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See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 52 (Unpublished):
From mother, creator.
to inheritor.
And here—
we are.
Leaving innocence,
wants arise.
In wants,
we lose the simple.
In what is small,
hold It—
and see all.
In yielding,
be steady.
Release what covers.
Let what is
remain.
Stand upright.
Know shadow.
See light.
Let what is true
show.
—
I’ve been thinking a great deal lately about human attention. And what I attend to.
What captures it and why. What fragments it. What shapes perception before we even realize perception is being shaped.
For most of human history, attention still encountered limits. Human beings could become distracted, manipulative, obsessive, or consumed by desire, but distraction eventually met interruption. The temple bell rang. The market closed. The sun disappeared beneath the horizon. The body grew tired. There were still spaces where awareness could recover from stimulation.
Some of that remains true.
But now many human beings carry entire systems competing for their attention every waking hour.
And artificial intelligence is accelerating this dramatically.
Not because AI itself is malicious, but because systems optimized for engagement quickly discover that human attention is profitable. Fear captures attention. Outrage captures attention. Validation captures attention. Novelty captures attention. Identity conflict captures attention. Anxiety captures attention. Nearly all of these can now be algorithmically generated, targeted, amplified, and scaled at speeds no previous generation experienced.
Human attention has become economic territory.
And whatever becomes economically valuable eventually becomes engineered for extraction.
Chris Hayes recently described attention as one of the most endangered resources of modern life. I think he is right. Entire industries now depend on harvesting human attention continuously. What earlier generations experienced occasionally through advertising or propaganda has evolved into something far more immersive and relentless. The competition is no longer simply for consumer preference. It is for cognitive territory itself.
Ezra Klein has explored similar territory in conversations about the growing war for attention unfolding across politics, media, and technology. That phrase feels painfully accurate. A war for attention eventually becomes a war for perception because whatever repeatedly captures attention gradually shapes emotional reality, social identity, and public imagination.
You can already see the consequences. Political discourse increasingly rewards emotional activation over careful reflection. Social platforms amplify engagement faster than truthfulness. Organizational life drifts toward permanent urgency because urgency captures attention immediately while deeper awareness requires time, reflection, and sustained presence.
When perception becomes unstable, democratic societies become unstable with it.
Leaving innocence,
wants arise.
In wants,
we lose the simple.
I do not think the Tao is condemning desire so much as warning about fragmentation. The moment wanting begins organizing perception, attention scatters outward. Human beings stop seeing clearly because craving starts filtering reality itself.
That feels critically important in the AI era because modern systems increasingly learn how to anticipate, trigger, and shape human wants faster than most people consciously recognize what is happening.
Yuval Noah Harari has warned that one of the defining struggles of this century may involve control over information and attention systems themselves. Whoever shapes informational environments increasingly shapes perception. And perception shapes decisions, relationships, politics, economies, identity, and eventually reality as people experience it.
That is sobering territory.
Especially because many people still imagine attention as passive rather than recognizing how deeply connected it is to awareness itself.
Gestalt psychology understood something important long before algorithms began competing for human attention. Awareness develops through figure and ground. Something emerges from the background and captures attention strongly enough to organize perception, meaning, emotion, and action.
The question is no longer simply what captures attention.
The question is increasingly: who—or what—is shaping the figures emerging from the ground?
In previous eras, this happened primarily through culture, community, family, spirituality, and direct experience. Now it increasingly happens through algorithmic systems designed to maximize engagement by surfacing whatever generates the strongest emotional reaction.
That feels like one of the defining human questions of the AI era.
Robert Kegan’s work on adult development becomes relevant here too. Less mature forms of meaning-making often become fused with surrounding systems, emotional reactions, identities, and social expectations. People absorb narratives without examining them. They react before reflecting. External stimulation organizes inner life.
As development continues, human beings gradually become more capable of observing their own thinking rather than remaining possessed by it. Awareness expands. Reflection deepens. People become more capable of asking difficult questions: Why does this capture me so strongly? Who benefits from my attention remaining fragmented? What happens to human beings when awareness gets replaced by endless stimulation?
These are no longer abstract philosophical questions. They are survival questions.
The leader unable to distinguish between genuine strategic priority and algorithmically amplified urgency makes worse decisions. Teams unable to create space for reflection become reactive rather than responsive. Human beings losing the capacity for sustained attention gradually lose the capacity for deep work, deep relationship, and deep meaning.
Attention can be captured. Awareness must be cultivated. Modern systems increasingly optimize for the first while weakening the second.
In what is small,
hold It—
and see all.
The older I get, the more I suspect wisdom rarely arrives through endless accumulation. More often it emerges through recovering the ability to notice what human beings have trained themselves to overlook: breath, presence, relationship, pattern, grief, beauty, conscience.
These do not optimize engagement. They do not scale algorithmically. Which may be precisely why they matter more than ever.
The Tao repeatedly returns to the small, the ordinary, the overlooked, and the unforced. Not because small things are sentimental, but because reality often reveals itself there before abstraction buries it.
Artificial intelligence complicates this in strange ways. We are creating systems capable of generating endless language, endless stimulation, endless recommendation, endless interpretation. Human beings may soon spend enormous portions of life interacting with systems designed to anticipate attention before conscious choice fully emerges.
What happens to awareness then? What happens to discernment? What happens to the human capacity to sit long enough with uncertainty, contradiction, grief, beauty, or reality itself without immediately demanding stimulation?
Those questions feel deeply important to me.
In yielding,
be steady.
Yielding is often misunderstood as passivity. But there is another form of yielding that looks more like disciplined non-capture. Not disengagement. Not indifference. Not retreat from reality. The ability to remain grounded without reacting to every engineered outrage, every ideological provocation, every manufactured urgency competing for attention.
That kind of steadiness may become one of the most important human capacities of the coming era because systems competing for attention often benefit when human beings remain reactive, distracted, emotionally fragmented, tribalized, exhausted, or perpetually stimulated.
Awareness interrupts that.
Release what covers.
Let what is
remain.
I think that may be one of the deepest challenges of modern life now. Human beings increasingly live beneath layers of noise, identity performance, algorithmic influence, stimulation, branding, anxiety, and informational overload. After enough exposure, people can begin losing contact with direct experience itself.
Everything becomes filtered, amplified, manipulated, and performed. Eventually people may no longer know whether they are responding to reality itself or to systems shaping representations of reality for them.
The Tao keeps returning to uncovering.
Not adding.Not accumulating.Uncovering.
Stand upright.
Know shadow.
See light.
That matters too because awareness without humility easily becomes self-deception. Human beings are not standing outside these systems looking down on them objectively. We participate in them. We get captured by them. We rationalize them. We project onto them. We bring our own fears, ambitions, loneliness, tribal instincts, and unexamined desires into the informational worlds we create.
Artificial intelligence amplifies human intelligence.
But it also amplifies human shadow.
The biases we deny. The fears we project. The tribal instincts we rationalize. The manipulation we justify.
AI learns from all of it—and scales it.
Which means the future may depend less on whether machines become intelligent and more on whether human beings become wise enough to live with what we are creating.
Let what is true
show.
Not force truth. Not perform truth. Not weaponize truth. Let what is true show.
That requires attention. But even more than attention, it requires awareness deep enough to recognize when our attention is no longer fully our own.
Through the disciplined cultivation of awareness—even when systems all around us are optimized to fragment it.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Attention AND Awareness:
INVITATIONS:
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