When Intelligence Becomes Abundant: A Redemptive Perspective on Work, Worth, and Belonging.

I’m Gen X.

I was raised in an era of grit and self-reliance, in a family where we scraped by, where electricity got cut off more than once, where Hamburger Helper and ramen noodles were dinner more often than I’d like to admit. Hard work was not just a virtue; it was survival. When Steve and I married at nineteen, we believed deeply that if we kept showing up, kept sacrificing, kept trusting God, life would move forward. And we were right.

“Work hard and make life happen” has been a frame for our lives and a statement repeated often in our home.

But as I watch the world change with artificial intelligence—systems that can think, draft, analyze, and optimize at scale—I am quickly becoming aware that the idea of “work hard and make life happen” is changing faster than any of us are truly prepared for.

That realization doesn’t undo the value of work, but it does require us to think about what preparation looks like, especially for the young adults that we parent and serve.

The Question Beneath The Question

I’ve been considering writing this article for a while as I’ve been studying the impact of AI and quietly observing the tone of the conversations forming around it. But this morning, at 6 a.m., I read an article circulating on X that I immediately texted to a few close friends; not because it was sensational, but because it felt like a threshold moment. It wasn’t the first time I had encountered the argument that intelligence is accelerating beyond our assumptions, but something about the timing of that piece with a book that I recently finished, The Last Economy, crystallized the weight of what we are living through. The article on X, Something Big is Happening by Matt Shumer, carried the urgency of insiders who believe we’ve crossed a structural line. The Last Economy articulated, with great depth, what that shift may mean: that intelligence itself—once scarce and embodied—is becoming abundant, scalable, and increasingly detached from human labor. Reading these pieces in proximity to one another made something settle in me. This is not a distant conversation or a conversation that should be left just to the technology sector. It’s also not theoretical. This is happening in real time and it’s impacting the young people that we love, parent, and serve every day. This shift is totally reshaping the world and the conditions in which they are coming of age. The public conversation, of course, is focused on jobs: which roles will disappear, which skills will remain valuable, and whether humans can keep up. But for those of us walking alongside young adults who’ve experienced trauma, abandonment, and instability, the deeper question has never been, “Will they get a job?” The deeper question has always been, “Will they have what it takes to thrive?”

In my book Redemptive Connection, I describe thriving as the intersection of belonging and self-efficacy. A young person must know that they belong—deeply, securely, and without performance. And they must believe that they have the capacity to make meaningful decisions and take concrete actions to design the life they desire to live.

When a young person feels loved but is never challenged to grow, they become comfortable and stuck. When a young person is pushed to perform without feeling secure in a relationship, they may achieve for a while, but it often comes at the cost of anxiety, burnout, or emotional isolation. Neither produces a fully thriving life.

And this is where technology enters the conversation.

“Use Your Resources” Is About Formation, Not Optimization

In our home, and later in our organization, I often found myself wrestling with the tension between helping and enabling. When a young adult is struggling with school, a job, money, or relationships, the instinct to step in and fix it can feel like love. Sometimes it is love, and sometimes it quietly erodes self-efficacy. So, my husband and I began using a simple and profound phrase, “use your resources.” If you don’t know how to write a resume, ask a mentor or Google examples. If you don’t understand a lease agreement, ask someone older and wiser to walk through it with you. If you don’t know how to cook, watch a YouTube video. In short, we can’t always give you the answer but we can help you figure out where to look to find it.

Using your resources is not a weakness; it’s agency. It’s the movement from helplessness toward personal responsibility without breaking connection and belonging.

In this new technological era, AI is one of those resources. It’s a tool. It’s not a replacement for identity, and it is not a substitute for belonging. But it is a helpful tool that, when stewarded well, can strengthen self-efficacy rather than diminish it.

Technology as a Resource — Not a Rival

We do our young adults no favors by pretending the technological shift is not happening. Nor do we help them by framing it as something to fear.

If a young person can use AI to practice for a job interview, clarify their thinking, learn a new skill, understand a concept more deeply, or draft something that they can refine on their own, then we should teach them to do so wisely. Not because technology can save them, but because learning to steward available resources builds confidence.

Self-efficacy grows when a young adult discovers, “I can figure this out and learn on my own. I can adapt and grow.” The mistake would be allowing technology to do all of the thinking for them. The opportunity is helping them to use it as a scaffolding while they strengthen their own internal capacity.

We often use a lighthouse analogy in our work to help families understand the concept of allowing their young people to figure somethings out on their own. We are a lighthouse to our young adults; we don’t jump offshore to rescue them in the midst of the storm, but we do shine a very bright light to help guide them to safety. We don’t remove the struggle entirely; we simply shine the light.

What Cannot Be Automated

What I’m increasingly aware of is that in a world where intelligence is becoming abundant and available to everyone at the click of a button and a few well-worded prompts, belonging is not. Information is everywhere, answers are seconds away, tools are multiplying, but secure, long-term, embodied relationships are still rare, and growing even more rare.

The acceleration of artificial intelligence doesn’t just change the job market. It subtly shifts how young adults measure themselves. If productivity becomes easier to replicate, if content can be generated instantly, if analysis can be automated, then the question moves from “Can I produce?” to “Am I still needed?” This question isn’t technological; it’s relational.

For young adults who already carry attachment wounds, who’ve been moved from home to home, who have learned to survive through self-protection, and who are accustomed to instability, the destabilization of work as identity carries some weight. When output becomes less uniquely human, identity must be anchored somewhere deeper. This is why belonging is not sentimental in this moment; it’s foundational.

A young person who knows, without question, that they belong can navigate enormous external change. They can pivot careers, they can reskill, they can adapt to new tools, and they can fail and try again. But a young person who has tied their worth entirely to performance will struggle when performance no longer guarantees safety.

The public conversation is about job displacement, but the deeper conversation is about meaning and identity displacement. If intelligence is becoming abundant, then what becomes scarce? Trust, covenant, embodied presence, long-term commitment, intergenerational wisdom & guidance, a safe place to land after failure. These are not things that AI can replicate. And, in a strange way, the more sophisticated our tools become, the more obvious the need for relational anchoring becomes.

This is why I didn’t start this article with an argument against technology. This isn’t an argument against it. It is an argument for the kind of human formation that can only be accomplished in true, committed human relationships.

We should absolutely teach young adults to use AI as a resource; to draft, to research, to learn, to experiment. We should help them understand how to collaborate with technology rather than fear it. But we must simultaneously build something that cannot be automated: resilience rooted in relationship.

Because when the market shifts, and it will; when roles change, and they will; when the algorithm does in seconds what once took hours, the young adult who thrives will not be the one who panics at change. The ones who thrive will be the ones who know that they are more than their output, they can learn, they have people in their corner, they have the capacity to act, and they are not alone. That combination—belonging & self-efficacy—becomes even more critical in an era where intelligence itself is no longer scarce.

For those of us who parent, mentor, and serve young adults, the call is not to retreat from this moment but to respond wisely. We must teach our young people to steward the tools, strengthen their internal capacity, anchor their identity beyond their productivity, and remain steady in relationships.

Hard work still matters, discipline still matters, and responsibility still matters. But belonging may be the quiet infrastructure that makes all of those virtues sustainable in the world that is emerging. If that’s true, then the most strategic investment we can make in this technological shift is not simply in skills training; it’s in connection.