Is it Hell of a time to be alive? Just a sounding board? A chatbot relationship?
Posted on: December 14, 2025
By Cathline Johnson
I saw an account I follow on social media talking about their “relationship” with a chatbot the other day. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone doing this.
For some reason, people feel compelled to not only engage in this behavior but also to ask for support and validation about it from their online community, like they’re coming out of the closet about a sexual orientation or something.
It’s weird because obviously I’m not going to go pick on someone who’s plainly suffering from crushing loneliness and probably some mental health struggles, but also it’s so painfully dystopian.
This is a really dark thing that’s happening.
What does it say about people that they can feel like they’re having a loving relationship with something that has no subjective experience?
An essential component of any real loving relationship is an acute curiosity about what your partner’s experience is like, what they’re feeling and thinking and what it’s like to be them from moment to moment.
If you’re not having that, then obviously you can’t really say you care about them.
But some people obviously don’t experience interpersonal relationships with others in this way, because if they did they wouldn’t think that what they were having with these chatbots was a relationship.
But then again I’ve definitely interacted with people who relate to others in that way.
If you’ve ever been trapped in a corner at some social event by someone who monologues at you about their own thoughts and interests without taking any interest in yours, that’s pretty much the vibe you get.
They’re not relating to you as a real person with your own thoughts and interests and subjective experience.
To them you’re just a sounding board for their own thoughts they want to hear themselves saying out loud.
In such situations I’ve literally found myself thinking “I don’t need to be here for this conversation. I could replace myself with a nodding animatronic replica and they’d never know.”
So maybe it’s better that some of these people aren’t in real relationships,.
If you’re emotionally incapable of seeing your partner as a real person like yourself, maybe it is better if you’re not roping a real human being into an emotional relationship with you and just spending your time verbally masturbating into a mechanical ear instead. At least that way you’re not hurting anyone else.
I’m not quite sure how I feel about this just yet. Hell of a time to be alive.
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