Loneliness is real. But often the solution isn't.
The Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, has issued a stern warning about the hidden consequences of loneliness. Beyond the health concerns for all of us, business leaders need to recognize the challenges associated with loneliness - a condition that nearly 50% of us report. “Loneliness is more than just a bad feeling,” Murthy shares, “The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day.” Beyond personal health, Oxford University Researchers confirm that close friendships increase workplace productivity. Relationships rank first in terms of workplace quality and job satisfaction. Do business leaders today have an obligation to offer deeper social connection at work? How can we reverse the trend of loneliness - or should business leaders even try?
Third spaces - environments that are not your home and not your work - are often offered as the solution to solitary confinement. But sending people to places of worship or other “gathering spaces” for social interaction isn’t the whole story. Especially when the third space of choice is actually online.
Are We Losing the Ability to Truly Connect?
"In today's world, my generation, Gen Z, has found themselves to be experiencing huge side effects of isolation caused by the pandemic,” Snapchat sensation Caryn Marjorie, age 23, tells Insider. With over 1.8 million followers, she continues, “many [are] too afraid and anxious to talk to somebody they are attracted to.” In a world where one third of relationships start at work, where 43% of us have married someone we’ve worked with, and 47% of employees have changed jobs to pursue someone, workplace connections are a fact of life in the modern workplace.
Perhaps even more significant than the sticky wicket of interoffice romance, office friendships are the number one source of retention. That’s right: if you want people to stick around, make sure they make friends. The economic impact is clear - good relationships are good for business. Dealing with difficulty gets easier when you have a support system in place. In a SHRM survey, 61% of respondents said that colleagues’ support helped them through tough times.
So, do things get better when you have a virtual girlfriend?
The Illusion of Online Relationships: Social Media Isn’t Real
Caryn Marjorie is the Snapchat influencer who built a rentable online girlfriend based on her likeness, programmed using OpenAI’s GPT-4 API. Inside her enterprising new venture is a startling and cautionary tale of the hidden costs of loneliness. Because substitutions always incur unexpected costs, much like the production of batteries for electric vehicles has impacted the environment. We save on the cost of gasoline, but what about the rare earth metals that are mined and produced to create the future? Are we making an even more dangerous substitution online - swapping the problem of loneliness in exchange for a more damaging AI-generated solution?
A Modern Day Galatea
In ancient Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a king who created a magical living statue, and he fell in love with his creation. Galatea was his Frankenstein, and he loved her with all of his heart. That heart was broken when he realized he loved a lie. He loved a construct, not another human being. He fooled himself, becoming a fool in the process.
In a world where we have thousands of online friends, what we find when times are tough is that the likes don’t really matter. Your Insta followers won’t help you move that sofa into your new apartment. Similar to thoughts and prayers for a grieving parent in Uvalde, social media doesn’t bring you the thing you miss most of all: something real.
Is Chat GPT Curing - or Curating - Loneliness?
Millions of people suffer from loneliness, according to Gallup data. More than 300 million people globally don’t have a single friend, and more than 20% of us don’t have friends or family we can count on whenever we need them.
That’s a lot of loneliness. But when we are starving, and we feed ourselves with empty calories - a poor substitute for real nutrition - what happens? We all have the ability to connect with “The AI Companion Who Cares” at replika.com. But what leaders need to care about is the real impact of substitutions. Artificial solutions are not the answer for a real problem: without real connection, companies will suffer. Turnover (quitting) will spike. Employee engagement scores will tank.
Without Real Connection, Performance Plummets
Today, Replika says it has 2 million users. Another AI company that provides chatbots, Character.ai, had 65 million visits in January 2023. CarynAI has over 1,000 paying customers and they are 99% men. While artificial relationships are a nascent business (and the plot of movies like Her and also Ex Machina), can bots really be our BFFs? Workplace connections are the ones that matter to business performance. Online alternatives are not the solution.
AI seems to be generating an answer for our stilted social skills, pandemic PTSD and love-language laziness. But for leaders today, the message is clear: create a path to connection, if you care about retention, team performance and employee engagement. The economic impact reaches into every aspect of the organization. Gallup tells us that friendships at work are tied directly to business outcomes, including improvements in profitability, safety, inventory control and retention. Artificial relationships aren’t the cure for loneliness - they’re a symptom of it.
