Trying to describe having no inner monologue 🧠🗯

It's still noisy up in here!!

Feb 09, 2023

I wanted to start off by saying that you have been HELLA cute in the inbox lately, and even if it takes me a week or so to reply I DO SEE AND LOVE ALL YOUR SWEET MESSAGES. I feel like somehow you all know how to say the perfect thing to me exactly when I need it, so whenever I’m in a bit of a lull, I head to my inbox and you’re there to cheer me up (hope I do that for you too!) A really spesh thing we’ve got here!! Anyway, enough soppy Luce shit, I wanted to share a cute message I got from one of you yesterday:

“Luce!!
I was also at Maisie Peters last night and she was INCREDIBLE!! I took a page from your book and travelled all the way to Auckland from Dunedin by myself to go to the concert on my own. I waited in line from 4pm and made lots of new friends, sang and danced like no one was watching (cause no one I knew was!!) and fangirled so hard over maisie!! It was honestly the best vibes ever, time of my life, 10/10 will be doing again.
Thanks for the solo concert going confidence boost!! lots of love :)”

Messages like these are literally what help me be brave. Seeing you do insane and scary and intrinsically motivated things (like travelling the whole country to go see your fave perform even if you’re doing it alone) is the dopest shit ever, and helps me be able to do it too!! Life’s short, but god I’m glad we’ve got each other to help us make sure we don’t miss out on a second of it.

Cute stuff aside for a sec - we don’t have an episode of The Shit Show for you today because frankly - I was a Worn Out Woman and one more pre-5am newsy/ pod record would have ruined me! As Bel says - we gotta protect our peace!!

Revisiting my lack of inner monologue
Bing has relaunched - with ChatGPT
Look what happens when I search ‘men’ on TikTok
It’s Friday so you get horoscopes!
Do you have an inner monologue?

🗯Revisiting my lack of inner monologue🧠

I mentioned IN PASSING a few weeks back that I don’t have an inner monologue and a BUNCH of you replied wanting me to re-discuss. Well, based on something that happened the other day, I feel like now is a good time to do it! First of all, for those who weren’t around, here’s what I wrote last March about NOT having a little voice inside my head:

“I find it really hard to imagine what it’s like to have an actual voice in your head. I don’t feel like I ever hear anything that’s happening in my brain (although I know I’m constantly thinking), and I reckon for me it’s because every thought I have just comes out of my mouth (or onto this page) before I can control it. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever formed a sentence in my head and then gone on to write it or say it - it’s all instant and extremely impulsive.”

Note: this doesn’t mean I don’t overthink (I still need a podcast to play each night to STOP me from thinking.) I’m just not HEARING thoughts verbally in my head. I can’t even explain it, but even as I’m writing this, I’m not planning it out in my head first, it’s kinda just… happening.

And someone else on Reddit described it like this (which is my EXACT experience):

"I don’t have any conscious thought about what I’m feeling, or any stream of dialogue describing it to myself. I just feel it. It’s like the inner dialogue is the middle man in my head, who just isn’t there."

And then I polled you, and:

88% of said you do have an inner monologue, but
12% of said you don’t

Now that we’re all clued up about what it feels like to NOT have a voice inside your head that you can hear, let me give you an example that happened a few days ago. So Rubes and I were grabbing a drink with a new friend, and we’d been discussing writing styles/inner monologues/ whether we plan conversations in our heads before having them - normal convos to have on your first meeting, right??

Anyway later on in the conversation (and a few more drinks in) Rubes and I were asked a question about something, and Rubes went in to answer it with the EXACT scenario/ anecdote I was going to say. One thing about me is that I love it when you’re just on the same wave-length with someone SOOO much, but instead of being a normal person and just thinking about how great it was that Ruby took the words out of my mouth, I sorta creepily said ‘niiiiiiiiiiice’ - out loud - as soon as Rubes started talking (as in ‘yes bitch, the perfect story to use in response to this question!!) Which was SUPER weird of me. We all had a laugh as I explained that this was an example of not being able to just say something to myself in my head, and how it was perfect timing seeing as we’d already been talking about inner monologues before this happened. But still just… super weird of me!!

I don’t know why I felt like you should all know that story, but since we’re pen pals, and this is basically my diary, it feels right to keep you in the loop with the lack of inner monologue chronicles.

Bing has relaunched - with ChatGPT

In my mind, AskJeeves crawled so that Bing could walk, so that Google could run (historically, this may be incorrect, but this is how I see the evolution of search engines.) BUT, things might be taking a bit of a turn, as Microsoft have just been introduced to the ‘next generation of Bing.’ This next generation of Bing is using a version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to inject ‘search’ with a whole new life.

You all know about ChatGPT because I wrote about it here and talked about it here, but as a refresher, it’s that search engine-esque chatbot that proved to be pretty helpful (if not slightly inaccurate) when it came to writing code, making workout plans, or writing cover letters (among other things.) and

According to The New York Times:

The new Bing, which is available only to a small group of testers now and will become more widely available soon, looks like a hybrid of a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot. Type in a prompt — say, “Write me a menu for a vegetarian dinner party” — and the left side of your screen fills up with the standard ads and links to recipe websites. On the right side, Bing’s A.I. engine starts typing out a response in full sentences, often annotated with links to the websites it’s retrieving information from.

I’m optimistic about what AI like ChatGPT can do to shake up search… watch out Google!!

PS (I just read about this before hitting send): To try and stay in the AI race, Google launched their own AI chatbot called Bard, but it made a mistake in its results in the literal promotional video for it and Google’s stock fell 7%+, wiping out $100B+ of its market value.

Look what happens when I search ‘men’ on TikTok

I saw a TikTok yesterday telling people to search the word ‘men’ in their search bar and see the weeeeird things that TikTok suggests them - so naturally, I tried it. And yep, the suggestions that came up were really really odd: