# New Age Optimism & What It Means To Be Human

A culture of emotional numbness grew up inside unprecedented abundance. AI might be the thing that forces us back toward taste, courage, and being human again.

Author: Konstantinos Papadopoulos (https://knspap.com)
Published: 2026-10-03
Reading time: 6 min (1242 words)
Tags: Culture, AI
Canonical URL: https://knspap.com/essays/new-age-optimism

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I really like observing culture. Because culture is upstream of everything, politics, economy, religion etc, you can get a pretty good idea of a society’s fabric by observing emerging cultural trends. And one of the saddest (and very disgusting) cultural trends that has made its way from the internet megaphone into the real life human consciousness is a shift towards emotional numbness. How many young people, men and women, have you come across that started as a joyful, lustful, vibrant soul that over time have lost a huge portion of their former vitality? How many playful kids have died from a fear of jumping into the dirty pit? How many friendships have silently died out, out of fear of suggesting that group trip? How many relationships never recovered (or even started for that matter!) because some self loathing crazy bitch or some 45 y.o. incel social media creator, convinced you that preserving your ego is the ultimate moral victory?

We — and by “we” I mean Western post-WW2 society — grew up in a society that received the extraordinary gift of historically unprecedented abundance, economic growth and prosperity, largely under the security umbrella of a Globalist American Empire. Despite all of the failures and excesses of the boomer and millennial years, we are still living under conditions that, a few hundred years ago, a king would have considered unimaginable. Pretty much every Western person reading this has access to food, clean water, electricity, antibiotics, sex, instant communication with almost anyone on earth, cheap international travel, entertainment on demand, information about almost anything ever written, and material goods that would have been considered luxuries even to the wealthiest people in human history. Isn't it crazy to think that, in purely material terms, many of us are objectively living lives that emperors could not have dreamed of 200 years ago?

And yet, somehow, all of this abundance doesn't seem to have translated into a corresponding abundance of happiness. The younger generation is infamous for recording some of the highest rates of depression ever observed. Now, you can argue like a retard that the definition of depression has changed, or that we don't really know what “happiness” means, or whatever other mental gymnastics you need to perform to make the numbers less uncomfortable. I'm not a professor, and I'm certainly not a wordcel. In fact, I don't even care that much about the statistics, because I can see it with my own eyes. You talk to young people and, increasingly, there is a strange absence of ambition. People don't seem to have dreams in the old-fashioned sense of the word. They couldn’t care less about winning. They are suspicious of wanting too much, suspicious of caring too much, suspicious of taking anything too seriously. There is a strange psychological flattening taking place. Everybody has become intellectually and psychologically German — and I mean that in the derogatory form. Even the type of humour has changed, allowing the proliferation of self-deprecating jokes that surely must have some impact on the self image over-time.

I don’t know exactly what caused this and it’s a multi dimensional problem anyway. Somewhere along the way, emotional self-protection became a virtue. We learned to hedge our opinions, pre-empt our own embarrassment, detach ourselves before someone else could reject us (how dare they!). The internet didn't invent this instinct, but it certainly amplified it with unlimited distribution. We have gradually started treating the avoidance of negative emotions as a form of psychological maturity. Don't get too attached. Don't care too much. Don't let anyone disrespect you. Don't put yourself in a position where you might get rejected. Don't make the first move. Don't take things personally. Don't give anyone the satisfaction of knowing they hurt you. All of these things sound perfectly reasonable when taken individually, but taken together, they produce a rather bizarre conception of what a healthy human being is supposed to look like: someone who is almost impossible to hurt because they have systematically removed themselves from anything that could hurt them.

But here’s the problem. Selectively removing the painful parts of human existence doesn’t work — the human psyche is not a buffet. The same person who is capable of being devastated by rejection is also capable of falling madly in love. The same person who can be humiliated can also experience genuine pride. And the same person who can fail spectacularly is the only one capable of building extraordinary things. Vulnerability and vitality are not separate systems; they are two sides of the same coin. If you spend your entire life optimizing away the possibility of pain, you don't end up with a happier version of yourself, but rather a much narrower, empty one.

And that is where I think AI can serve as a catalyst for change; for a complete cultural reset. A lot of doomers will look at AI as the ultimate threat to mankind. They will behave as modern day luddites, textile workers who are destroying the industrial machinery in protest. I am sympathetic to these people — and disclaimer — I am a software developer by trade, hence can be considered as “the first one in line to get replaced”. Yet, I choose not to be a luddite, because I believe that being human, being valuable, being a good operator and generalist is much more than being a good token generator. Noone wants to admit but we optimized ourselves away way before AI could get the chance to replace us. I am ambitious that humankind will look at history and the amazing things every single technology — yes, nuclear too — has brought upon us, and eventually view AI (now renamed to SI!) as nothing more than a gateway to more abundance. We are already standing on the shoulders of giants and our legacy must also be one of hopefulness & courageousness and not fear and pessimism.

I do believe AI will make us as a society re-appreciate the importance of taste and the necessity to stay away from the mean. It will force our hand into a much needed course reversal — away from mainstream education, away from office cubicles, away from standardized outputs. Because in an environment where converging towards the mean of the training data is the norm, you don’t have to be super smart to succeed, you just have to be on the tail ends of the bell curve.

Perhaps in an age where (super-)intelligence gets increasingly commoditized, human consciousness can progress by going back to the basics. Courage will persevere. Good instinct will thrive. Taste will make a comeback. And you? You, that spent the majority of your adult life “optimizing” for things that can now be optimized better and cheaper by Sam Altman, you have the opportunity to become human again. To find your individuality and reclaim some of your lost raw childhood mentality. An intelligence that was relying on curiosity and pure instinct to explore. And you will throw away all the poor-tasted societal learnings about how you should behave to fit into boxes and not hurt yourself. Caesar wept, Napoleon wept, Great Alexander wept. Do you think you are better than the great men of history? You too will weep.

> Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.
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> — *Dune*, Frank Herbert