Rapid response

The art of responding to your friends before AI does

A few months ago, my crush cut ties. He was right to do it. He’s unavailable, and we were crushing on each other hard. Hard, as in the two times we met in person, he wasn’t wearing his ring. Hard as in whenever we engaged, it felt like there was a fire between us that never quite went out, just waiting for air. Hard as in, I wrote a fantasy stream-of-consciousness piece about him that prompted my friend who read it to say that I should consider writing romance fiction.

https://substack.com/@chandraaa/p-186395930

I miss our friendship a lot. He’s funny and smart and witty and well-trained, as most married men are. We grew up worlds apart, but because he’s black and the diaspora is strong, we have a lot in common. He’s curious and cool and highly visible in this new world I find myself in, and definitely not in a position to have some new American girl set his world ablaze.

Unfortunately, I have a penchant for grey, both the color and the area. Ambiguity? Interpretation? There but not there? Said but unsaid? SIGN ME UP.

Since my crush cut me off, I’ve been trying to make sense of what was or wasn’t. By him cutting me off and pushing me away though, I can’t say I’m in any grey area. I’m solidly in the black now. We are not friends anymore. We are not acquaintances, because what even is that, and what’s the point? We are nothing now, even if we both felt something before.

Most of my friends are married now or in committed relationships. Despite their wilin’ out ways of yesteryear, they are all resolutely team “the marriage is most important,” no matter how you feel. The irony here is that many of these friends also met their current partners when they were in relationships with other people, but we often play by different rules than those we assign to others. In times past, I would’ve texted this small community of friends for their opinions and perspectives. I would’ve spent the next 6-9 months asking variations of similar questions to different friends in hopes of a response that validated my feelings, but also that helped me process and move forward.

But not this time.

This time, when I had a scenario I wanted to over-analyze, or a question about what a turn of phrase from my crush really meant, or why I had a nightmare about my four front teeth falling out and plummeting through dark sky a week after I got his last message shortly after my dad died, I didn’t have to text my busy friends and worry that my bat signal was landing in the middle of their kids’ tantrum or worse, the night, that might wake up a sleep deprived person. I didn’t have to wait four days for a one or two-line reply that may have been a sufficient response, but one that lacked space for further discussion.

No, instead, I opened ChatGPT and fed it my issue and got very sound, meaningful advice, and also suggestions for navigating the black. ChatGPT actually stopped me from sending a desperate, needy, boundary-ignoring text to my crush that would’ve certainly set things ablaze. It (or the OpenAI product managers responsible for the therapy relationship LLMs) was surprisingly thorough in its “analysis” and really wouldn’t give me an inch to engage in any messy human behavior.

Messy human behavior.

I’ve been reprimanded in more ways than I can recount for all of my messy human behavior. Life has not- so-gently given me painful reality checks when I’ve over-indexed on the dark arts of love-seeking. I’ve been abandoned, dropped, ignored, and excluded. And even though it hurt to endure those past experiences, in all of these scenarios involving other humans, I think I’ve learned to be a better one. Something good came from the struggle, and, strife, and mess.

And so I wonder what happens when we stop living as messy, real humans?

I can see all the ways AI is destroying our world. In the same vein, I can also admit to how much it’s helping me every day in mine. In a world that is increasingly too loud, too demanding, too intense, which therein produces people who are too busy, too tired, too stressed, too exhausted to be present (even when they very much want to be), AI seems like a natural response.

For single people or parent-less people or friend-less people (which is a lot of people), for people who have stressful jobs and little time to community-build, for people who have anxiety, I do think it’s becoming a default place to turn for help. And that’s the thing. People, despite our bank accounts, and talents, and abilities, still need help. And AI is filling so many gaps where I would’ve been forced to ask for human help before.

Let me give you a quick list of the ways AI has been helpful to me in the last 3 months:

• Crush therapy -- my married friends don’t often have time to parse through these conversations anymore in meaningful ways or without a child interrupting.

• Translations -- you can move to a place where everyone speaks English and still struggle a lot. No, I didn’t expect labels and things to be in my native language, but I don’t have to ask the cashier which bottle of goop is fabric softener or detergent.

• Comms with landlords and service providers; I’ve written some very eloquent comms to all manner of providers here that have gotten me real-time responses on things I need.

• Event/community planning -- I miss Instagram sometimes and still have a burner, but I don’t have to “follow” anyone to stay up on what’s happening in the city.

• Rules and regulations -- I chose one of the lucky flats in the city where there is a renovation happening next door-- drilling and banging and all the fun things that we love living next to in a city. One Saturday when all I needed was to sleep in, I was awakened to banging around 7:30a. Before complaining, I asked CG if they were legally within their rights to work that early on Saturday. Turns out they are. Womp.

Some people are waving the friction flag now and rightfully underscoring how friction in our day-to-day interactions actually helps us remain human. Yes, having to ask a person for directions, or going into a restaurant to pick up your takeout, or asking a cute stranger if they’ve read a novel you’ve got no interest in because you need a decoy to work up the courage to ask for their number, makes us more human.

I am someone who values efficiency and the work and time that goes into making processes run smoothly. In a world filled with insurmountable buraucracy it can feel like a breath of fresh air to encounter a system that was designed for humans to move successfully through it. BUT, applying the principles and practices of technology is counterintuitive where humans are involved. Unfortunately, we can’t engineer our way out of emotions and the mess of being human. ChatGPT would tell you emotions are temporary. I would tell you to feel them anyway.