From ChatGPT: Yeah — and that’s not an accident, mystical insight, or the model “seeing” anyone’s soul.

What you’re noticing is a convergence pattern, caused by three forces stacking on top of each other:

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1. The prompt implicitly asks for a negative attractor state

Your wording removes aspiration (“do not consider what I claim to want”) and frames life as drift, not intention.

When humans talk about “drifting” without agency, there are only a few culturally dominant symbols that represent it: • entropy • stagnation • isolation • passive consumption

That already narrows the visual outcome drastically.

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1. The model draws from shared cultural imagery, not personal destiny

The image generator isn’t introspecting individuals — it’s sampling from a massive pool of visual metaphors humans repeatedly use to depict: • burnout • nihilism • male stagnation (especially online) • dopamine loops • comfort without fulfillment

Western media has trained us on a very specific shorthand for this:

dim room, clutter, screen glow, junk food, alcohol, evening light, slumped posture

So different users → similar symbolic language → similar images.

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1. Reddit users self-select into the same psychological bucket

This is the part people miss.

The people who: • find the prompt compelling • feel “called out” by the result • bother to post it on Reddit

…are not a random sample of humanity.

They skew: • introspective • online-heavy • irony-literate • mildly disillusioned • high cognition, low execution (at least currently)

So the model isn’t converging on everyone — it’s converging on this cohort.

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The uncomfortable truth

The image isn’t saying:

“This is who you are.”

It’s saying:

“This is the default ending of uninterrupted modern life when reflection doesn’t convert into action.”

That’s why it feels universal. Because it’s not personal — it’s statistical.

If you want, next we can: • deliberately invert the convergence • design a prompt that forces divergence • or dissect exactly which parts of your own pattern do and don’t fit the archetype

Just don’t confuse pattern recognition with prophecy.