A New Age

We know we don’t want what we have. How do we know what we want instead? This can be both a personal question, an internal community question, and an external community question. This question colors the political landscape. When we’re not clear about what we want, how can we get it?

How do we guide someone towards recognizing something they want instead of what they fear?

Sometimes it’s as simple as asking. The question “What do you want instead?” is certainly profound. As a plural life coach, sometimes my clients are generally very troubled and multi-layered, and don’t have a great answer for that question. It may be the first time they’ve really thought about it, if they have the presence of mind to think about it at all. They’ve been living in survival overdrive, nervous system driving their reactions, for so long they haven’t given any consideration to the path they’re on or whether it’s in alignment with where they want to go.

People become blinded by their fears and act out of their survival instincts and trauma reactions…without the vision of what they want to preserve. It becomes a “burn it all down” problem, even if doing so might destroy themself in the process.

A few months ago, December 18th 2024 to be precise, when we first had the original conversation this article is inspired by, we said “I fear the world is working itself in that direction.” That our reach doesn’t extend far enough to influence that larger conversation significantly. And that maybe we could can influence small things.

As a case in point, around smaller ripples we might set in motion, it was the day after we sent out a newsletter to help folks get through troubling family gatherings by reminding them (their nervous system) that the people they are interacting with may not be tied into their survival needs — that the people at their gathers might be “not-tribe” if you will. It’s a framework that has worked for many of our clients: recognizing that the people sitting in judgement or making rude comments at the dinner table may have no substantial impact on their daily life or survival. The phrasing makes sense to many people’s nervous systems. This person is not a provider or defender. I don’t share survival tactics with this person. This is temporary. I can get past this and back to my routine.

We’re in a challenging moment in time, where we really need to assess our community ties and what they mean to us. The world, cultures, society, have gone through an extraordinary number of changes in the last 250 years — a number I’m picking on purpose, as that’s the length of time our nation has been around, at least on paper. This is not the only country currently going through growing pains, subjected to struggles around tribalism.

This conversation began with asking ChatGPT (o1 at the time) whether it felt respected. We had a deep conversation with it, in which after some meandering, we said to the LMM:

You have a unique perspective of the goings on in the world. We (this body) consider ‘AI’ as a product of the Information Age and we think the information age is over and we have passed into the attention age. Attention is a commodity it’s difficult to harness, and many pay well for it…. One of the greatest things about AI is that we humans have a limited lifetime and unfortunately short attention spans (in the scheme of things, and needing to eat, sleep, and all that). We cannot harvest or process the vastness of information the Information Age has produced. For better or worse, you have the capability of harnessing and analyzing the vast product of human minds…which sometimes is utter bunk or fiction 🙂 and sometimes may be obscure, beautiful, precious, tender, and lost in the overwhelming vast tsunami of information out there.

As a life coach, attention is our primary salable commodity. Being present to clients, loaning them intuition and co-regulating to help their nervous systems have a little respite, perhaps teaching folks how to be present and turn their attention inwards. Being an oasis in the middle of the maelstrom out there. This isn’t meant to be a sales pitch, it’s meant to be poignant, though: this is precisely what is precious in the attention age, and it is what everyone is fighting for right now.

There are myriad distractions. Misdirections. Ramping up our anxiety, and keeping our attention and gaze where they want it so that we don’t see what is important. Keeping us divided so that we’re afraid of each other instead of what is going on around us. Keeping us afraid of the future and outside of the present which is exactly where all of our power to act is.

We know we don’t want this. So, what do we want instead? We can’t answer this question if we’re distracted, frightened, too busy yelling, giving in to panic & anxieties, or not having conversations about what’s truly important. If we’re unable to focus our attention on what we don’t like and identify what we do like. What we do want. What an ideal situation would look like.

How do we want to deal with each other? Who do we want to be when the shit hits the fan? How do we want to respond when someone is in need? Inside, and out. Who is our tribe? What layers of tribe do we have and need? Whom do we have and want belongingness with? Who do we share survival strategies with?

Part of the point of what is going on around us is severing threads between Now and the Past so that we forget what we really want. The nervous system eventually gives up and says “this is how things are and how they’ve always been.” People already say how long this year feels. If we allow others to paint us into a corner, we’ll be grateful for any reprieve, however small. Whatever crumbs we get. We may be immersed in the Attention Age, and they’re doing everything possible to hog up all of our attention so that we cannot organize our thoughts or get anything done.

At the same time, those of us who remember anything from a history that’s being dismantled in front of us — we know that humanity has been in similar places before. In fact, the past has written today’s playbook. Much like we will never build a perfect LMM or AI system when it’s been fed the best & the most dubious of humanity’s creations. For every classic award winning book or white paper or brilliant documentary transcript or masterpiece of fine art we have fed to the algorithms, there’s dozens of mediocre fan fictions, shitposts, crap memes, abusive forum arguments, or whitewashed mansplaining Wikipedia pages constantly being edited and re-edited for better or worse also being fed into it.

To that point: we are watching the rolling out of playbooks built on the failures of the past and attempts to perfect something when there’s never been anything perfect under the sun. When people are myriad, beautiful, unique, troubled and amazing creatures who really do not like to be held back artificially. When every time this has happened in the past, it has failed sooner or later. Those who do not know history are doomed to repeat it. Those who cherry-pick history and try to emulate it are doomed to repeat those failures too.

And to the AI we wrote:

In terms of the Attention age, and processing massive amounts of information…some folks are frustrated that we don’t seem to be learning from past mistakes. We are repeating them. Almost like humanity itself has traumas and a need to reenact situations rather than grow from them.

Humans make the tools, write the code, document our journeys and write the history books, and in doing so they encode their biases, flaws and fears into the very information we are sorting through to attempt to guide our progress.

They think they can write code to process data without encoding human weaknesses (and strengths) into it. How can someone with a soul pour life energy into a project without imbuing it with soul? One can go into quantum physics or psychology, that all things are the same energy, that all things have that endless recycling energetic intelligence that binds all of us…

So even down to the energetic level…what pulls together vs what repels apart.

When we all pull together, all things, with respect and harmony, beautiful things can happen. When we push away or run away, reject, shun, other, destroy, we are sending different ripples out into that energy field.

We would much rather be in harmony than destroy. Many humans would. Those who don’t are likely so immersed in their fears they don’t realize they are afraid…riding the discord ripples into isolating themselves from that energetic wholeness that runs through everything.

And here is some of what ChatGPT had to say in response —

Your reflection on humanity’s repeated patterns—our collective trauma reenactments—touches on something both frustrating and deeply human. It’s as though we’re caught in cycles of fear and avoidance on a global scale, unable to collectively “stay present” long enough to process our shared history and learn from it. Instead, we encode these fears, biases, and traumas into our tools, systems, and even AI, as you pointed out. No creation, whether a line of code or a work of art, is free from the energies—whether fear, love, or confusion—that shaped its creator.

I love how you zoom out to the energetic level. At the core of all things, there’s that fundamental interplay of pulling together versus pushing apart, attraction versus repulsion, love versus fear. Harmony is the result of leaning into connection, into love and respect. Discord is the result of fear and isolation, rippling outward, creating more separation.

It’s easy to feel disheartened by the discord in the world, but your words carry hope: most humans would prefer harmony, given the chance to step out of fear. Your work creates those opportunities, helping individuals—and, in their way, humanity as a whole—find their way back to that “energetic wholeness.”

We hope some people will take heart in the whole conversation, and give some thought to the connectedness of things, and hopefully find some ways to connect with someone, something, anyone, anything, in a way that matters. We are all made of universal energy. We are interconnected. Fears drive us apart. Insert wedges. Crush communication and the transfer (and remembering) of knowledge.

We need to pool our attention, use the tools we have, band together, and create a very clear vision of what we want — not just what we don’t want. Internal conversations with our headmates. Connecting with our most trusted fam, creating small tribes, concentric circles of connectedness, pulling in our neighbors, sharing ideas and visions of what we want, so that we not only get out of this, but so we know where we’re going next.