CONCEPT
Going-On-Being
Going-on-being is Winnicott's name for the infant's primary experience of continuous existence: a sense of being that is prior to any particular content, any particular thought, any particular action. Impingement — the intrusion of environmental demands the infant cannot yet integrate — disrupts going-on-being and produces a reactive, compliant response that Winnicott calls the false self. Phillips extends this developmental framework to adult creative practice and uses it to ask a diagnostic question of AI tools: does this tool support the creator's going-on-being, or does it impinge?
In The You On AI Field Guide
The question is more precise than the general language of flow and engagement allows. A tool can produce high engagement while simultaneously functioning as an impingement — demanding constant response, imposing its own rhythms, colonizing the creator's attention with its own requirements. The productive addict whose engagement looks like mastery from the outside may, from the inside, be experiencing a sustained impingement against which the false self