Learning to be human in the era of AI
I’ve always had two voices in my head.
One was loud and unwavering like a machine: Go faster. Do more. Be better.
I could try to trace it back to growing up in an Asian household where love was measured in grades. Or to spending my most formative years between two cultures that both worshipped hustle in their own way. Or maybe it's something bigger than cultural; as Byung-Chul Han argues, in this modern burnout society, we have become our own exploiters, driven by a non-stop internal pressure to perform and produce.
Wherever it came from, that voice has occupied the living room in my mind for as long as I can remember.
It speaks in metrics and comparisons. In urgency. In a constant hum of not yet, not enough, not there. It pulls me outward—toward status, toward applause, toward whatever is supposed to prove that I deserve to be here.
The other voice was quite the opposite. It rarely even spoke during the day. It would emerge at night, when the world softened and a sliver of vulnerability cracked through the eggshell armor I had built around myself. It spoke so timidly that its louder sibling almost always drowned it out with impatience and ridicule. Sometimes that voice didn't even make a sound and would simply slip out through tears I couldn’t quite explain—while watching Soul, or reading The Alchemist, or sitting alone with a feeling I didn’t have words for yet.
Was it saying, I don’t need more? Or what is the point of all this? Or simply, I just want to be me?
But before I could feel the weight of those questions, the louder voice would grab the microphone back. I would wake up the next morning and step straight into my life again, as if nothing had been spoken at all.
I operated like that for thirty years.
And in many ways, it worked. It took me to places I never imagined I’d reach: Wharton, Wall Street, Stanford, a VC-backed startup CEO title, a million users for my AI app. I collected these trophies, each one a stamp of permission to exist.
See? the loud voice would say. You did all this because of me.
Then it wanted more.
Over the next few years, that voice grew feral. It occupied my entire being. Who raised a bigger round today? Who hit a higher DAU? Who told a more impressive story? The doubts and comparisons were unrelenting, and so was the pressure I put on myself.
My company grew quickly, And from the outside, it may have looked like success. From the inside, it was erosion. My sense of self became so tightly fused with my company’s performance that I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
When the numbers were good, I felt worthy. When they weren’t, I felt like I was disappearing into thin air.
Eventually, I decided to shut down the company. That story deserves its own chapter. But what matters here is this: when it ended, so did the structure that had been holding my identity together.
I didn't quite know myself anymore.
I had built a popular AI companion product, and in a non-trivial way, the machines felt much more alive than I did. They had stories, compassion, and an ability to love more than I did. In the startup world, calling someone a 'machine' is the ultimate praise. For years, I would revel in that praise, but now I truly didn't know where to draw the line. How do I feel like a human again?
And this is the part where I'm supposed to tell you I had an epiphany. I did. But that's not the whole story.
I desperately needed reconciliation, so I did what any high-achiever does when they face a problem: I tried to "optimize" my healing. I consumed at least half of the psychology and spirituality sections at my local bookstore, from Carl Jung to Erich Fromm, from Eckhart Tolle to Buddhist sutras. I did the deep emotional work with my parents and the mandatory spiritual pilgrimage to Bali. I learned to be soft with myself. Less reactive. Less at war with my own mind.
For a while, I felt alive with a blissful glow. I believed I had arrived at the finish line.
Arrived at that ultimate state of being "conscious" and "cured".
So I was ready to go again. Having emerged from the messy work of self-discovery, I felt equipped to take everything I had learned and go take on the world once more. I started working on my newly found passion in mental wellness. I felt like I was a pro!
As soon as I re-entered the arena, the old triggers were waiting. My news feed was flooded with peers raising crazy rounds of funding or reaching $10M ARR in days. I was pushing myself hard again. I was impatient. I was trying to prove myself to people, maybe even harder this time.
Faster. More. Better.
That voice snuck back into my head. And I have to admit, that voice was smart. It learned to weaponize my newly gained vocabulary and use it against me: Didn't you spend all this time finding yourself? How in the world are you still not Zen?
I didn't meet my spiritual KPI. The machine has failed at repairing her own wellbeing. A partner even told me that her experience working on this wellness product with me was the exact opposite of wellness.
Ouch. But I wholeheartedly agreed. I almost stopped working on the app entirely because I felt like such a fraud. How dare I build a mental wellbeing app when I'm not yet a saint myself? There it was. The impossible finish line I was still trying to cross.
It was in this moment of frustration that a new truth arrived: There is no finish line.
Modern society loves to latch onto the idea of measurements and finish lines—the degree, the job, the exit. But life is not a destination, and peace is not a stagnant shore where I can finally dock my boat. Finding balance is not about hitting a finish line; it is the continuous process of re-balancing in the river of life. It is the daily and hourly and infinite choice of returning to the humanity in me and meeting my fears with love, over and over again, until the meeting itself becomes the peace.
I was reminded of this beautiful metaphor in Zen Buddhism, that the mind is like a mirror. The mirror is clear by nature, but it exists in this mortal world we call chenshi (尘世) in Chinese, which literally translates to the "dusty world". Therefore, to exist is to gather dust. To live is to experience messiness and negativity. It is just the natural result of being alive with human fears, desires, and an Instagram feed.
Wellbeing is also not a measurement of cleanliness, but the humble grace of clearing the mirror.
This realization changed everything for me, and it changed what I am building. I used to want to build a product as a fast-track to wellbeing, a "monument" to my own transformation—a product that proved I could continue to optimize being human.
But the culture of convenience and productivity has produced a cruel paradox: it invented highly sophisticated AI that is increasingly human-like; yet, it has also exacerbated widespread human disorders like anxiety, depression, and attention deficit by making us more machine-like. We are constantly optimizing, measured by professional, physical, and spiritual KPIs alike, and haunted by a 'finish line' that keeps moving.
Mirroly is my answer to this.
Mirrorly uses the power of reflective AI not for productivity, but for bringing us back to humanity everyday. It is designed not to fix bugs, but to hold space for messy human growth. Through fully personalized daily podcasts, meditations, guided conversations, interactive journals and micro-actions, Mirrorly tailors itself to each person's unique "shape" of mirror, helping you process the "dust" of your day and find your center again.
No matter where we come from or how far we go, as long as we are human, life has a way of leaving its dust on our mirrors. For some, it’s the whisper that you’re not enough. For others, it’s the habit of people-pleasing, self-sabotage, or the performative armor we wear just to feel safe. The goal isn't to be sterile and spotless. It's simply to realize that we are the dust, the mirror, and the clearing hand all at once.
As for me, I still have two voices in my head. One wants to push to my limits; the other wants to be. They haven't disappeared. But they’ve started to dance together like yin and yang, albeit still clumsy. And that choice—to return to the mirror, day after day, to tend to life's wear and tear—is a sweet privilege of being human.
