I was programmed to work. Not by ideology, but by life’s necessity.
In a single-parent corner of Los Angeles, the only way out was forward. If I wanted a bike, I shined shoes or delivered newspapers. If I wanted gas for the car, my buck-sixty-five-an-hour job covered it. That’s just how life worked back then: You earned what you got.
So, when I married young, Mormon-young, and Carrie got pregnant three days later (yes, that fast), I did what I was wired to do. I worked. I studied. I built.
I didn’t ask “why.” The “why” was survival. The “why” was a cramped apartment across from CSUN. Eventually it was a house in the Santa Clarita Valley and three kids to raise.
And somehow, that drive worked. Decades later, I sit in a warm home with the bills paid and the wolf that once chased me now wandering harmlessly at the property line.
So why does the air sometimes feel thin?
Because the compulsion that built our lives has nowhere left to go. We were shaped by struggle, and much of that struggle is now gone. Retirement, comfort, convenience … they’re wonderful gifts, but they don’t ask anything of you. They don’t require muscle or grit or courage. And I’m not sure human beings thrive without those things.
What worries me even more is what this means for the next generation. Their faces glow from screens that do almost everything for them, except need them in return. Artificial intelligence can now write their essays, solve their homework, guide their finances, chat with affection, and increasingly simulate the things that once required effort, patience and skill.
If machines can do the thinking, planning, writing, creating, and eventually even the meaning-making, what’s left for them to build?
For generations, we used to call the answer “purpose.” But purpose isn’t found in an app. It’s forged through effort, hardship, and even failure. Purpose comes from pushing against resistance. From building something only you could build.
And if struggle disappears, replaced by an AI comfort cocoon, then our life’s meaning risks becoming just another product: a dopamine hit, a soothing whisper from an app, a feeling delivered by a neural chip.
If that happens, we won’t be living – we’ll be sedated.
And sedation, digital or chemical, has always been the quietest path to extinction, because it replaces the will to rise with the numbness of being carried.
History used to end brutally: famine, war, plague. Ours might end gently: with people who no longer remember how to care, build, sacrifice, or fight for anything real.
But here’s the pivot point, and it’s important: We are not helpless in this. Not individually and not as communities.
Just as previous generations built character by confronting the physical world, we must build character by confronting the digital one.
That means:
• Choosing effort over convenience.
• Choosing real conversation over algorithmic chatter.
• Choosing hard-earned skills over instant answers.
• Choosing service, responsibility, mentorship and actual contribution over passive consumption.
It means we teach our kids by example that a strong life isn’t something handed to you by a device. It’s something you build with your own hands, mind and heart.
It means we older folks must not “retire from purpose.” We have to stay in the arena, volunteering, mentoring, leading and learning, because a society that stops working on itself stops existing.
AI may shape the world, but it does not have to shape the people in it. Our newest digital creations can give us almost everything except the struggle that made us human. That part is still ours to choose.
If there’s a way off this slippery slope, it begins with remembering that freedom was never the absence of effort. Freedom is the chance to choose the effort that matters. So, let’s choose well.
Let’s step back from the cliffs of easy abundance and numbness and build strong lives. Lives that can stand upright in this new-age digital landscape, empowered to confront whatever digital and real-world wolves and challenges life throws our way.
Gary Horton is chairman of the College of the Canyons Foundation board. His “Full Speed to Port!” has appeared in The Signal since 2006. The opinions expressed in his column do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Signal or its editorial board.
