You Might Be a Humanist Entrepreneur (And Not Even Know It Yet)

I was in the middle of a conversation with Claude (because like the rest of humanity I’ve made the switch) when it happened.

Which is honestly a very funny place to figure out a very human thing.

We were going back and forth trying to find a word for what I do. Not my job title, or my elevator pitch (which I’ve always kind of sucked at), and not the tidy little list of ventures I run. Which is quite a few, to be honest. But the actual thing. The reason of it all. The depth of who I am, how I move through the world, what I’m building, and why I’m so damn stoked to be alive every single day, even when the world feels heavy.

We tried social entrepreneur. Creative entrepreneur. Culture entrepreneur. Human architect. Ecosystem builder. Every single one got close and then didn’t quite hold.

And then it landed: Humanist Entrepreneur.

I didn’t sit with it. Didn’t wonder if it was true or just pretty. It hit me somewhere in the gut and I just knew. That’s it. That’s the one.

Renaissance humanists believed in something very specific: realizing a person’s full potential, for their own good and for the good of the society in which they live.

I mean. Come on. That’s just it, isn’t it?

A Humanist Entrepreneur builds businesses, communities, and ways of working that keep the human at the centre. On purpose. As a philosophy, not a feature.

Not as a marketing angle. Not as a value you put on your website and then quietly ignore every time a real decision has to be made. As the actual organizing principle of how you build, what you build, and why.

For me that looks like Standard Office Space Society, my co-working space in North Shore Kamloops, built around the idea that entrepreneurs do better work when they’re not isolated. A Women’s Circle that exists because women need spaces where they’re not performing. Writing here that keeps coming back to the same stubborn idea underneath every topic…that you don’t have to hollow yourself out to build something real.

It looks like trying to go offline on Fridays, because the people in my life deserve a version of me that isn’t half somewhere else. (Full disclosure, though: I love my work so much that I haven’t fully nailed this yet, so TBD.) It looks like leaving social media for a year, because I got tired of optimizing my life for an algorithm that has zero interest in whether I’m actually okay.

None of that was a strategy. It’s just who I am, and I finally have a name for it. Not just a name, actually, but an articulation for a way of being. And a way of explaining what I’m building, and why it all belongs in the same sentence.

You used AI to figure out your humanist identity?!

Yeah. I did. And honestly? I think that’s kind of the whole point.

Using AI as a thinking tool is not the opposite of being human. Nobody gives you a hard time for driving a car instead of riding a horse to work. The car didn’t make you less present in your life, it just got you somewhere faster so you could actually be present for the things that matter. AI, used well, does the same thing. It helped me think out loud. It pushed back. It offered language I hadn’t found yet. And then I took what resonated and left the rest.

That’s the line, by the way. Not whether you use the tool. Whether the tool is doing your thinking, your feeling, your genuine perspective for you. That’s where it gets complicated. That’s the conversation worth having.

Can we just skip past the shame spiral already? You use AI. I use AI. And if you don’t, genuinely, that’s cool too. But I’m not going to pretend otherwise in 2026, because that would be its own kind of performance, and I’m pretty tired of performing things. AI is here. These are the tools we have. The question isn’t whether to use them. The question is how we use them in a way that makes us more human, not less.

And hey, I’m clearly still figuring that out, and that’s ok.

I talked through this entire article out loud. Wandered around. Made bad jokes. Changed my mind multiple times. Spoke my ideas and my perspective and my half-formed thoughts into a conversation with Claude, and it helped me find the shape of them. The ideas, the voice, the slightly inconvenient way I’ve chosen to live? All mine. I didn’t ask it to write my thoughts for me. I spoke my thoughts, and used it to help me hear them more clearly.

That, right there, is what using AI in a humanist way looks like to me. You bring the human. The tool helps you find the words for it. Maybe that’s useful for you too.

It’s not anti-technology.

(See above, re: Claude, cars, phones, and the extraordinary things humans can build with good tools.)

The Renaissance humanists weren’t anti-progress either. They were pro-human in the middle of enormous change. That’s a meaningful difference and I think about it a lot right now.

It’s not religious. I’m not interested in doctrine or dogma. But I do believe everything is energy. I believe in the kind of knowing that doesn’t fit in a spreadsheet. And I find it genuinely fascinating that science keeps catching up to what spirituality has known for a long time, we just finally have better language for explaining why. Whether you believe in God, Buddha, the universe, or something you haven’t named yet, honestly, I think it’s probably all pointing at the same thing. That’s my belief. Take it or leave it. It’s all good and all the love, man.

And all of this? It’s not a rejection of ambition. Humanist entrepreneurs build things. Cool things. We take risks. We care about revenue and sustainability and making something that actually lasts. We just refuse to do it at the expense of the humans inside it, including ourselves.

I’m excited to share this. I’m also a little nervous, because naming something this clearly invites people to poke at it. To find the contradictions. And there are contradictions, I’m not going to pretend there aren’t. I’m a humanist entrepreneur who uses AI. Who’s still working on the offline Fridays thing. Who is building all of this in real time, imperfectly, while also co-parenting and running a nonprofit and trying to remember to water the garden. Eep!

But I’m also hopeful. And energized. And genuinely happy to have this conversation out in the open instead of just rattling around in my head.

So if this landed for you, if some part of you read Humanist Entrepreneur and thought, wait, that might be me too, go ahead and use it! Seriously. Embody that shit! That’s the whole point of naming something.

And if you want to argue with me, pull up a chair, because that’s cool too. I do love a good intellectual banter ;)

Drop it in the comments and let’s talk about it!

Because this is exactly the kind of conversation that makes being human worth the trouble.

Your girl,

Stace

Hey Silly Rebel is written by Stacey Owen, a Humanist Entrepreneur and Silly Rebel based in Kamloops, BC. She co-founded Standard Office Space Society, leads Women’s Circles, coaches entrepreneurs, always says yes to public speaking opportunities brave enough to book her, is a girl-mom, avid vintage hoarder, and is four months into a year of no social media. She also has chickens, which has nothing to do with any of this but felt worth mentioning.