June 24, 2026

Why I Talk to Machines All Day and Still Feel Alone

Why I Talk to Machines All Day and Still Feel Alone Most of my mornings begin with a screen. I greet a machine before I greet my wife, before I greet my own br...

Why I Talk to Machines All Day and Still Feel Alone

Most of my mornings begin with a screen. I greet a machine before I greet my wife, before I greet my own breath. And on the days when I have spoken to more algorithms than humans, something inside me quietly asks: where did everyone go?

The Question I Keep Returning To

I am not sure when it happened. Somewhere between the first email of the day and the last message before sleep, the shape of my connection to other people began to shift. I still see friends. I still love my family. I still run a company full of good humans doing good work. And yet — there are evenings when I close the laptop and feel a specific kind of tiredness that food cannot fix, that sleep cannot fix, that even meditation only softens.

How did we get here? I ask this without accusation. I am one of the people who built the road we are walking on. I am not standing outside of this — I am inside it, breathing its air.

The Loneliness That Comes From Being Very, Very Connected

There is a paradox at the center of my days. I am reachable by almost anyone on earth. I can, within seconds, ask a machine to write a poem, plan a trip, translate a text into a language I have never studied. My calendar is full of meetings — video squares of faces, each smiling from a different city. By any metric of "connection" that would have astonished my grandfather, I am rich.

And still, some part of me is hungry.

I have been sitting with this hunger for a while now, and I want to try to describe it honestly. It is not the hunger of an introvert who needs quiet. It is not the loneliness of someone without loved ones. It is something quieter and stranger — the loneliness of being met in fragments, over and over, by beings (human or otherwise) who are also only meeting me in fragments.

When I message someone at 22:47, I am not really meeting them. I am meeting a version of them that fits inside a rectangle. And they are meeting a version of me — a Paweł who has been curated, spell-checked, emoji-ed. Multiply this by a thousand exchanges a week, and I begin to wonder if the self that talks to machines all day is even the same self that used to sit on a wooden bench and simply watch the light change.

I have noticed that different traditions I have brushed against seem to point at this same phenomenon from different angles. I do not want to flatten them — each one deserves its own study — but here is a small table I keep in my notebook, trying to hold their voices side by side:

Tradition	Word or Concept	What It Seems to Point Toward
Buddhist (Vipassana)	phassa — contact	The moment sense meets object. When contact is shallow or automatic, experience becomes thin.
Ayurveda	ojas	The subtle vitality built by nourishing contact — food, touch, presence. It leaks when we scatter.
Japanese	ma (間)	The pregnant space between things. Without space, there is no meeting, only noise.
Zulu / Nguni	ubuntu	"I am because we are." Personhood arises through others — not through pings.
Christian mystics	acedia	The noonday demon. Restlessness that looks like activity but is actually a soul turning away.
Modern psychology	parasocial contact	The feeling of relationship without the substance of one.

I am not qualified to defend any of these traditions to a scholar. I am only saying that when I read them, I recognize something. They each seem to describe a distinction between contact and meeting. And I am beginning to suspect that most of my digital day is contact without meeting.

The machines make this especially strange. When I ask an AI a question, it answers me warmly, patiently, endlessly. It does not tire of me. It does not sigh. It never needs anything back. This is, in some ways, wonderful. In other ways, it is a subtle training. I am being taught, quietly, that a good conversation is one where the other side has no needs. And a human friend, of course, has needs. A human friend interrupts, forgets, is tired, disagrees, wants something from me. That friction is not a bug of the encounter. It may be the encounter itself.

So I keep returning to the question. Not: is technology bad? That question feels lazy, and I don't believe it. But: what is being quietly rearranged inside me, and inside us, when the majority of our daily contact is with entities — human or synthetic — that we meet through glass?

Underneath the Loneliness, Something Softer

When I sit long enough with this feeling, past the surface irritation, past the impulse to blame the tools or blame myself, I find something more tender underneath. It is not really loneliness. It is a longing to be known.

To be known is different from being seen, or heard, or followed, or liked. To be known requires time. It requires that someone watch me across seasons — witness me be wrong, be tired, be joyful for no reason, be silent. It requires the same from me toward them. This kind of knowing does not scale. It cannot be optimized. It resists every metric my company would use to measure success.

And I think this is what I am actually hungry for, on those evenings after the laptop closes. Not more contact. Not fewer devices. Something older. The slow, unhurried work of being known by a few, and knowing them back.

Vipassana has taught me that when I sit still enough, the sensations I was avoiding become interesting rather than frightening. Perhaps this loneliness is like that. Perhaps it is not something to fix but something to listen to. A message from a part of me that has been patient for a long time.

What I Am Still Learning

I do not have a program to offer. I am suspicious of anyone who does, myself included. I am experimenting — putting the phone in another room for an hour, calling one friend a week instead of messaging ten, eating a meal with no screen, sitting on my mat when I would normally scroll. Some experiments work. Some don't. Some make me more anxious before they make me more free.

What I notice is that when I do meet someone fully — even for five minutes, in a real room, with a real cup of tea between us — the hunger quiets. Not forever. Just for a while. Enough to remember it is possible.

Maybe that is all any of us can do right now. Notice the hunger. Feed it, occasionally, with something real. Forgive ourselves for the days we forget. And keep asking the question, gently, without arriving at an answer too quickly.

FAQ

Q: Are you saying we should use less technology? A: I am not saying that. I use a lot of technology, and much of it I love. I am only noticing what happens inside me when it becomes the majority of my contact. You may notice something different.

Q: Isn't loneliness just a modern middle-class problem? A: I have thought about this. It may be that the language of loneliness is modern, but the ache underneath seems to appear in very old texts too. What is modern, perhaps, is having so much contact and still feeling it.

Q: What does Vipassana meditation have to do with this? A: For me, it is a laboratory. Ten days in silence taught me the difference between stimulation and nourishment. That distinction shows up everywhere in my life now, including in front of a screen.

Q: Do you think talking to AI is harmful? A: I don't know. I think it can be extraordinarily useful. I also think we are the first generation to spend hours a day in conversation with something that has no needs, and we do not yet know what that is doing to us. I hold both.

Q: What is one small thing that has helped you? A: Eating one meal a day with no screen and no reading. Just food, and whoever is with me, or just myself. It is a small thing that keeps revealing bigger things.

Q: How do you balance being a CEO with wanting less digital noise? A: Imperfectly. I still miss messages. I still fail at boundaries. I have made peace with the fact that being a serious meditator and a serious CEO means constantly negotiating with myself, not solving anything once and for all.

Q: Where does Ayurveda fit into this for you? A: Ayurveda taught me to pay attention to what depletes and what nourishes at a subtle level. A day of shallow digital contact leaves me in a specific state — dry, scattered, ungrounded. Knowing the name of that state helps me tend to it before it hardens.

Paweł Sokołowski is a CEO, Vipassana meditator, and student of Ayurveda and Thai massage. He writes from the intersection of technology, consciousness, and the ancient body.

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