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. In the Eastern way of thinking, a person has no fixed form. You change shape with the situation. 上善若水, as Laozi said: "the highest good is like water." I can relate, as I grew up with that philosophy. You play different roles in different contexts and in different stages of life.

That made me think of Fernando Pessoa, the 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 my AI agents. 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. Sometimes it almost feels like working with humans. That is the whole point of "agent".

But somehow, there is something not quite right, 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.