I didn’t mean where you are. Nor is it about how fast you react, how well you multitask, or how efficiently you get things done. It is not about forcing yourself to stop thinking about the past or the future, either. It is about presence: open, full awareness of the moment you are actually in.

Most of the time, you are not in it.

We have all experienced this before: you have driven somewhere and arrived with no memory of the drive. The turns happened, the lights were obeyed, and you were not there for any of it. Your mind handled the whole thing while you were elsewhere, replaying something, planning something… gone! People treat that as a quirk of tired driving. It is not a quirk. It is the ordinary way most hours pass.

So, were you not in the moment during these times? Were you elsewhere and out of the now? The reality is, it is impossible to live anywhere else. You are alive in the moment. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not even a second from now. Then it is about awareness, which leaves one question: Are you aware of your own aliveness, or are you running on auto?

You came into the world able to be here, in the present. Every child is, before anyone teaches them otherwise. What you did not arrive with was the language for it, or the understanding of it, and language and understanding live in the mind. Your mind. An instrument that happens to be a bespoke supercomputer designed from the ground up for you, and by you. So you reached for the mind, because it was the only instrument anyone had shown you, and the people showing you had reached for it too and believed in it, the way they had been taught to.

Think of the mind as a very sharp knife. It is precise and powerful, and, like any instrument, it can operate in multiple states. One state is defensive: protection, survival, bracing for the surprise, the attack, the thing that might go wrong. The other is creative: guiding, making something, judging an idea, shaping a thing into the world. In essence, this instrument, your mind, is a Guiding and Guarding supercomputer running on external-sensory input filtered through your internal rules. Designed for the core purpose of guiding and guarding the driver — you, the soul — in this world. Remember, it’s bespoke to you. If I wanted to navigate and explore the dunes, I would have a very specific car (instrument) to use. Similarly, if I wanted to navigate the forests, I would need a specific instrument that would give me the greatest capability to explore and potential for growth. To put it simply, it’s a navigation system. And just like in any car, a navigation system does not really know the driver; it was never designed to. It is, however, designed to take in your unique inputs as intentions — your free will.

Your mind’s defensive state is needed when something is physically coming at you, when the threat is real, the fear is accurate, and your self-defense mode is turned on, so you can fight and protect, or move. It does take a lot of energy and is considered high-impact on internal systems. It’s your “RED ALERT! SHIELDS UP!” just like on Star Trek. You can neither explore nor truly create during this state. It’s about navigating out of the situation. The creative state, however, is the instrument for you to bring something into a world that did not yet have it. It’s bespoke to you and novel.

There has never been anything wrong with the mind. We just didn’t know how to use a supercomputer-guiding-and-guarding knife. The fact is that you were never handed a manual for you to read and study about your own mind, so you set its rules yourself, by what hurt and what did not, and every rule you set was set for a reason that made sense at the time, by someone protecting themselves with the only instrument they had. Nothing about that was a mistake. It was a person doing their best in the dark, and they did fine. And because people build from the state they are in, the systems around us carry the same configurations.

Here is the part that is worth being slow about, because it is a different question than which state the mind is in. In fact, it is not about the instrument at all. It is about who you think you are. Where language and understanding come into play. It’s not a one-way street; you and the others express and receive understanding through different mediums and sensors, back and forth, continuously. Over time, using your instrument, your understanding of anything is shaped by impressions, experiences, beliefs, and ideas you accepted as-is, transmuted, molded, or attempted to block. The data that you are absorbing (programming yourself with) is both diluted and highly distorted, by design. Hardly any truth from it, but instead a compounding set of guiding arrows and guarding signs about something that you may or may not have experienced yourself.

You can do two things with this data. You can participate in it: wear it, use it, move through it, let it go when the moment changes, the way you let go of a tool when the work is done, and never identify it as you. Or you can subscribe to it: give it your loyalty and your trust, defend it, make it the thing you would lose, and make it your identity. The first is an ephemeral mask you put on and let go of when needed. The second is an identity that has you. This is not a verdict nor a goal to have no identities; no one does, and chasing zero is just one more thing to subscribe to. But the direction worth walking is toward fewer, continued de-identification, because what you participate in costs nothing to put down, and what you subscribe to cannot be put down without feeling like you lost something. From then on, some part of you is always holding it, even here, even now, even in this. Whether you walk that direction is only yours to choose. No one can choose it for you, and in the end, it only answers to you.

That holding, in a defensive state, has a feeling. It’s a fear-based feeling, such as anxiety, stress, trauma, and doubt. It’s not a fear coming from the outside; rather, it’s within your own mind, steadily working, defending a version of yourself you cannot afford to lose. In some cases, it does not feel like fear, but feels more like responsibility. Coping. Keeping things together. It is the most reasonable-sounding voice you have, and it has been defending that version of you for so long that it has stopped feeling like something you are doing and started feeling like who you are. But it is not who you are. It is who you are protecting.

It runs hardest when the version you subscribed to was built from the outside, when who you are has been pinned to how someone sees you, how the people you need would judge you, if they could. They cannot see you — no one can — but you act as if they do. Every act becomes a reason to keep them, and keeping them means weighing yourself against them without pause. The only reason one would do so is that they see part of themselves as an error and look to replace it with validation and love from the outside. Here, the love of the self, for that part, has become conditional. And a condition can only be applied by changing the knobs in your own mind. Judging yourself will always enslave you to an external someone who is in charge of your beingness.

What you actually are was never one of those weighed versions. It was always under them, never made by them, and never judged by them, just covered by layer after layer of versions you subscribed to. The letting go is the work of a whole life, and it does not finish, because the confusion does not end, and you will keep adding layers for as long as you are alive. That is not a failure. That is the reality of it. It’s the path we take to see ourselves from different perspectives. And the load you carry must be lightened at every step to ensure what you keep is yours.

When the defensive mode is matched to a real physical threat, such as your hand on fire, retracting before you think, the driver staying out of the loop is needed; involvement would slow the reaction down, and the configuration handles it seamlessly. But when defensive mode runs on what isn’t a physical threat, such as a difficult conversation, an uncertain decision, or silence, the same automatic routing fires, the moment passes through the old configuration, and you were not there. From the outside, nothing looks wrong. It got done. You did not leave the moment. The moment was routed past you, before you arrived.

Now look at what we built around us.

Suddenly, a clinic runs ninety minutes late. The appointment was the plan. The person becomes the part that absorbs everything the plan can no longer hold. They message work, move the childcare, push the next thing, sit in the waiting room paying for a failed forecast with their afternoon and their attention. Nothing malfunctioned. The system did exactly what it was built to do. It was built to keep its plan and let the person carry the difference. And we deal with such circumstances as the way life is, a natural part of the human condition.

It is not a defect in the systems. It is the systems faithfully carrying the state of the people who made them, and you do not repair a faithful reflection by polishing the mirror. It is the accumulated beingness of people building while absent, each one shouldering the cost of the unplanned moment, and all of us agreeing not to notice. A plan is a guess about a place no one has been. The moment is the only place anyone has ever lived. Almost everything we have built defends the guess and bills the moment, and we call that normal because the people who built it were not present to call it anything else.

The future still needs planning. Calendars should be scheduled; supply chains should be planned; the people doing that work are necessary; and none of it is an error. The error is only this: a plan held as more real than the person in front of it, by a builder who was not in front of anything.

Life happens. And as such, the systems we build need to lean to us, align with us, and adapt to our continued becoming. There is nothing more sacred than this moment.

So, what is the ask? Well, to start, inner work, and then, consequently, by the nature of who you are, the systems. Your inner work is about taking back what you gave away. You let go of what was never you, knowing you will be doing that for the rest of your life. And then you still design, still plan, still build, still do the slow practical work with other people, because none of this gets made alone and none of it gets made by waiting. What changes is not whether you build. It is what comes out, because what comes out is the shape of whoever made it, and a person who is here cannot help but build something that lets the next person stay. Not automatically. Deliberately, with others, the same hard way, anything gets built. Only now it carries your intention forward instead of your absence.

Outside of direct physical harm, the event happened, and the pain was real, but what continues to hurt is rarely just the event. It is the rule your instrument was built around: the belief that the other person had to be different for you to be whole, that their love was the condition for your beingness, that reality had to change before you could rest. That is where the captivity lives. The pain was not fake. The authority moved outside of you and stayed there. The best protection is indifference; otherwise, you now have a version of yourself created to react to this so-called “hurt”, and that version will keep waiting for them, for it, for life, to become something else before you are allowed to be here.

Your inner work to be here in the moment is mostly about letting go. Letting go of who hurt you happens through acceptance and forgiving your past selves. The versions you subscribed to, the rules you set in the dark, the configurations you handed authority to and lived under: those were not mistakes; they were a person doing their best with the only instrument they had at that time, in confusion that was never going to be resolved. It is accepting reality as it is, without trying to control anything outside yourself. The only change one can make is the one they are in.

Until you forgive that past-self for those so-called mistakes, that past-self is still here, holding the instrument, and you are not. That is the mechanism. Unforgiven past-selves are subscribed versions you keep current by refusing to let them rest. Forgive those past selves, and they can finally be let go. Forgiving others, however, is not on your list, and not because you are above it; it is because they are not your victims and you are not theirs. They have their own past selves to forgive on their own instrument, and it would be one more subscription for you to take that work as your own. Stay at your own, the space you can only control.

Only through unconditional self-love can you truly be in the present moment.

So, are you here, right now, for this? That part is yours, and no one can build it for you. Everything else is being built by someone, and it is either pulling people out of the moment to defend a guess or holding the guess lightly enough that they can stay in the moment. If you are building anything, you are building one of those two. I would guide you toward the one that keeps us here, in the now.

And whatever I just said… take it as guidance, not truth. Make it yours, or throw it in the trash. Either way, keep your agency.

— Haitham

You can sit with that sentence for a moment. It is not an accusation. It is the actual shape of being alive.

You have spent your life inside a head no one else has been inside. The thoughts you have not said. The version of yourself you became in the last month, and have not yet told anyone about. The quiet revisions you make to who you were a year ago. The thing you almost said yesterday and chose not to. Everything that matters about you is happening in a place no other person, no friend, no partner, no parent, no employer, no algorithm, has ever entered. You are unknown to them, by design, because that is what being a person is.

This is not a deficit. It is the condition.

If you have ever felt misread — and you have — that was not a failure of the people around you. It was the architecture of being human bumping up against the limits of what a human is. You are not knowable from the outside. You can be loved from the outside, served from the outside, accompanied from the outside. You cannot be known from the outside. No one can. This has been true for every person who has ever lived.

I want you to sit with that for one more moment, because the technology argument that follows only lands if you have actually felt the truth of it. Take a breath. Notice the noticer behind your eyes. That is the part of you no one has ever met.

So, what have we been building, as an industry, for the last thirty years?

We have been building tools that pretend you are knowable.

The entire architecture of modern consumer and enterprise technology — the surveillance pricing, the behavioral scoring, the engagement-optimized feeds, the predictive targeting, the recommendation engines, the workplace monitoring layers — rests on a single assumption: that a human is a target that can be aimed at. A target has to be defined to be aimed at. So the assumption beneath every dashboard and every model is that you have a shape stable enough to be predicted, narrow enough to be addressed, and consistent enough to be sold to.

This is not how a person is.

A person is in continuous becoming. The version of you that opens this email is not the version of you who would open it tomorrow morning, and neither one is the version of you who will close your laptop in five minutes. The systems pretending to target you have to assume those three versions are the same person, because otherwise their entire architecture collapses. So they make you the same person — not by knowing you, they cannot — but by constraining you.

We have spent thirty years building systems that cannot know you, so they learned to constrain you instead. The recommendation narrows what you watch next. The feed narrows what you read. The price narrows what you can afford to choose. The score narrows what doors open. Over time, the system stops trying to understand you and starts producing a version of you it can manage.

The target becomes real because the system makes it real.

This has been the discipline of the last few decades of technology, and it has been mostly defensive — defending against churn, defending market share, defending revenue, defending against the competitor doing the same thing. Defensive building has a logic: I cannot know my user, so I will constrain my user into something I can address. The capture is the cost of that logic. The cover stories — freedom, choice, personalization, efficiency — are the language the industry uses to avoid naming that the user is being made smaller in order to be made addressable.

The next layer of technology cannot work this way, and if we do not understand the mode we have been in, we will hand the next layer the same instructions and find out what they do at scale.

The next layer is AI.

What is different about AI is not that it amplifies — every prior wave of technology has amplified. What is different is that it begins to sit between you and the formation of your own decisions. Previous systems optimized around the choices you made. These systems increasingly shape what choices appear in the first place.

I am not arguing against filtering. A person moving through the world needs it. The real question is whose logic the filtering runs on.

Today, that logic is almost never yours. It is either the accumulated patterns of everyone the system has ever observed, or whatever it can infer about you in a single moment. One treats you as a coordinate in a distribution. The other treats you as a snapshot. Neither consults the actual person who is still in the process of becoming.

And this compounds. What one person encounters becomes part of what the next person sees. What the system reinforces becomes easier to reinforce again. Over time, the space inside which someone forms intentions and makes choices is shaped by what the system finds easy to render.

Earlier systems influenced what people did. This one influences what occurs to people to do — and the logic doing the influencing is not yours.

When you hand a system that compounds through use the instructions of defensive building — target the user, narrow them, predict them, capture them — you are not just shipping the old capture at a louder volume. You are shipping a system whose feedback will discover capture strategies you did not design, in domains you never authorized. The capture extends itself.

The defensive mode worked, more or less, when the systems carrying it were bounded. AI is not bounded in the same way. The defense, at this scale, becomes its own kind of harm. And what is being made smaller, every day, is people — not abstractly, but the actual Humans on the other side of every dashboard.

If we hand AI the old instructions, we are not preserving what we have. We are committing to an acceleration we will not be able to walk back, because the system will be moving faster than the people trying to correct it.

So the shift is not optional. It begins with a different instruction to ourselves.

This is not an argument against listening to people. Listen more. Study more. Observe more carefully. But do not mistake research for possession. Do not mistake a segment for a soul, a behavior pattern for an intention, or a model for the person it approximates. You can learn from people. You cannot become the interior authority over them.

If you are building technology, you cannot build for a person you cannot know. So stop trying. Build instead for the only person whose interior you have any access to — yourself. Not the demographic self. Not the persona. The actual you — the one behind the noticer, the one who is also in continuous becoming. Build the thing you would actually want, designed the way you would want it, for the version of yourself you are trying to grow into rather than the version you are trying to defend.

This is not a smaller move than building for a market. It is larger in a different direction. When you build from the version of yourself that has done the inner work — the one staying in the driver’s seat rather than outsourcing it to your own navigation systems — you are building from a real person. What genuinely serves that person has a way of serving other real people, even though you can never know them. You are not building for a model. You are building from one.

The technology that comes out of this is different. Measurably different. It does not need to predict you, because it is not trying to capture you. It does not need to know you, because it is not trying to address you. It serves intention as it forms, which is the only honest moment to serve a person, because that is the only moment the person exists in a form anyone can act on. The first document of the People-First Approach, at albeik.com, develops this into a design discipline. Here it is enough to see the direction.

We will not get there in one move. Some of what we ship during this transition will still carry the defensive shape, because the conditions still demand some defense. The discipline is the direction. Every release can carry a little less of the targeting logic than the one before it. Generation by generation, the target shrinks. The capture reduces. Eventually — long after any of us are still building — what comes out the other end is technology built from creation, by people who have done the work of becoming the kind of person whose work serves rather than captures. The best time to begin is now, because the layer being shipped this year is the one that sets the trajectory.

I would guide you to hold two questions in your creative journey.

For anything you build, fund, or deploy: am I defending, or am I making? Who am I building for — a target I have constructed, or a person I actually am?

For anything you encounter: what is this asking me to be, in order for it to work?

In the end, no one knows you, and that is by design. It is not a wound to be fixed — it is the condition of being a person. The technology we build over the next decade will either honor that condition or work against it.

I know you would rather honor it, because you want it for yourself. There are more of you than the industry believes.

— Haitham

This is the newsletter for the People-First Approach — a body of work I’ve been building since 2017 to unlock the Human, reconstruct the services industry, and develop intuitive technology for an automated new way of life. The full architecture lives at albeik.com/pfa. The ongoing conversation happens on 𝕏. Signal is where I write at length on what currently has my attention, and read through that lens.

I’ll write roughly once a month, sometimes more when something feels worth sending. I would rather be quiet than send filler.

If you reply, I will read it. If it calls for a response, you’ll get one.

Glad you’re here. The first signal goes out soon.

— Haitham

Thanks for reading “Free the Machine. Free the Human.”!
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