AI isn't just changing how we live or work, it is literally changing us on a mental and biological level. On top of that, it is generating more content in a single day than humans made in the first ten years of social media. This is terrifying because it all gets fed back into the models and recycled. This creates a feedback loop of synthetic ideas eating synthetic ideas until everything feels polished and predictable and hollow. Real human voices are being gobbled up and are disappearing. I don't think people are consciously realizing this yet. But they are noticing it on an unconscious level. When everything is artificial being human becomes the only thing that actually matters. Your real story is your advantage now because when people decide who to follow, they are asking, Whose perspective do they trust? Whose voice sounds real? Whose journey speaks to us? Our soul wants to follow an actual person not cultivated perfection. It is actually preferred now to be someone who has been shaped by pain and real experience. But here is what people may not realize yet. Watching real content and living a real life are completely different things. You can follow the most authentic person on earth while your own life feels like a performance that isn't satisfying or meaningful. Meaningful has nothing to do with your career or how you make money. It has to do with how alive you feel. Here's an example of how I lived this. I was in a relationship where I didn't feel human and I didn't understand it at the time. I wanted depth and realness and a shared journey. But the relationship was shallow. I couldn't connect fully on a deep level, no matter how hard I tried. I was surprised by how much I felt like I was playing a character of myself instead of feeling like a living human. It became unbearably uncomfortable. When something in your life is surface level, it becomes like a smoke alarm with a dying battery. It is that chirp that won't stop. It creates static between your soul and your physical being that gets more uncomfortable over time.

What if the Dark Night of the Soul (DNOTS) isn't what we think it is? The spiritual community has blown this concept up. It’s very popular. They treat it like a required stage of purification or a necessary stop on the hero’s journey. They tell you it’s a time of surrendering to divine will, making it sound like a painful, inevitable rite of passage. But what if it can easily be avoided? Let’s look at the list of DNOTS symptoms: - A sense of emptiness and meaninglessness - Feeling lost - Intense sadness or despair - Physical fatigue, brain fog, and trouble concentrating - Social withdrawal and isolation - Loss of interest in former activities - Feeling of stagnation With a degree in psychology, I can tell you these are the exact clinical characteristics of depression. I could pull out the DSM 5 right now and diagnose that list as depression. What if the dark night of the soul is just a self-diagnosis of depression? The problem is people are self-diagnosing a mental health slump as a Dark Night of the Soul to make the suffering feel holy and purposeful. This makes people think they have to go through this misery like it is a badge of purification honor. I'm a two-time Master and Champion of the Dark Night of the Soul. OOoof. If only I knew then what I know now. The foundational Buddhist principle states that life involves suffering, not because life is inherently bad, but because of attachment and impermanence. Life is going to life. No matter how healed, awakened, or high vibe you are, you will encounter the inevitability of the human experience: loss, disappointment, sickness, aging, and change. The initial pain of these events is unavoidable. But the suffering is optional. According to Buddhism, suffering is prolonged by our reaction to that pain and what was, versus what is. This is where choice comes in. No matter how healed you are, life is still going to life. We are here to have a human experience. But how quickly we recognize the suffering and turn it around will decide the length of time we suffer.