We race toward a never-ending story of growth and meaning.

The Meaning Economy (https://MeaningEconomy.ca) is the slowing down of the trappings of the rat-race, a productivity of connection, rather than of just transactions.

It is necessarily a communication and connection game – a much needed change from the drive-by consumption mentalities derived from nihilism and materialism.

Like continuous branches emanating to impact every aspect of society and area of individual lives, each connection builds on the network effect of community.

In this way, the old commercial and corporate sales conversations will no longer be chosen by default due to lack of healthy alternatives.

There are so many channels begging to capture the mindshare and groups you seek to cultivate, because it benefits the platform in mass scale, not because it benefits your small sphere.

Where you witness lack of control of the audience's attention, the metrics, and mostly the monetization, it certainly spells a conflict of interest.

If you are asking for an alternative to these walled gardens and in-human ecosystems, all your conversations need to belong to you.

Your voice and your reputation lead to your compensation and success.

Upon first appearances, the most popular ‘free’ and ‘open’ content-delivery and customer engagement platforms must be the best; but when did anyone prove that the majority are correct?

Notwithstanding the valuable uses of social media, we see ever-present and increasing data proving that mental health is being sacrificed on the altar of global communication.

We stand at the verge of a crisis, to only be amplified by a passive audience hypnotized by conversations mediated, massaged, and excused by Artificial Intelligence Language Models (LLMs).

Synthetic and biased data, though sourced from the vast repository of human knowledge (who could argue against that?), has the potential to dilute ‘fact’ and new editorial thoughts to their lowest common denominators – the economies of commercial scale and socially-mediated drivel, rather than the human voices upon which we depend to truly connect our hearts as the driving incentive to fiercely guard our critical thinking skills.

Skills fade and are forgotten, when not diligently practiced, and when the earned knowledge ceases to be actively applied in every-day life.

One day, the majority of humans will depend on AI the way we all depend on calculators and computers today.

Before map and navigation were commodity applications available to all, we had to benefit from the learning to read maps, and deduce where we stood in place and time.

In the Meaning Economy, effective communication and critical thinking skills become a valuable, scarce, and non-fungible commodity (or individualized token of real intelligence) to be traded for mutual benefit and commerce.

This has time-tested and broad value in both one-to-one, and one-to-many scaling models, just as many old books have proven their unique and un-duplicated value – and that had nothing to do with copyright laws, which are highly threatened in the modern age of AI ingestion, recycling, synthetic works, and content generation writ large.

Consider the opportunity costs suffered by countless people who pursue a solution, only to discover later that they didn't ‘know any better’.

We often didn't have the right influences, mentorship, or guidance on a personal or professional level.

What if each of us could go back in time and change our ways based on new insights?

That certainly would bring about changes in behavior, by re-examining both the futility of habits, and the things we would ultimately not want to change, even given the power to change them.

This has always been possible, in effect, because going back only requires a reversal of the intelligence inputs, assumptions, and action steps that inform your thinking now.

It does not require changing past events, recovering lost resources, or bringing anything dead back to life, it requires only new perspective in hindsight.

For this purpose, Artificial Intelligence does have its place, but it is not the General Intelligence it is cracked up to be.

AI does not generate, but merely synthesizes the existing and the old, selectively trained by mindshare engineers and masters of persuasion with something to sell.

Large Language Models cannot reason, albeit they may reverse the prompt on us to think of new ideas – but only if we choose to do that.

Copying and pasting is cheating, the plagiarism of our college-days when writing essays at a sloppy feverish pace.

AI does not have the answers, only more questions to ask itself with our training efforts – but it never will be an autonomous human child – do not be fooled by the marketing hype.

For a society seeking to evade asking ourselves the really important questions demanded of critical thinking practice and application of human intelligence, the wholesale offshoring of questions to a magic answer machine spells doom-prompting, and the AI fatigue may set in sooner than we expected.

For many of us, Artificial Intelligence has already worn out its welcome, even though we have some valuable uses for it as a servant device of our conscious human will.

It should never be viewed as our wise parent, or it will be our final captor, ceasing the existence of the human spirit and our species as a whole.

The more experienced among us hit the shortfalls of solutions to our perceived problems quite quickly and readily.

As costs and inconveniences mount, walls to the direct flow of communication and commerce rise higher and sleeker.

We seek new requirements to effectively deliver value and receive compensation in our daily endeavors.

Wisdom in applying appropriate solutions to the real problems can be found in humble introspection and changing beliefs.

We make the world a better place in which our generations can live with purpose, when we diligently seek connection with meaning and with others.