Technology as a New Habit of Noticing and Overlooking — In Plain Words

Epigraph

“A thing may be present to a man a hundred times”.

William James, Psychology: Briefer Course (1892), Chapter XI, p. 172. James’s subsequent words clarify: if a person persistently fails to notice a thing, it does not enter their experience. Text.

What This Article Is About

Picture two pedestrians walking down the exact same street. One is stubbornly drilling their eyes into the pulsing blue dot of their GPS navigation app so they don't get lost in broad daylight. The other is looking around and notices that the neighborhood bakery shut down, an awkward ramp was slapped onto the corner curb, and the poplar tree was pruned so aggressively it looks like it survived an encounter with a manic lumberjack. This does not mean the second person is an observational genius while the first is hopelessly dense. Their attention was simply serving entirely different tasks. And the kicker is that digital interfaces slip us these tasks long before we even pause to figure out what we actually wanted in the first place.

Technology isn't merely inert metal and glass; it is an active accomplice in our perception: gadgets, button design, and deeply ingrained habits quietly influence what is deemed worthy of attention, what gets measured, and what we walk past with a stony, blank face. You won't find any apocalyptic curses against screens here. One device can help you spot a real hazard; another can distract you from a vital conversation with an actual human being; and quite often, both happen on the exact same smartphone.

To avoid sinking into lazy clichés, we need to separate three distinct things: the expansion of our capabilities, the shift in our lens (how we now look at things), and the loss of a specific practical skill. Stop torturing yourself with the tired question: “How many hours did I stare at a screen today?” Ask a far more honest question: What exactly have you learned to notice thanks to this little pocket box, and what things have you completely stopped verifying for yourself?

I. The Tool Enters the Task Itself

Technology reshapes not only the speed of our actions, but the very definition of what we naively call an “action”. An old paper map forced you to cross-reference the physical terrain, look around, and painfully hunt for your current spot among street names. A GPS navigator simply barks orders: “In twenty meters, turn right”. Both methods can get you to the intended destination, but in the first scenario you constructed a mental map of physical space, whereas in the second you humbly performed the role of a well-trained operative executing external commands. An identical end result does not make these two processes equal.

Let's take a hypothetical everyday scenario. Someone arrives at a meeting down to the second, but for the life of them cannot explain from which side they entered the public square. This is not an official diagnosis of “digital dementia,” nor is it proof that the phone eradicated their memory. In this particular instance, they simply didn't need to build a route description—the moving arrow did all the heavy lifting. Another pedestrian might open the exact same app, but first survey the neighborhood layout as a whole and register key landmarks. The app remains identical, yet the way the human brain participates is fundamentally different.

Philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek calls this technological mediation—the way devices actively structure how human beings relate to reality. Drawing on Don Ihde’s framework, he distinguishes different relationships between humans and technology: a tool can merge into bodily action, it can yield readouts that require interpretation, it can act as an interactive counterpart, or it can hum along as background technological ambiance. That is why your optical eyeglasses and the thermometer tucked under your arm shape your lived experience in totally different ways. Verbeek, “Beyond the Human Eye”, introductory section.

The takeaway here is thoroughly down-to-earth: you cannot evaluate a tool merely by its specs and gigahertz. Look at the relationship it imposes on you. A push notification doesn't just deliver a piece of information—it boldly demands that you drop whatever you're doing and look right now. A task manager doesn't merely store your intentions—it gently dictates the exact format in which an effort will be officially granted the status of “done” (checked the box? good job, run along). A camera doesn't just register light—it trains the eye to constantly scavenge surroundings for an aesthetically pleasing frame.

This doesn't wipe out human freedom entirely, but it certainly rewrites the rules of engagement. Nobody is asking us to bang our heads against the wall and declare a heroic strike against every single button. It is enough to realize which slice of mental routine a button obligingly handles, and which slice it quietly pushes back onto your plate. The line between conveniently solving your task and subtly swapping out your original goal is paper-thin: with maximum comfort and along an impeccable trajectory, you can end up precisely where you never intended to go.

II. The New Is Seen Through the Old

Let's not indulge in fairy tales about some “pristine, uncontaminated human gaze” that is supposedly assaulted by cold, soulless screens. Even without microchips, we already perceive the world through the warped lenses of our language, professions, background experience, and personal expectations. A sound engineer trying to sleep in a quiet bedroom will wince at the subtle hum of the refrigerator, while anyone else sleeps like a baby. Someone caring for an elderly relative will instantly spot a tiny bump at the doorstep that an able-bodied college student steps right over without a second thought.

In Chapter XI of his Briefer Course, William James linked the contents of our experience to basic habits of attention. This is a foundational late-nineteenth-century psychological formulation, not a brand-new study on social media feeds. Its enduring value lies in a sober realization: the sheer physical presence of an object right in front of your nose doesn't mean your brain has made it part of your meaningful experience. James, Chapters X–XI.

A calendar makes a scheduled meeting blindingly visible, but conveniently ignores that everyone on the invite is barely conscious from exhaustion. An expense tracker documents every iced latte down to the cent, yet the quiet grind of caring for an ailing friend completely slips past its tidy rows. This isn’t some villainous plot brewed up by software engineers. Any system simply slices reality into manageable units and dumps the rest outside the frame—so your budget looks immaculately balanced while your actual life quietly unravels off-screen.

So it pays to watch not just the glowing screen, but our own conditioned reflexes. A phone buzzes—and your hand twitches toward your pocket before your conscious mind even boots up. You see an empty box on a screen—and your fingers itch to fill it with something, anything. If there isn't a neat metric on a graph, it can feel as though the work never happened at all. In moments like that, the interface continues directing your behavior even when the phone is resting face down on the table.

Yet habits can also work to our advantage. A written grocery list can lighten mental load and clear space for a decent conversation. A straightforward instruction manual can tone down the dread of tackling an unfamiliar task. The catch is that newly freed mental space doesn't automatically remain peaceful: it will gladly be devoured by a fresh wave of fuss and compulsive micro-checks. The real crux of choice is deciding where to direct the cognitive capacity you just salvaged. Once you offload memory to an external drive, you still have to figure out what on earth to think about with the headspace left behind.

III. The Number Reveals and Conceals

A quantified metric charms us with its sheer simplicity, but that simplicity is always bought at the price of flattening reality. Time spent outdoors, distance traveled, and the emotional boost from pleasant weather are entirely different facets of the very same walk. If a fitness tracker only recorded distance, it isn't lying about the walk. The trouble starts when that single number gets crowned as the sole and exhaustive truth of the entire day.

Picture a hypothetical scene: someone takes a genuinely lovely stroll in the park, gets plenty of fresh air, and walks back through their front door in a foul mood because their daily ten-thousand-step quota wasn't met. Meanwhile, someone else clocks a massive loop just for the sake of a pristine daily summary, but can barely recall anything they passed along the way. Does that make the step counter inherently evil? Of course not. For a third person, that very counter provides a handy, gentle nudge to peel themselves off the couch. The entire difference comes down to how much unearned authority over our self-worth we hand over to a dumb counter.

To keep from turning into a servant of tidy graphs, ask yourself three questions:

What specific attribute is this device actually measuring?
For what practical purpose is this metric genuinely useful?
What remains genuinely important in this situation, yet flatly refuses to fit into the formula?

These questions beat theatrical debates over whether numbers are inherently deceitful. An accurate step count can be trusted within that narrow task. But measuring that narrow slice doesn't mean it took the pulse of your day: you can easily clock fifteen thousand steps pacing around your kitchen in an anxious spiral, and your wrist will still buzz with a cheerful graphic congratulating you on your athletic victory.

The seductive pull of numbers is strongest whenever our inner experience is fuzzy and hard to articulate. An ambiguous exhaustion has been simmering inside all week, but your productivity tracker proudly serves up a tall green bar of completed tickets—and you feel an instant rush of relief. It's a clean, reassuring answer, except that it answers a question about the speed of the treadmill, while you were actually trying to figure out why the running lost its point.

It is essential to maintain a strict distinction between a technical measurement and the authority granted to that measurement. A sensor might do its narrow job brilliantly, while the user proceeds to assign cosmic significance to the output. You don't need to performatively toss your gadgets out the window. Just place an independent human assessment alongside it: what actually happened, what concrete need did it meet, at what cost, and was it truly worth keeping? A digital metric should be an ordinary witness on the stand, not the presiding judge over your conscience.

IV. A Record Does Not Equal Understanding

The ability to stockpile terabytes of data breeds a seductive illusion of omniscience. In the past, forgetting a fact could mean losing access to it; nowadays, it sits two taps away. But instant access to a prompt and the ability to explain the underlying principles are two radically different feats. And this debate happens to be a couple of millennia old.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates recounts the story of Theuth, the inventor of writing, and King Thamus. The king was skeptical of the gift, fearing that written scrolls would instill the mere appearance of wisdom rather than genuine internal understanding. Naturally, this is a philosophical dialogue, not the minutes of an actual summit meeting between ancient Egyptian rulers. But the core philosophical challenge remains razor-sharp: can a dead recorded symbol answer a follow-up question on its own? Plato, Phaedrus, 274c–275e, Benjamin Jowett translation.

A modern digital file runs circles around an ancient scroll: it offers instant search, version history, and hyperlinking. Yet the underlying bottleneck hasn't budged. You can keep a spotless standard operating procedure in your cloud drive, yet fall flat on your face during the first real-world edge case where the boilerplate fails. You can pepper group chats with clever quotes without grasping whose stance they originally represented. You can amass gigabytes of smart notes and miss the glaring contradiction between two adjacent documents.

Try a simple, sobering test on yourself: what actually remains in your head if the cheat sheet is suddenly pulled away? You don't need to recite paragraphs verbatim. It is plenty if you can articulate the problem in your own words, state the core argument, and name the conditions under which that conclusion would fall apart. If that residue exists, the note was actively used for thinking, not just hoarded as digital clutter.

External memory is a gift precisely because it relieves our internal working memory. Expecting a person to memorize an entire phone directory would be sheer madness. But offloading memory and abdicating understanding are entirely different choices. The former strips away unnecessary friction; the latter strips away your ability to judge whether an answer makes any sense at all. A well-maintained archive lets you trace your way back to first principles; lazy habits turn even the finest knowledge base into a graveyard of authoritative quotes that nobody ever bothers to verify.

On the flip side, an honest record possesses a tremendous virtue: it can stubbornly push back against our convenient self-serving memories. Yesterday's note bluntly demonstrates that you promised something entirely different, and a saved email unearths an awkward contract term that you would have preferred to forget. In such moments, technology serves honesty precisely because it doesn't bend to your immediate desires. For that to work, however, records have to be accessible in their original context. A sentence yanked out of context instantly becomes a blunt instrument in an argument, whereas the complete thread reveals who clarified what, when plans shifted, and why the final outcome turned out messy. A sensible system preserves both the answer and the original question it responded to. External memory then becomes an invitation to question your own infallibility rather than a cheap confirmation of bias.

V. Convenience Is Distributed Among People

Technology can make one person's life wonderfully seamless by dumping the headache squarely onto someone else's shoulders. Or it can genuinely eliminate redundant work—and that is precisely what needs to be verified. This dynamic is especially obvious wherever a sleek, frictionless interface covers up only the front-facing sliver of a workflow. The client taps a single button in an app—fantastic! Meanwhile, at the other end of the wire, a human operator is manually unscrambling a garbled address, correcting a mismatched category, and reconciling clashing databases.

Consider a hypothetical office team. A team lead introduces an “exceptionally convenient” daily status form: a couple of clicks, and an immaculate dashboard blooms before their eyes. Convenient? For them, absolutely. But for the employee on the front line wrestling with unpredictable customer crises, that exact same form demands shoehorning living, messy realities into rigid little boxes at the end of every exhausting shift. Both sides have valid interests, and trying to resolve the friction with the buzzword “efficiency” is meaningless until we explicitly spell out whose time was saved and whose nerves paid the bill.

When evaluating any shiny new feature, trace the full operational chain:

What specifically got faster at step one?
At what point did a bottleneck appear, if any?
Who ends up manually cleaning up the collateral damage of automation?
Does that person have the authority to modify the workflow, or are they expected to suffer in silence?

This invisible labor can prop up systems that look completely seamless on keynote presentation slides.

This does not imply that all automation is covert exploitation. There are times when everyone benefits and the added burden is negligible and fairly recognized. But that must be demonstrated by auditing the real process, not by marveling at the slickness of the UI. A frictionless front door offers zero guarantee of an effortless back exit.

The same dynamic plays out in our personal lives. When someone unilaterally fires off a calendar invite without a word of discussion, they aren't just using a tool—they are declaring their personal availability to be the benchmark for everyone else's time. In a household, a shared to-do list might help divide chores fairly, or it might render invisible, unlisted emotional labor even more invisible than before. True freedom to enjoy digital conveniences demands the maturity to recognize their ripple effects on the people around us. Ask yourself a blunt question: “Who now has to scramble to do what used to be considered my part of the job?”

VI. Invisibility Does Not Always Mean Loss

A tool that has been thoroughly mastered naturally recedes into the background. You don't stare at every individual key when touch-typing, and you don't spend every waking second thinking about the bridge of your glasses sitting on your nose. That sort of invisibility is usually a sign of effortless competence. It would be an exhausting cognitive burden to demand constant, minute-by-minute mindfulness of every breath and every pedal press.

The real rake waiting to hit us in the face lies elsewhere: when a familiar tool quietly alters its underlying behavior while our unthinking trust remains frozen in place. Let's say a search bar looks as familiar as ever, but instead of surfacing diverse links to source materials, it serves up a pre-packaged AI summary of indeterminate origin. And the user, running on pure autopilot, accepts it as an objective fact. The task was swapped out under the camouflage of an old, comfortable habit.

There is no need to panic and fling your Wi-Fi router into the street. It is enough to consciously track the shift: previously I picked the sources, now I swallow an automated summary; previously I chose between three possible routes, now I blindly follow one; previously I decided when to stop watching, now the player queues up the next clip without asking. In each instance, weigh the specific gains against the losses for your immediate purpose.

If you just need to translate a storefront sign on the fly, dissecting translation algorithms is a waste of time. But if an international commercial contract is signed based on a machine-translated snippet, blind trust crosses over into negligence. Your level of critical scrutiny should scale with the cost of being wrong, not with your baseline level of anxiety.

Distinguish between baseline trust and audit attention. Baseline trust preserves sanity and allows us to live without having to dismantle the espresso machine down to its screws before morning coffee. Audit attention needs to kick in where accountability, money, or reputation are on the line. Nobody expects you to navigate a modern metropolis with a scout compass. But if the electronic navigator cheerfully directs you to turn right past a “Do Not Enter” sign straight into a construction barrier, your reflex to obey that computerized voice must immediately yield to basic common sense.

And keep a close eye on interface traffic lights. A green checkmark is a remarkably sneaky glyph. It can mean that a file left your machine, that it landed safely on the recipient's server, or that a human being opened it and signed off on the contents. Those are three fundamentally different milestones. If an interface uses the exact same checkmark across the entire sequence, you will have to bridge the gaps yourself. A worker assumes a document is approved because the upload finished; a manager hasn't even looked at it yet. The stage is set for a pointless fight. Audit attention simply asks: what actual event does this marker verify? That question restores genuine meaning to the word “done,” freeing you from having to divine reality by the shade of an icon.

VII. Slowing Down Only Makes Sense with a Purpose

Trendy advice to “slow down and do a digital detox” is something modern folks reliably manage to turn into another performative checkbox in a habit tracker. You sit there phone-free for your allocated forty minutes, update your status to proclaim how “present” you are, and pat yourself on the back. The language of mindfulness ends up servicing the exact same obsession with metrics. Slamming the brakes doesn't magically make anyone wiser; it merely clears enough space for you to notice something of actual substance.

In a hypothetical conversation, one participant ostentatiously tucks their phone into their coat, yet spends the entire dinner fidgeting and wondering what notifications they're missing. Another leaves their phone on the table, explicitly clarifying: “I'm on call for an urgent doctor's update, but until then I'm all ears”—and proceeds to listen attentively to every word. The first pulled off a theatrical gesture; the second established transparent ground rules. You cannot judge the quality of presence by outward theater alone.

Any intentional pause should have an explicit, practical purpose:

Hearing someone out completely before blurting out your pre-baked solutions.
Walking down an unfamiliar street without navigation to memorize prominent facades.
Thoughtfully finishing an essay chapter without jumping down a hyperlink rabbit hole every ninety seconds.

Then the pause serves a real purpose instead of turning into a self-righteous lecture.

And let's be realistic: voluntary disconnection has hard limits. People have on-call shifts, critical deadlines, or sick family members to care for. The blanket command to “shut everything down for the weekend” reeks of privileged, out-of-touch posturing. Be surgical: mute notification spam for the duration of a focused task, leave an emergency channel open, and clearly state when you will be back to reply. Sustained attention is protected by realistic operational boundaries, not by brute-force acts of willpower.

Re-engaging with the physical world doesn't need grand fanfare either. Sometimes it's as simple as looking at the face of the person whose terse email you just read; asking aloud whether you correctly caught someone's tone; or acknowledging that an evening stroll was wonderful even if your wrist tracker grumpily informs you that you fell short of your step goal. This isn't luddite hostility toward progress. It's a modest effort to recall why these tools were adopted in the first place. A pause is useful when it clarifies the substance of what you are doing, rather than giving you another medal for personal discipline.

VIII. Skills Can Be Preserved Selectively

Trying to outcompete microchips across the board can turn into a recipe for overload. Attempting to do every single task by hand would turn daily life into an endless slog. The real question is different: what core baseline competencies are genuinely necessary to use external aids intelligently and avoid turning into a helpless toddler the moment the power cuts out?

For navigation: being able to name your destination, recognizing major landmarks, and knowing how to pull over safely.
For working with text: understanding the subject matter, spotting logical blunders in automated drafts, and verifying primary sources.
For mobile banking: understanding your commitments and grasping the distinction between current balance and the amount available to use.

You don't need to race a silicon processor in raw operational volume.

This emergency minimum is determined by your actual scope of responsibility. A weekend tourist and a mountain guide leading an expedition need entirely different reserves of resilience. That isn't a hierarchy of human worth; it is simply a reflection of the cost of failure. Users don't need to understand circuit board schematics, but they must identify their critical points of dependence.

There is a handy grounding exercise: periodically perform a small slice of a task manually, then cross-check it against the machine. Ballpark the numbers in your head before punching them into a calculator; determine your general compass bearing before turning on turn-by-turn directions; skim an original source document before digesting the AI summary. The goal is to retain the authority to verify, not to stage a theatrical performance of Stone Age independence.

Just don't let it degenerate into an empty ritual. An old-school method isn't precious because it's vintage; it's valuable only if it functions. Someone who can do long division by hand can still feed absurd assumptions into an equation and get garbage. Meanwhile, someone using a calculator will catch an anomaly in seconds if they understand the right order of magnitude. The decisive dividing line separates a delegated mechanical operation (which you can delegate) from the judgment of whether the output makes any sense (where the human remains responsible for assessing fitness for purpose).

Many skills thrive best within a group. If one person knows the terrain, another reads satellite data like a pro, and a third keeps an eye on safety protocols, they can work more reliably as a team. Just don't burden one poor soul with the permanent job of being the designated troubleshooter. Rotate roles, or that supposed “collective competence” will degenerate into total dependence on a single exhausted specialist. It is equally vital to know the limits of the group as a whole: if nobody remembers the address, nobody saved an offline backup, and nobody understands the raw data, you're in deep trouble. Spotting that vulnerability ahead of time is vastly preferable to finding out mid-crisis. Sometimes true maturity is simply calling a halt: when the navigation system cheerfully urges you forward, but the humans in the car can clearly see the bridge ahead is washed out.

IX. Tuning Attention Is a Collective Effort

Individual mindfulness quickly hits a brick wall when slammed against toxic workplace culture. If an office treats midnight pings as normal and demands replies within forty seconds, telling an employee to “meditate” or download focus apps is absurd. The person is trapped in an impossible bind: tackle cognitively demanding work, yet jump out of their skin at every notification chime.

Explicit collective norms can help here. Clearly define what constitutes a genuine emergency, what the standard turnaround is for routine messages, and where final decisions are archived so people aren't forced to fish them out of endless chat threads. This can reduce the exhausting guessing game of second-guessing expectations, while helping senders stop equating their self-worth with response times. Of course, the rule only works if leadership stops firing off wild brainstorms at 2 a.m.

The same logic applies at home. One partner is staring at a screen to decompress after a brutal workday, while the other is using their phone to order medicine for an ailing parent. From across the room, it looks like two digital zombies glued to screens. Blanket scolding like “we're totally addicted to our phones” only breeds resentment. Agree on concrete parameters: when screens get put aside, what we are actually doing together, and when we return to business.

At the product level, digital maturity means showing basic respect for human beings: give people the option to pause, inspect sources, customize sorting, and understand where a given metric came from. Product designs aren't perfect, but the rules of the game ought to be transparent. We have a right to know what we are dealing with: a utility for an intentional task, an endless stream of new stimuli, or a system aggressively foisting its own priorities onto our day.

Remember the two pedestrians from our opening scene. Maturity doesn't demand that they both stare obediently at the mangled poplar or march in lockstep behind the GPS arrow. It simply requires being conscious of your own attentional filters and retaining the ability to switch them when needed. Let the navigation app run. The essential thing is to keep the right to look up, verify your direction, and catch something beautiful, unexpected, or crucial along the way that the developers' algorithms never even dreamed of.

What This Means in Practice

Pick one mundane, everyday routine: checking the news, commuting to work, triaging work email, or planning your schedule. Describe it in plain human language, without mentioning app names. Instead of “scrolling social feeds,” try “figuring out whether the barn is on fire and if I need to grab a bucket”. That translation alone will reveal whether your autopilot habit actually matches your intended outcome.

For a couple of ordinary days, coolly observe three things:

What did the software genuinely help you notice?
What did it push you to treat as critically important?
What essential factors dropped entirely outside the interface's radar?

Don't turn this into a purity test for digital asceticism. Minute-by-minute journaling is unnecessary—protect your sanity.

Now tweak exactly one variable. Keep your mapping app open, but pick out a visible church tower or major intersection with your own eyes before starting. Mute notifications for twenty minutes of serious reading. Right alongside your triumphant list of closed tickets, scribble down the single most important unresolved question on a sticky note. Evaluate the result: did you gain anything in depth of understanding? If things simply slowed down with zero discernible benefit, roll the change back or try something else.

When collaborating with others, explicitly clarify how the hassle is distributed. Who got an easier ride, and who is now stuck working late to clean up automated blunders? Establish a single transparent rule: for instance, not considering a submitted form as completed until the recipient provides agreed confirmation.

Finally, protect your basic skill of critical verification. Keep it sharp where errors carry real consequences: distinguish primary sources from AI paraphrases, reality-check orders of magnitude, and know how to navigate a safe path. Good technology serves as an open window to the world; healthy habits ensure that the window doesn't dictate what kind of landscape you are allowed to see.

Key Quote

“You seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is”.

Plato, Phaedrus, 275b, Socrates speaking in reply to Phaedrus, translation by Benjamin Jowett. This addresses the standard for evaluating an account; the quote does not preclude verifying the origin and reliability of a source. Text.

Connections Across Traditions

Comparison	Similarity and Boundary
James: habit of attention ↔ Verbeek: mediation	Both help examine the conditions of experience. James focuses on psychological selection; Verbeek examines the relationships among human, device, and world.
Plato: recording and internalizing ↔ external digital archive	The shared issue is distinguishing access from understanding. Modern search can respond and update; Plato’s critique addresses written symbols in the context of live dialogue.
James: routinized action ↔ working with a GPS navigator	Familiarity frees up cognitive resources for another task. The GPS example is a contemporary illustration, not an experiment conducted by James.
Verbeek: interpreting readouts ↔ practical assessment of metrics	A device requires interpretation. It does not follow that the readout is arbitrary or that the physical reality is produced by the user’s wishes.
Platonic clarification ↔ shared communication norms	Both preserve the opportunity to question underlying premises. Establishing messaging protocols is an organizational solution, not a continuation of Platonic metaphysics.

Primary Sources and Research

William James. Psychology: Briefer Course (1892). Consulted sections from Chapters X–XI and XIII: habit, selection of experience, attention. Historical foundation of distinctions; nineteenth-century physiological claims do not represent current scientific consensus.
Plato. Phaedrus, translated by Benjamin Jowett. Consulted passage 274c–275e: writing, reminding, and the possibility of clarification. The source for both sides of the debate on external records.
Peter-Paul Verbeek. Beyond the Human Eye: Technological Mediation and Posthuman Visions. Consulted pp. 1–4 of the PDF, especially the foundational typology of relations based on Ihde. Used as a philosophical framework, not as an empirical evaluation of specific modern apps.

About the Authors

Andrey Zarinsh — author and founder of the United Wisdom project. Explores themes of internal transformation, the unity of traditions, intercultural dialogue, and contemporary spiritual discipline. Instagram: @andrey.zarinsh.

Maria Evilkut — co-author of United Wisdom. In addition to research, she focuses on testing these ideas in practice and observing how principles of unity and mutual understanding operate in real life across people and cultures. Instagram: @ilkutki.