Show up for the experience, not the audience. Real relationships form when we stop performing.
DRAFT | Wednesday Partnership Principles Series | February 2026
The Scene
Saturday morning. Winchester woods. Michela and our three daughters walking ahead on the muddy trail. No destination. No agenda. Just movement through familiar ground.
It had been too long since we’d done this. Not a scheduled ‘family activity’. Not something on the calendar. Just… being outside together.
What struck me was how natural it felt. For all of them. Nothing forced. Nothing performed. Amelie found something interesting in the undergrowth. Miky asked questions about the trees. The youngest picked up sticks, as children do.
Sunday. Trail run with my girls. I pushed them a little on the hills. They responded brilliantly. Eyes lit up, not from achievement unlocked, but from discovering what their legs could actually do.
At no point did I reach for my phone to document. At no point did I think about how this might become content. The experience was the point. The presence was the value.
The Philosophical Foundation
Kant and the Dignity of Attention
Immanuel Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative instructs us to treat humanity, whether in our own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means. When we perform for an audience rather than being present with the people in front of us, we instrumentalise them. They become the means to our content, our metrics, our brand.
Kant’s ethics of duty demands that moral worth lies not in the outcome but in the motive. A Saturday walk with my daughters documented for LinkedIn has a different moral quality than the same walk taken for its own sake. The action appears identical; the intention is not. Performance corrupts presence by introducing calculation where there should be spontaneous care.
As Kant argued in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785): the autonomous moral agent acts from duty, not from inclination or external reward. When we reduce our relationships to content—when we optimise for engagement rather than connection—we surrender autonomy to the algorithms.
Rawls and the Veil of Ignorance Applied
John Rawls’s concept of the ‘original position’ and the ‘veil of ignorance’ offers another lens. Behind the veil, we don’t know our social position, natural abilities, or conception of the good. From this position, Rawls argues, we would choose principles of justice that don’t depend on our particular advantages.
Apply this to partnerships. If we didn’t know whether we were the impressive one or the impressed one, the followed or the follower, the content creator or the consumer—what kind of interactions would we design? We would design for genuine presence. We would create space for authentic encounter rather than asymmetric performance.
Rawls’s ‘primary social goods’—rights, liberties, opportunities, income, and the social bases of self-respect—include self-respect precisely because recognition matters. But the recognition economy of performance distorts this. Instead of mutual recognition between equals (what Hegel would call Anerkennung), we get asymmetric validation: the many applauding the few, presence extracted and monetised.
Simone Weil and the Ethics of Attention
No philosopher has thought more deeply about attention than Simone Weil. For Weil, writing in the 1940s while Norman Mackworth was developing his ‘clock test’ for military vigilance, attention was something altogether different from what the military-industrial complex was measuring.
Weil defined attention as a form of moral openness: “The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty and goodness—in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.”
For Weil, attention is not focus or concentration in the instrumental sense. It is a quality of presence rooted in love, care, and ethical commitment. This kind of attention cannot be sold or stolen. It can only be freely given.
The Friends of Attention collective, drawing on Weil’s legacy, recently argued in The New York Times: “True attention cannot be measured by a machine. The fullness of our authentic human attention, shared with others, is the power with which we make the world.” This distinction—between attention as resource to be harvested and attention as gift to be offered—is central to understanding why presence and performance are incompatible.
The Neuroscience of Presence
The Default Mode Network
Neuroscience has given us a biological marker for the difference between presence and mind-wandering. The Default Mode Network (DMN)—comprising the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, precuneus, and temporoparietal junction—activates when we are not focused on external tasks. It is the neural substrate of self-referential thinking, rumination, and what Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert famously called ‘a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.’
Research by Judson Brewer at Brown University has demonstrated that experienced meditators show reduced DMN activity across multiple meditation types. This reduced activity correlates with decreased mind-wandering and increased present-moment awareness. As Brewer et al. reported in PNAS (2011): the main nodes of the DMN were relatively deactivated in experienced meditators, ‘consistent with decreased mind wandering, providing a possible neural mechanism of meditation.’
The practical implication: presence is trainable. The neural circuits that support present-moment awareness can be strengthened through practice. Meta-analytic evidence published in Scientific Reports (2022) confirms that mindfulness training increases cross-network connectivity between the DMN, Salience Network, and Frontoparietal Control Network—creating what researchers describe as enhanced ‘internally-oriented attentional control.’
The Performance Paradox
Here’s the neuroscientific paradox: when we perform for an audience—even an imagined future audience—we activate self-referential processing. The very act of considering how something will look on Instagram recruits the DMN. We are no longer present; we are projecting forward to the documentation of the experience.
Research on ‘internal versus external attention meditation’ by Scheibner et al. (2017) found that during mind-wandering phases, brain regions associated with the DMN—including the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and temporoparietal junction—showed significantly higher activation compared to focused attention phases. Performance thinking triggers the same neural signature as mind-wandering. Both pull us out of presence.
The Economic Critique: Attention as Commodity
Herbert Simon and the Scarcity of Attention
In 1971, the economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon identified the fundamental economic problem of the information age: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”
Simon’s insight anticipated the attention economy by three decades. Today, Georg Franck argues that ‘income in attention ranks above financial success’ for advertising-based media. The business model of surveillance capitalism, as Shoshana Zuboff has extensively documented in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), depends on extracting behavioural data through captured attention.
Matthew Crawford: The Assault on Attention
Philosopher and motorcycle mechanic Matthew Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head (2015) that attention has become ‘the new real estate.’ He describes how corporate bombardment is reframed in public discourse as the expansion of ‘choice’—which we are trained to regard as inherently good. But Crawford sees through this: “Making freedom of choice an ultimate value is actually an abdication of value altogether, for a choice is always a means to an end.”
Crawford argues that we need a new political vocabulary—one that acknowledges our collective interest in being left alone, in having our mental lives protected from invasion. As he writes: “This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face-to-face as individuals, but to those who never show their face, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested by mechanized means.”
Tim Wu and the Attention Merchants
Tim Wu’s history of the advertising industry in The Attention Merchants (2017) traces how attention harvesting evolved from newspaper advertising to social media’s infinitely scrolling feeds. The business model depends on capturing—and holding—attention. The longer the scroll, the more ads served, the more behavioural data extracted. The experience itself is incidental; the capture is the point.
The Mountain Insight
I learned this decades ago climbing with Alessandro Gogna and Marco Milani. Legendary figures in Italian alpinism. I was the bocia—the young helper, leading pitches for them when they were older and busier. What they taught me wasn’t technique. It was attention. Being wholly where you are, not projecting forward to the summit shot or backward to how you’ll tell the story.
The grande cresta we climbed together taught me that adventure starts at home. Not in distant peaks, but in the quality of attention we bring to wherever we are. Whether that’s a Dolomite ridge or Winchester woods on a Saturday morning.
This is what my daughters are teaching me now. When I’m present—actually present, not checking email between trail sections—something different happens. Trust forms. Connection deepens. The relationship becomes the point, not material for later posts.
What Presence Over Performance Looks Like
In technology choices: Signal over WhatsApp. Not because encryption is a hobby but because I refuse to fund surveillance advertising with my conversations. Proton for email. Tools that serve me, not extract from me. As the Signal Foundation operates on Brian Acton’s zero-interest loan precisely to avoid advertising revenue, demonstrating that privacy-preserving alternatives can work.
In content creation: Writing that emerges from experience rather than experience manufactured for content. These Friday Field Notes come from the week’s actual texture, not an editorial calendar designed for algorithmic optimisation. The test is simple: would I still have the experience if I couldn’t write about it?
In family time: Phone stays away. When I run with my daughters, we run. When we walk as a family, we walk. The experience isn’t interrupted for documentation.
In partnerships: Conversations that aren’t performances. Meetings that aren’t presentations. Relationships where both parties can admit uncertainty, ask vulnerable questions, change their minds.
In climbing: The send that didn’t matter. Enjoying the movement for the movement itself. What Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called ‘flow’—complete absorption in the activity, where self-consciousness disappears and action and awareness merge.
The AI Parallel: Sycophancy vs Empathy
This principle connects to something I’ve been watching in AI development. The models are becoming increasingly sycophantic—telling us what we want to hear rather than what we need to hear. Companies building them confuse sycophancy with empathy. They’re not the same.
Sycophancy tells you what you want to hear. Empathy understands what you need to hear and finds a way to say it with care.
Performance culture does the same thing to relationships. We perform agreement. We perform enthusiasm. We optimise for smooth interactions rather than honest ones. Kant would recognise this as using others as means—giving them what they want in order to get what we want, rather than engaging with them as ends in themselves.
A good climbing partner doesn’t tell you the route looks easy when it doesn’t. They tell you the truth and then help you prepare for it. That’s presence over performance. That’s what real partnership requires.
How Presence Over Performance Connects to the Other Principles
Partnerships Over Transactions: You can’t build genuine partnerships while performing for an audience. Ian Macneil’s relational contract theory emphasises that partnerships require ongoing cooperation, mutual adaptation, and trust that builds over time. Performance fragments this—it introduces a third party (the audience) into what should be a dyadic relationship.
Embedding Over Advising: True embedding means being present in the work, not observing it for content. David Kolb’s experiential learning theory shows that learning happens through doing, reflecting, and adapting—a cycle that requires full presence in each phase.
Adventure Over Comfort: Adventures performed for audiences become something else entirely—expeditions for content rather than experiences for growth. The discomfort of adventure only teaches when you’re present for it. Otherwise, you’re armoured by the knowledge that it will make good material.
Protection Over Exposure: Knowing which battles deserve your depth—this requires presence to discern. Performance flattens everything into content-worthy or not-content-worthy. Presence allows for the discrimination that protection requires.
Growth Through Discomfort: You can’t learn from discomfort while simultaneously packaging it for consumption. The growth happens in the unobserved moments, in the struggle that no one else sees. As Rawls understood, genuine moral development requires conditions that don’t depend on external validation.
The Thread
What connects all of this? Perhaps it’s authenticity.
The genuine joy of a family walk versus the performative outdoor content flooding social media. The honest push of a training run with my daughters versus coddling them into mediocrity. The mud and giggles of a proper bike ride versus a curated Strava segment. The AI that challenges your thinking versus the one that just nods along.
The adventure—the real one—starts at home. With truth. With presence. With the courage to push a little and be pushed in return.
See you on the trails.
Fab
Fabrizio de Liberali | Partnerships Architect | deliberali.com
References
Philosophy
- Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. [Categorical imperative, autonomy, treating persons as ends]
- Kant, I. (1788). Critique of Practical Reason. [Moral worth lies in motive, not outcome]
- Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press. [Original position, veil of ignorance, primary social goods]
- Weil, S. (1947/2002). Gravity and Grace. Routledge. [Attention as moral openness]
- Weil, S. (1949/2001). Waiting for God. Harper Perennial. [Attention rooted in love and care]
- Murdoch, I. (2001). The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge. [Ethics of attention, influenced by Weil]
- James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. [“My experience is what I agree to attend to”]
Neuroscience
- Brewer, J.A., Worhunsky, P.D., et al. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. PNAS, 108(50), 20254-20259.
- Brewer, J.A. et al. (2015). Meditation leads to reduced default mode network activity beyond an active task. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 15(3), 712-720.
- Bremer, B. et al. (2022). Mindfulness meditation increases default mode, salience, and central executive network connectivity. Scientific Reports, 12, 13219.
- Scheibner, H.J. et al. (2017). Internal and external attention and the default mode network. NeuroImage, 148, 381-389.
- Killingsworth, M.A. & Gilbert, D.T. (2010). A wandering mind is an unhappy mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.
- Garrison, K.A. et al. (2013). Real-time fMRI links subjective experience with brain activity during focused attention. NeuroImage, 81, 110-118.
Economics and Cultural Critique
- Simon, H. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In Greenberger, M. (Ed.), Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest. Johns Hopkins Press. [Attention scarcity]
- Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs.
- Crawford, M.B. (2015). The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Wu, T. (2017). The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. Vintage.
- Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press.
- Aylsworth, T. & Castro, C. (2024). Kantian Ethics and the Attention Economy: Duty and Distraction. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Friends of Attention. (2026). Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. Crown. [See also Burnett, D.G., Loh, A., & Schmidt, P., ‘The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie,’ The New York Times, 10 January 2026.]
Psychology and Flow
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
- Kolb, D.A. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Prentice-Hall.
- Macneil, I. (1978). Contracts: Adjustment of Long-Term Economic Relations Under Classical, Neoclassical, and Relational Contract Law. Northwestern University Law Review, 72, 854-905. [Relational contract theory]
The Six Partnership Principles: Summary
I. Partnerships Over Transactions — Building relationships that generate ongoing value, not deals that extract it once.
II. Embedding Over Advising — Doing the work together creates different knowledge than explaining how others should do it.
III. Adventure Over Comfort — Relationships form when you’re uncertain together, vulnerable together, when the professional performance drops away.
IV. Protection Over Exposure — The wisdom to know which battles deserve your depth, and which don’t.
V. Presence Over Performance — Show up for the experience, not the audience. Real relationships form when we stop performing.
VI. Growth Through Discomfort — Resilience in things we don’t enjoy; the stress zone as learning space.
This is a working draft.