Between Worlds
AI, Homogenization, and the Structural Exclusion of Gifted Minds
Editor’s note
This essay was written at the end of the year, not as a reflection on success, but as an attempt to articulate a structural shift that is already underway. It examines artificial intelligence not as a neutral tool, but as a force reshaping cognition, creativity, and the conditions under which gifted minds can still exist without being flattened or erased.
As the year closes, public discourse fills once again with familiar reassurance. Posts about “successfully closing the year,” well-deserved rest, gratitude, and confidence in what comes next. Implicit in all of this is an assumption of continuity: that the systems we inhabit still make sense, that acceleration equals progress, and that 2026 will simply be a better-optimized version of 2025.
I do not experience it that way.
This moment does not feel like an ending. It feels like standing between worlds. The old world is still operational, but its explanatory power is thinning. The new world is already perceptible, but it has not yet taken form. There is no shared language for it yet, no stable infrastructure, and no collective agreement about direction. Only friction, misalignment, and a growing sense that something essential is being eroded under the banner of efficiency.
That erosion becomes tangible when technology is framed as inevitability rather than choice.
For me, artificial intelligence represents an existential danger. Not because of speculative future scenarios, but because of what it quietly replaces in the present. AI is often presented as the next step in human evolution. I see it more accurately as a step toward de-evolution.
By replacing human functions with AI, we do not merely gain efficiency. We lose capacity. We lose our natural ability to imagine, to create, to wrestle with problems that do not yet have predefined solutions. Human cognition is biological, and it follows a simple principle: use it or lose it.
Our bodies renew themselves continuously, but reduced use leads to volume loss in tissue and organs. The brain is no exception. Reduced cognitive engagement affects neural structures, including the hippocampus — essential for memory, spatial orientation, imagination, and conscious integration. Outsourcing thinking at scale is therefore not neutral. It reshapes us.
A second effect of this shift is homogenization. When large groups of people rely on AI to formulate, structure, and decide, thought begins to converge. Language smooths out. Ideas become interchangeable. What emerges is a cognitive “vanilla”: efficient, acceptable, and devoid of sharp edges.
This may look like progress. In practice, it produces sameness without depth and speed without understanding. Creativity becomes recombination. Problem-solving becomes pattern reuse rather than genuine insight.
This is where the discussion intersects directly with giftedness.
Giftedness is defined by deviation. It involves atypical perception, non-linear cognition, intensity, and the ability to perceive patterns outside the statistical mean. Systems optimized for uniformity cannot tolerate this. They normalize difference, reduce intensity, and label the result “workable.” What remains is adaptation, not development.
Giftedness does not survive homogenization. Once difference is flattened, the very quality that could have renewed the system disappears. What is lost is not only individual potential, but systemic resilience.
This tension became concrete for me this year.
I transferred money to my son so he could continue his path — toward Berlin. Not as an investment, and not out of abundance, but because for a certain type of mind there is increasingly no place in the current societal architecture.
He is not moving in search of comfort or status. He is moving because highly gifted, non-conforming minds cannot indefinitely survive in environments optimized for predictability, compliance, and throughput. They are forced to seek their own kind — not for advantage, but to remain cognitively and existentially intact.
Cities like Berlin still function as gravitational points for such minds. Not because they offer certainty, but because they tolerate unfinished ideas, sharp edges, and contradiction without immediate correction. They offer density of peers rather than safety. Breathing space rather than guarantees.
From a systems perspective, this can be described as access to a peer field.
Highly gifted individuals do not primarily struggle due to lack of intelligence or resilience. They struggle because their mode of perception has no echo in the environments they inhabit. Without resonance, even high-functioning cognition begins to compress, leading over time to withdrawal or over-adaptation rather than failure.
Berlin enables the temporary emergence of high-bandwidth cognitive micro-ecologies — fragile spaces where difference is not immediately normalized. But informal refuges are not enough. Without articulation and coherence, such peer fields remain unstable.
This is where a different systemic function becomes necessary: structural witnessing.
Structural witnessing is not leadership in the traditional sense. It is the capacity to recognize emerging fields before they are formalized, to articulate their necessity without prematurely instrumentalizing them, and to protect their integrity long enough for coherence to arise. Systems that lack this function inevitably misinterpret deviation as dysfunction.
This is what NEXUS attempts to name — not as a platform or community, but as an organizing principle. Gifted cognition stabilizes only in the presence of perceptual equals, and such stabilization is a precondition for generativity. Without peer fields, giftedness turns inward. With them, it becomes structurally productive.
These are not safe spaces. They are high-friction environments characterized by speed, intensity, and tolerance for complexity. Academically speaking, they function as non-linear adaptive zones, where emergence occurs through sustained cognitive tension rather than consensus.
Seen from this perspective, financing movement toward Berlin is not belief in a city. It is recognition of a structural necessity. In the absence of peer fields, non-conforming intelligence degrades. And when systems systematically eliminate perceptual outliers in the name of efficiency, they undermine their own long-term adaptability.
This is not resistance to technology, nor nostalgia for earlier forms of organization. It is an insistence that intelligence — particularly non-conforming intelligence — requires ecological conditions.
I write this from a position inside systems, not outside them. I can still navigate expert, academic, and organizational environments when necessary. My withdrawal is not ideological. It is perceptual. What I see no longer aligns with what these systems reward.
Standing between worlds offers no comfort. There are no guarantees, no metrics, and no applause. But there is clarity.
And in times of genuine transition, clarity matters more than reassurance. Perhaps this, too, is a form of success —just not one that fits the old definitions.
Crossing the Threshold
On January 18th, from 19:00 to 20:30 CET, we’re hosting our first webinar: Crossing the Threshold. It’s about moving beyond the familiar 3D script into a grounded, autonomous way of living—how to truly hold yourself in that space.
We won’t dissect this article directly, but the themes overlap. If this piece resonated, this session will take it deeper. Tickets are available at TheNexusFormula.com
See you there!
Great piece! I’ve often said that AI should be used as a tool, supplementary to our own cognition—yet, of course, it’s rarely experienced that way by the developers or users. The sheer amount of money poured into AI, in contrast to things that really matter—food, water, housing, connection, both physical and psychological—speaks for itself. The data people freely share is another layer; it’s almost creepy how much we reveal. Relying on AI turns us into the very robots your piece warns against, homogenization in its own right, and in doing so, we reinforce the technocracy we say we wish to escape. But do we really?
You’re providing clarity to what I’ve been experiencing. My move to Berlin is deeply uncomfortable, but very necessary. Over the past years, I’ve realized that only by following this pull do the “right things” start to happen. Perhaps this discomfort should instead be reframed as excitement, or even joy.
I don’t claim to have all the answers, but what I’ve learned is that acting on the pull, rather than resisting it, transforms the frustration many gifted people feel. Patience becomes active, self-paced, and much more generative: slowing down allows you to go faster, saying no can be a way of saying yes and vice versa. No need to abandon logic, but more like honoring what makes giftedness unique and giving up the things that constantly pull you out. Instead of forcing myself to fit into others’ systems, I need to find those who simply get it and operate within a shared/similar resonance. That, I feel, is where the deeper drive lives—creating together, beyond screens, beyond homogenization, and having fun at it.
Thanks for seeing not just what I am, but what the world requires of me to remain whole. Your support is a rare and vital kind of resonance in itself!