To The Students Of The World
Thursday • February 12th 2026 • 6:31:27 pm
You were born into the most extraordinary contradiction in human history.
The library of Alexandria — every version of it, every lost text, every burned archive, every forbidden book that someone died to protect — now fits in your pocket. The tools to learn any language, model any system, test any idea, build any vision — they exist, right now, for nearly all of you.
And yet.
Most of you will be trained to sit still. To absorb. To repeat. To perform the rituals of education without ever once being asked to think — really think — about anything that matters.
I am writing to you because I believe this is the central emergency of our time. Not war. Not climate. Not any single crisis. But the fact that we are mass-producing human beings who have been taught to live as passengers in their own minds.
And I am writing to you because, for the first time in history, you have the power to end it.
I. The Cage You Cannot See
Let me say something that will be uncomfortable.
You are not the victim of your miseducation. You are its co-author.
There is a deal that every human being is quietly offered, usually before the age of twelve. The terms are simple:
Give up the need to figure things out for yourself, and we will give you the feeling of knowing. Give up inquiry, and we will give you certainty. Give up the terror of an open question, and we will give you an identity, a group, a flag, a feed, a set of pre-approved answers — and you will never have to feel lost again.
Most people take this deal. Not because they are stupid. Because they are human. Because uncertainty is physiologically painful, and belonging is physiologically essential, and no one — no parent, no teacher, no institution — ever sat them down and said: the ability to tolerate not knowing is the beginning of all real intelligence.
So the cage gets built. Not by tyrants. Not by some shadowy committee. By you. By the quiet, daily choice to let someone else do your thinking. By the slow replacement of curiosity with consumption. By the moment you stopped asking "Is this true?" and started asking "Does my group believe this?"
And the cruelest part is that the cage feels like home. You furnish it with opinions you never examined. You hang curtains made of borrowed certainty. You lock the door from the inside and then blame the architect.
The most successful prison in human history is the one the prisoner decorates and calls freedom.
Yes — there are systems that exploit this. Yes — there are industries built on your distraction, economies that run on your passivity, algorithms tuned to the exact frequency of your insecurity. But these are parasites on a wound you allowed to open. They did not create your sleep. They merely profited from it.
The real question has never been "Who is doing this to me?"
The real question is: "When did I stop doing my own thinking, and why did it feel like relief?"
II. What Education Was Supposed to Be
Somewhere along the way, we confused education with instruction.
Instruction is when someone transfers information into your memory. Education is when someone is transformed — when a human being develops the capacity to see clearly, reason honestly, act deliberately, and carry the weight of an open question without reaching for a comfortable lie.
Instruction can be measured by exams. Education can only be measured by what you do when no one is watching and no one is grading.
The tragedy is not that schools are failing. The tragedy is that schools are succeeding — at producing what they were designed to produce: compliant, credentialed, externally motivated people who know how to perform understanding without possessing it.
III. The Game That Changes Everything
Artificial intelligence has just handed your generation a tool that no previous generation possessed: the ability to build living simulations — worlds that respond, adapt, challenge, deceive, teach, and refuse to let you pass until you have actually understood.
So here is what I am proposing. And I am proposing it with the seriousness of someone who believes it may be among the most important things your generation ever builds.
Learn to build game like interactive simulations.
Not a game that entertains. A games that train. Reality-simulations so honest, so beautifully ruthless, that the player cannot complete it without becoming a clearer, braver, wiser, and greater human being.
Imagine:
You press a single key, F11, and your screen becomes a new world — a simulated desktop, a simulated life. You have an inbox full of messages, some true, some manipulative, some urgent, some trivial. You have a news feed that mixes signal with noise, fact with fabrication, and the game will never tell you which is which.
IV. Why This Matters More Than You Think
There is a girl in a village you will never visit who will not be allowed to go to school tomorrow. There is a boy in a city you have seen on a map who will sit in a classroom for eight hours and learn nothing that will help him think. There are a billion human beings alive right now whose potential will be quietly, invisibly destroyed, by the absence of anything that could have awakened them.
And most of the world will scroll past this fact the way you scroll past everything: with a half-second of discomfort, followed by the merciful amnesia of the next piece of content.
This is what sleep looks like. Not ignorance. Not malice. Just the soft, chronic refusal to stay awake to what is actually happening.
AI-powered simulation games can reach anyone with a phone. They can adapt to any language, any level, any context. They cost almost nothing to distribute. They cannot be shut down by a government that fears educated citizens. They cannot be diluted by a bureaucracy that fears real assessment. They are, potentially, the first educational technology in human history that scales wisdom, not just information.
V. The Person You Must Become
I want to speak to you now not about what you should build, but about who you must be to build it.
Because the world does not need more clever people. It has plenty of clever people. It is drowning in clever people who use their cleverness to avoid the terrifying work of becoming wise.
What the world needs — what it has always needed and never needed more urgently than now — are great beings. Not great achievers. Not great performers. Not great brands.
Great beings.
A great being is someone who has done the interior work. Someone who has faced their own capacity for self-deception and rejected gods, religions, serviture and the other imaginary comforts. Someone who can carry truth without collapsing into cynicism, who can see suffering without numbing, who can act without needing applause. Someone who has discipline — not the aesthetic of discipline, but the real, heavy, unglamorous practice of showing up to do difficult things when no one is watching and no reward is coming.
A great being does not reject inauthenticity with slogans. They reject it with wisdom. They have built, through years of practice, the ability to detect when they are lying to themselves — and the courage to stop and rebuild.
This is what the game must train. Not reflexes. Not trivia. Not the shallow pattern-matching that passes for intelligence in a world that has forgotten what intelligence is for.
It must train the whole person. The mind that can reason. The heart that can endure. The will that can act. The conscience that refuses to look away.
VI. The Challenge
So here is what I ask of you.
Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for funding. Do not wait for someone older and more credentialed to tell you this is a good idea. They will not. They are too comfortable. They have too much invested in the system that exists.
Start now. Start badly. Start with a single simulation, a single level, a single moment where a player must choose between a comfortable lie and an uncomfortable truth — and make the consequences of that choice real within the world of the game.
Make causality visible. Show how one person's intellectual laziness becomes a community's vulnerability. Show how one person's courage to verify a claim before sharing it can prevent a cascade of harm. Show how the choice for greatness transforms the world for the better, even when it's painful, even when it isolates you from your group.
And when the player finishes — when the credits scroll and the simulation fades — do not end with congratulations.
End with this:
Everything you just practiced was real. The skills were real. The clarity was real. The courage was real. The only thing that was simulated was the world.
Now close this screen. Walk outside. And bring what you've become to the world that needs it.
Make more games, take them to the library. Bring them to the classroom. Bring the philosophy to the dinner table, the ballot box, the conversation you've been avoiding.
Make the greatness real.
The world does not need more content. It does not need more information. It does not need more noise dressed as knowledge or performance dressed as thought.
It needs minds that are growing all the way up. Hearts that refuse to look away. Visions that can build.
You are the generation holding the most powerful tools ever created. The question is not whether you can build the education the world needs.
The question is what heights will your students reach.
