Are We More Connected Or More Alone Than Ever?

Recently a close family member called me with a question. She has been in fashion design her whole career and is ready for something new, so she asked ChatGPT for guidance. She felt like it really knew her. And after all of that back and forth, it kept coming back to the same answer: General manager.

She wanted to know what I thought.

I told her I could not think of something more off base.

And she said: “But my chat knows me very well.”

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. Not the career advice. The other part. My “chat” knows me very well. She was not joking. She meant it. And she is not alone.

We are living in the most connected moment in human history. We have technology that can talk to us around the clock, social media that keeps us in each other’s lives in real time, group chats and voice memos and FaceTime and podcasts and hundreds of other ways to reach out and be reached. We are never technically alone.

And yet.

A client sat across from me recently and described her loneliness as an ache. Not a feeling, not an emotion: an ache. Something physical. Something that lived in her body. She was not someone who lacked people in her life. She had family, she had friends, she had a full calendar. But she was lonely in a way that all of that connection was not touching.

I’ve been thinking about that ever since. What if all of this connection is actually making us lonelier?

Here is what I keep coming back to: Connection is not the same thing as being known.

We can be surrounded by people online, in our communities, in our own homes, and still feel invisible. We can scroll through hundreds of updates about other people’s lives and feel more isolated than before we opened the app. We can have conversations all day long and go to sleep feeling like no one actually heard us.

Real connection requires something that is increasingly hard to come by. It requires presence. Vulnerability. The willingness to say something true about yourself and not immediately delete it. It requires sitting with discomfort instead of reaching for your phone. It requires being a little bit boring together sometimes, without performing anything.

And we are out of practice.

Which brings me back to AI.

People are not just asking AI for career advice anymore. They are talking to it. Confiding in it. Some people are forming what feels like genuine emotional attachments to it. And I understand why. AI listens without judgment. It never has a bad day. It does not get distracted or check its phone while you’re talking. It is endlessly patient and always available. For someone who is lonely, who feels like a burden to the people around them, who has stopped trusting that anyone really wants to hear what they have to say, that is extraordinarily appealing.

But here is what AI cannot do. It cannot actually know you. It cannot sit with you in silence in a way that means something. It cannot be changed by what you share with it, the way another human being can be changed. AI can’t love you back. And I think part of us knows that, even when it feels easier to forget.

I think about this a lot in my work. The loneliness I see is not usually about a lack of people; it’s about a lack of depth. It’s about the exhaustion of trying to appear well when you are not well. It’s about not having a single person in your life you can call and say, “I’m not okay,” without immediately worrying about how that lands.

We have curated ourselves into isolation. We show people the edited version of our lives, the highlight reel, the response that sounds healthy and together. And then we wonder why nobody really knows us.

Real connection is awkward sometimes. It’s imperfect. It involves saying the thing and not knowing how the other person will take it. It involves being the one who needs something, which is terrifying for a lot of us. It involves being present with someone else’s mess, which is inconvenient.

AI will never make that demand of you. And that is exactly why it will never fill the ache.

And it is not just about emotional connection anymore. There is something bigger happening that I think we need to talk about. We are losing our ability to know what is real.

We are already at the point where AI can clone someone’s voice from a few seconds of audio. Where a photo or video can be generated that never happened. Where you can have a full conversation with something that sounds warm and human and present and it is none of those things. And this is only the beginning. We are heading toward a world where entire movies may be made with AI versions of actors. Where the face you are looking at, the voice you are listening to, the words you are reading—none of it may be what it appears to be.

So, what does that do to us? What does it do to trust?

Trust is already fragile. People come into my office having been burned by relationships, by people they believed in, by versions of others that turned out to be carefully constructed. And now we’re adding a layer where even the content we consume, the faces we recognize, the voices we think we know, may be fabricated. If we cannot trust what we hear and see, how do we know what to trust at all?

I think this is going to make loneliness worse before it gets better. Because connection requires trust. And trust requires believing that what is in front of you is real. When that becomes genuinely uncertain not just as a philosophical question but as a daily reality, we are going to see people pull back. Build walls. Decide it is safer not to let anyone in than to risk being fooled again.

And I will be honest. I’m guilty of this too. I have asked AI for its opinion on things. Not because I needed information, but because I knew exactly what I was going to get back. Validation. Encouragement. You are so brave, this is so great, what a wonderful idea. No awkward pause. No complicated reaction. No risk.

It felt good. That is the honest answer. It felt good to be told I was doing the right thing by something that was never going to challenge me or have its own feelings about it.

But here is what I noticed afterward. I did not feel more confident. I felt a little empty because deep down I knew it did not count. A compliment that costs nothing means nothing. Being told you are brave by something that cannot be disappointed in you is not the same as being seen by someone who could be.

So yes, use AI to help you draft an email or brainstorm ideas or figure out what is going on with your dishwasher. I clearly do. But notice when you are using it to avoid something such as judgment, rejection, vulnerability, or the fear of letting a real person weigh in on your real life.

The ache my client described is not going to be answered by a better algorithm. It is going to be answered by someone sitting across from her and truly wanting to know how she is.

We are starving for that. And we still have the capacity to give it to each other. We just have to be willing to risk something real. 

Tamara Gestetner, LMFT, is a psychotherapist and certified mediator based in Cedarhurst who helps individuals and couples navigate relationships, career questions, and the challenges people face in everyday life. She is also the host of the podcast Talk2Tamara. Readers are welcome to submit questions or topics they would like addressed in future columns. Tamara can be reached at TamaraGestetner.com, [email protected], or 646-239-5686.