Lately, I’ve been thinking about how much of life is being redesigned around the idea that we no longer need other people for as many things.

You can learn alone now.
Build alone.
Code alone.
Brainstorm alone.
Get feedback alone.
Even feel productive alone.

And on paper, a lot of that is incredible.

This week especially, it felt like every headline was pushing the same reality a little further: AI tools are getting better at operating our computers and acting more like collaborators than software. More of the world is being built around the assumption that if you have enough intelligence on tap, you can reduce friction, remove middlemen, and move faster with fewer people in the room.

I understand the appeal because I use these tools all the time.

A lot of my recent Saturdays have looked exactly like that. I’ve spent a good chunk of them coding, building little apps, trying to solve problems that bother me. Lately, one of those problems has been my back pain because I’ve been sitting too much, so naturally I turned it into a mini project. That instinct is real for me. I love making things and I’m craving the feeling of momentum.

But last Saturday, something sliced through that whole rhythm.

I ended up in a two-hour conversation with a Harvard MBA, YPO, multi-exit kinda guy who said schooling is going to completely change because of AI. He also said Neil Young was one of the greatest artists of our time

I agreed with his first point, his second point: I had to turn to Spotify to validate, lol.

If education is mainly about access to information, explanation, and personalized support, then yes, the ground is already moving. AI can teach, summarize, tutor, organize, and respond on demand in a way no traditional system ever could. We know this.

But as we kept talking, I felt a lil resistance stir up.

Not because I think he’s wrong and maybe I’m nostalgic for older systems (shout out: Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing!) I don’t believe AI is going to transform how people learn, it’s something deeper than that. Yes, AI can help you learn faster, but there is a difference between learning something and becoming someone. Those are two different processes.

And I’m not sure the future we’re rushing toward is taking that distinction seriously enough.

Some of the most important education in my life has happened nowhere near a classroom. It happened when my mentor taught me how to tell if I had food in my teeth during a business lunch or how to actually show up to a meeting prepared. My education grew when I was able to test an idea out loud and email someone in my network for feedback. It happened when I started training my brain to notice problems and present a clear path forward aka the summer I spent digitizing past interviews for a documentary filmmaker.

That is a different kind of intelligence.

I think we’re entering a future where more and more of our lives can technically happen without those moments.

But it cannot fully do the thing another person sometimes does in one long conversation:

Help you locate yourself.

What another person can give you is not just information: it’s orientation.

For weeks, I have doubted if moving to a small town mid-career was the right move. Conversations like these have helped me validate. The relief of hearing your own half-formed thoughts become clearer in someone else’s presence will never be replaced with AI. The kind of recognition you get sharing life with others don’t just tell you what to do next, but they remind you of who you are.

AI is getting better at producing the outer shape of help:

It can answer quickly.
It can organize.
It can sound confident.
It can give you twenty ideas when your brain only had two.
It can even reflect your own language back to you in a way that feels eerily personal.

But it cannot want anything for you, it cannot surprise you from the depth of a lived life. It cannot tell you why you hate scary movies and love cucumbers. It cannot create generosity, history, or conviction. And it definitely cannot hand you a bag of lemons

I think that’s why I left with more than just “insights.”

I left feeling more anchored. And lately, that feels increasingly rare.

Which means if we want lives that are not just informed but formed, we’ll have to choose that ourselves.

We’ll have to keep saying yes to the coffee, the walk, the dinner, the conversation that runs long, the afternoons that make no sense as a productivity strategy but somehow return us to ourselves.

Yes, school will change.
Work will change.
The texture of everyday life is already changing.

But I hope we don’t forget that some of the most important education still happens in the presence of another person.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you even get sent home with lemons from a new friend’s garden.