Beyond the Isolated Self

George Orwell and Aldous Huxley both anticipated something important about the world we live in today. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, an authoritarian state maintains power through surveillance, fear, censorship and the control of truth. In Huxley’s Brave New World, truth is not just suppressed by violence or force, it is made less important, obscured beneath pleasure, entertainment, consumption and constant distraction. The unsettling part is that nobody needs to force people into silence when distraction is satisfying enough. The idea itself is so old, it is older than either of the novels. The Romans understood that political control could be strengthened not only through force, but also by keeping people occupied and satisfied. Juvenal’s famous phrase panem et circenses, usually translated as “bread and circuses,” referred to food and public spectacle as a means of diverting attention from political life. While the phrase belonged to Roman context, the broader political pattern has appeared repeatedly throughout history. Rulers have often understood that a population absorbed in spectacle, pleasure, consumption, nationalism, religious fervor or endless distraction may have less time, energy or inclination to question how power is being exercised. Our world today contains a little of both. We have enough of the authoritarian hellscape to make us question whether those in power really care about our rights, our freedom or our capacity to think for ourselves, and enough media, pleasure and constant stimulation to keep us occupied and comfortable enough that rebellion can begin to feel unnecessary. Perhaps that is the more interesting danger. Power does not always have to silence us. Sometimes it only has to some of us entertained enough to distract the others. Somewhere between those two writings lies a question about our present condition. We can be watched and distracted at the same time. We can be surrounded by information while knowing very little, with more opportunities to speak than ever before and still find ourselves repeating desires, opinions, and language that have already been given to us. The question is not simply whether we are free to rebel, but whether we still possess the psychological appetite for rebellion. Even though their worlds were fictional, but the psychological problem they explored was not. Our world, even after all this time, still contains a little of both.

If we had to write a novel on our society, perhaps it would be called The Overstimulated, underfocused or tired. Not necessarily evil, not stupid, just too distracted to care. We live in an endless flood of information, dopamine-driven outrage, notifications, content, advertising, sexualisation, fear, performance, tribalism and noise. So much noise! My God, so much noise that people have become psychologically exhausted. We are so inundated with information that apathy can begin to look like indifference when it may simply be exhaustion. This is not a character flaw, nor is it entirely accidental. Human attention has limits, and modern systems have become remarkably skilled at competing for those limits. The battle is no longer simply over what we believe, but over what we are able to attend to long enough to believe, question, understand or even care about. This is why reclaiming attention is more than a spiritual pursuit. It can become a political and psychological act. Attention is where we being to choose what-to-experience begins, and what is repeatedly is attended to, begins to shape the reality we inhabit. Platforms use this concept to build their algorithm. The endless scroll, the notification, the short video, the recommendation, the carefully timed interruption are all designed around keeping attention moving from one stimulus to the next. Even when platforms restrict the amount of content we can consume, the deeper economy remains the same. Attention has become a form of capital. Yet there is something almost paradoxical here. The more relentlessly we are offered to consume, the harder it becomes to sustain the concentration required to consume anything deeply. We move from one thing to another before the previous thought has had time to settle. So if you are reading a book today, perhaps you should brag about it a little; because that kind of attention is rare these days, it is a commitment to follow an idea without immediately replacing it with another. To be present to those minutes of life without stimulation. To let a thought become inconvenient before dismissing it. That may seem like a very small act, but perhaps rebellion often begins in precisely this way. You could being to take back of your scattered attentions, and that could be enough, just enough for today.

Stepping into the bridge between mindfulness and psychotherapy

Perhaps the next step is to begin participating differently in the contexts of our lives. That may be one of the greatest gifts we can give to ourself, our relations and the world at large. We grow through participation, through entering different relationships and allowing each one to be what it is, rather than trying to make every experience resemble the last. Growth could be more like mycelium, spreading in different directions, forming connections that are not identical because every relationship has its own conditions, history, and character. We have become remarkably good at standardising experience, while using brands to reinforce identity and ego, and systems of consumption, from Starbucks and McDonald’s to Costco, to sell us more of what we never knew we needed. You know what you are going to get because the experience has been designed to be recognisable, repeatable, and almost identical wherever you find it. Human relationships do not work that way, although we increasingly attempt to make them do so. Automated birthday reminders, broadcast messages, mass tagging may create reach, traction, convenience and efficiency. But did they create an honest, warm human space, or merely another performance of the ego, measured by visibility rather than intimacy? What we may have lost is the ability to participate through discernment and empathy, to be present with people as they navigate their life and space with us, rather than bringing the automated responses. This requires an understanding of interrelationship and interdependence, because we live within a systemic reality where every interaction has consequences, not necessarily negative or unwanted. We are shaped by choices beyond our immediate control: war, trade, taxes, even the cough of a neighbour. We are connected, and therefore systems thinking becomes necessary to understand the reality we inhabit. To participate differently requires a certain quality of presence, the capacity to recognise context, discern relationships, and notice the patterns through which we are already participating. What becomes necessary, then, is awareness and its application, the capacity to observe oneself within these systems, to be able to look for sameness in differences and differences in sameness, to recognise patterns as they emerge, and to discern how one’s participation alters the field and self. The distinction between inner and outer begins to lose its usefulness here. What happens within us is never entirely separate from the relationships we inhabit, the environments we move through, or the larger field of which we are a part. Health, meaning, relationship and even our sense of God or the universe emerge within this web of participation. The question shifts from what is happening to me to what is happening through me.

Systems cannot be understood by just mapping its parts

Logic can take us towards data, quantitative or qualitative, measurable and repeatable. But it takes a human, empathetic relationship to understand how things came to be. Was it cultural, economic, political, familial, generational, biological? How does it exist in relationship with the ecosystem, the microbiome, the history that surrounds it? These are not simply questions of data. This is indigenous knowledge, embodied knowledge, relational knowledge, and we must reclaim it. But reclamation requires integrity, radical hospitality, and generosity. It requires us to understand that tone matters, that the journey matters, and that not everything meaningful can be reduced to the objective. We have seen this before, and we see it even today; governments, often working alongside capitalist interests, clear a forest, build a road, bring in factories and jobs, and suddenly the numbers say you have created development. But the forest is not an empty economic variable. It is water, soil, biodiversity, climate, food, culture and livelihood held in one living system. Alter one part and the consequences move through the rest. A rational economic decision can therefore produce ecological loss, displacement, disease and long-term instability. That is Bateson’s work, its looking for the pattern that connects, the problem begins when we mistake a system for a collection of separate variables. Every intervention enters a web of relationships, and what appears to solve one problem can create several others. 

Every interaction enters a web of relationships, and what appears to address one context can set off a much wider field of impacts, relationships and consequences. The same is true of us when we look at the way we define and understand ourselves and others through the various levels of hierarchies, roles, beliefs, etc., within different contexts. We do not exist outside the systems we participate in, and yet we often enter them carrying fixed categories about ourselves and others: who I am, who you are, what you believe, what you should be. The ability to temporarily suspend some of these labels and definitions may therefore be one of the few meaningful replies to an authoritarian, distracted, capitalist world. It creates the possibility of presence, of conversation in which life and its difficulties can be encountered across different and interconnected contexts. We begin to notice relationships, patterns, emotions, histories, assumptions and points of view as different maps meet. It is this relationship between things, rather than the things themselves, that holds complex systems together. That, too, is indigenous. Everyone likes the village, but very few people want to be a villager. (Bateson et al., 2026). We are drawn to the idea of community, whether in marriage, social life or the workplace, and each of us arrives with our own beautiful idea of what that community should be. But a village is not just an idea; it is a living system of people, land, memory, obligation, conflict and interdependence. Across cultures and indigenous traditions, the individual has often been understood not as an isolated self, but through relationships of mutual responsibility, family, kinship, place and obligations to something larger than oneself.Yet neither tradition, nor any other community, exists without friction. Bring together people with different histories, expectations, languages, generations and ideas of responsibility, and what feels like belonging to one person can feel like intrusion, obligation or exclusion to another. The same happens in marriage, friendship and work. Sooner or later, our different ideas of what the relationship should be meet, and what began as difference can become caustic to both relationship and communication unless we develop the capacity to hold the discomfort, breathe through it, recognise where our own history is entering the room, and draw boundaries without immediately turning difference into threat, trigger or transference.