Treat what is as though it were not.

There it is — a prescription so absurdly serene it feels almost illegal in our day and age. A heresy against productivity. A blasphemy against attention. A threat to the entire data economy. Because what that means — and what we’ve desperately forgotten — is that you don’t always need to respond to the world in order to be part of it. You don’t need to say “yes” to every ping, every post, every dopamine-colored balloon floating across your screen.

Sometimes, the most radical form of presence is a dignified absence.

We are not well. Our sickness has a thousand names: scrollitis, multitaskosis, feed fatigue, reality deficit disorder. We used to tell stories to understand what happened. Now we scroll through stories to avoid what is happening. And in that crowd of images, that overload of urgency, something sacred is lost: the ability to let go. To not-know. To be fully present by being partially absent. To make space. For grace. For silence. For God, maybe. Or at least for breath.

The sacred science of letting go begins where the algorithm ends.
It is not about detachment as indifference, but detachment as discernment.

You don’t need to see everything.
You don’t need to have an opinion about everything.
You don’t need to watch all fifteen thousand reels about that panther that may or may not exist.

Let the news go. Let the meme go. Let the hot take go.

Treat what is as though it were not.

Don’t agglutinate the world.
Don’t build yourself out of other people’s urgency.
Don’t mistake stimulation for depth.

The fear of not seeing it — is just the latest avatar of spiritual greed.

You will not die if you miss a trend.
But you might forget to live if you chase them all.

In the end, the most sacred truths are not the ones you cling to — but the ones you let slip through your fingers without panic.

And maybe that’s what the mystics meant all along:

The world is the sum of all that does not happen.

That sentence would get flagged by today’s algorithms.
It would be shadowbanned for “low engagement potential.”
Maybe even demonetized for “insufficient relevance.”

Because what it proposes — this heresy wrapped in apophatic silk — is that you don’t have to react. Not to every post. Not to every war. Not to every artificially inflated tragedy wrapped in Canva templates and set to emotional piano music. What it proposes is discernment — and that is dangerous in a culture built on reflex.

We are no longer living our lives — we’re busy co-curating them for an imaginary audience that claps in silence and scrolls without mercy.
We are drowning not in ignorance, but in stimulus.
We don’t suffer from too little information, but from too much insistence.

Insistence to care. To share. To watch. To have a position. To weigh in. To react now. To see everything. Always. Enter the modern mutation of anxiety:
FONSI. The Fear of Not Seeing It.

To let go is not to abandon.
It is to make room.
For stillness. For thought. For ambiguity.
For the soul, which — unlike the feed — has no refresh button.

Treat what is as though it were not.

Try it.
Don’t add that story to your story.
Don’t frame every sunset.
Don’t convert every pain into content.
Don’t turn your life into a press release.

The world does not need another angle. It needs witnesses who know when to close their eyes. And when you do… when you finally learn the sacred science of looking away — you may find that clarity doesn’t come from seeing more, but from letting go of what you were never meant to carry. Because the world — the real world, not the one optimized for metrics — is the sum of all that does not happen.