Why I founded S3NiTY: A return to simple living in the AI age

S3NiTY founder Elian explains why accelerating artificial intelligence makes a deliberate return to human needs, natural rhythms and the meaning of “enough” more urgent than ever.

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Every technological age invents a picture of the good life. The industrial age celebrated scale. The internet age celebrated connection. The age of artificial intelligence celebrates speed: faster answers, faster production, faster decisions and systems that never need to sleep. I founded S3NiTY around a question that sounds almost rebellious in this climate: what if the purpose of intelligence is not to make life endlessly busier, but to make enough of it simpler that we can actually live?

I call S3NiTY “the new old way of living”. Its premise is deliberately plain. Strip away the institutions, possessions, rankings and technologies that people have accumulated around themselves and the human animal retains a short list of non-negotiable requirements. S3NiTY gathers these under four blunt headings: Eat, Shit, Sleep and Sex. The language is provocative, but the argument beneath it is serious. Life depends on nourishment and intake, the release of waste, restoration through sleep and, across generations, reproduction. Everything else should be asked to justify the space, labour and attention it occupies.

This idea grew from personal contradiction. I came from an ordinary middle-class home and later built a career in another country, gaining things I had once only dreamed about. Progress delivered much of what I had been taught to want. Yet the world around me did not clearly become happier, calmer or more alive. Places I remembered changed, environmental damage became harder to ignore and people seemed to possess more while having less time to enjoy being alive. S3NiTY began as my attempt to question that direction.

It is not a demand that people abandon cities, medicine, education or useful technology. Modern people live among laws, employment, housing and responsibilities that cannot simply be wished away. S3NiTY treats technology as a transitional tool rather than an ultimate destination. That qualification is essential. A philosophy of simplicity becomes useful when it helps us choose among modern systems, rather than pretending those systems do not exist.

The timing is unusually apt. Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index says generative AI reached roughly 53 per cent adoption within three years of its first widely available products, a faster early trajectory than the personal computer or the internet. AI is entering offices, schools, creative work, healthcare and private conversation at remarkable speed. It can remove drudgery, widen access to knowledge and give individuals capabilities that once belonged only to large organisations. Those gains are real. S3NiTY does not need to deny them.

Yet abundance of capability does not automatically produce abundance of life. An assistant that saves an hour can create space for rest, conversation, cooking or a walk. It can also make ten more tasks possible and quietly raise the expectation that all ten will be completed. Automation can reduce labour while increasing the volume of work society expects. A stream of instant answers can enlarge knowledge while weakening the habit of reflection. The central question is therefore no longer whether AI can do more. It is whether we can decide what the “more” is for.

One of S3NiTY’s organising principles is need before excess. I distinguish abundance from ownership. A forest may be abundant without one animal possessing the forest. Enough food, water, shelter, time and care can constitute wealth even when they are not accumulated as status. In an AI economy designed to predict desire and generate unlimited content, the ability to recognise “enough” may become one of the most important forms of personal freedom.

That insight extends beyond consumption. Digital systems are exceptionally good at turning attention into a measurable resource. Notifications, recommendations and synthetic media compete to occupy every idle moment. The OECD’s work on digital wellbeing says the effects of technology are mixed: digital tools can improve access, flexibility and connection, while some forms of use are associated with anxiety, loneliness, information overload and strained work-life boundaries. Context and purpose matter. My answer is not a moral panic about screens. It is to ask whether a tool is serving a human requirement or recruiting the human to serve the tool.

The Four are useful partly because they resist abstraction. Hunger, fatigue and bodily discomfort cannot be solved by a better personal brand. Sleep cannot be permanently optimised away. In S3NiTY, tiredness is information rather than a character flaw and rest is part of life rather than time stolen from it. In a culture that often treats constant availability as ambition, this is more than wellness advice. It challenges the idea that a person’s value should be measured by uninterrupted output.

S3NiTY’s treatment of sex also requires a clear boundary. It recognises sexuality as a biological and human reality without making desire compulsory. Consent, adulthood, legality and respect are absolute conditions; wanting another person creates no entitlement to that person. Any philosophy that invokes nature risks confusing biological observation with permission. I do not. Individual freedom must exist beside responsibility to others.

I also do not want S3NiTY to recreate the architecture of spiritual authority. It requires no deity, sacred text or supernatural certainty. Founding an idea does not make me a guru, prophet or unquestionable master. People should question S3NiTY, compare it with their own lives and decide what makes sense. On life after death, my honest position is that belief is not knowledge. Saying “I don’t know” is a strength at a time when both algorithms and public figures are rewarded for confident answers to questions they may not understand.

S3NiTY will not persuade everyone. Reducing life to four fundamentals can sound too narrow because human beings also seek art, friendship, justice, knowledge, belonging and meaning. I do not consider these things worthless. I believe they should grow from a life whose foundations have not been sacrificed to obtain them. Music heard with attention, work that serves a real purpose, friendship given time and technology used deliberately all belong in a simpler life. Complexity is not condemned merely for existing; it is asked to prove its value.

The phrase “reverse gear can also be progress” captures what I believe S3NiTY can contribute now. Societies usually measure progress by addition: more processing power, more products, more output and more choice. Subtraction rarely appears in a growth chart. Yet removing an unnecessary meeting, an addictive notification, a wasteful purchase or an hour of performative online activity can improve a day more directly than adding another service. AI could make that subtraction possible if we direct it toward reducing burdens rather than expanding expectations.

Imagine AI handling repetitive administration so a nurse spends more time with patients, helping a small farmer interpret weather data without surrendering control of the farm, translating between neighbours while leaving the conversation human, or assisting a family to plan nutritious meals without turning eating into an optimisation contest. The machine performs the complexity; the person recovers time, judgment and presence. That is my human-centred test for innovation.

There are practical limits. Simplicity is easier to choose when housing, food, healthcare and safety are secure. People working several jobs cannot solve structural pressure merely by listening to their bodies. S3NiTY must never present exhaustion as an individual failure. Its idea of genuine access to what people need points toward the larger issue: simplicity should not mean deprivation for those with least while excess continues untouched elsewhere. It should mean designing society so that a good life does not require continuous competition for basic security.

The need of the hour is not retreat from intelligence. It is wisdom about its purpose. Artificial intelligence may become one of humanity’s most useful tools, but it cannot decide what makes a human life worth living. It can simulate conversation without needing companionship, produce images without seeing beauty and optimise a schedule without feeling fatigue. Those differences should not make us hostile to AI. They should make us more attentive to the living experience that technology is meant to support.

S3NiTY begins with the obvious. We are living organisms before we are users, workers, consumers or data points. We need nourishment, release, rest, intimacy on freely agreed terms, and a habitable natural world in which any of these remain possible. In the AI age, remembering that order is not primitive. It may be the most sophisticated decision we can make. Living simple is not the rejection of the future. It is my demand that the future remain fit for life.