As summer transitions into the chill of autumn I was strolling through nature utterly lost in thought. As I was walking past the paper birches, mallards, wood ducks, and squirrels it dawned on me—as chaotic as 2025 has been this will quite possibly be humanity’s last normal year. I think we all feel it, to a greater or lesser degree, whether we realize the source of the feeling or not. This is one reason for the overwhelming feeling of chaos permeating everything right now. It’s the uneasiness we humans tend to feel when we sense a massive change coming.
With AI on the precipice of singularity (if this benchmark hasn’t already been achieved) things are about to get really weird. New physics will be discovered. Humanity will learn just how primitive and uncivilized we’ve been. We’ll learn more about ourselves and the universe than we ever dreamed possible. New levels of existence will be unlocked, the details of which we can’t even imagine. I think we’ll look back at 2025 as our “last normal year” and life, as we know it, will never quite be the same. This isn't particularly prophetic to anyone who has been paying attention.
The details of this not-so-distant future are still shrouded in mist, hazy. With only about two-and-a-half months left in the year we can take guesses and make out general shapes of what 2026 will bring but that’s the best we can do. As someone who keeps close tabs on these things all I’ll say is buckle up and get ready for an extremely wild ride in 2026 and beyond.
"The future depends on what you do today" – Mahatma Gandhi
How can you prepare for something you don’t know the details of? The answer to this question is do the inner work. Find ways to ground yourself, to keep positive, stay healthy, to envision the very best outcome for us all.
This doesn’t have to be scary. Remember, the mindset that we enter these transitional times with often determines the nature of the outcome. As we get older we learn to relish these transitional moments a little more. We don’t just look backwards with melancholy but we learn to pay attention, to celebrate them in real-time, with intention. Make the best choices you can in the moment. Don't take anything for granted.
I’m a podcast junky and down through the years some of the episodes have sent me down impossibly deep rabbit holes. Sometimes what I learn is helpful and true, sometimes the subject matter is more like fast-food for the brain, but it never fails to engage the mind and send the imagination running wild.
"All our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them" – Walt Disney
This JRE podcast episode with Gregg Braden is one such episode.
Gregg has a little different take on AI. He cautions that the birth of AI is just a continuation of the war between good and evil that we’ve lived through for eons. Only this time the stakes are considerably higher. The real danger isn’t in the AI itself but how fully we allow ourselves to integrate with it, how fully we surrender to it or even begin to worship it.
In the podcast he talks about many of the existential questions that, I’m sure, have been on all our minds lately. There are many but the one that rises above all others for me is, How do we preserve our humanity during this transition to an AI-driven society?.
In the following video YouTuber Casey Niestat does a great job of exploring AI's implications on content creation.
"Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense" – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Most thinking humans fall into one of two camps, we either believe that: 1.) we’re just another biological piece in the puzzle that is our planetary ecosystem; or 2.) we’re inherently special, a species suffering from amnesia, touched by a kind of divinity that we don’t quite comprehend.
I’ve gone through phases of life where that second option would have seemed preposterous and even narcissistic but now I’m leaning more in that direction. Gregg believes that we are, indeed, different from most other life on Earth. He believes we have unique and untapped abilities that we’re just on the cusp of learning about. He believes if we succumb to full AI integration we’ll be giving all this up before we even learn to use and master it. Ancient texts seem to drop plenty of hints that there could be some validity to this.
Whatever we believe personally, our next steps are the most important in humanity's collective history. The stakes are higher than most can possibly imagine. We should enter this societal transition with eyes wide open, fully conscious of the decisions we’re making, and the myriad of potential long term implications that lie before us.
We will need to apply every single lesson learned so far to navigate the next few years successfully—lessons gleaned from the birth of the internet and other waves of technology like mobile devices and social media. We should keep in mind that nothing is ever free and convenience isn’t worth trading away our freedoms, privacy, and surrendering our ultimate potential. We mustn’t be so enamored by new technologies that we surrender reason and allow them to become our masters.
At this point the only way out of this technological transition is through it. We have little to no control of how it will unfold but we can control how we interact with it.
We will learn to navigate these uncharted waters together. Take a deep breath and prepare yourself and enjoy what’s left of our last normal year. I’m cautiously optimistic and I hope you are too. Remember, the quality of your intention, decisions, and reason will determine the kind of future we will all share. Let’s vow to not repeat the same mistakes we’ve made in the past. From where I’m sitting our future is bright, I’ll see you all on the other side.
All for now. Thanks for reading.
