You’re Not Bad at Relationships, You’re Overloaded
How digital life is degrading real life connections
Hey all,
Before we jump in today, there’s something we can DO RIGHT NOW to help keep ourselves and each other a little bit safer.
Speaker Mike Johnson is fast-tracking a bill that will let the government surveil Americans with ChatGPT. A bipartisan group of Representatives is trying to stop him–we need to pressure all of Congress to join them this week.
The good folks at QuitGPT have tons of info you can read up on: CLICK HERE.
I know, nobody likes to make phone calls, but honestly: it’ll be over in 5 minutes and there’s a killer script you can read from at the link above. We don’t have a ton of ways to protect ourselves in this moment, but this is a real one.
Thanks to Cut Off the Spigot for sounding the alarm. We love doing this work in community.
Also, if you’re feeling ready to quit ChatGPT today, subscribe and we’ll send our “AI Go Bag” with the first easy steps straight to your inbox.
Now for our regularly scheduled programming…
I was recently at dinner with my wife and a good friend. I should have been having a good time, but something felt off. It wasn’t anxiety or boredom, it was this low-grade sense of being behind, like somewhere else another version of my life was waiting for me to show up for it. And that’s when I realized: I was working. Not for a job, not for other people. I was working for my digital life.
Cue Severance theme music.
We talk about living two lives, online and offline, like they’re equal, but they’re not. The digital one is quietly running the other. Every meal is pre-production for content. Every beautiful place is documentation proving our presence in the beautiful place. Every conversation carries this background hum of what you’re going to do with it later.
Even online, it’s not just one life. It’s LinkedIn colleagues and Substack readers and Instagram peers and group chats and DMs; each one its own neighborhood with its own norms and its own version of you that’s overdue to show up.
The specific feeling that produces is: failing the people who are physically in your life. Not because you don’t care about them, but because you’ve committed to a level of care across so many places that no human being can actually keep up with.
And now AI is in the mix.
The bar for how fast and how constantly we’re expected to respond keeps rising, and these tools make it theoretically possible to meet that bar, so the expectation never comes back down. The pitch is that AI helps you respond and summarize and keep up and perform care at scale.
But is that our goal? Cosplaying connection?
What we’re losing is three relationships at once:
the internal quiet that lets you hear yourself think
the full presence that the people you love deserve from you
and the connection to the actual natural world, the one with no engagement tracker, no algorithm punishing you for going quiet.
Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re late. She really doesn’t.
In the latest episode of Life With Machines on Youtube, we unearth:
Why this isn’t a screen time problem but a relationship problem, and why the platforms are designed to make sure you never stop feeling behind.
How maintaining separate identities across every platform and group chat creates a permanent background sense of relational debt toward the people physically in your life.
Why the bar for responsiveness keeps rising, and what AI tools make possible that humans were never built to sustain.
Why individual digital detox keeps failing, and what actually reduces the load: shared agreements with the people in your life about what presence and availability actually mean.
Watch it here:
Then tell us in the comments: where do you feel most relationally overwhelmed? Where do you feel stretched across too many versions of yourself? And what have you tried, alone or with others, to slow it down without dropping out entirely? We want to hear it.
Thanks for being in this with us.
- Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.