Your friends shouldn’t be chatbots

I stayed up too late one night, and I don’t really regret it. The day had been full of friction and I already had a bad taste in my mouth before bed. Normally that’s when I’d seal myself off and pick things up the next morning. But a few friends I hadn’t really talked to all summer started a conversation in our group chat, and I ended up typing back and forth for hours with people my age I hadn’t spoken to in person in months.

Later I noticed something odd. I felt relief and joy that we were having an actual conversation—and not just someone posting a meme and people saying relevant comments before disappearing. But it wasn’t coming from the chat itself, instead from the knowledge that these were people I’d choose to sit across a table from if the option existed right then. The chat was a proxy for something I actually wanted: physical interaction, with actual faces. The chat scratched the itch enough to keep me up, but it didn’t satisfy it. That gap is probably why I kept typing instead of stopping at a reasonable hour.

Naturally this isn’t a knock on my friends. They showed up in the only form available at 11 PM on a Tuesday in July, and that’s real. The problem isn’t whether they are real, but whether you’re after camaraderie or just something that will respond.

“Phone bad.” No, not ; what’s happening is more subtle. The texting/IM medium starts to train you to relate to real people the way you’d relate to a chatbot: responsive text on demand, low friction, generally always available. The only pain is when no one replies. The conversation can feel alive in the moment while the relationship itself is thin. Essentially you’re interacting with someone’s output, not them.

In contrast, physical communication is different in ways that are easy to miss until you’re deprived of it. Faces, cadence, body language, silence—they all matter. It’s also a commitment of time and energy. You have to be there, paying attention, and you can’t rapidly switch contexts they way you can between The Feed™ and The Chat™. These things don’t only matter in a romantic context. I suspect the substitution is one of the main ways our social lives have gotten thinner.

Group chats are useful. They keep friendships from dying of neglect and occasionally serve as the source of the most delectable memes. The danger is that when they become the main way you know someone, the relationship starts to thin without you noticing. Your benchmark can be simple. If it takes you a second to remember their face, the friendship is coasting on inertia. And the more you meet your social needs through responsive text, the more natural the thinner version begins to feel.