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spent fifteen years optimising his life for success - tech, VC, a fund that raised over $100M. What he found at the top: a pill to focus, a pill to sleep, and no idea who he was anymore.

This episode is about what came next, and the idea Scott calls the Acceleration Decade: a period of relentless change we’re all unprepared for, because we’ve spent years overriding the very things that would help us survive it: connection, stillness, meaning.

His case: meaning isn’t a luxury. It’s what makes you antifragile. One of our best conversations, enjoy!

Don’t build in public (do this instead)

A recent re-reading of Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power has made me rethink something I have done instinctively for most of my career: building everything in public.

It’s easy to see the appeal. You’re developing a business, fleshing out new ideas and sharing what’s influencing you along the way. It follows to create an audience as you go by talking about what you’re doing while you’re doing it. There might even have been a golden period over the last five to ten years in which this made perfect sense for creators, entrepreneurs and business builders.

Market the thing by narrating the making of the thing. Why wait until it’s finished?

I have done this many times, across many businesses. Not as a conscious marketing campaign, but as an instinct. Because of the nature of what I do - working with people, in conversation, in rooms - I am always, in a sense, building and working in public. The work and the telling of the work happen largely in the same breath. I’ve noticed that the urge to build or tell in public and begin marketing prematurely is probably because I get bored of waiting and want to act or feel like I’m doing something.

But this has caused more problems than solved for me: not because I was doing it wrong, but I was doing it too soon for where the project was at the time, and what kind of attention it truly needed from me.

And yet I am increasingly convinced that building in public (at least in the way we think about it) is not only a poor strategy for the long-term survival of whatever you are creating, but a genuine risk to your reputation that you may not have considered.

Let’s get into it.

Opening a new account in the red

When you talk about something you have not yet done, you create an expectation.

Whatever you put into the ether about what your project will do, how it will work and how great it will be: that becomes the bar. And nobody set that bar but you. Nobody asked you to announce it. Nobody invested on the basis of your promise. You did that to yourself.

By the time you have declared your mission (and all it is, at that point, is a mission) you have already opened your bank account in the red. Aside from some good talk, which may well be brilliant talk, you have nothing to show. Which means you are on the back foot until you do.

There are people who follow through on this, and I will always give them credit. But the problem is that most of us create a far larger obstacle than we need, especially in the early stages when the vision is still forming and the progress is fragile.

You need every ounce of energy and focus you can get. Marketing what you do does not fill the space of what still needs to be done in order to deliver it. In fact, in unequal measure, it drains the very energy that the doing requires.

The unknown unknowns can eat you alive

When you are building something truly new, unique and difficult (which often come in the same package) you are going to meet obstacles that you did not plan for.

Some of those obstacles will take your project in a completely different direction. They may expand the original vision beyond recognition, or reduce it to something smaller and more honest.

The nature of an unknown unknown is that you have no idea how much of a no idea you have. In that uncertainty, everything is waiting for you: the terrible mishaps and failures that can take you off course by years, as well as all the unfathomable connections and opportunities that can take a million-dollar concept to the billion-dollar level.

While you are in this fragile stage, speaking too soon can be costly. Every public commitment you have made about what you are building becomes a cage. The narrative you created in the early days, when you knew the least, forces you into a pigeonhole of what you think other people think they need from you.

Those assumptions will not only kill a business before it gets out of the womb, but also impact your confidence and clarity of your vision, because now you’re not just navigating the unknown: you’re navigating the unknown while performing certainty for an audience.

I experienced this first-hand during the early days of founding Humble Mind. I was not clear enough yet on what I wanted to do with my fledgling community and who it was for. But instead of taking the time, space and silence to think through this clearly, I sought that clarity elsewhere. I spent too much time in too many conversations with people who, despite having my best interests at heart and wanted to support me, ended up giving me too many ideas that muddled my own clarity.

I thought I was lining up customers, but really I was losing time and focus, setting me back by months and even years.

You attract the wrong crowd too early

If you build in public and speak too soon about what you’re making, you tend to attract small fish. These are people who, for a lack of their own vision or energy or project, will try to flatter you into serving their needs in some way.

This is not necessarily malicious, but it is seductive. It is easy to stop at the first line of recognition and settle there, rather than allowing the passing stages of people and trends to run their course. Worse, you begin to feel a public pressure to deliver a message that fits the times (or people) as they are, rather than focusing on where they may be going. A music producer friend of mine once said that as soon as you can spot the trend, it has already passed.

You do not want to become an untimely appendage on somebody’s subscription list because you spent too much time talking up what you do and not enough time actually delivering or building it.

Ultimately, in building too publicly and too soon, you are setting yourself up for an impossible task: trying to deliver on whatever all of that talk was exciting within people. And that excitement was never yours to manage. It was yours to earn later on, with the work itself.

What I’m really learning: patience

What I am learning, slowly and often painfully, is to spend less time marketing what I don’t have yet and more time listening. More time observing and in conversation without an agenda or a pitch.

One of my collaborators, a very successful individual, recently described his own approach in a way that stayed with me. He spoke about the discipline of patience: of spending long stretches in careful observation, studying the landscape, staying quiet and undetectable and then moving with such precision and timing that the moment of action is almost impossible to miss. He spoke about striking like a viper. It works not because it was loud, but because it was exact.

I am learning to operate more like that. To spend far more time listening than speaking. To build context quietly, so that once the moment comes, which it will come, one clear, decisive move can deliver beyond anything a premature promise could have managed.

You don’t want to broadcast your target, method and your timeline to the world before you’ve even begun or proven it. Not because secrecy is glamorous, but because the target will have moved while the assumptions you created have not. That’s par for the course. And now you are chasing something that no longer exists, weighed down by expectations that were never necessary.

The work, when it arrives, should speak with a force that no amount of early narration could have manufactured. A little more discipline, and a little less marketing.

The product or solution will be ready once its out of the oven. And then, it’ll be able to do its own talking, once everyone can see and smell it for themselves.

I hope you enjoyed reading.

Humble Mind is a facilitation and social learning practice building communities, human skills and the conditions for real learning.

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All the best until the next one,

Alex

There is a shortage happening in the workplace right now that nobody is talking about.

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It’s not a shortage of talent or skills gap, or even engagement. Around the world, humanity is facing a willingness crisis. And nowhere is its absence on more merciless display than in the organisations that need it most.

I don’t mean the old-fashioned, soldier-through-it kind of willingness: the muscling through long hours, gritting of teeth and performative hustle that still passes for dedication in too many boardrooms.

What I’m talking about is something far more demanding: the willingness to do the things that are good and necessary for us. The things we know, somewhere in the gut, that need our attention but that we have become remarkably skilled at avoiding.

The only way to it is through it

I find it useful to think of what we perceive to be obstacles or challenges as initiations. Professional life offers no shortage of rites of passage, whether it’s dealing with a difficult colleague, falling short on a project or failing to lead with enough presence during a time of change. The things we need to embody most are invariably the ones that contain the truths we do not want to face in our private lives.

This is what makes work a continual initiation. We are invited, over and over, to grow at a slightly faster pace than would be comfortable. And most of us, most of the time, decline the invitation.

Incentive works for a time. A new role, a pay rise or a promotion help to kick off movement in the right direction. But before long, the middle slump arrives. The initial energy fades, the novelty wears thin and undead habits return from the shadows. Something more than financial reward or the gaining of prestige is required to push through to the end, particularly when the end is not even visible. This is the point where willingness is supposed to show up and, increasingly, it doesn’t.

To add salt to the wound, the current support structures of corporate life are ill-suited. They are not built for the long haul and not for any form of genuine uncertainty. Instead, we find ourselves caught between two tides of influence, both of which are failing us.

On one side sits the executive culture: the ruthless, zero-sum machinery of growth, big change and profit margin. Here, willingness is assumed. You either deliver or you’re replaced. There is no patience for the messiness of human development, only the clean lines of quarterly results.

On the other side sits the toothless tools of the human resources department, singing songs and slogans about the importance of equality, fairness and working together as though these were the only missing ingredients. Good intentions, most definitely. But in practice, a kind of organisational anaesthetic that numbs the very discomfort that growth requires.

Both, in their current form, are not only unhelpful but often dangerous to true progress. Because neither embodies what neither sees it needs.

What’s actually needed is something that cannot be mandated from above or workshopped from the side. It has to, and can only, come from the individual.

Willingness, in its most profound form, lives not in the mind or even the heart. It lives in the body, often in the stomach, that same region where dread and excitement are indistinguishable from one another. It is not an intellectual position or a callous mindset shift. It is a felt, physical energy that says: I will step toward this, even though I cannot yet see where it leads.

This is where willingness meets something most organisations have quietly abandoned: the opportunity cost of a lack of imagination.

We are, as a working culture, profoundly deficient in our ability to conceive of opportunity cost. Not in the financial sense (spreadsheets handle that well enough) but in the human sense. It’s the cost of the conversation we didn’t have or the hire we didn’t make. It’s the experiment we talked ourselves out of or the crucial, painful moment of honesty we swallowed because the meeting was already running long.

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.

Everyone knows this. And yet, as with most great, simple wisdom, it hides in bald sight. We are remarkably unwilling to apply that logic when looking forward into an uncertain future, where it needed most. It is so much easier to look back and reverse-engineer our outcomes - so as to say, well, that needed to happen like that, or the right message came at the right time - than it is to extend that same trust to what hasn’t happened yet.

There are always far more decisions we don’t commit to than the ones we do. And in every one of those unchosen paths lives something we will never know about. To be willing is to be able to entertain situations and scenarios that are not even there yet, not as flights of fancy that pull us away from what’s urgent, but as genuine acts of imagination that expand what we believe is possible.

This is where willingness meets creativity, experimentation and real presence (not just leadership). This is why it must be driven at the individual level, because you are who you show up as - your education, interests, prejudices and desires, and no structure, however well-designed, can do this work for you.

The options are to either find it or create it where it does not yet exist.

This, I believe, is the major test that organisations of a certain size will face in the coming three to five years. Not disruption from AI or shifting markets: those are real, but they are external. The deeper threat is internal: the slow, imperceptible erosion of the willingness to try, to fail, to imagine something other than what is already in front of them. Get it right, and your business will live to fight another day (with the people who should stay). Get it wrong, and watch your market share and profits fall like a stone.

So what do we actually do about it?

The answer is not another change programme or a motivational offsite. It is something far simpler and (sorry about this) far harder: allowing your cultural mechanism to keep pace with your change mechanism.

Culture is, and has always been, the only indicator that matters in any kind of business change. How people show up and how they demonstrate to each other as a collective the value of showing up. This either spirals upward or it spirals downward. There is no standing still.

Here are three places to start:

Promote from within before you hire from without.

You probably already have enough diamonds in your team. The reflex to look externally for someone holding the supposed golden ticket is expensive, disruptive and usually the ticket never arrives. Instead, reinvest in the people you already have, and in particular, the younger and more junior members of your organisation.

Their proximity to the work, hunger to please and instinct for what’s broken give them an innovative power that far too many leaders overlook. You will be surprised how far promoting from within and genuinely celebrating those contributions will take you.

Make experimentation a standard KPI.

One new experiment per quarter, minimum. If you want to link it to incentive because you know incentive works, go ahead, but make the experimentation itself a cultural incentive, not merely a financial one. Let the individual step into the driving seat of the change you want them to lead. Let them own and shape it and help others create a cultural fabric that actually sticks.

Willingness grows when people are trusted to try things, not just told to execute them.

Any significant change, whether it’s adopting AI, pivoting into a new market, or radically shifting your product focus, will require the consent and creativity of the people who have to deliver it. Mandates are useless when they come from people who do not have to directly deliver on them.

Train your people to think in opportunity cost.

This is perhaps the most overlooked and most valuable of all. There is so much research and writing on how to not just teach the mental concept of opportunity cost but embed it into how standups, meetings, reports and one-to-ones are run between teams and managers. Being able to frame the opportunity not taken (rather than only what is visibly in front of us) is a cognitive skill that sharpens judgement, rewards curiosity and makes the willing indispensable.

The people who can think this way will stay and grow. The people who can’t, or won’t, will make that visible too.

None of this is easy. All of it is uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.

Willingness is not a soft skill. It is the most demanding and urgent level of initiation we face at the moment, and the one most conspicuously absent from the places that need it most.

The question is not whether your organisation can afford to develop it, but rather whether you can afford not to and whether you are willing to be the first one to step forward and find out.

Did this essay help you go deeper and get clearer? Subscribe to Humble Mind to receive weekly essays exploring meaningful work and meaningful becoming.

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She also hosts the podcast Unprofessionalism, where she explores what happens when people dare to shed the armour of professional performance and write their own script.

Think back to a big decision in your life.

It was almost certainly accompanied by a conversation.

Your exchange of words with someone else helped you to think, clarify and decide on a necessary course of action. Whether it was the choice to have children, to change jobs or to step into a far-off destination, you leaned on the experience and process of conversation with another human being to help you decide.

Why do we do that? Why, in an age of artificial intelligence, instant purchases and faster-than-instant justifications, do we still reach for the most ancient human technology - conversation - to navigate our lives?

Conversation is how we ask questions, learn, experiment, rediscover and reorient ourselves. For over 250,000 years, it has been the craft by which humans have made meaning, beauty and connection.

And in a time of unceasing noise, where volume often substitutes for value, it is worth celebrating conversation as one of the oldest and most reliable ways we have to truly understand how the world works.

In doing so, we have the chance to understand how it works and perhaps even, become a better conversationalist.

The two conversations we’re always having

The word converse comes from the Latin converso, meaning ‘inside out.’

At any given moment, two conversations are taking place:

• The external one, with words exchanged between you and your interlocutor (person you’re speaking with)

• The internal one, a private dialogue with yourself, where you judge, observe and decide what to say next.

In this way, every act of communication carries a cost. We think faster than we can speak, and in converting thought into words, something is always lost in translation. In other words, the price of clarity is the act of communication itself. The best conversationalists learn to reconcile the two conversations so that clarity is achieved without losing connection.

Conversation as a meaning-making engine

Conversation is not simply about transmitting information: it is a technology for making meaning.

A great exchange with a friend, a teacher or even a stranger can provide a completely new perspective on familiar circumstances. It can reframe the way you think about your desires, beliefs or decisions. And unlike most other technologies, it requires no money, permission or education to use. It is freely available to anyone willing to enter the space.

This is also why journaling or writing is such an effective tool: it is a way of having a conversation with yourself, of turning the inside out, of seeing your own thoughts reflected back to you.

But not every conversation is poetry. Many are purely transactional, like deciding who will take out the rubbish or whether it will rain tomorrow. And yet, some conversations stand apart.

The kind we are looking at here are the surprising, deep and exploratory conversations we all know and love. These are those that surface something you didn’t know you knew, or help you co-create a new insight with another person. These are the apex moments of conversation, when we stumble into a space of discovery together.

Good conversation is about more than words

Great conversations require some of our other important human faculties to be engaged. Two of these include our attention span and our innate desire for connection and closeness. If you remain closely attentive during a conversation with someone, you come to see a world of infinite detail close up: their command of their bodies, their speech patterns, mannerisms while talking and listening, how their voice modulates, where their eyes go while thinking, how they hold their hand in front of their mouth when coughing, and so much more.

These all contribute to the sensory experience of a conversation being had - between people, and helps to greatly reinforce the sense that this is a connective experience for both. These details reinforce the experience of closeness and accelerate trust.

This is why, oddly enough, we can feel deeply connected even in conversations with chatbots. It is not that they sound human, but that they are endlessly attentive, always ready to listen, clarify, and help us make sense of our ideas. The balm of conversation is the sensation of being listened to.

And it is also why imagining a world without conversation is unbearable. Without talk, without shared meaning-making, our species would spiral into isolation and alienation. We need to hear other voices to know we are not alone.

8 principles of better conversations

If conversation is a technology, then becoming a better conversationalist means learning how to operate it well. Here are eight principles to practice:

1. Think your questions through
Questions are the spark plugs of conversation, but not all questions are equal. Too often we stumble our way through a question, only to realise halfway that we don’t know what we’re really asking. A good question has clarity of intention: What do I want to know here? What am I inviting the other person to share? Even a few moments of thought beforehand can transform a vague probe into an illuminating exchange.

2. Optimise for reaction, not just response
Facts are useful, but reactions reveal meaning. When you ask someone for their view, or better yet, for how something makes them feel, you invite honesty and depth. ‘Do you agree?’ leads one way. ‘How does that make you feel?’ opens another. Reactions show emotional truth, and they often become the doorway into surprising discoveries.

3. Define (and refine) your own opinions
A conversation is not only about drawing things out of others; it’s also about showing up with something of your own. The clearer you are about your positions and perspectives, the more easily you can contribute to dialogue. Journaling or writing helps here: it forces you to articulate what you believe, and in turn, makes it easier to speak with conviction and curiosity when those topics arise.

4. Remember the body is in conversation too
Your brain may do the talking, but your body carries half the message. The way your voice rises and falls, the way your eyes flicker while you think, the way your hands trace ideas in the air - these all become part of the experience. Being aware of your body in conversation is not about performance, but about presence. Your body is already saying something: the art is noticing what it’s saying, and making use of it as a tool during the experience.

5. Silence is golden
We live in a culture that fears silence, rushing to fill every gap with words. Yet pauses are essential to life. They allow thoughts to land, emotions to surface and meaning to settle. A well-placed silence shows attentiveness, signals respect and creates space for new directions to emerge. To sit with a pause is not weakness but generosity. Silence is golden - use it!

6. To clarify is to beautify
Conversations rarely unfold with total, perfect clarity. Sometimes the most powerful move is to stop and ask, ‘Could you say more on that?\ or ‘What did you mean by that?’ Far from derailing the flow, clarification often enriches it. It gives the other person a chance to rethink, reframe and rearticulate. Asking for clarity is a way of saying: I’m listening, and I care enough to understand you well. This is also crucial if you have a conversation that others are listening to as well.

7. Practice listening
Listening is more than staying quiet while the other person talks. It is an active, demonstrable craft. Physically, it looks like leaning in, making eye contact, staying still. Verbally, it sounds like paraphrasing: ‘So what I hear you saying is…’ This kind of active listening both deepens your own comprehension and lets the other person feel heard. And that feeling (of being listened to) is often the true gift of a conversation that benefits all those involved.

8. Stay curious
Curiosity is the lubricant of every meaningful exchange. Without it, conversation collapses into repetition or fruitless debate. With it, conversation becomes exploration. I call this entering the ‘no-assumptions zone’, which is being willing to say ‘I don’t know, let’s find out together’ and this is what keeps dialogue alive. Curiosity keeps the door open to surprise, and surprise is where new meaning is made.

Conversation remains one of the simplest, most profound ways of making life richer. It reduces uncertainty, builds trust and creates togetherness.

Every conversation carries the possibility of surprise: of revealing a new way of knowing or seeing. That possibility is worth cultivating, and why it’s worth investing in your abilities as a conversationalist.

The invitation is simple: pay closer attention to the conversations you are having. Practice them as craft and notice when you are surprised.

And perhaps most importantly, ask yourself:

What is the conversation I am not having, that might change how I see the world?

We were promised connection, but got audiences.

Since the birth of social networks in the early 2000s, businesses have tried to leverage one of humanity’s core needs to strengthen their products: community.

In doing so, community became synonymous with platforms and tactics: content, groups, messaging, feeds. It was measured in metrics: engagement, followers and views. With all that online social networks gave us, their fundamental mistake was underestimating what belonging actually requires.

And without belonging, there is no community.

We need to reclaim what building community-led businesses truly requires.

To do so, let’s go back to the roots of what makes community worth it and what makes it work.

In 2016, I joined one of the longest-standing and most impactful communities of my life. Back then, my friends and I were all interested in mindfulness, but had no idea what we were doing. Thankfully, one of my friends’ parents was a seasoned meditator and facilitator. She invited us to come over on the first Monday of every month to practice mindfulness at her home.

What started as a small experiment became a decade-long drumbeat in our lives. I knew that I could show up every month and connect with people in a way I couldn’t in everyday life. I listened and was listened to - deeply. We laughed, gained crucial life skills, and cultivated wonderful friendships. We organised simply but effectively, with an RSVP WhatsApp message a week before.

Over time, we started co-designing the experience and eventually began facilitating sessions ourselves. Thanks to Bridgette’s tough but fair approach, we all implicitly knew what was allowed and what wasn’t. Her deep passion for the topic and relational skills seeped into the culture of the group. Her beautiful home and pristine slides told us we were intentionally gathering, not just hanging out. People thought we were a cult for a while, but we didn’t mind.

When you walked through those doors, you were made to feel like you belonged, you were in capable hands and that you would leave a little wiser.

We’re interested in building community-led businesses, not passion projects. But the principles that made it work are the same ones that successful community-led businesses require.

This community, like any community-led business, was run off two interdependent processes: a community’s way of being and its way of doing.

A community’s way of being starts with its founder and is shaped by its members.

Before a community has culture, it has a host - someone with a leading edge. The founder’s values, sense of purpose, emotional patterns, relationship to power, conflict and status and assumptions about people all shape the environment members enter into. This becomes the starting point for the community’s own way of being. Over time, the community develops its own norms, energy and culture, but in the early stages it is deeply influenced by what the founder models, allows and rewards.

This shapes whether people stay, contribute and draw others in. It affects whether community members get the outcomes they came for. A strong community can reinforce learning, create accountability, deepen belonging and turn passive consumption into real participation.

Bridgette’s way of being, over the course of ten years, birthed and steered Mindful Mondays. This wasn’t always easy for her. She was always preparing for the next session, carrying the programme alone for many years. People would cancel in droves at the last minute. Relationships got frayed around sensitive topics. Many times she would say it wasn’t easy - but she loved it nonetheless.

Like Bridgette, community builders need to understand not only their own way of being, but how it is shaping the community’s way of being. People feel this long before they can describe it. They can sense whether a space is shaped by generosity or performance, curiosity or control, steadiness or insecurity.

Your way of being is your community’s source of connection. Your community’s way of doing is its execution system.

It is how you design conversations, facilitate sessions, create rituals, set expectations, manage logistics, use platforms, measure health and translate insight into offers or next steps. This is what gives a community form and purpose. A good way of doing creates rhythm, consistency and clarity. It helps members understand how to participate, what value they can expect and how the community fits into their lives.

This is its source of credibility.

Most new community builders’ first questions are about this. They reach for platforms, tools, channels and content rhythms. Part of this is how we have been taught to think about community. But the deeper reason is that real community-building requires more care, restraint and patience than a tech stack can provide. These things are also harder to measure and harder to delegate.

There are two traps here: leaning too far in one direction and misalignment.

Being without doing can create a space that feels thoughtful and human, but struggles to hold shape under pressure. Doing without being creates the opposite problem: the structure may be polished and efficient, but something essential is missing.

Then there is the subtler challenge. A community builder may value depth, trust and real connection while building systems that feel transactional, noisy, or overly engineered. Members may not be able to name the problem, but they can sense when the culture and the structure are not making the same promise.

The strongest community-led businesses learn to hold both and to align them.

They build trust through who they are and credibility through how they run the room. Heart and structure are not opposing forces. Each strengthens the other when they are coherent. There is no permanent state of balance here. The work is not to find a perfect formula and freeze it. The work is to keep experimenting, personally and professionally.

The communities that last tend to feel human because of the way they are led and dependable because of the way they are built. That is what turns a community from a nice idea into a serious business asset.

With curiosity,
Daniel Shaw

Your tastes are unique to you because, in large part, you don’t choose them.

You can’t help what you like and dislike. Whether it’s 90s rap, blue cheese, gothic art or Aston Martins, our brains and senses conspire to determine precisely what we adore and absolutely cannot stand.

No matter how hard you try, if you can’t hate George Michael and love rollercoasters, your personal preference is exactly that: personal.

And our preferences, as peculiar and often involuntary as they are, play a profound role influencing every aspect of our behaviour and the decisions we make every day.

But taste is not trivial. It’s the visible edge of something far older and more serious than whether George was better on his own or with Wham!

Right now, taste and judgement are constantly invoked as humanity’s great edge in an age of AI. We’re told our discernment is precious, irreplaceable, uniquely ours. What we’re rarely told is why.

What is it about the way humans judge, prefer and intuit that actually matters, why is it valuable and where does it come from?

The general flow of the argument goes something like this: our ability to naturally discern one decision, situation or preference from another is exclusive to us because of our specific, lived experiences. This crucial faculty is nowhere near as developed in other animals, and by definition non-existent in artificial systems. Our innate ability to make judgements simply cannot be replicated outside of the human experience.

That claim sounds reasonable enough. But the real reason goes deeper than experience alone.

Like all biological organisms, we face an ongoing friction with nature. Some day in the not-too-distant future, our bodies will stop working and life as we know it will end. Each day that we postpone the inevitable is a victory. We will have skilfully navigated another plethora of challenges the natural world hurled at us simply to stay alive. If we don’t develop the necessary intelligence and levels of awareness to do so, the friction with nature will overwhelm us and our day will come, perhaps too soon.

Part of the brain’s wondrous evolution has been to refine our sensory judgement to help keep us safe and reduce dangerous friction with our surroundings. A million years ago, a distant ancestor’s dislike of a particular berry may have been the difference between staying alive and perishing from poison.

Over thousands of generations, this information was preserved and became felt knowledge. We know this as intuition. It’s the feeling of something being true, beyond words or mere information. You simply know that you know.

What we didn’t fancy for lunch that day long ago may have saved us from certain extinction. Our gut feelings carry a deeply ancient inheritance of human wisdom and experience. The head, the heart and the gut are not separate systems. They are layers of the same intelligence, each shaped by contact with the real, physical world.

Here’s another way to put it: our intuitive intelligence is what elevates the human experience beyond what would simply be information. Only we know how it feels to live, breathe, interact, overheat, suffer and love and communicate it with some skill. The value in this experience is the experience itself. Only I can know what it feels like to shudder in revulsion when Careless Whisper assails the radio. Instead of this being a useless subjective quirk, it’s what surprisingly gives all of life meaning and purpose.

What we feel is valuable to us, above all else - even above objective truth.

That sounds like a radical claim, but think about how you actually move through the world. You don’t weigh every decision against a dataset. You feel your way through most of them. The things you care about, protect, pursue and avoid are not chosen by logic alone: they are shaped by something older and less articulable than reason. And they matter to you precisely because they are yours.

Stay with that for a moment. Because it also tells us something about the nature of value itself.

Without stakes and risk, at least for humans, there is no value to anything. No reason to live, experience or try anything. The friction we experience with nature, as painful and costly as it may be, is also precisely what provides every decision, moment and opportunity with its natural stakes. Without the ultimate friction of death and returning back to the void, it would be like playing every level in our video game of life on God mode. And that loses its novelty pretty quickly.

To live as a finite creature is to understand and reckon with the stakes of staying alive and, fleetingly, to seek and share the beauty of the moments in between.

This is where the AI question becomes genuinely interesting. Not in the familiar debate about which tasks machines will outperform us in. That much seems settled. In legal, medical and scientific fields, among many others, there may soon be no competing with artificial intelligence.

The more interesting question is what kind of being is required to make any of it matter.

An AI does not risk itself. It does not perish or feel the world as costly. Asking an AI what it feels like when rain drops fall on your skin would be a task as hopeless as asking a human to calculate the product of a trillion numbers. It can try and even mimic, but it can never know. Not because it lacks processing power, but because it has no body to lose.

It is our felt, involuntary sense of intuition, and how it shows up as our idiosyncratic desires and values, that keeps us central to any question of what intelligence is for. The friction is not a flaw, but is actually the source. Our direct and perilous contact with nature is the very thing that gives us an edge no computer could fathom.

Our tastes, desires and judgements, whether conscious or not, subtly nudge each of us forward in our lives and help us make choices. They evolved to help keep us safe and connected to others. They have contributed to everything we celebrate, from knowledge and hard-won ethics to poetry, art and even our understanding of love.

Our taste and judgement is not decoration. It is selection under pressure. It is one of the ways life learns what keeps it alive and one of the ways culture remembers what matters.

Intuition, like AI, is here to stay. And because of that fact, so are we.

With curiosity,

Alex Searle

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Her first collection of poems, Weeping Becomes A River, is available on Audible and explores themes of belonging, identity, and the power of voice to heal, connect and transform.

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