The Agency of the Human Spirit

I woke up this morning and checked the news. That was my first mistake.

2026 has been relentless. AI stoking fears of job replacement. A job market destabilized by foreign policy failures. American citizens losing their lives for carrying out their rights. And now a war.

It’s tough not to let things that affect you on a daily basis steal your hope. It may seem like things are chaotic right now, and I think part of the fear that all of us feel has to do with how, on some level, we know how fragile peaceful times are. How quickly they can deteriorate if we let them.

I used to yearn for the times that our parents and elders told us we would have if we did well in school, stayed the straight arrow path. But I think I have to let that go. There is no such thing as stability, at least not in the sense that we were promised. Not as something given. Only as something built. Their path was theirs. Ours is different. And I think ours starts with understanding what we have inside us, and learning to cultivate it.

As long as humans have been a concept, we’ve been fighting toward something. And what we’ve been fighting against to get there, the thing we can say is certain, is death. Built into every single one of us is the ability, the need, to survive.

We’ve developed weapons, religion, books, cultures, language, rockets, wifi, bombs. Everything we could think of to survive. Not to conquer. To survive.

Genghis Khan didn’t invent anything. He simply used tools that were created before his time to invade neighboring territories and feed his need to conquer. Neither did Alexander the Great. Neither did Mao. Neither did Hitler, Mussolini, Andrew Jackson, Bin Laden.

And the weapons aren’t always missiles anymore.

Sam Altman took a nonprofit research lab meant to ensure AI would benefit humanity and turned it into a profit machine. Now every product launch comes with the same message: the next model will change everything, your job is next, the world as you know it is ending. It’s not true. But it doesn’t have to be true to work. It just has to make you afraid enough to pay attention, and afraid enough to pay.

Elon Musk does the same. He doesn’t build rockets to inspire; he builds spectacle. He doesn’t buy platforms to free speech; he buys them to shape it. Every move positions himself as the man with the answers. The only one who sees clearly. The only one who can lead us through.

And then there are the influencers. The Tates of the world. Men who’ve learned that fear and outrage are currencies. They don’t need to invent anything. They just need to convince you that you’re lost, and then sell you the map.

These are weak people. Grown men who felt small, convinced themselves they overcame it, and now assume the rest of the world feels the same way they did. In their heads, they’re the strong man. They’re the answer. And in their arrogant certainty, their unquestioned belief that their vision is the right one for everyone, lives a quiet malice. They use the wonder of the human spirit, something that exists in all of us, to make you think you’re without it. To make you afraid. To profit from that fear.

But most people don’t walk around dwelling on how small they are. They just live. They raise their kids, do their work, help their neighbors. They’re not waiting for a savior.

Don’t let these people infect you with their weakness.

The tools they wield, the bow and arrow, the musket, the atomic bomb, the algorithm, are instruments that can kill. And as humans, in order to survive and thrive, we had to develop them. But those powerful tools that now strike fear into us did not come from the figures who wish to subdue us.

They came from the human spirit. The human drive to survive. To get out of whatever current state of death we were living in and usher in a new age of peace.

Those who press the button don’t care why the button was created. They don’t have to. They just press it.

But they didn’t build it. We did.

And here’s what they will never understand: the same spirit that built the tool is still here. It doesn’t always look like invention. It doesn’t always look like skill. Sometimes it looks like a man standing in front of a tank in Tiananmen Square with nothing but his body and his refusal. Sometimes it looks like a monk in Saigon setting himself on fire to wake a nation. Sometimes it looks like a preacher in Washington, standing before millions, speaking love into the face of hate.

The human spirit doesn’t need a weapon. It doesn’t need a degree. It doesn’t need permission. It just needs someone brave enough to say enough.

That spirit is in every one of us. It always has been. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we know this, because we’ve done it before. Thousands of times. Every peaceful era humanity has ever known wasn’t handed to us. It was fought for. Built. Chosen.

We can do it again.