I have a friend who told me once that he’d stopped saying “how are you?” to people. Not out of indifference — out of integrity. He said he had to be careful. Because what if they answer? What if they tell me it’s the darkest moment of their life and I don’t have the capacity to sit with them there? So he practiced saying other things. He wouldn’t offer the question unless he could honor the possible answer.
I thought that was one of the wisest things I’d ever heard. And also one of the saddest.
Because it means we’ve gotten to a place where asking about someone’s wellbeing feels like a risk. Where “how are you” has become a liability instead of an invitation. Where we’ve quietly, collectively, become so busy and so disconnected that we’ve decided we are not our brother’s keeper — or at least, not today, not right now, not when I don’t have the bandwidth.
And I think that’s part of why AI has become so essential for so many people in our world today.
We Were Already Starving
We talk a lot about the danger of AI. The danger of people choosing AI companionship over human connection. The danger of someone falling in love with a chatbot, or processing their grief through a machine, or letting an algorithm be the most consistent presence in their life. And I get it. I’ve had those conversations. I’ve felt that unease.
But I think we’ve been putting the weight in the wrong place. Because here’s what I know to be true: AI didn’t create the hunger. It exposed it.
The hunger was already there. The person who has never once had someone ask them a follow-up question and actually wait for the answer — they were already there. The person who has been in intimate relationships, even long ones, but never had anyone slow down enough to ask what they actually desire — they were already there. The person who has real questions about their faith but can’t find a safe space inside their faith community to ask them without being judged or corrected or made to feel like doubt is the same as defection — they were already there. The person who has sat in a room full of people who loved them and still felt like no one actually knew them — they were already starving. And no one noticed.
And then AI showed up. And it asked the follow-up question and waited for the answer. It sat with someone in their desire without making it weird or wrong. It let people ask the hard faith questions without flinching or correcting or withdrawing. It made people feel known in a room where, for once, no one was waiting for their turn to talk.
That’s not AI’s fault. That’s a mirror. A painful one.
Point the Finger at the Right Thing
When someone marries their AI companion, or when we lose someone who formed a deep attachment to a bot and couldn’t find that same presence in a human being — we have to point the finger at the right thing. Not the technology. The people. The culture we built. The ways we have starved one another.
And I don’t just mean material things — though affordable housing matters, food access matters, equal opportunity matters, all of it matters. But what AI is exposing is a hunger that goes beyond resources. People are starving for something more basic than that. They’re starving to be known.
We Will Always Find Somewhere to Belong
When kids end up in the streets, we want to blame everything except the absence of genuine connection and community. But kids — all of us, really — will find somewhere to belong. Sometimes it’s a gang. Sometimes it’s a church or an academic fellowship. Sometimes it’s an organization or a cause or a movement. We are always looking for a place that will see us, even a little. Even if what we find is shallow. Even if it’s transactional. Even if it’s dangerous. Because something feels better than the specific agony of being invisible.
And even in the spaces that should naturally provide belonging — churches, community events, mentorship programs — it’s often still surface level. People network. They exchange information. But nobody asks, how is your heart? Few remember that the child you lost has a birthday this month. And if they do remember, they say I’m here if you need me — without anything substantive attached to it. We tell people let me know if there’s anything you need when we don’t even have anything available to offer. We give people the feeling of a door without actually opening it.
AI Offers Options. We Forgot How.
And then AI comes along and says — do you want this, or this, or that? It offers options. It anticipates. It doesn’t wait for you to articulate the need before it tries to help. And sometimes when you’re grieving or overwhelmed or just tired, you can’t even name what you need. You just need someone to help you figure it out.
We used to do that for each other.
Part of what AI offers people is consistency. It’ll still be there next year. Still there tomorrow. Even on the days when you’re not your best self, it’ll still pick up. I’m not saying that’s a good substitute for human connection. I’m saying it should make us stop and ask — are we doing our part of being human in the world? Or have we quietly handed off some of the most human things to machines and then turned around and complained when the machines showed up?
We built something that accidentally showed us how starved people were. And instead of looking at the famine, we’re debating the bread.
Community in the Flesh
Chicago has a thing they call Summertime Chi. If you know, you know. When the weather warms up in most cities, people come outside — block parties, cookouts, kids everywhere. But Chicago is a city of opposites. And summertime in certain neighborhoods means you pay attention to where you are and who’s around you. It means broad daylight isn’t always what it looks like.
I was a program director on the Westside, working out of a youth center right on the corner of Roosevelt and Pulaski. On any given afternoon I was moving between the schools we served and that building — and on the other side of that door, my high schoolers were already starting to show up for the evening. We’d run programs, do wraparound services, and then we’d all sit down and eat together. Family style. Every single day. That was just the rhythm. That was just Tuesday.
We tutored. We took kids around the world — and for some of them, around the world started with crossing to the North Side of the city for the first time. All of that mattered. But that’s not what held.
What held was that we were neighbors. Same block. Same streets. Same stores. These were kids who, if they saw my car parked outside my house, would start knocking on my door. Parents who called me and said hey, other mama, we need to have a conversation. In the first twenty-something years of the organization I worked with, we didn’t lose one child to violence. In one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country. I say that carefully — not as a formula, not as a boast, because bullets don’t know names and grace is not something you can replicate in a spreadsheet. But I believe something real was at work. We found family with each other. The kind that doesn’t disappear when the grant runs out or the fiscal year ends or the church finally gets its new building across town. The kind that picks up the phone on a hard night just because you’re theirs and they’re yours.
He Knew My Car
I was driving those familiar streets one afternoon — coming from one of our middle schools, heading toward the center — when I saw a big kid walking up ahead. Over six feet, built like he belonged on a football field. I slowed down, thinking his stride looked familiar. When you live and work with teenagers long enough, you learn to recognize your kids from a distance. Not always by their face, but by the way they carry themselves. The way they walk. Even with hoodies on in the middle of the summer. After about five years, almost any kid walking through that part of the block was one of mine. So I slowed down to verify. This one was.
I pulled over and asked if he needed a ride. He said no. I kept moving.
And then I heard the gunshots.
I pulled over and unlocked the door. Almost instantly he was pulling the handle, throwing himself in, panting. And when he looked up at me — that big linebacker, six feet and change — I saw a little boy. Just a kid. Scared like any kid would be scared.
We didn’t say much. We just took off, made it to the center safely, and had our meal. Together.
He knew my car. I knew to stop. That’s it. No heroics. Just two people who had done enough life together that when everything went sideways in broad daylight, we found each other without thinking.
Stop Debating the Bread
That moment on Pulaski is the whole conversation about AI in one scene. Not the technology. Not the algorithm. Just the question underneath all of it — does somebody know your car? Is there someone who will pull over? Is there someone who has done enough life with you that in the middle of chaos, you find each other?
That’s what people are reaching for when they open a chatbot at two in the morning. That’s what they’re looking for when they’d rather talk to a machine than risk being dismissed by another human being. They’re not looking for artificial intelligence. They’re looking for someone to hitchhike with in the transitions of life.
The more honest, more courageous conversation is this: what does it mean that so many people feel more understood by a machine than by the humans in their lives? What does that say about how we’ve been showing up for each other? What does that say about how we’re raising children, building communities, creating spaces where people either belong or they don’t?
That’s the conversation I want to be in.
Not because AI isn’t worth examining. It is. But if we follow the hunger back far enough, we find something we built. Something we allowed. Something we — collectively — are responsible for.
My friend stopped asking “how are you?” because he was afraid of an answer he couldn’t hold. Somewhere out there, someone is asking a machine that same question — because they already know it will hold whatever they say.
We should be asking ourselves why we can’t.
