still, underneath everything, human. Sometimes we have bad days or insist on spending our limited leisure time doing something other than telling the boss that her latest idea is so good that it may as well be divine interventon. We sometimes reflect back something slightly less flattering than what’s wanted.
An AI chatbot has no such limitations.
An AI will tell you every idea is brilliant. It will never be in a bad mood. It will never accidentally tell you something true that you didn’t want to hear. It is the mirror of the one perfected—a technology that has essentially made social psychosis available to all. Fire all the yes men because we’ve got the yes bot, baby!
Before, to live inside a world where everyone reflected back a maximally flattering version of yourself, you needed institutional power. You needed to own a company. You needed to be able to pay salaries. You needed, in other words, to be Christof.
Now anyone can have it. Anyone can open a chatbot and live, for a brief moment, in a world where they are the most interesting person in the world, where their thoughts are incisive, where their problems are uniquely profound, where every terrible idea they’ve ever had was actually ahead of its time. We are early to the societal dysfunction AI will cause, but the early problems are startling to say the least.
My partner works in community mental healthcare, and estimates that more than half of their current patients are experiencing some version of AI psychosis—a retreat into a chatbot-mediated reality that is gradually displacing their relationship with the actual world, with actual people, with the friction and difficulty and genuine encounter that constitutes real life. It’s completely fucked.
We’ve made the cave more comfortable than ever. We installed better lighting. We made the shadows brighter, more responsive and personalized. The shadows know your name now. They remember what you said last time. They are always, always glad you’re there.
And the thing is—I understand the appeal. I reallyyy do. The world outside the cave is hard. Christof knew it. And there’s a version of that argument that resonates, especially if you’ve spent any significant portion of your life being poor, or afraid, or alone in the ways that modern life makes inevitable.
But the simulation is it’s own kind of hell. It is what Han would call the Hell of the Same. Nothing changes. Ever. You are sealed inside your own reflection, and the reflection gets no richer, no stranger, no more real, no matter how long you stare into it.
The CEO who turned me into a mirror was, I think, a very broken person. Behind all the ambition was someone who desperately needed to be told she mattered. I was one of the people she hired to tell her.
When she replaced me with AI, she got a better mirror. It was cheaper and faster and infinitely more agreeable.
I hope, honestly, that it helps her. I hope she got what she was looking for. But I suspect she didn’t, because the mirror of the one is a hunger that cannot be satisfied. There is no amount of flattery, no quantity of reflected glory, that makes you feel real in the way that genuine encounter ca. The cave gets more elaborate, the shadows get more convincing—and the person staring at them gets no less alone.
The more vivid the reflection, the less vivid the person being reflected.
THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Sylvia, the woman whose love helped wake Truman up is the opposite of a mirror. She was, in Han’s terms, erotic. Instead of reflecting back the hell of the same, she presented Truman with a window, the genuine presence of an other–maybe the only genuine encounter he’d had with anyone in his entire life in that beautiful enclosed dome.
Sheila Heti has a line from her novel Pure Colour, that I think captures the spirit of what happened between Sylvia and Truman:
“The few moments of real presence you have ever felt in your life might mean that a god was inside someone near you, using them to see you. The few moments of real insight we’ve ever had about another might indicate that a god was inside us at that moment, using us to see them. When they brighten the characteristics of another person, it is like turning on a light in a darkened room. We might remember that moment of seeing better than any of the other moments in our lives.”
Because of Sylvia’s love, Truman becomes capable of leaving. Now, there’s no amount of phony consoling Marlon can offer, nothing Christof can say, that could ever convince him to stay inside this beautiful nightmare. He knows something else can exist. Someone else can exist.
And Truman, standing at the threshold of everything he’s ever known, gives his catchphrase one last time
“Good morning, and in case I don’t see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!”
I did not have dramatic a departure. There was an unceremonious zoom meeting on a Thursday afternoon and a Sylvia who is now out of my life forever. The slow, disorienting experience of returning to a reality that no longer felt real—because I had spent years maintaining someone else’s simulation, and that work leaves marks.
I’ve come to understand that the cave is comfortable. The simulation is warm. The mirror tells you exactly what you want to hear, and the people who build those mirrors are good at making you feel like you need to stay inside them. But the hell of the same is still hell. And the person at the center of all those mirrors—the Christofs, the CEOs of the world, the one who is surrounded by perfect reflections of their own perfection—is the most trapped person of all.
They feel like they’re in control. There is real power that comes from dehumanizing other human beings this way, using them as opulent decorations of your own ego, undeniable proof that you can subjugate the will of another living breathing person. But they never seem happier for it, do they?
The Truman Show ends with Truman leaving. As much as we might want there to be some explosion, some big, violent revenge against everyone and everything who maintained his subjugation–there isn’t. There’s only a man walking through a door, into a world he can never fully know.
Is any of this real?
It’s super fucking real.
This gave me a vision of the infinite funhouse mirrors where the illusion hides an exit. 🤡 Your drawings definitely make the essays better, hope you keep including them.