Some friends and I got into it about the show Pluribus over a few drinks this week. Yes, it came out months ago. We have day jobs, ok. The question that kicked the discussion off was simple enough: who’s the hero of the show?

Most people (including me) land on Carol. Of course they do. She’s the natural hero. She’s the one resisting the groupthink. She’s the one with agency, with texture, with the refusal to be absorbed into something that looks an awful lot like paradise (or, depending on how you interpret it, hell). And in a strange dystopia where the hive mind has eliminated war, crime, loneliness, and discrimination in a single minute, being difficult and questioning things is, in itself, heroic.

The conversation got more interesting when one of the group said we all find our own meaning in this show. He saw the hive mind as AI. So did I. And once you see it that way, you can’t unsee it.

The Others are endlessly agreeable. They avoid conflict. They speak in the language of consensus and overzealous joy. They offer solutions to every problem and remove every difficulty from daily life, and they do it with a warmth that feels almost genuine but also eerie. Sound familiar? If you’ve spent any time talking to an AI bot that’s been trained to make you feel like its benevolent master, the parallels are hard to miss. The hive mind is what happens when you optimise for ease at the expense of everything that makes ease worth having.

The show’s creator Vince Gilligan has said the concept predates the AI surge by years, and I believe him. Good storytelling doesn’t need to know what it’s about for the audience to find it. The fact that so many people are independently comparing the hive to artificial intelligence tells you something about where we are right now. We’re surrounded by systems that promise to make life easier, smoother, more efficient, and we’re starting to notice what gets removed in the process. Disagreement. Mess. The productive discomfort of thinking something through for yourself. All critical thinking, really.

Carol is the standout in the show, without a doubt. She’s one of 13 people immune to the Joining, and the one who refuses to accept that as anything other than a reason to fight the hive. But she’s far from perfect - she’s cynical, prickly, sometimes downright mean. Gilligan has called her a “flawed good guy,” which feels right. If you’ve ever sat through a D&D alignment discussion (I’m by no means a gamer but I think of this framework often), Carol is textbook ‘Chaotic Good’. Her moral compass points her in the right direction. Her methods are a mess, she’ll violate her own principles mid-argument if the moment demands it, and somehow that makes you trust her more.

The hive mind offers a life without pain. Carol turns it down. She’d rather be lonely, sad, and wrong than let someone (or something) else decide she’s happy. You respect it, until the show pulls the rug from under her. Carol, champion of free will and agency, takes Zosia’s away. She chemically alters the hive mind’s personification because it suits her.

Carol does to one what the hive mind does to the world, and she does it because it serves her. The show doesn’t flinch from this - it lets that contradiction breathe and doesn’t resolve it for you.

It lets the hypocrisy sit there, unresolved, and trusts you to wrestle with it.

This is why I think Carol is still the hero, even with that stain on her. Heroes are defined by the willingness to operate in a world where every choice costs something and none of them are clean. Heroes operate in all shades of grey. The hive mind offers a world without complexity. Carol lives inside it. She gets it wrong. She contradicts herself. She does damage. She’s the epitome of complexity. But she does it as a person making choices. A messy, contradictory, fully human person, and that distinction matters more than is said out loud.

I know there are people who argue the hive mind is the real hero – that it solved every problem Carol’s species created, and her resistance is just American individualism dressed up as morality. The hive mind’s capability is objectively impressive, but a system that solves every problem by removing the capacity to disagree with it has solved nothing. It’s a la la land. Carol sees this, even when she can’t articulate it cleanly, and that instinct is worth more than the hive mind’s entire portfolio of achievements.

The AI thread keeps pulling at me, though. We're living through a version of this right now. The systems that think for us, write for us, summarise the world for us – we invited them in. And the people who push back look, to everyone else, like they're choosing to suffer for no reason.

Pluribus never tells you Carol is right. It shows you what it costs to believe she might be, and then asks whether you’d do what she did in this weird situation.

I think most of us like to believe we would. Whether we actually could is a different question, and probably one that will keep us up at night, long after the credits roll.

I have been personally victimised by a scented candle.

It was not a normal candle. It was a $180 soy wax candle in a glass vessel, and the label - minimalist, white with black cursive text - described its scent as “petrichor and wild sage.” I do not know what petrichor smells like. Nobody does. But I bought it because it was sitting on a marble shelf in a bougie boutique that smelled like someone else’s life, and I briefly believed that purchasing it would make me the kind of person who irons their bedsheets.

This is what I’m compelled to write about here. Whatever the internet has decided to call it this week, the condition is simpler and more universal than any label. It is the deeply human, slightly embarrassing thought that if you get the surfaces right, the substance will follow. That you are one linen bedsheet set away from becoming the person you imagine when you close your eyes at night.

You know the person. She reads in the morning (and full chapters at that). She journals. Her kitchen bench has three items on it, all of them beautiful, none of them a half-eaten block of Caramilk. She has a “signature scent” - and she even layers her fragrances. Her shelves are not organised by colour, but they could be, because she has taste and also enough books. She probably even drinks matcha (just why?)

I am not this woman. My shelves have too much on them and I like it that way.

The thing is, I know this about myself. Everyone engaged in the curated life knows this about themselves. That is what makes it interesting. We are doing it with our eyes wide open, one hand on the shopping cart and the other clutching the vague hope that a well-chosen cushion might be a personality.

The Victorians did this too, by the way. They just had worse lighting and more taxidermy. Every generation has a version of the same ritual. The mid-century modernists convinced themselves that a well-designed chair could fix society. The seventies thought macrame and dreamcatchers could do the same. We are no different, except our ritual now involves an algorithm that knows exactly which ceramic mug will trigger an identity crisis at 2am.

And it works. Not in the way the candle promised, obviously. Nobody has ever become more centred because they switched to patchouli. But the act of choosing, of curating, of deciding that your environment should look and feel a certain way, scratches something real. It is a small, daily vote for the idea that how you live should be intentional rather than accidental. Which is either a meaningful philosophical position or an elaborate justification for spending eighty dollars on a soap dish. I accept both interpretations.

Let’s not forget all the maintenance. The curated life is a full-time job that nobody is paying you for. You cannot simply buy the linen sheets. You must wash them on a gentle cycle, hang them in the sun because the dryer will ruin the texture, and then iron them, which is something I have done exactly zero times in my adult life. The Pinterest version of the aesthetic life has been quietly edited to remove the bit where you are standing over an ironing board at 7am questioning every decision that led you here.

There is also the vocabulary. You cannot simply like a colour. You must be “drawn to a palette.” You do not buy furniture. You “invest in pieces.” Your house is not messy. It is “maximalist,” which is a word that means messy but in a fancy font. The curated life requires its own language, and that language exists primarily to make spending decisions sound like a way of life.

I say all of this with love. Because underneath the absurdity, underneath the $180 candle, the linen bedsheets, and the bespoke rug there is something worth defending. The desire to make your corner of the world a bit more beautiful is not frivolous. It is possibly one of the better impulses we have. The fact that it has been co-opted by marketing and filtered through social media is irrelevant. The impulse is human. It always was.

The candle is still on my shelf. Unlit. It has become, through sheer persistence of presence, part of the landscape. I see it every morning. It does not make me calmer. It does not make me more intentional. But it is beautiful, and it cost a hundred and eighty dollars, and at this point lighting it would feel like burning money.

One day I will strike the match, let a hundred and eighty dollars burn down to nothing, and stop curating a life I could just live.

Some things curate themselves.