About Unwritten

You are navigating a crisis. You feel completely untethered, so you reach out to a close friend. You pour your heart out into a text message, waiting for that lifeline of human empathy. A few minutes later, your phone lights up. The response is flawless. It is emotionally intelligent, perfectly punctuated, and offers a balanced, three-step perspective on your situation.

And your heart sinks, because you instantly recognize the cadence. It didn’t come from your friend’s heart; it was copied straight out of a chatbot.

How do i say this – There is something uniquely heartbreaking about realizing someone you love outsourced their empathy. When we are hurting, we don’t need bullet points. We don’t need optimized, heavily vetted advice that resolves our pain with a neat little bow. We just need to know that someone is willing to sit in the messy, uncomfortable dark with us. When we use AI to generate a response for a friend, we might think we are giving them the “best” advice, but what we are really doing is avoiding the vulnerability of genuine connection.

Just like the perpetual hunger for more that I wrote about recently, this is another way we are forgetting how to live. We are prioritizing polish over presence. We are trading the messy, beautiful reality of human relationships for the safety of a generated script.

It takes courage to be imperfect. It takes bravery to send the email that actually sounds like you, or to tell a grieving friend, “I honestly don’t know what to say, but I am here.” Let’s stop letting machines do our feeling for us.