By Leo Babauta

These days, you can’t avoid hearing and thinking about AI — it’s all around us, and it’s taking over the world. So much of our lives are being automated … which in some ways is breathtaking.

In other ways, I think we can all feel that we’re losing something.

This is a moment to stop and reflect: what is important to remain human? What human skills do we want to protect?

Let’s explore some of those very human habits that we can’t let fall to the bots.

The Habits That Matter

While AI can generate a lot of amazing things, and help us in incredible ways … there are some things that are ours, as humans:

• Being present: The AI bots can’t actually be present with us. That’s for humans to do with each other. There’s something in our nervous system that gets soothed when we’re in the loving presence of someone we care about. There’s something that opens in us when we’re present with someone we’re learning about.

• Caring: One thing we notice from AI generated stuff is that it’s very intelligent … but there’s no feeling that it cares. Of course not — because AI doesn’t care. That’s for us humans to do, and it’s incredibly important in our lives. We can’t lose connection to what we care deeply about.

• Sitting with discomfort: I think technology is slowly seeping away our ability to be OK with discomfort. Our phones, computers, social media, AI, and the abundance of entertainment means that we can be comfortable all the time. But it’s a very human capacity to allow ourselves to sit in the middle of discomfort. And it matters: it’s how we expand, connect with each other, have difficult conversations where we disagree, and meet our resistance to doing hard things.

• Choosing what matters: Sometimes, we want things to be chosen for us, because we have so much decision fatigue. But AI can’t choose what matters, because nothing matters to it. That’s for us — we have to think deeply about what matters to us, and choose to step in that direction.

The Habit of Being Human

All of this is a choice: we can choose to care, to sit with discomfort, to be present with the world and each other, and decide for ourselves what matters.

And it’s a choice we can make a habit — something we do regularly, because we care about these human things. Because they matter to us.

I encourage us to make it a habit to do our focused work — the work that matters to us — in the presence of another human being. And have conversations with them, even if it’s uncomfortable. Go deeper, and discover something new together, without reaching for AI.

Notice when you reach for technology when you’re uncomfortable, bored, feeling resistance or uncertainty. And then turn towards that, as a human habit. Feel it. Only we can feel boredom, and sit with that discomfort. In this place, the deepest discoveries of humanity have been made. What would Aristotle, the Buddha, Epictetus, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Newton have created, if they had technology to keep them from being bored?

Choose to care about what you work on, what you put your attention on, who you spend your time with. Find a deeper appreciation for each of these, in each moment. Let yourself be filled with wonder, that great human experience that’s always available to us.

Slow down, and let yourself savor human connection and weirdness and huge loving hearts.

These are the human habits I urge you to care about. Automation will eat the tasks. But we are so much wilder than our tasks.