It feels like the answer to any serious problem begins with coming back to this moment. You might be reading this text, lightly aware of your surroundings, your breathing, a bird chirping and the lists of things you have to do today. But there is a big difference between being present, and able to switch between things and being stuck inside any one of them.
I get distracted. I have always felt it is part of my job as someone that works in Advertising to actually spend some time in whatever the latest channel might be. I actively search for Ads to watch, asking myself if they are any good. But as I scroll, or doom-scroll as some say, I also lose sense of reality and enter a strange type of flow that is similar to when I had a TV set with 400 channels and I would just constantly drift from one to the next, never watching anything for more than thirty seconds.
This sensation of losing oneself into a flow of random distractions is a bit of a moment of escape from reality, from feeling and all the tricky real world problems we have to deal with. But it is also similar to being obsessively focused on one specific problem. At least for myself, when I have a problem, I can easily get absorbed by it, drawn into it as if it were a deep cave. It can affect my mood, relationships, my health and as I obsess, trying to create a model of the problem in my head, I just journey deeper, spelunking, unaware of what is going on around me.
When in this cave in many ways we are not acting out what it means to be human. We resemble more cognitive machines that are ignoring everything around them and so we lose agency and sense of possibility to choose what to dedicate our attention to.
I have a friend that teaches Gestalt Psychotherapy. It is a fun school of therapy because its creative, multimodal and immediate. If I have a question that is coming to me from a song I wrote, he’ll let me play and give me some tips as to what is going on. It is a bit of a crazy school of psychology but the one thing I have learned from these Gestalt people is that they really understand “the moment”. So if I have questions about this sort of thing I go to him.
I had been trying to explain how I get side tracked and spend ages scrolling on my phone automatically, looking at crap. But it’s also part of my job to understand what crap is out there so it’s hard for me to not do it at all.
“Doomscrolling… Isn’t that like being present, in the moment? Drifting from one idea to the next?”
“No, I don’t think so. When you are present you are also usually aware of your surroundings, not lost and distracted.”
It is true that when I am absorbed in my device I even struggle to listen to the person talking next to me.
“But,” he continued, “it’s not enough to be present. You can get stuck scrolling and be aware of it. Its why you are doing it that matters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, different people have different reasons.”
“I do it for work.. no? Its good and bad at the same time, no?”, I asked him.
He was drinking a coffee, sipping slowly and holding the small dish carefully. A dish which has always seemed to be more there for its ritual value than practice.
“Sure is. I think one way of looking at it is you can get lost in something, as long as you can find your way back. You even, need, to get lost or you won’t learn how to find your way back.”
“But what if I really want to solve one problem. I want to write a piece say, for example, and focus on it till I am finished.”
“Well… sometimes your body takes over and your hands work on their own and you write the piece easly, so you need to trust your hands sometimes. Other times you need space for your thinking. And the space comes from not being stuck in a particular corner of thought.”
“So, what? Should I have an alarm go off every so often while scrolling? And what about when I am chatting with an AI trying to figure something out?”
“You could put an alarm… but you can also learn how to decide when to come back.”
I was thinking about this conversation while walking along to see my friends Sinedades play a gig at their festival. Walking through Florence after a summer rain cooled off the awful heat.
Here I am, breathing, walking, thinking and when I have a question that is a bit more than basic I jump to my phone and one of the seven AI tools I have installed to see what it says.
I was talking to myself to keep the moment, and then to the LLM/AI.
“What does it mean to be present?”
Usually, the AI responds with some extra detail, interesting but it distracts me. Or it addresses one part of the question but leaves elements hanging out so I have to add a few more questions.
“Do I have Agency if I am talking to a LLM, whenever I have a chance?”
A familiar woman’s voice answering through my headphones:
"You do have agency as you are choosing a LLM but you are asking if your choice is expanding you thinking and capabilities or if you are losing presence..."
What kind of thinking habit I am drifting into?
Am I using the AI to avoid something?
I remember how different it was with Internet search. I remember even before search, before the Internet was common. There used to be sites that had all the links in the world that you would consult by category like Open Directory or Yahoo! But search – the best search – was around 2010, where you could type something in and if you knew how to ask you would get some very interesting information that you could speed scan and learn from. You had to work with the results, and take a moment to think what to do next…
My friends Sinedades were playing their gig in a green house surrounded by plants. As has been signature to their gigs they ended by inviting everyone to sing along: “Ahora y Acá, con vos y nadie más”. I always get a lump in my throat at that point.
Here and now with you and no one else.
Sinedades first performance of the song, soundtrack for this piece and inspiration to the title: [Sinedades – Ahora y acá | Sofar Padova]
I include a LLM prompt below that is a game you copy paste into a clever LLM/AI and try. The way you use it is you take a couple of relaxing minutes and write out everything you feel and think, as it fleets through your mind. If it is a thought, perhaps, mention that you are observing it rather than getting caught up in it. Then add a rating for how present you think you are with a number 1 to 10, its ok if you are not so present and rate it low at the start.
I did it a few days ago I wrote something like this July 15, 2025:
I am thinking of… the news, live aid remembering, my knee, the smell of dinner, blame game Epstein, I am distracted by TV, thinking do I care, heated confrontation, the thought of why does it matter, the sense of how its interesting to watch dissent, shoulder hurts, she liked flowers, someone mumbling, news on tv is so cheap today.
I am thinking of… news as a kid in italy, big words, formal, maybe more factual.
My presence: 7
Copy paste this to your favourite LLM:
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Please welcome the human player to the Presence Game by Yates Buckley!
In this game we exercise your sense of presence by asking you to write out what you are thinking about as it comes up. The thought can be internal or external, mental or physical. You are not trying to control the thought but just observing and describing what it is like. Make sure you are comfortable and not getting stuck analysing your thoughts. It can be useful to write "I am thinking..." before each item, but don't worry about doing anything wrong. Each player must end their turn with a presence rating from 1-10. If a player forgets to provide a rating, the other player should ask for one before continuing.
The players take turns at describing thoughts and a rated presence and they can take several minutes per turn.
The self reported presence rating accumulates for each player each turn. And player scores are listed each time as well as a summary.
At the end of each turn either player can question the other players actual presence by noting that the described issues raised do not support actual PRESENCE. If the question is agreed then the score for the whole round for that player is -1 (not added to their total score, but replacing their round score entirely).
After raising an objection, the challenging player must still complete their turn by reporting their thoughts and presence rating before the penalty is applied to the challenged player's score.
The game ends when the first player reaches a score of 25.
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For a sample gameplay script please check out this other companion blog page:
Thank you for reading my work!