There’s a moment I keep returning to. It’s not dramatic. I was sitting in the kitchen, watching steam spiral out of a chipped mug. Outside, a cat threaded its way along the fence line. Nothing was urgent. Nothing was optimized. And yet, everything felt just right. Lately, it’s hard to find that kind of quiet. We live in the middle of an accelerating equation—models getting smarter, decisions getting faster, predictions edging closer to prophecy. Everyone talks about intelligence. Almost no one talks about patience. But I’ve been thinking: maybe the future isn’t about speed. Maybe it’s about staying. I read a lot about artificial intelligence. I use it. I write with it. I even ask it questions I used to ask myself. And still, there’s this quiet instinct in me that holds back, like a dog waiting at the edge of a river it isn’t sure how to cross. Stoicism, in this context, doesn’t mean ignoring the changes. It means meeting them without flinching. It means seeing the neural networks for what they are—tools, not truths. Weather, not fate. There’s a kind of resistance in not reacting to everything. I think of my grandfather, who would fix broken radios in silence, who never once googled how to do anything, because he lived inside his own answers. He was, without ever calling it that, a stoic. And he was deeply human in ways that no machine has replicated. He waited for things. He got things wrong. He forgave without keeping track. If AI is teaching us to want everything at once, maybe humanity will be the art of wanting less—but more deeply. Not everyone needs to write manifestos or retreat into analog monasteries. Maybe it’s enough to keep practicing the small mechanics of being human: taking time to decide. Sitting with not knowing. Listening when no one is speaking. The future is coming fast, yes. But I don’t want to outrun myself trying to meet it. I want to be there when it arrives—fully. Unflinchingly. Human.