Not long after I released the first episode of this channel, I came across a Reddit post that stopped me. A user in the Futurology subreddit wrote: "I feel like I'm training my own replacement. If intelligence is now so abundant, then what's my edge as a human? At what point does using AI to be more efficient turn into making yourself redundant?"

I read that and realized this person was asking the question my entire upbringing never prepared me for.

I grew up with a word in Yiddish: mensch. In the way I heard it, being called a mensch was the highest praise you could receive. It meant you were a good person, empathetic, kind, someone who showed up. And showing up meant something very specific. You got up in the morning. You went to school. You studied hard, not for the sake of knowledge, but because one day you'd need to get a good job, support a family, be a productive member of society. Pay your taxes. Have kids. Send them to school. Rinse and repeat.

Being a mensch, at least the way my generation understood it, was inseparable from being a provider. Your value was in your ability to take care of the people who depended on you.

I never questioned that framework. I built my life on it.

And now, millions of people are sitting with the same question that Redditor posted. What's my edge as a human when the thing that made me a mensch, the providing, the producing, the performing, is being done by a machine?

The fear is not irrational. Working with AI in a professional capacity, I am watching it, in real time, transform roles, compress timelines, make certain skills less valuable almost overnight. Tasks that used to take a team days can now be done by one person in hours. That is not a prediction. That is happening right now. I cannot dismiss the feeling that we are training our own replacements, because in many ways, we are.

Every answer you will find in a career column or a LinkedIn thread, learn a trade, become more entrepreneurial, work alongside AI, is still answering the same underlying question: how do I stay useful? How do I keep my seat at the table?

That question, and that whole framework, is what AI is about to break.

If you are what you do, and a machine can do what you do, then what are you?

This is not a thought experiment anymore. For more and more people, it is a question that has to be asked now.

I refuse to be the guy sitting comfortably telling people to find their inner light while they're worried about making rent. The system we live in, where your health care is tied to your job, where your dignity is tied to your paycheck, where your worth is measured in productivity, that system is real. You can't meditate your way out of it.

But that system, the one that ties your value to your output, is now the problem. It's the jungle philosophy turned inward. You are what you produce. You are worth what the market says you're worth. Every wisdom tradition on the planet has pushed back on this idea for thousands of years. We spent the last century burying that pushback under a mountain of productivity metrics, career ladders, and quarterly earnings. We convinced ourselves that you are your résumé.

Now a machine walks up to that story and asks: really? Is that all you are?

I don't have a clean answer. I don't think anyone does yet. I can't tell you how to fix a system that measures human value by output when the machines are about to outproduce us in domain after domain. That's a civilizational problem, and it's coming, and we are not ready.

But I can tell you this. The people who will be most devastated by this shift, not just economically, but existentially, are the ones who never considered their worth beyond productivity. The people who will navigate it with something like grace won't necessarily be the ones with the best prompt engineering skills or the most AI certifications. They will be the ones who know something about themselves that no machine can replicate.

Not a skill. Not a credential. Something deeper. Their capacity to love. To be present. To find meaning in something other than output. To see the person next to them and actually care.

The Redditor who wrote that post wasn't really asking how to upskill. They were asking: what's my edge as a human?

Your edge as a human is your humanity. And if that sounds obvious, ask yourself when was the last time you actually invested in it.

Maybe being a mensch was never really about the paycheck. The word literally means human. Maybe it was always pointing at something deeper than productivity, and we just forgot.