The mask behind the mask

I was listening to a podcast the other day while cooking dinner, and the discussion landed on personas.

The guest was comparing the Western and Eastern versions of "persona". The Western one roughly means: you are supposed to be someone. One tag that defines you. So be yourself, be authentic. The Eastern one is the opposite, and I can relate, as I grew up with that philosophy.

In the Eastern way of thinking, a person has no fixed form. You change shape with the situation, like water. You play different roles in different contexts and in different stages of life.

That made me think of Fernando Pessoa, my favourite Portuguese writer. He spent his whole life writing as dozens of different people he called "heteronyms", and he insisted they were neither masks nor pen names. Each one was a complete person, with a certain way of living, and a personality of their own.

Then I thought of the AI agents I created. I have a few of them these days. Each of them has its own role, skill set, how it should think and write. All set up in its own agent.md file. Each behaves, honestly, like a different character.

But somehow, I feel something is missing there. Pessoa's people, and all the roles we play in daily life, share one thread: one memory, one life running underneath. You can call it a "soul" behind the masks. In Pessoa's case, it's Pessoa himself.

And my agents? I don't think they have such a thread. Nothing connects a market researcher to a technical builder. Unless you count that person behind these md files, editing them, one by one.