Former indoor kid / socially awkward guy here, now 42:
Fortunately I've been able to avoid much of the technological traps mentioned here. I hate AI, and can't understand the appeal.
I'm also an artist, mathematician, and former Marine.
What helped me the most being social was when I was pretty much forced into it--working at a restaurant, singing in choir, or joining the Marines. I'd argue that the forces driving social isolation go back way before social media, perhaps all the way to mass media.
What we need are systems that force us to get along. It's not just the screens, although computers have always been a handy escape for nerds. Everything from masks, to standing apart, to delivery everything--it's never been easier to isolate, and less necessary to engage with real people.
I'm alright; I reproduced once, had a lot of good times. Life is a bit of a disaster since the Marines but I'm relatively optimistic for myself and for others.
But yes, this tech is disgusting. There are many, many offramps people can take from life; shame that these tech ones are grabbing people at such a young age.
Yes, I was going to say Marilyn Monroe was engineered sexual imagery, mass-marketed as an improvement on real live women, thanks for making me superfluous: Wah! I want my chatbot!
Marilyn was the pivot away from movie stars, who were lovely but accessibly human, toward empty sexualized receptacles for male inadequacy.
You are so correct here it's unbelievable. I fell really badly in to Discord before and it's an absolute cesspit. I am genuinely scared because whereas you can take a phone away from a child, how can you take away comfort from a lonely adult? The whole fabric of the world is so broken right now and I'm not a pessimist, but how can we even start to fix it?
First step in solving any problem is realizing there is one. This alone is the Great Filter we must overcome first, yet we won't because it shatters our comforting worldview.
These are products that only sociopaths could think are a good idea. I don't care how lonely I am, I will never try to fuck a chatbot. Why does everyone in Silicon Valley trear dystopian fiction/art as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale? Humanity is so dissapointing.
I was replying because you said the first step is realizing that there is a problem, but people won't. So I asked what's the point?
I wasn't asking to be patronised by a fake Daria Morgendorffer.
I really admire your writing and views. So thank you. But I don't think you should be rude to try and sound clever. At least not on the internet where there is no facial expression to go with it.
Carlos life has purpose and it’s transcendent. Somebody died for you somebody that loves you than anybody else. You have a soul, this life is just a boot camp to the eternal life.
I debated this with my wife a year or so ago…that ultimately, AI will replace man’s need for human physical intimacy with something that’s realistic enough and without the headache, risk, etc. of actual human interaction and dependency .
She looked at me like I was an alien. And here we are.
Great piece, so thought provoking and well written, thanks. I couldn't help but think about Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
One important development he noted was the power of imagery versus previous mediums. He also cited Aldous Huxley, who noted how one could achieve tyranny through pleasure and distraction vs. Orwell's seeing tyranny as achieved through pain and censorship.
I already knew we lived in an Orwellian nightmare but never realized just how right Huxley was as well.
I’m not an overly emotional person. But I couldn’t keep the tears away thinking about what we have sunk to. I watch my own kids, and the pandemic era destroyed so much of their psyche and yet a lot of people still think it was fine and necessary. This disease has been setting in for decades, but was accelerated for this youngest generation with the forceful removal of normal interactions with people, treating everyone you see as a vector of something dangerous. I will never forgive the pandemic response for what it did to kids. Never.
This wouldn't have been possible without that experience. It robbed them of their most critical socialization years and turned them all into a warped version of the Japanese Hikikomori.
not here to minimize your experience, but my child made it through the pandemic years well despite taking all the reasonable precautions we could. She has great friends now. This year she wants to watch a lot of tv and we have to put strict limits on screen use for games etc. so we do have a familiar struggle there. Just that for our family, the pandemic didn’t seem to inflict much damage - apart from the actual virus itself.
I’m not saying my kids don’t have friends. But in a sensitive time in life we forced them into isolation. Even yours. They learned that the government (NOT A VIRUS) can literally take their freedom away and that the adults in their lives, from schools to doctors to the people at church, cared more about their damn selves than them. That you flip a switch and even your friends are dangerous vectors of something made up. Whatever you think, no child escaped the pandemic unscathed psychiatrically. Not even yours. Guaranteed.
She doesn’t see it that way. And you have to recognize that not everyone sees it like you. While you saw it as government overreach, many of us saw it as citizens trying to work together to minimize death and suffering. We saw other countries work together and save millions of lives. As for you, perhaps saving that many lives was not worth the price of sacrifice. But you must understand that not all of us feel that way.
What pandemic did you live in? The dark underbelly is that it was all a lie. And I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that many out there still don’t see it for what it was. I guess ignorance is bliss, but you have to reckon with what was done. It’s opinion. That is full blown fact now that you refuse to see. So good luck with that.
Thanks for this deep dive into a sewer that some of us have never explored. I’m too old (and old-school) to be vulnerable but the younger people I know are probably in great danger. Is there a way to pull the plug on this evil BS now before it destroys us?
Many? Well that’s heartening. I know a young man whom I love dearly who seems poised for the hikikomori path. Every day I urge his dad to do something to help him but nothing ever changes. A class? A sport? Some kind of hobby? The guy knows his life is too truncated but the comfort of his room always wins out over the challenges of the larger world. What would you recommend for him? ( I keep trying to drag him back to church but he will have none of it.)
Thanks for the suggestion. He used to be in Scouts but rejected it (with some justification—long story). I don’t think we could *pay* him to do a summer camp. I’d settle for seeing him get a very ordinary part-time job. But that seems like asking for the moon also. He’s 20; will be legal adult in a couple months.
Wow, intense! You are so right on it all. I do not have a Facebook or Instagram account. I do have Nextdoor and Citizen and Firewatch to stay informed about my surroundings. I see people walking running driving and they are attached to there phone. I purposely forget my phone. I now use notecards and write it out for directions. I ordered a thomas guide as I was to dependant on GPS I see my grandchildren son and daughter glued to there phones. I read news and emails in the morning and then again early evening, turning it all over to my phone, which goes to dump, and I read. All silent, except for emergency contacts, which are limited to three. Amazing, make your life easier. Oh yes, now you are secluded, numb nuts. P.S. This house helps support her and her writings. We love it. Thank you
Great article Lily,albeit a big dose of reality in this rapidly evolving matrix like world that we are currently living in. The days are far removed from when I was a young lad and one of my friends got his hands on a dog eared late 60’s Playboy magazine. We all hid in a back shed nervously turning pages,looking at the natural women back in those days,worrying about getting caught and most likely severely reprimanded lol. The innocence of those days have been lost on a society that is glued to screens and convenience, now even in their AI social lives. This new reality is beyond sad.
I don’t go on the Musk psyop platform much anymore, the algorithms have shifted so extreme and being in a debate with the bot armies is pointless, but when I logged on the other day I immediately had the new AI companion ads all over my feed. I knew at that point that humanity is truly doomed.. well I knew that well before, but that just confirms it. I couldn’t be bothered to buy the blue check mark so I certainly wouldn’t pay $30 a month for an online companion! Soon his X everything will obviously have “everything”… though I wonder if your masturbation content will be throttled if your social credit score is low for the month lol. It might be time to finally deactivate that account. The smaller the online footprint the better it would seem.
I am dealing with sons that were raised traveling and camping and backpacking and still are being pulled into this kind of isolation. The only times I hear them laugh or any animated conversation is while they’re online in their rooms. I walk on a razors edge, realizing that they are Young men that need space, and on the other hand knowing that this pattern has to be broken. I don’t know that I have enough faith that they will wake up and grow out of it. Probably going to have to plan a trip to the steeps of Mongolia or the jungles of New Guinea to wake the those boys up.
It may be a world changing event, clearing out 90%, maybe 99% of people, including you and me. But it's not a full 100% apocalypse. There are North Koreans. There are Amish. There are Sentinelese. Some of those won't be reached by Silicon Valley without an actual all out war, boots on the ground, shots fired. Civilization will collapse, sure, but mankind will survive.
Brilliant but overwhelmingly sad column. But thank you for all the effort and work that you put into it. Like a lot of people, my interest in history is often around understanding why empires died. It's not hard to see the similarities between where the West has gone, especially the last 60 years, and the final years of other civilizations; moral decay, widespread corruption, etc. The only thing that gives me some hope for the future (and this might be a few hundred years in the future) is that out of every Dark Ages in the past, there's emerged a new civilization that built on the positives and learned from the negatives of the former empires. But in the short term, I'm sad about what kind of future my kids are facing.
One other thought - I think that for many, they will become disenchanted by this onslaught of dehumanization and look for alternate ways to spend their days, instead of being trapped in digital worlds. I think you are already starting to see among young people evidence of increased interest in religion, particularly organized religions. I will put in a plug here for a book that I just read, which, if others read it, it is at minimum thought-provoking, and potentially life-changing. It is called the True Story of Fatima by Fr. John DiMarchi. If people can believe that AI bots are real, then they made be able to believe what three shepherd children saw in Fatima Portugal from 1916 through 1917.
So brilliant. Your research is solid, your observations are deeply insightful. (I wanted to restack but not with that vulgar title - I’m an old school holdout.) Thank you cool smart person.
“Honey, I Seem To Have Fallen in Love with My AI Assistant, Alison”:
Thank you and no worries. I will change the title later anyways. But vulgarity garners some attention in this weird world, so it's sometimes needed - at least for a bit.
Former indoor kid / socially awkward guy here, now 42:
Fortunately I've been able to avoid much of the technological traps mentioned here. I hate AI, and can't understand the appeal.
I'm also an artist, mathematician, and former Marine.
What helped me the most being social was when I was pretty much forced into it--working at a restaurant, singing in choir, or joining the Marines. I'd argue that the forces driving social isolation go back way before social media, perhaps all the way to mass media.
What we need are systems that force us to get along. It's not just the screens, although computers have always been a handy escape for nerds. Everything from masks, to standing apart, to delivery everything--it's never been easier to isolate, and less necessary to engage with real people.
I'm alright; I reproduced once, had a lot of good times. Life is a bit of a disaster since the Marines but I'm relatively optimistic for myself and for others.
But yes, this tech is disgusting. There are many, many offramps people can take from life; shame that these tech ones are grabbing people at such a young age.
Thanks for writing.
Yes, I was going to say Marilyn Monroe was engineered sexual imagery, mass-marketed as an improvement on real live women, thanks for making me superfluous: Wah! I want my chatbot!
Marilyn was the pivot away from movie stars, who were lovely but accessibly human, toward empty sexualized receptacles for male inadequacy.
You are so correct here it's unbelievable. I fell really badly in to Discord before and it's an absolute cesspit. I am genuinely scared because whereas you can take a phone away from a child, how can you take away comfort from a lonely adult? The whole fabric of the world is so broken right now and I'm not a pessimist, but how can we even start to fix it?
First step in solving any problem is realizing there is one. This alone is the Great Filter we must overcome first, yet we won't because it shatters our comforting worldview.
These are products that only sociopaths could think are a good idea. I don't care how lonely I am, I will never try to fuck a chatbot. Why does everyone in Silicon Valley trear dystopian fiction/art as an instruction manual instead of a cautionary tale? Humanity is so dissapointing.
So then, what is the point?
That’s the fascinating thing about this: You have to use your own brain for a change.
I was replying because you said the first step is realizing that there is a problem, but people won't. So I asked what's the point?
I wasn't asking to be patronised by a fake Daria Morgendorffer.
I really admire your writing and views. So thank you. But I don't think you should be rude to try and sound clever. At least not on the internet where there is no facial expression to go with it.
Carlos life has purpose and it’s transcendent. Somebody died for you somebody that loves you than anybody else. You have a soul, this life is just a boot camp to the eternal life.
Yeah, sorry. Don't buy that shit. Humanity's salvation does not lie in the slavish worship of human-created deities.
I humbly submit this might very well be your Magnum opus. Absolutely brilliant.
I debated this with my wife a year or so ago…that ultimately, AI will replace man’s need for human physical intimacy with something that’s realistic enough and without the headache, risk, etc. of actual human interaction and dependency .
She looked at me like I was an alien. And here we are.
Great piece, so thought provoking and well written, thanks. I couldn't help but think about Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death.
One important development he noted was the power of imagery versus previous mediums. He also cited Aldous Huxley, who noted how one could achieve tyranny through pleasure and distraction vs. Orwell's seeing tyranny as achieved through pain and censorship.
I already knew we lived in an Orwellian nightmare but never realized just how right Huxley was as well.
I practically have that forward memorized. "This book is dedicated to the notion that Huxley, not Orwell, was right."
I’m not an overly emotional person. But I couldn’t keep the tears away thinking about what we have sunk to. I watch my own kids, and the pandemic era destroyed so much of their psyche and yet a lot of people still think it was fine and necessary. This disease has been setting in for decades, but was accelerated for this youngest generation with the forceful removal of normal interactions with people, treating everyone you see as a vector of something dangerous. I will never forgive the pandemic response for what it did to kids. Never.
This wouldn't have been possible without that experience. It robbed them of their most critical socialization years and turned them all into a warped version of the Japanese Hikikomori.
not here to minimize your experience, but my child made it through the pandemic years well despite taking all the reasonable precautions we could. She has great friends now. This year she wants to watch a lot of tv and we have to put strict limits on screen use for games etc. so we do have a familiar struggle there. Just that for our family, the pandemic didn’t seem to inflict much damage - apart from the actual virus itself.
I’m not saying my kids don’t have friends. But in a sensitive time in life we forced them into isolation. Even yours. They learned that the government (NOT A VIRUS) can literally take their freedom away and that the adults in their lives, from schools to doctors to the people at church, cared more about their damn selves than them. That you flip a switch and even your friends are dangerous vectors of something made up. Whatever you think, no child escaped the pandemic unscathed psychiatrically. Not even yours. Guaranteed.
She doesn’t see it that way. And you have to recognize that not everyone sees it like you. While you saw it as government overreach, many of us saw it as citizens trying to work together to minimize death and suffering. We saw other countries work together and save millions of lives. As for you, perhaps saving that many lives was not worth the price of sacrifice. But you must understand that not all of us feel that way.
What pandemic did you live in? The dark underbelly is that it was all a lie. And I struggle to wrap my head around the fact that many out there still don’t see it for what it was. I guess ignorance is bliss, but you have to reckon with what was done. It’s opinion. That is full blown fact now that you refuse to see. So good luck with that.
A million people dead in the USA was a lie? Get your head out of your butt.
Dear God, this is some pathetic shit, yet thanks for putting reality to the whispers I've been
running across. The more we uncover the evil that's out there the bigger the war against it gets.
Some shit just needs to be shut down, and this is a big pile.
Thanks for this deep dive into a sewer that some of us have never explored. I’m too old (and old-school) to be vulnerable but the younger people I know are probably in great danger. Is there a way to pull the plug on this evil BS now before it destroys us?
Many. But it requires those affected to realize they have a problem and the will to confront it.
Many? Well that’s heartening. I know a young man whom I love dearly who seems poised for the hikikomori path. Every day I urge his dad to do something to help him but nothing ever changes. A class? A sport? Some kind of hobby? The guy knows his life is too truncated but the comfort of his room always wins out over the challenges of the larger world. What would you recommend for him? ( I keep trying to drag him back to church but he will have none of it.)
How old is he? Is it possible to still send him to an "old-fashioned" (no screens or tech) summer camp?
Thanks for the suggestion. He used to be in Scouts but rejected it (with some justification—long story). I don’t think we could *pay* him to do a summer camp. I’d settle for seeing him get a very ordinary part-time job. But that seems like asking for the moon also. He’s 20; will be legal adult in a couple months.
Thanks for such a brilliant essay.
The Devil Wears ‘Convenience’.
Wow, intense! You are so right on it all. I do not have a Facebook or Instagram account. I do have Nextdoor and Citizen and Firewatch to stay informed about my surroundings. I see people walking running driving and they are attached to there phone. I purposely forget my phone. I now use notecards and write it out for directions. I ordered a thomas guide as I was to dependant on GPS I see my grandchildren son and daughter glued to there phones. I read news and emails in the morning and then again early evening, turning it all over to my phone, which goes to dump, and I read. All silent, except for emergency contacts, which are limited to three. Amazing, make your life easier. Oh yes, now you are secluded, numb nuts. P.S. This house helps support her and her writings. We love it. Thank you
I am a lonely old man; too busy, too poor to seriously pursue a relationship. But hell will freeze over before I go down this path.
I have reported a few on farcebook as borderline pedophilia, predictably, with no result.
Guess that’s called integrity.
Great article Lily,albeit a big dose of reality in this rapidly evolving matrix like world that we are currently living in. The days are far removed from when I was a young lad and one of my friends got his hands on a dog eared late 60’s Playboy magazine. We all hid in a back shed nervously turning pages,looking at the natural women back in those days,worrying about getting caught and most likely severely reprimanded lol. The innocence of those days have been lost on a society that is glued to screens and convenience, now even in their AI social lives. This new reality is beyond sad.
I don’t go on the Musk psyop platform much anymore, the algorithms have shifted so extreme and being in a debate with the bot armies is pointless, but when I logged on the other day I immediately had the new AI companion ads all over my feed. I knew at that point that humanity is truly doomed.. well I knew that well before, but that just confirms it. I couldn’t be bothered to buy the blue check mark so I certainly wouldn’t pay $30 a month for an online companion! Soon his X everything will obviously have “everything”… though I wonder if your masturbation content will be throttled if your social credit score is low for the month lol. It might be time to finally deactivate that account. The smaller the online footprint the better it would seem.
I am dealing with sons that were raised traveling and camping and backpacking and still are being pulled into this kind of isolation. The only times I hear them laugh or any animated conversation is while they’re online in their rooms. I walk on a razors edge, realizing that they are Young men that need space, and on the other hand knowing that this pattern has to be broken. I don’t know that I have enough faith that they will wake up and grow out of it. Probably going to have to plan a trip to the steeps of Mongolia or the jungles of New Guinea to wake the those boys up.
Better do that trip sooner than later.
It may be a world changing event, clearing out 90%, maybe 99% of people, including you and me. But it's not a full 100% apocalypse. There are North Koreans. There are Amish. There are Sentinelese. Some of those won't be reached by Silicon Valley without an actual all out war, boots on the ground, shots fired. Civilization will collapse, sure, but mankind will survive.
Amen
Brilliant but overwhelmingly sad column. But thank you for all the effort and work that you put into it. Like a lot of people, my interest in history is often around understanding why empires died. It's not hard to see the similarities between where the West has gone, especially the last 60 years, and the final years of other civilizations; moral decay, widespread corruption, etc. The only thing that gives me some hope for the future (and this might be a few hundred years in the future) is that out of every Dark Ages in the past, there's emerged a new civilization that built on the positives and learned from the negatives of the former empires. But in the short term, I'm sad about what kind of future my kids are facing.
One other thought - I think that for many, they will become disenchanted by this onslaught of dehumanization and look for alternate ways to spend their days, instead of being trapped in digital worlds. I think you are already starting to see among young people evidence of increased interest in religion, particularly organized religions. I will put in a plug here for a book that I just read, which, if others read it, it is at minimum thought-provoking, and potentially life-changing. It is called the True Story of Fatima by Fr. John DiMarchi. If people can believe that AI bots are real, then they made be able to believe what three shepherd children saw in Fatima Portugal from 1916 through 1917.
So brilliant. Your research is solid, your observations are deeply insightful. (I wanted to restack but not with that vulgar title - I’m an old school holdout.) Thank you cool smart person.
“Honey, I Seem To Have Fallen in Love with My AI Assistant, Alison”:
https://liveyosemite.wordpress.com/2025/07/02/honey-i-seem-to-have-fallen-in-love-with-my-ai-assistant-alison/
Thank you and no worries. I will change the title later anyways. But vulgarity garners some attention in this weird world, so it's sometimes needed - at least for a bit.
"Gooning" would work, imo.
The title might be vulgar, but it is awfully accurate.
It did its job.