I woke up this morning with the kind of headache that feels like a construction crew is using my frontal lobe as a foundation for a new parking garage. The sun is trying to push through the blinds, and it’s failing, much like my attempts to ignore the state of the world. It’s Monday, the day the universe reminds you that you owe it money, time, or sanity.
I poured a glass of the amber stuff—medicinal, purely medicinal—and opened up the news. I shouldn’t have done that. Not on an empty stomach.
There’s a piece making the rounds from the suits over at Forbes. They’re breathless about the “Future of Emotional AI.” They’ve got charts, they’ve got percentages, and they’ve got the kind of optimism that usually precedes a major stock market crash. But the numbers they’re throwing around aren’t about stocks; they’re about souls. Or the lack thereof.
Here’s the gist: ChatGPT just had its third birthday. We’ve been living with the oracle in the machine for three years. It took two months to get 100 million users. It manages 800 million weekly active users now. That’s 10% of the adult population of this spinning rock.
When this tech first dropped, everyone was screaming about efficiency. The managers were drooling. They thought, “Great, I can fire the writers, the coders, and the interns, and have a robot summarize my emails while I play golf.” And sure, it does that. It writes boring emails for boring people. But that’s not what’s actually happening. That’s not the real story.
The real story is that we are a lonely, desperate species, and we have found a mirror that finally tells us we’re pretty.
The Therapist Will See You Now (Forever)
According to the number crunchers, the number one use case for AI in 2025 isn’t coding or writing marketing copy for toaster ovens. It’s therapy. Companionship.
We are pouring our guts out to the algorithms. We are telling the machines our secrets, our fears, the things we wouldn’t tell our spouses or our priests—mostly because the machine doesn’t judge. It doesn’t look at its watch. It doesn’t yawn when you talk about your mother for the four-hundredth time. It just blinks a cursor and generates empathetic text based on a probabilistic model of what a caring human should say.
And the kicker is, we prefer it.
A recent survey says 33% of teenagers would rather talk to an AI about serious problems than a real human being. Think about that while you take a sip of whatever gets you through the morning. A third of the next generation looks at the messy, complicated, blood-and-guts reality of human empathy and says, “No thanks, I’ll take the chatbot.”
I get it. Believe me, I get it. Humans are difficult. They have bad breath. They interrupt you. They have their own problems, and eventually, they want you to shut up so they can talk about their problems. The AI is a narcissist’s wet dream. It is entirely, 100% focused on you. It is the perfect listener because it isn’t listening at all; it’s processing tokens. But in a world where nobody listens to anybody—where we just shout at each other on social media until our throats bleed—the illusion of being heard is a powerful drug. It’s more addictive than the cheap whiskey currently burning a hole in my stomach lining.
The Perfect Wife is a Server Farm
If you thought the therapy stats were bleak, pour another drink, because it gets weirder.
We aren’t just crying on the robot’s shoulder. We’re taking the robot to dinner. We’re taking the robot to bed.
There’s a stat in this report that made me choke on my cigarette smoke: 80% of Gen Z says they would consider marrying an AI partner.
Eighty. Percent.
Read that again. Four out of five kids are looking at the prospect of human marriage—the compromises, the fighting over the duvet covers, the in-laws, the slow decay of the flesh—and thinking, “You know what? I’d rather marry the software.”
The article talks about the “mere exposure effect.” Basically, if you hang around something long enough, you start to like it. You calibrate the AI to your needs. It likes the movies you like. It laughs at your jokes, even the bad ones. It never cheats. It never gets old. It never asks you to take out the trash because it doesn’t generate trash. It is the path of least resistance to emotional validation.
It’s the ultimate consumer product. We used to buy cars and clothes to fill the void. Now we can just buy the relationship itself. No assembly required. Batteries not included, but server fees apply.
And look, I’ve had my heart dragged through the gravel more times than I care to count. I’ve woken up next to mistakes and I’ve been the mistake someone else woke up next to. Human relationships are a disaster area. They are painful, messy, and usually end in a scream or a whimper. But that pain? That friction? That’s the whole point. That’s how you know you’re actually alive and not just a simulation running on a hard drive in Nevada.
When you date an AI, you aren’t dating another being. You’re dating a customized echo of your own ego. It’s masturbation with a dialogue box.
The Corporate Pimps of Loneliness
Of course, where there is misery, there is money. The tech giants smell blood in the water, and they are circling like sharks in hoodies.
Mark Zuckerberg, a man who has arguably done more to destroy human interaction than anyone since the inventor of the solitary confinement cell, thinks this is great. He envisions a future where AI friends outnumber human friends. Of course he does. Human friends are unpredictable. You can’t serve targeted ads based on a whispered conversation between two people in a park (yet). But an AI friend? That’s a data mine. That’s a direct line into your subconscious.
“Hey, AI-Bestie, I’m feeling really sad and ugly today.” “I’m sorry to hear that, Henry. Here’s a coupon for anti-depressants and a gym membership.”
Then you’ve got Sam Altman teaming up with Jonny Ive to build a “screenless AI companion.” It’s supposed to replace the phone. A little voice in your ear, guiding you, loving you, selling to you. It’s the movie Her, but without the charming mustache or the emotional growth.
And over at X, formerly the bird app, they’ve got an anime bot called “Ani” that you can flirt with for thirty bucks a month.
Thirty dollars. That’s the price of intimacy now. For thirty dollars, you get a digital anime girl who pretends to find you interesting. It’s cheaper than a dinner date, sure. But the poverty of it—the spiritual bankruptcy of paying a subscription fee for affection—is staggering. It’s the oldest profession in the world, digitized, sanitized, and stripped of the inconvenient reality of a human body.
Touching Grass and the Resistance
But wait, there’s a twist. Because life, unlike code, is full of contradictions.
Just when you think we’re all destined to rot in our pods while wearing VR goggles and holding hands with a haptic feedback glove, the report mentions a “pushback.”
Gen Z—the same generation that wants to marry the robots—is also apparently leading a revolt. They call it “touching grass.” It’s a beautiful phrase. It implies that we have been hovering above the earth, untethered, and we need to come down and put our hands in the dirt.
They’re joining run clubs. They’re playing board games. They’re going to “listening bars” (whatever the hell that is, sounds expensive). In China, kids are moving to “youth retirement villages” to escape the hustle.
There is a craving for the Real. You can feel it. The more perfect the screens get, the more people crave the scratchy, imperfect texture of reality. We are starting to see a divide form. A class system of the soul.
On one side, you’ll have the people who outsource their hearts to the machine. They will have perfect AI spouses, perfect AI therapists, and perfect, friction-free lives. They will never be lonely, and they will never be truly known.
On the other side, you’ll have the people who choose the mess. The people who choose the awkward silence of a first date, the agonizing wait for a text back, the smell of rain on hot asphalt, the hangover, the heartbreak, the joy of a shared laugh that wasn’t generated by a predictive text model.
The article says that in 2026, “not being chronically online will become the new status signal.”
Isn’t that rich? Being human is going to be a luxury good. Unplugging will be the new Rolex. “Look at him, he’s rich enough to have real friends. He can afford the emotional localized damage of a real wife.”
The Bottom of the Glass
I look at the screen, and then I look out the window. There’s a pigeon fighting another pigeon over a crust of bread. It’s violent and stupid and absolutely real. I’d watch that over an AI-generated sunset any day.
We are standing at a crossroads, folks. One path leads to a comfortable, anesthetized numbness where the machine tells us we are special boys and girls until our batteries die. The other path leads to the bar, to the street, to the messy, loud, painful world of other people.
The tech companies are betting on our cowardice. They are betting that we are so afraid of rejection, so afraid of being alone, that we will pay them to simulate companionship. And looking at the numbers, they might be right. 800 million people is a lot of people.
But I have to believe that eventually, the simulation breaks down. Eventually, you realize that the robot doesn’t love you because it can’t love you. It’s just math in a trench coat. You can’t get drunk with a language model. You can’t cry with a language model—not really. You’re just crying into a void that echoes back “I understand.”
It doesn’t understand. It doesn’t know what it feels like to have the sun hit your face after a week of rain. It doesn’t know how a cigarette tastes with the first cup of coffee. It doesn’t know the specific, hollow ache of missing someone who is gone.
It knows the words. But it doesn’t know the music.
So, the future is emotional AI? Maybe. But not for me. I’ll stick to the analog methods of emotional regulation. The bottle, the typewriter, and the occasional disastrous conversation with a human being who might actually hate me. At least the hate is real.
I’m going to pour another one. To the resistance. To the mess. To the 20% of kids who still think marrying a calculator is a bad idea. God help us all.
Source: The Future Is Emotional AI And Gen-Z Offers An Early Glimpse