Humans are optional and humans are awful

Some thoughts on a strange convergence

Photo by Joël Vogt on Unsplash

In early September, I was drinking wine with a few of mom friends while listening to a table of old men play music on guitars. We hadn’t planned the night to unfold this way. We’d been sitting outside on some picnic tables — surely one of the last nights of the year it’d be warm enough to do so — and decided to move in after the sun went down and we’d finished our fish and chips.

Once we got inside, there was a notable tone shift, as we realized our relentless chit-chat might have to take a backseat to the scene in front of us. Because what was going on in that room was honestly something you couldn’t take your eyes off of: a group of eight or so middle-aged to old guys sitting around a long table, each with guitar, taking turns absolutely belting out songs and sinking pints of Guinness. From Irish sea shanties to Bob Dylan to nineties rock, it was all happening. I would defy anyone to stay in that room and not find themselves singing or tapping along.

If you’re a sensitive person like me, this kind of open-mic night energy can feel really precarious to watch — the vulnerability! the judgement! the second hand embarrassment! But this didn’t feel like that at all. Instead, that room was vibrating with the authenticity, electricity, and delight of a bunch of old guys (English and Northern Irish ones at that!) working through their stuff in song.

The energy was the polar opposite of AI slop and algorithmic churn — it was pure human connection. Sitting there, I was overcome with emotion. I had the sense that this is the kind of stuff humans have been doing since, well, humans have been around.

A strange convergence

It’s a disjointed feeling to be writing a book that won’t come out for a while. It’s like a high-wire act of attention: each day you have to put one foot studiously in front of the other on this incredibly long task that requires deep, committed focus. Simultaneously, you must observe an unrelenting parade of horrifying and collapse-adjacent events unfold at your feet and somehow not lose your nerve. I find the same thought surfacing again and again as I make my pilgrimage to the library: What kind of world will this book even be coming out into?

One of the great tensions of our moment, the thing I see a lot of people grappling with, is how to respond to the idea that large swathes of our fellow citizens are more or less irredeemable, that they hold views that we just cannot tolerate. Political polarization is not new, of course — it’s certainly defined the political climate of my entire adult life — but as the actions of those in power become more brazen and depraved, the idea that you can be living among people who support such things becomes almost too much to bear. It starts to feel like there is no way back.

And yet, there is a strange convergence happening, one that not many pundits acknowledge when they discuss how political actors might best respond to this moment. We’re living right at the precise moment in history when interaction with other humans face-to-face has become, to a large extent, optional. When algorithmic internet defines not only what we see and think about all day, but by extension, how we actually feel in our bodies. When there is a massive ad campaign on the NYC Subway system (reportedly the largest in history) that suggests you can replace the friction and flakiness of real friends with a $129 AI pendant you wear around your neck.

You cannot convince me these two ideas — that humans are optional and humans are awful — are not inextricably linked. Right at the moment where the stakes of our civil discourse seem genuinely existential, where we need to draw upon all of our relational skills to find a way through really complex and fractured realities, those same skills are weak and fading fast. Before we even begin to figure out how we might change other people’s politics, we might try engaging with other people again, full stop.

Proactive human connection

So back to that room with the singing and the pints of beer. The setting where this took place was a sports club that’s a short walk from my house. It’s hard to really explain what this is to Americans, because it’s exquisitely British: A kind of pokey little bar and event room attached to a big, enclosed cricket field. The interior looks exactly like something that would host a middle school dance. (I’m pretty sure it does, actually.) The bar is sticky and the rosé they serve is undrinkable. It costs £30 a year to become a member. The cricket matches on Saturday seem to last all day because they take innumerable breaks for tea and lunch.

Despite these questionable aesthetics, this sports club been the scene of a lot of my social life for the last six months. Anyone who has young kids will relate to the interminable period of time that is the Sunday afternoon stretch before dinner, when three hours can feel like seven. So at the beginning of summer, we started going to the sports club for a pint right as the 4pm hour struck most weekends. Then, we started telling our burgeoning group of toddler parent friends we were going, and it turned into a little routine.

Because as it turns out, everyone else was grasping for a way to get through the hours of 4-7pm, too. The more families that turned up with more snacks and toys, the less hands-on parenting I had to do — funny how that works. It’s fair to say this was easiest and most successfully recurring social plan I’ve been a part of since Covid. Now that winter descends, I’m already missing it. There was very little advanced coordination involved, because it hit every note of the ‘keep coming back’ formula I shared back in February: The setting was low cost; the time horizon predictable; it fulfilled a need (killing Sunday afternoon), and it was easy to get to.

All of this brings me to how this might connect with the broader idea of building a village in the time of collapse: We must replace a lot of the time and headspace we give to these algorithmic platforms with proactive human connection of all kinds.

People have a resistance to this simplicity of this idea, I think, because it sounds like I’m suggesting you burst out your front door and find your friendly neighborhood fascist to sing Kumbaya with. But it can actually be a lot more subtle than that. How many times a day do you feel annoyed by the mere existence of other people? Of the way they cut you off in traffic? Of the aggressive man having an outburst in Pret A Manger for no apparent reason? Of how long it takes to make a plan with others in a group chat? Of the elderly lady who is, not so subtly, judging your parenting?

How many times do you think: I wish everyone would just be a sensible, nice person like I am! Or at least just get out of my way! I have these thoughts all the time. But as I work on the book and think about where we’re headed, I try to stop myself and mentally lean into the friction. To question where I got the idea that life should be seamless and without complication. To think about what a life without the inconvenience of other humans might look like. To find some curiosity, and maybe even some compassion, for the many people I come across who act in ways I find incomprehensible.

I, too, revile the policies of the men who hold power and have a chokehold over our attention spans today. But I simultaneously don’t believe that everyone who supports them is worth casting off — it’s just too simple of a narrative for me to accept. And I can’t help but notice how many spiritually impoverished billionaires profit when roughly half of us assume the other half are irredeemable; that addiction to fear, hatred, rage, and reactivity on both sides translates nicely to increased time spent scrolling. Not to mention how neatly it all dovetails with the lie that the phenomenal AI bubble is relentlessly trying to sell us (with the tech media’s help): You actually don’t need other people at all. Humans are entirely optional. AGI will be here soon to smooth out and replace us.

This is so antithetical to how we are wired to exist on a cellular level, I’m writing a whole goddamn book about it. And as I further research how we got to the horrible place we’re in, I’m realizing that this really is work right now. In our current moment, it takes actual effort to prioritize relationships with other people, even people you like. It’s an instinct that has been eroded, slowly and gradually, and then seemingly all at once. And it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that as social disconnection has increased in the last half century, so too has political polarization.

We need to rebuild and practice these skills, not only because it makes life better, but also so we can use them where it really counts. We’re not going to enjoy every minute of doing this, because unlike sycophantic LLMs, real people are messy, confusing, and challenging a lot of the time. But before we even get to changing people’s politics, I think it’s a worthy place to start. (Here is a small yet mighty example.)

When I ask myself: What kind of world will this book even be coming out into? I have to believe it will be one where it still feels good to sit in a room and watch a bunch of humans, no matter who they are, play music. I’m not letting that one go.

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