The Courage to Be Present in an Age That Wants Us Absent

Why self-awareness is a necessity today

Never so connected, never so absent.

There is a paradox running through our time. Never have human beings been so connected, so informed, so reachable — and never, perhaps, so absent from themselves. This is where self-awareness stops being an abstract notion and becomes a concrete necessity: because in that stream that never stops, something subtle and decisive takes place — we cease to choose and begin to react. Life flows on, and we move through it on autopilot, driven by impulses we neither see nor have chosen.

The human being, in all their complexity, lacks awareness of their own state of being and of the mechanics at work within it. This is an ancient truth. But today it has become an industrial truth as well. For the first time in history there exists an economy built expressly to capture our attention and feed on our automatisms. Distraction is no longer an accident: it is a business model. And a fragmented attention is an attention that does not choose. It is precisely the ground on which inner freedom is lost.

Here is the first reason for why today. In a world that works ceaselessly to make us reactive, awareness is the only real counter-power. Not as escape, not as mystical refuge — but as the concrete ability to observe one’s own impulses before acting on them. It is in that subtle interval between stimulus and response that it is decided whether we endure life or truly inhabit it. To cultivate that interval is, quite literally, to reclaim possession of one’s own existence.

A fixed point in times of utter uncertainty.

The second reason concerns the kind of time we are living through. We inhabit an uncertainty that is not passing but structural: economic, geopolitical, ecological and technological upheavals that call into question the external reference points we were used to leaning on. When external structures waver, the only stable ground that remains is the inner one. Not a consoling illusion, but a compass: a centre from which to look upon change without being overwhelmed by it. Those who have not worked on themselves waver in moments of transition. Those who have built a clearer relationship with their own state of being choose.

Preserving what makes us human.

The third reason is the most surprising, and the most timely. We are entering an age in which machines imitate ever more convincingly what we believed to be exclusively human: calculating, writing, predicting, even conversing. Just as this happens, it becomes urgent to ask what remains properly human. The answer is not a cognitive function: it is presence. The awareness of being here. The capacity to give meaning, to choose in full consciousness, to enter into real contact with another. To work on one’s own self-awareness, today, is not nostalgia for a lost world: it is to stand guard at the frontier of what makes us human. It is to cultivate the one intelligence no machine possesses — the one born of contact.

And here something often misunderstood must be said. A path of this kind is not therapy, not the repair of a defect. It is evolutionary work: the development of a faculty every human being possesses but few cultivate. Like the lamp Mother Teresa spoke of — “for a lamp to keep burning, we have to keep putting oil in it” — presence is not a state possessed once and for all: it is a practice, a constancy, a daily exercise.

An impact that goes beyond the individual.

There is, finally, a reason that exceeds the individual. One might think that tending to oneself is a form of retreat, almost a narcissistic luxury in times that call for action. The opposite is true. Transformation unfolds in three concentric circles — within oneself, within the environment in which one acts, within the whole planet — and there is no shortcut that skips the first circle. The great collective problems of our time, from the ecological crisis to the crisis of our relationships, have a root in the quality of consciousness of those who inhabit them. To change the way a human being is present to themselves and to others is the most concrete civic act there is.

The value of time.

Lastly, the simplest and most forgotten reason: time is finite. Every morning, Steve Jobs would look in the mirror and ask himself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” Most of our days pass without our noticing, consumed by automatism. To take part in work on awareness means deciding, at least once, not to let life slip by unawares. It means pausing long enough to ask who is living this existence — and choosing to be truly present.

This is why, today more than ever, cultivating awareness is not one more experience among many. It is an act of presence in an age that would have us absent. It is, precisely, the courage to live: not the absence of fear, but the capacity to remain present in the very instant life asks us to choose. And we are human because we can choose what we wish to bring forth, what we wish to pass on, what we wish to be for ourselves and for those we meet.

👉🏻 Awareness — The Courage to Live, 26–27 June 2026