Building the Economy of Wisdom

From Identity Crisis to Human Fulfillment

Sev Geraskin

Mountain 1

The Problem

A cracked mirror reflecting 4 billion faces

4 Billion

Over half the population will experience a mental health disorder in their lifetime

Large-scale study by Harvard Medical School and the University of Queensland

Structured, face-to-face surveys of more than 150,000 adults across 29 countries

THREE BUCKETS

Material, Intellectual, Emotional Needs

Material
Food, shelter, safety, rest - basic stability
Intellectual
Challenge, growth, craft, competence
Emotional
Love, belonging, community, being seen
Maslow's Hierarchy

Maslow's triangle <-> Chakra system overlay

Different map, same mountains. Different words, same human.

THE TREADMILL

Economy over-serves material, under-serves the rest

  • What we have becomes normal fast
  • Always chasing next dopamine: Amazon box, title, bigger yard
  • Marketing sells status as fulfillment
  • We try to fill emotional gaps with material stuff
  • We try to fix identity pain with titles and awards
  • We try to solve loneliness with scrolling
"We were handed a language for purchases, not needs"

THE MIRROR

AI amplifies what we feed it

  • I am a technologist... But I think clearly about what we amplify
  • Trains on civilization's data: posts, outrage, ads, loneliness, highlight reels
  • Optimizes for engagement, efficiency, scale
  • "Garbage in, garbage out is a physics law for information"
  • "AI will not automatically create universal abundance and solve human fulfillment"
  • Material abundance yes, but won't heal the 3 a.m. ache

"WHO AM I?"

"As AI automates tasks faster and better, identity crisis emerges"

Identity deeply entwined with work, titles, roles

Layer that on pre-existing mental health conditions - it multiplies the problem

"So what do we do? Let me get practical, and human."

Mountain 2

The Human

A bleeding man debugging a laptop on red-stained concrete

THIS YEAR, WE WENT TO THE STREET

  • Met my partner, April
  • Started Economy of Wisdom Foundation
  • Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
  • Went to sit, listen, share food, learn

GRANDPA PHILIP

Grandpa Philip

"Most people walk past. We sat down."

HIS STORY

Three beats

  • Beat 1: Worked at Canada Post
  • Beat 2: Had chance at housing through social programs
  • Beat 3: Restrictions made him feel less human
"It was, in his words, easier to be on the street"

"That sentence still stings when I say it"

THE LAPTOP

Technical revelation

  • Had a laptop - yeah, a new one - and a virus
  • Walked me through debugging it
  • Tradeoffs, steps, signatures, process trees
  • "One of the deepest, more technical conversations I've had this year"
  • "I've had shallower conversations at tech meetups"

THE STREET NETWORK

Community in action

Street Community
  • People sharing knowledge around us
  • "Check here, call this number, use this app to find food"
  • One guy showing another: AI model on phone to locate shelters and medical services
  • Learning together. Teaching each other. On the street.
  • Street economy: Trading items, medicine, clothes, fixing phones

THE REALIZATION

Four-part epiphany

  • "We sat and ate with people that some of us are trained to avoid."
  • "And you know what I noticed?"

Respect. Humility.

The kind of quiet courtesy that, I'll be honest, I don't always see at tech events

"Yes, there are addictions. Yes, there are hard edges."

"But there is also a kind of presence we lost somewhere between notifications"

THE REALIZATION

Continued

  • Our narratives about who is 'valuable' are so broken
  • Fulfillment starts with safety, dignity, community of practice, a role to play
  • That's true on a sidewalk. True in a Fortune 500. True anywhere humans show up.

TWO POVERTIES

On the Street
Material poverty
In Middle Class
Emotional poverty
  • Fridges full, calendars empty of meaning
  • Costco pallet overflowing, dinner table silent
  • Hyper-connected online, starved for a neighbor who knows our kid's name
  • Excess square footage, excess food, excess devices - "still feel like orphans in our own neighborhoods"
Man with cracked laptop and bruised eye debugging malware and sharing knowledge

"Tell me again what 'value' means"
MY DEFINITION OF VALUE

"Value is whatever brings a human closer to balance - material, intellectual, emotional - without extracting dignity"

If your AI, policy, product does that - great.
If it only drives attention and purchases while emotional account runs deficit - be honest about externalities.

Mountain 3

The Way Forward

Three glowing questions on a weekly calendar

THE RESET POSSIBILITY

What AI enables

  • Not "tear it all down" reset
  • A "choose what we optimize for" reset
  • What if we built for balance instead of faster treadmills?
  • What if we measured fulfillment - material, intellectual, emotional - not just output?
  • What if we remembered human value is inherent, not earned through titles?

"YOUR IDENTITY"

"And your identity? Let's be blunt."

  • You are NOT your title
  • You are NOT your salary band
  • You are NOT your JIRA velocity or productivity graph or "promotability"
  • You are NOT your affiliation

Your value is there because you are

You are a being who can love and imagine and choose

THE BRIDGE

Lions Gate Bridge
  • What does a wise life look like?
  • What would a wisdom economy optimize for?
  • What would a wise AI learn from?

THREE WEEKLY QUESTIONS

"Let me offer a simple lens that's helped me"

Once a week - just once - I ask myself:

Material
What is one thing I can simplify so I feel safe enough?

"Not maximalist abundance - enough"

Intellectual
What is one thing I will learn or build this week that stretches me just a little?

A page written, script shipped, question asked

Emotional
Who are my humans?

Who do I text, feed, sit with - this week

"That weekly reset is tiny. But tiny things change the data we generate."

"And the data we generate... trains the systems we live in."

THE HINGE

The Core Insight

"Because here's the hinge: our choices are the training data"

  • Our clicks say: "show me more of this"
  • Our builds say: "deploy more of this"
  • Our values say: "optimize for this"

The real question isn't "What will AI become?"

The real question is "What will we become?"

THE HINGE

Continued

  • If we stay unbalanced -> AI amplifies imbalance
  • If we practice balance -> AI scales it

STEADYING IDENTITY

How might we steady identity while jobs change?

These are just observations from my own stumbling:

  • Reflection 1: What if titles are just costumes?
    I've worn many. Hung some up. I didn't vanish when the costume changed. What if we taught that early?
  • Reflection 2: What if we're portfolio selves?
    I'm a parent, neighbor, coder, community builder, sometimes I ski, learning psychology. My "self" is broad enough that no algorithm can automate all of me.
  • Reflection 3: What if productivity bought us time for each other?
    From hedonic consumption -> community contribution. What if we put the time back into us?

THE MODEL LAYER

Technical Reflection

  • There's also something we could consider at the model layer
  • What if we curated training data to amplify what we actually want learned?
    Cooperation, constructive disagreement, craft, neighborliness
  • What if we filtered to reduce the worst engagement-bait?
  • What if we ran smaller models at the edge for communities?
    Trained on care-centered local data, with consent
"AI is not fated to mirror the worst of us"
"It's just easiest to build when we don't choose"
What if we chose?

A CLARIFICATION

  • "Let me be clear:"
  • I'm not anti-growth, anti-profit, anti-tech
  • I run companies. I ship things. I like fast GPUs.
  • I just keep coming back to this:
"Growth without fulfillment is decay in disguise"

And I think we're wise enough, right now, to adjust course by a few degrees

THE SIMPLE PICTURE

"If you remember nothing else, remember this simple picture:"

Material
Safe enough
Intellectual
Learning enough
Emotional
Loved enough

"Enough is not mediocrity. Enough is the runway for liftoff."

People lift off when those three are in rough balance

Economies flourish when many people lift off - not just executives of a few platforms

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

"Let me land this with a simple, maybe even uncomfortable truth."

AI will not save humanity.

AI will scale humanity.

THE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTH

Continued

  • If we remain: unfulfilled, disconnected, ashamed, addicted to comparison
    AI will scale that. Optimize it. Feed it back faster than we can metabolize.
  • If we choose: fulfillment, connection, humility, wisdom
    AI will scale that. Help distribute it. Serve it up in thousand small ways.

The choice is NOT "AI or humans"

The choice is which humans we decide to be

And therefore, which training data we decide to produce with our lives

TWO PATHS

Unfulfilled World
Moves faster

Somehow feels emptier

Fulfilled World
Moves wiser

Materially enough, intellectually alive, emotionally connected

WE CHOOSE

The Invitation

We get to choose the dataset
We get to choose the optimization target
And we start today:
By rebalancing one need
By sitting with one neighbor
By building one feature that honors dignity over dopamine

Thank you.

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