We have been trying to win a race we were never meant to run.

For years now, the conversation about artificial intelligence has circled a particular fear: that humans are becoming obsolete. Too slow. Too emotional. Too inefficient. That the machine will outpace us — and perhaps already has — in every domain that used to make us feel useful.

But I want to offer a different frame.

What We Got Wrong About Intelligence

We built our entire model of human value around output. Speed. Accuracy. Volume. We measured ourselves against these metrics and found ourselves wanting — long before AI arrived. The burnout epidemic, the exhaustion epidemic, the epidemic of leaders who have achieved everything and feel hollow at the centre of it: these are not new symptoms. They are old ones that have simply been given a new backdrop.

The problem was never that humans are too slow. The problem is that we forgot what we are actually for.

The field that no algorithm can enter

There is a quality of human presence that cannot be replicated, simulated, or approximated. Not because it is mysterious — though it is. But because it requires something no machine possesses: a living body, a nervous system, a field of consciousness that responds in real time to what is true.

When a human being is fully present — not performing presence, not managing impression, but actually inhabiting this moment, this breath, this exchange — something happens in the space between people. Information transfers that was never spoken. Trust forms without evidence. Clarity arrives without effort.

This is coherence. And it is the most advanced technology on earth.

Presence Is Not a Soft Skill

I have spent years inside organisations at the highest levels — boardrooms, strategy sessions, technology builds that changed the shape of industries. And in every one of those rooms, the person who shifted the outcome was never the fastest thinker in the room. It was the person who was most present.

The leader who listened past the noise to what was actually being said. The visionary who slowed down enough to feel which path was alive. The advisor who held the room in a quality of attention that made everyone think more clearly.

This is not softness. This is the most sophisticated form of intelligence we possess. And it is entirely inaccessible to any machine — not because machines aren't clever enough, but because it requires a nervous system, a body, a being embedded in the living field of reality.

What this means for how we work

It means we have been optimising in the wrong direction.

Instead of asking how to keep up with AI, the more precise question is: what becomes possible when AI handles everything it does well, and humans are freed to do what only humans can?

The answer is not "more leisure time." It is more presence. More depth. More of the quality of engagement that actually moves things — that actually builds the trust, clarity, and coherence that organisations and relationships require to thrive.

The Race Was Never Ours to Win

The spiral doesn't move in lines. It moves in depth. And depth is not something you can automate, accelerate, or approximate with a language model.

Depth requires time. It requires stillness. It requires a willingness to not know — and to be present with the not-knowing until something true emerges.

This is what I work with. Not because it is mystical, but because it is precise. Because when a human being operates from coherence rather than performance, everything they touch changes quality. Decisions clarify. Relationships stabilise. Creativity returns. The field around them becomes, in a measurable sense, more alive.

AI will continue to accelerate. It will continue to improve at everything it is built for. And that is exactly why this moment — this strange, disorienting, luminous moment — is an invitation to return to what we are actually built for.

Not output.

Presence.

The human is not a slow machine.
The human is the only being on earth that can be fully here.

And being fully here is already enough.