The Power of Being: Coherence vs. Hustle Culture

In the book, A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle (one of my favorites), he writes not just about presence, but about awakening. The irreversible shift from identifying with the egoic mind to anchoring in the still awareness beneath it. He says that once the seed of awareness has been activated, it cannot go back to sleep. Even if the mind returns to chaos, something in you stays awake. That silent witness becomes the root of your coherence, and the source of your power. 

“Awareness is the greatest agent for change.”

— Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

This mirrors what I’ve come to understand through coherence: once your system - or your mind, your emotions, your attention, tastes alignment, it cannot fully tolerate fragmentation again. Like a flower that’s bloomed, you can’t force it back into a bud. The power of being is not just about peace, it’s about pattern recognition. It’s waking up to the way hustle culture runs on incoherence, and choosing not to plug back in.

We live in a world that confuses motion with meaning. Asking someone “what do you do?” or “what are you working on?” isn’t just small talk, it’s become a metric of worth. Hustle culture rewards speed, optimization, and 24/7 productivity as if perpetual output were the ultimate form of value. But beneath the glorified busyness, many of us feel fragmented, anxious, and perpetually behind. The truth? Hustle culture isn’t just unsustainable, it’s emotionally incoherent. We are pushed to produce more while becoming less present in our own lives. 

The idea of being vs. doing is a false binary. Our culture treats being and doing as opposites - as if presence means passivity, and activity means absence. But the most powerful actions come from a centered state of being. True productivity doesn’t come from pressure; it emerges from coherence.  

In a landmark 2010 study published in Science, researchers Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert found that people are significantly less happy when their minds wander, even when they’re thinking about pleasant things. In fact, people were often happier doing unpleasant tasks than they were imagining something enjoyable while distracted… meaning “a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.” So, it’s not what you’re doing that makes you happy, it’s whether you’re present for it. This study confirms what many wisdom traditions have long known: attention is the root of emotional stability. When our minds drift, our emotional state destabilizes. When we return to the moment, we begin to self-organize again. This is the essence of coherence. When our mental, emotional, and energetic states align. My own Coherence Field Theory suggests that presence isn’t just a personal state; it’s a systemic field effect. Coherence within the self becomes coherence within relationships, teams, technologies, and even computational systems.

Being isn’t passive, it’s a stabilizing force.

Hustle culture disrupts coherence because it trains us to equate our value with output. Rest becomes suspicious. Stillness feels like failure. Even our moments of supposed downtime are filled with guilt, scrolling, or strategizing our next move. But what this culture really produces is fragmentation. The more we shift between tasks, suppress emotional signals, and override our body’s natural rhythms, the more incoherent we become. Thought fragments from feeling. Intention fragments from action. And presence fragments from performance. In terms of coherence field theory, hustle culture isn’t just stressful, it’s structurally dissonant. It pulls us out of alignment with our own nervous system, with nature’s pace, and with each other. We become less intelligent, less intuitive, less capable of truly creative work - not because we’re not doing enough, but because we’re not being enough. 

In a world obsessed with doing, being is radical. To pause is to risk irrelevance. To listen inwardly is to defy the algorithmic pressure to broadcast. To be present with what is - without rushing to change, fix, or monetize it - requires a kind of courage that hustle courage doesn't teach. But stillness is not stagnation. It’s a form of deep structure, like the still axis of a spinning spiral. Coherence is not about stopping motion, it’s about moving from a stable center. Nature reminds us that the most generative cycles begin with rest. Winter precedes bloom. The seed germinates in darkness. In myth, the hero retreats before returning transformed. So, in your life - and in your systems - this coherence is the soil. And doing is the bloom. But without the soil, the bloom is brittle.

If incoherence is engineered through endless notifications, hyper-productivity, and profit-maximized platforms; then coherence can be re-engineered too. Imagine a world, or a tech system, designed not to extract your time or attention, but to stabilize your presence. Interfaces that invite intention instead of demanding reaction. Rhythms that mirror natural cycles, like working, resting, reflecting, and creating.

You don’t have to earn your worth through exhaustion. You don’t have to prove your value by producing more than your nervous system can sustain. There’s a deeper intelligence available - one that speaks in silence, stabilizes in stillness, and blooms without force. This is the power of being. 

If you want to explore how we’re building coherence into systems, please email us: licensing@quantumphiholdings.com