Seaweed Gatherer, by Paul Serusier

Intelligence and hard work would surely be rewarded.

But something felt wrong with this picture. Climbing that ladder only leads to stress, comparison, exhaustion, disconnection, and a nagging sense of being optimized to fit in those giant corporate machines. Is this really what success looks like?

The Real Absurdity

Then AI showed up and made the absurdity impossible to ignore.

Suddenly, the “intelligence” we’d spent decades honing as knowledge workers, could be done by LLMs much faster, cheaper, and better.

The golden formula cracked open. And I can’t help but wonder, if human intelligence isn’t our competitive advantage anymore, then what is the point of us?

But it isn’t really about AI threatening our jobs. It’s more about AI forcing us to rethink our definition of human value:

What does it mean to be human if our intelligence isn’t that special anymore?

Maybe It’s Time to Just Be Human Again

The answer might be surprisingly simple: just be human again.

For thousands of years, before anyone cared about ROIs, humans were wired for something completely different. We sought food, shelter, connection. We created art, told stories, cared for each other. We played, explored, loved. Not because these things made us efficient, but because they made us alive.

Somehow, the golden formula convinced us to suppress these instincts to optimize our cognitive performance for the 9–5 grind.

And now that AI can take my job and handle the cognitive heavy lifting, maybe we’re finally free to be human again — creativity over productivity, relations over competition, meaning over metrics…