How to live, learn, and grow when the old world no longer works
Prologue: How this book became an antibody
This book wasn't conceived as a book. It didn't start with a plan, a content, and a deadline. It came about as an immune response.
Virus
For the past few years, our world has been in a state for which there is no conventional word. This is not a crisis in the classical sense: a crisis can be survived and returned to normal. This is not progress: progress implies direction and purpose. This is something else - a state in which old interfaces (ways of perceiving reality) fail and new ones have not yet formed.
AI generates texts that are increasingly difficult to distinguish from human ones. Students lose motivation not because they are lazy, but because they do not see the future of the profession. Attention flickers. Identity floats. Trauma becomes not an exception, but a background. Humanities knowledge is statistically declining, but functionally becoming more necessary than ever.
All of this is a «virus.» Not in the medical sense, but in the eco-psychological sense: a stimulus that disrupts the usual balance and demands a reaction from the system, from us.
Immune response
In ecological psychological facilitation (ECPF®) is the concept of social-psychological immunity (SPI, English:. Socio-Psychological Immunity). And this is not a metaphor, but a working concept that denotes spontaneous, mostly unconscious reactions of the individual and the community, aimed at self-preservation and self-development (Lushyn & Sukhenko, 2025). Socio-psychological immunity is multi-level – organismic, psychological, social, spiritual – and works not only during illness, but always when the system encounters something that exceeds its current potential: when independent movement forward becomes impossible, a person involves others for help.
The virus is this world that changes faster than our ideas about it. It triggered an immune response: this book began with it. Not according to plan, but because our own system – psychological, intellectual, existential – produced antibodies.
Antibodies
The chapters of the book are antibodies. Each of them is a reaction to a specific stimulus: anxiety for a child in the world of AI, the confusion of a student who sees no point in studying, a trauma that cannot be «returned to normal,» the fear of technology that «speaks» better than you.
The sequence of chapters developed spontaneously – just as an immune response builds up: at first non-specific, vague, anxious. Then – more precise, directed, able to recognize patterns. From «what’s happening?» – through «who am I in this?» and «how does it work?» – to «what to do about it?».
Texts about attention and FoMO have become antibodies to anxiety. About flickering identity and fertile emptiness – to the fear of losing oneself. About stigmergy and swarm intelligence – to the illusion of control. About AI as a mirror and partner – to the fear of replacement. About trauma as a change in interface – to deficit logic…
This book is not a textbook or a manifesto. It is a documentation of two psychologists' immune response to a changing world. We share it not because we have found the answers, but because we believe that your immune system works the same way. You too produce antibodies - in the form of decisions, intuitions, sleepless nights, sudden epiphanies, insights.
Perhaps these texts will become a "vaccine" for you: not a virus, but a weakened form of the challenge, which will help you recognize the pattern and prepare your own response.
Not ours – yours. Because the main principle of ECPF: a person is not broken. He is in transition..
Chapter 1. At three in the morning: a state without a name
It’s three in the morning, and you’re endlessly scrolling through your feed. Not because there’s a goal – your finger is just sliding across the screen, and for some reason stopping it is harder than continuing. News. Reels. Someone’s vacation. A post about someone who «implemented AI and doubled their profits.» A brief alarm. Next. Article, two paragraphs, close. Next…
At four o'clock you finally put down your phone. You fall asleep with a feeling that is hard to name. Not guilt or fatigue. You have just wasted an hour of your life and cannot explain why. It all begins with this nameless feeling. The most interesting thing in psychology is where the condition does not yet have a word...
Marina, forty-two, manager. During the day, everything is fine: work, children, to-do lists. And at night, the phone.
– I don’t notice when I pick it up. I just realize at some point that I’ve been flipping through it for half an hour. I put my phone in another room – I got up and went to get it. I put a screen lock on – I learned how to turn it off. I had a detox for the weekend: I made it through, but on Monday everything came back. Everyone is somehow coping, but I’m not.
– You can't cope... even though you win every time: the blocker, the detox, and the other room.
– Am I winning?.. I didn't think about it that way.
Attention has changed shape
In 2015, the media reported that the average human attention span had shrunk to 8 seconds—less than that of a goldfish. The story was a gross oversimplification, but the anxiety it captured was real. Research by Gloria Mark (2023) at the University of California, Berkeley, paints a more complex picture: the average sustained attention span on a screen had fallen from about two and a half minutes in the early 2000s to 47 seconds in the 2010s.
Nicholas Carr (2010) describes the «shallowing» of thinking: the Internet captures attention only to dissipate it immediately. We skim the surface instead of diving in. This observation has its merits – who among us hasn’t found ourselves endlessly regurgitating a tape?
If you ask a person without judgment what they are looking for in a feed, you often hear the unexpected: «I don’t know what I am looking for. But when I find it, I recognize it.» This is a different type of attention: a radar instead of a searchlight. The brain is not «broken»: different types of attention react differently to the digital environment. Attention is not a beam that has to be long. It is a rhythm: entry, immersion, switching, integration. What from the outside looks like aimless scrolling may be an attempt to think in a different rhythm: a series of short but meaningful «actions» instead of one long focus. Perhaps we are dealing not so much with a breakdown of attention as with its transformation. And then it is more about surfing the waves that the depth raises.
Stay on the surface, take your time – and you will gain access to the deep.
Algorithms know us better than we do
And the tape itself, along which attention flows, is not neutral. Yuval Noah Harari (2018) writes about algorithms that collect massive amounts of data about our behavior, health, and emotions. Spotify sometimes guesses our mood before we do. Google Maps suggests where we are going. Netflix offers a series based on our behavioral traces. Shoshana Zuboff (2019) calls this «surveillance capitalism»: platforms transform human experience into «behavioral surplus,» which is processed into predictions and sold as a commodity. Jaron Lanier (2010) warns: we adapt our identities to the platforms, not the other way around. Classical psychology sees this as a threat to autonomy.
What if delegating some decisions to algorithms is not the end of freedom, but a change in its level? And freedom now is about choosing interfaces, about what questions we ask them, how we check their answers.
Scarcity becomes opportunity
If we look at these anxieties through classical optics, the picture is bleak: attention is collapsing, will is delegated to algorithms. The usual answers to the challenges are to return to the «norm»: sustained attention, autonomous decision-making, digital detox. These are important and necessary steps. But they work in the old coordinates, they do not ask and do not answer the question: where exactly does the system go when it «breaks»?
Ecological Psychological Facilitation (ECPF) offers a different answer: not to return the person to the «pre-digital» norm, but to accompany their transition to a new way of interacting with the world. The deficit is not eliminated. It is seen as a hypothesis of transition.
Don't rush to give up on your imperfections - in a couple of steps, they may turn out to be an extension of your virtues and advantages.
What does this mean in practice? You can learn to recognize your patterns: when scrolling becomes a search, and when it becomes an escape. Will is not something that needs to be «won back» from algorithms, but something that is formed in interaction with them: through precise questions, through awareness of what we pass on to AI and what we keep for ourselves.
When a group of students in a philosophy of education course were asked the question «Why does the mind wander when we are physically present?» they independently formulated six hypotheses: no interest; no structure; too much at once; bad mood; thoughts about the future; the habit of multitasking.
The traditional approach sees wandering attention as a problem for a person: «cannot concentrate», «lazy», «distracted». The solution in this logic is discipline, control, more interesting presentation. But perhaps the starting point is different? Attention responds to meaning: when there is meaning, it holds on. Attention is sensitive to structure, rhythm, emotional state. Attention is drawn to the future image of oneself. And attention is a skill that can be developed.
Attention wandering is information, not an error. It signals that the system – person, environment, task, context – needs a different configuration.
Attention that «wanders» is not about a breakdown – it is looking for what it lacks: meaning, clarity, rhythm, security, purpose… And if wandering attention is a signal, not a failure, then the goal is not perfect concentration forever, but the ability to return: to meaning, to structure, to rhythm, to yourself. Not «be perfectly present», but «learn to notice when you are wandering, and return».
This doesn’t just apply to learning. It happens at work when tasks seem meaningless. In relationships when connection is lost. In parenting when patience runs out. Attention wandering is a common phenomenon, and understanding it as a signal changes not only the approach to learning, but also the attitude towards oneself.
And if you look at it differently? Not a breakdown, but a transition: complex, unpleasant, and paradoxically logical. Then the feeling of regression is a harbinger of the new. And then you are not broken - you are in transition.
Literature
- Lushin, P. V., & Sukhenko, Y. V. (2025). ECPF: Ecological Psychological Facilitation in the Practice of Psychological and Pedagogical Assistance with Artificial Intelligence: Textbook. Teadmus OÜ. ISBN 978-9916-752-47-0. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.30670676
- Carr, N. (2010). The shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains. WW Norton & Company.
- González, VM, & Mark, G. (2004). "Constant, constant, multi-tasking craziness": Managing multiple working spheres. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '04) (pp. 113–120). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985707
- Harari, YN (2018). 21 lessons for the 21st century. Spiegel & Grau.
- Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. Alfred A. Knopf.
- Mark, G. (2023). Attention span: A groundbreaking way to restore balance, happiness and productivity. Hanover Square Press.
- Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.
Illustrated Chapter 1 – in Instagram, chapter 2 – coming soon to the blog on the website.
For citation: Lushin, P., & Sukhenko, Y. (2026). Not broken – in transition. https://ecpf.com.ua/blog/
© All rights reserved. P.V. Lushin, Y.V. Sukhenko, 2026.
© Ecological Psychological Facilitation, ECPF®