Here’s something I think about often these days: AI is going to change the shape of a human life, and probably sooner than most of us are prepared for.

In the short term, I think it will cost jobs – real ones, and a lot of them. That part isn’t controversial anymore. But I don’t think that’s the end of the story. My own belief is that in the longer run, AI leads somewhere better: toward genuine abundance. And when the basic questions of survival and income start answering themselves, people don’t stop asking questions – they start asking bigger ones. What is this all for? What actually matters? I wouldn’t be surprised if this decade turns out to be the beginning of a quiet, worldwide resurgence in spirituality, simply because abundance has a way of pushing people back toward the questions that productivity usually crowds out.

Which raises the question I actually want to sit with here: if this is genuinely where we’re headed, what should we be teaching our children right now?

I keep coming back to the same three things.

One: Knowing yourself, deeply

The first is the ability to sit with yourself – really sit, without needing to reach for a phone, a distraction, or an escape hatch the moment things get quiet or uncomfortable.

This is, I think, the most underrated skill a person can have, and it’s one AI will never be able to hand anyone. No model, however advanced, can look inward on your behalf. It can’t sit with your discomfort for you, or help you understand what you actually want beneath what you think you’re supposed to want. That work has always belonged entirely to the person doing it – through meditation, through yoga, through honest reflection – and I think it’s about to matter more, not less, precisely because AI will strip away so many of the external distractions and obligations that used to fill the time where that self-knowledge might otherwise develop.

Two: Good relationships

The second is relationships – not networking, not “who you know,” but the real, sustained kind.

Harvard has run the longest study of adult development in the world, tracking the same people and, eventually, their children, for more than 84 years. Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz, who now lead the study, wrote a book about its findings called The Good Life. Their conclusion, distilled from over eight decades of data, is disarmingly simple: “..good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” Not career achievement. Not income. Not status. Relationships.

I don’t think this is a coincidence, and I don’t think it’s a soft, sentimental finding – I think it’s a foundation. Career matters. Financial security matters. Health matters. But relationships are the thing everything else seems to be built on top of. And this is, again, something AI cannot do for a child. It can simulate conversation, but it cannot give someone the lived experience of being truly known by another person, or the discipline of showing up for someone else over decades. That’s still entirely on us.

Three: Fundamentals – not just subjects

The third is fundamentals. And I want to be precise about what I mean by that, because it’s not the same as “make sure your kids study hard subjects.”

What I actually mean is the underlying grammar of how things work – whether that’s a scientific principle or a basic truth about how life tends to operate. The value isn’t in memorizing a specific fact. It’s that once you genuinely understand a fundamental, you can derive new answers yourself, in situations nobody taught you to expect. AI can hand a person an answer instantly. What it can’t hand someone is the internal capacity to know whether that answer is actually right, or to build the next one from scratch when the question changes. That capacity only comes from understanding things at the root, not the surface.

Why this all matters more, not less

The abundance that AI brings, though, will come with its own demands. I think our children – and honestly, all of us – will need more support than we’ve needed in a long time. Support in knowing ourselves deeply. Support in building relationships that actually hold up. Support in learning fundamentals well enough that the integration of new knowledge stays in our own hands, rather than something we simply outsource and stop understanding.

That, to me, is the real task ahead. Not competing with AI.

Three books, if you want to go further

If any of this resonates, here are three books I’d genuinely recommend, one for each of the ideas above:

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda – the foundational text, for me, on what it actually means to know yourself. It’s shaped more of modern Western interest in Indian spiritual thought than almost any other single book, and it holds up.

The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz – the book behind the Harvard study mentioned above. Accessible, well-written, and backed by more real longitudinal data than almost anything else written about happiness.

The Great Mental Models, Volume 1: General Thinking Concepts by Shane Parrish — the clearest starting point I know of for learning to think in fundamentals rather than facts, across science, economics, and everyday decision-making.

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References

Waldinger, R., & Schulz, M. (2023). The good life: Lessons from the world’s longest scientific study of happiness. Simon & Schuster.