The Human Frequency: Issue #4

August 26, 2026

Hello, friends, and welcome to The Human Frequency, my weekly newsletter highlighting ideas, research, people, and entertainment that show how tuning into the human frequency - doubling down on the glories, small pleasures, values, hilarity, and messiness of being human - can help us build a life worth living more than any self-help book or influencer ever could.

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Trigger warning: AI content to follow, but then moving on!

Most of us can’t stand to read about AI anymore. We’re just sick of it. Unfortunately, I need to write about it for just a minute because AI has done me a big favor - it’s made me into a true human exceptionalist.

Looking at a world filled with AI and with talk of AI has convinced me that this technology will never be able to surpass what makes us irreducibly and magnificently human. My confidence here allows me to take a rare stance: skeptical hope. I critique (constantly) but have a positive vision of how I want to live and feel in this brave new world.

Hope isn’t easy when soothsayers of doom jam the airwaves. Perhaps you’re agitated by the stories of rogue AI destroying the world, or the transhumanist just-so stories about the Machine God emerging from the Singularity and transforming our mere flesh into silicon eternity (people really do think this). If your tastes run less baroque, there’s the AI job apocalypse to worry about, which in turn spark fears about being trapped in a permanent underclass once AI takes all the jobs. It’s ugly stuff.

Cast thy fears aside, Dear Reader, and let them trouble not thy heart. Because (a) there are no logical or compelling arguments for any of it, just a lot of handwaving and prophesying and arrogance (“look at the God-like technology WE created! AI will cure cancer in 10 years!); and (b) these mythic hype stories are clearly exactly that, make-believe narratives concocted by AI companies and investors with the single-minded goal of raising God-awful-zillions to win the supposed arms race to create the king of kings, lord of lords, holiest of holy recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence (before China).

Of course, the AI boomers’ own prophecies of doom are now turning against them in the most satisfying ways via a virile and reflexive anti-tech backlash driven by fear and disgust in equal measure. But let’s move past my schadenfreude to consider another future. This is the future I think will actually happen, if we keep our hands on the wheel even the slightest bit.

The New Age of the Person

We are about to enter a new age of personalism, where the greatest value will be derived from the uniqueness and inviolability of us, human beings. In a world of increasing slop, simply being human will set the standard and represent the pinnacle of quality: our taste, our discernment, even our frictions and inefficiencies.

In other words, being human will be the new rock n’ roll.

In science, being human will be more essential than ever. Humans evolved to imagine things that don’t yet exist, to excel at solving puzzles and problems. Soon, AI drudges will analyze and flood us with endless amounts of data and even “do science." Yet, it’s ridiculous to state that AI will cure cancer in 10 years or cure anything at all. Human insight and instinct will become more necessary to select and test potential new hypotheses and new cures. Humans will have to filter out all the AI noise to find the signal that actually makes sense. There will be a lot of work for us to do.

In day-to-day life, the more we’re flooded with AI, the more we’ll flock to live performances, physical art, and the small visceral pleasures of living. We’ll read more physical books, and spend more time gathering, talking with other people, in person. We’ll look forward to the trip to the grocery store, or the brick-and-mortar store to buy things made by people, sold by people. We’ll cook stuff, have people over to dinner. We’ll play records and enjoy their warmth and creaturely distortion. I think we’ll start writing more, so we know we can still do it (I know you don’t believe me on this one). The list is endless. It’s already happening. Look around.

We’ll also marginalize the anomalies and outliers - biohacking and looksmaxxing and the drive to perfect our minds and bodies like we’re machines. People won’t think Bryan Johnson is a role model. They’ll send him get-well-soon cards. We’ll spend less time looking for “the answer” and “the secret to fixing ourselves” and realize that these two ideas are poison. Humans aren’t objects to be fixed.

There will certainly be some aspects of this that will become elitist: art, fashion, home decor, travel. But that’s happened already. It’s old news. It will all be countered by the explosion of DIY makers and merchants, and our innate ability to access the over-abundance of simple pleasures and the beauty of the natural world with no price tag. Those things cannot be hoarded1.

It’s why Sora failed and why the brief moment of Studio Ghibli-fying everything passed. It’s why AI writing is hollow. The slopocalypse that we feared has not happened, and it never will. We’ll always be grossed out by the uncanny valley of it all. Even if AI graphics become perfect, and AI writing improves, it will only drive us to find more pleasure and awe in humans and in things made by humans. “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.2”

But we have to do our part. We must keep our hands on the wheel of being human in ways big and small. We’ll have to work very hard to screw this up. Keep it simple but keep doing it. For example:

Gather with others and choose presence over distraction

Create something, anything

Reject slop

Treasure reminders of what matters, like Dr. Vivek Murthy’s Staying Human Soul Box

Create good friction in your life with people and activities you love

Immerse yourself in the small stuff

Develop your own taste, and share it

Connect with a goal greater than yourself

Treat and regulate AI like normal technology, not something inevitable or all-powerful

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Try this little experiment today: Pick one thing you can do quickly and superficially with a digital device or AI and instead do it in a way that takes more time, that engages your full attention, that allows you to directly experience something you value, or that includes other people. Think about it for a moment. You’ll know the right thing.