The world’s oldest technology is the one we need most.
“Muse contacted Spectrum for us and negotiated a lower bill for internet!” my husband told me excitedly when he started playing around with what the new personal assistant from Meta could do.
No one likes calling their internet service provider, waiting on a seemingly endless series of call transfers to talk to the person who actually has the authority to try to keep your business when you tell them you want the same deal they’re advertising to others. The idea of a personal assistant always “hustling,” according to Meta, to take care of such tasks has a nice draw to it. But before we offload all our tasks, from the mundane to the more complex problems that require our ingenuity, we should stop and consider the full picture of its impact.
We are hurling ourselves into a world filled with tools that are supposed to afford us the time and [digital] space for more connection. But we are suffering, ironically, from our lack of connection so severely that it’s making us unwell. In 2024, Gallup found that daily loneliness afflicts one in five Americans. And we’re losing the skills to heal it.
Perhaps even more ironically, as the world becomes more modern, the answer to our pain is something as old as time—stories. Stories are the world’s oldest technology, but increasingly more relevant to help us maintain our humanity as we navigate our changing world.
AI is removing essential growth-building aspects of the human experience
We’re all watching the AI arms race, likely with a mix of skepticism and trepidation (or feelings of impending doom). And at the same time, we’re testing, experimenting and incorporating AI into our lives in ways both obvious and completely unbeknownst to us. Does it make some things faster? Of course. But at what cost?
In my day to day, I market AI products from the world’s tech companies leading on the frontier. It’s not something I talk about often in my writing and sharing because quite frankly, these technologies feel anathema to the personal growth and human connection work at the heart of my purpose and what gives my life meaning. But it’s true: in my “9 to 5” as Executive Strategy Director at Article Group, I spend my time understanding the latest AI technologies and helping the biggest names in tech sell them to business buyers. This is why everything you see from me on my socials is about inspiring more connection and offering tools for people to create movement and meaningful growth in their lives, primarily through using story strategically. We need to proactively counter-balance the impact of this technology on our human experience.
In 2025, Elon Musk predicted that in the AI future work will be optional. “It'll be like playing sports or a video game or something like that. If you want to work, [it's] the same way you can go to the store and just buy some vegetables, or you can grow vegetables in your backyard. It's much harder to grow vegetables in your backyard, and some people still do it because they like growing vegetables."
He’s not the only leader in big tech saying the proliferation of AI will free up our time to do anything we want. Time to be social or artistic. Time to focus more on ourselves and less on the toil of tasks.
But it’s in the toil of tasks that we learn the skills to persevere through hard things. And it's in the small moments that come with getting things done—like interacting with strangers who are nothing like us— that we learn how to be human. (Gillian Sandstrom) The awkward conversation ordering takeout. The conversation with a store clerk to find the right gift for someone. The tough conversation it takes to fix a travel plan that needs to change. These are the moments that teach us how to spark human connection on a moment’s notice. To be patient or tolerant at moments of difficulty. To persevere through annoyances and the mundane.
They might be strange and unfamiliar people, but these interactions show us we are connected by something greater than our algorithm allows. They show us that despite our differences, we are all human.
The daily grind of work shows us we are capable of grit and resolve.
The problem-solving skills to figure out any small challenge we’ve started to offload to AI teach us critical thinking. It’s this same set of analytical and philosophical tools we’d need to spend our supposedly abundant time in an AI world on human ingenuity and human experience—to maintain our humanity in a technology-dominated world.
I don’t want to be so blind as to not recognize that there are many ways AI can eliminate unnecessary frustrations. I use AI at work and at home, and I continue to find ways for it to be a helpful tool to organize information and make certain parts of my day and work run smoother or even better. But there’s a difference between eliminating these mundane and time-consuming tasks and going so far as to relying on AI for things that might be annoying, but also challenge us and help us grow.
If we’re going to use these tools, we need to be just as intentional about doing the things that nurture our human growth and development, and counter-act the impact of AI use.
“Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research surveyed knowledge workers who regularly use AI tools, analyzing nearly 1,000 real-world examples. The study uncovered a confidence relationship: the more you trust AI's abilities, the less likely you are to think critically about its outputs. And as AI tools improve and earn our trust, our natural inclination to scrutinize their outputs decreases — precisely when maintaining critical oversight becomes most crucial.” (Forbes)
MIT Media Lab’s 2025 study, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task” demonstrated cognitive debt that comes as a result of using an LLM over your brain in a task like essay writing. (MIT Media Lab)
Well-being is not just about leisure time. Well-being is learning how to do hard things. Engaging with opposition thoughtfully. Well-being comes from nurturing wellness from unwell situations. It comes from growth through conflict and learning how to evolve and grow over time. It requires both a willingness and a capacity.
In 1994, Robert Bjork coined the term “desirable difficulties” to describe his results on why hard learning has more positive effect on long-term stickiness. In learning science, a desirable difficulty is a condition that makes practice feel harder and slower while you're doing it, yet produces better retention and transfer days or weeks later. (Glasp) While this concept of desirable difficulties was based on learning and retention, it is just as applicable to the challenges of everyday life—where we have the most frequent and abundant learning opportunities.
Taken together, these insights indicate that outsourcing our challenges and conflict to technology could lead a lesser capacity to deal with them, less learning, and less lasting impact on the benefits of overcoming challenges.
Applied to the challenge of connecting with others, if we don’t put an equal amount of energy into fostering our human well-being as more of our thinking and problem-solving is outsourced to technology, we will retreat further and further away from one another.
In a future where everything is done for you and all the hard things are simply removed from your day to day, you may have the willingness to be well. But you will not have the capacity.
Stories help us maintain our capacity for well-being and connection
Capacity requires practice.
What happens when we’re out of practice with connection? Connection to others. Empathy. Compassion. Forgiveness for others—or for ourselves, which we learn by practicing it with others first.
Our stories are the world’s oldest technology. And they offer a solution to our divide.
Nerd out with me for a minute here. The definition of technology is “the application of scientific knowledge, tools, and methods to solve practical problems, create products, and improve human capabilities,” according to the AI summary at the top of my Google search. (Yes, I asked AI for this succinct definition.)
For as long as we’ve had language, verbal or visual, stories have been helping us apply knowledge to solve problems and improve human capabilities. Stories are the most effective way of transferring any information. According to Stanford Graduate School of Business professor, Jennifer Aaker, they’re 22x more memorable than facts alone.
At the root of the power of story is its ability to ignite empathy in the brain. When we hear stories, our brains release cortisol (which helps us formulate memories), dopamine (which helps regulate our emotional response and keeps us engaged), and oxytocin (which is related to empathy). All of these chemical reactions activate parts in the brain that allow a listener to turn the information into their own idea and experience. (Paul Zak, Story Lab)
When we engage with story—whether writing our own or listening to another—we experience speaker-listener neural coupling. Our brain waves literally synchronize with the narrative. (Uri Hasson, Princeton)
As I was going through a major midlife transformation, I experienced the utility of story as a tool for strength firsthand. Up to that point, I’d spent most of my life prioritizing others’ needs and feelings, operating on little to no sense of self-worth. At the time, I had been on a multi-year journey, trying to explore the deep sense of longing I was feeling for “more” out of life and feeling guilty about it, which limited my ability to grow through the experience. Then I was presented with an opportunity to examine my story.
In a coaching exercise that asked me to write out scenes of my childhood, I was able to step outside my first-party perspective and finally look at my life experience as a story. In doing so, I felt a swell of empathy and compassion for my child self and finally saw myself as the protagonist in my own life. I realized how much pain I’d endured and how much I’d overcome. That experience gave me a new sense of strength and helped me start to make moves to own my story in ways I hadn’t ever before. I stopped waiting for permission and started pursuing my goals with commitment and resilience.
As I started sharing this experience, more and more women would tell me how much they identified with my story, and then they’d open up and share vulnerably with me in return. And so, stories help us improve our ability for connection with others. They help us see each other in one another’s experiences. They help us relate to each other as humans, no matter how different our experiences and backgrounds may be. It’s the same muscle those small moments with strangers build.
And stories keep our critical thinking in our own hands. Storytelling itself gives us a structure that is more than just a series of disparate facts. It gives us an arc to follow. You start with the context or situation. You have a character with a challenge or opportunity and you follow them through rising action until we get to a climactic consequence, at which point the solution comes in. The threads that weave great stories through this arc are all connected. At the same time, they create interesting tensions and play off one another. Those tensions reveal insight and meaning that we relate to as the audience of the story.
Maybe this is a little biased as a strategist, but I don’t think AI can get you to your insight yet. It can get you facts. But don’t outsource your critical thinking. You are still the human in control. Or you’ll be the owner of a rather flat story.
Stories help us develop more self-compassion and a way to identify strength and resilience for ongoing development and self-optimization. When we share stories about ourselves, we’re able to see ourselves through the eyes of someone else and identify with our own “character” with empathy.
In the age of AI, where our capacity for these things is faltering, stories of how we’ve conquered challenge, endured conflict, and evolved despite the world around us are the very thing that can maintain the capacity necessary for well-being.
Use your story to help you through hardship and nurture growth
AI doesn’t seem to be going anywhere (unlike the metaverse). I won’t naively hope the same fate for AI. Not just because I’ve accepted the impending change, but also because I truly do see the benefits of this technology as much as I see the danger. And both of those things can be true.
And so as much as we see the evangelization of AI to eliminate the hard things in life, I will be evangelizing the importance of doing hard things as a human, in order to better connect with yourself and others.
As the daily tasks are removed, task yourself with the toil and hardship of growth to continue to cultivate your grit and resolve.
As our capacity is removed in many ways by technology, it’s time to use a technology as old as time, story, to maintain capacity within yourself.
Before you hand the next hard thing to AI, write down the last hard thing you did yourself. Read it out loud. What did this reveal about you, your strength, and your capacity for growth? Let that be a story you tell yourself to remind you of what you’re capable of.
