You probably think I'm going to start this article with an example of AI stating some absurd falsehood.

I'm not going to do that. Yes, AI does hallucinate. What really scares me though, is it's getting so good at telling the truth we stop even trying to parse the bullshit.

As AI improves in assisting with assignments, writing essays, and tutoring, our brains rust, like a sad set of weights left outside but never properly oiled. It's the difference between a river carving its own path through stone and a pipe someone else laid for you. We lose our meta-thinking, meta-learning, and idea validation skills. And we lose something much worse... We lose touch with the very aspiration to find truth in the first place.

I'm not Anti-AI. I'm a huge supporter of using AI to find truth. But that only works if you have the right truth seeking foundations underneath. You can't ask AI to build those for you. It must come within yourself.

So if you're the type of college freshmen who cares about getting things right, rather than just right, this article is for you. We'll dive into:

• Think like a wanderer, not a sentinel
• How to think more systemically instead of categorically
• And finally, how to parse truth from bullshit amidst AI

Think Like A Wanderer, Not A Sentinel

On a Saturday afternoon at 3:37 p.m. I find myself debating with five Mormons at a bagel shop in Collegetown. I am the sole atheist. Had you told Aidan from ten minutes before this was what he'd be doing, he'd laugh. He thought he was going to be talking to one Mormon, when they texted him to chat. Instead, they sent an army.

They sit down with their unanimous white dress shirts and ties, name tags glinting in the afternoon sunlight. We talk for three hours about all sorts of topics: the pointlessness of suffering, the nature of faith, why streetlights are proof against God's existence (one of my finest theological arguments, if I do say so myself). I'm trying to hear them out. To understand where they're coming from. But one thing remains clear throughout: they have no intention of changing their mind. Every answer comes pre-loaded, like a vending machine that dispenses certainty for the low price of not thinking too hard.

I'm not ratting against religious people overall. I have many religious friends who wrestle with their faith in ways I respect. These Mormons, however, embodied what I call a sentinel mindset. And they aren't in the minority.

These two mindsets are dimensions, not boxes. Nobody cartoonishly fits fully into either one. We all carry both, and the balance shifts depending on context, stress, and how much sleep we got. The point is recognizing which direction we're leaning in a given moment.

The Sentinel Mindset operates like a guard defending sacred ground, a fist closed around a coin. Sentinels ask: "Can I believe this?" They carry a strong sense of purpose and identity rooted in their beliefs, which makes them loyal, structured, and dependable. But it also makes them rigid. They tend to over-trust authorities which could be professors, religious texts, AI, political parties. Truth, for a sentinel, lives in black and white categories. There are hidden assumptions packed underneath, and very little curiosity about how their own survival instincts, emotions, and group belonging shape what they accept as true (If you've read the Conscious College Journey, you'll recognize this in the Cosmic Follower stage).

Here's the trap: most sentinels think they're wanderers. They're not. Which becomes very clear once we learn what the wanderer mindset really means.

The Wanderer Mindset asks a different question: "What is truth?" Not "can I defend what I already believe," but "how can I hold onto it like a bird that landed in my hand?" Wanderers accept they don't know much. They actively try to unearth hidden assumptions, both their own and the culture's. They understand that truth is systemic, relational, sometimes paradoxical. And they pay close attention to how self-survival and collective self-survival warp our perception. A wanderer doesn't worship authorities. They learn from them, question them, and hold their teachings lightly, like a map that might need redrawing after the next ridge.

The wanderer builds maps. The sentinel defends them. This begs the question...

Why Is It So Hard To Be A Wanderer In College And Amidst AI?

Four forces push against the wanderer mindset from every angle.

Mentally, most students are stressed, emotionally dysregulated, and running on a cocktail of imposter syndrome and comparison. It's not fully our faults. We aren't taught emotional intelligence in school. Most of society doesn't practice it. So when an AI response sounds confident and clean, the exhausted brain thinks: "close enough."

The body participates too. Poor sleep, dining hall nutrition that reads more like a chemistry experiment, and disappearing exercise habits that pulled a father and "went to get the milk" collapse us away from nuanced thinking. It's hard to seek truth when your nervous system is in survival mode (check out my article on stress regulation for more on this).

Culturally, college tilts toward grades, extrinsic motivation, and getting things done. None of this is any individual student's fault, or any professor's, or any dean's. It's the factory system we've inherited over centuries. But it means the incentive structure rewards finishing the assignment — and fast with AI — not questioning whether the assignment's framing was right in the first place.

Zooming out further: Gen Z and older Gen Alpha face a financial landscape worse than their parents'. If everyone around us uses AI to get ahead, not using it feels like bringing a butter knife to a sword fight. The pressure to optimize crowds out the patience to wonder.

The hardest part though, is that being a wanderer hurts.

It means sitting with not knowing. Losing friends who can't hold complexity. Growing past old identities that once felt like home, and grieving them on the way out. The sentinel mindset is warm. It's certain. The wanderer mindset is a cold trail at 5 a.m. with no guarantee the summit even exists. We choose it not because it's comfortable, but because deep in our bones we know living any other way is just sad.

So if we're going to walk this trail, we need better tools for the terrain. One of the most essential: learning to think systemically instead of categorically.

How To Think More Systemically Versus Categorically

If you've read me for a while you know saying "systems thinking" is like throwing a dog a bone. But it wasn't always this way.

Some of my most prominent high school memories are having sleepovers at Bob's barn. We'd bring a mountain of snacks and alcohol, all endangered species in my house. The barn had a row of battered red movie-theater seats scavenged from God-knows-where, plus couches so soft you'd wake up with a crick in your neck. We'd sprawl there for hours, watching movies or screaming at each other over Call of Duty kills.

It was on one of these nights, with the air thick with salt-and-vinegar chip dust, that my brother and I got into a heated argument with Hayung.

"Fat people are fat because they're lazy," I said with the surety of a flat earther who looked at the ground to see, yep, flat as a cutting board.

Hayung shifted in his seat. He wasn't fat, but he wasn't exactly a spring chicken either, and I could see my words land on him like a stone. "Have you ever considered they're fat for other reasons?"

I grinned. Of course I had. Maybe they had less money, or not a lot of cash, or a shortage of that sweet green paper. But that wasn't an excuse. If anything, less money meant less food. I told him as much, glancing at my broer for backup.

Hayung fumbled for words, and I was practically glowing inside. Like any good debate, it was all about who was winning, and even the dim barn seemed brighter. I can't remember what he said after that. Only that I left feeling victorious: one more point in the argument game.

This, my dear reader, apart from disgusting on my part, is a great example of categorical thinking.

I took all fat people, a MASSIVE category, and batched them into one box. Genetics, food deserts, childhood trauma, hormonal conditions, socioeconomic systems, cultural norms around eating: I flattened all of it into "lazy." And I felt smart doing it, which is the scariest part.

Most college students still trend toward categorical thinking. AI doesn't push us toward systemic thinking, because most of society doesn't think systemically either, and well, that's what it's trained on. To break out of this, we need to understand what we're working with.

Objects: The Building Blocks of Your Reality

Our brains evolved for speed, not accuracy. Better to mistake a stick for a snake than a snake for a stick. A low signal-to-noise threshold kept our ancestors alive on the savanna, where hesitation meant getting eaten by something with better pattern recognition than you.

The problem is that we still carry that same hair-trigger wiring into lecture halls, group chats, and AI conversations. In a modern world where most first-world college students have their physical needs met, fast pattern recognition creates more blind spots than it prevents deaths. We're flinching at sticks all day long.

So what are we actually perceiving? At the most basic level, objects: distinct forms in consciousness. Emotions, shades of color, textures, the hum of a fluorescent light, the weight of a backpack strap cutting into your shoulder. Before we slap a label on any of these, they just are.

But we can't help ourselves. We associate objects with concepts (color, chair, sight) and then assume those categories are objective features of reality baked into the universe. They aren't. We don't see ultraviolet light. A colorblind student and their roommate have different mental associations to the exact same sunset. The objects are real enough; the way we carve them up is ours.

Categories: Useful Until They Aren't

Categories are generalized abstractions for groups of objects. Apple. Tree. Christian. Lazy person.

They simplify. They make communication possible. Without categories, ordering coffee would take forty-five minutes: "I'd like a medium-dark liquid, extracted from a roasted seed, heated to approximately the temperature of mild regret, served in a vessel I can cradle while pretending to study."

But without care, categories harden into categorical thinking.

The richness gets sanded down, the edges disappear, and we start mistaking our map for the territory it was supposed to represent.

Categorical thinking makes us more like sentinels. It's how we overvalue meritocracy by assuming outcomes reflect effort and intelligence, ignoring the dozen systemic factors underneath. It's how we think of love as an emotion we either feel or don't, rather than a participatory phenomenon we practice and build . How we think of gender as a light switch when it's closer to a dimmer.

I did this to Hayung. I took a complex, multidimensional territory (why some people struggle with weight) and crushed it into a single category (laziness). The category felt clean. The territory was messy. And my sentinel brain chose clean every time.

We need a different way of thinking. Something that puts us more into the wanderer mindset and doesn't result in calling all fat people lazy.

Maps, Territories, and Systems

Introducing, maps, territories and systems: the breakfast of wanderers.

Maps are meta-representations we make of territories. Think a literal map compared to a physical territory. A map for how to learn more effectively. The many associations we have of different majors (Psychology is obviously the best).

Good maps can break us out of categorical thinking by honoring how rich and dimensional territories actually are. But the map can never fully describe the territory. Imagine a map big enough to perfectly encapsulate the territory of North America. Every tree, every creek, every pothole on I-90. We have a special name for that map. It's called, uh, just being in North America. Pretty useless map. Also extremely heavy. You'd need a backpack the size of North America to carry it.

When maps get more sophisticated, they become systems: models describing groups of interdependent dynamic parts that integrate into a larger whole. Your college's grading system. The application pipeline. Climate change. A political election. A system is always made up of smaller and larger systems, what Ken Wilber calls Holons: things that are simultaneously wholes in themselves and parts of something bigger. Your dorm room is a whole, and it's part of the dorm building, which is part of campus, which is part of a university system, which is part of the higher education landscape, which is part of the entire Universe! It's turtles all the way down.

One of my favorite maps for thinking about truth: signal and noise.

Signal is the value in a thing. Noise is what distracts from the value. Here's what makes this map powerful: signal and noise are inherently relational. They depend on context and observer. Imagine listening to Bach while birds chirp outside your window. The birds could be lovely, but right now you want to hear the cello suite. The birds are noise. Tomorrow morning, coffee in hand, the birds might be the whole point, and Bach would be the interruption.

Whether something counts as signal or noise is a choice. And recognizing that it's a choice is what separates categorical from systemic thinking. A systemic thinker can look at a perspective they disagree with and ask: "What's the signal here?" before writing the whole thing off. A categorical thinker sorts it into the "wrong" box and moves on. The systemic thinker sees something to learn in almost every conversation. Perhaps it would have helped me in my conversation with Hayung.

Wanderers think in maps, territories, and systems. Sentinels think in categories and defend them. And without care, AI can push you further and further into the Sentinel seat.

Parsing Truth From Bullshit Amidst AI

So what do we actually do with all this?

Three steps. They sound simple. The practice of them is a lifetime.

Step 1: Build self-awareness of what being in the wanderer versus sentinel mindset feels like.

Not just intellectually. In the body. The sentinel mindset has a texture: a tightening in the chest, a narrowing of the eyes, a rush to respond before the other person finishes their sentence. The wanderer mindset feels different, more spacious, a little uncomfortable, like the pause before you admit you don't know. Start noticing which one shows up when you read an AI response. When AI gives you a clean, confident answer, does your body relax into agreement, or does something in you lean forward and ask, "Wait, is that actually right?"

The wanderer doesn't distrust AI. The wanderer distrusts the speed at which they trust anything.

Step 2: Train your AI to help you act more like a wanderer.

Most people use AI like a vending machine. Put in a question, get out an answer, walk away. But you can train it to challenge you. I feed my scripts into a writing bot that channels the voices of my favorite teachers and spiritual mentors, and I ask them to bash my work. Not gently. I ask Claude to tell me where my arguments are weak, where I'm being lazy, where I'm parroting something I heard instead of thinking it through.

You can do the same. Tell your AI: "Before you answer this, ask me three clarifying questions." Or: "Give me the strongest counterargument to what I just said." Or: "Where might I be thinking categorically instead of systemically about this?" Turn the vending machine into a sparring partner.

Step 3: Journal about how you can act more like a wanderer.

Not journaling in the "Dear Diary" sense. Journaling as a practice of catching yourself mid-thought and asking harder questions. A few to start with:

• Where in my life am I thinking categorically when I could be thinking systemically?
• What self-survival tendencies (fear of looking stupid, need for certainty, desire to belong) might be shaping what I accept as true?
• How can I build relationships with people who hold different beliefs but share the wanderer mindset?

None of this is easy. The sentinel mindset is often warmer, faster, and more socially rewarded. But every time we choose the wanderer path, even just for a few seconds while reading an AI response at 11 p.m. with an essay due, the muscle gets a little stronger. And the truth, whatever it turns out to be, gets a little closer.

It's the mindset I wish those mormons had been in so we could have a real truth seeking conversation. It's what I wish I knew when arguing with Hayung about how all fat people are "lazy."

So, I didn't start this article with some absurd AI falsehood. In fact, the opposite is true. I've been using the principles of the wanderer mindset and systemic thinking to train my AI. I think it's working. I mean, it did write most of this article. I'll let you decide whether it did a good job showing the truth.

If you found this post interesting you would love my free College Freshman Cosmic Journaling Kit (CJK). ✨📚

It's a gamified journaling system that helps you grow your emotional intelligence, self-understanding, and purpose with over 1,000+ journaling questions in just 15 minutes a day.