If the Campfire Goes Dark

The Leadership Lesson of Avoidance We Can’t Outsource

1. The Crisis of Avoidance

We don’t just avoid conflict. We engineer around it.

For ten years, I’ve researched how leaders handle tension. The pattern is consistent: most will do anything to avoid being shunned from the warmth of the campfire.

That glow once offered belonging, but it was an artificial sense of safety—a paternalistic fire where conformity bought protection. It felt secure. But we also learned less.

Now AI is multiplying that avoidance. We’ve never been more stateless—working apart from institutions, outside the firelight, further from the tribes that once held us accountable.

And what do we train machines to do?
→ Skip the pause before responding
→ Smooth over uncertainty with instant answers
→ Erase the friction of hard conversations
→ Package “efficiency” as if it were wisdom

We think we’re making life easier. What we’re really doing is outsourcing the very discomfort that grows us.

2. The Mirror We Don’t Want to Face

AI isn’t just a tool. It’s a mirror. It reflects our deepest shame about being human: messy, slow, complicated.

If the next generation learns only to optimize friction and avoid discomfort, they won’t just lose skills. They’ll lose the resilience that comes from being shaped by firelight: negotiating, enduring, and learning together. We learn best with and through others.

The question isn’t just “What do we lose when we erase the very frictions that make us human?”
It’s “If growth no longer comes from firelight, where will it come from?”

3. The Context Shift

The glow from corporate campfires isn’t gone, but it’s dimming. Those fires bundled everything—skills, judgment, credentials, belonging—and something deeper: our selfhood.

Purpose, identity, and worth were tied to the company’s glow. People didn’t just trade time for money. They traded time for identity. For a place in the story. For the reassurance that you belonged. That’s what all the anxiety and grieving have been about for the last fifteen years as people have been navigating purpose in their careers, third chapters, and the impending tsunami of AI layoffs.

The bundle we’ve become accustomed to is breaking. Skills are now scattered across YouTube and AI tutors. Judgment shifts to the open market. Credentials are now collapsed into portfolios. Belonging fragments into networks.

The next generation won’t gather by a single fire (i.e., that tenure at McKinsey? It won’t matter like it used to.). What will matter now? Individual flames: projects, communities, experiments that rebuild not just skills but selves.

And then there is AI. What it offers isn’t fire at all, but a synthetic glow. Bright but cold. Frictionless, efficient, engineered to soothe our avoidance. It looks like connection, but there’s nothing to gather around. It promises safety without risk, identity without struggle, light without warmth.

👉 The old campfire kept us safe.
👉 The new flames can make us strong.
👉 The synthetic glow will make us forget we were ever human.

Summary

→ Corporate campfires offered belonging but at the cost of conformity.
→ AI multiplies our instinct to avoid friction, erasing the very discomfort that enables growth and development.
→ As the old bundle breaks, selfhood must be rebuilt through individual flames.
→ The choice is clear: human flames that teach us, or a synthetic glow that erases us.

(Published on LinkedIn)