Abstraction. Connection. And me.
I just published a piece for IDR about the limits of AI in social change work. It’s got frameworks, evidence, and careful arguments about where these tools belong and where they don’t. And it’s all true, as far as it goes.
But here’s what I didn’t write there: why any of this matters to me personally. This is the real story of why I cared enough to write it.
For years, I built platforms. Designed convenings. Created frameworks to help organisations think more systematically about change. I was good at it. People found it useful. But I had no idea what I was actually doing.
I was building externally what I couldn’t find internally.
All those containers for other people to belong in? I was creating them because I didn’t know how to belong to myself. The systems designed to hold complexity? I was building them because I couldn’t hold my own contradictions. The safe spaces for others? I was making them while performing a strength I didn’t always feel.
I thought I was leading. Turns out I was protecting myself through usefulness. Stay busy. Be reliable. Hold space for everyone else. Just don’t ask to be held yourself.
The work looked successful. The platforms functioned. The convenings happened. But my body was keeping score.
My neck hurt constantly. My shoulders were rocks. My back felt like it was carrying weight that wasn’t just physical. I assumed this was normal—you work hard, you travel, you sit in too many meetings, your body complains. That’s just how it is.
Then a Pilates instructor watched me move and said, almost casually, “You’re bracing wrong. Your whole body is trying to hold everything together.”
I stopped mid-movement. She was right. I was holding everything together—my posture, my projects, other people’s anxieties, my own uncertainty. Gripping when I should have been breathing. Bracing when I should have been sensing.
My physiotherapist said something similar a few weeks later. The tension in my shoulders wasn’t just tension. It was something deeper, something I’d been carrying for years. That’s how I ended up in therapy, doing trauma-informed work, finally starting to look at what I’d been so carefully not looking at.
Slowly, things started to shift. I learned to notice when I was reaching for control and calling it clarity. When I was trying to fix what needed to be felt. When I was rushing to name something that was still taking shape.
My body kept teaching me what my mind resisted: you can’t shortcut your way to wholeness. You can’t optimise your way to presence. You can’t think your way out of what needs to be felt.
And here’s the thing—the patterns in my body were the same patterns in my work. I kept trying to solve everything by building better systems, clearer frameworks, and more elegant platforms. And sure, those things had value. But they were also a way of keeping distance. Abstraction as protection. Scale as a way to avoid the intimate, messy, slow work of actually being in relationship.
Once I saw this pattern, I couldn’t unsee it. I watched myself in meetings, always prepared, always with an agenda, rarely leaving space for what wasn’t planned. I noticed how I responded to people’s struggles—jumping to solutions instead of sitting with their uncertainty. I saw how I led—projecting steadiness whether I felt it or not, rather than letting anyone see when I was unsure.
The most important work wasn’t out there. It was right here.
Not because the external work didn’t matter. But because I couldn’t serve it honestly while bypassing my own humanity. I couldn’t help build resilient systems while staying brittle myself. I couldn’t talk about connection while living in abstraction.
The shift has been slow. I still catch myself reaching for those familiar patterns—the quick framework, the helpful intervention, the strategic distance. But I catch it sooner now. I pause more often. I let things stay messy instead of rushing to make them neat.
I’ve learned the difference between longing and belonging. Longing makes me perform, reach for recognition, seek the quick relief of being seen. Belonging is quieter. It lets me breathe easier. I can listen without rehearsing my reply.
I stopped trying to earn my place through usefulness and started learning to simply be present. Not performing strength but acknowledging when I was tired. Not having answers but sitting in questions. Not always holding space for others but letting myself be held.
And this completely changed how I see the work.
When I look at AI tools in social change now, I don’t just see a technology question. I see the same pattern I was running—the belief that we can shortcut past the slow, embodied, relational work that actually creates change.
The promise is so seductive. Speed, efficiency, scale. Skip the long meetings, the difficult conversations, the slow building of trust. Jump straight to insight and action.
But what I learned in my body applies to systems too. You can’t optimise your way to resilience. You can’t abstract your way to trust. The shortcuts bypass exactly what makes the work real.
That’s why I wrote the IDR piece. Not from some theoretical position, but from lived recognition of what happens when we privilege abstraction over connection. When we let tools drive relationships instead of serving them. When we optimise for efficiency at the cost of what makes systems human.
Those frameworks about where AI belongs and doesn’t belong—they didn’t come from analysis. They came from years of learning, in my own body and work, the difference between what scales and what sustains. Between what looks efficient and what actually holds.
I used to think the work was building better systems. Now I understand it’s about protecting what makes systems real—the relationships, the trust, the slow formation of shared understanding. The parts that resist measurement. The parts that can’t be automated. The parts that require presence, not just process.
The real work happens at the speed of trust. It happens in the pauses, the repairs, the moments of honest uncertainty. It happens when we stop performing competence and start practicing coherence.
This isn’t against tools or technology. It’s recognising that tools must serve the foundation, not replace it. And the foundation is always relational. Always human. Always slow.
That foundation starts with each of us being present to our own humanity—our uncertainty, our needs, our limits. They aren’t weaknesses to overcome, but rather the foundation on which real leadership emerges.
The journey from abstraction to connection isn’t just about changing how we work, but transforming our approach to work and changing who we’re willing to be. In our bodies. In our relationships. In our leadership. Moving from performance to presence. From platforms to places of care. From being the one who holds, to letting ourselves be held.
Not heroic. Not glamorous. Just honest. Just human. Just willing to stay, even when it would be easier to scale.
If you want the systematic thinking about where AI fits, read the IDR piece. But if you want to know why it matters, why I care about protecting the slow layers—this is it. What my body finally taught me when I stopped long enough to listen.
We can’t build human-centered systems until we’re willing to be human ourselves.
Originally published on Substack on 2 October 2025. Read on Substack →
Gautam John 
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