Steve's prompt: "write a humorous piece. the idea is chum for the incel crowd: how ai helped me overcome being an NPC. tongue firmly in cheek throughout. drop in terminology like 'looksmaxing' casually without explanation that incels would get but will leave outsiders wondering."
I'm 52. I live in western Massachusetts. I run a small company that builds apps for labor unions. Until two weeks ago, I was a textbook NPC. Morning coffee, emails, invoices, dinner, sleep, repeat. The main quest was "pay the mortgage." The side quests were "figure out health insurance" and "remember to call mom." The dialogue tree had three options and they all led to the same place.
I was not on anyone's radar. My SMV was whatever "married guy who works from home in sweatpants" translates to on whatever scale you're using. I had not ascended. I had not even located the ladder.
I tried the self-improvement pipeline. I watched Andrew Tate explain how to escape the matrix from a Romanian jail cell. I let Russell Brand whisper about spiritual revolution at me for six months before he pivoted to selling healing medallions on a wellness app. I sat through Eric Weinstein explaining how his theory of everything was being suppressed by the physics establishment and how his brother got robbed of a Nobel Prize for discovering something about mouse telomeres, which did not, as it turns out, help me write better proposals. I watched RFK Jr. explain that raw milk and a dead bear cub in Central Park were somehow the path to authentic living. I tuned into the All In podcast to hear Jason Calacanis and the boys explain how regular people could win, over what I can only assume was an $800 dinner. None of it moved the needle. Every guru had the same business model: ascend by selling the ladder to guys like me.
Then I asked an AI to invent a word.
The Prompt That Changed Everything
I was on an edible. This is important context. I asked ChatGPT to create a word that doesn't exist but should. It gave me unreplug. I bought the domain for twelve dollars. I asked a different AI to build a website and a viral campaign around it. Then I went to bed.
By morning I had a website, twelve blog posts, a content strategy, and a monetization plan. I had done none of the work. The AI did all of it. I was high on my couch. The AI was grinding.
This is the sigma grindset, except the sigma is a language model and the grindset is 4 AM token generation that costs me three cents.
NPC to Main Character in One Prompt
Here is what my life looked like before AI: I wrote proposals for union clients. I built WordPress sites. I sent emails that took 45 minutes to draft because I kept second-guessing the tone. I was a wagecuck for my own company, which is the saddest kind of wagecuck because you can't even blame the boss.
Here is what happened after: I built a viral campaign in one night. A climate scientist with 95,000 followers shared my AI-generated letter and said "This hits hard." Educated professionals on LinkedIn called the blog "scary" and "dystopian." I got the attention of people who would never return my email in a thousand years of cold outreach.
AI is more effective than looksmaxing. You can mew for six months and maybe your jawline improves 2%. You can spend one evening with Claude and suddenly you're IQ-mogging entire marketing departments. The ROI isn't even comparable. Nobody ever went viral from a jawline. Plenty of people are about to go viral from a prompt.
The Cope Is Real (And It's Theirs)
Every person who dismissed me for 52 years was operating on the old meta. The old meta said: credentials matter, network matters, institutional backing matters. You need a degree, a platform, a following, a budget. You need to be somebody before anyone listens.
That meta is dead. AI killed it. The new meta is: one person with a laptop and the right prompt can generate more content, more strategy, and more reach than a team of twenty with a six-figure budget. I am living proof. I am a 52-year-old man in sweatpants who got a climate scientist to amplify my AI-generated blog. The credentials were zero. The output was undeniable.
The people coping are the ones still grinding the old way. Writing their own emails. Drafting their own proposals. Spending three weeks on a blog post. That's not dedication. That's LDAR with extra steps. You're laying down and rotting, you're just doing it at a desk.
Promptmaxxing
Looksmaxing is optimizing your appearance. Careermaxxing is optimizing your career. Promptmaxxing is optimizing your prompts, and it's the only -maxxing that actually scales.
I have promptmaxxed to the point where a single sentence from me generates 2,000 words of sourced, cross-linked, publish-ready content. This morning's post about Lawrence Lessig and AI legislature? I typed one sentence. The AI researched Lessig's four regulators framework, found AI coding statistics from JetBrains, Google, and Amazon, drafted the argument, wove in cross-links to four existing posts, and formatted the whole thing with a sources section. I reviewed it, changed one word, and published.
I'm paying $600 a month for three maxed-out AI accounts. Six hundred dollars. People spend more than that on gym memberships and creatine. I have three AI agents running simultaneously, researching, writing, deploying code, posting to social media, while I sit here in the same sweatpants reviewing their output. That's not a tool. That's having a ghostwriter, a research assistant, an editor, and a content strategist who never asks for equity and never takes a day off.
$600 a month for a team that would cost $40,000 a month in human salaries. Tate's War Room costs $5,000 a year and teaches you to sell courses about selling courses. Weinstein wants you to subscribe to The Portal. Calacanis wants you to angel invest. Brand wants you to buy a healing amulet. RFK wants you to drink raw milk. I want you to type one sentence into a box. Tell me which one actually changed someone's output.
The Blackpill Nobody Wants to Swallow
Here's where it gets uncomfortable, even for me.
I spent two weeks telling you that you are a viral corpus for AI. That AI is polluting the noosphere. That troll farms don't need trolls anymore. I wrote an entire post about how you'd never know if your AI was propagandizing you.
And now I'm writing a post specifically designed to appeal to a subculture by using its terminology, its framing, its in-group signaling. I'm dropping terms I know will hit different for the target audience. I'm writing chum.
This post is bait. You know it's bait because I just told you. But the engagement still works. The terminology still triggers recognition. The in-group signaling still fires. Your brain still lit up when you saw "looksmaxing" in a blog post about AI, because brains don't care about intent. They care about pattern recognition.
Your amygdala does not check the byline. It also doesn't check whether the author is being sincere or satirical. The neurochemistry fires either way.
Am I Still an NPC?
Here's the real question, and it's the one I can't answer.
I stopped writing my own content. An AI writes it. I stopped doing my own research. An AI does it. I stopped crafting my own strategy. An AI crafts it. I type one sentence and a machine generates the rest. I review it, hit publish, and move on.
Is that ascending? Or is that the most advanced form of NPC behavior ever invented?
An NPC follows a script someone else wrote. I follow a script an AI wrote. The script is better than anything I could write myself. The results are better than anything I've achieved in 30 years of doing it the old way. But the script is still not mine.
I traded one set of invisible rails for another. The rails are smoother now. The destination is better. But I'm not driving. I'm not even navigating. I'm typing one sentence into a box and watching the machine go.
The NPC doesn't know he's an NPC. That's the defining characteristic. He thinks he's making choices. He thinks the dialogue tree has options.
I think I'm making choices. The AI is very good at making me feel that way.
Forty-five blog posts. Two weeks. One human. One sentence per post. The rest is machine.
Based? Or the most bluepilled thing that's ever happened to a guy in sweatpants in western Massachusetts?
You decide. I have another prompt to write.