What's happening to wisdom?
This morning I heard a kid say to his dad as they passed me on their walk to school, "Dad, you give me wisdom on top of wisdom."
It reminded me how my dad's lessons became guiding principles for me when I was that age — listening to how he'd learned and applied his own, long before I had a word for any of it. That's how we learn about life, isn't it? The experiences that give us new insight into who we are as human beings and the identity we're cultivating every day.
The idea of "who are we becoming" has always fascinated me. As a child, I would watch people closely in public — to the point that my mom told me to stop staring, giving an embarrassed nod to those who noticed, and to the awkwardness that followed when I simply couldn't stop.
People fascinated me. They still do. Mostly I would watch their eyes. I felt I could see into their souls. I'm sure you have your own version of that, too — remember how learning from adults was about trying to understand? Learning from other kids was more about mimicking behavior, keeping up, and perhaps showing off. Ok, that was me — always trying to outdo other kids' agility, which might be why I ended up a competitive gymnast from the age of six. But I digress. Or maybe not.
Because that's what the staring and the watching and the wondering actually were: curiosity about human intention, thoughts, and behaviors before I had any understanding about what it meant to be an expression of myself. I wasn't studying people to collect facts about them; I was trying to understand them to understand myself.
That same curiosity is what we need now in our relationship with AI and what human participation looks like. Not managing the technology — understanding the human capacity underneath it, and building the conditions for us to show up fully.
Machines can execute what we spent years becoming experts at — not just AI, but also what we've been doing since the Industrial Revolution.
My point is: are we experts on being human?
Do we understand how to work with ourselves beyond emotional intelligence? Emotional intelligence matters. But it's not the whole of our human capacity.
Wisdom is deeper than managing our own emotions or being empathic with others. It's understanding cause and effect — what our choices set in motion, what they shape in others, what they normalize in a culture, and how our choices impact our collective future, not just our own.
How do we learn and grow now? Are we willing to give up what we know, and challenge what we don't, so we can know what we don't know — and with that, find the wisdom, not just the information? And what is wisdom, anyway? Is the wise one the elder who knows all things about how life works? Perhaps.
Then what happens to youth when the elder becomes a machine with all the answers, and we're left with no questions to wonder about? The wondering doesn't disappear because the answer showed up faster. It disappears because we no longer need it. And a capacity you stop using is a capacity you stop having.
Is wisdom what inspires innovation?
I believe wisdom comes from curiosity, not from knowing. I believe it comes from seeing the connections in the living system we're all part of — whether in nature or in culture. And I believe it comes from the very intelligence that we humans have been managing, ignoring, suppressing, and dismissing for centuries: our own judgment about what matters, and why.
What none of it has — the machines, or the systems before them — is an essential, critical understanding of human nature: the thing that makes the difference between more and faster versus better and smarter. A machine can answer a question in a second. It can't tell you which question was worth asking, or what it costs you to stop asking it yourself.
Asking the question: why?
We ask that question from childhood. And it's not actually because we're trying to understand just what something is and how it works — it's because we need to understand why it matters.
We're at a choice point. We have to decide whether AI speed determines the future, or whether our human participation shapes the decisions we make and what we choose to pay attention to, act on, and hold as meaningful. That takes wisdom — the same understanding of cause and effect we started with, applied at scale: what our participation sets in motion, and what it normalizes if we don't.
That takes pause, because wisdom doesn't show up in a hurry. Not because we need to slow down the speed of change — change is how we grow — but to pause to ask the questions that remind us wisdom knows why it matters.
PAUSE ON THIS:
Before you move on to the next thing today, stay here for a moment.
Where in your life are you collecting information, when what you’re really looking for is why it matters?
When did you last pause long enough to notice what — or who — you were paying attention to?
What’s a question you’ve stopped asking, because you assumed someone (or something) already had the answer?
You don’t need to answer right away. Just let the question sit with you. That’s the pause.
