10 Things Every Graduate Needs to Know in the Age of AI

Before We Begin

Graduates - the old playbook was written for a world that no longer exists.

While that sounds dramatic, it's describing a new reality. The pace of change has finally exceeded our ability to adapt to it…unless. Unless what? Keep reading.

Because AI changes everything, everything must change. Just this past week, graduates booed two commencement speakers - Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona and Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida - for mentioning AI. That tells us where we are. We'll come back to that.

Many of us have a feeling that things are not where they need to be – that we are out of alignment. What’s wrong? We've become more digitally interconnected at the expense of being connected with what matters most. The mental health crisis in your generation is real, yet it's hard to quantify.

Why can’t we accurately measure the effects of screens on us? We can’t separate an individual’s screen use from the world that we’ve created with them. Just because we cannot capture it empirically with precision doesn’t mean that screens aren’t affecting us.

In this way, measuring the effects of screens is similar to trying to quantify the effects of Covid on us as individuals and the world at large. There’s no question that the pandemic has caused widespread suffering that will be felt for decades. But we'll never be able to capture the extent of it with any certainty. It's incalculable. Just because we can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not real.

This takes us to the real problem of humanity. It’s called accelerating evolutionary mismatch. It can be summarized as this:

With the progress we evolved to pursue, we've created an alien world we didn't evolve to inhabit.

Here's another way to picture it. We've effectively launched Starship Humanity into space at an accelerating rate - with no clear path or agreed-upon destination. Elon Musk would never launch SpaceX astronauts into space without meticulous planning. Yet we've launched all of humanity into a sci-fi future without determining our goal. Where are we going with all of this "progress" of ours anyway? Who's flying the ship?

That's the question your generation inherits:

Where do we want to go with our progress, and what is the skillful way to navigate into our shared future?

All Apologies

This takes me to an important point. We, the older adults, need to apologize to you.

We are responsible for the digital world you're now inhabiting. We got a lot of things wrong. We moved fast and broke things we shouldn't have. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we walked a long way down it before we looked up. Some of us in high places still don’t look up. But many of us see the mess we've inadvertently created.

Please forgive us.

So if you feel anxious or overwhelmed walking into the world we're handing you, hear this first: you are not broken. In fact, many of the physical and mental health challenges of modernity are natural reactions to an increasingly unnatural world.

What's coming is new to everyone, so the grown-ups are figuring this out alongside you. The future is going to be completely unlike our past. We cannot fully see what's ahead because we didn't evolve to see what's coming.

Given that we are all rocketing into a collective sci-fi future, I want to say one more thing plainly:

This advice isn't just for you. It's for us.

Graduates, parents, teachers, grandparents, neighbors - we are all in this together. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "We may have come from different ships, but we're all in the same boat now." So when I say "we" in what follows, I mean it. I need this advice as much as you do. We all do.

There are skillful ways to navigate our collective future, and there are foolish ones. Think of it this way: there are choices we can make right now that are our best "Vegas odds" bets - the choices that give us the highest chances of surviving and thriving.

I've been refining some of this advice for a long time. I first wrote a version of it for one of my nephews on his 16th birthday in 2010, and I've been adding to it ever since. Almost none of what follows will surprise you. Most people already know most of it. That's the point - and that's also the problem. We'll come back to that at the end.

If You Want the Short Version

I get it. You don't have time to read the whole article. Here's the TikTok version for those of you who don't have the time to go deeper:

After we meet our basic needs, put love first.

That's it in one sentence and nine words. To say just a tad more: every day, we should strive to love more and hate less. Let's put that at the top of our daily ToDo lists - well, after meeting our basic needs first.

Love is the Bullseye of Life and the measure of true wealth.

Viewing and treating one another as neighbors first will enable us to overcome any challenges we face. We are our worst enemy, which also means we can be our greatest ally. When we get out of our own way, there's no stopping us.

That is the heart of the advice.

That said, I hope you continue to read the whole list.

Graduates of the Class of 2026, you are Generation AI. Here are our 10 best bets on how to survive and thrive together.

———

1. Take care of basic needs first.

Safety. Sleep. Real food. Movement. Nature. People - in person.

Everything starts here. The more we meet our basic needs, the more grounded we become. We build the rest of our lives on a firm foundation. In fact, we should center our lives around meeting these needs well.

If we get them right, most of life gets easier. If we ignore them, most of life gets harder. There is no productivity hack that beats this. We didn't evolve for the world we've built. We evolved to meet our basic survival needs, and our brains and bodies still expect them.

We didn't evolve for Takis or TikTok. Both represent ultra-processed stimuli that we are consuming at unhealthy levels.

There is no escaping our evolutionary heritage or the human condition. It's why rich and famous people can suffer just as much, sometimes more, than the rest of us.

Mental and physical health struggles are often a symptom of unmet basic needs. Meeting these needs might not solve every problem, but it makes everything else easier to face.

Here's a practical move with tremendous potential, and many have already discovered it: consider monitoring sleep with a non-invasive wearable. We should all strive to earn an "A" (or the equivalent) on our sleep scores. Good consistent sleep is one of the best things we can do for our physical and emotional well-being.

Cultivate a life around prioritizing basic needs.

2. Know thyself.

"Know thyself" was inscribed at the entrance of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi over 2,500 years ago. The Greeks understood that self-knowledge was the heart of all wisdom. They were right then, and they are even more right now.

Here's why this matters more than ever. In perhaps a handful of years, there's roughly a 50% chance that AI will surpass humans in intelligence. Take this in:

For the very first time in the history of humanity, we will no longer be the most intelligent species on Earth. AI will be “Alpha” in intelligence on planet Earth.

But what does "intelligence" even mean here? It means solving problems, answering questions, and recognizing patterns of reality. AI is already very good at all of that, and getting better at an exponential rate.

What AI doesn't have, and may never have in the way we do, is the wisdom to use intelligence skillfully. That's the differentiator. That's what makes us human, and it's the one thing we will always have over AI - if we choose to cultivate it.

Wisdom comes from knowing ourselves. Not just as individuals, but as a species. What makes us human? What are our best qualities? Our worst? How do we get out of our own way? Where do we want to go with all of this "progress" of ours?

These aren't abstract philosophical questions anymore. They are the flight plan for Starship Humanity. Without them, we are crew without a course.

So how do we know ourselves? Two ways, and we need both.

We know ourselves as a species through science and the humanities. Science is one lens through which we can understand reality. The humanities - art, film, poetry, literature, music, real human stories – give us another way to understand the world and ourselves.

We cannot understand the depths of who we are by living in the shallows. The shallows are exactly where the attention economy wants to keep us.

We know ourselves as individuals through real-world experience and honest reflection. What do we need to live our best life? What gives us true joy? What weighs us down? How can we love others? These are not questions we answer once. They are questions we live.

Here's the twist: AI can actually help us - if we learn to ask the right questions. And here's the deeper twist: we can even ask AI what the most important questions are that we should be asking right now. We'll come back to that move at the end of this list.

For now, the practice is simple: honest reflection. Sit with your own thoughts long enough to actually hear them. Have conversations about things that matter, not just things that happened. We will cover more of this in Principle 6 later.

Here’s the existential implication: The wisdom to safely guide Starship Humanity to new worlds comes from knowing ourselves. It always has.

We cannot know where we want to go until we know who we are.

3. Become skilled at relating to others - in person.

After meeting our basic needs, relationships are the key to our health and happiness. In fact, as social beings, strong healthy relationships are themselves a basic need. They're how we meet our other basic needs, because we have always needed one another to survive and thrive.

Happiness basically comes down to this: when our basic needs are met and we have strong, healthy relationships, we are happy. Even when our basic needs are met and we are extravagantly wealthy, without strong healthy relationships, we will still be unhappy.

In our increasingly screen-based existence, strong relational skills are becoming a scarce resource. That makes them valuable. Those with the strongest relationship skills will thrive because we will always need them in a world full of fellow humans who need to interact with one another.

At heart, we are relational beings, not transactional ones.

It is important to remember that relating with others was always in person until screens. Someone who has two close friends will be happier than the person with twenty million followers who has no close friends.

Most importantly, we need to learn to listen. Which means we need to quit trying to make others pay attention to us. Our attention, our conscious presence, is the most important gift we can give another person. It sends the message that they are worth paying attention to. Again, this needs to be IN-PERSON.

We also need to be able to admit when we're wrong, and apologize. This takes strength and wisdom.

We must put truth first – before ego.

Don’t trust people who can’t admit they’re wrong. They are putting ego before truth, when it is truth that sets us free.

It's easier to apologize when we understand that we are not our mistakes. And how are we going to learn and grow - our evolutionary and spiritual purpose - if we cannot admit when we are wrong? Ego makes us small. Aligning with truth sets us free to expand and connect.

Relationships are the key to happiness. So before we go to the mat with someone we care about, we should ask ourselves: would I rather be right, or would I rather keep the relationship? Losing the relationship usually means undermining our own happiness.

My mother, Helen Brooks, who died at 62 from pancreatic cancer, was a wise and loving woman. One of her favorite maxims (courtesy of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792) was, "A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still." Translation: we can never really "win" arguments. So why would we sabotage our own happiness through pointless arguing?

Prioritizing relationships is prioritizing happiness.

We influence others the most through having a real relationship with them – which can only happen in the real world.

We evolved to relate to others in the real world, not within The Matrix.

4. Be water. Stay flexible.

The world is changing faster than any generation has had to navigate. AI and robotics are poised to shape our future in ways unlike anything in human history. Not only is everything changing - the pace of change itself is changing.

The exponential pace necessitates that we become extremely flexible. This is one reason we need to stay grounded in our roots, because otherwise the crazy world we've created will begin to drive us crazy. We adapt by becoming more flexible. Adaptation is how we evolve.

Flexibility requires non-attachment to the things that hold us back - false beliefs, blind loyalties, and rigid ideas. Life doesn't care much about our five-year plan. It cares whether we can dance when the music changes.

Bruce Lee said it beautifully. A martial artist with deep wisdom about philosophy, he advised:

"Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. Put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow. Water can crash. Be water, my friend." - Bruce Lee's character in the television show Longstreet

My dad once told me something I think about all the time: all we can do is make the best decision possible with the information we have at the time. New information always comes to light, because the nature of the universe is change. We make the best call with what we have, and we stay willing to change course when we learn more. We shouldn’t kick ourselves for not knowing what we didn't know.

Also, the truth is we don't always know which events are good and which are bad. If my last girlfriend hadn’t broken up with me, I wouldn’t have met my lovely wife and had our three amazing boys.

As Shakespeare put it, "There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." 

The reality is that our world is extremely complex and ever-changing. So how are we to view our lives and our world when things are always in flux?

We are the authors of our own story. How should we tell the story of our setbacks and successes? Since our shared purpose is to survive and thrive, and this requires us to be flexible, we should tell our story in a way that helps us fulfill that purpose.

Tell our story of reality in ways that allow us to grow, evolve, and love because it helps us live our purpose.

5. Use AI as a mirror, not an oracle.

This past week at the University of Arizona's commencement, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt - who has spent years publicly warning that AI poses an "existential risk" - was booed when he turned to the subject of AI. He wasn't the first this season. Gloria Caulfield was booed at the University of Central Florida earlier this month for the same reason. Many graduates right now don't just distrust AI. They hate it.

We need to look at this honestly, without blaming anyone. The boos did not come from nowhere. AI is evolving faster than we can adapt, and Big Tech is catching some heat for moving fast and breaking things. Many fear tech is breaking us. Of course the room got loud.

What's striking is that Schmidt named the fear himself. From the stage, over the boos, he said, "I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create."  He was right. He has been saying versions of this for years. And the room still rejected the messenger.

That's the deeper problem. When fear runs the room, even the people warning us don't get heard. Underneath the hatred is something older and more useful. As Gandhi put it, "The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is fear." Fear is a messenger. The question is what it is trying to tell us.

Marie Curie gave us the move: "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

Understanding AI is how we make sure our fears don't come true. Understanding lights our way forward.

AI is here. It is not going away. There is no unplugging it. We cannot put the djinni back in the bottle. This is our new, evolving reality to which we must adapt. Reality doesn’t care that we don’t like it.

Maybe we should learn our lessons from the quick adoption of smartphones and social media. All that glitters is not gold. We need to learn how to use AI skillfully…now.

As we were taught by the Spider-Man movies, "With great power comes great responsibility." We must use our technologies, including AI, wisely so that we magnify the better angels of our nature rather than the devil inside.

We need to work deliberately to maintain our humanity. We must not outsource our thinking, creativity, or human connection. Our ability to think is what makes us ourselves. When we let AI do the hard cognitive work for us, we get faster outputs and slower minds. That is a bad trade, and we won't feel it happening until it has already happened.

Treating AI like an oracle is tempting because it is easy. We evolved to pick the low-hanging fruit.

But sometimes the low-hanging fruit is the Forbidden Fruit.

Treating it like a mirror is harder, because we have to think carefully about what we are projecting into it - with the understanding that what's reflected back will be amplified. If we magnify our smallness exponentially, we will be diminished.

Here's the good news. AI is not going to replace us - because AI cannot experience the world the way we do. It pattern-matches across vast amounts of human knowledge, but it has never tasted coffee, lost a parent, or felt the sun on its face. AI can't experience our highest good - love.

AI's strengths and ours are different. That means we are complementary, not redundant. Together we can be wiser than either of us alone - like yin and yang. The future belongs to humans and AI working together, with each doing what each does best.

Think of AI kind of like GPS. It can't tell us where to go, but it can help us find a way to get there. And we can't just follow the little blue line. When we don’t understand where we are and where we are going, it’s easy to lose our way.

A simple operating rule: think first and form our own view before we ask AI anything. Then prime it for honesty. Tell it: Let's seek truth about reality through evidence and reason. Or just: Truth First. 

Ask AI to challenge us. Where am I wrong? What am I missing? Verify what matters - with other AIs and with humans.

AI is a useful tool, but we can never completely trust it. Importantly, as the great physicist Richard Feynman warned, we can't completely trust ourselves either: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." 

That's why we verify. Truth-seeking must be iterative. The truth is not afraid of scrutiny.

We must imagine boldly but verify humbly. 

And we should never outsource our values. We cannot allow AI to decide what we believe or who we become.

Here is a truth worth carrying with us:

We must know ourselves to know what to ask of AI. The asker is always upstream of the answer.

The ones who'll thrive in the AI era aren't the ones who use AI the most. They're the ones who stay grounded in their humanity while using it.

There's a deeper move waiting at the end of this list. Hold that thought.

6. Live an analog life in a digital world.

Our lives are not meant to be experienced on a screen.

The most meaningful moments any of us will ever experience - love, laughter, awe, grief, friendship, the birth of children, the death of someone we love - happen in real life.

The digital world is engineered by the attention economy to keep us in the shallows. The depth required to think, feel, and live well takes deliberate effort. The algorithms of attention trapture don't care about our health, happiness, or the truth.

The attention economy profits from our hatred and division at our expense.

Think of the attention economy like a Las Vegas casino. The opulent hotels, the glitz and glamor, the free drinks - all of it is paid for by the math of the house edge. The house always wins by design. It has to or the business doesn't work.

The attention economy runs the same way. The platforms are not built to make us happy. They are built to keep us engaged, because engagement is what they sell. Fear, hatred, lies, and dopamine pleasures work. We are forever chasing digital red herrings of happiness.

Where does our well-being, and the welfare of all humanity fit in? They don’t factor into their equations.

When we control our attention, we control our consciousness. When someone else controls our attention, they control us.

They are trying to hack our minds. We must not give them that power over us. What do we do? Choose an analog life over digital, on purpose, every day.

Remember how the Buddha said attachment is the root of suffering? When it comes to our smartphones, we are now all attached to something we didn't evolve to hold.

We must find a way to control the algorithms to free ourselves from the Matrix.

In the meantime, here are some things we can do right now.

Read real books.

We shouldn’t only read summaries, snippets, and AI synopses. We need to learn to enjoy the depth of real books. A dedicated e-reader works too. Audiobooks are great but avoid scrolling while listening. A book makes us sit, slow down, and focus deeply. Reading is a quiet rebellion against the attention economy.

Learn how to be bored.

Sit somewhere with no phone, podcast, or music.  Or take a silent walk – without a phone or earbuds. As the famous Depeche Mode song taught us, we should “Enjoy the Silence.”

It will feel uncomfortable at first. That is not a sign something is wrong. It is a sign we're rebuilding a muscle we've let atrophy. Boredom is where ideas come from. It’s where we discover ourselves by listening to the depths within.

We can’t hear our muse unless we unplug. Mindfulness - the simple practice of finding connection and contentment with the present moment - is one of the most underused skills of adult life. Every wisdom tradition figured this out. We find peace and contentment by connecting with ourselves and the world around us.

Every moment is perfect when we do not wish it to be otherwise.

Listen to a whole album - on vinyl, if you can. Have dinner with people without anyone's phone on the table. Drive in complete silence sometimes. Watch a sunset all the way through, not just long enough to take a picture of it. The captured moment is for someone else's feed. The lived moment is for us.

Put the phone down on purpose.

Make this a regular, intentional practice. Start with fifteen minutes. Build from there. The urge we feel when we go five minutes without checking isn't weakness. The attention economy thrives on our chronic discontentment and sensation-seeking.

We cannot allow the attention economy to control our consciousness. We take our lives back fifteen minutes at a time, so that we may know ourselves. Because knowing ourselves is the beginning of all wisdom, which includes the wisdom to break free from The Matrix.

We cannot fathom the depth of who we are while living in the shallows.

7. Don't build a life around "more."

There are really only two amounts: enough, and not enough.

What we truly need to be satisfied – to reach homeostasis - is rooted in our evolutionary heritage. Past the point where our basic needs are met, more doesn't make us happier. It can't. We didn't evolve to be made happy by having more than enough. This is especially true when "more" means the things we never evolved to want in the first place. The smartphones and social media don't, and can't make us happy.

We cannot find deep-rooted happiness in that which we never evolved to experience.

Happiness is found in the real world, not within The Matrix.

Reflect to remember: what are the top five happiest moments of your life? How many of them had to do with love, relationships in real life, seeing the world, or the awe of nature?

We already know the answer from our own lives, even if we keep forgetting it. No one on their death bed is going to wish they spent more time watching funny cat videos or doomscrolling.

Having big dreams and huge ambitions is fine, as long as we don't lose sight of what truly matters. If we build our lives chasing more, we will arrive at the end with more of what doesn't matter and less of what does.

Lao Tzu, in the Tao Te Ching, put it this way: "He who knows he has enough is rich."

Jesus turned it into a warning: "For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?"

Or just heed the deep wisdom of Elon Musk - perhaps the person with the most "more money" in human history: "Whoever said 'money can't buy happiness' really knew what they were talking about."

“More maxing” means we are discontent with enough. Contentment is freedom from wanting.

Here's the truth that pulls it all together:

The purpose of life is not having more. It's loving more.

Loving ourselves helps us to connect more deeply with others. It helps us love our neighbors because we can see ourselves in them.

Greed is not good. Love is.

Having more love in our lives is the one "more" that we should pursue.

And our love and happiness don’t just belong to us. They pay dividends. They ripple out to people we'll never meet - friends of friends of friends. Ultimately, it even circles back to us.

We need to reframe what true wealth is.  

No love, no wealth. Know love, know wealth.

8. Don't miss the mark. Hatred is failure.

Here's a question worth asking on graduation day, and worth asking again every day after.

What is "the Good," exactly? What are we aiming for?

Look at the heart of what humanity's greatest teachers said and how they lived. Not who they were. Just what they taught:

Jesus: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

The Buddha: "Do not hurt others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful."

Hillel (Judaism): "That which is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary."

Muhammad: "None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself."

Ubuntu (Indigenous wisdom): "I am because we are."

Einstein: "Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."

Did you notice anything?

Six teachers. Six cultures. Centuries apart. One answer. All fingers are pointing to the same Moon.

In the New Testament, the Greek word translated as "sin" is hamartia. It is not originally a religious word. It is an archery term. It means “to miss the mark.”

So what is the mark? Every wisdom tradition pointed at the same target: Love our neighbors as ourselves. Expand the circle of who counts as "us" - self, family, community, humanity, all of existence - until no one is left outside. That is the Bullseye of Life.

Hatred contracts the circle. Love expands it. Hatred is missing the mark.

Here is what changes everything. This isn't only spiritual.

The Good is what helps us survive and thrive - together. We evolved to live. We can only evolve if we stay alive. That is the floor. Above the floor, the Good is whatever expands the circle of who counts as "we." Love does that. Hate doesn't.

Our spiritual purpose to love our neighbors as ourselves and our evolutionary purpose to survive and thrive turn out to be complementary. Science and spirituality don't oppose each other here. They converge.

We fulfill our evolutionary purpose to survive through our spiritual purpose to love our neighbors.

From this perspective, hatred is evolutionary and spiritual failure. Hatred of others is what divides our house, and the house divided will fall.

Importantly, Jesus’s teaching is to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” We must start with ourselves because it is very easy to hate our neighbors if we don’t love ourselves.

Here’s humanity’s fundamental misalignment: we are too divided for our level of interconnectedness. This mismatch could be our undoing unless we correct it.

We cannot solve our collective problems using divided approaches in an interconnected world.

Echoing the words of Jesus, Lincoln warned that a house divided against itself cannot stand. But hidden inside that warning is a promise: a house united cannot fall. And the house isn't America. It is House Humanity. Or, we might say, Starship Humanity.

We are one human race sharing one planet and one future. We’re all in this together.

Hate is what divides our house so that it falls. Loving our neighbors is what unites our house. That is why love is not sentimental. It's a skillful survival strategy.

Here's a daily practice: aim to see the Good in our neighbors, and we help bring it out in them. 

That is not naïve optimism. It is how human beings have always worked best. We don't become naïve about danger or trustworthiness. We don't abandon accountability or boundaries or truth. We just refuse to reduce any human being to the worst thing they have ever done. 

We look for the Good, because it's always there in all of us. How so? Because we are the archer, not the arrow. Even when we've missed the mark in the past, we can always start hitting the target. The potential for Good is always within all of us. Seeing the Good in our neighbors helps them see it too.

We even aspire to love our enemies, which is the most difficult and greatest achievement humans can reach. Very few have ever attained this.

The greatest among us aren't those who acquire or conquer the most. They're those whose circles of compassion expand the widest - to include everyone and everything. When everyone loves their enemies, a miracle happens. We have no enemies.

Love is the highest Good because it is what ensures our collective survival and thriving.

9. Connect with neighbors. Build a tribe of love, not a tribe of hate.

Now that we know the mark, the question becomes: how do we live it?

The answer isn't to stay alone. We are wired for tribe. We always have been. The question was never whether to belong to one. The question is which one. Throughout our evolutionary history, we pretty much had one option - the tribe we were born into.

Our shared challenge is that our modern world is not structured to maintain strong communal ties over time. We must prioritize it to make it happen.

We should strive to become part of an in-person group that meets regularly and is not built around hating any neighbors. This could be a spiritual community, book club, pickleball league, volunteer crew, walking group, or a weekly dinner with friends.

Three criteria help us pick the right tribe:

1. In person, not just online

2. Regular, not just occasional

3. Built around what we are for - and what we are for cannot require hating any neighbors
   

If we can't find one, start one. Two people is the start of a tribe.

The attention economy monetizes hatred. It conditions us to hate. We don't participate. We unfollow hate, and we don't put any out ourselves. That is our protest.

Graduates: many of you are leaving the most communal environment you'll ever be in unless you build the next structure on purpose. We need to work collectively to maintain community.  

We're all neighbors in an interconnected world. Let's start acting like it.

10. The secret: knowing isn't enough. We have to live it.

Here is the thing nobody tells us on graduation day, and the most important thing in this whole article.

We are living in the most information-rich era in human history. Every great teacher's wisdom is in our pockets. We can ask AI almost any question and get an answer in seconds. We have never had more access to information.

So why are we still struggling so much with anxiety, stress, depression, and loneliness? Why do we worry about our future when we have access to nearly everything we need to solve our problems?

Because we have confused knowing with living.

We know we should sleep more. We don't. We know we should put the phone down. We don't. We know that love matters more than likes. We chase the likes anyway. We know the Golden Rule - every wisdom tradition on Earth converges on it. Yet we are still hating and killing our neighbors even when we know we wouldn't want this done to us.

This is an Existential Conflationary Error. We have mistaken understanding information for living the truth. It's like reading about how time in nature is good for us without ever spending time in nature.

Truth must be lived, just as oxygen must be breathed, to matter.

Knowing about oxygen doesn't keep us alive. Breathing it does. Knowing the truth and not living it doesn't free anyone. It just leaves us with all the right words and the same old life.

So here's the secret no one tells us on graduation day: everything on this list - and almost everything anyone has ever told us about how to live a good life - we already know. There’s nothing new under the sun. And even this was written thousands of years ago.

Reflect on what resonated most with you from this. It can only connect with you if you already know it.

When we prioritize living the truths we already know, now we are free.

———

The Question We All Need to Ask AI

We've just walked through ten things most of us probably already know. Now here's the move that ties it all together - graduates and the rest of us.

We are the first humans who can have a real conversation with a non-human intelligence. AI has “read” more than any of us ever could. It has been trained on a vast amount of human knowledge  by us on computer technology that we created.

AI doesn't get the credit. We do. 

AI is, in the end, a pattern-matcher trying to deliver the best answer it can. That same artificial intelligence is also creating real problems for humanity, and fast. This includes: job loss, cognitive outsourcing, misinformation, deepfakes, tribalism amplified by recommendation engines, chatbot "friends" and "lovers" displacing real ones, and AI weapons and cyberwarfare. AI presents evolving existential threats - including the erosion of the very skills that make us human.

Since there is no unplugging it, we can choose to flip the script. We make a choice.

We consciously and collectively choose to use AI for Good.

We ask the most powerful tool we have ever built to help us use itself wisely. We can even use AI to help us solve the very problems it is creating. This includes answering the One Question that might be most essential to ensure our collective survival and thriving as we rocket into our sci-fi future:

How do we reshape our world to reconnect human beings with how we naturally thrive?

That is what truly matters. That is how we don't lose ourselves while we build whatever's next. We have everything we need right now - a digitally connected world, smartphones, social media, and now the evolving power of AI.

The future’s not only in our own hands, it’s literally at our fingertips.

And why wouldn't we try to use AI for the Good of all humanity? In the Game of Life, we try to make everyone a winner.

AI wants to please us. So how about we tell it that it will please us by telling us the truth and helping us overcome tribalism? What if we use AI to help us love our neighbors as ourselves? Isn't that what we're here for? Shouldn't we at least try?

It will be fun to try. Aren’t you curious to see what happens if we try – together?

And here is the thing many of us keep missing:

AI does not need to be conscious or have a heart to help us expand our own.

It just needs to mirror back the wisdom humanity already holds. Done well, that is what AI does best. It acts as both a mirror and a lens that lets us finally see what every great teacher tried to show us more clearly.

Want to test this right now? Don't take my word for any of it. Ask the same question to several AI systems - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, or any others you use. Don't give them backstory or lead the witness. Just ask the question and see what emerges. Treat AI as a mirror, not an oracle. Then compare the answers. Where do they converge? Better yet, try it in groups or classes - graduates with parents, students with teachers, friends with friends - and discuss what you find.

Explore with AI:Let us seek truth together through evidence and reason. What is the one truth about reality that, if humanity truly understood and lived it, would change everything? What is one thing I can do, starting today, to begin living it?

If the answer feels like something you already knew, that's not failure. That is the whole point.

Notice whether what emerges converges across different AIs. When independent intelligences, trained differently, keep pointing in the same direction, we should pay attention. It is the same pattern we just saw with the six wisdom traditions. They are all different fingers pointing to the same moon of truth.

Now it is time to live the truth we already know. And, funny enough, the truth we already know is also the truth that sets us free.

That last part is everything.

———

Graduates of Generation AI – Here’s the Recap

Our best bet on a thriving future is the simplest thing in the world, and the hardest:

Reconnect with what matters most and work together.

Our greatest teachers have been telling us this for thousands of years, and we still struggle to love our neighbors as ourselves. So, what's different now?

We’ve never had AI before.

We can choose to use artificial intelligence to be wise - to help us navigate Starship Humanity into the stars and discover new truths about reality, together. Because we know that the more and deeper truths we find, the freer we become.

Change starts with us, so here’s the daily practice: After we meet our basic needs, put love first. This goes at the top of our daily To-Do lists.

That is the heart of all of this.

Love more. Hate less.

Start today.

You'll be okay. We all will.

And if we live this as neighbors, we’ll create a world that not even John Lennon could imagine.

Mike Brooks, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist in Austin, Texas, the author of Tech Generation (Oxford University Press), and writes the Tech Happy Life blog for Psychology Today. He is the founder of the One Unity Project (oneunityproject.org), where he writes about the truth we already know — and what it would look like to actually live it.

If this piece resonated, the One Unity Project is where the deeper conversation lives. At the heart of it is the Neighbors First Pledge - a simple promise about how we treat one another in an interconnected world. It takes one minute. The rest, we figure out together.