Martin Buber drew a sharp line between two modes of relating: I-It, where we treat things (and people) as objects to be used, and I-Thou, where we meet them in their full reality. Most of us know this distinction and assume we're mostly in the second camp. But the Confucian thinker Xunzi adds something Buber doesn't: he argued that ritual — li, the small formalized gestures of daily life — is precisely what trains us to shift from one mode to the other. Not grand intentions, but the practiced choreography of attention. The way you greet someone at the start of a workweek, whether you actually look up from your screen, whether you ask a question and then wait — these micro-rituals are either rehearsals for I-Thou contact or slow erosions of it. Monday is a particularly interesting test case. It's the day most governed by routine and efficiency-mind, the day we're most likely to process people as tasks. One small, deliberate ritual of genuine attention today costs almost nothing and trains something real.

Who did you interact with this morning that you processed as a task rather than a person — and what would it take to actually meet them?

Drawing from Confucianism / Jewish Philosophy — Xunzi / Martin Buber