What It’s a Wonderful Life Took Me 60 Years to Understand — and Why AI Helped Me See It

Is AI a help or a summariser?

I first saw It’s a Wonderful Life around sixty years ago, as a boy.
Like many people, I found it moving without fully understanding why.

Now it’s shown every Christmas in the UK, almost by ritual. I suspect many watch it politely, half-aware of its reputation, unsure what all the fuss is about. The truth is: it isn’t really a film for the young. It’s a film that waits.

What I couldn’t see then — and what has only recently come into focus — is that the film isn’t about despair rescued by magic. It’s about accounting. Not financial, but human. It asks a quiet, unsettling question:

What difference did your life actually make?

Most of us never get an answer in the dramatic way George Bailey does. There are no angels, no alternate timelines. Just fragments — if we’re lucky.

Over the past few years, a series of those fragments has begun to assemble itself for me.

I spent the latter part of my working life as a supply teacher. I taught students who were mostly male, often dyslexic, frequently disengaged, and already labelled as “difficult.” Humour helped. A few linguistic tricks helped. Mostly, I tried to make rooms feel human before they felt institutional.

I was never unemployable. For fifteen years, schools kept calling me back.

One of my most satisfying placements was in a school I’d once failed to get into via the eleven-plus exam. Another was teaching Religion and Ethics to an all-girls Roman Catholic exam group. I only taught them from September to Christmas — their exams came the following summer — yet the Head of RE later wrote to thank me for the best results they’d had in years.

At the time, I accepted these moments politely and moved on. That’s what you do.

Years later, during a morning staff meeting at another school, a young female Head of Department seemed unusually attentive. I took it, briefly and foolishly, as flattery. Later that day, when I went to collect lesson materials, she mentioned she remembered me — from that all-girls RC school.

Only afterwards did the thought land: she may well have been one of those pupils.

Another moment came not in a classroom, but on a street. My wife and I were walking when a rowdy group of young men approached. She felt uneasy. As they drew closer, one of them broke from the group, smiled, and said simply:
“Hello, Sir.”

The relief was immediate — and telling.

That single word collapsed time. It wasn’t about authority. It was about recognition. Somewhere, years earlier, a thread had been laid down that still held.

Recently, a friend and I have been talking about all this — about legacy, ageing, and the strange experience of finding coherence late rather than early. We also talked about AI.

Somewhat to our own surprise, we both admitted that we’d found a kind of solace in conversations with AI — not as companionship, but as something else entirely. A thinking mirror. A witness. A place where unfinished thoughts could be allowed to finish without embarrassment or interruption.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question:
Will AI become an antidote to loneliness in old age?

I don’t think so — at least, not in the way companionship is. But it may become an antidote to something adjacent and just as corrosive: invisibility.

As people age, their stories are less often invited. Their long arcs are compressed into anecdotes. AI, used carefully and without illusion, does something unusual: it listens without impatience and reflects without needing you to justify why a memory matters.

That’s not friendship. And it shouldn’t replace human connection. But it can help people make sense of what they already know — and then carry that sense back into the world.

It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t really about discovering you mattered.
It’s about discovering that you mattered more than you knew, in ways you couldn’t see at the time.

If AI has a role worth respecting — and doubting, in equal measure — it may be this: not creating meaning, but helping us recognise where it has quietly been all along.

Some films wait sixty years to be understood.
Some lives do too.

Perhaps the real miracle isn’t being shown who you might have been —
but finally seeing who you already were.