Being, Not Doing

Over a decade ago, I encountered a phrase that has never left me: "Humans doing, not being." Like a stranger pressing an intriguing book into your hands, it stayed with me—not fully understood, but insistent. A thought that periodically surfaces, asking to be examined more closely.

I think we all experience this with certain ideas. We hear something that resonates at a depth we can't quite articulate, and it takes years, sometimes a lifetime, to unpack what it actually means. For me, this phrase has become a lens through which to view our entire modern condition.

The Quiet Disconnect

Being, as I've come to understand it, is any pursuit that carries a quality of peace—away from noise and distraction, yet not devoid of meaningful stimulus. It's the state in which we feel most authentically ourselves. Doing, by contrast, has become the default mode of contemporary life: constant motion, constant production, constant consumption of information and experience.

But here's what troubles me: we live in an age of purposeful overload. Countless entities compete for our attention simultaneously. We're fragmented across devices, identities, roles, and loyalties. We've forgotten what it feels like to simply be present—not productive, not optimizing, not performing. Many people can't step away. They move from one thing to another, never pausing, never questioning the rhythm that propels them forward.

This constant doing disconnects us from ourselves, from each other, and from the natural world we're part of. We've become, in a sense, soul-less robots following invisible scripts.

How We Lost Control

To understand this, we need to trace how we arrived here. Throughout history, civilizations have followed strikingly similar patterns—rising, adapting, declining—with varying degrees of success. But a crucial shift occurred as human societies expanded.

Originally, people lived in tribes and small settlements where individuals had direct contact with their leaders and influence over their communities. Problems were resolved collectively, quickly, for the benefit of the whole. Families and individuals maintained agency over their lives and choices.

But as tribes grew into nation states, something essential was lost. The closer relationship between individual and authority fragmented. Personal sovereignty—the moral right to control one's own life and body—began to erode. The voice of most people became increasingly limited, even as systems promised progress and improvement.

This fragmentation was not accidental. It was systematized.

The invention of money was perhaps one of our species' most consequential mistakes. While we once traded directly and understood value intuitively, paper currency promised a fiction: that a note could represent wealth. This abstraction opened the door to manipulation at scale. Digital currency and "credit systems" are simply the next iteration—mechanisms designed to give complete visibility and control over our choices, our movements, our very sovereignty.

But money is only one thread. Look deeper and you'll see the same pattern everywhere: in media and information systems that divide us—left against right, color against color, culture against culture, religion against religion—rather than unite us as a shared species facing a shared moment. In education systems designed to produce compliant workers rather than thinking individuals. In art and culture that have been inverted, their original authentic messages replaced with controlled narratives that serve power rather than truth.

We have been systematically separated from ourselves, from each other, and from what is real.

The Truth Detector Within

But here's what those in power cannot fully control: our capacity tofeel the difference between what is natural and what is constructed.

We possess an intuitive mechanism—what we might call our lower, almost animalistic level of knowing—that can detect authenticity versus artifice. This isn't about paranoia or conspiracy thinking. It's about using both mind and body, intellect and intuition, to question everything we're exposed to.

When you encounter a piece of art, a movie, a cultural narrative, a relationship dynamic, or a piece of information—does it feel contrived or genuine? Does it expand your sense of possibility or constrain it? Does it unite or divide? Does it serve your autonomy or subtly undermine it?

Art and culture have been particularly infiltrated. Ancient wisdom traditions, spiritual practices, creative expressions—many have been corrupted, inverted, or transformed into mechanisms of control dressed up as progress or enlightenment. Learning to discern the difference is essential.

This questioning isn't about reaching some final state of "awakening." Different people will arrive at different conclusions, and that's okay. Some will read this and feel fully at peace with their lives, needing nothing more. Others carry a persistent angst—a sense that something is wrong—that manifests as stress, anxiety, or mental unease. For those with this niggling awareness, the question becomes: what now?

The Practical Answer: Being

The path forward isn't more information about control mechanisms. It's not joining a movement or adopting a belief system. The practical path is simpler and more radical:choose to be.

Choose quietude. Choose to step away from the noise, even briefly. Choose to question the rhythm that propels you forward. Choose to reconnect with what feels natural and authentic to you. Choose to create, to relate, to think in ways that honor your own intuition rather than external instruction.

This isn't about rejecting all of modern life or retreating into isolation. It's about making conscious choices about what you absorb, who you listen to, how you spend your time and energy. It's about using your discernment—that felt sense of truth—to navigate a world full of competing narratives.

For those who question everything and have begun recognizing the patterns at play, half the battle is won. The other half is living differently now, in whatever small ways are available to you.

Toward Connection and Wholeness

We need to rethink everything from the ground up, starting with a blank sheet. Not to reject modernity wholesale, but to ask: What genuinely serves human flourishing? What enhances our connection—to ourselves, to each other, to nature? What supports autonomy and creativity? And what, by contrast, is simply a mechanism of control wearing the mask of progress?

This requires a fundamental shift in how we relate to one another. Less divisive, more supportive. Less competitive, more collaborative. Less performative, more authentic. We are all different—different cultures, different experiences, different capacities for awareness—yet we share this moment in history. We don't need uniformity; we need unity in recognizing our shared humanity and our shared stake in what comes next.

Some things from the modern world are genuinely positive and worth keeping. Others are tools of fragmentation and control that need to be recognized and released. The distinction matters, and only you can make it for yourself, using both your mind and your felt sense of truth.

The invitation, then, is this: Begin to be. Begin to notice where you're trapped in endless doing and ask what it would feel like to stop. Begin to question what you're exposed to—media, culture, relationships, systems—and feel into whether it's serving your autonomy or undermining it. Begin to connect with others who recognize the pattern, not to form a new ideology, but to support each other in thinking and living differently.

We've been conditioned to move from one thing to another without pause, separated from ourselves and each other, our authentic creativity and culture systematized into tools of control. But we are still human beings. We still carry freewill and spirit, even when both have been tested to their limits.

The return to being—to peaceful, authentic presence—is not a luxury or an escape. It's the most practical and revolutionary thing we can do right now.