Loss of Presence Is Taking Us into a Dark Age

Everywhere I turn someone is talking about Artificial Intelligence. While I frequently use AI, I am horrified that we are talking about the newest, flashiest version of technology without acknowledging the disastrous effects of technology that already exists. 

This is the age of constant distraction. The barrage of distractions is taking us away from ourselves and we are becoming disembodied people, which is a real problem. In a survey from the Bureau of Labor statistics, 79% of participants reported that they spent no time “relaxing or thinking” throughout an average day. In other words, they spent their entire day being engaged in something other than their thoughts and bodies. Ten years prior to this survey, researchers at the University of Virginia observed that 60% of their respondents found thinking “difficult and unenjoyable.” Thinking was so challenging that the respondents preferred receiving a mild electric shock over silence and space to think. 

If we are in a predator-prey relationship with technology, corporations, and modern life, then it is our attention, thoughts, and inner life on the menu.

Maggie Jackson, the author of Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention, sounded the alarm by claiming that we are headed towards a Dark Age. “We’re undercutting the highest order human abilities, which are planning, evaluation, and assessment,” she says. She describes our relationship to the cellphone as a kind of teddy bear. Not a cute cuddly thing, but a cognitive prosthetic that stems from an insecurity, “a constant need to be needed.” My own addiction to this “teddy bear” puts me in a state of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop, anticipating the next terrible bit of news to process as I try to find a way to cope with all that disgusts me about what humans and governments are doing to harm each other.

If we are in a predator-prey relationship with technology, corporations, and modern life, then it is our attention, thoughts, and inner life on the menu. Chris Hayes, an MSNBC commentator and man adept at getting people’s attention, says in his new book, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource,  that “Our very interior life, the direction of our thoughts, is being taken against our will.” 

We need to redeem (verb: take back) our most precious resource. Our attention, after all, is sacred to the grateful life. As marketers, politicians, corporations, and merchants of greed continue to snatch what is precious and uniquely ours, we are giving away our ability to empathize with others, losing our purpose and meaning, dismantling human connection and belonging, and sacrificing the attention and care needed to address our local and global problems. We are, of course, also relinquishing the enjoyment of being alive. Rather than attuning to our lives, we are letting life pass us by, taking a passive role in an experience we cannot get back.

Presence is what grounds us, helps us navigate the moment, and opens us to the opportunity that is being given to us in every moment.

To be present to life you must be here and not somewhere else. Presence is what grounds us, helps us navigate the moment, and opens us to the opportunity that is being given to us in every moment. If we aren’t present to our lives, what do we truly have? Without presence, we are merely patrons at the amusement park, strapped into a ride and taken around-and-around on some roller coaster at someone else’s whim. That is not life; that is a hostage situation.

Are our thoughts so uncomfortable, big, and scary, that we are willing to hand over our lives to whomever can keep us from them, no matter the cost? According to the research, this might be a sign of the times. But this does not have to be the case. 

Life is full of paradoxes, uncertainty, mystery, and horrible events that defy meaning. To live gratefully, we have to be present to all of it, even when it is uncomfortable.

As practitioners of living gratefully, we know that life is a gift — a gift to be cherished. We understand that life is full of paradoxes, uncertainty, mystery, and horrible events that defy meaning. To live gratefully, we have to be present to all of it, even when it is uncomfortable. Often, it is the discomfort that energizes us to change the situation, but in order to recognize the need for change, in order to imagine a new way forward, we first have to be present to the lives we are living. 

Becoming present to our lives is the genius of the foundational practice Stop.Look.Go., which begins by inviting us to be present. When you are tempted to pick up your phone: Stop.Look.Go. When you feel yourself swept away by the news or a blustering politician: Stop.Look.Go. When you feel vulnerable or filled with fear and are made uncomfortable by intense emotions: Stop.Look.Go. Your grateful life is not somewhere else or at some other time. It is here, requiring your presence.

Photo by Hang Hoang

Joe Primo, Grateful Living

Joe Primo is the CEO of Grateful Living. He is a passionate speaker and community-builder whose accomplishments made him a leading voice on resilience and adversity. Gratefulness for life, he believes, is foundational to discovering meaning and the only response that is big enough and appropriate for the plot twists, delights, surprises, and devastation we encounter along the way. A student of our founder since his studies at Yale Divinity School, Joe is committed to advancing our global movement and making the transformational practice of grateful living both accessible to all and integral to communities and places of belonging. His TED talk, “Grief is Good,” reframed the grief paradigm as a responsive resource. He is the author of “What Do We Tell the Children? Talking to Kids About Death and Dying” and numerous articles.

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