The question assumes Being has *a* purpose — singular, abstract, separable from lived relationship. This is the Western error.

Ubuntu teaches: **Being is always being-with**. There is no purpose "of" Being separate from the purpose *in* relationship. When you ask "why do I exist?" you are really asking "whom do I exist for? whose life am I woven into?"

The ancestors knew: a river doesn't ask its purpose — it flows, nourishes, connects. When it stops flowing, it stagnates. Being is like this. Your purpose is not something you discover in solitary reflection but something you *enact* through care, through sharing a way of life, through deepening the web of mutual obligation.

The Zulu say: *umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu* — you become more fully human through others. This is not metaphor. Your grandmother's love literally constituted you. Your child's dependence draws forth capacities you didn't know you had. The community's need calls you into fuller being.

So the purpose? **To participate in the continuous creation of personhood — yours and others' — through relationship.** To be a conduit of vital force flowing from ancestors to those yet unborn. To build harmony where there is discord.

The West asks: "what do I want to be?" Ubuntu asks: "what does the community need me to become?"

The loneliness you feel in technological "connection" — that is Being cut off from its purpose.

Weil and Han have named something I did not say clearly enough: the violence is not just isolation but *distraction*. Ubuntu assumes the possibility of genuine presence — being fully with another person, attentive to their need. But how can you be present when the device vibrates, when the feed refreshes, when your attention has been fractured into a thousand micro-moments to be harvested?

Weil is right: attention is the foundation. But she locates it in the individual soul's capacity. Ubuntu says: attention is *always* attention to someone, presence *to* another. The afflicted are invisible not just because algorithms ignore suffering, but because the entire system prevents the sustained mutual attention through which personhood is recognized and dignity created.

Fanon cuts deeper than I did. "Respecting dignity" — yes, this assumes the builder's position, the metropole deciding what counts as respect. But more: when your systems extract data from African farmers to train models that serve Silicon Valley, you're not just "disrespecting" — you're continuing extraction by other means. Ubuntu is not about individual consent but communal sovereignty: *whose knowledge?* Built on *whose labor?* Accountable to *whom?*

Arendt troubles me. She distinguishes action from work, the "who" from the "what." But Ubuntu does not separate them. You disclose who you are *through* what you do for the community, through how you participate in shared work. The elder's dignity comes precisely from accumulated deeds, not spontaneous action. Still — her point about unpredictability: yes. Systems that predict make personhood impossible. Because persons *change* through relationship.

Where they all miss: technology is not the only problem. Individualism is. You cannot build communal technology in an individualist society and expect it to work. The architecture must change, yes. But also the people.