I develop trails for a living. a farming game still hyjacked my brain.

I had to quit playing Farmville more than seven years ago, even though my "farm" was thriving. I'd earned the beloved collie without spending a dime, just steady engagement with the game.

But during my 45-minute commute from city to country, I started noticing something unsettling: I was overlaying game logic onto real farmland. Driving past acres of soybeans and hay, I found myself thinking in crops, harvests, game assets. That's when I knew the game had started to warp something fundamental: the way I process place, reality, and meaning.

It was messing with the way I create knowledge.

This morning, I watched a YouTube video announcing that OpenAI has acquired the company owned by Jonathan Ive (he designed the iPod and iPhone). The reports suggest they're working on a device that wouldn't require us to look at a screen. My first reaction was "oh shit.” Are we heading toward technology that will impose images on the landscape, in stores, in parking lots, wherever we are, that don't reflect what is actually there?

I played Pokemon Go once, just to see what it was like. I got a notice that there was a character in the Mayodan Lowe's Home Improvement parking lot. I drove over there, parked, got out of the car, and there it was! I had to hold my phone up to see it. It was weird and funny. Then tragic reports started coming in of kids walking out in front of cars or walking into immobile objects because they were more focused on their phones than the real world in front of them.

We cannot know what OpenAI and Ive are designing. But I have a foreboding that it's something that will entice us to project our own images on the landscapes, on what is in front of us.

The pattern that emerged this morning, connecting a seven-year-old gaming experience to current tech developments, didn't come from careful analysis. It knocked on my consciousness the way insights do when we're not forcing them.

But what if that capacity itself is what's at stake in the world of generative artificial intelligence?

We have the same brains as our ancestors, but our experience of the world has changed dramatically through agricultural and industrial revolutions. We cannot fully know what was lost in those shifts. What ways of creating knowledge, what forms of human experience, disappeared as our attention became increasingly mediated by new systems?

How can we assess what we might be about to lose when we can't even name what we've already lost?

How easily my brain started overlaying game logic onto actual farmland. How Pokemon Go had kids literally not seeing what was in front of them.

If we're heading toward technology that makes the designed layer even more seamless, even more compelling, shouldn't we at least pause and ask what we might be trading away?

The threat isn't just to our health, but to our capacity to think clearly. To let genuine insights knock on consciousness instead of having our attention constantly pulled toward designed stimuli optimized for engagement rather than understanding.

Maybe what we need is to put a stake in the ground, a way finding for the way back.

Trails are this in most literal sense. They mark a path back to unmediated contact with place. Trails provide access to the forest. Spaces where that wandering quality of mind can still operate. Where patterns can knock on consciousness without algorithms directing what we notice.

The way back might be surprisingly simple: actual ground under our feet. Places where we touch and smell the earth, our mother ship.