Throughout history, technology has strongly influenced human evolution. The plow enabled us to settle down in one place, the printing press allowed us to learn anywhere, and the clock standardized time as a new form of currency. Such disruptive technologies have created both opportunities and constraints in reshaping how we live, learn, and work.
We live in an era of digital abundance. Every minute brims with possibility and is replete with urgency. And yet, a fundamental truth remains: While the opportunities may be infinite, our time is finite.
This fundamental truth creates a paradox. The more technology enables us to do, the more it fragments our attention and overwhelms our ability to prioritize. Today, we human beings find ourselves trapped on a “to-do treadmill,” caught in an endless cycle of increasingly frenetic activity that feels like it is going nowhere fast. Worse, despite our best efforts to save time through efficiency, new demands rush in to fill the chronological space we worked so hard to create.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) purports to solve our treadmill woes by taming complexity and prioritizing activity. Our digital copilots, they say, will help us get our heads around increasingly wicked problems and our arms around what must be done when. Unfortunately, these AI agents are exclusively focused within the realm of Chronos—or chronological time—emphasizing productivity and efficiency rather than the realm of Kairos—or deep time—emphasizing synchrony and harmony where we connect deeply with life’s fullness and meaning beyond the constraints of linear time.
The true problem here isn’t how to better manage chronological time, but rather how to focus our attention on deep time. Left to its own devices, AI could inadvertently accelerate the speed of our to-do treadmills rather than liberating us from them to focus our attention on finding more meaning in life.
FOCUSING ATTENTION
We must reframe our world view and train our AI agents to replace “busy”ness with “being”ness. A meaningful life is not achieved through the relentless pursuit of task efficiency. It comes from paying closer attention to our deepest aspirations. It is time to stop running toward productivity and start pausing on purpose. So the next time you find yourself breathless on your to-do treadmill, pause to contemplate what truly matters to you. In so doing, the futility of spending time on increasingly trivial tasks will be replaced with the ecstasy of paying attention to meaningful moments.
Then we can transform ourselves from “humans doing” to “humans being.” Isn’t that what being human is all about?
