how to be aware in an unaware world

Tag: thoughts

Humans
It’s been a while since I posted & I feel now an obligation not to justify the time away, but in the famous words of Phil McKnight, just do it – that is, write more posts at a higher frequency.
In the time away, however, I have dived into books as a way of learning from great writers, which if I am disciplined and graced with prose, can become by the end of my tiny life.
This post was written at work, while pondering the growing divide between each other in the advent of growing reasons not to need each other – this is frankly frightening & should create urgency in our society. Anyway, hope y’all like it.
We need more humans to be there for each other than ever before.
On the massive wave of the AI Revolution, I believe we humans will increasingly be searching for other humans to lean on, trust in, spend time with, & just be there for one another.
But equally, there are more & more reasons to stay indoors, play video games, watch netflix, ignore our neighbors, stick to our screens, & reinforce our social anxiety by doing so.
This should be very, very alarming for obvious reasons (without social connection & face-to-face interactions, we devolve as a species) & unobvious reasons (our connection to our devices becomes our preferred choice of interaction).
As we begin to put more & more trust into AI models, we put more & more trust in the AI companies behind them – marking a 2.7 trillion dollar combined valuation. This is creating an unprecedented amount of wealth for a very small group of technocrats.
People are treating their AI voice models like real people, confiding very sensitive information to these very few companies, whose privacy policies are primed for ad effectiveness not personal anonymity.
Originality is at the core of combating this trend and can be the future if we are adamant. People for thousands of years have used their ingenuity, creativity, & experience to write, create, talk, play, & produce original ideas – & still do!
Like this very blog post, which I am writing entirely on my own. Like I do every single blog post. This is not to taute my own originality, it is to stand by my own belief that I have plenty to say without the need for AI to expand my thoughts.
This is not to say that I don’t use spell-check or grammar-check in my posts, just that I steer clear of AI when it comes specifically to creative writing or asking for ideas.
The greatest books of all time, for instance, were written before this life-changing invention because we humans are pretty damn creative:
George Orwell’s 1984
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
Homer’s Iliad & The Odyssey
Paulo Ochelo’s The Alchemist
C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, Witch, & the Wardrobe
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Shakespere’s Romeo & Juliet
Frank Herbert’s Dune
Tolkein’s Lord of Rings
Emily Diceknson’s Poems
J.K Rowling’s Harry Potter
…just to name a handful
What makes these books so relatable is that they are written by real humans with real pasts, real problems, & real imaginations – & it’s a real problem when books are written by AI.
Characters are manifestations of an author’s friends, family, mentors, enemies, & colleagues. Books are filled with these incredible manifestations, sometimes consuming the author whilst creating them. Frank Herbert’s own son once told an interviewer that Paul Atredies was more of a son to his father than he was.
AI can and never will be able to create these kinds of characters because it has no real past of its own, filled with emotions tied to experiences. It’s like the hive mind humans in Pluribus that combine all neurological activity like knowledge & reasoning into one shared mind, but lack individuality & independent thought.
Will AI be able to create complicated, artificial memories in the future, sure, but will it have good & bad, right & wrong, past experiences to link those memories to, no. Because it cannot attach what it does not have to memory: emotions.
In a great interview with Michael Polen, he describes the biggest difference between us & AI being how we think vs how an AI bot thinks. That a single neuron in the human brain is equal to thousands of lines of code in an AI script.
We are the single most complex (emotionally & physically) creatures we have yet to discover in the universe. That complexity is something to take note of & something that enabled the greatest minds to develop AI in the first place.
As we learn how to adapt to AI, like we did with automobiles, office jobs, the internet, social media, & every technological shift in the last twenty years; we must not lose our humanity.
The simple yet most important quality to being human is our ability to talk, face to face with each other. If we lose this, we lose what it means to be human – & sadly, our youth is losing this profound ability every day.
I encourage you to step outside your comfort zone: talk to a stranger in the street, call a friend, plan a family gathering, or attend a social event.
You don’t have to be a massive extrovert to do this, it may take more effort, but it is so worth it! Afterall, it is through real connection with each other that makes us the most human!
Thank you so much for reading. I’m on this journey with Mindfulness & to ultimately become a better writer each day (and to put excuses why not to write behind the dream of reading a new book a month & publishing a book of my own by the end of the year).
Three More Things
April 12, 2026
Why
Boy, it’s been a good while since I wrote a blog post, a process that was so dear to me, but, as they say, there is no time like the present, because, well, there is only the present.
Starting to share thoughts from this wild mind of mine feels like a breath of fresh air.
My mind exists in a jungle of vines, bushes, and strangling things, but through this process of creative writing and musing a door appears in the distance – opening into a land of blue skies, rolling hills, and the purest air known to man.
And it’s in getting to that land that the wild becomes tame and the dark jungle gives way to bright pastures.
I know. I know it’s cheesy. I’m a fiend for analogies, but this process of writing really is super impactful to me.
But alas, I digress, you wanted a new blog post and so I dug deep into my archive and found just the thing to write about!
It begins with a simple yet deeply insightful question.
What keeps you up at night and what gets you up in the morning?
These two questions will invariably answer the “Why?” in our lives and that “Why?” gets to the meat of it all, to the core of our very being.
There are obviously no right or wrong answers to this question.
There’s no one answer either. Highly fluctuating answers will come at different stages in life, that’s totally okay and only a reflection of our aspirations.
The “Why do I stay up at night?” in my life right now is to make money, or more specifically, to pay off some debt, save a good chunk of cash, and invest extra earnings. This “Why?” is not very glamorous, but it is necessary. I must stabilize myself financially so I can move on to my next “Why?”.
The next “Why?”, “Why do I get up in the morning?” is unquestionably to help others that come across my path live a happy and healthy life through deep listening, occasional words of wisdom, mindfulness teaching, emotional support, and guided meditations. In other words, my “Why?” is the very thing I am building: Mindfulness &
Each of these categories contain a plethora of direct and applicable advice, with mindfulness teaching being at the core.
I adamantly believe that mindfulness is the foundation by which we build a happy and healthy life on. Like the foundation of a house (which reminds me of the Series of Unfortunate Events movie scene when that house completely falls apart into the ocean, but the rock on which it stands is still perfectly intact).
The reason mindfulness is so important is because it opens our eyes and ears to even be aware of the very question. It brings us back to the present moment, forcing us to reflect on the “Why?”.
I would also say community support is equally foundational because it entails surrounding us with people that can enrich our lives and remind us that we are never alone in any stage of life. Without community support we are lost in the sea, and no man is an island.
This point of community was humorously illustrated when a man tried to make his own chicken sandwich from scratch (by procuring all that is needed to make the ingredients). I won’t spoil anything, just say that it was no easy process at all.
We live by way of a very complex system of logistics. Everything from the cup of coffee we drink to the very words I’m typing on this laptop took hundreds of thousands of people in order to be.
This is the beauty of interdependence. The quicker we understand how much we need each other, the quicker we can get out of our own way and serve.
Three More Things
February 7, 2026
Writing
I am in the process of not only developing a writing habit but also developing an identity as a writer. I want to proudly tell people I am a writer, that writing isn’t just something I do but something I am.
I have written about a page a day for the past eight years, after meditation, but it is not enough. I must go beyond the pages of a journal or even this blog and into the ether that is storytelling.
One of my many inspirations in this world is Hugh Howley, author of the acclaimed SILO series.
Hugh mentions the difference between being an amateur writer and being an acclaimed author. A shift from interested to obsessed.
He describes the path it took to create the SILO series. He was writing from an emotional place, a place that bled into the characters of his first draft.
From there, he says it grew naturally and formed like a sculpture from a ball of clay, though the idea was tucked away in his mind long before it made its way into books across the nation.
An idea of any size takes shape over time, culminating yet ignored by most of us—the separation between that which is great and that which is not is measured by awareness.
The more we are aware, aka mindful, the more we can find those ideas that can spark something in us, then write them down, record them, or create something from them (like a business, piece of music, or work of art).
But it is not enough to just be aware, we must also take action (intention). There are three focus points to mindfulness:
Awareness – of the body and mind in the present moment
Emotion – how we are feeling in the present moment
Intention – of what we dream to be in the present moment
Our greatest selves are here in the present moment, already complete.
When we start from this place, we can go anywhere because we aren’t trying to “complete” or “achieve” anything.
Actualization – from idea to identity.
Luckily, I just want to be a writer to become one. The passion is built into me. Now, the discipline must follow, and then I’ll have a rhythm – a daily practice that can produce incredible results.
Yet, each obstacle in my way of being a writer is but a building block to the writer I want to become.
What I love about books is that the author behind each story is different, and yet some series of obstacles shaped them all.
What I love about writing is that it is the very expression of the soul, sometimes bound together in and shared with other souls, and sometimes kept only for one’s own soul.
June 3, 2025