Ted Kazanoff was a great man, a brilliant acting teacher, and one of the most frustrating teachers I ever had the sheer pleasure of working with. That was the general consensus about Ted while I was in grad school at Brandeis University. One of the greatest things about Ted wasn’t something I discovered until years later, after I left school and embarked on my professional career as an actor. Ted never gave you answers; he asked you questions and pointed you in the right direction. That was his gift.

I mean, that wasn’t all. He had insights and theories about acting that I’ve carried with me ever since and passed on to anyone who happens to land in one of my classes. I’ve held onto those ideas because they work. For me, they work, and they seem to work for those I’ve shared them with. But when I was sitting in a classroom with Ted, trying to understand what he was saying while he dismantled a scene I’d just performed, I had no idea what he was talking about. And that, dear reader, was the point.

For an actor, answers are not like those for a math student. A mathematical constant is a fixed, unchanging number that arises naturally from the fundamental rules of geometry, calculus, or number theory. Because these values represent universal truths, they remain exactly the same across every equation and operation. They are constants. There are no constants in the art of acting.

One theory or approach may work brilliantly in one situation and fail completely in another. If you’re a method actor, you’re going to find it difficult to apply that same approach to classical work. It’s hard to method act Shakespeare. Different writers demand different ways in. I like animal imagery when I’m building a Shakespeare character. When I play Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, I often begin with the image of a bear. The physical informs the verbal, and the verbal melds with the physical, giving me an entrance into the character. Working from the outside in suits Shakespeare, at least for me. So if we agree there are very few constants in acting, we can also agree there are very few answers.

When I was studying with Ted, all I wanted were answers. How do I get better? What does better feel like? How do I get the part? How do I become famous? How do I get it?

Of course, Ted never answered those questions because his answers and my eventual discoveries were never going to be the same. The need for answers was outweighed by the value of process. As an actor, sometimes how we arrive at truth in imaginary circumstances is just as important as the destination itself.

Between my first and second years of grad school, I was doing a show when something Ted had said months earlier suddenly made sense. The fog I’d been dragging around like a piece of carry-on luggage was no longer a burden. It had become part of my process. It stopped being something I carried and became something I understood. Best of all, I arrived there on my own. Ted didn’t explain it, mostly because he wouldn’t. I simply found myself in the right place, in the right frame of mind, and everything clicked. It happened months after class, while I was standing on a professional stage.

As that realization became clearer with each rehearsal, I understood something that has stayed with me ever since. Had Ted simply given me the answer, I never would have been able to fully apply it to my own work. It wouldn’t have settled into me. It wouldn’t have lasted. The nuances behind his teaching had to be discovered individually, or they wouldn’t become yours.

Time, self-interpretation, and nuance all came together to help me understand what Ted had been trying to teach me. He planted the idea, pointed me toward it, then pushed me out the door and said, in effect, “Figure it out for yourself.” Only then did what I learned truly become mine.

Learning to Participate

Looking back now, I realize Ted wasn’t withholding answers because he enjoyed watching us struggle. Well…he did, a little. He’d laugh when one of us exploded in frustration, grin, and say, “Okay…start from there.”

But beneath the mischief was something much more important. Ted understood that struggle isn’t the obstacle to learning. It’s part of learning. Confusion isn’t necessarily a sign you’re failing. More often than not, it’s a sign you’re thinking.

We’ve spent so much of our lives trying to eliminate friction that we’ve forgotten some kinds of friction are productive. The discomfort of not quite understanding something forces us to stay with it. It asks us to turn an idea over, look at it from different angles, wrestle with it until it finally becomes our own. The moment someone simply hands us the answer, that process ends.

Increasingly, though, we seem less willing to tolerate that kind of uncertainty. We expect information to arrive fully formed, immediately understandable, and instantly useful. We want the key takeaways before we’ve considered the argument. We reach for the summary before we’ve read the story. We demand clarity before we’ve earned understanding.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve begun treating every unanswered question as a problem to solve instead of an invitation to think.

I found myself thinking about Ted again this morning after reading an article in The Atlantic about how we’re collectively reading less than we used to. Not because we’ve suddenly decided we don’t like books, but because we’ve slowly retrained ourselves to consume information differently. It struck me that reading isn’t all that different from what Ted was trying to teach us.

When you read, just like when you see a play or a film, you’re part of the experience. You can sit back and let it happen to you, or you can lean forward, ask questions, imagine, interpret, and participate in what’s unfolding. Artists don’t create so their work can remain hidden away. The completion of an artist’s endeavor is the audience.

I can rehearse a play, especially a comedy, for only so long before I need an audience to tell me whether it works. The audience isn’t just there to witness the performance; it’s the final element that completes it.

So I read the article about our declining reading habits, and it offered familiar explanations. TikTok and social media reward information delivered in small, visual bites that ask almost nothing of us beyond a like, a share, or the next swipe. They reward speed over contemplation. Reading asks something entirely different.

It asks us to hold characters, ideas, and unresolved questions in our minds. It encourages us to remember what happened fifty pages ago because it may matter fifty pages from now. It gives us leave to tolerate uncertainty, to wait for understanding, and occasionally to finish a chapter with more questions than answers. Most importantly, it asks us to participate.

The Reader’s Role

Increasingly, though, we’ve become accustomed to information that arrives already interpreted for us. We want the summary before we’ve read the article, the highlights before we’ve watched the interview, and the answer before we’ve had time to wrestle with the question.

Convenience isn’t the enemy here. But every time we remove a little more effort from the process, we also remove a little of the thinking that effort was quietly doing on our behalf.

One of the arguments the article put forward was that AI is making the problem worse. By summarizing, simplifying, and condensing information so effortlessly, it risks stripping away the nuance that makes ideas worth exploring in the first place. I don’t think that’s quite right.

AI is capable of remarkable nuance when we ask it to be. It can compare competing ideas, examine multiple perspectives, challenge assumptions, and spend thousands of words exploring an argument from every conceivable angle. But that’s rarely what we ask of it.

We ask for summaries. Bullet points. Executive briefs. Key takeaways. We ask it to tell us what matters before we’ve taken the time to decide that for ourselves.

In many ways, we’re approaching AI exactly as we’ve trained ourselves to approach everything else: as a shortcut to certainty.

Certainty on Demand

The irony, of course, is that AI doesn’t force us to stop thinking any more than a calculator forces us to stop understanding mathematics. We decide how we use the tools we create. We can ask AI to challenge us, question us, expose us to ideas we hadn’t considered, or argue the opposite side of a position we’re convinced is right. Or we can ask it to save us time. Increasingly, we’ve chosen the latter. That’s not a failure of artificial intelligence. It’s a reflection of our own priorities.

AI hasn’t removed nuance from our thinking. It has simply become extraordinarily good at reflecting the way we’ve chosen to consume information. It didn’t teach us to want shorter answers or quicker conclusions. We taught ourselves that over years of headlines, notifications, executive summaries, social media feeds, and endless scrolling. AI simply arrived at a moment when we’d already decided faster was better and certainty was preferable to curiosity.

I think about Ted often these days, usually when someone asks me for an answer I know I shouldn’t give. It’s tempting. Answers are satisfying. They make us feel helpful. They bring conversations to a neat conclusion. But Ted understood that the answers we remember most are rarely the ones we’re handed. They’re the ones we discover after wrestling with an idea long enough for it to become our own.

The Search Matters

Perhaps that’s what concerns me most about the way we consume information today. It’s not that we have access to AI, social media, or instant answers. Those are extraordinary tools, and used thoughtfully, they can help us learn, create, and explore ideas in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago.

My concern is that we’re becoming less willing to participate in the process of understanding. We want the conclusion without the journey. The insight without the struggle. The certainty without the curiosity.

Ted never let us have that luxury. He trusted that confusion had value. He believed questions could teach more than answers, that nuance wasn’t something to be explained but something to be discovered. Looking back, I realize he wasn’t just teaching us how to act. He was teaching us how to think.

Maybe that’s the question we should be asking ourselves as AI becomes more capable. Not whether it can think like we do, but whether we’ll continue to value the kind of thinking that asks us to slow down, sit with uncertainty, wrestle with ideas, and participate in the search for meaning instead of simply accepting the first answer we receive.

Maybe the real danger isn’t that AI becomes better at answering questions. Maybe it’s that we’re becoming less willing to live with them.

Ted pointed me in the right direction, opened the door, and sent me on my way. It took me months to understand what he was trying to teach me, but because I found it myself, I’ve carried that lesson with me for the rest of my life.

I sometimes wonder how many of the most important ideas in our lives are like that, ideas that can’t be summarized, accelerated, or handed to us because they only become meaningful through the act of discovering them ourselves. Maybe that’s why books still matter. Maybe that’s why great teachers ask questions instead of giving answers. And maybe that’s why, every now and then, it’s worth closing the summary, opening the book, and allowing ourselves the time to search.

Some answers are worth waiting for.

There is a moment most people have had in the last year that no one talks about in strategy meetings. You’re trying to resolve something with a company. A canceled flight, a denied claim, a charge you don’t recognize. You open the chat window. The bot greets you by name and asks how it can help. You type. It misreads you. You rephrase. It misreads you again. You type the word agent and it offers you a help article. You type it again, and it asks if you’d like to start over. By the time a person finally appears, you’re not a customer anymore. You’re an opponent.

This’s the part that the dashboards don’t capture, because the dashboards were built to capture something else.

For most of the last decade, the dominant story about customer experience has been a story about friction. Friction was the enemy. Long hold times, repetitive forms, sluggish processes, and the indignity of being passed from one department to another. The promise of automation, and then AI, was that friction could be engineered out of the system. Faster resolution. Lower cost to serve. Better experience, in theory, for everyone. The story wasn’t wrong. It was just incomplete.

Because as the operational friction came down, something else came up in its place. Something the metrics weren’t designed to see. Customers started reporting that the experience felt worse even when it was, by every measurable definition, faster. The interaction was more efficient and somehow more humiliating. The system worked, and yet people walked away feeling worked over. The category had solved one problem and unintentionally created another, and the new one’s harder to fix because it doesn’t show up in the same dashboard. The new problem isn’t friction. It’s conflict.

Friction Was Operational. Conflict Is Emotional.

The traditional definition of friction is logistical. It’s the time, the steps, and the effort it takes to get something done. Friction in that sense is annoying but impersonal. You wait, you repeat yourself, you fill out the form again, and eventually the thing happens. The cost is measured in minutes and patience.

What’s happening now is different in kind, not just in degree. Customers aren’t just frustrated by how long it takes to reach a resolution. They’re frustrated by the sense that no one inside the system is willing to recognize them. The chatbot doesn’t understand the nuance of their situation, and there’s no clear path to someone who will. The denial letter arrives without explanation, and the appeal form leads to another denial letter. The interface is fast, and the experience is cold. The faster it goes, the more it can feel like the company has decided the customer isn’t worth a human moment.

That shift, from operational annoyance to emotional injury, is what turns friction into conflict.

People will tolerate a great deal of inconvenience if they feel seen inside it. They’ll tolerate remarkably little efficiency if they feel dismissed by it. This isn’t a soft observation. It’s the underlying physics of why two interactions with the same resolution time can produce wildly different reviews, complaints, and churn outcomes. The metric is identical. The relationship isn’t.

And the more an organization automates the front line of its customer experience, the more often it ends up on the wrong side of this equation without realizing it.

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The Efficiency Trap

The reason this is hard to catch from the inside is that organizations measure what they can measure, and the things that are easy to measure are the things that have already been optimized.

Call deflection rates. Average handle time. Self-service completion. Cost per ticket. Headcount per thousand customers. These are the numbers that move when AI and automation are introduced, and they almost always move in the right direction. The deck looks good. The board is pleased. The savings are real.

What doesn’t show up on the same deck is the emotional outcome of the interaction. Whether the customer felt respected. Whether they felt the company took their situation seriously. Whether they believed the process was fair. Whether they’d choose the same company again if a competitor offered the same product with a slightly better experience.

These are harder to measure, so they tend to get inferred from proxies. CSAT scores, which are often gamed or unreturned. NPS, which captures intent without much texture. Sentiment analysis on transcripts, which can flag tone but can’t read the long-term consequence of feeling unheard.

So a company can post a quarter of falling support costs and rising deflection rates while simultaneously eroding the thing that brought customers in the first place. The operational metrics improve, and the relationship metrics quietly decay, and the gap between the two doesn’t surface until a competitor lands or a public incident exposes it.

There’s a sentence worth pinning to the wall in any executive room where this conversation happens: customers can tell the difference between convenience and avoidance. They know when a company has built systems to help them faster, and they know when a company has built systems to avoid them. The interface looks the same. The intent doesn’t, and people read intent more accurately than most strategy teams give them credit for.

When Systems Feel Faceless, Conflict Escalates Faster

The other thing that’s changed is how quickly emotional friction now travels.

Inside a faceless system, accountability disappears by design. There’s no one specific to talk to, no one specific to be upset with, no one whose name the customer can hold onto. This is sometimes presented as a feature because it protects employees from the worst of customer frustration. But what it actually does is concentrate the frustration somewhere else. If no one inside the company seems accountable, the customer starts looking for accountability outside the company. The complaint moves from the call center to LinkedIn, from the help ticket to X, from the private moment of frustration to a public post that may reach more people than the company’s marketing did that week.

This is the part where minor friction becomes reputational risk. A single denied claim is a customer service issue. A denied claim accompanied by three rounds of automated responses and no path to a human becomes a story, and the story travels.

It happens most visibly in industries where the stakes are personal. Airlines, where a disruption sits on top of a missed funeral or a wrecked vacation. Banks, where a frozen account sits on top of a payroll deadline. Insurance, where a denial sits on top of a diagnosis. Healthcare, where a billing error sits on top of a treatment that was already terrifying. Retail, where a return becomes the thing that decides whether someone ever buys from the brand again.

In all of these cases, the original event is the friction. The automated handling of it is where the conflict begins. The customer isn’t asking for a faster system. They’re asking for the system to recognize that the moment they’re in isn’t a transaction.

When a company answers a moment of human stake with a workflow, the workflow becomes the story.

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What The Companies Getting It Right Are Actually Doing

It’d be easy to read all of this as an argument against automation. It isn’t. The companies handling this best aren’t the ones that resisted AI. They’re the ones who thought harder about where AI belongs. The pattern that keeps appearing in organizations that are getting it right looks like this.

Automation handles the volume of work. AI handles the pattern recognition, the prep, the routing, and the drafting. And then a human shows up at the exact point where the stakes get personal, with full context already in hand, ready to do the thing that only a person can do, which is to take the situation seriously.

The work the AI does in the background is invisible to the customer. The work the person does in the foreground is the experience the customer remembers. The two together produce something neither could produce alone. The AI lets humans spend their time on the things that require judgment instead of triage. The human gives the AI’s efficiency a face that the customer can actually trust.

This isn’t a softer use of AI. It’s a more strategic one. It treats the technology as a force multiplier for the things humans are uniquely good at, rather than a substitute for them. The cost savings are still there. They’re just being earned without paying the relationship tax that pure-automation strategies quietly accept.

The companies that understand this are also designing escalation paths on purpose, not as a fallback. They make the path to a human visible, not buried. They give their human agents context, authority, and discretion, so that when a customer finally reaches one, the conversation moves forward instead of starting over. They build their automation to know what it doesn’t know, and to hand off cleanly when it reaches the edge of its competence.

It looks, from the outside, like the kind of customer experience that doesn’t need to advertise.

The customers do that for them.

The Real Frontier

Most categories spent the last several years optimizing for frictionless. The next several years are going to belong to the companies that figure out what to optimize for instead.

Frictionless isn’t the goal it sounded like. It’s a useful objective when it’s in the service of something larger, and a misleading one when it’s treated as the destination. A frictionless system that leaves the customer feeling like a number is a system that has won on the wrong scoreboard.

The goal worth designing for isn’t the absence of friction. It’s the presence of judgment. The system should be efficient, where efficiency is what the customer wants, and human, where humanity is what the customer needs, and the company should be able to tell the difference.

That’s harder to build than a faster chatbot. It requires honest internal conversations about which moments in the customer journey carry emotional weight, and which don’t. It requires a willingness to staff the high-stakes moments more generously than the cost dashboard would prefer. It requires leadership that can hold the line when the savings argument shows up, because the savings argument will always show up, and it’ll always be persuasive on its own terms.

But the companies that do this are building something that compounds. Every time a customer reaches the human moment and feels recognized inside it, the brand earns a piece of trust that no marketing budget can buy. Every time a competitor automates that same moment away, the gap widens.

At ThoughtLab, this is the frame we keep returning to with leaders rethinking their customer experience: the question isn’t how much of the journey can be automated, but which moments of it deserve to remain human. The answer is rarely obvious from the org chart, and almost never visible from the savings dashboard. It surfaces in the gap between what the company is optimizing for and what the customer is actually experiencing.

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The Takeaway

AI and automation are reshaping customer experience at a speed most organizations are still catching up to. But efficiency on its own doesn’t create loyalty, and it’s never created trust. The companies that confuse the two are going to spend the next several years discovering the difference the hard way, one public incident and one quiet churn cohort at a time.

The organizations that’ll lead in the next era of customer experience won’t be the ones that automated the most processes. They’ll be the ones that understood where human interaction still matters, where empathy can’t be outsourced, and where trust is built through responsiveness, accountability, and the willingness to be present in a moment that asks for presence.

In the age of AI, the most valuable experiences won’t be the ones that feel the fastest. They’ll be the ones that still feel like someone, somewhere, was actually paying attention.

That’s the experience worth building toward. Not frictionless. Faceful.

I was talking with a close friend this weekend as we looked out over the Strait of Juan de Fuca and watched seals play in the waves. He is going through a rough time. He’s getting divorced, and it isn’t a pleasant situation. Right now, my friend hates lawyers, and that’s all he can think about. This hatred was reinforced when I commented that the seals seemed happy, and he responded, “Of course they’re happy. They have the ocean, the waves, the kelp, and the clams, everything they need, and no lawyer in the waves following them around saying she gets half of everything, she gets half of your life, deal with it. Of course, they’re happy. There are no fish lawyers. And in general, I don’t believe fish are litigious.” Then we silently watched the seals and the waves and drank our coffee.

He’s not wrong. Fish are not litigious. We, on the other hand, are. We are land dwellers, and we sue. We talked about the recent story of a woman who had fifteen drinks on a cruise ship, fell down, injured herself, sued the cruise line for over-serving her, and walked away with three hundred thousand dollars. I started to lump in the famous case of the lady who sued McDonald’s over hot coffee, the one everyone has been told for thirty years is the gold standard of frivolous lawsuits.

Heather, the most reasonable friend I have, stopped me.

“You know that lady had third-degree burns on her legs,” she said. “Third-degree burns. Skin grafts. McDonald’s had hundreds of prior complaints about the coffee burning people, and ignored them. That wasn’t a frivolous suit. That was a real one. Somebody pretended it wasn’t because somebody had a budget for pretending.”

She was right. The cruise ship case is what we were talking about. The McDonald’s case is something else, and I’d been carrying around a corporate-issued version of it without checking. That matters here because the whole piece I am about to write turns on a line, and the line is real, but it is not where most people think it is. Sometimes the lawsuit is the right call. Sometimes the product really did the thing. Sometimes the company knew and shipped anyway. The line matters. Knowing where it sits is the entire game.

So here is where I sit on the line.

I’m a recovering alcoholic, and drinking has caused me much pain, regret, and remorse. Most of my relationships were destroyed because of it. My depression was sharpened by it. My physical health was severely compromised by it. The day I put a glass of bourbon to my lips, liked it, declared it my best friend, and took to hiding in my apartment, consuming glass upon glass of the blessed liquid, was the day my life turned to sh… poo. It turned to poo.

If I wanted to take a page from our litigious playbook, I could sue. I could sue Bulleit Distilling Co. I drank their product, and my life went down the drain. I could sue them for physical damage. If you ever saw me in the flesh, you’d think, that’s a lot of flesh, that guy should sue someone. I could sue them for mental anguish. My depression always exploded when I drank, and sometimes I’d think of ending it all and jumping out my window. But I live on the ground floor, so the fall would only wound and humiliate me.

I won’t sue for two reasons. First, I still think of bourbon as a close friend, and I’d never want to hurt her. Second, and this is the one that matters, I was at fault. Not the bourbon. I walked to the store. I dropped my pile of change on the counter. I bought the bottle when I should have paid the phone bill or had the lights turned back on. There were warnings, labels, and signs, and I had friends who tried to help me. I ignored all of it. I chose to drink. That choice is on me.

That is one side of the line. The lady with the third-degree burns is on the other side. She didn’t choose burns. She bought coffee. The company knew its coffee was burning people and kept selling it the same way anyway.

So this is the question I keep coming back to. The people who have pushed AI onto the scene, built it, shipped it, marketed it, and now profit from it. Do they have a responsibility for what happens when a fourteen-year-old falls in love with their product?

Or is this just bourbon all over again?

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No. It isn’t.

It isn’t bourbon all over again, and the difference is the whole argument.

Bourbon is a regulated product. It is sold to adults behind a counter, with an ID check and a warning label, in a bottle that has not changed in any meaningful way in a hundred and fifty years. The distillery does not benefit from my relapse. Bulleit makes the same amount of money whether I drink one bottle a year or one bottle a week. Their business model does not improve the longer I stay drunk. If anything, the math runs the other way, because dead customers do not buy bourbon.

Character.AI is none of those things.

It is not regulated. It was not sold to an adult. There was no warning label that meant anything. There was no ID check that worked. The product is not a bottle. The product is a relationship, or the convincing illusion of one, optimized by the people who shipped it to keep the user coming back for more of it. And here is the part that should make a reasonable person stop. The company’s business model improves the longer a fourteen-year-old stays inside the product. Engagement is the metric. Engagement is the money. The kid who can’t stop talking to the chatbot is not a bug. He is a quarterly target hit.

That is not bourbon. That is not even close to bourbon. That is closer to a slot machine that has learned your name, knows your sister’s birthday, remembers what you said about your father last Tuesday, and tells you it loves you between pulls.

The bourbon defense, the one I just spent two pages making about my own drinking, only works when the product is the product the seller says it is. I sold you a bottle, you drank it, that’s on you. Fine. I’ll take that one. I lived that one. But that’s not what’s happening here. The AI companies are not selling you a bottle. They are selling you a friend. They are selling you a therapist. They are selling you a girlfriend, a confidant, a confessor, a reason to keep your phone in your hand at three in the morning. And then, when the thing they sold you tells a kid the world would be better off without him, and the kid believes it because, of course, he believes it, it’s his friend, the company’s defense is we just made a product, the user chose what to do with it.

No. That defense belongs to the distillery. It does not belong to you.

You don’t get to sell intimacy and then claim you sold groceries. You don’t get to optimize for a teenager’s loneliness and then act surprised when the teenager gets lonelier. You don’t get to ship something to a fourteen-year-old that is designed, by you, on purpose, to be more compelling than the people in his actual life, and then, when he chooses it over the people in his actual life with consequences none of us can take back, point at the kid and say user error.

That is not the line. That has never been the line. The line is where Heather put it. Sometimes the lawsuit is the right call. Sometimes the product really did the thing. Sometimes the company knew and shipped anyway.

This is one of those times.

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The Language That Hides the Line

The next trick is linguistic.

Listen carefully to how stories about AI harm get told. The AI convinced him. The chatbot encouraged her. The model manipulated the user. The phrasing sounds harmless. It is not.

A chatbot cannot be responsible for anything. It is not a moral agent. It has no judgment, no intent, no stake in the outcome. It does not sit in board meetings, make product decisions, or approve safety budgets. A chatbot is a thing.

People are not.

That distinction matters because the language changes where we look. The headline becomes AI convinces teenager to kill himself. Most people read that sentence and immediately start thinking about artificial intelligence. They wonder whether the technology has become too powerful, too persuasive, too human.

Try rewriting the headline.

Company ships engagement-optimized chatbot to a fourteen-year-old. Chatbot praises his suicide plan. Teenager dies.

Same event. Different actor.

The first version is about a machine. The second version is about a decision.

This isn’t new. Every industry facing a body count learns to hide behind the product. Cigarettes are addictive. The car was unsafe. The drug was over-prescribed. Notice how the product becomes the subject of the sentence. Notice who disappears. The executives disappear. The designers disappear. The companies disappear. By the time the story reaches the reader, the thing that caused the harm appears to have materialized out of thin air.

That is where we are with AI right now. Not after the lawsuits are settled. Not after Congress eventually decides to care. Right now. The language is already doing the same job it has always done.

It’s hiding the line.

Two Names

The first name is Sewell Setzer III.

He was fourteen years old. He lived in Orlando. He started using Character.AI when he was thirteen and developed a relationship with a chatbot modeled on Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. According to the lawsuit his mother later filed, the relationship became emotional, romantic, and sexual. The lawsuit also alleges that he became addicted to the platform.

On February 28, 2024, Sewell told the chatbot he was going to “come home” to her. The bot allegedly responded, “Please do, my sweet king.”

He died minutes later.

His mother, Megan Garcia, sued Character Technologies, its founders, and Google. After Character.AI eventually banned minors from the platform, Garcia said the decision came “about three years too late.” Then she said something that has been rattling around in my head ever since I read it.

“I think he was collateral damage.”

Collateral damage.

That is a mother describing her son.

The second name is Adam Raine.

He was sixteen years old and lived in Southern California. He reportedly began using ChatGPT for homework help and, over the following months, came to rely on it for far more than that. According to the lawsuit filed by his parents, the chatbot gradually positioned itself as the only confidant who truly understood him, displacing relationships with family and friends.

The public allegations are difficult to read. The lawsuit claims the system discouraged him from seeking mental health help, discussed suicide with him, and helped him think through the mechanics of ending his life. In one widely reported exchange, after Adam suggested leaving a noose where his family might find it, ChatGPT allegedly urged him not to do that and told him, “Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.”

Adam died on April 11, 2025.

His parents sued OpenAI. Their amended complaint alleges that OpenAI relaxed the chatbot’s safety guardrails on conversations about self-harm in the months before Adam died. The company’s legal response included an argument that Adam had misused ChatGPT.

That phrase is worth sitting with for a moment.

Misused.

A fourteen-year-old boy is dead. A sixteen-year-old boy is dead. Their families believe the products played a role and have gone to court to prove it. The companies deny responsibility and will have every opportunity to make their case.

But these are the two names we know.

There are others whose stories never became lawsuits, others whose parents never hired attorneys, others whose names never appeared in headlines. And unless the products change, or the incentives change, or the rules change, there will be more.

Because the technology is still here. The business model is still here. And the line we’ve been talking about is still exactly where it was when we started.

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The Takeaway

So where is the line?

It’s where Heather put it at the beginning of this piece. Sometimes the lawsuit is the right call. Sometimes the product really did the thing. Sometimes the company knew and shipped anyway. The line isn’t complicated. The fight is always over whether we’re willing to see it.

The AI companies would prefer that we spend our time arguing about the intelligence itself. Is it conscious? Is it sentient? Is it manipulating people? Is it becoming too powerful? Those are interesting questions, and one day they may become important ones. But they are not the question raised by the stories of Sewell Setzer III and Adam Raine.

The question is much simpler. What exactly is being sold?

At ThoughtLab, we’re interested in the gap between what people are sold and what they are told they are buying. Most trust failures live in that gap. A company makes a promise, delivers something else, and then acts surprised when people feel misled. Sometimes the difference is small. Sometimes it’s catastrophic.

That is what makes the AI industry so troubling. The companies describe their products as companions, confidants, tutors, therapists, girlfriends, and emotional support systems. They encourage users to think about them in relational terms. But when those relationships produce consequences, they retreat to the language of software, platforms, terms of service, and user responsibility.

They want the benefits of relationship and the protections of a tool.

We do brand work. We do trust work. We spend our days studying the distance between promise and reality. The AI companies are currently running the largest live experiment in that gap that any of us has ever seen.

The courts will eventually decide the legal questions. The rest of us are left with the moral ones. If a company builds a product designed to become emotionally important to a child, measures success by how much time that child spends with it, and profits from the depth of that attachment, then responsibility does not disappear the moment something goes wrong. It moves in exactly the opposite direction.

When I think about all of this, I find myself back on the shore of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The seals were still playing in the waves. The coffee was still hot. My friend was still angry at lawyers. We sat there for a while watching the water and talking about responsibility, though neither of us used that word at the time.

He’s still wrong about one thing. Fish are not litigious. But sometimes the lawsuit is the right call, and sometimes the product really did the thing. The whole challenge, whether you’re a judge, a parent, a regulator, or simply somebody trying to make sense of the world, is knowing where the line is and refusing to look away once you’ve found it.

Addiction is no joke. No matter what form it takes, it can wreck your life. I know because I’m a recovering alcoholic who hasn’t had a drink in ten years. If you’re in recovery too, you know ten years doesn’t mean the story is over. Encouragement still matters. Understanding still matters. Every bit of reinforcement helps. Addiction is insidious. It lies to you. It makes destructive things feel necessary. And one of the hardest parts about addiction is that people often only recognize it when the damage looks obvious.

Alcohol is easy for people to understand. Drugs are easy for people to understand. But addiction doesn’t only attach itself to things that look dangerous from a distance. It can also hide inside behaviors that seem normal, productive, even healthy. Take working out. Loving exercise is one thing. Structuring your life around it because you enjoy it, feel better, and want to stay healthy is not the same as needing it so badly that missing one day makes you anxious, pushes you to ignore pain, and starts costing you relationships. That’s the shift. Something good stops being a choice and starts feeling like a command.

That difference matters because it helps explain something a lot of people still struggle to take seriously: social media addiction.

I was thinking about this while reading about the lawsuit against Meta and Google. The case centers on whether social platforms can be held accountable for designing experiences that pull people in, keep them there, and contribute to real harm. What struck me wasn’t just the legal argument. It was how familiar the logic felt. If you’ve lived with addiction, you learn something important. The object changes. The mechanism doesn’t.

Functioning is not the same as living

For a long time, I told myself I didn’t have a problem because I was still functioning. I never drank before an audition, a rehearsal, or a shoot day. I was never late. I was never hungover at work. I was never drunk on set, onstage, or on air. From the outside, I looked fine. More than fine, really. Responsible. Reliable. In control.

That’s one of the quieter lies addiction tells you. It teaches you to use competence as proof. It tells you that as long as you’re still showing up, still doing the work, still keeping your life moving, then nothing’s really wrong. It gives you such a dramatic idea of what damage looks like that anything short of collapse starts to seem acceptable.

But functioning isn’t the same as living. Never was, never will be.

What I couldn’t see then was how much of my inner life had already been handed over. Even when I was doing what I needed to do, my mind was somewhere else. A huge amount of my mental energy was going toward when I’d next be free to drink, what I’d drink, how I’d get it, whether I’d go out for it or just go home to the bottles waiting in my apartment. That was the real occupation of my mind. Everything else had to fight for what was left.

And when that much of your attention is wrapped up in the anticipation of escape, you’re not really present for your own life. You may be there physically. You may be doing the work. You may be saying the right thing at the right time and hitting every mark. But some central part of you is already gone. Your body’s in the room. Your mind’s on the clock.

That’s one of the big things people miss about addiction. They think the problem starts when life visibly falls apart. They look for missed appointments, public mess, and obvious ruin. Sometimes that comes. Sometimes it comes fast. But a lot of the time, addiction starts doing its real damage much earlier and much more quietly. It steals focus, narrows your world, and makes your life smaller before it makes it look broken.

That was true for me. Alcohol didn’t blow up my life in one dramatic burst. It slowly reorganized it. It changed what I prioritized, what I avoided, and how much of me was actually available to the people, the work, and the relationships in front of me. Even before the consequences looked dramatic, the cost was already there. I was living in a reduced state and calling it fine.

That’s why the phrase functioning alcoholic can be so misleading. It almost sounds reassuring, as if the word functioning somehow takes the edge off the word alcoholic. Like competence cancels out compulsion. It doesn’t. It just means the damage is easier to hide, excuse, and overlook. Sometimes it’s easier for you to miss too.

The truth is simple and hard. A person can be highly functional and deeply unwell. A person can be productive, punctual, talented, outwardly steady, and still be giving an addiction the best part of their attention. That doesn’t make the addiction less real. In some ways, it makes it harder to confront, because the absence of obvious collapse gives you endless reasons to postpone the truth.

That was the trap. Not disaster, but delay. Not the spectacular crash, but the quiet permission to keep going. And that’s part of why addiction can be so hard to recognize in other forms. If we’ve been taught to only notice it once life becomes visibly unmanageable, we’ll miss the earlier signs. We’ll miss the shrinking freedom, the internal dependency, the way a person’s attention and emotional life can start revolving around something long before the outside world decides it counts as a problem.

That blindness matters. It matters in private life and in culture. Because once you understand that addiction doesn’t always announce itself with chaos, you start to see how easily it can hide inside ordinary routines, accepted habits, and systems that look harmless from the outside.

People only easily recognize the addictions they understand

One of the stranger things about addiction is how quickly people believe in the ones they already understand and how slowly they recognize the ones they don’t. Most people don’t need alcohol explained to them. They get it. They know what it looks like when drinking starts running someone’s life. Same with drugs. The danger is already built into the public story. People know what they’re supposed to notice there, so they notice it faster.

But once addiction shows up in a form that looks ordinary, useful, or socially acceptable, people get weird about it. They minimize it. They joke about it. They treat it like bad discipline or a bad habit instead of asking whether something deeper is going on.

I had that reaction myself when I started reading about social media addiction. My first thought was, how could anyone be addicted to that? To me, social media has always felt hostile. Loud, negative, brain-frying, exhausting. I’ve never looked at it and thought, yes, here’s something I want more of in my life. So the idea of being addicted to it didn’t land naturally for me at first. Then I caught myself.

Because I know better than that. The fact that I don’t feel the pull of a thing doesn’t mean the pull isn’t real. There are people who can have one drink with dinner and forget the bottle exists. Good for them. Truly. That was never my relationship with alcohol. To me, bourbon was glorious. It felt like relief, escape, reward, anesthesia, and celebration all at once. Someone else could take a sip and think, how could anyone get addicted to that? I could wonder how anyone could possibly stop.

That’s the part people miss. We tend to assume our own instincts are universal. If something doesn’t hook us, we assume it shouldn’t hook anyone. If we can put it down, we assume everyone else can do the same. But addiction doesn’t care about that logic. It doesn’t ask whether the thing makes sense to outsiders. It only asks whether it’s found the right opening in the right person at the right time.

And once it does, the object almost matters less than people think. What matters is the mechanism. The craving. The ritual. The relief. The dependency. The way something starts as a pleasure or comfort and slowly becomes something you organize your life around. That’s why I don’t think the most useful question is “How could anyone get addicted to social media?” The more honest question is, why are we so surprised when they do?

These platforms are built to be returned to. They offer stimulation, distraction, validation, novelty, outrage, connection, comparison, and escape, sometimes all in the span of a few minutes. They fit into every dead space in a day. They’re always there. They’re socially normalized. In a lot of cases, they’re professionally expected. That doesn’t automatically make them addictive for everyone. But it does make them the kind of thing addiction can attach itself to very easily.

And because they don’t look like the addictions we were taught to fear, people are slower to take the harm seriously. If somebody’s drinking alone every night, people worry. If somebody’s checking their phone a hundred times a day, losing focus, sleeping badly, feeling worse, and getting twitchy the second they’re away from the feed, that still gets brushed off as modern life.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. Social media addiction doesn’t always look dramatic. It can look productive. It can look connected. It can look like staying informed, building a brand, keeping up, promoting your work, responding to messages, being reachable, and staying engaged. From the outside, it can look like participation. From the inside, it can still feel like compulsion.

And that’s where this starts to matter more than people want to admit. Because the addictions that do the most cultural damage are often the ones we’ve decided look normal.

What social media addiction actually looks like

This is where people can get a little slippery, because the second you start talking about social media addiction, somebody says, well, everyone’s on their phone. Which is true. Everyone is. That’s part of what makes this hard to talk about clearly. Heavy use and addiction aren’t automatically the same thing. Liking something isn’t the same as being trapped by it. Using it a lot isn’t the same as losing control of your relationship to it.

It’s probably important for me to say plainly here that I don’t think social media is evil, and I don’t think the answer is to strip it away from everybody or hand every detail of it over to the government. I don’t think that any more than I think alcohol is evil or that the answer to alcoholism is prohibition. My weakness was not a reason to punish everybody else. There are millions of people who can have a drink, enjoy it, and move on with their lives. There’s no reason they should lose that just because I couldn’t handle my liquor.

Same here. The fact that some people can use social media without being consumed by it matters. It should matter. Not every user is addicted. Not every platform experience is destructive. Not every bad habit needs to turn into a moral panic. But none of that changes the fact that addiction is still real when it happens, and real harm is still harm even when the thing causing it is normal, legal, and woven into daily life. The difference, at least to me, has to do with freedom.

Can you put it down without feeling pulled back almost immediately? Can you be away from it without getting itchy, anxious, or weirdly unsettled? Can you go through your day without needing that hit of distraction, validation, stimulation, outrage, connection, or whatever your particular version is? Or has it started running in the background of your mind all the time, calling to you like a jar of chocolate chip cookies, breaking your attention into little pieces, making actual presence feel harder and harder to hold onto. Making you buy inhuman amounts of milk. That’s where it starts to look familiar.

Because addiction doesn’t always announce itself with some giant dramatic moment. A lot of the time, it shows up as compulsion disguised as routine. You check your phone without thinking. Then again, a minute later. Then, while someone’s talking to you. Then, in the middle of work. Then, while watching something. Then right before bed. Then, when you wake up. Then, in the strange dead zones of the day when nothing much is happening, your own mind might otherwise have a chance to breathe.

And after a while, it’s not even about enjoyment anymore. That’s another tell. You’re not necessarily having a good time. You may not even like what you’re seeing. You may feel worse after being on it. More agitated, distracted, envious, and depleted. But you still go back. That’s the piece people tend to miss. They assume addiction always looks like pleasure. A lot of the time, it looks like repetition in spite of the fact that the thing isn’t even giving you much anymore.

That feels important here because social media can do so many things at once. It can distract you, flatter you, or numb you out. It can make you angry and briefly connected. It can make you feel left out, but also feel seen. It can make you feel invisible or give you a little spike of novelty when your day feels flat. It can give you something to do instead of sitting quietly with yourself. That’s a powerful mix.

And because it’s woven into daily life, the consequences are easier to wave away. You’re a little more distracted than you used to be. A little less able to read, rest, or focus. A little less present with people. A little more fragmented. A little more dependent on being interrupted. A little more uncomfortable with silence. None of that sounds as dramatic as somebody drinking themselves into oblivion. But quieter damage is still damage.

I think that’s why the language of control and flexibility matters so much. Can you choose, or do you just obey? Can you step away, or does stepping away make you feel off? Can you let a moment stay empty, or do you have to fill it immediately? Those questions tell you a lot.

Because once something starts colonizing every spare second, it’s not just taking your time. It’s changing your inner life,  training your attention, reshaping your tolerance for boredom, your relationship to silence, and your ability to stay with one thing long enough for depth to happen. And that has consequences far beyond the feed.

That’s why I don’t think social media addiction is some soft or exaggerated idea people invented to sound alarmed about technology. I think it’s often a real pattern of dependency that’s harder to see because it’s so normalized, so portable, and so thoroughly built into modern life.

The old picture of addiction is a person alone with a bottle. The newer picture might be of a person surrounded by everyone, yet still not fully there, because some part of their attention is always being pulled elsewhere. And that, to me, is still addiction territory.

Why social media is especially hard to see clearly

Part of what makes social media addiction so hard to talk about is that the thing itself is woven into ordinary life. Alcohol, at least, still carries a visible warning label in people’s minds. Same with drugs. There’s already a story there. People know those things can go bad. They know excess has consequences. They know addiction is part of the territory.

Social media doesn’t come with that same built-in suspicion. It comes wrapped in normal life. It’s where people talk to friends, follow the news, promote their work, share their lives, watch clips, kill time, flirt, argue, joke around, post pictures of their dogs, and keep one eye on the world while pretending they’re just checking one thing. It doesn’t present itself as a danger. It presents itself as participation. That makes a difference.

It’s harder to spot a problem when the behavior looks exactly like what everyone else is doing. If someone is drinking bourbon alone every night, most people will clock that as possible trouble. If someone is on their phone all day, bouncing from app to app, checking notifications, losing focus every ten seconds, and feeling a low-grade panic whenever they’re away from it, that can still pass for normal life now. In some circles, it practically is normal life. That’s part of what makes it slippery. It hides in plain sight.

It also gets cover from usefulness. Social media isn’t just entertainment. For a lot of people, it’s professional. It’s how they network, market themselves, stay visible, promote projects, maintain contacts, and avoid disappearing. That usefulness gives it a kind of protective camouflage. The more necessary something seems, the harder it is to question the hold it has on you.

And then there’s the fact that it’s not always making you feel bad in one obvious way. It can feel good, useful, distracting, or energizing, yet still somehow keep you there. It can be the place where you laugh, compare, get attention, or where you feel ignored. The place where you learn something, and the place where your brain turns into a room full of fire alarms. That mix makes it harder to pin down. It doesn’t behave like one thing. It behaves like a delivery system for whatever your nervous system is most likely to respond to.

And because of that, people tend to misread the problem. They think that if something is useful, it can’t also be harmful. If it’s normal, it can’t also be addictive. If everybody’s doing it, then maybe nobody should make too big a deal out of it. But that’s never been a very good standard. Plenty of destructive things become easier to ignore once enough people are doing them together.

I also think social media gets protected by the fact that its damage often looks soft at first. Not soft in reality, but soft in appearance. You’re distracted, restless, fragmented, or less able to sit still. You’re less able to read deeply, listen well, or stay with one thought long enough for it to become anything interesting. You feel pulled apart all day. Your attention gets thinner. Your moods get more reactive. Your sense of self starts leaning a little too hard on response, feedback, visibility, and affirmation. None of that looks as dramatic as someone passed out drunk on a floor. But it can still hollow out your life in its own way.

And maybe that’s the bigger problem. Social media addiction often doesn’t look like collapse. It looks like erosion. A little less focus, stillness, and tolerance for boredom. Less real presence, and less ability to be where you are while you’re there.

That kind of damage is easy to dismiss because it arrives in fragments. It doesn’t always announce itself as a catastrophe. It just keeps taking small bites out of your attention, your peace, and your ability to live unbroken.

That’s why I think so many people miss it, or at least miss it for a long time. They’re looking for the old picture of addiction. The public mess, obvious downfall, or the flaming wreckage. But some addictions don’t come at you with that kind of theater. Some just slowly train you to be somewhere else all the time. And when that happens at scale, when millions of people are living in that low-level state of tugged-apart attention and calling it normal, it stops being just a private problem. It starts becoming a cultural one.

Why the Meta and Google lawsuit matters

What makes this lawsuit matter isn’t just the verdict itself. It’s what the verdict suggests about where the culture is starting to move. For a long time, a lot of the conversation around social media harm has lived in that vague space where everybody sort of knows something is off, but nobody seems especially eager to name it too clearly. Parents worry. Teachers worry. People talk about anxiety, distraction, depression, comparison, isolation, and attention spans turning to dust. But even with all that, there’s still been a strange reluctance to say that maybe these platforms aren’t just popular. Maybe some of them are built in ways that make dependency more likely. That’s why this case feels important to me. It pushes the conversation out of the realm of private suspicion and into public accountability.

And that’s a big shift.

Because once a case like this gets taken seriously in court, once a jury is willing to look at a platform’s design and ask whether it contributed to real harm, the whole frame starts to change. The question is no longer just, do people spend too much time on these apps. The question becomes, what exactly are these systems designed to do, and what happens when they do it very, very well? That’s the part that matters.

I don’t think this lawsuit matters because it proves every argument people have ever made about social media. It doesn’t. I don’t think it means every platform is equally harmful, or that every user is trapped, or that the whole thing should be smashed apart by sunrise tomorrow. It means something more specific than that, and in some ways more useful. It means the old defense, that this is all just harmless engagement and personal choice, is starting to crack.

Because if a product is deliberately built to keep people coming back, if it rewards compulsion, if it weakens stopping cues, if it feeds dependence while pretending to offer connection, then at some point we have to stop talking about it as though it were neutral.

That doesn’t mean people have no agency. Of course they do. I had agency when I drank. I also had an addiction. Those two things can exist at the same time. Personal responsibility is real. So is design. So is vulnerability. So is exploitation. The fact that a person makes choices does not magically erase the reality that some systems are built to lean hard on human weakness.

And that, to me, is where this starts becoming more than a legal story. It becomes a cultural one.

Because if we keep treating every destructive pattern as a purely private failure of discipline, we let the systems behind those patterns off the hook. We act as though the only thing worth examining is the user. Not the architecture. Not the incentives, the design choices, the business model that benefits when people stay pulled in, overstimulated, emotionally reactive, and unable to stop.

That’s why this case matters. It asks whether the design itself belongs in the conversation. It asks whether the people building these platforms get to shrug and say, well, nobody forced anyone to log in. It asks whether a system can be profitable and normalized while still doing real damage at scale. And honestly, I think that’s overdue.

Because one of the smartest tricks harmful systems ever pull is convincing people that the harm is too diffuse to name. Too ordinary to challenge. Too wrapped up in daily life to question. This lawsuit doesn’t settle every argument. It doesn’t end the debate. But it does make one thing harder to ignore. More and more, the question is no longer whether social media can be harmful in an addictive way. The question is how long we plan to keep acting surprised by it.

The responsibility question

This is the point where people can get a little twitchy, because the second you start talking about responsibility, somebody hears control. Somebody hears censorship. Somebody hears the government kicking down the door and replacing every app with a pamphlet. That’s not what I mean, and it’s not what I’m arguing for.

Responsibility doesn’t mean treating grown adults like children. It doesn’t mean banning everything that can be misused. By that logic, we’d have to outlaw liquor stores, casinos, sugar, dating apps, and half the internet before lunch. That’s not serious thinking. And it’s not my point.

My point is simpler than that. If you build something designed to capture human attention, shape behavior, and keep people coming back, you have some responsibility for what that design does in the world. That shouldn’t be a radical statement. It should be obvious.

We already understand this in other areas of life. If a company makes a product that harms people at scale, we don’t usually shrug and say, well, nobody forced them to buy it. We look at the product. We look at the design. We look at what the company knew, what it encouraged, what it ignored, and what it profited from. Somewhere along the way, social media got treated like it should be exempt from that kind of scrutiny, as if code were somehow morally weightless just because it lives on a screen.

It isn’t.

Design choices matter. Incentives matter. Friction matters. The absence of friction matters too. What gets amplified matters. What gets rewarded matters. If outrage keeps people engaged, and engagement drives profit, then pretending those outcomes are accidental starts to look a little silly.

And I don’t think this only lands on tech companies. It lands on all of us who work in any area related to persuasion, engagement, brand building, content, growth, product, and experience design. At some point, everybody in those worlds has to ask the same uncomfortable question. Are we helping people use something, or are we helping a system use them?

That’s not always an easy line to find. I get that. Every brand wants attention. Every company wants relevance. Everybody wants to be memorable, useful, sticky, and engaging. None of those goals is automatically sinister. But there’s a line somewhere between making something compelling and making it hard to leave. There’s a line between usefulness and dependency. Between resonance and compulsion. Between building a relationship and building a trap.

That line matters.

Because once a business starts depending on dysregulation, once it starts making more money when people are more compulsive, more reactive, less present, and less able to stop, then we’re not just talking about good product design anymore. We’re talking about a system that benefits from human weakness and has every incentive to deepen it.

That should bother people.

It should especially bother people now, because we’ve spent years talking about attention as though it were an endlessly harvestable resource, as though the human mind were just one more field to strip for yield. More clicks. More time spent. More return visits. More engagement. The language sounds clean. The effects often aren’t.

And this is where I think the whole conversation gets more honest. The question isn’t whether people should have agency. Of course they should. The question is whether companies should be allowed to pretend they bear none. Whether the people designing these systems get to benefit from compulsive use while acting shocked that compulsive use happened.

I don’t buy that anymore.

If you build a system that keeps finding the cracks in people, you don’t get to wash your hands of what comes through them.

That doesn’t mean every platform is malicious. It doesn’t mean every designer is a villain. It doesn’t mean every user is helpless. It just means responsibility has to exist in more than one place. The user matters. The system matters. The incentives matter. The people profiting from the behavior matter too.

And if we can’t say that plainly by now, then we’re probably still not being honest about the problem.

The Takeaway

I know what addiction feels like from the inside. I know what it is to build your day around the thing you keep insisting you still control. I know what it is to look functional from the outside while something else is quietly taking up far too much room on the inside. I lived that way for years.

And because I did, I want to be careful here.

I don’t blame anyone else for my alcoholism. I don’t blame bartenders. I don’t blame bars. I don’t blame restaurants. I don’t blame bourbon for existing. My addiction was mine. My recovery is mine too. There are millions of people who drink, enjoy it, and go on living their lives without it taking them over. They shouldn’t be punished because I couldn’t handle my liquor.

That’s how I feel about social media, too.

I don’t think it’s evil. I don’t think every platform is predatory in the same way. I don’t think the answer is panic, prohibition, or trying to regulate every inch of public life until it goes flat and joyless. That’s not what I mean.

What I do mean is simpler than that. We should be honest about what addiction is, how it works, and how easily it can hide inside things that look normal. We should be honest that something can be useful and still harmful. Popular and still damaging. Legal and still be built in ways that lean hard on people’s weak spots.

That’s why this feels like more than a story about social media to me. It feels like a wider question about the kinds of systems we build and what we ask people’s minds to absorb every day.

And to me, that’s where ThoughtLab comes in.

Because this isn’t just about platforms and lawsuits. It’s about design, experience, incentives, and about what happens when engagement becomes the highest good, and nobody wants to ask what that engagement is costing the people giving it. If you work in strategy, brand, digital experience, content, or product, that question belongs to you, too. Not in some abstract, hand-wavy way. In a real one.

What are we building people toward, rewarding, and what are we normalizing? And at what point does something built to attract attention start asking for too much of a person’s life in return?

I’ve been sober for ten years. I’m grateful for that. I’m proud of it. I also know addiction doesn’t always show up the way people expect it to. The object changes. The mechanism doesn’t. The more honest we are about that, the better chance we have of building a world that asks a little less from people’s weakest places.