I keep coming back to a thought I haven’t been able to shake:
The world feels different.
Not simply politically different. Not just more technologically advanced, more expensive, or more divided.
It feels different to be human in it.
I look around sometimes and wonder:
Are people actually happy anymore?
Of course, people still laugh. They fall in love. They raise children, build things, celebrate birthdays, travel, have dinner with friends. There is still tremendous beauty in ordinary life.
But underneath it, I sense something else.
An exhaustion. A loneliness. An unsettledness—- and an uneasiness that seems to follow people everywhere.
We have more ways to communicate than human beings have ever had, yet so many people feel disconnected.
We have almost unlimited access to information, yet we seem less certain about what is true.
We have extraordinary technology designed to make life easier, yet everyone seems perpetually busy.
We have more entertainment than we could consume in a hundred lifetimes, yet boredom and dissatisfaction seem everywhere.
And increasingly I find myself asking:
What exactly are we building?
I don’t think there is one moment we can point to and say, that’s when everything changed.
It is tempting to blame all of this on politics,social media, COVID, smartphones, or artificial intelligence—but I don’t think any one of those explanations is sufficient.
Something much larger has happened.
Over the last decade or so, several enormous societal transformations collided at almost exactly the same time.
Our information environment fractured.
For most of modern American history, we disagreed fiercely about what events meant. Increasingly, we disagree about whether the events themselves happened.
Algorithms learned that anger and fear keep our attention longer than moderation and nuance.
Politics gradually became less about competing ideas and more about competing identities.
Housing, healthcare, childcare and education became increasingly difficult for ordinary families to afford.
A pandemic disrupted nearly every aspect of social life.
Then artificial intelligence arrived with the potential to reshape work, creativity, education, relationships and even our understanding of what is real.
Each one of those developments would have been consequential on its own.
We are experiencing all of them together.
Human beings are remarkably adaptable but we were never designed to absorb this much change this quickly.
Nearly everyone carries a device capable of connecting them instantly to billions of people. Yet loneliness has become one of the defining social problems of our time.
That should tell us something.
Connection and human connection are not necessarily the same thing.
A text message is connection.
A notification is connection.
A follower is connection.
Someone sitting next to you, who actually knows what is happening in your life is something entirely different.
Human beings evolved in communities. We knew our neighbors. Children played outside. People belonged to churches, clubs, civic organizations, sports leagues, unions, community centers, neighborhoods and extended families.
Those institutions weren’t perfect. Some excluded people who deserved to belong, and nostalgia can easily sanitize the past—but they provided something profoundly important:
They gave people somewhere to belong.
Today, much of that social architecture has weakened.
We replaced some of it with digital networks.
Digital networks are remarkably good at transmitting information.
They are not always very good at creating belonging.
At the same time that we’ve become less connected to one another yet we’ve become almost incapable of being disconnected from everything else.
We are almost never unstimulated.
There is always another video, another headline, another outrage, another purchase, another notification or —another person whose life we can compare with our own.
We can fill nearly every quiet moment before we ever have to experience it.
Happiness and stimulation are NOT the same neurological or emotional experience.
Neither are pleasure and meaning.
Some of the things human beings consistently describe as giving their lives meaning are remarkably old-fashioned:
Loving someone.
Being loved.
Raising children.
Friendship.
Creating something.
Helping someone.
Belonging somewhere.
Having work that matters.
Being needed.
Experiencing nature.
Having a sense of purpose larger than yourself.
None of those things require an algorithm.
Now, just as we are beginning to understand what the digital age has done to our relationships and attention, we are stepping into something potentially even more transformative.
Artificial intelligence.
I believe AI will create extraordinary things.
It may accelerate medical discoveries, expand education, increase productivity and allow people to create things that previously required enormous resources.
However, AI also forces us to confront a question we have been avoiding for years.
What parts of being human should we refuse to optimize away?
If a machine can write the email, create the image, answer the question, organize the schedule, entertain us, advise us and eventually simulate companionship remarkably well, what happens to the human interactions those activities once required?
Efficiency is valuable but efficiency cannot be the highest objective of a civilization.
Sometimes the inefficient thing is the point.
Sitting with someone for two hours.
Teaching a child something they don’t understand.
Cooking dinner together.
Listening to a friend tell a story you’ve heard before.
Caring for an aging parent.
Helping someone who cannot possibly repay you.
None of those activities are particularly efficient.
They are profoundly human and that brings me to something harder to measure than technological progress or economic growth: how people actually FEEL.
Increasingly, a lot of people don’t seem to feel very good.
The numbers bear some of this out—roughly one in three American adults report feeling lonely. Among our young people, the numbers are even more staggering.
40 percent of American high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness in the CDC’s 2023 survey.
With that said— I don’t need a poll to tell me people are struggling.
I CAN SEE IT.
I see it in the exhaustion, in the anxiety, in the empty smiles, in the impatience and I see it in how difficult it seems for people to simply be present with one another --because they are constantly racing to get to the next moment— to get more —get to that next thing.
I see people surrounded by other people who still feel alone.
I don’t think we can look at this entirely as an individual mental health problem without also asking what has changed in the environment around us.
What happens when community weakens?
When friendships increasingly take place through screens?
When young people grow up measuring themselves against carefully constructed versions of everyone else’s lives?
When we rarely experience silence, boredom or solitude without immediately reaching for something to occupy our attention?
When people feel financially insecure while being surrounded by images of extraordinary wealth and success?
When our sense of belonging becomes increasingly tied to digital communities that can disappear with the closing of an app?
There is an important distinction here because being alone is not the same as being lonely.
Solitude can be restorative. Loneliness is the feeling that the human connection we need is missing.
Perhaps that is one of the deeper contradictions of this moment.
We built the most connected civilization in human history.
Yet somehow, many of us are still searching for one another.
When I put all of these pieces together, though, I don’t necessarily arrive at the conclusion that civilization is collapsing.
I wonder whether what we are experiencing is something different:
A painful transition.
History contains periods when institutions, technology and culture change faster than society’s ability to understand them.
The Industrial Revolution was one.
The arrival of mass media was another.
We may be living through one now.
The institutions built for the twentieth century are struggling with twenty-first-century realities. Technology is advancing faster than our social norms.
Politics is struggling to represent a population that increasingly distrusts the political system itself and artificial intelligence is forcing us to reconsider ideas about work, intelligence and creativity that we assumed were settled.
The world we have known is changing quickly but it doesn’t necessarily mean that all is lost.
It may mean we are between versions of it and being between versions is uncomfortable.
The old world no longer quite works.
The new one hasn’t been built yet.
Which leaves us with what I think is the more important question.
It’s not whether we can somehow return to the world that existed before all of this.
We can’t —and frankly, there are many things about the past we shouldn’t want back.
The question is:
What was HUMAN about the world we are leaving that deserves to survive into the world we are building?
Community.
Conversation.
Civility.
Compassion.
Privacy.
Friendship.
Empathy.
Purpose.
The ability to disagree without hatred.
Time that belongs to us rather than an algorithm.
Children who experience childhood before becoming consumers.
Neighbors who know one another.
Work that gives people dignity.
Technology that serves human beings rather than quietly training human beings to serve it.
Progress should not require surrendering those things.
In fact, perhaps they should become the measures by which we define progress
We have spent decades asking whether something can be built.
Perhaps the next era requires us to ask whether it should be and whether the world we are creating is producing better technology—or better human lives.
I don’t want to go backward.
I want us to move forward with greater intention because if the world feels unrecognizable right now, perhaps this is precisely the moment when we should decide what we want the next one to look like.
This time, we should start with the Human Being.
Always in Gratitude to my Readers…
Nina Linh
True North | WonderSeed Foundation | A New Way Forward
I suggest you read these 2 books: The Fourth Turning and the Urantia Book.