Avoiding the Automation of your Heart

A correspondence with Freya India

In an age of automation, how do we maintain our agency?

In an age of alienation, how do we reconnect with others?

These were just two of the questions explored during a fascinating month-long letter exchange between me and one of my favourite Substackers,

Freya India

. Freya writes about the challenges facing young people in the digital age. Her work can be found at the Spectator, the New Statesman, Quillette, UnHerd, and her blog, GIRLS.

Below is the entirety of our 8-letter correspondence. For ease of following the discussion, Freya’s letters are in bold.

---

Freya: Gurwinder, you wrote an incredible essay for UnHerd about what you call the “pathologisation pandemic” — people confusing sadness for sickness, particularly young women. Some of my other favourite pieces of yours include TikTok is Time Bomb, and Why Everything is Becoming a Game.

I think a theme here is loss of agency. We rely on the medical industry to tell us what is healthy or unhealthy, depending on psychiatric labels and diagnoses to explain ourselves. We allow algorithms to deliver us our personalities and opinions. We depend on dating apps to find us the right matches, trusting online metrics and scores rather than our own judgement. As we have both written about, this seems to come from—or cause—an external locus of control, this feeling that outside forces dictate our lives. Even if people recognise their lack of agency now, their first instinct is probably to search for influencers or podcasts to tell them how to fix it. Whereas I tend to think most of the answers we need, the wisdom we are looking for, is inside us already. We know what we need to do, what right and wrong is, but we have silenced our instinct and intuition, muffled it with all this noise.

I think this is a defining paradox of my generation: we have this lack of agency, this feeling of powerlessness, but also an outward obsession with agency. Young women often emphasise how independent and empowered they are, how they don’t need anyone.…but the evidence suggests the opposite, almost as if it’s a front for how helpless and out of control we really feel.

I worry about this with AI. My main concern isn’t so much losing human creativity or everyone having AI girlfriends, but that someday we won’t trust ourselves at all. I see a future where young people won’t trust any instinct they have without checking with ChatGPT first. Where they will ask AI to solve relationship problems, to calculate who is right in an argument, to make decisions for them instead of going with their gut. I genuinely believe people are already doing this, outsourcing not only their ability to write or work, but to decide, to act. I’ve seen a few examples of this lately, like people using AI to flirt for them, message their dating app matches, or write birthday cards. We already had a dependency problem before AI—we couldn’t think for ourselves without searching online, without asking forums for advice, without sources and studies…but now it’s getting serious.

The reason I think this is because every time you ask an AI to double-check your text messages, to make sure your email sounds right, to help you flirt with someone, you lose a little more trust in yourself, in your own judgement. I mean, imagine a young woman asking her boyfriend every time she does something, before every email she sends, “Is this okay? Does this make sense?” Eventually someone would say, uh, you’re giving him too much power over you. Eventually she wouldn’t be able to do anything without him checking first, and granting permission. That would be a recipe for a very toxic relationship. And yet I worry that is exactly what we are doing with AI, training young people to never trust their own judgement, until they can’t act, can’t think, without its approval.

As you put it in a recent tweet: “Ironically, the more the world becomes automated, the more important self-reliance becomes. When every task can be mechanized except personal agency, success hinges on taking charge of your life and making good choices.”

So, somewhat ironically, I’m going to ask for your advice…or at least your take on this. If low agency is our central problem, how do we take charge of our life, as you say? How do we trust ourselves to make the right choices, and build self-reliance in an age of algorithms and AI?

Gurwinder: Freya, it’s an honour to have this conversation, as I’m a big fan of the order in which you hit keys on a keyboard. Like you, I’m concerned about the fate of human agency in the age of automation. To me, the greater danger of AI is not that machines will think for themselves, but that humans will cease to.

The age of automation doesn’t just endanger agency, it also makes it more important than ever. For most of human history, the limiting factor in what a person could accomplish was often their intelligence. But now that we can outsource intelligence to machines, the new bottleneck for most people will be how proactively they make use of all that external intelligence.

So our degree of agency will determine our “success” in the AI age. However, the success of the AI age could also determine our degree of agency…

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates worried that the invention of writing would cost us our memory and wisdom, because the ability to record knowledge on parchment would keep us from storing it in our heads. It may be true that writing has made us dependent on writing, but it also gave us the printing press, the internet, search engines, CTRL+F, and many other superpowers. So, overall, writing took a little of our agency, and gave us so much more.

The question is, will AI turn out the same way? Will the agency it gives outweigh the agency it takes?

I’d say it depends how much agency one already has, because agency typically can’t be given; it must be grown. Let’s take the example you give: of someone using ChatGPT to write flirtatious messages for them. A low-agency person would simply adopt the first pick-up line the chatbot generated. A high-agency person would give the chatbot multiple prompts and then carefully select the best pick-up line from among them, and in so doing, learn what works. So the low-agency person would use AI to eliminate choice, while the high-agency person would use AI to increase choice. The low-agency person would grow more dependent on the AI to think for them, while the high-agency person would use AI to help them think for themselves.

I therefore see AI as a personality amplifier; it will give more agency to those who already have it, and take more from those who already lack it.

I wonder what the long-term consequences will be of this Matthew effect. In H.G. Wells’ novel, The Time Machine, humanity in the far future has evolved into two subspecies, the Morlocks and the Eloi. The Eloi live lives of automated bliss, completely dependent on the machinery maintained by the Morlocks, who tirelessly toil underground. Generations of labour have kept the Morlocks sharp and self-sufficient, while generations of idle leisure have atrophied the Eloi’s minds, so that they never care to realise that the Morlocks are farming them for meat.

Since both agency and its opposite will compound in the AI age, it’s wise for people to maximise their agency now, because, years or decades down the line, it could be the difference between being whoever you want to be, and becoming an Eloi.

So how do we maximise our agency? We must first consider why we give it away in the first place. The reason is phronemophobia: humans are naturally averse to thinking.

In 2014, researchers at Harvard and the University of Virginia conducted experiments in which they left participants in a room with nothing to do except think or give themselves electric shocks. After just a few minutes, many participants began to give themselves the shocks. They preferred being zapped to thinking.

We’re configured to avoid thinking because cognition eats up a lot of time and calories, which in our evolutionary history were scant resources. As such, the brain is not so much a thinking machine as a machine that tries to circumvent thinking—it is calibrated to ration rationality. (This is why even the smartest people are dumb most of the time.)

The side-effect of this aversion to thinking is that people don’t want to be left alone with their thoughts. They’ll spend hours doomscrolling news of horrific tragedies rather than introspect. As Carl Jung wrote, “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.”

The price of this avoidance is steep. Living as a fugitive from yourself makes you forget who you are and relinquish who you could be. Since you’re never listening to your own thoughts you fail to develop perspective, refine your beliefs, and make long-term plans. You cease to be proactive and your life becomes a series of reactions to your immediate environment.

Even worse, the less you think, the harder thinking becomes. All the screentime we engage in to escape our own heads stops us from developing a rich inner world, and with such barren imaginations we become even more dependent on external stimuli to keep us occupied.

So how do we make it easier for people to inhabit their own heads?

The simple answer is practice. To overcome the strain of thinking, do more thinking.

When the Industrial Revolution made it possible to live lives without physical exertion, going to the gym became necessary to stay fit. Equally, now that the AI Revolution has made it possible to live without mental exertion, we need the mental equivalent of gyms to stay sharp.

For me, the best brain-gym is writing—it forces you to shut out distractions and listen to your thoughts. A particularly useful form of writing is journaling, where you basically keep a diary in which you routinely interrogate yourself. What did you learn today? What did you regret? If you had ten times more agency, what would you do? If you did the same thing you did today every day, where will you be in ten years? (For those looking for an intro to journaling, I recommend my friend Elisabeth Andrews’ course.)

A habit of journaling helps you understand what you want (and don’t want), and it nurtures your imagination and acclimatises you to thinking for yourself. Daily journaling also acts as continual feedback by which you can evaluate whether you’re moving toward your goals. All of this brings order to the mind, so that, like a well-tended garden, it becomes a place we want to spend our time in rather than escaping at any opportunity.

So that’s my convoluted answer to your question. Write, even though machines can write for you, because the purpose of writing is not just to produce writing, but to distil your thoughts, refine your beliefs, and maintain your agency.

If Socrates had only spent more time with his pen and parchment, perhaps he would’ve realised that the thing he feared would cost us all our agency might ultimately be the thing that saves it.

Freya: That’s so true, what you say about writing as a way to maintain agency. Writing has always made me feel more in control of my life somehow, like I have more command over my thoughts, decisions, and what direction I’m going in. I think it helps you stay on track.

That is, of course, unless you start writing solely to please an audience.

Speaking of which, you seem to resist social media influence very well. I’ve been following you for years, and you are just as measured now as you always have been. You seem very intentional and, like me, you take your time with your essays. I see all these tips and tricks on how to grow a Substack now and I pretty much do none of them—the only thing I care about doing consistently is writing. Some people have told me I’m not doing enough—that I should publish more, react to breaking news, tweet every day, start a podcast. But to what end? More subscribers but less pride in my work? Host a podcast but constantly cringe because it’s not really me?

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there seems to be an assumption now that if you don’t maximise engagement by every means necessary, you are slacking—rather than maybe deliberately resisting, doing this careful dance to avoid the abyss gazing back at you. People mistake being vague politically for cowardice, instead of trying to avoid becoming a parody of yourself. Or they assume you aren’t getting many opportunities, not realising you might be turning some down for the sake of your soul.

As you put it, “having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience”. You warn that “being someone often means being someone you’re not, and if you chase the approval of others, you may, in the end, lose the approval of yourself.” I completely agree. I think if you build an audience but you aren’t being authentic, there’s always some sort of debt hanging over you. Even if you get followers and fame, something has been traded for it. The more you achieve on the outside, the more ashamed you feel on the inside. Because, as Johnny Cash put it, “you’ve still got the devil to pay.”

Anyway I’m interested in audience capture not only from the perspective of public writers, but anyone, particularly girls and young women. You don’t have to be some influencer for it to happen to you. Girls are now shopping online for who to be, funnelled toward the same face, recommended not just products but personalities. Maybe something more like algorithm capture makes more sense here—adapting to who the algorithm “wants” us to become.

So how do you resist this, both as a writer and as someone online? You mention staying deliberately vague, but is there anything else you do in your personal life? And what made you recognise the need for resistance in the first place?

Gurwinder: Audience capture reminds us that humans are as much a threat to agency as AI is. But where automation risks replacing agency, audience capture risks hijacking it—redirecting it toward goals you don’t have, at the expense of goals you do.

With the advent of social media, people began adopting online personas that attracted followers who demanded more of the same, eventually trapping the person inside the persona. On Instagram, many developed a following by presenting cherry-picked snapshots to portray the idyllic life. They received so much adulation for their choreographed “life” that it began to define them. And in order to fulfil the accumulating expectations that came with this new identity, they were doomed to forever fake their days, putting more effort into portraying a good life than actually living one (you of course wrote a powerful piece about this).

I’ve thankfully never identified as living an idyllic life, but many people called me smart, and I was dumb enough to believe them, so I started to identify as a rational person. This identity fed on the online comments that praised my insights, as well as on getting the final word in debates. My rational persona offered me self-esteem, but it also made me insecure in that I found it hard to accept when I was wrong, because my identity now depended on me being right. And so I’d instinctively consider any disagreement as a personal attack, and, if ever I was shown to be wrong, instead of admitting I was wrong I’d move the goalposts so I could claim to be right again. Essentially, identifying as smart made me stupid. I see this in many intellectuals today.

So how did I escape the prison of my persona? As you mention, I chose to become vague, but only in a very specific way: I adopted an amorphous self-identity. That is, although I knew things about myself—what I wanted, feared, etc—I no longer regarded myself as being a certain type of person. When people called me smart, I was like, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. This freed me from any expectations, both external and self-imposed, and made my identity flexible enough to wriggle out of any trap.

But formlessness wasn’t enough. If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. So, while my self-identity was vague, I made sure my goals and principles were specific and concrete. The surer the path ahead, the better your resistance to being led astray.

The way to develop specific goals and principles is, again, introspection through journaling. Your desires crystallise a little more whenever you take time out from the digital distractions to assess your life and explore your own head. And when you have a clear purpose, you’re less liable to seek one from others.

I no longer identify as a rational person. I now identify as the universe trying to understand and experience itself as fully as it can. Not only is this literally true—I am, like you, a splinter of the universe awakened—but it helps keep my identity humble and vague, and my goals and principles (truth, happiness) specific. I’m now open to changing my mind, since I’m trying to understand rather than be right. And if I’m going to find truth and happiness, then I must defend them and all the other principles upon which they depend: courage, sympathy, security, and freedom. To be a seeker and defender of such things is the only identity I need.

Of course, society still pushes me to act against my nature. As you mention, there’s pressure for us writers to post frequently. It’s the best way to grow an audience and get rich on Substack. But it’s also the best way to lose your way. So, like you, I hold back.

Part of the reason I take so long to publish is that I’m currently focused on my book. But I’m also naturally a slow writer, because I don’t trust my impulses, so I create deliberate delays between stimulus and response in order to scrutinise my motivations and quality-control my intuitions.

A theme of my work is information overload, and I believe a big cause of this is that content creators feel compelled to rush out content for their subscribers. As soon as a big news event happens (which, in our hyper-connected world, is every few hours), writers race to post the first take, and such haste often leads them to careen into bullshit. It also makes them more susceptible to audience capture, since they receive more frequent feedback signals, and leave themselves less time to think about where they’re headed.

For this reason I disobey the social pressure to post quickly and regularly, and just post when I’m confident I’ve written something that will add value to my readers’ lives. I’ll gladly publish my take last if it means publishing works that will last. It may not make me as much money, but it does make me rich, because it frees me to be who I want to be rather than who I’m expected to be—and what, in the end, is wealth, if not freedom?

Freya: Wow, so well said. This made me think of something Christopher Lasch wrote in The True and Only Heaven, about the societal shift from people following their “calling” to “careerism”. People once felt morally and spiritually called to a particular task or vocation, often by God. But those “who wished simply to practice a craft” were overtaken by a “vicious kind of careerism”, those ruthlessly trying to get ahead and make it. “Raw ambition,” as Lasch put it, “counted more heavily, in the distribution of worldly rewards, than devoted service to a calling.”

This is certainly what we reward now. We praise people who say they are “ambitious” from an early age, even without specifying what they are ambitious about. Young people want to be “YouTubers” before they even have a particular skill or talent to be known for. They want to influence before they have anything to say. The ambition is simply to have an audience.

This makes me think back to when I was younger and I often felt a resistance to displaying myself online, but dismissed it as shyness or anxiety. I’ve always been embarrassed to post pictures, or pose on the street in public with friends — and I would punish myself for this, thinking, what’s wrong with you? Why is your heart pounding? But as I got older, I realised that maybe I should listen to that feeling, maybe it’s telling me something, maybe it’s not anxiety but something we used to call humility. I think we are encouraging young people to shove this down now — that’s just your low-self-esteem! Get over your shyness! Now the well-adjusted person never feels ashamed, and always wants an audience. I want to defend that instinct to resist.

Because I think some of the bravest people these days are those who hold back. People keep saying it’s brave to stand up and speak out, but I don’t know…I’m starting to think sometimes it’s braver to stay quiet, to watch, to contemplate, and speak only when you have something to say, only when you really mean it.

You mention that audience capture redirects us toward new goals “at the expense” of our original ones. This is a profound point. Often people end up becoming the opposite of what they intended. Conservatives ignore their families to post about the importance of family values. Instagram influencers make themselves miserable to appear happy all the time. (You could also say this about those lecturing about screen time and social media but always writing about it online…but let’s move on). The strangest part is when some people end up arranging their lives around things they hate—“anti-woke” commentators, for example, seem to spend more time thinking about wokeness than actual woke people do, enraging themselves every day. Eventually even their personal lives can get consumed by it, until marriage proposals and pregnancy announcements become weapons in the culture war.

When it comes to resisting audience capture, I agree with what you say about being vague. I also think one of the best ways to resist is by being in a long-term relationship, or staying close to family and friends—preferably people who knew you before you had a public profile. These relationships remind us who we really are, rather than who our audience wants us to be.

Which brings me to something else I’ve been noticing lately—this encouragement to push other people away. We pathologise not only ourselves but other people. Now our mothers must have undiagnosed ADHD, our dads don’t realise they are autistic, now everyone else is a narcissist. As you say, we have a medical industry motivated to convince people they are sick—but I would add we have a whole network of industries telling us other people are the problem, the causes of our sickness, the reasons for our symptoms.

And we can use this not just to blame people but cut them off, especially those we decide are “toxic”, “narcissistic”, or getting in the way of our growth. I see this not only in therapy culture, but self-optimisation culture—we can work harder, sleep better, and achieve more alone. I think this attitude has huge cultural consequences. Personally I’m not worried about falling marriage and birth rates because I think every young woman needs to live the same traditional life, but because I think some of our avoidance is cultural, and I think it’s a tragedy—an outrage, actually—to convince young people that human connection is an inconvenience, that other people are obstacles.

Admittedly I am a bit of hopeless romantic; I’ve always wanted a lifelong relationship, but I also think it’s very useful. We are often warned to avoid committing too young if we are ambitious—put yourself first, we are told, make it on your own, don’t get distracted. But among all these self-optimisation hacks, I feel like this is a missing one: a good relationship is a great life hack for becoming a better person. Being with someone from a young age can ground you while others are pulled toward self-obsession. It’s hard to be selfless without a reason, a person, to be selfless for. And you know, something will humble you some day—either it’s going to happen against your will, or you start practicing now. Like learning any other skill, it only gets harder later in life. So if you spend your 20s learning how to be in a relationship, how to love, care for someone, commit, compromise, sacrifice, and concentrate with others around, rather than trying to master all these things for the first time way into adulthood, you learn valuable lessons. You learn that life is not frictionless, how to depend on someone and be dependable, and how unreasonable it is to expect a life without distractions. And if you’re lucky, you have someone who keeps your ego in check, and reminds you who you are. So it’s not just romantic, but an actual competitive advantage.

I wonder what you make of all this. Do you see a cultural push to avoid relationships, and pathologise human connection? Why do you think this might be happening?

Gurwinder: You make an important point about the decline of real-world relationships in the West. Between 2003 and 2023, in-person social interaction among unmarried US men and people under 25 declined by over 35%. People of all ages are now making fewer friends, getting married less, and, according to various surveys, at least half of surveyed adults report feeling lonely. Further, as the world becomes increasingly automated, eliminating the need for human interaction, alienation seems like it’ll only get worse.

This matters because, as you point out, other people orient us. They’re like the world’s greatest journal. As you write in the Age of Abandonment, “Our identity, our meaning, our purpose, as humans, was always our ties and obligations to others, and now we are trying to do it all alone, trying to figure out who we are alone, and we’re nobody alone.”

So what’s the cause of this loneliness epidemic? Are people alienated because they’ve internalised a culture that pathologises human connection? Possibly. But I think there may be even more causality in the opposite direction; people are pathologising human connection because they feel alienated.

I agree with your essay, Risk-Aversion is Killing Romance, that, well, risk-aversion is killing romance. Or at least stopping it from being born. And I think you’re correct that one reason young people are more risk-averse to relationships is that so many of them are growing up with divorced parents. As you write: “In the UK, a third of Gen Z now see their parents split by the time they are 16. Try not being risk-averse when those are your templates for love.” Many young people seem so afraid of being hurt that they pack their hearts with mental bubble-wrap, which stops them from breaking, but also from beating. So it may be that their pathologisation of love stems in part from the normalisation of abandonment.

But I think there are other reasons, too. The young are not only averse to falling in love, they’re also averse to having sex, making friends, learning to drive, and working. They seem to be faced with a general lack of agency.

There’s that word again. And, ironically, one of the chief sources of agency is having a loved one who depends on us. It gives us a stake in life that’s greater than ourselves, motivating us to take initiative, work hard, and make good long-term decisions. So, again, causality may be going both ways; apathy creating alienation, and alienation creating apathy. When people have no one to be better for, they don’t try to be better, so don’t attract someone to be better for.

So what triggered this vicious circle? I share Lasch’s (and presumably your) view that we have a culture of narcissism, in which many people have replaced the worship of gods, nations, and families with worship of the self. But I believe culture rarely changes people’s lifestyles directly. Instead, what tends to happen is that economic and technological changes incentivise new lifestyles to emerge, and then culture changes to accommodate and justify these new lifestyles. In other words, most social mores are post-hoc rationalisations.

So I think the age of alienation wasn’t a result of a change in culture per se, but a change in incentives. For most of human history, there were things everyone needed to do in order to have even a shot at a fulfilling life: forming relationships, getting married, having kids, and, in the 20^th century, getting a job and learning to drive.

Thus, societies systematised certain rites of passage; you were expected to learn to drive in your teens, get married and have kids in your twenties, and then spend the rest of your adulthood raising a family. These milestones became the foundation of almost every life; if you didn’t do them, you couldn’t do much else. So there was always one clear path ahead, one route through life that was obviously superior to the alternatives.

Today, however, technology has saturated the world with new pleasures and purposes, and enabled countless new lifestyles. It’s even possible to live a completely occupied life without ever leaving one’s home. Forming relationships is no longer essential to survival, and it now has to contend with a thousand other activities, many of which have greater short-term appeal, and most of which don’t require anywhere near as much buy-in or risk.

So, not only have we become unmoored from the customs that once gave structure to our lives, but we’re now faced with overchoice: a bewildering array of options, many of them cheaper and easier than forming relationships. It seems to me, then, that the underlying reason for the increase in both apathy and alienation among the young is, frankly, that they have too much freedom.

Now don’t get me wrong; I value liberty immensely, and I appreciate that we’re blessed with a degree of choice that our ancestors could only have dreamed of. But the truth is that liberty is enantiodromic; too much of it leads to its opposite.

Modern liberal society is defined by its lack of constraints, but rather than make people feel free, it tends to make them feel lost. Without a system to guide us through the labyrinth of dizzying possibilities, we resort to our evolutionary programming, mimicking our peers or following animal impulses that lead us into neurological traps like addictions to porn and news, or indoctrinations into cults and ideologies, or obsessions with status and money.

In today’s world it’s possible to have a wide range of choices, but for most of those choices to be a trap. Therefore, the freest people are not those with the most choices, but those with the best ones. And the only way to have the best choices is to live a life of structure and discipline, taking the hard path over the easy, favouring the long term over the short. Paradoxically, we must restrain ourselves to be free.

William Blake once wrote, “I must create a system, or be enslav’d by another man's.” The modern world is filled with systems created to enslave us, and the only defence—a system of our own—is hard to formulate amid all the noise.

And when you don’t have a system to organise your life around, your principles tend to just become flexible post-hoc rationalisations for your whims. As the Arabian caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab wrote, “He who does not live in the way of his beliefs starts to believe in the way he lives.”

This, I believe, is one of the chief dilemmas of the young. With a dazzling array of options to choose from, and without a system to guide their choice-making, they have no good heuristics by which to forge a path through life, so instead of making long-term decisions, they rely on their impulses, and then seek to rationalise their impulses with philosophies like safetyism and the pathologisation of whatever is too much work.

I’m curious to know what you think. Do you see social connection as salvageable? Do you believe the young could benefit from a system of some kind, in order to make them feel more connected to each other and to themselves? If so, what kind of system would it be?

Freya: “The pathologisation of whatever is too much work” is a very interesting way of putting it. I also see a lot of ideological objections to things that I think are often, deep down, just hard to handle emotionally. For example, I’m not persuaded when I hear young women saying they object to marriage because it’s a heteronormative patriarchal arrangement or something. I think it’s often more like fear that it will never work out.

I agree with your central point about freedom too. There is so much talk about how good this generation has it, and it definitely looks that way — but we forget that too much freedom can be unbearable. It’s very hard for humans to handle. And maybe our culture of narcissism is a defence mechanism. As Lasch saw it, things feel so insecure now that we go inwards, minimise our worlds down to only ourselves, and get very defensive. As he writes: “Faced with an escalating arms race, an increase in crime and terrorism, environmental deterioration, and the prospect of long-term economic decline, (people) have begun to prepare for the worst, sometimes by building fallout shelters and laying in provisions, more commonly by executing a kind of emotional retreat from the long-term commitments that presuppose a stable, secure, and orderly world”.

I see so many young women feeling very anxious about this excess of freedom —partners they can't trust, their families breaking down, and so on— but at the same time they are terrified of being restricted, really defensive if you suggest it. As you say, we are incentivised to act this way. When commitment feels impossible, when technology facilitates things like unrestricted access to porn and infinite options on dating apps, there are incentives to be emotionally detached. Maybe the strong independent woman ideal is just a response to a world where human connection is getting riskier. Maybe self-obsession is our only defence.

In terms of a “system”, the first thing that came to my mind is my neighbour. I live near a vicar and her husband, and they have an “open house” that I’m at pretty much every week. I’m not the most social person, but this is different from anything I’ve ever experienced. Every Sunday, anyone is invited for lunch, and you never know who you are going to meet. Everyone says grace and shares a meal, and every possible season and event is celebrated with music and fireworks. Nobody is networking, nobody is trying to impress each other. It feels like a crime to get your phone out.

I was speaking with her the other day about how much I admired what she has built, and she told me how it all began. How her and her husband started inviting people over to their first tiny house, starting with anyone who was alone on Valentine’s Day. They had no dining table and a cramped living room, so they ate dinner on lap trays. And I realised that’s what it takes. Hosting, even when your house isn’t perfect. Showing up, even if you feel tired and not in the mood. Making dinner for friends, even if it’s microwaved and on plastic plates. Even now it can be chaos at her house, but in the most beautiful way. Not enough glasses, not enough chairs, guests showing up at random times. But I have honestly never seen more well-adjusted young people than the ones coming in and out of her home. They are always smiling, laughing, biking, swimming, playing instruments, lost in conversation. And always giving back too—you can’t help but want to wash up, lay out the cutlery, make her life a little easier.

So I suppose what I’m describing is a system centred around community. And I think the intergenerational part is important too. Young people are often accused of having no respect for the past now, but it’s hard to have if you don’t spend much time around anyone older. When I go to my neighbour’s, I see a home and community she laid the groundwork for years ago, carefully built up over time.

This helps orient me. I respect her so much—her marriage, her home, her love for life—that I want to follow her example. So I listen to her life story, I look at what sacrifices she made, I pay attention to what restrictions and responsibilities she willingly took on, I notice what she had to say no to, and I’m trying to do the same. It’s very simple. But I think that’s what young people are missing: real life examples to emulate. Not going on Reddit forums to ask random people advice, or listening to TikTok influencers telling us what type of relationship we should want, but going out into the world and waiting to see that one beautiful life or one beautiful relationship that makes us stop in our tracks. And not stop because we want to afford that thing or live in the same house, but stop as in…I want to be that type of person, I want to earn that type of respect, I want to leave that kind of legacy.

And of course the opposite can happen as well. Sometimes you see people orienting their lives around fame, money, content…and you can see it hollowing them out, that debt hanging over them. But when you meet someone whose life is organised around something good and honest, it’s more motivating than any self-help podcast or therapy session or TikTok advice could ever be.

So young people need systems where we can belong to something bigger, forget about ourselves for a while, and be exposed to better examples. But I believe we have to start that system. We can’t wait around for community to come to us. We can create communities ourselves, little by little. We just have to start hosting with lap trays. We have to invite friends over even when it feels inconvenient. We have to welcome people into our homes even when we haven’t had time to tidy. We have to help wash up. And this can spiral into something that connects and inspires so many others. So yes, I think social connection is salvageable, but again, we need to have more agency. And maybe that starts by opening our doors, and taking down some of our defences.

Gurwinder: I love this idea. But I do wonder, if a big reason people are not forming relationships is misaligned incentives, are there ways society could re-incentivise people to leave their homes and meet each other?

I guess the obvious way is to promote the benefits of social interaction (like your earlier point about relationships being adaptive). For instance, many long-term studies, including the 50 year Roseto study and the 85 year Harvard Study of Adult Development, found that having close-knit relationships is as important for longevity as diet, sleep, and exercise. Research has also found that people tend to underestimate how much they’d enjoy social interaction, and how much others enjoy their company. And then there is Solomon’s paradox; the finding that we’re better at solving other people’s problems than our own, because detachment yields objectivity.

Just as raising awareness of the benefits of exercise encouraged people to go to gym, raising awareness of the benefits of social interaction may encourage people to host lap-tray dinners.

There’s also a less obvious, but more direct, way to encourage social interaction. Experiments in the business world found that the success of a typical business is tied to the number of face-to-face interactions between its employees, so the tech giants began redesigning their workspaces to maximise social interactions.

Facebook’s and Apple’s headquarters are ringed with huge walking loops festooned with digital art, exotic flowers, and seating areas in the middle of nowhere. Google’s Mountain View campus is filled with spaces to play impromptu games of Frisbee and volleyball, while Samsung’s HQ holds Tai Chi classes in a cactus garden. They’ve made subtler changes, too, such as reducing the number of coffee machines to increase the chances of people meeting at a coffee machine.

I wonder if something similar could be done with cities. There are already urban planning philosophies like fifteen-minute cities, which seek to redesign neighbourhoods so that most amenities are in walking distance. Not only is walking better for health than driving, but it’s also more conducive to social interaction. Imagine if everyone had a nearby park to walk through, with scenic spots where people could gather to admire the beauty. Or a Speakers’ Corner in everyone’s vicinity, so that a lively public discussion was only ever a stone’s throw away.

Currently there isn’t much public appetite for grand urban redesigns (especially given the conspiracy theories around fifteen-minute cities), but perhaps that will change when social alienation has gotten sufficiently bad.

Earlier I referenced enantiodromia—the transformation of things into their opposites. This often happens because of the region-beta paradox—the tendency for humans to only improve their situation when things get sufficiently bad. It may take pigeons shitting on your car for you to finally wash it. Equally, we may need a critical mass of people to feel sufficiently isolated before there is any public appetite to change the way we live. The incentives must change before the culture changes.

I do believe the night has yet to become darker before the dawn. Something I’ve noticed about humans is that they tend to value each other in proportion to how rare other people are. They’re unfriendliest in the most densely populated areas, like in the centres of big cities (and on social media). And they’re friendliest in the least populated areas, like in remote rural communities.

If birth rates continue to decline, and if automation continues to reduce opportunities for social interaction, then other people will become rarer in our lives, which would likely lead most of us to appreciate people more. So, perhaps it will only be by replacing enough humans with machines that we’ll finally discover the true value of a human.

At the same time, we must also reckon with how machinelike we can be. In many ways, humans are highly predictable (which is why AI is so good at impersonating us). And one of the most predictable things about humans is that they tend to imitate each other. When Sylvan Goldman invented shopping carts in 1937, most shoppers initially viewed them with a mixture of confusion and ridicule, and refused to use them, so Goldman paid actors to use carts in his stores, and everyone else soon followed.

Getting people to socially interact could be much like getting them to use shopping carts, except we don’t need to pay actors to pretend to socially interact. We can just do it for real. Friendliness is contagious, and if we make an effort to get to know others, then they likely will too.

So I fully agree with you that the best way to get people to reconnect is to reconnect. And to that end, I’m grateful that you reached out to me with your letter, because you’ve inspired me to write to others, and hopefully that’ll inspire them to do the same. Thank you for showing agency in initiating a wonderful conversation, and for doing your small part to make the world a more connected place.

Freya: I’ve loved talking with you, Gurwinder. Despite everything we’ve said about screens and online interaction, this conversation has made me feel less alone. So thank you.

---

Subscribe to Freya’s Substack here: