The Case for Aliveness
Introducing Ecological Aliveness Theory
This is the first article in January’s series, “Alive in the Age of AI.” In November, we climbed the Ladder of Abstraction—tracing how four technological revolutions progressively pulled human cognition away from direct experience. In December, we explored what’s still at the bottom of the ladder: the immediate-return world we evolved in, and the environmental factors that naturally cultivate presence. This month, we ask what to do about it.
You’re here, but not really here.
You’re on vacation, sitting somewhere beautiful, and your mind is rehearsing a conversation you need to have when you get back. You’re with people you love, and part of you is elsewhere—planning, evaluating, running simulations of futures that haven’t arrived yet.
You’ve tried to fix this. Meditation apps. Digital detoxes. Long weekends. And they help, a little, temporarily. Then you’re back in it. The same low-grade hum of mental activity. The same sense of experiencing life through a pane of glass.
You’ve probably assumed this is just how you are. How your brain works. Maybe a flaw to manage, maybe just the price of being a thinking person in a complex world.
It’s not.
What you’re experiencing has a name, a cause, and a history much longer than your own life. And understanding it changes what you do about it.
You know that experience of suddenly “catching yourself” thinking?
You’re driving and realize you have no memory of the last ten minutes. You were gone—lost in thought—and didn’t know it until something snapped you back. You’re in a conversation and notice you haven’t heard a word because you were mentally somewhere else. You’re thirty minutes into a worry spiral before you realize you’ve been spiraling.
These moments of catching yourself are glimpses of something important. They reveal that there’s a difference between being present and being lost in thought. A difference you otherwise don’t notice.
That’s the key: you otherwise don’t notice.
The rest of the time—the vast majority of the time—you don’t know you’re in it. The thinking doesn’t feel like a mode you’re operating in. It just feels like being awake. Like consciousness itself.
This is habituation.
In psychology, habituation is what happens when a stimulus becomes so constant that you stop consciously registering it. The air conditioner hum disappears from awareness. The feeling of clothes against your skin fades. Your brain encounters a persistent signal and, determining it’s not novel or threatening, stops flagging it for conscious attention.
This is that same process—but applied to thought itself.
Habituation not to the thoughts themselves—you’re often painfully aware of those. But to thinking as the medium you live in. You’ve become so accustomed to operating in mental abstraction that it’s become invisible, like water to a fish. You only notice it in those brief moments of catching yourself. Then you slip back in and forget there was ever a difference.
I call this abstraction habituation: the state of being so continuously immersed in abstract, mental processing that you’ve forgotten there’s another way to be.
This didn’t happen by accident. And it didn’t happen in your lifetime.
If you followed this newsletter through November and December, you already know the shape of the story. The Agricultural Revolution shifted humans from present-focused to future-oriented. Survival began to depend on thinking about next season, next year, the harvest months away. The Industrial Revolution severed us from direct engagement with materials, craft, and natural rhythms. Work moved indoors, onto schedules, away from the body. The Digital Revolution put life behind screens—we began experiencing reality through symbols and representations more than direct sensation.
Each step was a step up what I’ve been calling The Ladder of Abstraction. Each one trained cognition a little further from concrete, embodied experience and a little deeper into the realm of concepts, plans, and mental models.
Ten thousand years of this. Four hundred generations. The mind you’re experiencing right now isn’t a starting point. It’s a result.
What gets lost when abstraction becomes the default?
Not our intelligence. Not our ability to plan or analyze or think strategically.
What gets lost is access to the other mode. The concrete one. The mode that operates through sensation and presence rather than mental simulation. The mode where intuition lives. Where creativity actually happens. Where you sense what a moment needs rather than calculating it. Where you’re here, fully, not watching yourself be here from somewhere behind your eyes.
I’ve started calling this aliveness.
This isn’t a special, esoteric state. It’s actually very normal. The real default state of the human mind. It’s the felt sense of being fully present—not dimmed, not buffered, not running the world through mental models before you let yourself experience it. It’s what people mean when they say I feel alive.
Aliveness isn’t an achievement. It’s closer to a birthright. It’s what emerges naturally when you can move between abstract and concrete modes of being—between analytical thinking and embodied awareness—based on what the moment actually requires.
The capacity to make that shift is called cognitive flexibility.
And abstraction habituation is what happens when that flexibility erodes. When abstract processing becomes so dominant, so automatic, that the concrete mode becomes hard to reach.
This would matter in any era. But it matters now in a way it never has before.
You probably spent years getting good at abstraction. School rewarded it. Your career rewarded it. You learned to live in your head because that’s what success required—analyzing, strategizing, planning, solving problems through mental manipulation of concepts and symbols.
And now you can watch machines do that kind of thinking better than you ever could.
AI excels at abstraction. Pattern recognition, analysis, synthesis, logical inference—everything that happens in the realm of abstract cognition, AI does well and is doing better by the month.
Which might actually be a relief. If you could remember how to do anything else.
Here’s the quiet irony of this moment: You traded presence for performance. You climbed the ladder of abstraction because that’s where the rewards were. And now the thing you gave up—the aliveness, the embodied presence, the ability to actually be somewhere rather than just think about it—turns out to be exactly what machines can’t do.
Creativity. Intuition. Reading a room. Sensing what isn’t being said. Responding to genuine novelty with something other than pattern-matching. Being with another person in a way that’s more than information exchange.
These are capacities that require a different form of cognition. They emerge from the concrete mode—the one you’ve been habituated away from.
These capacities don't disappear entirely. But they become harder to access. Life feels dimmer. You watch your own experience through a fog of mental commentary. Something is missing, even when nothing is technically wrong.
The age of AI isn’t just changing what’s valued. It’s revealing what was lost.
So what do you do?
Not what you might expect. Not more training. Not another skill to build. Not another app.
The research points somewhere else entirely. In communities still living in what researchers call immediate-return environments—contexts with direct feedback, experiential learning, immersion in natural surroundings—present-moment awareness isn’t achieved through practice. It’s the default. It’s how minds work when conditions support it.
This suggests something important: Aliveness isn’t something to manufacture. It’s something to stop suppressing.
Cognitive flexibility doesn’t need to be built from scratch. It needs conditions that allow it to re-emerge. Conditions we’ve systematically removed from modern life—and can begin to reintroduce.
I’ve been developing a framework for thinking about this, which I call Ecological Aliveness Theory. “Ecological” because the core insight is environmental: your cognition emerges from the interaction between you and your context. Change the conditions, change the capacity. “Aliveness” because that names what returns when flexibility is restored—the felt experience of being fully here.
The framework looks at three dimensions that shape cognitive flexibility:
Place—your physical environment. Sensory richness, natural elements, spatial variety. The spaces you spend your time in aren’t neutral; they’re actively shaping your cognitive patterns.
Pursuits—the structure of your activities. Feedback loops, completion rhythms, how concrete or abstract your daily tasks actually are. Endless abstract work with no clear endings trains the mind into a single mode.
Perspective—the cultural messages you’re swimming in. What counts as “real thinking.” What you’ve been taught to value. The assumptions about mind and productivity you’ve absorbed without noticing.
Over the next three weeks, I’ll explore each dimension. Not as theory, but as practical territory—what suppresses flexibility, what restores it, what you can actually change.
This isn’t about rejecting abstraction. Abstract thinking built the world you live in. It enables complex coordination, long-term planning, scientific understanding, the technology you’re reading this on.
But abstraction was supposed to be a tool, not a cage.
Somewhere along the way, we forgot that the ladder goes both directions. We forgot that thinking was one mode among several, not the whole of mind. We climbed so high we forgot there was a ground.
The ground is still there. The capacity for presence, for embodied knowing, for being fully alive to what’s actually happening—it hasn’t disappeared. It’s been covered up. Trained over. Made hard to access by decades of living in environments that reward abstraction and provide no support for anything else.
The age of AI doesn’t just make this recovery possible. It makes it urgent.
Let the machines handle the top of the ladder. They’re welcome to it.
Your job now is to remember what they can’t touch—and find your way back to it.
Going Deeper
The concept of abstraction habituation is explored in depth in my recent peer-reviewed paper in Frontiers in Psychology: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1763376/abstract
Recent white papers by The Alive Institute:
The Ladder of Abstraction: How 10,000 Years of Technological Progress Shaped Human Cognition—And Why It Matters Now
What We Left on the Ground: The Environmental Factors That Shape Cognitive Flexibility—And What Organizations Can Do About Them
Uniquely Human Skills for the Age of AI: Why Cognitive Flexibility Is the Foundation That Makes Them Possible
Working with The Alive Institute: I help individuals and organizations restore cognitive flexibility through workshops, training programs, and assessments grounded in peer-reviewed research. Learn more at TheAlive.Institute. Email James@TheAlive.Institute for inquiries.
—James
Note on AI collaboration: The Alive Letter explores how humans can stay fully human while learning to work with modern technology. In that same spirit, I collaborate with AI in the creation of these articles. As an industrial/organizational psychologist who studies human-AI collaboration, I carefully guide, refine, and evaluate AI outputs. At its best, this partnership helps me more clearly and authentically communicate my own thoughts and perspectives than I am able to alone.