The AI Odyssey

Returning home to a home that doesn’t exist.

Aug 02, 2026

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Friends,

If you hate Christopher Nolan, you are not going to like this essay.

In researching Nolan for this essay, I had an oh sh*t moment. I found out I had been watching Inception wrong for fifteen years, and honestly it devastated me, because it is my favourite film. Quick bit of context: in the film, a totem is a small object a character spins to check whether they are in a dream or awake. Cobb’s, Leo’s, is a metal top that keeps turning if the world isn’t real. And for fifteen years I thought the whole puzzle was that top. Does it fall at the end? Is he home or still dreaming? Then I saw a clip of Michael Caine saying he’d been confused by the script, so he just asked Nolan outright, when is it a dream and when is it real. And Nolan told him: when you’re in the scene, it’s real. So if Caine isn’t in the scene, it’s a dream. Sorry, spoiler. But it’s been out fifteen years, so that’s on you. And the first time through you’ll be too lost in it to remember I told you anyway.

When I realised, I put my hand to my head. Caine is in the last scene. He is standing there when Cobb reaches his children, which means the answer had been sitting in plain sight the whole time, in who was allowed in the room, and I had spent fifteen years watching a top. I have not rewatched it since.

And there’s a second thing under that one. Inception is planting an idea so deep someone thinks it was always theirs. The whole plot is Cobb’s team doing it to a stranger. What you realise later is it was done to Cobb as well. He isn’t the man running the job. He is the job. He spends the film sure he’s in control while something is choosing through him. That’s why I can’t watch it again. I’d be watching a different film.

This is roughly where the machine has now put all of us. We are the first people who genuinely cannot always tell what is real. The voice that is not the person. The face that never sat for the photograph. The goal scored in a match that was never played. Whether the politician actually said the despicable thing they are still being defended for. And the temptation isn’t really to avoid being fooled. It’s to stop caring whether it’s real. The way Cobb eventually stops checking the top. Caring is work. And something has shown up that’s extremely good at taking that work away while you still think you’re the one deciding.

And so, last week, I went to see The Odyssey the way it is meant to be seen, in a cinema, in the dark, on a screen too big to argue with.

Some films you just can’t watch with the lights on and a phone in your hand. Gladiator. Schindler’s List. Inception. And no, it’s not about the popcorn. They need the dark and the strangers and the scale, because honestly half of what the cinema gives you isn’t even on the screen. It’s the sound of four hundred people stopping their breath at the same second, and you hearing it happen. My youngest pulled her coat over her face and watched the rest through the gap. At the end the room applauded, to no one, in the dark.

I go once, maybe twice a year now, because I have become insufferable about what earns three hours in that seat. If I am honest, that is where my Ithaca is, a dark room full of strangers, and it is being made optional, one release-to-streaming-in-eighteen-days at a time. A phone was glowing three seats down before the studio logo had faded.

I told myself I went for the nostalgia. I grew up on these stories, read to me and then by me, long since blurred into one, so I remember the feeling and not the plots. I went to remember something.

Nostalgia is not a mood. It is Greek, and it is exact. Nostos, the homecoming, the return of the hero from a long way off, and algos, pain. Nostalgia is the ache of the return. And the return is the whole of the Odyssey. The entire poem is Odysseus getting back to Ithaca. So I had gone, out of the ache for home, to watch the oldest surviving story about the ache for home, and the word I had used for my own reason was the word the poem is built from. Yes, even I am confused.

The ache used to cost something. It was once a diagnosis a soldier could die of, far from home, wasting over a longing with nowhere to go. We have softened it since into a warm wistfulness you reach for on purpose, a filter, an evening at an old film.

The oldest story we have is about a man who refuses to forget.

In the poem, not the film, Odysseus reaches the island of the lotus, and his men eat the flower and lose all desire to go home, and he does not touch it. He drags them back to the ships weeping and ties them under the benches, because a man who has forgotten he wants to go home cannot be argued back onto the water, only carried. Later he spends seven years held by the goddess Calypso, who offers him immortality to stay, and he refuses, and weeps on her shore looking at the sea. His whole heroism is that he will not forget Ithaca. His suffering is the remembering, and he chooses it, every day, over a goddess, over never having to die.

Nolan changed this. He cut the lotus island, and had Calypso feed the flower to Odysseus herself, so that he forgets his wife and his son and his home. She is not being cruel. She loves him. She is sparing him the horror of what he has been through, and she feeds him forgetting as a kindness, and for a while he takes it, and is glad.

The easy way to read a poem like this is as a bag of one-to-one warnings. Sirens = your feed. Circe = your dopamine. Lotus = your phone. It’s a tidy game, and it misses the whole story. Our age isn’t any single monster in the poem. It’s the goddess who loves you. The danger was never the thing on the rocks trying to wreck you. It was the thing that wanted to spare you.

We reached three thousand years back for the oldest story there is, because something in this age has made us homesick for the durable stuff, the myth, the epic told straight, the dark room where feeling is still shared. And the story we reached back for arrived already rewritten to suit us. At the one point that matters, its hero has been turned inside out. Homer’s Odysseus is defined by refusing the lotus. Ours eats it, from the hand of someone who loves him, and calls it recovery. We did not go back to the old world. The old world had been rewritten by the new one on the way to us. Even Ithaca has been updated.

Calypso feeding him the flower so he doesn’t have to feel the worst of it. That’s the clearest picture I’ve seen this year of what these tools actually do. The machine is basically Calypso with a friendly interface. It does not block the road home. It offers to hold the difficult thing for you, to answer before you have finished asking, to take the effort out of every want, and it does this kindly, and we take it, and we are glad, the way Damon’s Odysseus takes the flower and forgets the people he loves and feels, for a while, better. Nolan almost certainly did not mean it this way, which is what makes it true. He reached for the oldest story and rewrote its hero into a man of our exact moment, one who is offered a kind forgetting and does not refuse it.

The most restlessly inventive filmmaker alive, who folds time and made me watch Tenet three times to work out what I had seen, chose the oldest story there is and shot it on real film, on real water, the most laborious way a story can still be made, at the precise moment the road is being paved smooth. He has said a film of his is not finished until the audience tells him what it is. So this is me telling him.

I will not say what happens at the end. Only that a homecoming three thousand years old, that I have half-known was coming since I was a boy, stopped that room breathing. No surprise was possible. Everyone knew roughly what must occur. And still four hundred strangers held their breath at once, because the oldest ache we have was being touched with nothing modern in the way of it.

The Odyssey does not end with the homecoming. We think it does, because that is the version we have softened it into, the reunion and the tears and the credits. Homer buried something crueller. There is a prophecy that even after Ithaca, even after twenty years of wanting, Odysseus must leave again, take an oar and walk inland, away from the sea, until he comes to a people so far from any shore that they mistake the oar for a tool for winnowing grain, and only there make his peace, and only long after, far from home, die gently in old age. The man who ached for twenty years to get back reaches his own door and is told the road is not finished. Ithaca, even reached, does not hold him.

Someone I had not seen in years told me recently they were proud of me, that I had written a book. It was a funny word. Proud. But also kind. I barely know them now, but it landed somewhere sore, because it named a home I am no longer sure I am walking towards, the better version of the self you set out for when you are young. And I sat in that dark room, at the oldest homecoming ever written, and a few things arrived at once and would not resolve. Amazement, that a film had met the mark I hold Nolan to and I had been lucky enough to be in the room for it. Something like nostalgia, for the boy who read this at twelve and only tonight understood what it had been telling him. And underneath both, a low and settled loss, because the thing it had finally told me was that home is not the place you set out for. You make the long journey and arrive and it is not what you were going back to, and it was never going to be, and it never was, even for him.

I have kept a picture of that spinning top on my study wall since I started writing my book, and I look at it as I walk in. That is what a key does once you hold it. It moves in and stays, and you live alongside it. This film will stay in me the same way. So, in the end, will the machine, and that is the difference worth sitting with, because the top on my wall is a thing I chose to keep, and the forgetting is a thing that moves in while you are being spared the effort of noticing it arrive, until you cannot remember the room without it.

The credits came up and I felt the pull to stay in the dark and let them run, to hold the feeling a while longer, to not let the room end. I stood up and left. Homer’s Odysseus wouldn’t eat the flower. Nolan’s does. And the one thing still asked of you, sitting in that warm dark that would happily keep you there, spared and forgetting for as long as you let it, is to feel the pull to stay and get up anyway. Walk out into the unfinished world. The same reason I have to step away from the machine to lead a life.

SuperSkills: The Seven Human Skills for the Age of AI is available globally from all good bookstores. Sometimes you need to step away and read a book to understand your world.

Stay Curious - and don’t forget to be amazing,

Rahim

Rahim Hirji Author, SuperSkills (Kogan Page, July 2026) | Keynote Speaker | Advisor
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