Emmanuel Levinas argued that ethics begins not with abstract principles but with the face of another person — the raw, irreducible demand of someone looking at you. The Yoruba concept of Ifá runs a parallel track: your ori (personal destiny) is not achieved in isolation but is continuously shaped through your alignment with the community around you. Together, these traditions suggest that the modern professional habit of optimizing in private — strategizing, planning, journaling alone — may be the wrong unit of analysis entirely. The person in front of you is the work.

Who have you been treating as background context in your life that is actually the foreground?

Drawing from Jewish Philosophy × African Philosophy (Yoruba Ifá) — Synthesized: Emmanuel Levinas / Yoruba Ifá tradition