Strategy #1: Re-Wilding Attention
This is the foundational core.
Instead of letting society and the algorithm choose what you notice, you choose what you notice. This is the orientation of the tracker.
You might live in a suburb, a town, even in a city apartment, but your awareness is anchored in:
- sensory presence
- what is outside
- what is around you
- weather patterns
- animal behaviour
- plant growth
- seasonal rhythms
- land-mindedness
Doing this, even in modern life, gradually reclaims the mental states of the natural person.
It takes a while to open up to this, there are many things of the modern world to unlearn/undo. Here, the idea is to consciously choose to focus on the things that a natural person would notice and think about.
The aim here is not to collect observing skills to be able to tick off an “achieved this” box — it is to reclaim the skills that you would have, had you been born into a naturally living group of people, rather than a vast industrial empire. To choose to think about these kinds of things.
You are learning to reinhabit the instinctual human template. This is not a knowledge specialisation, it is normal human cognition.
A house cat that never goes outside, and gets fed two meals a day for its entire life, still wants to hunt. It’s not hunting to survive — it’s hunting because it is a cat, and that’s what cats do. The tracker does not know wild food sources to survive. The tracker knows wild foods because noticing food sources is part of what a human is.1 The tracker learns where water lies hidden because humans are water-sensitive animals by nature. The tracker learns tracks because reading footprints and animal signs is part of how humans perceive the living world. The tracker learns about the things of nature because humans living in right relationship with the land simply know these things.
The modern world is forever trapped in an endless search for identity because we have forgotten the in-born, instinctual identity coded within our DNA — that of a human. Here we shall use the word “natural” to describe human beings living in a way that matches our DNA. In the ancient past, everyone lived this way. In 2025, only a tiny fraction of our species does.
Recovering our humanity starts with recovering the way of seeing the world that natural humans had. In natural human societies, there was a role which was all about paying attention. This role goes by many names, the scout, the tracker, the pathfinder… In the native language of the group it was often called whatever word(s) meant “the one who notices”. As we seek to recover the original human state of being, we start with attention, so we look to the role where attention was the main feature of the role — the tracker.
Out of all the possible names to call this role here, I have settled on “tracker” as it carries the clearest English common-use meaning that’s the closest to the role, and it isn’t trademarked or gatekept by any existing associations (like the word “scout”).
The tracker is not:
- a doomsday prepper
- a survivalist
- a hermit
- a gear collector
- a militant
The tracker is:
- an awake animal
- a listening presence
- a biological human
- a perceptual instrument
- a part of ecology
- a nervous system tuned in to the field of life
This is what I felt as a child in the bush.
It was not “practice.”
It was being.
To Summarise All This
The foundational strategy for re-learning what it is to be a human involves using our awareness, our attention. The strategy is to deliberately focus on the kinds of things that natural/ancient humans focused on. The natural role which most strongly develops and harnesses awareness is that of the tracker. Therefore, this is the path to which I must direct my attention.
- This means noticing food sources in nature, not in the shops! ↩︎