“Where is your presence of mind?”
When I was growing up, my dad would ask me this question whenever I seemed distracted or careless.
It wasn’t a gentle question. It carried weight — the sense that I wasn’t paying attention, that I was missing something right in front of me. Sometimes it was about not noticing my surroundings. Sometimes it was about not listening closely enough to what he was teaching me. Other times, it was about simply drifting, not being in the moment.
That question has stayed with me. Over the years, I’ve found myself repeating it in my head like a quiet correction — a reminder to pay attention to where I am, to what I’m doing, to who’s in front of me, or behind me.
Presence of mind.
I thought about that question a lot these past few weeks as I traveled across the world on planes, trains, and buses. The accents changed, the scenery shifted, the ticket stubs looked different — but one thing was constant everywhere I went: people glued to their screens. Rows of passengers scrolling Instagram. Commuters on trains flicking through TikTok as the scenery blurred by outside the window. Even in Ubers, drivers stealing glances at WhatsApp between red lights.
A crowded train car should hum with life. Instead, it felt strangely hollow — a hundred people, each sealed inside a glowing feed, present in body but absent in attention. My dad’s question kept echoing in my mind: Where is your presence of mind?
It wasn’t always like this. I still remember when strangers struck up conversations, families played cards on the fold-out table, and solo travelers sat quietly staring out at the countryside, lost in thought. Those moments weren’t glamorous, but they were human. They left space for imagination, empathy, and noticing. Today, those same journeys feel sterilized — the landscape outside reduced to a blur, the inside filled with silence and the soft glow of screens.
This isn’t just nostalgia. It’s a warning. Presence is eroding, and with it, the very capacities that make us human. Without presence, empathy collapses. Without presence, creativity shrinks. Without presence, relationships weaken. Without presence, democracy falters. Because leadership without attention is performance, not service.
And now, technology, and AI in particular, threatens to accelerate this erosion. Why wrestle with the stubborn silence of your own thoughts when an algorithm can fill the space for you? Why read, reflect, or write when social media can produce something entertaining in seconds?
What used to be minor side roads have now become the main road. Technology could free us to be more present — but the way we’re using it today mostly does the opposite.
Attention is becoming the scarcest currency of our time. Not just in classrooms, where students drift between tabs during lectures. Not just in families, where conversations are interrupted by buzzing notifications. But in our very ability to cultivate compassion, curiosity, and learning. And this erosion of presence isn’t an accident. It’s a business model.
Entire corporations are competing for the smallest slices of our attention. Every notification, every “recommended for you” reel, every autoplay video is designed to capture just a few more seconds of our gaze — because those seconds translate into billions of dollars. The result? We’ve built an economy where distraction is rewarded and presence is punished. Where being endlessly entertained is easier than being momentarily uncomfortable. Where scrolling feels productive, but rarely is.
AI doesn’t just join this battle — it supercharges it. Algorithms aren’t just responding to what we want; they’re predicting what we’ll want next and serving it before we even know we’re looking. If attention was once stolen, now it’s engineered out of us.
What We All Can Do
Presence isn’t just an educational challenge — it’s a human one. If corporations are mining our attention, then reclaiming it is an act of resistance, a choice we all have to make. A few starting points:
- Notice Your Surroundings: look up on the train, the bus, the walk home. Let your mind wander without a feed filling the space.
- Reclaim Boredom: give yourself moments without stimulation. Boredom isn’t the enemy — it’s often the birthplace of creativity.
- Practice Deep Listening: in conversation, fight the urge to check your phone. Be fully with the person in front of you.
- Create Boundaries with Tech: notifications off, intentional screen-free hours, no-scroll mornings. Attention is too valuable to give away by default.
- Model Presence: for students, children, colleagues. Show that being here — fully here — is a form of leadership.
And if this is what each of us can do, here’s what schools and universities must do: deliberately design presence back into learning.
A Curriculum for Presence
So what would it mean to build presence of mind into our curriculum? Here are a few ways:
1. Screen-Free Rituals
Build intentional pauses — ten minutes at the start or end of class with phones away, pens down, and space to simply sit, notice, or reflect.
2. Attention Training
Teach focus as a skill, not an accident. Mindfulness exercises, journaling, or even sustained reading assignments where the goal is duration, not speed.
3. Structured Reflection
After every major project or trip, require students to capture what they noticed rather than what they achieved. Presence before performance.
4. Immersive Experiences
Redesign study abroad and field trips so the point isn’t the Instagram highlight reel but the deeper act of observing, listening, and engaging with what’s unfamiliar.
5. Friction by Design
Resist the urge to automate every step with AI. Sometimes the longer road — wrestling with the blank page, grappling with the tough problem — is where growth hides.
A Challenge to Institutions
Here’s my challenge to universities: we’ve spent decades building centers of information — libraries, labs, and learning management systems. Where are the centers of presence? Imagine a Department of Attention as core to campus life as the business school. Imagine orientation programs that teach focus the way they teach academic integrity. Imagine universities rewarding empathy and reflection the way they reward grades and rankings.
If the last decade was defined by access to information, the next must be defined by access to presence. And presence — unlike information — can’t be outsourced. It can only be practiced.
And maybe the question we should all be asking, in classrooms, in boardrooms, in daily life, is the same one my dad used to ask me: Where is your presence of mind? Because attention — our presence of mind — is the true currency of the future.
Ex Cogitatione, Progressus
Girish
