We forgot what people are

We Forgot What People Are

A Field State Observation

I was walking along the Thames recently, somewhere between Blackfriars and Waterloo, and I kept noticing the trees. Then I remembered something about the trees in London... that they are largely Plane trees. This was interesting because the Plane tree is one tree that can survive what the pollution of the city does to the air. And Plane trees are excellent at filtering pollution. Good on London for mitigating the problem, but those trees are doing active damage control. They are planted deliberately between the glass and the steel, lining the outskirts of parks and squeezed into whatever space the city had left for them. This got me thinking that we know the consequences of our actions, but do just enough to make those deliberate and negative actions slightly balanced with a nod to something positive. Maybe we're remembering that people need trees.

Then I was snapped back to reality by the noise. The screens. The signs selling me something and the digital displays and the ten thousand other things competing for a piece of my attention everywhere I looked. Nothing was serene. Nothing was still. Even the Thames, which should have been the most grounding thing there, felt like a brown negation of my need for something natural. I had to ride all the way to Hyde Park, find a bench, sit down and wait for my nervous system to relax and find some sort of quiet.

And then I saw it. This is what we've built. This is what we are actively choosing.

It's no surprise that I've been looking for work for a while now. The process has been, for the most part, deeply impersonal and quite frankly almost soul destroying. Forms designed to filter. AI systems built to sort and hunt for keywords on a person's experience. Automated responses that arrive before any human could have read a word. I understand why. I do (I've been on the other side countless times). But understanding something doesn't stop it from having a human cost. We send our experience, our thinking, our years of work, into a process that feels entirely indifferent to the fact that a person sent it. It wears on you in a way that's grinding.

Then I came across a job description from B Lab, the organisation behind B Corp certification. And I was blown away. Not only because the role was interesting, but because the questions they asked were human. Because the way they described what they were looking for treated the applicant as a thinking, feeling person with real values and a point of view. It really felt like they would read everything I submitted and respond with care, not like someone trained only to look for signals that a particular organisation might match people against. Sadly this shouldn't have felt remarkable. But it did. Who knows what will come of it, but I poured my heart and soul into that one.

These contrasts are what this whole Observation piece is about. And I don't think any of it is accidental. I think it's symptomatic.

We have built great things in a few thousand years of civilisation. We've built systems, defined units to measure things by and make sense of what we can understand. We've created commerce systems and created money. We've even built machines to make things for us and to help us manage the scale and pace of the mighty things we've built. But somewhere along the way we made a quietly agreed decision to treat people as units. We call people resources, headcount, and give them numbers. We apply measurement terms to people like bandwidth and capacity and want them to execute. And this appears to be normal and acceptable. I never really thought about it until a couple of years ago, and very few people are saying... hold up, can we look at this? My issue is that these are people. People have needs, rhythms, lives and souls. I'd even argue we should be extending the same courtesy to our fellow human beings that we extend to the machines we've built to serve us.

Over time we seemed to have replaced quality of life with the bottom line or... more disturbingly, personal metrics of performance. Again... I get it. The argument is we need these things for performance evaluations. OK. But it is rare when someone has to make a tough decision and does so with empathetic, conscious and ethical aspects front of mind. I could be wrong, but this seems to have happened over many years and now moving numbers is seemingly way more important than the person behind that number. We're blindly trusting AI and algorithms to make decisions that really should always require human judgment, human context and human care. Diversity of thought and background and lived experience is written on paper and advertised but ignored in practice. (I can't say that's a blanket statement... I've worked in places where this is real and I loved it.) But it does sometimes feel like genuine openness to other perspectives is slow, or very surface level. What we need is real listening. We need the openness and willingness to be changed (or at least to consider being changed) by what we hear. Rigid systems don't like that. Systems like efficiency. (Insert robot sounds)

In order to do this work we built great office buildings filled with straight lines and unnatural light. We contain people inside geometries that have no precedent in the biological history of our species. We asked them to sit still, focus indefinitely, perform consistently, and called it professionalism. However, you can get a comfy chair and have an ergonomic consultant make sure your monitor is at the right height so you don't strain your neck. Cheers.

We know our bodies have modified and evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to orient toward nature and movement. Our eyes love things like the fractal patterns of trees and water and open sky. But each and every day, many of us find ourselves surrounded by hard edges and fluorescent lights and the endless low-grade demand of the screen. It's wild to me as I write this, but as you know, our bodies and minds adapt. We're good at that. But adapting to things that actually harm us has a cost. We become like Pavlovian dogs and we are all slowly paying the price.

I'm not saying these things to scare anyone, although it would be great if what I've been talking about allowed a question or observation to come alive in your own mind. What we've got now is not just a workplace problem. It is a societal habit... an injustice even. We seem to consume the same way we think about people. We're not pausing to ask whether we actually need this, whether it is worthy of the resources it costs or whether the planet on the other side of the transaction can absorb it. I could ramble on about my affinity for PCLD (Planetary Life-Centred Design), but I'll save that for later. What we want is… More. Faster. Cheaper. Again. The logic of accumulation applied everywhere, to everything, until the Earth itself starts sending back signals we can no longer ignore. (Pretty sure that is happening now.)

What we lost, underneath all of it, is real appreciation and real gratitude. For each other. For difference. For the reality that the person sitting across from you (or across the world from you, in a culture you don't fully understand, with a history you haven't lived) carries perspectives that could genuinely change how you see things. Diversity isn't a metric to manage. It is a source of intelligence. A form of richness. An invitation to be expanded by something outside your own experience or perspective.

So what's the point? What can we do?

We can pay attention. We can remember to treat people as people. We can look around us and remember we live on a beautiful and special planet that is a living system, deeply interconnected... and so are we as humans, should we choose to remember that. Our planet is not a resource we are absentmindedly entitled to. We can pay attention to the rhythms and cycles in our own bodies (yes, men have them too). We can listen to the voice, or feel the feeling, when something feels right or wrong. We can be in the moment.

As you may know, I started Field State to address some of these things. I hope that one day Field State can address all of them and make real systemic change. But I'm starting with people. I believe that one individual can make significant steps toward greater connection and that one person can and will influence others around them.

Field State exists because I believe that returning to natural rhythms, to genuine rest, to the regenerative attention, is not a luxury. It is a necessity. And as artificial intelligence becomes more present in every system, more embedded in every decision, more "trusted" to do what only human judgment should do, the need for natural intelligence becomes more urgent than ever. The goal is for our own intelligence to become more attuned to what is around us. To be more responsive. To become more present to the person in front of us.

That is what Field State is built around.

We need to remember what the systems are supposed to serve.

People. The planet. Each other.

———

Field State is a coaching practice built around chronobiology, natural rhythm and the return to what the body already knows. If this resonates, you can find out more at fieldstate.life.

I used Claude to help edit and organise this piece. I do feel that AI is a helpful thinking and organisational tool. Not a replacement for thought.