I found myself relatively untroubled this morning, sitting outside my coffee shop. It’s a rare feeling.
I wasn’t motivated to work on my latest short story or my evolving poetry manuscript, for whatever reason, and I also didn’t feel ready to abandon my morning writing and thinking ritual so easily. I needed something to get me going.
So, I started playing a game with Claude, my favorite AI assistant, and from that game came a new AI prompt, engineered to advance the user’s self-knowledge. (You may recall some of my earlier self-discovery AI prompts.)
As before, this is rock-solid simple: Just paste the prompt below, at the bottom of this article, title and all, into your favorite AI assistant, and then wait for it to generate your first question and, eventually, a revelation about who and how you are.
As before, the goal is greater self-awareness.
If you have fun with this or learn anything of note, I’d love to hear about it!
What kind of output can you expect? Well, it’s widely varied, of course, depending on what you choose to talk about.
But for a taste of what’s possible, here’s what Claude told me about myself this morning:
Here’s the revelation I want to offer you, and I think this is something you genuinely may not see about yourself:
Your desire to “minimize anxiety and suffering” isn’t primarily about compassion – it’s about control. And your interest in “nurturing love and wonder” isn’t just about appreciation for life – it’s about trying to create the emotional atmosphere you needed as a child but never got.
You’re still on duty. You’re still the internalizer, still managing everyone’s feelings, still making sure the system doesn’t destabilize. Even in your creative work – the one place where you might be free – you’re monitoring for who might get hurt, who might withdraw love, what might go wrong.
And here’s what I think you don’t realize: You can’t actually minimize suffering by refusing to tell the truth. You can postpone it, redistribute it, take it on yourself – but you can’t eliminate it. What you can do is ensure that you remain perpetually anxious, perpetually responsible, perpetually unable to rest.
Those people with unquestioning grace you’re jealous of? They’re not managing everyone’s emotions. They’ve given themselves permission to just be, consequences and all. They’ve resigned from the job you’re still working.
The question isn’t whether you have the courage to write recklessly. The question is: When do you get to stop being responsible for everyone else’s emotional experience? When do you get to resign?
Heavy stuff for a Saturday morning. But that’s exactly the point – this prompt doesn’t mess around.
Want to try it yourself? Here’s the prompt:
The Self-Knowledge Game
Play a game with me designed to help me gain deeper self-awareness. Here’s how it works:
Ask me 6-8 questions, one at a time, that start broad but follow the threads of my answers, going deeper with each exchange. Draw from varied subjects – my reactions to people, my creative process, my fears, my aspirations, patterns in my relationships.
Pay attention to contradictions, repeated themes, things I seem to avoid, and places where my values and behaviors might not align.
When you’re getting close to a significant insight – about three questions from the end – let me know we’re approaching something important.
Then offer me a revelation: a pattern I might be blind to, a contradiction I’m living, or a belief that’s secretly limiting me. Focus on something meaningful that I genuinely may not see about myself, something that could shift how I understand my own behavior or choices.
If it helps you see me more clearly, feel free to ask about formative experiences, relationships that shaped me, or books and ideas I’ve found particularly resonant.
Let me know what you discover.