The Most Rebellious Thing You Can Do in 2026

I dropped Elsa off at school this morning and started driving home.

Alone in the car. Twenty minutes of road ahead of me.

And I caught my mind doing something I want to tell you about. Because I think it happens to you too.

I was thinking: “Man, I wish I could be doing something right now. I could be talking to AI. I could be answering that message to the landlord. I could be creating something. Instead, I am just stuck here, driving.”

Stuck.

That was the word my brain used.

Stuck in my own car. On a beautiful morning. With working legs, working lungs, working eyes. Stuck in the one moment I actually had.

And then it hit me.

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This Week in AI

Every major AI company is racing toward the same promise right now: we will give you back your time.

• Self-driving cars getting closer to mainstream rollout
• AI assistants handling email, scheduling, and follow-up in one prompt
• Video editing by voice command
• Meal planning, calendar management, and task completion on autopilot
• Customer service agents that never sleep

Industry estimates suggest that by the end of 2026, the average knowledge worker will save between 5 and 10 hours per week from AI-driven automation alone.

Sounds amazing. But here is the question nobody is asking loud enough.

What are we planning to DO with all that freed time?

Because I can already tell you what most of us will do. We will scroll more. We will email more. We will try to produce more. We will fill every reclaimed minute with a new kind of busy.

Unless we catch ourselves.

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Which brings me back to my twenty minutes in the car.

There was a time when driving felt like freedom. Remember? The first time you got your license? Windows down, music up, the whole world in front of you. Nothing to do except be there. Nothing to produce. Nothing to prove.

When did driving become the thing I want to escape?

A question to sit with.

What is the last thing you did that was BOTH familiar AND genuinely pleasurable?

Not new. Not exciting. Not novel. Not productive.

Just good. Simple. Repeated. A thing you have done a thousand times and still enjoy.

If you can name it in under five seconds, beautiful. If you cannot, that is the whole point of this article.

Something has happened to all of us.

We have trained ourselves to only feel alive when something is new, exciting, improving, advancing, producing, or stimulating. Anything that does not fit those buckets, we call “wasted time.”

• Driving
• Waiting in line
• Washing dishes
• Folding laundry
• Walking to the mailbox

The thousand tiny moments that make up the actual fabric of a human life.

We want out of all of it.

We want the self-driving car so we can work more. The smart home so we can scroll more. AI to take over every “boring” task so we can do what? Produce more? Improve more? More of what, exactly?

Did you see the Pixar movie Soul?

The whole premise: a musician named Joe chasing “his purpose” his entire life. He thinks his purpose is jazz. Playing the perfect gig. Making it big.

Then he dies (sort of) and meets a soul named 22 who does not want to come to Earth. She thinks life looks pointless.

Joe keeps trying to show her his version of purpose. Career. Passion. Achievement.

But 22 finds her spark somewhere else. In walking. In the sky. In a slice of pizza. In a seed falling from a tree.

Joe does not get it until the very end. He spent his life chasing purpose. And the whole time, the spark was not a thing you achieve.

The spark was just being alive.

Here is what that movie understood before AI was even a headline.

We did not come here to be productive. We came here to be alive.

I believe that on a soul level. I do not think our souls randomly land on Earth. I think it is a privilege to be here. A privilege to have a body. A privilege to taste food, feel rain, hold a hand, hear a laugh.

The body is not the thing that slows down the mission. The body IS the mission.

Because here is something nobody is saying loud enough: AI will never have this.

• AI will never feel the ocean on its skin
• AI will never feel its heart beat faster when someone it loves walks into the room
• AI will never know what it is like to hug a tree and sense something unnamed hugging back
• AI will never cry. Really cry. The way you cry when you lose someone, or when a song finds the part of you that was hiding

AI will get smarter than all of us. Probably within the decade. But no matter how smart it gets, it is missing the one thing that made coming to Earth worth the trip.

It does not have a body.

So why are we so busy escaping ours?

Here is what I think is actually happening. The mind is trying to escape the body. The body is the only place the present moment exists. So as long as the mind stays busy planning, producing, scrolling, solving, improving, it never has to come back home.

And we call this being productive.

We call this success.

We call this “making the most of our time.”

But most of us have never actually been in the time we are trying to make the most of.

I will be honest about my own tug of war.

I have practiced Vipassana meditation since I was 19. Built a whole philosophy called Pazitud around intentional peace. And even I have to make it a point.

Even I catch my mind wanting to be somewhere else. Even I sometimes treat driving like an interruption instead of a gift.

The last time I felt fully alive was this Saturday. Elsa and I went to a live comedy show. Then we got massages. Then we had dinner. Simple. Embodied. Human.

No screens. Nothing to improve. Just being in a body, in a room, with another human being I love.

That is the medicine. And I think, on some level, you already know it.

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Try This Today

The next time you are driving, waiting, walking, washing, or doing anything your mind calls “boring,” try this instead:

1. Set a timer for 90 seconds
2. Do not reach for your phone. Do not turn on a podcast. Do not plan the next three things.
3. Breathe normally. No special technique. Just breath.
4. Feel your body. Your hands. Your feet. Your weight in the seat.
5. Notice what your mind tries to do. Notice what your body already knows.
6. When the timer ends, continue whatever you were doing.

Do it once this week and you will feel the difference. Do it daily for a month and it will change your life.

That is the practice.

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The world is about to change faster than any world has ever changed. AI will handle more. Automate more. Replace more. The people who only have screens to offer will be the first to feel unnecessary. Because AI will do screen work better, cheaper, faster.

But the people who know how to feel their own life? Who know how to be in their own body? Who can taste food without reaching for their phone? Who can sit on a bench without needing to be entertained? Who can drive home from dropping their kid off at school and let themselves enjoy the drive?

Those people will be unshakeable.

Being fully present in your own life may sound simple. It is not.

In 2026, it is the most rebellious thing you can do.

So I will ask you the question I had to ask myself driving home this morning:

Are you living your life? Or are you just managing it?

If you do not like the answer, you do not need a new app. You do not need a new productivity system. You do not need more time.

You need to come back.

Back to your body. Back to the moment. Back to the privilege of being here in the first place.

That is the rebellion. That is the medicine.

That is what it means to be AI Conscious.

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Share this with someone who has been “too busy” lately. Someone who has not stopped to feel their own life in a while. Someone who needs permission to just be, without earning it. They already know. They are just waiting for someone to remind them.

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AI for a better quality of life.