Morning, CEO!
I spent most of yesterday staring at a blinking cursor while an AI agent wrote better React code than me in seconds. It’s fine. I’m fine.
But it did send me into a mild existential spiral (my favorite hobby). If the bots take the logic and the logistics, what’s actually left for us?
I went digging for answers in E.O. Wilson’s The Origins of Creativity. Wilson wasn’t a tech guru; he was a Harvard biologist who studied ants.
And strangely, he gave me the best career advice I’ve heard in 2025.
If you’re worried about AI taking your job, grab a stick and a marshmallow. We need to talk about fire.
1. The Day is for Robots, The Night is for You
I am obsessed with “optimizing” my day.
I track my hours. I color-code my calendar. I try to turn myself into a processing machine.
Wilson says this is exactly how our ancestors survived... during the Day.
For early humans, daytime conversation was boring. It was 100% logistical. “Where is the bison?” “Hand me that rock.” “Don’t eat that berry, Steve died.”
It was high-efficiency data transfer. Survival mode.
But then, the sun went down.
We built a fire. And the data changed.
Anthropologists found that at night, 81% of the conversation wasn’t about logistics. It was storytelling. It was gossip. It was myth-making. It was Creative.
Fire didn’t just cook our meat (giving us the calories to grow big brains); it gave us a “safe zone” where we didn’t have to hunt. We could just be.
Here is the uncomfortable truth for us late bloomers:
AI owns the Day.
AI is better at “Where is the bison?” logic. It is better at the spreadsheet, the syntax, the logistics. If your value is purely “I can process daytime tasks fast,” you are competing with a nuclear-powered calculator.
But AI doesn’t have a Night.
It doesn’t sit around a campfire trying to make sense of the stars. It doesn’t use metaphors to explain why we should care about the quarterly goals.
Your job, as the leader of your own career, is no longer just “hunting.” Your job is to build the fire. Your job is to tell the story that makes the hunt matter.
2. Why We Are Weirdly Heroic (and AI Isn’t)
My social battery holds a charge for approximately 15 minutes. The idea of “group activities” usually makes me want to hide in a server room.
But Wilson points out something fascinating about evolution.
If you look at “survival of the fittest” on an individual level, heroism makes zero sense.
If you run into a burning building to save someone, your “selfish genes” should be screaming, “Are you an idiot? We need to reproduce! Run away!”
Yet, humans do it. We sacrifice ourselves for the tribe. We have honor. We have ethics.
Why? Because of Group Selection.
A tribe of selfish cowards might survive individually for a bit, but a tribe of altruistic heroes will crush them in the long run.
Culture and Art were the “software updates” that programmed us to care about the group over the individual. They are the glue.
This is your moat.
An AI can simulate empathy, but it has no skin in the game. It cannot be brave. It cannot sacrifice. It doesn’t care if the company (the tribe) survives, because it can’t die.
In your work, are you just transacting? Or are you building the “glue”?
When you manage a client or a project, you aren’t just delivering a file. You are signaling: “I am in your tribe. I will not let this fail. I have your back.”
That feeling of safety you give people? That’s biological. That’s ancient. And that is something a prompt cannot generate.
3. Don’t Be a Water Strider
Wilson describes these little insects called water striders. They live their entire lives on the surface film of a pond.
To them, the world is 2D. They have food, they have mates, they have a little society. But they have no idea that deep water exists below them or that birds exist above them.
If you tried to explain a “bird” to a water strider, they’d think you were hallucinating.
Wilson’s critique of the modern world is that we’ve split into two camps of water striders:
The Artists: Who obsess over human feelings but refuse to understand how the world actually works (science/tech).
The Scientists: Who dig deep into one tiny technical niche but forget why it matters to the human soul.
I feel this split every day. I see “Tech Bros” building tools that solve nothing, and “Creatives” terrified of tools that could help them.
To become the kind of human that simply cannot be automated, you have to be amphibious.
You need the Science (the technical competence to use the tools, to understand the data, to see the “deep water”) AND the Humanities (the ability to feel, to judge, to see the “birds”).
If you are just a “tech person,” you are a commodity.
If you are just a “vibes person,” you are irrelevant.
The “Agency of One” mindset requires you to merge them. Use the tech to extend your senses (like a microscope), but use your human wisdom to decide what you are looking at.
The Bottom Line
I know it feels like the machines are winning.
But remember: They are just really, really good at the “Daytime.”
They can calculate the trajectory of the spear perfectly. But they don’t know why we’re hunting, and they certainly don’t know how to celebrate when we bring the bison home.
Stop trying to out-calculate the calculator.
Light a fire. Tell a story. Be the one who makes the group feel safe.
That’s what you were built for.
Links:
https://eowilsonfoundation.org/about-us/e-o-wilson
https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Creativity-Edward-Wilson/dp/1631494856
