11/18/2025
I was talking with a friend the other day who told me about an older man, a widower, who has struggled with deep loneliness and has now turned to an AI Chatbot to fill the void. This older gentleman said his Chatbot has become his best friend. He asks it questions, and it responds in a human voice. He tells it to talk to him, read to him, share the news with him, and give him the weather forecast, and his Chatbot shares, in a gentle, sweet voice, the answers and conversations he lacks with humans.
Has it been helpful to assuage this man’s loneliness? Perhaps at a surface level, but in the man’s own words, “I still miss human connection". Yes, indeed. We all need connection, especially in a world overcome by loneliness.
Thomas Wolfe wrote in his essay, “God’s Lonely Man,” that “the whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence” (From Strength to Strength, 118). Lonely people often feel they are the only ones who are truly lonely. “They feel lonely in their loneliness” (idem.).
Loneliness not only affects our emotions; it also affects our bodies. According to research, it leads to lowered immunity to disease, insomnia, cognitive sluggishness, and higher blood pressure. Lonely people tend toward high-calorie, high-fat diets and lead more sedentary lives than non-lonely people.
In her book, The Lonely Century, Noreena Hertz shows that in terms of health outcomes, “loneliness is comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes per day and is worse than obesity. It is also strongly associated with cognitive decline and dementia” (ibid., 119).
So, what’s the answer? Another AI Chatbot? No. AI is only a placebo that makes people temporarily feel connected, but it doesn’t address the root cause of loneliness.
God created us in His image to be in actual relationships with Him and others, not quasi-relationships through technology. Just as people talk about having a “soul mate,” we need “soul connections”—one soul immersed with another soul in the waters of genuine connectivity.
When we experience this, our souls find shalom, and we discover the delight of healthy attachments. When our lives are void of human connectivity, our souls discover the destruction of unhealthy attachments. In other words, like a virus searching for a host, our souls are in a never-ending quest for attachment, and if they don’t connect to God as our primary Host, they will wind up attaching in unhealthy ways to technology, destructive relationships, or isolation.
Here's where we begin. We are the branches, and Jesus is the Vine. First and foremost, we connect with Him (John 15:1-5). We open our souls to the triune God to dwell with us be in us (John 14:15-23). From our souls connecting with the soul of God, we can then connect with the souls of others (1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 21-26).
This is not theoretical; this is practical. This truth of soul connection, rooted in God’s nature and revealed in Scripture, is to be lived out in the daily realities of our lives.
So, I leave you with this challenge. Who are three people in your life right now with whom you have a soul connection? And your AI Chatbot doesn’t count. If you have those three (or more), celebrate and deepen those soul connections. If you’re not there yet, begin to open yourself up to others through the Church, the Bride of Christ, because your soul is prone to wander, and it will try to attach somewhere. So, why not make sure it’s connecting in healthy ways to God and others rather than to an AI Chatbot that serves as a sugar pill rather than the real thing?
