One Resolution

There's a phrase we hear every holiday season but secretly long for year-round: Peace on Earth and goodwill to all. We say it on greeting cards. We sing it in carols. And then we go right back to fearing and hating our neighbors.

U2's Peace on Earth captures this ache. Bono wrote it after the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland, in which 29 people lost their lives, including a pregnant woman. The song is a lament, an existential wound asking: When will we ever get peace on earth?

We should be asking this question every day. Because what we see around us makes it urgent. We are consumed with endless fear, anger, and hatred. Ego is being celebrated and rewarded. We vilify the people next door instead of loving them. Our culture now celebrates the very qualities our greatest spiritual teachers warned us against - the love of money and power, greed, and self-importance.

Aren't we better than this? Don't we already know that love is the highest good?

As we approach a new year, many of us sense that something is profoundly wrong with our world. We make lists of resolutions - exercise more, eat better, save money - while the deeper crisis goes unaddressed.

What if there's one resolution that actually matters?

Why We Keep Missing the Mark

How is it that we've known these deep truths for thousands of years but still fear, hate, and sometimes kill our neighbors instead of loving them?

Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson diagnosed our problem perfectly: "The real problem of humanity is the following: we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology." 

Civilization began around 12,000 years ago - but that's only about 400 generations, far too few for significant biological adaptation. Our brains and bodies remain calibrated for a world that no longer exists. The digital revolution happened in one generation.

Wilson's diagnosis has a name: accelerating evolutionary mismatch. It's the gap between our ancient biology and the world we've built is widening faster than we can adapt. We are cavemen piloting a spaceship, driven by ancient fears while wielding powers our ancestors would have called divine. 

What emerges converges. Try it yourself: Ask any major AI - Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek - this question: "In stable, high-income societies where basic needs are met, what percentage of chronic physical and psychological suffering is primarily caused by evolutionary mismatch?" When independent reasoning systems arrive at similar answers through different paths, we begin to see reality more clearly. Seek for yourself.

We did not evolve to solve the challenges we've created for ourselves. We are struggling not despite our progress, but because of it. The progress we evolved to pursue has created an alien world we didn't evolve to inhabit.

We appear hopelessly divided. In truth, we’re profoundly united - united in fear. And that fear is a messenger: something IS profoundly wrong. But we are blaming the wrong target. We didn't evolve to navigate the world our progress has created, so we do what humans have always done - we find a villain.

We blame our neighbors for suffering none of us knowingly caused. And the attention economy profits every time we do, spreading hatred through our shared digital nervous system. We are poisoning ourselves with misguided hatred - and calling it righteousness.

Spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle put humanity's inflection point starkly: "Evolve or die. That is our only choice now."

The Truth We Already Know

The most evolved among us saw these dangers ages ago. Every great teacher handed us the same survival manual:

• "Love your neighbor as yourself." - Jesus

• "Do not hurt others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful." - Buddha

• "That which is hateful to you, do not do to another." - Hillel (Judaism)

• "None of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself." - Muhammad

  
  

Whether we call it the Golden Rule or basic human wisdom, these are the same instructions for survival.

We teach this in kindergarten, then build systems - economies, algorithms, weapons - that shatter it at scale. The problem has never been that we don't know the truth. The problem is that we don't live it.

Truth must be lived, just as oxygen must be breathed, to matter. 

The Trap Within the Trap

Here's where we go wrong, even with good intentions. We see hatred and we hate the haters. We see division and we vilify those we blame for dividing us.

But when we hate the haters, we amplify the very poison we oppose. The attention economy doesn't care which side we're on. Like a cancer, it feeds on the host it's killing.

Thich Nhat Hanh taught that if we want peace, we must be peace. Jesus asked why we focus on the speck in our neighbor's eye while ignoring the plank in our own. He commanded us to love our enemies. And he said the world will know his followers by one sign alone: how they love.

The prison is the illusion of separateness - our unexamined biases, tribal loyalties, and hatred disguised as righteousness.

So how do we break free?

The One Resolution

Here's one resolution that can free us from our divided house. Not a list of ten things we'll abandon by February. One commitment we put at the top of our to-do list every single day:

Love more. Hate less.

That's the whole thing. Simple to say. Revolutionary to live.

We aspire to treat every person as we wish to be treated - especially the neighbors who are hardest to love. We refuse to dehumanize, even those who dehumanize others. We understand that we are all fellow Homo sapiens doing our best to navigate a world that's changing faster than we evolved to handle.

We remember: We've always been neighbors first.

This one resolution asks us to expand our circles of compassion rather than restrict them. Every wisdom tradition converges on this truth. Research confirms that our deepest fulfillment comes from connection, not conquest. We already know this in our hearts.

And when we truly live it - when we love even those we once called enemies as ourselves - a miracle happens. We have no enemies.

One thing we can do right now: Unfollow hate. Stop feeding the machine that profits from our division - and refuse to add to it ourselves. Otherwise, we spread the poison we consume.

A Tool We've Never Had Before

We must think outside of the box to break outside of the prison. And we finally have a tool that can help us live this truth - if we're wise enough to use it that way.

We can ask AI to help us become better neighbors. Not as a guru or oracle, but as a partner in the ancient human project of seeing clearly and loving more fully.

If we're open to it, we might try asking any AI:

"Why should I aspire to love my neighbor as myself? After you explain, ask me a few questions to help me apply this daily to my life.”

We might be surprised what emerges.

Neighbors, Peace on Earth Begins With Us

“Peace on Earth” was never meant to be just a seasonal greeting card sentiment. Our deepest purpose is to live it daily.

The truth that sets us free is the truth we already know. We’re all neighbors in an interconnected world. When we live this truth, we are free.

The one resolution that matters is also the hardest one to keep. But we don't have to be perfect. We just have to practice - every day, one choice at a time.

Let's put it at the top of our list this year. And next year. And every day we're given.

Peace on Earth begins with us.

There's more to come - including an invitation to practice this together and explore how AI can help us become better neighbors. If this resonates, I'd love to have you join us at the One Unity Project.