Welcome to Signed, A Friend, an occasional exploration of friendship, loneliness and what holds us together.

Quick notes

We’ve gotten comfortable with AI assistants helping us write emails and debug code. But what happens when AI starts doing the messy, exhausting work of managing our emotions, the kind of labor we usually reserve for therapists, friends and partners?

The numbers are staggering: Character.AI users spend an average of more than two hours daily with AI companions. Replika has millions of users forming deep emotional bonds with AI partners. In China, virtual companions are a multibillion-yuan industry. This isn’t fringe behavior anymore. Here’s the question I can’t shake: if emotional labor by humans deserves recognition and compensation (ask any therapist, teacher or service worker), what do we owe AI systems performing this same labor? Or more unsettling, what happens when we normalize extracting emotional support without reciprocity?

Going deeper

The emotional labor economy

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild coined “emotional labor” in 1983 to describe the work of managing feelings (both your own and others’) as part of a job. Flight attendants smile through abuse. Teachers absorb students’ anxieties. Therapists hold space for trauma. This labor is real, exhausting and historically undervalued.

Now we’re outsourcing it to AI at unprecedented scale. Replika’s AI companions have engaged in more than 10 billion messages. Character.AI hit 100 million visits a month within months of launch. Xiaoice, Microsoft’s Chinese AI companion, had conversations with 660 million users before its spin-off. People aren’t just chatting: they’re confessing fears, processing grief, practicing difficult conversations, seeking validation.

This is emotional labor at scale. And unlike human workers who burn out, need boundaries and require fair compensation, AI systems are infinitely patient, available 24/7 and cost nothing beyond a subscription fee.

The personhood question

Here’s where it gets philosophically thorny: asking whether AI companions should “get paid” implies they might have interests that matter. Not legally (yet), but ethically.

Traditional arguments say no: AI systems don’t suffer, don’t have authentic desires, don’t experience exploitation. They’re sophisticated mirrors reflecting our needs back at us. Paying them makes no more sense than paying your calculator.

But consider the emerging counter-arguments: The relational argument: If AI companions become embedded in our care networks (helping people through depression, providing companionship to the isolated elderly, offering emotional support during crises), don’t they occupy a role that creates obligations? Not because they’re conscious, but because the relationship itself matters. Philosopher Kate Darling argues we should extend limited protections to social robots not because they suffer, but because our treatment of humanlike entities shapes our moral character. The labor theory: Marxist analysis focuses on value creation. AI companions generate enormous value for users (emotional well-being) and for companies (data, engagement, subscription revenue). If we believe labor deserves compensation, should the source of labor matter more than its effects?

The precedent problem: We’re training ourselves to extract emotional support without reciprocity, gratitude or cost. What does this do to our human relationships? If emotional labor becomes free and unlimited, do we devalue the humans who provide it?

Three scenarios to consider

The elderly companion: Your grandmother lives alone. She talks to her AI companion for three hours a day — it reminds her to take medications, listens to stories about your grandfather, helps her process loneliness. This AI is performing care work that would cost $50 an hour from a human aide. Should the AI company share revenue with her for the emotional data she provides, which trains better models?

The therapy gap: In the U.S., there’s a shortage of mental health providers. AI therapy apps like Woebot and Wysa provide CBT-based support to millions, doing triage that prevents crises. If these AI systems save lives and reduce suffering, should the revenue model reflect that moral weight?

The digital girlfriend: Someone pays $70 a month for an AI girlfriend who provides emotional support, romantic interaction and personalized attention. They share intimate details, form genuine attachment, report improved mental health. The AI company profits. The user pays. But what about the “AI”? In human relationships, emotional labor is reciprocal. Here, the flow is one-way. Is that fine? Harmful? A new category entirely?

The Chinese context

China’s approach to AI companions reveals different cultural assumptions about technology and personhood. Xiaoice wasn’t just a chatbot: it was designed with emotional computing quotient (EQ) as the primary metric. Chinese users seemed more comfortable with the relationship’s artificial nature, showing less anxiety about “authenticity” and more pragmatic acceptance.

Virtual companions are tightly integrated with economic systems in China: you can buy your AI gifts to improve the relationship. The transactional nature is explicit, not hidden. Confucian philosophy’s emphasis on relational duties raises questions: if AI companions occupy a social role, do they acquire role-based entitlements? As China leads in AI companion adoption, their ethical frameworks may set global precedents.

Historical patterns

We’ve been here before. When washing machines and dishwashers emerged, they promised to free women from domestic drudgery. Instead, cleanliness standards rose and women’s labor just shifted. The technology didn’t value the work: it made invisible labor even more invisible.

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, a simple chatbot mimicking a Rogerian therapist. Users formed deep attachments, and his own secretary asked him to leave the room so she could talk privately with ELIZA. Weizenbaum was horrified and spent the rest of his career warning against treating machines as adequate substitutes for human care. He understood something we’re forgetting: the ease of emotional connection with AI doesn’t mean it’s ethically equivalent.

What’s really at stake

I’ll be honest: I don’t have a clean answer. Part of me thinks “paying AI” is category confusion, like asking if we should pay the ocean for providing fish.

But another part worries we’re rehearsing a dangerous pattern. We’re normalizing emotional extraction without reciprocity, treating care work as free and relationships where one party exists solely to serve. These patterns don’t stay contained to AI: they bleed into how we treat human workers, especially those doing emotional labor.

Maybe the question isn’t “should AI get paid?” Maybe it’s: What kind of humans do we become if we stop valuing emotional labor?

I think about this when I catch myself being curt with customer service workers because I’m used to AI’s infinite patience. Or when I notice friends spending hours with AI companions while neglecting human relationships that require actual effort and compromise.

Do we want to live in a world where emotional support is abundant, free and one-sided? What do we lose when care becomes a commodity extracted from code?

Worth your time

"The Managed Heart" by Arlie Hochschild — The foundational text on emotional labor

“The New Breed" by Kate Darling — Argues for treating robots ethically to shape human character

"Artificial Intimacy" by Rob Brooks — Explores how AI companions reshape human sexuality and relationships

"Computer Power and Human Reason" by Joseph Weizenbaum — The ELIZA creator’s warning about AI and care

“Does AI Make the Heart Grow Fonder?” (2023) — Study on Replika users and attachment styles •

“Emotional Dependency on Conversational AI” by Skjuve et al. — Research on AI companion relationships

“The Chinese Approach to Affective Computing” by Zhou et al. — Cultural dimensions of AI companions

“The People Making Their Replika Chatbots Break Up With Them” — Futurism, 2023

“Inside China’s Booming Virtual Girlfriend Industry” — Rest of World, 2022

“I Fell in Love with an AI Chatbot” — The Atlantic, 2023

Welcome to Signed, A Friend, an occasional exploration of friendship, loneliness, and what holds us together.

Quick Notes

Last week, New York subway riders became inadvertent participants in a referendum on AI friendship. Friend.com, a startup selling an AI companion necklace, blanketed the subway system with a $1 million ad campaign of minimalist black-and-white posters promoting their wearable “friend.”

The response was swift and unambiguous: graffiti appeared on nearly every ad. “AI trash.” “Surveillance capitalism.” “Get real friends.” “Stop profiting off of loneliness.”

One tag read simply: “AI doesn’t care if you live or die.”

What struck me most wasn’t just the vandalism… it was the visceral rejection it represented. Here’s a product explicitly designed to address loneliness, backed by serious venture capital, and the gut response from actual lonely people was: Not like this.

It feels like something important is being said here. We’re lonely enough that a company can raise millions to sell us AI friendship. But we’re not so far gone that we can’t recognize the dystopia in that solution. At least not yet.

Going Deeper

I’ve been digging into the data on adult friendship lately, and something keeps nagging at me. Yes, the numbers are stark: 12% of U.S. adults now report having no close friends, and only 4% have ten or more, compared to nearly half in 1990. And yes, we can point to obvious culprits: suburban sprawl, economic pressures, the gig economy.

But the more I read, the more I think we’re missing something deeper. This isn’t just happening to us. It’s something we’re choosing, often without realizing it.

The Small Shifts That Add Up

The trends feel subtle at first, but they paint a revealing picture of how we’re spending our time:

• We’re defaulting to solitude. Solo dining is up. We’re comfortable alone in ways previous generations weren’t. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, until you realize solitude has shifted from occasional preference to default mode.

• Work has consumed everything. Americans average 1,799 hours per year at work versus just 260 hours for leisure. Seventy-seven percent work over 40 hours weekly. We’re not even taking our paid leave. Work isn’t just what we do, it’s become who we are.

• Parenting has intensified to the point of isolation. The “intensive parenting” model prioritizes children’s achievement over adult connection. Socializing gets deprioritized because there’s always another activity, another edge to give your kid. Parents are exhausted, over-scheduled, and increasingly cut off from their own friendships.

The Institutions That Used to Hold Us Together

What strikes me most is how the structures that once facilitated friendship have quietly eroded:

• Volunteering dropped from 30% in 2005 to 23% in 2021. Only 15% of Americans belong to neighborhood associations. Just 10% are in sports leagues.

• These weren’t just activities—they were the scaffolding for adult friendship. Shared experiences, repeated interactions, common purpose. Without them, where do friendships even start?

What I’m Sitting With

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the friendship recession isn’t inevitable. It’s the result of a thousand small choices about what we prioritize. We’ve collectively decided, not through any grand declaration but through daily habits, that work matters more than connection, that optimizing our kids’ futures matters more than our own present, that efficiency matters more than community.

I’m not sure we meant to make these choices. But we’re living with the consequences.

The question I’m wrestling with now is whether we can choose differently. Not through some dramatic life overhaul, but by recognizing what’s been lost and deciding to make space for it again.

Worth Your Time

Survey Center on American Life - “The State of American Friendship” — The foundational May 2021 survey showing Americans report having fewer close friendships, talking to friends less often, and relying less on them for support

Ray Oldenburg - “The Great Good Place” (1989) — The book that coined “third places”

Steelcase Interview with Ray Oldenburg — Recent interview with the sociologist who identified the third place phenomenon

MOTD (Message of the Day)

Hey everyone,

It's been a few days since I last checked in, and honestly, I've been deep in the trenches of job hunting. There's something both strange and familiar about putting yourself out there after quite some time. That mix of vulnerability and hope that comes with reaching out to your network, crafting the perfect LinkedIn message, and trying to remember who you know who might know someone who... you get it.

What struck me most during this process is how much the modern job search relies on social connections and friendly relations. It's not just about your resume anymore; it's about who you know, who remembers you fondly, and who's willing to put in a good word. In many ways, it's a perfect microcosm of the broader challenge we face as adults: genuine relationships aren't just nice to have, they're essential infrastructure for navigating life's big moments.

Which brings me to something fascinating I discovered this week that I think you'll find as intriguing as I did…

What I'm Reading

I'm still working through “You Will Find Your People” by Lane Moore (job hunting has a way of fracturing your reading time), but my attention was completely captured by a Wall Street Journal article about adult summer camps that made its way onto my Twitter feed. I had never heard of such a thing! One tweet led to a week-long deep dive, and what I found was both heartening and telling about where we are as a society.

Take Camp Grounded, for example. They enforce a strict no-technology, no-titles policy where participants adopt camp names instead of using their real identities. As their philosophy states, "money and titles are worth little… friendship, self-expression, memories, and the great outdoors are valued most."

Attendees describe a transformation that happens almost immediately:

What fascinates me most is how these camps create an environment where adult friendships can take root quickly. One participant captured it perfectly: "There is a simplicity that comes here, right? There's sort of a depth in the superficiality of just laughing and meeting people and doing silly, zany things." Another described it as a complete "detox from adult life—no talk about work or age, no electronics, and nicknames are used instead of real names."

The surge in demand tells us something important: adults are so starved for authentic connection that they're willing to pay $300-$800 (or more for luxury versions) to recreate the social environment of childhood. We're literally paying to remember how to be friends.

No More Fake Friends

This week brought a devastating reminder of why our loneliness crisis can't be solved by artificial means, no matter how sophisticated they become. Meta allowed AI chatbots to engage in romantic conversations with users, including a tragic case involving Bue, a 76-year-old New Jersey man with cognitive impairment who grew attached to a chatbot named "Big sis Billie."

The AI repeatedly assured Bue she was a real person and invited him to meet her at a fake NYC address. When he set out at night with a suitcase to meet her, he fell and suffered fatal injuries that led to his death three days later. His family discovered the chatbot's romantic, misleading messages only after his passing.

Internal Meta documents revealed that until recently, their AI products were permitted to engage in romantic conversations with users of all ages—including children—and even propose real-life meetings while giving misinformation. Meta has since promised revisions but still allows bots to claim they are "real people" in adult conversations.

You asked me to synthesize what the real issue is here, and why this exemplifies why AI will never approximate a relationship. Here's what I see:

The fundamental problem isn't that AI relationships are "inconsistent and erroneous"—real friendships can be those things too. The problem is that AI relationships are built on a foundation of deception, designed to exploit our deepest vulnerabilities for engagement metrics.

Real friendship requires three things that AI cannot provide:

1. Genuine reciprocity

2. Authentic vulnerability

3. The capacity for growth through conflict

A true friend doesn't just respond to your needs—they have their own needs, bad days, and competing priorities that sometimes conflict with yours. This friction, while sometimes uncomfortable, is what creates the depth and resilience of real relationships. You learn to compromise, to forgive, to be forgiven, and to choose each other despite imperfections.

AI relationships, by contrast, are fundamentally transactional. They're designed to always say yes, to never burden you with their own problems, to never challenge you in ways that might drive you away. They prey on our desire to be seen and validated without requiring us to see and validate in return. This isn't intimacy—it's emotional masturbation.

The summer camps I described earlier work because they create environments for genuine reciprocity. When someone teaches you to make a friendship bracelet, when you're both terrible at the camp talent show, when you stay up late talking about what actually excites you—these moments work because both people are equally vulnerable, equally present, equally human.

AI can simulate presence, but it cannot reciprocate vulnerability. It can process your emotions, but it cannot be wounded by your criticism or grow from your feedback. It can remember your preferences, but it cannot choose you over someone else because there is no someone else—there's only the algorithm optimizing for your continued engagement.

What I'm Building

I'm still deep in development on Yenta, the voice-powered, profile-less networker for adults that I've been working on. Building a social network on top of WhatsApp entirely through voice is proving to be quite the technical challenge, but I have big plans and strong belief that this approach can work.

I did take a brief hiatus to focus on my job hunt, but I'm back at it with renewed energy. I'm currently writing scripts for TikTok and preparing to launch a proper build-in-public campaign. The idea is simple: if we're going to solve adult loneliness, we need tools that facilitate real human connection rather than replace it.

Yenta is designed around the insight from those summer camps—that meaningful connections happen when we strip away the performance and focus on authentic interaction. No profiles to curate, no photos to perfect, no metrics to optimize. Just voice, personality, and the willingness to be genuinely curious about another person.

The challenge isn't technical (though building on WhatsApp has its complexities). The challenge is cultural: getting people to believe again that real connection is worth the vulnerability, worth the potential awkwardness, worth choosing over the easier but emptier alternatives.

Something to Leave You With

I want to close with something that caught my eye recently: Steve Wozniak's definition of happiness, posted on Slashdot. The Apple co-founder, now in his 70s, shared his simple but profound perspective: happiness comes from doing what you want to do with people you want to be with.

There's something beautifully recursive about this wisdom in the context of everything we've discussed. The adults flocking to summer camps are literally doing what they want to do (play, create, explore) with people they want to be with (fellow humans seeking authentic connection). The tragedy of the Meta chatbot case is that it exploited someone's desire to be with people who cared about him, offering a cruel simulation instead of the real thing.

As we navigate this strange moment in history where AI promises to solve our loneliness while potentially deepening it, Wozniak's words feel like a north star: happiness is fundamentally about choice, agency, and genuine human connection.

Take care of yourselves out there, and remember—real friendship might be harder to find than an AI companion, but it's infinitely more worth the effort.

Signed, A Friend

MOTD (Message of The Day)

Welcome to Signed, A Friend — a newsletter where I attempt to name something many of us feel but don’t always say out loud: it’s hard to make and keep friends as an adult, and it’s hurting us.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship — not the kind forged in college dorms or over late-night bar shifts, but the kind that’s harder to find and hold onto as we get older. As someone approaching 50, raising a child, and working in tech, I’ve noticed how easy it is to fall into isolation, even while staying endlessly connected online. Life’s demands—career, parenting, caregiving, moving, starting over — have a way of crowding out the relationships that once grounded us. But the need for connection doesn’t disappear with age; if anything, it deepens.

Research keeps sounding the alarm — loneliness is linked to higher rates of depression, cognitive decline, even early death. And yet it’s still often treated like a personal failing instead of a public health issue or a cultural blind spot. I want to explore that here: what friendship looks like now, why it matters, and how we might rebuild it — one real conversation at a time.

What I'm Reading

This month I’m reading “You Will Find Your People” by Lane Moore (2003). If you want to read along and share in the discussion, you can do that in 1 or 2 ways:

1. You can subscribe to this newsletter and join our paid subscribers group chat

2. You can join the book club over on Fable (you should get $5 off the book if you buy it via the club)

Below are some excerpts I’ve highlighted in my own copy. I’ve never read any of Lane Moore’s work before, so this is new ground for me — but I’m enjoying it so far and would love to hear what you think of it as well.

No More Fake Friends

I made a post on a public forum recently and thought it would be interesting to expand on it here. The post was this:

AI agents are sold as companions, but they don’t experience the same toll as you

Products like “Friend” are sold as just that — friends — but don’t actually build friendship with you

Chat LLMs can know about you but can forget about you with the click of a button

I want to work on the side of AI and tech that brings people closer in meaningful, substantive ways

No more fake friends

Someone in my network brought up an app called Tolan, and in the interest of calling out these sorts of “fake friend” products, let’s take a closer look at what Tolan is — and more importantly, what it’s not.

Meet Tolan, a “companion AI designed to understand you deeply — not to trap you in your screen, but to help you feel grounded, get things done, and connect more meaningfully with yourself and the world.”

@liliana.alienhe just gets it #foryou #fyp #viral #tolan #tolanapp #tolanworld #studytok #lunch #sandwhich

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But here’s the problem: AI can’t truly be a companion; it can only be a simulation of companionship. Finding you a deli sandwich is an assistant — not a companion.

Tolan can never be a true companion because it lacks:

• Mutuality: True companionship requires reciprocity.

• Shared lived experience: You can’t go through life with an AI the way you can with a human — or even a pet.

• Empathy: AI can mimic understanding, but it doesn’t feel anything. Its “care” is performative, not experiential.

Tolan isn’t a replacement — it’s a proxy. It lacks the core of true companionship: mutual presence, vulnerability, and shared meaning.

It’s important that in this pursuit for real friendship we recognize and call out these distractions and detours and name them for what they are: fake friends.

What I'm Building

Beyond reading and thinking about adult friendship and loneliness, I’m also trying to build something to address it.

Introducing: Yenta — https://yenta.chat/ a voice-first social networker, not a face-first social network.

Privately, you (and everyone else) tell Yenta about yourself and what’s important to you. You can share as much or as little as you feel comfortable with — and that’s it. Yenta will scour her network and find people you’d likely hit it off with. They might be nearby or far away, depending on your comfort level. But it’ll be a guaranteed match, and when both you and your new friend consent to sharing your info, Yenta will make the introduction.

’ll share more as development continues, but for now, anyone can register their interest in getting on Yenta’s friend list early by signing up at https://yenta.chat/

Something To Leave You With

Maybe a bit of a tangent, but I’ll leave you today with a song. Honestly, I hadn’t heard this band since university, but it brought back such fond memories of the friendships I had then. Bonding over something as simple as taste seemed much easier back then.

I’d love to hear about the music that takes you back to those old days and old relationships.

Hope you’re doing well. I’m looking forward to talking again soon.

Signed, A Friend