On work, identity, and attention
Letting Go.
The work can continue.
Your attention can go somewhere else.
You open the spreadsheet again. The numbers reconcile. The columns are aligned. You move a border, soften a color, adjust a heading. Everything is already there, but you are still attending.
There is satisfaction in this. You know where everything belongs. You can bring a small, unruly part of the world into order. People have come to depend on you for it. Somewhere along the way, the work became evidence of who you are.
Now AI can begin to absorb that work. And the feeling that arrives may be surprisingly close to grief.
We tend to discuss this moment as a question of capability. Can the AI reconcile the records? Can it find the mismatch? Can it produce something clear and usable? Those are real questions. But even after they have been answered, another question remains.
If I no longer have to do this,
who do I get to become?
The grip
What absorption asks of us
I use the word absorption deliberately. Automation describes a change in who or what executes a task. Absorption describes a change in what requires our attention.
A system can produce a spreadsheet in seconds and still leave you carrying the entire process. You remember to request it. You explain the same requirements. You move the result into the right place. You inspect it, revise it, and remember to do it again next week. Production became faster, while the work remained a tenant in your mind.
Absorption reaches further. Within a dependable, bounded arrangement, the routine occurs without needing to become your recurring mental assignment. The records still reconcile. The necessary checks still happen. Something unusual can still reach you. The ordinary work stops asking you to hold it together.
That is the possibility AI puts before us. Realizing it requires capable systems, appropriate access, and evidence that the work is being handled. It also requires a human being willing to stop attending once that evidence exists.
In The Three Gates to “Getting AI”, I called letting go the second gate. Today I want to stay at that gate a little longer. We can understand the technology and still stand there with our hands closed.
A small thought experiment
Give attention somewhere to go.
This illustration assumes the routine is dependable. It shows a choice about attention, rather than a measure of AI capability.
What should we make possible with these resources?
Totals reconciled.
Exceptions surfaced.
The self
The task became a mirror
The analyst is the person who can make the model balance. The coordinator is the person who remembers every loose end. The writer is the person who can turn the blank page into something worth reading.
These identities were earned through practice. They carry competence, recognition, and often a paycheck. Being asked to loosen them can feel like being asked to surrender the part of yourself that other people value.
This is why an unnecessary edit can feel necessary. A small change puts your fingerprints back on the result. You can point to something and say, “I did that.” The intervention may add little to the artifact while doing a great deal for your sense of ownership.
In The Second Subconscious, I described the timing problem: synthetic help arrives after we have already formed an identity around attending. We encounter it with years of effort invested in the very work it can absorb.
That effort still belongs to your history. The skill still helped people. A task becoming easier does not reach backward and make your contribution meaningless. But history can explain how you arrived here without deciding where your attention must remain.
Let the competence travel. You learned to notice inconsistency, honor a commitment, explain something difficult, and care about the result. Those capacities can find a new object. Your identity has more room in it than the procedure through which you first expressed them.
The ground
We have moved our attention before
Think about the distance between your day and the lives of ancestors who hunted and gathered thousands of years ago. Finding food demanded intimate knowledge of a place: seasons, tracks, plants, weather, and the movements of other living things. Survival depended on capacities most of us no longer practice.
The Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program places the emergence of food production within roughly the past 12,000 years. The transition was uneven and took many forms. Hunting and gathering remain living practices, and people in those societies have always had relationships, imagination, ritual, and intellectual lives. Human depth did not begin when food systems changed.
What changed for many people was the organization of necessity. The person buying groceries can spend the afternoon studying astronomy without first tracking an animal. Food still has to be produced. The labor and knowledge still exist, distributed across people and systems. But each individual no longer has to attend personally to every layer of obtaining it.
The same is true, to different degrees, of shelter and safety. Reliable buildings, clean water, public services, and other shared arrangements can keep vital needs from consuming every waking thought. Their success makes room for attention to travel.
That room is unequally available. Hunger, insecure housing, and danger remain immediate realities for many people. This argument begins wherever a necessity has actually become dependable; nobody can think their way out of an unmet need by deciding to let go.
Where dependable support does exist, however, we rarely interpret the freedom it gives us as a personal failure. We do not wake up ashamed that we cannot identify every edible plant. We have found other things to learn, make, understand, and love.
Our descendants may find our attachment to reconciling a spreadsheet just as difficult to imagine.
The opening
Beyond a beautiful spreadsheet
I have written before about arithmetic moving into the spreadsheet. Now consider the next movement: the spreadsheet itself receding from the center of a person’s attention.
The numbers matter because something happens through them. A business decides whether it can keep a promise. A school decides what it can offer its students. A family decides whether a different life is possible. A clear, accurate sheet serves those questions. It does not have to become the destination.
When I say let your attention move to higher planes, I mean move toward questions with more meaning for the life you are actually living. What is worth building? What are these resources for? Which promise should we make? Who needs us present?
“Higher” does not mean a more prestigious title or a larger stack of work. It might mean finally learning the subject that has held your curiosity for years. It might mean listening to your daughter without mentally checking a report. It might mean giving an idea enough uninterrupted attention to discover what it could become.
In Education Is the Upward Migration of Attention, I argued that releasing a mechanical burden should make deeper engagement possible. That invitation reaches beyond the classroom. The point of absorbed work is a life in which we have room to encounter something more.
There is no guarantee we will use that room well. An empty hour can disappear into another feed. A company can fill every released minute with more assignments. Attention needs somewhere to go, and the destination deserves a conscious choice.
One place to begin
Choose one thing you can stop holding.
Choose a recurring task whose results can be checked. Name the outcome, establish how the work will be verified, and decide what exception should return to you. Give the arrangement enough real use to learn whether it deserves your trust.
Then notice what happens when it succeeds.
Do you reopen the work because something needs your judgment? Or because being the person who touches it has become reassuring?
Correct a real defect. Keep a real obligation. But let a successful routine be successful without requiring another performance of your involvement.
Choose, in advance, one place for the released attention to land: a question, a person, an idea, a practice you want to deepen. Give that part of your life the attention the routine used to receive.