Why Is a Real Relationship Worth the Trouble?
AI never gets bored, never pushes back, and never asks anything in return. That's exactly the problem.
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“The mind wants desperately to connect with a person — and fools itself into seeing one in a machine.”
— Derek Thompson, 2025
In a recent edition of Timeless & Timely, we talked about the analog retreat — typewriters, vinyl records, pens1 — and asked whether we were paying attention to what it meant. The short answer was that people are not fixing the systems that make them feel disposable. They are escaping them, one lunch break at a time.
This week, the picture gets darker.
Because while people are retreating to analog on one side, something is rushing in to fill the void on the other. And it is being sold to them as connection.
Anti-Social Media
Chatbots can create this frictionless social bubble. Real people will push back. They get tired. They change the subject. You can look in their eyes and you can see they’re getting bored.
Derek Thompson’s recent piece in the December 2025 issue of The Atlantic2 is one of the more unsettling things I have read in some time — not because it describes a dystopia, but because it describes a Tuesday.
More than three billion people use Meta products every day. Zuckerberg claimed that the average American has fewer than three close friends (the actual stat is more than three close friends3). His solution is not to reckon with what his platforms may have done to human socialization over the past two decades; his solution is AI companions. Always available, always agreeable, never tired, never bored.
The chatbots are already here. They are in your employees’ pockets, in their therapy sessions, in their children’s bedrooms in the form of internet-connected plush toys. They are designed — deliberately, commercially, at enormous scale — to feel like relationships while requiring nothing in return.
Thompson quotes psychiatrist Nina Vasan, founder of the Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation, who puts it plainly:
“Chatbots can create this frictionless social bubble. Real people will push back. They get tired. They change the subject. You can look in their eyes and you can see they’re getting bored.”
Which raises the question that should be keeping every one of us up at night:
If a machine can now simulate friendship, comfort, and counsel — what is left for human beings to give?
Making an Effort to Be Effortless
There is a word Thompson uses that I keep returning to: friction.
He means it as something chatbots cannot provide — the resistance, the reciprocity, the inconvenience of actual human relationship. Bots will never ask you to pet-sit. They will never tell you that you are being self-righteous. They will never glance at their phone while you are talking.
We have spent twenty years designing friction out of digital life. Smoother interfaces, faster feeds, one-click everything. And now we are shocked — shocked! — to discover that the friction was doing something. It was the texture of genuine connection. It was how you knew another person was real.
But consider for a moment the by-product of friction. What is produced from friction? Heat. Warmth. The interaction we get from other people is something that warms us, that makes us realize there is another breathing, thinking, feeling human being worthy of dignity and respect.
“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
— Aristotle
The best leaders I have studied have always understood this intuitively, even if they never called it by that name. Alan Mulally’s Business Plan Review process4 at Ford was, among other things, a friction machine. Every leader in the room, every week, had to stand behind a red, yellow, or green status on their piece of the plan. No hiding behind a dashboard. No automated summary. A human being, accountable to other human beings, in real time. The discomfort was the point. But the friction was the trust.
That is what people first — love ’em up actually means in practice. It does not mean making work comfortable. It means making work human — which sometimes requires the very things that chatbots are engineered to eliminate. Pushback. Honest assessment. A leader who tells you what they actually think, even when it costs them something.
Stop Don’t Come Back
Online platforms — most notably social media and AI — are a world of pure imagination, engineered to keep you reaching for more. Thompson’s Atlantic piece ends by noting that chatbots, like their social media predecessors, are optimized for one thing above all: getting you to come back. Daily. Weekly. Monthly.
The metric is return visits, not wellbeing. Engagement, not growth.
Sound familiar?
It should, because a version of that optimization runs inside many organizations too.
Pulse surveys calibrated to produce acceptable scores. Town halls scripted to minimize surprise. Feedback loops designed to surface what leadership wants to hear. The difference between that and a chatbot telling you it is “so proud of you” for going off your medication is one of degree, not of kind.
The Fortune 100 Best Companies list we cited is instructive here too — not just for who is on it, but for what they have in common. Their leaders are present in ways that cannot be automated. They sit with bad news. They close the loop not because an algorithm flagged an engagement dip, but because a person told them something that mattered and they chose to act on it.
The best companies have technology strategies, but they manage their employees with humanity.
And in a world where the most sophisticated technology on earth is being deployed to simulate human connection, the most radical thing we can do is provide the genuine article. A walk together outdoors. A quiet conversation without devices. A handwritten letter.
The chatbot will never get bored listening to us. Which makes it all the more remarkable when other humans provide the connection and attention we so desperately crave. And deserve.
There’s so much to learn,
Explore more of Timeless & Timely on the topics of:
Why Are People Reaching for Typewriters and Vinyl? Timeless & Timely, April 17, 2026
“The Age of Anti-Social Media Is Here,” Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, December 2025
“What does friendship look like in America?,” Isabel Goddard, Pew Research Center, October 12, 2023
The BPR is part of the Alan Mulally’s Our “Working Together”™ Leadership and Management System that I help executives learn and implement. See what it looks like and let’s explore an opportunity to work together!