Mumbai, mid-90s. Night before a history exam. That sickly feeling is back, right on schedule. As usual, I’ve left it to the last minute. I’m at the dining table under the ceiling fan, trying to cram as many facts into my noggin as possible and keep them there for a few more hours, just long enough to regurgitate them the next morning. Just enough to get me a respectable 75%. And what’s at stake? Oh, only the shame of letting down my family, my bloodline, my culture. Rinse and repeat across subjects, across years, across my entire schooling.

Mark Twain once supposedly said, “I never let schooling get in the way of my education.” I hadn’t come across that quote back then, but I lived it. Schooling was something to get through. Awe, wonder, the joy of learning. Do that in your own time.

And I want to be careful here. I know what school represents in a city like Mumbai. For a lot of families it is hope. I’m not blind to that. I was also lucky. I had books, movies, music, all these doorways that fed my curiosity. But inside the classroom, I mostly felt trapped. School felt performative, a place where you learned how to produce the right answers on demand.

Scarcity

Education tends to reward whatever is scarce, and it usually bends toward what the world outside the classroom happens to value. For most of history, what was scarce was access to knowledge itself. So memorisation made sense. It was a way of carrying information with you, and standardisation made it easy to test people at scale. It also doubled as a rough proxy for discipline and seriousness, two things I struggled with, hence the night-before-the-exam shenanigans.

Then came the internet, and then Google. Recall became instant and close to free. Once facts sit at our fingertips, the question shifts. It stops being “What do you know?” and starts being “What can you do with what you know?” Can you test it in the real world? Can you apply it when the situation is messy? Can you connect it to something else and see a pattern? Can you tell what matters from what is merely available, and let that shape how you live?

In a world where facts were easy to retrieve, the winners were often the people who could turn information into something that worked. The builders. Software engineers. Designers. Product people. Anyone who could make the pieces fit and ship the thing. Of course, that was not the only kind of scarcity that paid well. Finance, law, medicine, sales, management, entrepreneurship. Plenty of professions stayed lucrative because they sit on different kinds of scarcity: credentials, regulation, capital, networks, trust. The broader shift still held. When facts became cheap, the premium moved to synthesis and judgement.

Being the conductor

We are in the middle of another shift. AI. Many of us have ChatGPD’d our way through drafting an email, summarising a meeting, or explaining something we didn’t quite grasp. At first, it looks like a faster way to do the same work.

But the deeper change is that the tools are starting to do more than help with a single task. They are beginning to carry parts of a workflow. Instead of “write this paragraph,” it becomes “plan the steps, draft the materials, send the follow ups, keep track of what happened.” That is what people mean when they talk about agents, or agentic AI. Not robots walking around, but software that can take a goal and run a sequence of actions.

I read three big reports that all point in the same direction. AI is moving from a helpful add-on to a new way organisations run work. Microsoft describes “frontier firms” built around human and AI teams, where people set direction and the systems handle more execution. McKinsey shows adoption is now widespread and these workflow-based systems are growing, but most organisations are still wrestling with the unglamorous part: turning pilots into real impact, and managing risks, including simple inaccuracy. Bain makes the point that ambition is outpacing capability. Demand for AI skills is rising faster than supply.

Or, to put it more simply, work is moving from doing to orchestrating.

And this is where the scarce thing moves again. It is no longer only facts that are cheap to retrieve. Output is getting cheap too. Drafts, code, designs, plans, arguments. The premium shifts to what machines still struggle to hold. Human understanding, what people actually need and what matters in context. Orientation, what is worth building at all. Taste and judgement, what is good, true, and ethical. Responsibility, the willingness to stand behind a choice and live with its consequences.

Education cannot only produce capability. It has to produce character. Knowledge matters. Skill matters. But so does taste, the ability to tell good work from impressive work. As machines get better at producing, the scarce thing is the person behind the output, not the output. A person with real domain depth, who can reason from first principles, who can spot the edge cases where rules break, who has a moral backbone, and who is willing to be accountable. Someone who can set a direction, not just complete a task. Someone who treats the work as a responsibility, not a process.

Education has to move from producing competent doers to forming responsible conductors.

Education and Meaning

“In an age such as ours, that is to say in an age of existential vacuum, the foremost task of education, instead of being satisfied with transmitting traditions and knowledge, is to refine the capacity which allows man to find unique meanings. Today, education cannot afford to proceed along the lines of tradition, but must elicit the ability to make independent and authentic decisions.”
- Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning

Frankl wrote that in the 1960s. At the time, as traditions were fading, people were being pulled into a kind of drift, drifting into conformism or getting pulled into totalitarian ideologies. He wasn’t a hardline traditionalist, but he worried that if traditions crumble and values thin out, people, rather than being free, become unmoored. In the absence of something solid, many reach for what feels like certainty, no matter how dubious the source. He called it the existential vacuum, that strange condition of being busy and empty at the same time. And he argued that the task of education is to refine the capacity for meaning, the ability to sense what matters in a specific moment and take responsibility for it.

In 2026, education needs to form people who can tell what’s true enough to act on, who will stand behind their choices even when a machine did half the work, and who have a reason for acting that goes beyond status and comfort. You can see what that looks like in the basics: assessment that asks for judgement and trade-offs rather than polished output, real projects with real stakes, AI used as a mirror for taste and ownership, and the kind of reflection and discussion that forces you to reason, empathise, and take responsibility when there is no neat answer.

So, back to that boy under a ceiling fan in Mumbai, trying to hold a night’s worth of facts in his noggin for one more morning. The test of my schooling was, “What do I need to remember to get through tomorrow?” If I were that boy today, the question would be, “Who do I need to become to get through life?”

References

A quick note about the workshop:

If “Who do I need to become to get through life?” stirred something in you, that’s very close to what my upcoming workshop is about.

On Saturday 28 March (11am–3pm) at Sanders Place, Richmond, I’m hosting a small in-person workshop called Finding Meaning in Work (capped at 15).

What we’ll actually do in the room:

It’s reflective, not career advice. No jargon, no hustle culture, and you won’t be put on the spot. Sharing is optional.

If you’d like to join, you can book below. Use DBN2026 at checkout.

On the fence? Reply with a sentence about your situation and I’ll tell you honestly if it’s a fit.