AI and the Dawn of the Growth Age: A Manifesto for the Soul
The end of cognitive work and the quest to reclaim what makes us human.
There is a feeling that follows me through the day lately.
It isn’t a loud, panicked anxiety; it’s something quieter and harder to name.
I’m sitting on the floor with my daughter, playing charades. I’m laughing. I’m present. And I can stay here for a while (ten minutes, twenty minutes) fully in it. But then, somewhere underneath, I feel it: the clock ticking. A subtle pressure that says I’m running out of time in this moment, that I can’t just stay here, that I have to get on to the next thing.
Even if that next thing is something harmless like washing the dishes. But far too often, the next thing involves picking up my phone or opening my laptop. And that takes me ‘out’ of reality entirely. Then I have to work to get back in.
I’ve spent my career helping leaders become more courageous and authentic. I’ve built a life I’m proud of: a passionate relationship with the love of my life, work that matters, and health practices that keep me grounded. By my own standards, I’m doing it right.
And still, I feel it. This sense that we are living in a world that has been sanitized into a user interface, and even when we know better, even when we’re trying our hardest, we’ve started to act like the screen. As if some part of me is still running an algorithm even when I’m trying to just be alive.
You feel it too, don’t you? Not in the big moments you’re failing at, but in the small moments you’re supposedly winning.
The Summit of Safety
Let’s be clear: the human mind is a miracle. Over the last century, we organized our entire civilization around the capacity for cognitive supremacy, and the results are staggering. For a significant portion of humanity, those of us reading this and those of us in the developed world, we’ve built a world that is, on the whole, safer, healthier, and more secure than any our ancestors could have imagined.
Wars have declined. Starvation has plummeted. Disease has been pushed back. We used our minds to solve for survival, and we won. But for those of us fortunate enough to be safe, we’ve hit a ceiling.
We’ve topped out at the level of security. We’ve used our brilliance to create a mind-mediated world: a world where everything is “safe,” yet somehow hollow. We have reached the summit of safety only to find the air thin. In our drive to analyze and control our environment, we created a massive chasm between our ability to do and our capacity to be.
We are drowning in productivity and starving for presence. We’ve perfected the “User Experience” of our lives, but we’ve lost the experience itself.
The Final Boss of the Information Age
In every real transformation, personal or collective, you have to exhaust the old way first. We’ve optimized our calendars and our movements until there’s no “us” left in them.
And now, AI has arrived.
AI is the Final Boss of the Information Age. It has already won the game of being right, being fast, and being clever. It has mastered the one thing we thought made us special: cognitive competency. Machines can now out-think, out-analyze, and out-produce us.
This is a gift. Not because thinking was bad; thinking gave us everything we have. But because AI reveals that thinking was never the path home. For most of us, the cognitive route became a compensation: a way of maintaining ourselves, of managing reality, and of avoiding the messy work of actually becoming who we are.
The Final Boss isn’t here to replace you; it’s here to release you from the algorithm. It is the universe’s way of saying: “The game of survival-through-cleverness is over. You’ve won. Now, you are finally required to do the living.”
The Illusion of the Shortcut
The danger of this moment is that AI offers us a seductive lie: that the output is the goal.
When I look back at my own creative work, the results were never the point. The insights I’ve shared over the years weren’t just data points; they were the distillation of decades of failing. They were the result of hitting my own limits and eventually, painfully, crawling through the tiny, clouded window of my own authenticity.
Authenticity isn’t a destination you can outsource. It’s a path that morphs specifically to keep you from getting comfortable. If we use AI to skip the “wrong directions,” we aren’t being more efficient; we are being evicted from our own evolution.
The machine will always out-think you. But it can’t out-feel you. It can’t out-be you. The machine holds up the mirror. And the choice is whether you keep trying to think your way around it, or finally walk through it.
The Question We Forgot to Ask
In the early days of the current AI gold rush, Sam Altman often leaned on a straw-man question: Is AI a tool or a creature? His answer was always the safe one: AI is a tool. But in our rush to be comforted, we forgot to ask the far more dangerous question that follows: If AI is the tool, then what are we?
For a century, we have acted as if we were thinking machines. We’ve treated our bodies like hardware to be optimized and our minds like software to be upgraded. But we are creatures. Not productivity engines. Not users optimizing a life-interface. Creatures.
You can feel the difference immediately: the quality of aliveness, the texture of experience, the sense of being here, in this moment, in this skin. And here’s what you also know, even if you don’t want to admit it: it is literally impossible to be in your body while you’re on your computer.
The machine is evicting us from our intellectual hiding places, leaving us with no choice but to become creatures again. This is the door to the Growth Age.
The Three Accountabilities
To step into this new era, we have to stop asking what AI can do for us and start asking what AI can reveal to us.
From Transaction to Transformation: Does this tool help me bypass the mess, or does it help me move through it?
From Efficiency to Efficacy: Am I becoming more capable, or just more dependent? Efficiency is doing things faster; efficacy is being the kind of person who can produce a result because of who they are.
From Appearing Wise to Being Wise: Am I using this to perform a version of myself, or to become myself? In the Growth Age, the most valuable people won’t be those with the best prompts, but those with the most Integrated Presence.
A Practice for the Growth Age
The machine has won the game of cleverness. It has taken the “thinking” off our plate so we can finally take up the weight of our own souls. I’m not asking you to reject AI. I’m asking you to use it with awareness.
Before you delegate a task to AI, pause and ask yourself: “Is the value of this in the result, or in the struggle?”
If the value is purely in the output (the formatted report or the organized data) then delegate it. But if the value is in the struggle (in finding your voice or sitting with the discomfort of not knowing) then stay in the room. The resistance is the point.
Because the machine can handle the thinking. Only you can handle the becoming.
P.S. If we are moving out of the Information Age and into the Growth Age, what is the one human capacity you want to reclaim first? If thinking is handled, what do you want to do with your being?
Jonathan Raymond is the Founder & CEO at Ren and the author of Good Authority.