When AI Arrives, Why Do People Need Even More to Learn to Settle Themselves?
In recent years I have been traveling with the PSF team between different countries.
In Japan you feel a very deep sense of order. It is not just surface quietness but an aura in which every link is precise, every person restrained and every matter meticulous. You sit at the conference table, and the other side may not say much, but time, rhythm, detail and response all have a precision that hardly allows any loosening. In Singapore you see another kind of futurism: finance, technology, healthcare, urban governance and capital efficiency integrated into a highly fluid system. It makes you feel that the future is not a slogan but a way of life that has already happened. In Dubai, what you feel is not even efficiency but a sense of carrying. When meeting a prince, a minister or a high-ranking leader, what first hits your senses is not just status but the certainty that flows naturally from the gaze, the fragrance, the tone and the posture. Then in the Czech Republic you see how civilizational depth sinks into people’s daily lives — not only old buildings, not only a sense of history, but a natural understanding of rhythm, order, proportion and beauty. And every time I look back at Taiwan from these places, the same question rises in my mind: in the AI era, how should people live? This question looks, on the surface, like a question about technology. Looking one layer deeper, it is not asking whether you can use AI, nor which model is stronger, nor whether you have kept up with the latest tools. What it really asks is: as tools get stronger, speed gets faster and competition looks more and more like exponential expansion, can you still hold on to yourself? That is the core of the question.
1. What This Era Truly Changes Is Not Only Tools but the Underlying Rules of Competition
When many people talk about AI, their first reaction is efficiency. That is not wrong: AI does make copywriting faster, presentations faster, data organization faster, video generation faster and analysis faster. It is compressing many things that once required a lot of time, manpower and trial-and-error cost into very short times. But if you see AI only as “a more capable tool,” you are still seeing too shallowly, because what AI truly changes is not just single-point efficiency but the entire pattern of competition.
Past competition was more linear. One more hour gave you a bit more output; one more person gave you a bit more execution; a few more late nights got you a few more documents done. In that world, diligence, willpower and endurance earned large returns. But now it is different: competition is rapidly moving from linear to exponential. Between a person who knows how to use AI, build systems and orchestrate workflows and a person who relies only on grinding it out, the gap is no longer just 20% or 30% but possibly 5x, 10x, 50x. That is very real.
In the future you are not competing with the peer next door over who is more earnest; you are competing with the whole combination of “person + AI + systems + a globalized rhythm.” So many people, before they have figured out the situation, first enter a dangerous misconception:
he thinks that as long as he works harder he can close the gap. But in an exponential era, many gaps cannot be closed by gritting your teeth. This is also what I keep thinking about: AI doesn’t just make the world convenient; AI is rewriting how the world decides winners and losers.
2. Relying on Working Hours, Gritting Teeth and Late Nights Is Beginning to Fail
Taiwanese people have a very strong spirit that I have always respected: diligence makes up for lack of talent. We believe that as long as we are willing to push, endure and carry, life will get better and better. Many bosses started this way, many factories were held up this way, and many families got through the hardest times through this spirit. This culture should not be looked down on.
It was once Taiwan’s most important undertone: we were not born with silver spoons, nor with especially many resources; we got here step by step through down-to-earth hard work. But I must say honestly: this method is beginning to be not enough in the AI era. It is not that effort has no value; it is that if the way of making effort doesn’t change, in the end it may become high wear and low return. In the past, staying up late to organize data might really have given you more competitiveness than others; today someone else may use an AI workflow to have a first draft, analysis and structure done — even the presentation visuals — before you have opened your first file. If you are still fighting a new system with old methods, the result is usually only one: you will be very tired, and you will have less and less advantage. This is why many people today are not insufficiently hard-working but are working hard in a tragic way. Rushing by day, catching up at night, chasing on weekends, phone never off, mind never resting. On the surface it looks like pushing hard, but in reality you increasingly lose your overall rhythm. He is not creating; he is catching up. He is not commanding the game; he is being dragged along by it. He is not getting stronger; he is only preventing himself from falling. This state may hold up in the short term, but in the long term it will certainly have problems, because people are not machines — to put it more precisely, the easiest mistake people make in the AI era is to live themselves into an old-model machine that is low in efficiency, overheated, continuously wearing out and without a self-repair mechanism.
3. The Stronger AI Becomes, the More People’s Anxiety, Comparison and Imbalance May Be Amplified Too
Many people think that when AI arrives life will be easier. That sentence is only half right. AI makes things faster, but faster does not necessarily mean easier, because when speed rises, standards rise with it, expectations rise with it and anxiety expands with it. In the past, a business plan taking three days felt reasonable. Now if AI can first run out a version for you, others will begin to expect a more complete version from you within a day. In the past, editing a video took a lot of time; now that generation tools are more mature, the market will not lower its requirements because of it; instead it will begin to demand that you do it faster, more completely, more eye-catchingly and with a better understanding of traffic. That is, AI on one hand releases efficiency and on the other raises the overall threshold of competition. More troublesome still, AI will amplify comparison.
Every day you open your phone and see others talking about AI, others showing results, others launching new products, others organizing knowledge, others automating, others monetizing. This creates an extremely strong collective psychological pressure: you seem always a bit behind, always a bit less skilled, always one step slow. So many people are not truly learning but chasing tools in anxiety; not building systems but chasing updates; not forming their own rhythm but being held hostage by the world’s rhythm. After a long time, what collapses first in a person is not ability but the heart. Sleep quality worsens, attention drops, emotions float more, patience gets lower; the head is clearly tired but can’t stop, and though many things were done, there is no solid feeling inside. Such a person is growing fast on the surface but continuously going out of balance inside. So I say: AI’s real challenge is not only a skills challenge but, even more, a challenge of mind.
4. Many People Lose Not on Ability but First to a Runaway Nervous System and Attention
We often understand failure as lack of ability, lack of resources, lack of background, but the more countries, teams and collaboration scenes I have seen in recent years, the more I find one thing: many people lose not on method but because their whole system has already been thrown into disorder. The nervous system is under high pressure for a long time, the sympathetic is maxed out, the head is always in preparation mode, emotional reactions are quicker and quicker, attention is cut into fragments, and before one thing is done another pulls them away. The phone buzzes and the heart moves; messages pile up and the rhythm is disordered; the slightest stir outside and the whole inside ripples. This state makes a person look busy on the surface but in fact scattered: he can keep attending meetings without truly settling, keep replying to messages without truly judging, keep chasing new things without truly integrating. It is not that he isn’t smart or doesn’t work hard; it is that inner control has already been taken away. Attention is the most expensive asset of this era, and the nervous system is the foundation behind attention. If your nervous system is long out of balance, even the strongest tools will be used crookedly; if your attention is always held hostage by the outside, even the best methodology can hardly truly land. I think this is more fundamental than learning any single AI tool, because the number of people who can use AI will only grow, but the number who can stay steady, clear and in rhythm in the AI era will not be large. And the latter are the ones who will truly go far.
5. Meditation, Mindfulness and Sitting Aren’t About Slowness — They Take Back Inner Control
Many people, hearing meditation, mindfulness and sitting, instinctively feel it is the language of another world: something for religious people, for slow people, for those who have already left competition, business and the scene and have time to talk about such things. I don’t see it that way. I actually feel that in the AI era these capabilities will become more and more important, because sitting is not escaping reality, mindfulness is not telling you to think of nothing and meditation is not asking you to become someone who does nothing. Their real function is to let you take back control of yourself. Control of what? Attention, breath, rhythm, the ability not to be dragged off by every thought, the space not to be hooked instantly by every outside stimulus, and the freedom to see clearly first and then decide whether to react. Once you begin to have this ability, your whole life becomes different, because what truly consumes a person is often not that there are too many things but that inside there is constant war: when something comes, a script starts first in the head; when someone says a word, ripples start first in the heart; with a piece of bad news the whole system is thrown first; when an opportunity comes, you rush to pounce. Such a person doesn’t live in the world but in his own continuously runaway reactions. So meditation, sitting and mindfulness are not slowness; they train a person to keep stability in speed, clarity in pressure and rhythm in competition. This is not merely self-cultivation; it directly affects your judgment, leadership and capacity to carry, and even whether you can ultimately take on bigger things.
6. What PSF Sees at the International AI Scene: The Bigger the Game, the More It Needs Steady People
In recent years PSF has not been working only on local Taiwanese projects: we have gone to discuss AI compute positioning in Japan, to see how cities like Singapore and Kuala Lumpur integrate capital, healthcare, technology and life into a more complete picture of the future, to Dubai to come into contact with higher-level power structures, and to the Czech Republic to think about possible links between a country, a city, civilization and AI development. The more I travel, the more I find that truly big games are held up not by “the loudest people” but by “the steadiest people.” In high-level negotiations, those with real weight are usually not the ones most eager to perform; those who can truly settle a situation are often not the ones who talk the most; and those who can make others trust them are not the ones best at shouting slogans but those next to whom you feel that this person has order, proportion and rhythm inside. This steadiness is not only emotional steadiness; it is overall steadiness — steady thinking, steady presence, steady rhythm, steady eyes for seeing things, not being first overwhelmed by one’s own reactions when big things happen. Such a person is not necessarily the most flamboyant but is usually the one who can go all the way to the end. This is also something I am increasingly sure of: the truly advanced competitiveness of the future is not only technical ability but inner stability. AI can amplify your ability and also amplify your chaos; capital can amplify your territory and also amplify your imbalance; tools can speed you up and also make you lose control faster. So the question has never been whether there are opportunities outside, but whether you can hold up under that opportunity.
7. Series Introduction: What Will Be Truly Scarce in the Future Is Not Information but the Ability to Settle Oneself
This is why I wanted to write this whole series, “Inner Sovereignty in the AI Era.” I do not want to talk simply about meditation, nor to write a set of empty spiritual articles, nor to force AI and spiritual practice together. What I want to discuss is: in an era when technology, capital, civilization, rhythm and competition are all rapidly reorganizing, how should a person rebuild his own center? From Japan we saw the power of repair within a highly disciplined society; from Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, the integration of healthcare, capital and lifestyle; from Dubai, deservingness, capacity to carry and civilizational presence; from the Czech Republic, rhythm, a sense of history and the composure of not being in a hurry to prove oneself. Then, returning to Taiwan, we see our own strengths anew and also our anxiety and blind spots, and step by step we walk back to the most fundamental human question: how to settle? How to repair? How to bring the sympathetic and parasympathetic back into balance? How to skillfully guard our thoughts in a noisy world? How to let technology serve life rather than swallow it? How, in the AI era, to not only do more but live in a more integrated way? How to go from capability, finally, to a state of being? Because what will be truly scarce in the future is not information — information will multiply, tools will get stronger, knowledge will get cheaper and efficiency will become universal — but a person who stays undisturbed amid great change, keeps balance under high pressure and does not lose himself in competition. Such people are becoming scarcer. And such people truly deserve to enter the next era.
So for Part 1, I want to place one sentence here first as the starting point of the whole series:
When AI arrives, what truly matters is not only what you can do. It is whether, in this ever-faster world, you can still settle yourself.
