Human
OS V2.0

At a Humanity+ conference at Harvard in 2010, I shared the stage with Ray Kurzweil to celebrate human potential and ingenuity. Yet even in that heady age of tech optimism—on the eve of Arab Spring when social media was undermining rather than enabling authoritarianism—I wasn't there to blindly cheerlead progress. Instead, I warned about the drive to exploit, to add fine print, to enshittify every product for an additional dollar—and how the process could be so slow and imperceptible that we would fail to notice it like a frog slowly being boiled alive. Few listened. The congregation was drunk on possibility. Two years later, in 2012, I wrote about the Human Operating System—arguing that "artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity" and that we needed technology built to fit humans "like a glove instead of a cast." The thesis has only become more urgent. Today we both can claim the mantle of prophecy. In the last five years, we've made as big a leap as any since splitting the atom. Yet the value of this change to humanity is just as ambiguous as the nuclear age. With superhuman intelligence at our fingertips, we haven't become supermen. We've become shallower, more anxious, and less capable.

The good news is that the pace of change has jolted us into awareness. Maybe the frog was boiled too fast and can still jump out of the pot. "If I said an alien species is coming in five years—maybe they will be nice, maybe they will cure cancer, but they will take our power to control the world from us—people would be terrified. This is the situation we're in. But instead of coming from outer space, the threat is coming from California." — Yuval Noah Harari Tristan Harris, former Design Ethicist at Google, describes "human downgrading"—the systematic erosion of human capacity through technologies optimized for engagement rather than flourishing. Aza Raskin, who invented the infinite scroll, now speaks with deep regret. They founded the Center for Humane Technology, warning that social media was humanity's first contact with AI—and that humanity lost.

Yet I did not write this to add to the chorus of doom. Fear is not just a poor foundation for flourishing—it's a surrender to the very forces you think you're fighting. The attention economy profits from your anxiety. Don't let them. I offer a different path: agency at human scale. In a world of systems designed to break you down, you can stand tall and reclaim your self-determination. Many wisdom traditions that survived millennia converge on similar core practices: moderation, community, presence, contentment. The Stoics knew this two thousand years ago. The Buddhists knew it five hundred years before that. This convergence reflects invariant features of human flourishing. Fifty-five years ago, Alvin Toffler warned of "Overchoice." Thirty-four years later, Barry Schwartz proved him right. In The Paradox of Choice, he identified Maximizers (who exhaustively search for optimal) and Satisficers (who stop at "good enough"). The finding was counterintuitive: satisficers are happier.

For those who feel they can't get their head above water, here's an imperfect start. Six principles. Not commandments. Invitations. 1. Choose satisficing over maximizing. Set clear criteria for "good enough." Once met, stop searching. The maximizer's pursuit is a trap algorithms exploit. The satisficer's contentment is a fortress they cannot breach. 2. Embrace voluntary simplification. Reduce complexity by choice before circumstances compel it. This is not deprivation but liberation. Own fewer things. Maintain fewer accounts. Cultivate fewer but deeper relationships. 3. Build at human scale. Robin Dunbar discovered humans can maintain approximately 150 stable relationships. Invest in these Dunbar-scale communities—your 15-50 deep bonds, your 5 inner circle. These sustain you when large systems fail. 4. Redefine abundance. True abundance is not accumulation; it is alignment. When resources flow toward your conscious intentions, scarcity dissolves. Shift from "Do I have enough?" to "Am I contributing enough?" 5. Let the titans compete. Large corporations, governments, and AI systems will compete for dominance. You don't need to participate. Turn inward. Build community. Create meaning. Redirect attention to what you can actually affect. 6. Love more, need less. The ultimate hedge against AI dominance and civilizational stress is genuine human love, presence, and connection. These require no external energy, scale poorly (which is their strength), and constitute the irreducible core of flourishing.

On your information diet: Limit news to one focused session daily. Eliminate notifications except direct messages from people you know. On your finances: Maintain 6-12 months liquidity. Avoid debt that creates dependency. Invest in resilience—skills, relationships, community. On your relationships: Quality over quantity. Depth over breadth. Difficult conversations now, boundary-setting now, repair work now. On your mind: Invest in practices that restore your nervous system: meditation, nature, exercise, connection, sleep. These are not luxuries. They are infrastructure.

The storm is coming—or perhaps it is already here. You cannot control the storm. But you can become the kind of person who navigates storms with grace. You can build the kind of community that weathers storms together. And once you do, you can start systemic change to make the journey easier for others. It begins with you. It begins now.