1. At the New York Times, Alice Lassman provides an eye-opening reflection on AI and intimacy. AIs often function as a place to take worries that seem silly and thoughts that seem irrational, or to reveal character flaws you don’t want your friends to know about. It scratches some itches we’ve been on about for a while: its ability to speak quickly and (somewhat) authoritatively to specific life situations feeds our need to optimize—never has it been so easy to compare the pros and cons of oat milk vs. almond milk. Perhaps most appealing, it’s non-judgmental: “Is fifteen hours a week of videogames an addiction?” isn’t a question most kids would care to ask their parents, girlfriend, or even friends. Because of those draws, among others, its use is more pervasive than people usually acknowledge, and Lassman gathered stories about AI use that her interviewees hadn’t told anyone except her:
When I write about artificial intelligence and intimacy, people tend to imagine A.I. girlfriends or tech fanatics. Only extreme users would use chatbots to manage their social and emotional lives, or so the thinking goes. But in conversations with other Gen Z-ers, I’ve found that young people are relying emotionally on A.I. more than we realize. […]
Despite speaking to chatbots every day, most of them also maintained full social lives, and in many ways A.I. enriched them. Several interviewees told me that it helped them think about their relationships more clearly and deliberately. But it also began to form the scaffolding of their consequential decision making: encouraging breakups, de-escalating arguments that the chatbot had decided weren’t worth their time. “If I’m more rational and less emotional, I’m doing good,” Lavish Daksh, a 21-year-old in Germany, told me. A.I. had allowed him to make more clearheaded decisions, he said. But he described wanting to strip emotion from his relationships entirely. […]
He felt more comfortable taking his feelings to ChatGPT before sharing them with another person. Intrusive thoughts are to be nullified; friends are there for lightness and laughter. […]
Mike Jeffcoat, a psychotherapist of 14 years, told me that he doesn’t share the same challenging emotions with his friends that he shares with A.I. He prefers to do his spiritual and emotional processing alone. “Who can and will be truthful, hold space and be competent with one’s confusing subconscious content?” he asked.
Who indeed? In some of these contexts, AI is essentially replacing prayer. Unlike God, AI gives an immediate, verbal response on command. But the god of AI is one fashioned in a human image, and one wonders if it’s capable of genuinely new or counterintuitive solutions. Maybe God’s silence in prayer is a better thing than we realize; maybe our concerns are shallow and God is working in the depths; or maybe truth is something that is learned by suffering (pathei mathos, Aeschylus) rather than the thin, technocratic assertions of AI.
A.I. hasn’t slowed our communication, but it may be changing what we communicate. Now that there’s a tool on hand to smooth and rationalize the bumpiness of our thoughts, we find ourselves being a little less unfiltered with one another, a little less vulnerable.
Perhaps most concerning is the accelerative effect of people taking their problems to AI. If we feel our weaknesses are stigmatized around friends or family (and most of us do to some extent), that drives us to share less with people and more with AI, which then sanitizes the social sphere even more, driving us to take even more things to AI … and on and on in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. People are desperate for therapy, counseling, and confession, and a chatbot can provide those things in a way, but without the human love and acceptance that makes those things effective. AI provides optimization of one’s shortcomings but not absolution or healing. The need for grace or even just nonreactive listening seems like it’ll only keep growing, and to the extent weakness and fault are banished more and more from the social sphere, the role of the gospel and the church becomes ever more sharply highlighted in its absolute distinctiveness — the promise of being fully known and, simultaneously, fully loved. (On the flip side, some of the other things the church tries to do, like life coaching, are in for some stiffer competition.)
2. The Times also ran a story on the Hallmark Channel’s 25th Anniversary celebration. It’s a classic example of a neglected cultural phenomenon — massively popular but rarely commented upon. The profile is interesting:
Hurt people watch Hallmark. They watch it from empty nests and hospital bedsides. When they dial up a Hallmark Christmas movie in July, “they are going through the hardest times of their lives,” said the actress Erin Cahill, whose most recent Hallmark Channel film is “Christmas at the Catnip Cafe,” in which she plays a savvy marketing executive who inherits her late great-aunt’s cat cafe. “They just want something that’s going to help them sleep at night.”
This bent towards consolation cuts more broadly than the Hallmark Channel:
In the world Hallmark has made, the screen is less an entertainment option than a comfort object, one that anesthetizes the viewer against the stresses of modern life.
Behind lots of our screen time is an urge to comfort, or at least to distraction. Is an action movie that invites one to identify with a tough, suave lead less anesthetic than a sappy Christmas movie? Or a video game where one can role-play as a brilliant medieval general or a beneficent, eco-friendly farming tycoon in a bucolic village? The consolation a Hallmark movie offers is more saccharine, but maybe also more honest, than researching pellet smokers or optimizing one’s breakfast diet. At least Hallmark is addressing felt needs that are closer to the bone:
The channel’s most durable cliché is that of the hard-charging businesswoman who leaves the big city for a life-changing holiday romance with a man who works with his hands and owns a mildly alarming amount of seasonal décor. The audience for this stock plot is deceptively broad. America is a country pulled desperately between the all-consuming flames of family and work.
At the same time, there’s an undeniably escapist element to some of it:
Only in Hallmark’s universe can a heroine exit the rat race for an idealized hamlet, one where she’ll never drown in the isolation of child care or worry about money after she quits her corporate job to pursue her passion for miniature villages. While the viewer may be busy silencing debt collectors or filing COBRA forms, the Hallmark star is on the screen in the background, closing her laptop to hunt down a long-lost Christmas ornament with a mysterious man from her past. […]
The network’s stars are aware that they’re selling a snow-globe version of real life. When I asked the actress Autumn Reeser what the most absurd aspect of Hallmark movies was, she replied: “Adults drinking so much hot chocolate.” The Hallmark hunk Wes Brown said that the characters “probably make too little money to fund these lifestyles. Like, man, your Christmas tree farm really rakes in the dough.” I posed the same question to Kim Caprio, a Hynie from Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who came to the event with a pair of glittery heart-sunglass earrings dangling from her lobes. Her answer: “The happy ending.”
While it’s easy to scoff at the blinkered economic realities of, say, a Christmas tree farmer with a world-class wine cellar, I suspect one reason some of us are quick to scoff at Hallmark is that it makes our universal human need for consolation uncomfortably transparent. Some proud part of us is hesitant to admit that we really just want a happy Christmas.
3. Whether one’s consuming Hallmark movies or video games, it also seems time spent buying and selling, or figuring out what to buy, is taking up more and more of our time and, for whatever reason, has become increasingly difficult. Rachel Sugar at the Atlantic published a reflection on the phenomenon — “Shopping is Impossible.”
For several months, I had been on the hunt for new T-shirts … There were many, many shirts that seemed to meet these criteria — and with a few clicks, they could be delivered to my doorstep, maybe even by tomorrow. And still, I had purchased none of them.
The problem is the overabundance of options. The problem is too much information, or too little information. The problem is inflation, which has eroded any sense I had of what a T-shirt is supposed to cost. Yet none of them alone can explain why shopping is sucking up more of my time — and maybe yours too. “I don’t think people are actually enjoying the shopping process,” Jaehee Jung, a University of Delaware professor who studies the psychology of fashion, told me. “People spend more time contemplating, and the pre-decision process seems to be taking longer.”
Sugar notes that in the past, one would be either shopping (say, in a department store) or not shopping (say, at home reading the paper). But now, there’s a third category: “a little bit shopping.” It’s continual exposure to Internet ads, clicking a promoted link on Instagram, and then returning to the scroll. This third category
is the feeling of being haunted by the targeted ads that populate your social-media feeds. Even if you never click on them, their very presence contributes to the overwhelming sense that the retail landscape is infinite — so infinite that perfection must exist, and if you look long enough and hard enough, somewhere in the universe, it is probably on sale. […]
Unlike brick-and-mortar stores, the internet never closes. You can a little bit shop forever, until you are also a little bit miserable. Shopping in person, then, ought to solve the problem, but it often doesn’t… The shoes are out of stock in your size, but have you checked the website? You could stand in line to buy lesser, uglier shoes and be done with it, but why? Online, beautiful shoes are infinite and, in theory, instant.
The more mindful you are about various concerns — overconsumption, worker exploitation, microplastics — the higher the bar climbs: I need not only black pants, but ethical black pants that I can wear to the beach, but also to the opera, and that will be flattering from now until my death. No such pants exist, which is why I don’t have any, but as long as you’re a little bit shopping, the possibility exists.
The law of optimizing one’s purchases, one’s style, and one’s adherence to the ever proliferating set of ethical imperatives can be paralyzing. Ironically, the more possibilities for ethical shopping, value shopping, or simply self-actualization that we have, the more burdensome it gets.
4. Still, the meaningful things tend to be in one’s relationship to others, whether passive or active. Over at Longreads, Sam Roberts, the obituarist for the NYT for almost a decade, reflects on the form, collecting humorous obit stories from across the nation and noting that “obituaries are a reminder that when you die, someone else gets the last word on your legacy.” He also delves into a survey of what qualities made people “worthy” of an NYT obit. On average, the deceased had accomplished whatever made them worthy of an obit at 37, but many didn’t reach fame until their obituary, an average of 44 years (!) later. A word study also found that
the one word that leapt out everywhere was help, as a noun or verb. The most universal value, it seemed, that elevated the famous and not-so into those the Times editors considered worthy of obituaries was how much people helped. “They made a positive dent in the fabric of life,” [social-media researcher Lux] Narayan said.
A couple more interesting observations:
[Another study found] “simultaneous increases in celebrity obituaries and declines in religious obituaries [over the twentieth century],” Nolan and Timothy J. Bertoni reported in the journal Sociation Today. “They document the increasing secularization and hedonism of American culture at a time when personal income was rising and public concern was shifting away from the basic issues of survival. The magnitude of these trends is seismic. While the Greeks may have looked to their gods for guidance and entertainment, we’ve turned increasingly to our celebrities — entertainers and athletes.” […]
[In a study on grief, Janice Hume wrote that] “a typical Victorian obituary would carry the statement, ‘in life we are in the midst of death,’ but as this study suggests, at least on the obituary pages of historic mainstream American newspapers, in death we are in the midst of life.”
5. In humor, Reductress reports that “Woman Seems to Really Believe Watercoloring Will Fix Her,” McSweeney’s chimed in on the gap between “is” and “ought” in baby parenting with “Places My First Baby Slept as a Newborn vs. Places My Third Baby Has Slept as a Newborn,” and WWN strikes a nerve with “Local Man Determined to Win Argument with Online Bot No Matter How Long It Takes“:
Correctly ascertaining that some of the comments by @Preserveourpurity88 bore little relation to the core topic being discussed and made no sense, Grogan could have walked away, learning a valuable lesson in the state of the internet today and how a small percentage of online accounts drive the majority of the discord online.
“Yeah, or, I could teach this little [bot] a lesson with some well reasoned statements of facts,” countered Grogan, his blood pressure higher than the satellite being used to transmit the bot’s time-sapping messages.
Cancelling plans for the evening, week and weekend, Grogan suddenly obtained a focus and level of research skills that is never present in his day job and began addressing every divisive posting his inanimate adversary has ever made.
Oh, and Clem Samson’s “How to Spot an Egomaniac” was helpful too.
Strays:
- Slate published an interesting piece commenting on the economic factors in the current loneliness epidemic.
- Over at 1517, Mbird friend and contributor Amy Mantravadi gives the positive take on Hans Luther, Martin’s occasionally maligned dad.
- At LRB, Harvard lit professor James Wood reflects on his childhood, including his time at Eton and his upbringing by a puritanical mother and seemingly saintly father.
- After the August 7 release of Tony, Aaron Timms at the New York Times Magazine published an insightful piece on “The Gospel According to Anthony Bourdain,” exploring our cultural fascination with the man. Among the piece’s gems: Bourdain was a sort of early influencer, able to do what he loved (eating, discovering) professionally. But in a society that valorizes a certain type of hedonic experience and ostentation, where the lines between consuming experiences and producing identity have blurred, “Eating has become work.”
- At the Red Hand Files, Nick Cave tackles marriage, writing back to a woman who expressed concerns about her dependence on her husband. Cave notes that for him, he’s never kept love at a “sensible distance”: “I think your partner is fortunate to have someone who seems willing to submit to love’s snares and entanglements. To me, the measure of a relationship is not in the distance maintained between the two of you, but whether you want the best for your partner, and your partner wants the best for you. If you have that and can maintain it, you are pretty much there and can let love have its way.”
- Finally, two podcasts of note: David Zahl talks “enoughness” at The Cartographers and also gave an excellent interview over at TableCast.
