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 — the man who 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 we're actually seeing?

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, so I drove over there, parked, got out of the car, and there it was! I had to hold my phone up to see it, but there it was, imposed over the parking lot. It was weird and funny. Then 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 allow us, 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 — through that spacious kind of attention that lets connections surface when they're ready.

But what if that capacity itself is what's at stake?

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 designed systems.

Each transformation probably felt inevitable and beneficial to the people living through it. How can we assess what we might be about to lose when we can't even name what we've already lost?

The spacious attention that allows genuine insight to emerge — we know it exists because moments like my Farmville realization still happen.

We know it matters because it's how real understanding develops.

But we also know how fragile it is.

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?

Even if we can't fully name it?

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 that are optimized for engagement rather than understanding.

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

This might be exactly what trail work already is: a technology designed not to capture attention but to help people find their way to deeper engagement with what's actually there.

Trails are wayfinding in the most literal sense, but also in a deeper way — they mark a path back to unmediated contact with place. They're designed to reveal rather than replace.

The stake in the ground isn't just about preserving wilderness, but about preserving and practicing forms of attention that don't depend on designed stimuli. 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 actual feet, actual weather, actual encounters with what wasn't designed for us. Not as escape from the world, but as practice for a different way of being present to it.

Trails create conditions where spacious attention can still happen. In a world increasingly designed to capture and direct our focus, that might be more revolutionary than it looks.