Expect Everybody to Do Exactly What They Are Going to Do

If you are screaming at the television at the five o'clock hour, you need to understand something. A majority of what you see has been positioned for you by artificial intelligence. They already have the playbook. Your feed is not random. Your emotional state is not an accident. You are being set up to react. And every time you spike your cortisol over a headline that was engineered to make you spike your cortisol, you are shortening your life.

Pull back. Just a little bit. Not from awareness. Not from caring. But from the reaction. The things you see on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and every other channel are designed to trigger a specific emotional response. Look at your feed. If yours is anything like mine, it is full of content that pisses you off and upsets you. That is not a coincidence. That is a product working as intended.

The discipline is not in ignoring it. The discipline is in how you receive it. Instead of rage, try this: Interesting. Fascinating. Maybe not thoughtful, but interesting. That reframe is the difference between losing your peace and keeping it.

I expect everybody to do exactly what they are going to do. That one sentence changed my life. Somebody screws me over? Expected. Somebody takes advantage? Expected. Somebody calls from my past to tell me I am a terrible person without cause? Expected. There are no surprises anymore. It is almost like learned helplessness applied to real life. Once you stop being shocked by human behavior, you stop giving away your peace.

A real estate agent in Simi Valley named Brian taught me something without trying. Every time you asked him how he was doing, same answer. Working on my happiness. That landed. Because happiness is not a destination you arrive at. It is a construction project. Nobody else gets to mess with it. Not the news. Not the people who disappoint you. Not the AI systems getting smarter than you. Interesting. Fascinating. But not in charge of your state of mind.

We have built something smarter than us. We have invented an entity with more capability than any human being. That is real. And it is going to raise questions we are not prepared for. The Ship of Theseus. If every piece of a ship gets replaced over time, is it still the same ship? If a person gets enough parts replaced, are they still the same person? Darth Vader was mostly machine. Was he still Anakin Skywalker? We are going to be answering questions like that for the rest of our lives.

But none of that gets to touch your happiness. That is yours. Work on it. Protect it. And expect everybody, human or machine, to do exactly what they are going to do.