The Return to Context: Why Knowing What You Want Matters More Than Ever
The Elevator: Curated inputs to elevate your business and expand your lifestyle.
We are drowning in content. Every day, millions of articles, videos, posts, and messages flow past us like a loud river that never stops. We scroll, we consume, we forget….And yet something deeper is happening beneath this deluge of information something that has been true about human existence all along, which our technological age is forcing us to rediscover: context, not content, is what actually matters in our lives.
As we leave the world of “productivity” we enter the age of meaning and connection. Information flows and management become obsolete as they are taken over by machine intelligence.
Now, how we make meaning in our lives and connect with others is the method by which we navigate an complex world. As machines take over work, they inadvertently teach us more about what it means to be human.
It’s All About Context
Context is the field in which everything occurs. It’s the background that gives the foreground its meaning. A word means nothing without the sentence around it. A simple facial reaction means nothing without the relationship history that frames it.
I learned this from a mentor who was a Gestalt therapist someone who understood that human experience doesn’t happen in isolated moments but within a whole, living context.
In Gestalt therapy, you don’t just look at what someone is saying or doing; you look at the entire field of their experience: their body, their environment, their relationships, their past. Everything happens within context. Nothing exists in isolation. And yet that is so much of what our scientific minded world has attempted to direct us towards: isolated parts and pieces of reality instead of the whole.
Gestalt therapy changed how I saw the world. It taught me that to understand another person, to truly walk in their shoes, you must understand their context.Context helps facilitate connection and empathy.
"Behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else he or she wouldn't have done it." – Helen Langer
There’s a spiritual dimension to this. We acknolewdge that we’re not isolated individuals. We are embedded in something larger through relationships, in history, and place. To honor context is to honor the wholeness of our existence and to resist the fragmentation that our modern world so often demands of us…
The Art of Prompting
When you interact with an AI, you quickly discover that the quality of what you get back depends entirely on what you give it. A vague request yields boring results. A well-contextualized question that includes your goal, constraints, personal preferences, gives you something useful.
So is prompting more art than science? Kevin Kelly observed that machines are fundamentally question answering engines.
“A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for.”
That means the questions we ask are still up to the human. And so it is the human’s ability to ask great questions that is the bottleneck to our insight.
OpenAI understands this, which is why they’re developing hardware devices designed to capture more of your contextual information in real time.
When an AI knows what you’re looking at, what you’ve been working on, what time of day it is, what your energy level might be, it can serve you better. It needs more context mimic humanity
Trying to solve this problem, we’re forced to confront a deeper question…Do we know what we want?
The Discipline of Knowing What You Want
Knowing what you want used to be luxury. Now we have infinite outputs, first digital, and maybe soon, physical. Self knowledge, honesty, and courage still exist as the highest values. We must, as Socrates has said, “Know Thyself.”
True wisdom begins with understanding oneself before seeking external knowledge. And this is both my concern about, and the opportunity of our time. I fear our collective lack of self-awareness our when given more powerful tools.
Most of us don’t really know what we want. We know what we think we should want. We know what others want for us. We know what would be impressive or safe or socially acceptable. But that authentic pull and the thing that calls to us without justification, without defense is harder to identify. Our cultural context, the water we’re swimming in, makes it difficult to define what are deepest gifts are.
Following your bliss, doing what it is that you are called to do, matters, but not for obvious reasons. Following your bliss is our path to sustainability and truth.
When you force yourself to do something you don’t want to do, you create a battle that must be fought again and again. Each morning you wake up and face the same resistance. This forcing becomes an addiction to overriding your own desires, to pushing through, to ignoring what’s true.
The cost is enormous. It’s the cost of becoming disconnected from yourself, from that quiet voice that actually knows what you need. When we don’t listen, our more destructive vices take over. Ironically knowing what you truly want and need is anti-hedonism. And knowing what you want, following your bliss, can be profoundly unselfish.
A chef who cooks what excites them creates better food than one who cooks what they think others expect. There’s a paradox here: the most authentic giving often comes from following your own desire.The best things in life are the things you want without justification.
You want them simply because you do.
Everything Condenses to a Single Conversation
In watching what’s happening to our interfaces, you see that they are disappearing. One search box, one blinking cursor, infinite possibility: This is another opportunity.
You don’t need to navigate menus or learn commands or click through options. You just talk. You describe what you want. The interface eventually simply becomes a conversation.This simplification is profound because it mirrors how humans actually work. We don’t think in menus and hierarchies. We think in questions and needs and contexts.
You say: “So I’m trying to do this thing, here’s my situation, here’s what I care about, what should I do?”
When everything is contained in a single conversation, you must know what you’re asking for. The scalpel becomes more valuable than the shovel. You can’t afford to be vague or unfocused. You must bring your context, your clarity, your purpose.We’re drowning in content precisely because we haven’t learned to be specific about what we want.
We consume broadly, hoping something will stick, rather than choosing narrowly based on what we actually need. The simple box, the conversational interface, forces us to confront this dilemma.
What do you want? Really, what do you want?
Because I can give you anything
…but first you have to ask clearly.
Autonomy and the Future of Work
Dan Shipper offered a useful frame for thinking about AI agents: the closer we are to artificial general intelligence, the more time an AI will spend on tasks autonomously.
Think of it like a leash…how long can it be before you need to check back in?
Right now, when you use tools like Claude Code, you can step away for twenty minutes and let the system work. It’s executing, debugging, iterating without you h The longer it can run in the background, the more autonomous it is.
This is changing what work means. The intellectual labor the grinding through of tasks, the systematic processing of information that’s all being automated. Where you choose to begin holds all of the leverage.
That’s the human work. This kind of work can’t be delegated because it’s inseparable from your human context. An AI can help you execute your vision, but first you need to have one.
It can help you articulate what you want, but first you need to want something.
Learning What You Want: Resources
Start with questions: When you’re stuck, don’t look for answers look for better questions. Every challenge you face is an opportunity to ask a question.
Good therapy: Good therapy helps you learn your own field of context. Not to stay stuck in the past, rather to mine yourself for integrated understanding. Therapy is context work helping you see the field of your life more clearly so you can make choices from awareness rather than habit.
Iain McGilchrist’s work on the divided brain offers another lens to view the global transition.
Small Choices: Make small choices every day and honor them. See how you feel about them. Choose and allow yourself to become present to the choices you’re making.
Why Choice Matters
We are living through a transition. The information age promised us abundance and it delivered too much abundance, too much content, too many options, too much noise.
We’re learning that abundance without clarity puts us into confusion.
The next era will be defined by context and choice. The human capacity for choice has always been our greatest gift. We can choose what to pay attention to. We can choose what to create. We can choose how to respond to what happens to us.
This shift is both exciting and terrifying. It’s exciting because it means work can become more meaningful, more personal, more aligned with who you actually are. It’s terrifying because it means you can’t hide behind someone else’s instructions anymore.
You have to know what you want. You have to choose.
xx David