Not long ago, my mother was in a car accident. She spent about ten days in the intensive care unit, and fortunately made it through the worst of it. ICU wards and university hospitals have strict visitation limits, so most of the time I was either sitting in a hallway chair or waiting at a nearby cafe. I could not focus on anything during the day, and I could not sleep at night. It was a hellish stretch of time.

During that time, I stopped consuming AI news. Work nearly stopped as well. New models, benchmarks, and the usual stream of who built what all felt very far away. They had been pushed completely out of my priorities. I found myself asking what I had been living so frantically for in the first place.

Wealth + Health. These two would be enough.

Wealth

Most of what we do is ultimately for wealth. Thinking about careers, meeting people, meetings, doing business, starting a company, raising money, collaborating, and selling. All of it is, in the end, about making a living. More precisely, it is about creating the resources and choices that let me live the life I want.

But strangely enough, people forget the most important things most often. Work should be a means, yet at some point it becomes the goal. Meetings become the goal. Deadlines become the goal. Busyness itself starts to feel like diligence. When you stay busy following the path others take and building the credentials the market demands, it becomes hard to tell whether you are moving toward the life you want or just getting consumed by work.

That is why I do not want to define wealth as money alone. It is also about what choices I can make, how steady I can remain in the face of crisis, and what I can do for the people I love. Hospitals show this very clearly. Making treatment decisions, securing time, and enduring uncertainty all require resources. The ability to pay hospital bills. The room to pause work. The freedom to care for family. Those are all part of wealth.

This is the frame I want to use to look at work. Is this work really building my wealth? Is it increasing my ability to lead my life in the direction I want? Once that question appears, work no longer drags me around. I begin choosing my work. It also gives me a standard for which opportunities to create, take, and let go.

Health

Going back and forth to the hospital shows you something else too: health is the precondition for everything.

When my mother was hovering between life and death, all I could think was that it would be enough if she simply stayed alive. In front of that, work, money, career, and future plans all shrink. We hear so often that health matters that the phrase can start to sound stale, but when someone close to you is badly hurt, it suddenly becomes concrete. Once health collapses, so many other things lose their meaning all at once.

And health is not only the body. It also includes sleep, mental stability, relationships, the ability to handle anxiety, and the condition of being able to get through the day without falling apart. Looking back, there were many times when I pushed these things aside in the name of work and goals. But trading physical and mental health for money is not sustainable.

If the body and mind cannot hold, focus collapses, judgment collapses, relationships collapse, and wealth cannot be built for long either. If I want to move toward the person, life, and goals I truly want, these two have to grow together.

For personal flourishing, we need a virtuous cycle between wealth and health. And the more people who can sustain that cycle, the healthier and stronger society becomes. After going through this, I started thinking more deeply about how to make that possible.

AI Is Leverage

My thoughts about AI changed a little too. Ironically, it was only after I stopped following AI news that it became much clearer to me how I wanted to use AI. For an individual, AI may be less of an end in itself and more of a lever for protecting and growing wealth and health.

For example, when something bad happens, I tend to overthink. That happened this time too. I kept spinning through questions about how my mother's condition might unfold, how the accident should be handled, how to coordinate with the insurance company and the police, and whether I was missing anything. So I delegated that overthinking to AI.

What I asked it to do was not especially fancy. I created a repository, set up a directory structure, and dropped every piece of information I had into it, including accident materials and updates on her condition. Then I asked AI to map out the possible branches like a multiverse simulation, organizing them into best case, worst case, and most likely case. It also kept structuring accident and insurance handling for me: which documents were needed, what should be checked in what order, and what questions we should be asking. In moments like that, it felt calmer and more systematic than many professional adjusters.

Of course, AI did not replace human judgment. Medical judgment belonged entirely to the doctors and medical staff, and all other decisions were made by my family, led by my father. People still had to make the final calls. But AI helped structure scattered information and possibilities, and in the process it significantly reduced our anxiety.

Anxiety comes partly from not knowing enough, but also from having too many possible branches and trying to run all of them alone in your head. AI externalized that process and organized it. It showed us what we knew, what we did not know, what was most likely, and what we needed to do first. That mattered more than I expected.

AI is also powerful from a wealth perspective. It raises execution capacity, lowers the cost of experimentation, and helps explore more opportunities. I was also reminded of a business lesson: wealth is not only about earning more money. Sometimes not having to spend money reduces the greater pain.

In Closing

After going through this, my priorities became a little clearer.

Looking back, when AI sat at the center of my life, it often amplified busyness and anxiety. There was pressure to catch up faster, use more tools, and run more experiments. But if wealth and health are at the center of life, AI becomes a very good tool.

For an individual, wealth and health are the most practical foundation for supporting the life one wants. AI is best understood as a tool for protecting and building that foundation.

I will keep learning AI and making things with it. But rather than chasing technology for its own sake, I want to look first at what it actually adds to my life. Does it help grow my wealth? Does it protect my health? Does it bring me closer to the life I want?

That is the standard I want to use now. For myself, and for the people around me that I love.

Thank you.