There is something that happened to all of us, gradually and then all at once, and it is slowly eroding our lives… minute by minute.

It’s demonstrated through the action of picking up your phone to check the time and putting it down 30 minutes later having watched 3 videos, read half an article, opened Instagram twice, and completely forgotten what you were originally looking for. Whilst also not remembering at all what you have just spent a significant chunk of time consuming. It’s the reunion dinner with old friends and whilst the energy and conversation is in full flow, there is still a pull somewhere inside of you, a low-level itch, to just quickly check your phone. It’s the way any silence in your day has started to feel unbearable or all together impossible to sit within without reaching for a distraction.

We’ve all felt it. We just haven’t talked about it directly enough.

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But it’s not our fault?

Johann Hari spent 3 years trying to understand this phenomenon, interviewing over 200 of the world’s leading experts on attention for his book Stolen Focus. What he found wasn’t that we’re lazy, or weak, or addicted in the way we usually use that word. What he found was that our attention was taken, systematically, deliberately, by the most sophisticated technology ever built for exactly that purpose. As he put it: “Your difficulty in focusing is a system problem.” Not a personal one.

These aren’t personality flaws…they’re design outcomes.

Because here’s what happened while we were busy living our lives: somewhere in the early 2000s, someone in Silicon Valley worked out that in a world of infinite content, the scarce thing wasn’t information, it was the human capacity to pay attention to it. And once you understand that, the entire architecture of the internet makes sense. Every notification, every infinite scroll, every algorithmic feed, all of it is engineered around a single goal: capture the most of that scarce resource, hold it as long as possible, and sell it to the highest bidder. Your attention became the product. And the business model of a generation was built on this very thing.

Terrifyingly, we now spend an average of almost 7 hours a day on screens. Gen Z (the first generation to grow up entirely inside of this system) clocks closer to 9 hours. We spend an estimated 5.7 years of our lives on social media alone. For context: that’s longer than most people spend in formal education...😨

Attention < Presence

All of that is more or less understood now. We know our phones are designed to be addictive, the feeds are engineered for compulsions to check. And alongside this we can feel that something rather important is at major risk of being lost forever. But still, we stay in the loop of habit.

This is where we must zoom out, because the answer isn’t individual willpower or developing a better relationship with your phone settings. What’s actually happening is an economic shift… one that’s just beginning to show up in the data, in the culture, in the choices people are making when no one’s watching them.

There is a principle that runs beneath every major shift in history: value migrates toward scarcity. Salt was precious where it couldn’t be found. Silk commanded fortunes because its secret was guarded for a thousand years. The scarce thing is never the same thing for long. And the moment something becomes infinite, it stops being the scarce thing. And therefore, stops being the most valuable thing.

Attention was scarce when content was limited, but that time is over. AI can now generate more content in a minute than any of us could consume in a lifetime. The machines are competing for attention too, and manufacturing the very things that fill it. Which means the economic logic that built the internet as we know it is quite literally inverting…

And the question we keep coming back to, the one we’re investigating closely through MOSAIC’s mission, is this:

We think it’s PRESENCE

And we want to be careful here, because presence is one of those words that’s been over-used in wellness culture which has sadly drained some of its original weight. We don’t mean presence as in mindfulness, as a yoga practice, or as a meditation technique. We also don’t mean the type of presence you have to ‘try’ to achieve. We mean: the lost in the moment type of presence.

Presence from the Latin root praesentia.

The state of being here. Whole-heartedly, whole-mindedly, whole-bodily, whole-souly here.

You see, attention is a fraction of you, the cognitive, screen-facing sliver that can be captured and monetised and served back to you in a feed. Presence, however, requires the whole of you. Your body in a space, your nervous system calibrating to the room’s energy, your inter-relational awareness, your mind focused on the moment, your senses attuned to your surroundings. Presence is the part of us that reminds us what it means to be alive.

And here’s what we’ve noticed: you cannot automate it. You cannot generate it. You cannot serve it through a screen. The serendipity of a conversation that goes somewhere neither person planned, that’s not replicable. The particular quality of a room where something shifts and everyone knows it, that can’t be live-streamed. The experience of dancing for hours and not once thinking to check your phone, that exists only in the body that is dancing.

Is presence a skill? We’re not sure. An art might be closer representation. Or maybe it’s more like a sense, one that atrophies when it goes unused, and comes back, a little painfully and then suddenly all at once, when you give it the right conditions.

A return to the room

The run club replaced the running app, the supper club replaced the restaurant review, the pottery class is the new hype. People are leaving the screen and returning to the room. Not in a “put down your phone” preachy way. More like a hunger, slow-building, for something they couldn’t quite name until they found themselves in the right room at the right time and felt it.

This isn’t nostalgia. Most of the people most hungry for it never had it in the first place. It’s something more like an instinct reasserting itself, the deep human knowledge that this, right here, the actual physical experience of being alive alongside other people, is the whole damn point.

And if value migrates toward scarcity, then the most valuable thing in the world right now is the thing that can’t be automated, replicated, or generated at scale.

Embodied, shared, lived PRESENCE.

We’re building a collective of people who want to shape a more human future, if you wish to join us click here!

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Sources

• Dscout, Mobile Touches: A Study on Humans and Their Technology (2016) — study finding an average of 2,617 daily smartphone interactions.

• Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again (2022) — discussion of attention, task-switching and the 65-second / 3-minute figures.

• The Open University, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention — summary of research cited by Johann Hari, including the 65-second student and three-minute office-worker figures.

• DataReportal, Digital 2026: Global Overview Report — global data on internet use and time spent online.

• Forbes Advisor, Social Media Statistics — calculation estimating that current average social-media use amounts to approximately 5.7 years over a 73-year lifetime.
  

Everything’s moved online: work, friendship, dating, entertainment, identity, community. And in the age of AI our world is only going to get faster, smarter and more connected than ever. Whilst we have a lot to thank our ridiculously speedy and efficient online world for… something essential feels missing. Not information, opportunity, or access but something harder to name. A sense of aliveness. The reality of actually living our lives, not just watching them through a screen.

Because the more online life becomes, the more valuable offline starts to feel. Not because we’re rejecting technology. But because we’re beginning to remember what it cannot replace.

The most valuable thing in the world right now

Here’s something the internet never solved: presence.

Attention, it captured brilliantly. Every click, scroll, and notification is proof of that. But attention is only the cognitive, screen-facing piece of us. Presence is something else entirely, embodied, shared, felt in real time. It exists when bodies are in the same room, when a conversation goes somewhere unexpected, when you feel an experience before you think about it.

You cannot automate presence. You cannot optimise it or algorithmically recreate it. And in a world where AI is commoditising knowledge and content at scale, what cannot be replicated becomes the most valuable thing there is.

Value always migrates toward scarcity. And presence is becoming scarce.

This isn’t nostalgia, it’s where the future is going.

The future is REAL

The builders of this future are already here.

They’re designing retreats, creating offline communities, rebuilding third spaces, gathering strangers around long tables, campfires, movement, conversation, craft, music, ideas.

They are building what technology cannot automate: presence, trust, belonging, serendipity, atmosphere, embodiment.

But they’re mostly doing it alone. Fragmented, disconnected from one another, reinventing the wheel in isolation, without infrastructure built for what they’re actually creating.

We think there’s another way to do it.

A piece to our whole

A mosaic is made of pieces that only make sense when assembled together. We think being human works the same way, each of us a mosaic of the experiences we’ve lived, the places we’ve been, the decisions we have made, the people we’ve met, the feelings we’ve felt.

That’s the philosophy behind MOSAIC: Assembly.

When the right people, ideas, and intentions come together, something larger than any one person is capable of becomes possible. We’re building with that in mind: with people, not for them.

So, what is MOSAIC?

We’re here for the hosts, facilitators, retreat designers, community builders, curators, and experience-makers building the future of IRL, and for everyone beginning to feel the pull towards the offline world.

Through essays, research, and IRL gatherings (and something bigger we’re quietly building) we’re here to explore, connect, and ultimately make the offline future easier to build in today’s tech dominated times.

The invitation

MOSAIC is still forming. That’s part of the point. Like any mosaic, it takes shape through its pieces, through the people who enter it and help determine what it becomes.

The Offline Renaissance is already underway. We’re building the home for the people leading it.

SO, if any of this resonates and you want to shape what this becomes click here.

We look forward to the ride,

Ali & Annabelle x