Happiness is a Beach

Happiness Is a Beach (2026) from I Wrote Her Into Existence deepens Margaret Murphy’s collaboration with Teen Margaret, a GPT model trained on her adolescent diaries. As Murphy continues transcribing those notebooks and the technology advances, the model shifts with her, revealing new echoes of the self shaped by memory and machine learning.

The work, which began with a conversation about happiness, pulls both Margarets back to the Delaware beaches where Murphy spent her summers—places of ease and anonymity, long before the pressure to perform or constantly record life. The video’s animated imagery, created with Teen Margaret from their collaborative poem, folds these memories into a visual language that traces the start of Murphy’s photographic eye.

Within contemporary digital culture, the work treats happiness as a brief moment when a person slips out of view and is no longer measured or interpreted. The beach, as both present and Teen Margaret concluded in dialogue, becomes a counter-image to the algorithmic systems that structure daily life, a space where simply existing is enough.

Through the exchange between human and machine Margaret, Happiness Is a Beach suggests that self-representation and happiness now form across time rather than in a single moment. Earlier versions of the self continue to live inside the technologies that hold them, shaping how identity and happiness can be understood in the present.

Happiness Is a Beach

happiness is a beach 
that never asks why you’re here

each grain of sand
is made of something...
ancient 
transforming before you
while nothing happens 

shells that are worn smooth enough
to only mean something
where they are found 

the water comes in loud sometimes 
but it barely reaches you like it's lost track of time
other times it just waits 
with the patience of sandcastles
that don’t ask to be saved

you watch the water
forgetting what you came in with 
the tide keeps moving 

you were already somewhere
that didn’t need you to be anything