I had the honor of giving a talk at the Sofia Tech Park event Pro during September. The topic was how authentic experiences create lasting transformation in a world obsessed with viral moments. But the real education began after I stepped off the stage.
Moving from Western Europe to Bulgaria, my wife and I discovered something that should be impossible in 2025: a culture where human connection still dominates over digital distraction. In restaurants, clubs, bars, parks—everywhere we looked, people were actually talking to each other. Not glancing at phones between sentences, not scrolling while pretending to listen. Bonding, in Bulgaria, still dominates the conversation.
This isn't nostalgia. This is survival. While the West surrendered its social fabric to algorithms, Bulgaria preserved something essential: the art of being present with another human being.
"We do not remember days; we remember moments."
Pavese wrote that in 1950. Before Instagram. Before smartphones. Before we started collecting moments like currency and calling it a life. Before we turned human consciousness into a commodity to be strip-mined by algorithms.
Here's what should terrify you: despite our overflowing digital galleries—thousands of photos, countless videos, endless feeds—how many of those pixels actually resonate? How many are more than just algorithmic debris washing through your neural pathways?
Not all moments touch us. Most pass through us like wind through an empty house, leaving nothing but the faint ache of time wasted.
But in the cafés of Sofia, Plovdiv, in the mountain villages where kukeri dancers prepare their ritual masks, in the rose fields of Kazanlak where artisans still distill essence by hand—something different happens. Moments become memory. Experience becomes identity. Touch becomes transformation.
The attention economy is a pyramid scheme. We're all complicit. We fragment human consciousness for quarterly metrics and call it innovation. We've turned engagement into a strip mine and wonder why everyone feels scattered, anxious, perpetually incomplete.
So here's the question that actually matters: What makes a moment memorable? What makes it count? What makes it worthy of the irreplaceable resource we call human attention?
Let me as someting from you. Not your attention—that's cheap, everyone's harvesting it like digital sharecroppers, and frankly, it's not that special anymore. I want your coherence.
Coherence is what happens when all the parts of us—body, memory, thought, intuition—line up. It's what great music does to you in that moment when every instrument becomes one sound. What ritual does when ordinary objects become sacred. What happens in a Bulgarian horo dance when individual bodies become one flowing circle, when personal rhythms surrender to collective transcendence.
It's the opposite of fragmentation, of the click, the swipe, the endless scroll toward nowhere.
For the next few minutes, let's not talk about capturing attention. Let's awaken something more dangerous: your potential to create experiences that gather human beings instead of scattering them.
The first language we learn
We live in a world where when someone mentions the word touch, we tend to get a negative reaction, but touch doesn't need to be creepy. If you really think about it, it's the language we spoke before we had words.
The moment my daughter was placed on my chest, she immediately pooped on me. Two years later, my son managed the same feat. (Well, minus the immediate poop—that artistic expression came later in life.) But in those first seconds, something ancient happened. Something our devices have made us forget.
Touch is the first language we ever learn. Before syntax, through skin. An infant in arms knows everything it needs to know—not through words, but through contact. Safety, love, belonging—all transmitted through temperature, pressure, rhythm. This is coherence in its purest form: when information and being become indistinguishable.
In Bulgarian culture, this understanding never left. Watch a grandmother tie a martenitsa on her grandchild's wrist each March—red and white threads that carry wishes for health and happiness. It's not just tradition. It's tactile transmission of love, protection, care. The child doesn't understand the folklore. They understand the touch, the intention, the presence of someone who sees them as worthy of blessing.
We've systematically forgotten this. In our world mediated by glass and pixels, we've lost what it means to truly touch someone—emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. We say something "moved" us. What is that but a kind of inner contact? When someone feels truly seen, truly understood—that's touch. When an experience changes how you see yourself—that's touch.
The interfaces we design, the experiences we create, the interactions we orchestrate—are they contact points or just click points? Are we creating moments of human connection or sophisticated behavioral manipulation?
Most engagement strategies are just behaviorism with better fonts.
The deception
I've spent years watching companies obsess over engagement like it's the holy grail. The automotive industry, tech startups, Fortune 500s—all chasing the same digital dragon, optimizing for the same hollow metrics.
But engagement has been kidnapped by its evil twin: attention capture. Clicks, hooks, streaks, notifications that scream at you like needy children demanding to be fed by your consciousness.
Real engagement—the kind that transforms—doesn't grab you. It opens you. It doesn't exploit your psychological vulnerabilities. It honors them.
Think about the difference: A slot machine grabs your attention through intermittent reinforcement and dopamine manipulation. A sunset opens your awareness through beauty and perspective. A notification hooks you with artificial urgency. A conversation with someone who truly sees you engages your entire being through recognition and resonance.
Consider the Bulgarian concept of гостоприемство (hospitality). When you're welcomed into a Bulgarian home, the host doesn't check their phone, doesn't multitask, doesn't optimize the interaction for efficiency. They create space—physical, emotional, temporal—for genuine encounter. The table becomes an altar. Food becomes communion. Time becomes gift rather than resource to be managed.
The best technologies aren't addictive. They're invitational. They amplify our internal rhythms instead of overriding them. They create coherence instead of contributing to the great scattering. Ritual does this. Music does this. Memory does this. The seasonal festivals that still pulse through Bulgarian villages do this—Kukeri celebrations that chase away evil spirits, harvest festivals that honor the earth's gifts, fire dances that transform participants into something beyond their ordinary selves.
Can design?
The companies still asking "How do we increase engagement?" are asking the wrong question. The right question is: "How do we create experiences that honor the fullness of human attention rather than exploit its weaknesses?"
Sacred object
My wife carries a coin in her wallet. As currency, it's worthless—unless you happen to be in Australia. We picked it up during a trip there, spider museums and all, one of those tourist trinkets you usually forget in a drawer.
She's carried it for years now. Through job changes, moves, life upheavals. It's not a coin anymore. It's a threshold. A physical reminder of a shared experience that became shared memory that became part of who we are together.
This transformation from utility to meaning is everywhere in Bulgarian culture, if you know how to look. In the Rhodope Mountains, I watched an elderly woman show me her grandmother's spindle—worn smooth by three generations of hands, still used every winter to spin wool. Not because she can't afford a machine, but because the rhythm connects her to something larger than efficiency. The spindle carries stories, carries presence, carries the accumulated wisdom of women who understood that making something beautiful by hand is a form of prayer.
This is what happens when utility transcends itself and becomes ritual. When function becomes meaning. A hammer is a tool. A wedding ring is a ritual. A spindle can be either, depending on the consciousness that holds it. Both are functional. Only one encodes coherence into daily life.
The objects and experiences that endure—books, candles, bells, handwritten letters, traditional Bulgarian pottery that carries the fingerprints of its maker—they all crossed this threshold. They became more than their function. They became vessels for meaning, carriers of human coherence across time and space.
Ritual begins where utility ends.
I want to live in a world where creators ask not "How can this go viral?" but "How does this make someone feel whole again?" Where we design for reverence, not just revenue.
The architecture of the self
Here's the thing nobody talks about, the secret the attention merchants don't want you to know: We say "I remember" like it's passive, like memory is a filing cabinet we occasionally rifle through for old data.
But memory is construction, not retrieval. Every experience you choose shapes who you become. Every moment you allow to touch you is a vote for a future self. The experiences that stick, that change us, that we carry for decades—they don't just inform us. They form us.
Memory is identity in slow motion.
In the village of Shiroka Laka, nestled in the Rhodopes, I met a man who could trace his family's presence in that valley back twelve generations. Not through documents or genealogy websites, but through stories embedded in landscape, in stone houses that each generation added to rather than replaced, in songs passed down through voices that never needed recording because they lived in bodies, in memories that became the architecture of cultural identity.
The things we touch, the moments we feel, the interactions that resonate—they become part of the architecture of who we are. This is why coherent experiences matter beyond metrics and conversion rates. They don't just solve problems in the moment. They encode possibility into who someone is becoming.
There's a difference between having information and having memory. Information is external, searchable, disposable. Memory is woven into the fabric of self. When someone says "That changed my life," they're talking about a moment that became memory that became identity.
In Bulgarian rose festivals, I've watched tourists take selfies with the roses while locals gather the petals at dawn, their hands stained with essence, their movements shaped by centuries of practice. The tourists collect pixels. The locals collect memory that becomes muscle memory that becomes cultural memory that becomes identity that gets passed down through touch, through presence, through the kind of attention that transforms rather than just consumes.
So the question shifts from "How do we improve user experience?" to "How do we create experiences worthy of memory?" What do we want people to remember—not about our product, but about themselves? What version of themselves do they become through this interaction?
The companies that master this won't just win market share. They'll win something more valuable: the gratitude of humans who feel whole again.
Transformation threshold
Most design ends at interaction. Click here, swipe there, convert and move on. Optimize the funnel. Increase the metrics. Ship the feature. Repeat until you've optimized all the humanity out of the experience.
But the experiences that change us—the ones we carry for decades—they do something else entirely. They create thresholds. Moments where you cross into a new version of yourself, where you discover capabilities you didn't know you had, where you see possibilities that were always there but suddenly visible.
I witnessed this during a nestinarstvo ceremony in the Strandzha Mountains. Fire dancing isn't performance art—it's a threshold ritual where participants, in a trance-like state, dance barefoot across red-hot coals. What I watched wasn't entertainment. It was transformation. People entering the fire as one version of themselves and emerging as another. The fire became a literal threshold between states of being, between what you thought was possible and what actually is.
You don't remember every website you've visited. But you remember the first time you heard a song that made you understand something about your own heart. The moment someone looked at you and truly saw you. The conversation that shifted everything you thought you knew about what was possible.
These weren't just usable experiences. They were transformative ones. They didn't just meet expectations—they shattered assumptions. They didn't just solve problems—they revealed new ways of being.
We need to design for thresholds, not just touchpoints. For revelation, not just interaction. For the moments when someone discovers something new about who they're capable of becoming.
This requires a different kind of courage—the courage to create experiences that matter, that risk depth over virality, coherence over fragmentation. The courage to ask not "Will this scale?" but "Will this transform?"
Practice
Here's your coherence litmus test. Take anything you're working on—a product, a campaign, a conversation, a room, a relationship.
Ask these three questions:
Does this gather someone's self—or scatter it? Does it amplify their potential—or dilute their presence? Does it touch them—or merely tap them?
These questions cut through every complexity, every stakeholder meeting, every feature request, every A/B test. They reveal whether you're designing for coherence or contributing to the great fragmentation that's making everyone feel crazy.
Apply them to what I've witnessed in Bulgarian culture: A horo dance gathers participants into collective rhythm rather than scattering them into individual performance. Traditional crafts amplify human potential through skill, patience, beauty rather than diluting presence through efficiency and mass production. A proper Bulgarian feast touches you through all your senses, through story, through the host's undivided attention, rather than merely tapping you for consumption and departure.
They're simple questions. But simple doesn't mean easy. Simple means essential.
Most of what we build scatters. Most of what we create dilutes. Most of what we call engagement is just sophisticated tapping on the glass of human consciousness, trying to get a response without creating connection.
The companies and creators who master coherence won't just win attention. They'll earn something infinitely more valuable: the trust of humans who finally feel seen, understood, whole.
In the mountain villages where old women still sing ancient songs while making bread, where men gather in the center square for coffee and conversation that lasts for hours, where children play games passed down through generations of children—coherence isn't a design principle. It's a way of life. It's what happens when you prioritize being over having, presence over productivity, depth over speed.
Benediction
This moment—right now, as you read these words—is unrepeatable. This isn't content marketing. It's not optimized for a metric. It's not being A/B tested for maximum conversion.
It's two realities—mine and yours—meeting briefly in the space between one sentence and the next. Something coherent emerges in that meeting. Something rare. Something worth protecting in a world that profits from fragmentation.
Like the conversations that still happen in Bulgarian cafés where people put down their phones and pick up their humanity. Like the festivals where entire communities gather not to consume but to participate. Like the artisans who make things slowly, beautifully, meaningfully in a world obsessed with faster, cheaper, more.
The world is full of people trying to capture your attention, harvest your data, monetize your consciousness. I'm asking for something different: that you become someone who creates coherence instead of consuming fragments. Someone who gathers instead of scatters. Someone who touches instead of just taps.
Bulgaria taught me that cultures of coherence don't happen by accident. They're preserved by people who understand that human connection is more valuable than efficiency, that presence is more powerful than productivity, that touching someone's life matters more than tapping their screen.
Thank you for letting me touch your attention. May it awaken what's already waiting inside you.
Now go build something that makes people feel whole again.