Ideas that challenge / comfort / inspire
Stephen Goforth
When someone keeps repeating inappropriate behavior, try the DESC approach. The four steps are describe, express, specify, and consequences.
1. Describe the objectionable behavior.
2. Express your feelings.
3. Specify what action you want to see.
4. Tell the person the consequences if there is no change in behavior.
She built an AI bot of her mother to help her grieve – Rest of World
AI romance is not a bug It’s Big Tech’s most dangerous feature. – Fast Company
Could AI relationships actually be good for us? - The Guardian
A religious fervor surrounds our relationship with technology. – New York Times
Inside Google's vision to make Gmail your personal AI agent command center - ZDnet
AI Romance is Perverse – Christianity Today
They hear, but do they care? What AI can teach us about listening better – BBC
People Are Paying $99 a Month to Talk to a Tony Robbins Chatbot – Wall Street Journal
Recovering from AI delusions means learning to chat to humans again – Washington Post
AI companions: "The new imaginary friend" redefining children's friendships – Axios
A mom thought her daughter was texting friends before her suicide. It was an AI chatbot. – CBS News
A teen’s final weeks with ChatGPT illustrate the AI suicide crisis - The Washington Post
A Prompt Engineering Framework for Large Language Model-Based Mental Health Chatbots - PubMed
Empathetic, Available, Cheap: When A.I. Offers What Doctors Don’t – New York Times
Teens Are Saying Tearful Goodbyes to Their AI Companions - Wall Street Journal
The Biggest AI Companies Met to Find a Better Path for Chatbot Companions – Wired
Is AI making some people delusional? Families and experts are worried – LA Times
Instead of an AI Health Coach, You Could Just Have Friends – Wired
Admit it, You're in a Relationship with AI – Bloomberg
The People who Marry Chatbots – The Atlantic
Google and Character.AI to Settle Lawsuit Over Teenager’s Death - New York Times
AI companions: "The new imaginary friend" redefining children's friendships - Axios
Listening is not thinking about what you are going to say when the other person has stopped talking. – H Norman Wright
All of us are crazy in very particular ways. We’re distinctively neurotic, unbalanced and immature, but don’t know quite the details because no one ever encourages us too hard to find them out. An urgent, primary task of any lover is therefore to get a handle on the specific ways in which they are mad. They have to get up to speed on their individual neuroses. They have to grasp where these have come from, what they make them do – and most importantly, what sort of people either provoke or assuage them. A good partnership is not so much one between two healthy people (there aren’t many of these on the planet), it’s one between two demented people who have had the skill or luck to find a non-threatening conscious accommodation between their relative insanities.
The very idea that we might not be too difficult as people should set off alarm bells in any prospective partner. The question is just where the problems will lie: perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us, or we can only relax when we are working, or we’re a bit tricky around intimacy after sex, or we’ve never been so good at explaining what’s going on when we’re worried. It’s these sort of issues that – over decades – create catastrophes and that we therefore need to know about way ahead of time, in order to look out for people who are optimally designed to withstand them. A standard question on any early dinner date should be quite simply: ‘And how are you mad?’
How AI is Powering Modern Love – Axios
AI Relationships Are on the Rise. A Divorce Boom Could Be Next – Wired
Are A.I. Therapy Chatbots Safe to Use? – New York Times
How people really use ChatGPT, according to 47,000 conversations shared online – Washington Post
What if you're being manipulated? – Understandably
The right place for AI companions in mental health care – Stat News
They Fell in Love With A.I. Chatbots — and Found Something Real – New York Times
Character.AI to ban kids from talking to its chatbots – USA Today
AI for therapy? Some therapists are fine with it — and use it themselves. – Washington Post
‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder- The Guardian
With therapy hard to get, people lean on AI for mental health. What are the risks? – NPR
Many teens are turning to AI chatbots for friendship and emotional support – American Psychological Association
Somebody to love: should AI relationships stay taboo or will they become the intelligent choice? - The Guardian
ChatGPT Is Blowing Up Marriages as It Goads Spouses Into Divorce – Futurism
Next Time You Consult an A.I. Chatbot, Remember One Thing – New York Times
How chatbots will likely develop as general life advisers. – Osmarks
‘I love you too!’ My family’s creepy, unsettling week with an AI toy - The Guardian
AI Is Making Online Dating Even Worse – The Cut
People are starting to talk like ChatGPT - The Washington Post
The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI's ChatGPT is to blame – NBC News
People Are Having AI “Children” With Their AI Partners – Futurism
Teenage boys using ‘personalised’ AI for therapy and romance, survey finds – The Guardian
Managing negative emotions is a fundamental function of the brain, enabling you to build resilience and learn. But experts say that A.I. chatbots allow you to bypass that emotional work, instead lighting up your brain’s reward system every time they agree with you, much like with social media “likes” and self-affirmations. That means A.I. chatbots can quickly become echo chambers, potentially eroding critical thinking skills and making you less willing to change your mind. -New York Times
“If teens are developing social skills on AI platforms where they are constantly being validated, not being challenged, not learning to read social cues or understand somebody else’s perspective, they are not going to be adequately prepared in the real world.” - Michael Robb of Common Sense Media, quoted in the Associated Press
“In interviews with The Associated Press and a new study, teenagers say they are increasingly interacting with AI as if it were a companion, capable of providing advice and friendship. ‘Everyone uses AI for everything now. It’s really taking over,’ said Kayla Chege, a high school student in Kansas, who wonders how AI tools will affect her generation. ‘I think kids use AI to get out of thinking.’ More than 70% of teens have used AI companions and half use them regularly, according to a new study from Common Sense Media.” -Associated Press
He would lay awake late into the night, talking to the bots and forgetting about their schoolwork. Using Character.AI is constantly on your mind. It's very hard to focus on anything else, and I realized that wasn’t healthy.” This led him to start the “Character AI Recovery” subreddit. Not everyone who reports being addicted to chatbots is young. In fact, OpenAI’s research found that “the older the participant, the more likely they were to be emotionally dependent on AI chatbots at the end of the study.” -404 Media
An OpenAI study found “personal conversations with chatbots actually led to higher loneliness. Despite this, top tech tycoons promote AI companions as the cure to America’s loneliness epidemic. ‘It's like, when early humans discovered fire, right?’ Axel Valle, a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at Stanford University, said, “It's like, okay, this is helpful and amazing. But are we going to burn everything to the ground or not?’”-404Media
No one in a relationship problem is ever totally innocent or totally guilty. With this belief, people can always keep the door open to their own faults without engaging in excessive, guilt-provoking self-incrimination. Holding back anger for even a short time and engaging in self-analysis in private has the effect of tempering the expression of anger. Confession altars our goals from changing others to changing the relationship.
Gary Collins, Counseling and Anger
You have applied for a job and the interviewer asks you a question that lands like a bombshell: do you have a boyfriend? Then another: do people find you desirable? And a third: do you think it is important for women to wear bras to work? If you are a woman you probably know what you would do. Perhaps you would refuse to answer, complain or walk out. You would certainly be furious.
This is how 197 female American undergraduates, asked to imagine such an interview, said they would react. But they—and probably you—were wrong. The psychologists who asked them, Marianne LaFrance and Julie Woodzicka, orchestrated a real-life version of this ordeal, by advertising for a research assistant and arranging for male accomplices to interview the first 50 women who applied.
Half were randomly chosen to be asked those three questions. Not one refused to answer, let alone complained or walked out. When they were asked afterwards (and offered the chance to apply for a real job), they said they had felt not anger, but fear.
Videos of the interviews showed how much this supposedly minor sexual harassment threw the women off their stride. They plastered on fake smiles.
In a final twist, the researchers showed clips of the videos to male MBA students. Fake smiles are fairly easy to tell from real ones: they involve fewer facial muscles and do not crinkle the corners of the eyes. But many of the men saw the women as amused, even flirtatious.
When individual members leave a family, whether through death, marriage, relocation, or a cutoff, the system will generally be quick to replace the person who is lost. Whoever the replacement is, new child or new spouse, new in-law or new boarder, clergyman or clergy woman, in the same generation or the next, he or she will replace in all the family triangles the person who has left. They will have grafted onto them all the expectations associated with the predecessor, and the un-worked-out problems that may have contributed to the predecessor’s leaving (or becoming symptomatic) are likely to resurface in the new relationships. Replacement is a function of grief, and grief is always proportional to the un-worked-out residue of the relationship that was lost.
Edwin Friedman, Generation to Generation
An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.
Austin Kleon, How to Steal Like an Artist
A 2022 study found that the more “relational diversity” a person has in their social repertoire, the higher their well-being. Using the analogy of a “social portfolio,” Harvard Business School doctoral candidate Hanne Collins and her colleagues found when people socialize with a range of conversation partners — family members, coworkers, friends, and strangers — on a given day, they report feeling happier than those who converse with fewer “categories” of people.
Allie Volpe writing in Vox
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy wrote a New York Times opinion piece two weeks ago about loneliness. He called it a “public health” problem and suggested the cause is isolation.
The Washington Post published a follow-up article based on the significant response it got to the advisory, noting:
Some (readers) pushed back on the notion that isolation was bad for them, describing themselves as introverts who prefer solitude or distrust others in their community.
So, on the one hand, you have people being told they are lonely, and they must be fixed, who do not see a problem themselves and aren't asking to be fixed. On the other hand, as noted by a sociologist in a Psychology Today article, the surgeon general's advisory reduces loneliness to "something people often bring on themselves." The fix for this lack of social interaction is, therefore, more social interaction. But there are "many outgoing people with active social lives (who) are lonely."
Symptoms interpreted as caused by a lack of interaction may actually be caused by estrangement. This alienation would not be solved by additional interaction but by more meaningful connections. That is, quality instead of quantity.
Stephen Goforth
If I really cared . . .
I’d look you in the eyes when you talk to me;
I’d think about what you’re saying rather than what I’m going to say next;
I’d hear your feelings as well as your words.
If I really cared . . .
I’d listen without defending;
I’d hear without deciding whether you’re right or wrong;
I’d ask you why, not just how and when and where.
If I really cared . . .
Are your friendships driven by your preferences or more by your social opportunities? It’s the latter, according to a study out of the Netherlands. Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst interviewed more than 1000 people and interviewed them again seven years later. His finding: Our personal networks are not formed solely based on personal choices.
Mollenhorst says you’ll have a turnover of about half of your closest friends at least every seven years. But don’t blame it on fickleness or disloyalty. Circumstances will play a major role in who stays in the inner circle as your favorite discussion partners and practical helpers. When parts of your friendship network move away or change jobs or have babies, you replace them. As you make life-changing decisions about marriage and divorce, your best mates will be determined largely by the happenstance surrounding the decision.
Friends come and go. But you should hold on to some of them. Who makes you a better person just for hanging around with them? Who expands your world and helps you to define yourself better? It takes extra effort but hang on to these friends. They're worth it.
Stephen Goforth
Individuals will walk out of relationships, rather than letting go of the approach to the relationships that made them unsuccessful and unsatisfying in the past. Individuals will look for new jobs rather than face the attitudes and behaviors toward work and toward authority-figures that made them unsuccessful in all of their past jobs. They don’t ask what it is time for them to let go of. Instead they say they need to start over. Individuals will decide to move to a new house or a new town, rather than letting go inwardly of the old way of living that lacked meaning. They make a change rather than making the more profound transition, which would put them on a genuinely new life-path.
William Bridges, The Way of Transition
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