Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘We’re increasingly becoming a society in which very wealthy people get obsequious, leisurely human care, like concierge medicine paid out of pocket, apothecaries with personal shoppers and private schools with tiny class sizes and dead-tree books. Everybody else might receive long waits for 15-minute appointments with harried doctors, a public school system with overworked teachers who are supplemented by unproven apps to “personalize” learning and a pharmacy with self-checkout.

Or, as [Allison] Pugh puts it, “being able to have a human attend to your needs has become a luxury good.”

As I was reading her book, I had a minor revelation about the growing lack of trust in various American institutions. Overall trust in institutions is at historic lows, according to Gallup, and the picture is one of declining faith over the past 40 years. That’s roughly the same period in which technology has accelerated and replaced or bowdlerized a lot of low-stakes human interaction, otherwise known as weak ties, like the ones you have with a grocery store clerk you see regularly or even the primary care physician you see once a year.

I wondered if having to interact with an extremely stressed person who is being rated on how many customers she sees a day or, alternatively, talking to a malfunctioning robot that keeps asking us if we’re human is making many of us feel our institutions don’t care about us at all.

I called Pugh to see if she thought my theory — that the loss of connective labor was a factor in the breakdown of institutional trust — held any water. She did, and she told me a story about a postal worker who had heard her on a podcast and got in touch with her. The postal worker was retiring, and the people who lived in the neighborhood she worked in threw her a little party.

“She said she felt so moved, and she talked about how she didn’t feel like those kinds of relationships are that possible anymore because of the time pressure” workers are under, Pugh told me. So the postal worker was in a kind of double mourning — for the relationships she had made and because she thought that as a society that prefers to get packages dropped off without even making eye contact, we were losing those kinds of everyday connections entirely.

I asked Pugh if there was any hope in pulling back from this dystopian, inhuman future. She assured me that a world where we are applying “Moneyball”-style statistical analysis to the soul work of hospital chaplains is “not inevitable.” Even with all the “extraordinary advances” of interactive technology (the refinement of large language models like ChatGPT), “humans lose interest in interacting with machines after a while, partly because of machine predictability.”’ (from the New York Times)