We Pay for Efficiency With the Death of Presence
What You Use Every Day Quietly Ceases to Exist for You
That was shortly after I arrived in Russia.
On the subway, I’d stare at the announcements inside the car. Safety instructions, ads, station names—anything. Not because I could fully understand them, but because those Cyrillic letters were still a mystery to me, and a mystery is worth lingering on.
The Russians next to me looked at me as if I were doing something very strange.
They didn’t read those announcements. Not because they were uneducated, but because those words were too familiar to them. So familiar that they didn’t need to process them. So familiar that they simply disappeared.
Later, I thought about the Shanghai Metro.
I can’t even remember how many years I rode it. For a while, I took it every day.
If you asked me what the announcements on the subway say—I couldn’t tell you.
Those words passed before my eyes thousands of times, but they never truly entered me.
This isn’t a memory problem.
It’s our nervous system doing something for us: archiving the familiar, then removing it from consciousness.
This mechanism is incredibly useful. You don’t need to reacquaint yourself with every piece of furniture every time you walk into your own home. You don’t need to relearn how to shift gears every time you drive. Familiarity frees up cognitive resources to handle what truly needs handling.
It’s efficient. It’s normal.
But it comes at a cost few notice—
You think you’re experiencing life, but most of what you experience has already been filtered out by yourself before you even realize it.
Those announcements were always there. It was your brain that decided they weren’t worth processing.
So why did that state of staring at the announcements on the Russian subway feel so good?
Not because I was learning Russian. Not because I’m more curious than others.
It was because that was one of the few moments when I was actually experiencing where I was.
Those words hadn’t been archived yet. That place hadn’t become background noise yet. My senses were still open.
I was present.
But there’s an essence to this state—it’s temporary.
Once you become familiar with it, it disappears. It’s not your failure; it’s its nature.
After I’d been in Russia for a while, those announcements gradually began to disappear too. I started riding the subway like a local, staring at my phone, not reading anything.
Even an unfamiliar place eventually becomes background.
But here’s a question more worth asking than “how to stay fresh”—
It doesn’t matter if subway announcements become background.
But have you, somewhere where you should be present, become completely absent because it’s too familiar?
Not subway announcements.
It’s the things you truly care about. A relationship happening every day. Something you’ve been doing for years. A city you’ve lived in for a long time.
You’re still there. You experience it every day.
But how long has it been since you truly saw it?
Has it quietly become background too—not because it doesn’t matter, but because it’s so familiar that your nervous system has archived it, removed it from your perception before you even knew it?
I can’t tell you how to solve this.
Because the archiving mechanism can’t be turned off, and it shouldn’t be. You need it.
But maybe you can occasionally do one thing—
Like a stranger who just arrived in a foreign place, take a look at a place you already know too well.
Not deliberate practice, not mindfulness meditation, not assigning yourself homework.
Just occasionally, stop, and really look.
The way you would have looked at it the first time you were here.