From Bullet Journals to AI Brains: Why Storytelling Is the Final Boss

Key takeaways

• Write in 1-4 short sentences (or 1 long sentence) everyday on how this one day is different from the rest. This is your homework for life. Relevant for inspirations for stories, and journaling.
• A story may need years to form, you may have an experience, know the ending but it may take a while to figure out how to tell the story. It may take many iterations.
• The pattern of the story typically goes this way: You start with the opposite of the ending. You typically know the ending first if it is a first-hand experience, otherwise, you typically start and figure out the ending as you go along. The ending forms.
• You want to cut away everything from the story except the point of the story, everything around the story serves to enhance and support it, make it clear.

It Started With a YouTube Video (As All Great Journeys Do)

A friend sent me a YouTube video about bullet journaling. Months ago. I finally watched it. (Yes, I’m that friend.)

But it changed something. The video recommended a book, and I went down the rabbit hole — because I’m a journaling nerd. Not the “Dear Diary, today was hard” kind. More like the “If I don’t write this down, my brain will run 47 tabs simultaneously until it crashes” kind.

Here’s the thing about journaling: when you write, your thoughts get weirdly… clear. Like defragging a hard drive from 2003. Suddenly, you can see what matters.

A few friends noticed. They started asking me:

“How do I start journaling?” “What do I even write about?” “I don’t have time for this.” And that last one? That’s the real problem. We all hit the ground running every morning with a thousand things screaming for attention and zero time to figure out which ones actually matter. It’s like being asked to Marie Kondo a hoarder’s house — in 10 minutes.

“Does this spark joy?” “I DON’T KNOW, THERE ARE 47 BOXES OF VINTAGE NEWSPAPERS ON TOP OF ME.”

Now Let’s Talk About AI (Bear With Me, This Connects)

As AI gets smarter, one of the things Yann LeCun keeps pointing out is still painfully true: AI doesn’t have worldview context. And it won’t — not until our infrastructure catches up. And that hinges on raw materials, better efficiency, and solving a mountain of logistical, pipeline, and technological problems that are… let’s just say… still loading.

But you and I? We have worldview context.

Now, sometimes it feels like my worldview is too small to count. Like, “Oh sure, my personal experience of eating instant noodles at 2 AM while questioning my life choices — that’s definitely ‘worldview.’” But here’s the thing: it’s still infinitely more than what an LLM has. Your 2 AM existential crisis has more emotional depth than the entire training dataset of GPT-whatever.

Storytelling: The Final Boss of AI

Working on the storytelling engine for Manaburn, I went deep into what it takes to build a compelling storytelling LLM. And after all that research, I arrived at one elegant conclusion:

Storytelling is absurdly, unreasonably, almost offensively complicated.

Think about what goes into one sentence that makes a human feel something:

📜 History we never lived through — but somehow internalized through books, movies, and that one really intense history teacher in 10th grade 🔗 Connections between past and present that took humanity years to make — and we casually reference in a tweet ⏳ The weight of time on physical environments, on cultures, on language itself 🌍 The living, breathing evolution of a people — constantly shifting, never static A machine can read about pain. It can analyze 10 million descriptions of heartbreak. But it will never understand pain the way you and I do — the way your stomach drops, the way your chest tightens, the way a song you haven’t heard in years can absolutely wreck you in a grocery store.

An LLM can simulate empathy. It cannot feel it.

So Now I’m Obsessed With Storytelling

How do you tell a good story? I can’t stop thinking about it. I’ve been reading everything I can about how great writers break it down:

💡 What inspires them? 🔥 What keeps them going when the blank page fights back? 🎣 How do you capture attention? 📈 How do you build tension? 😮‍💨 How do you release it — at exactly the right moment? 🎭 How do you manipulate emotion through text, through setup, through silence? 🗣️ How does language itself evolve? That last one is fascinating — and deeply personal.

Here’s something most people don’t realize: if you leave your home culture long enough and come back, you won’t recognize parts of it. The slang has shifted. The humor has evolved. They say hi in a different way, your understand it but it is not the way you say it. The references have moved on without you. The space and time between your one greeting and a local hits you like a truck.

We all assume our culture is a fixed thing — especially when we’re born into it. “This is how we are. This is how we’ve always been.”

That is utterly, spectacularly untrue.

Culture is a living organism. Language is its heartbeat. And if you’ve been away long enough, coming back feels like visiting a parallel universe where everything looks the same but nothing quite fits anymore.

And that — that disorientation, that bittersweet recognition — is the kind of thing only a human can truly write about.

At least for now. 😏

You know that I don’t write well. This is my blog. Did AI wrote this? Or, did I?