invisible addictions
how our quest for certainty fuels overwork and isolation
In a New York Times op-ed, Clay Shirky, a vice provost at NYU, posits that AI chatbots reduce classroom frictions in two ways: cognitive offloading (using AI to reduce the amount of thinking required to complete a task) and emotional offloading (using AI to reduce the energy required to navigate human interaction). He relays a story:
Back in 2023, when ChatGPT was still new, a professor friend had a colleague observe her class. Afterward, he complimented her on her teaching but asked if she knew her students were typing her questions into ChatGPT and reading its output aloud as their replies.
I’ve always allowed laptops in my class—it feels silly to ban the use of technology in a course with the Digital Age in the title—but recently, I’ve been contemplating adopting a no-laptop policy. There is something perverse about a tool which reduces thinking and energy in the liberal arts classroom. Unlike math or physics, there are no inherent right or wrong answers in law. The process of thinking and putting forth energy is the entire praxis.
What’s lost is not just cognitive and emotional offloading, though. It’s also the ability to sit in the uncertainty of not knowing the answer, the terror of not knowing exactly what to say next. We have become accustomed to receiving answers at our fingertips, the very moment we have questions. We are no longer forced to endure the unbearable stress and delicious freedom of not knowing and not being able to find out.
The not being able to find out part is important, especially in human interactions. No matter how much you rehearse a conversation, you will still never be able to predict how it will go. That is both the ugliness and beauty of human conversations: the magnitude of surprise goes both ways. Sometimes the other person will blow up, start yelling at you out of nowhere, unjustified; other times, the person will exhibit an unprecedented level of compassion and understanding. Being emotionally prepared for both outcomes is a requirement for not letting your emotions overpower you in the moment.
Being able to sit in uncertainty is also a requirement for developing meaningful human relationships. Meanwhile, the inability to sit in uncertainty breeds invisible addictions.
Hi, my name is Cece, and I’m an addict.
One year, I found myself at a chaotic Thanksgiving dinner. You know the type—babies crawling on the floor, toddlers punctuating the sizzle of sweet potatoes with screams, earnest but awkward small talk. Everyone was talking, even if they were speaking mostly at each other rather than with one another. But it was nice. It was nice, right? The stilted dialogues reminded me that, at the very least, people were trying.
An hour in, I began taking more frequent sips of water than was required by thirst. I’d participated in no fewer than four conversations in which people talked past each other. That was, when they weren’t otherwise preoccupied with monitoring the children, their eyes bundt-cake-glazed as if in front of the Patriots game.
I wondered if adulthood was simply a series of finding acceptable ways to avoid the looming discomfort of peer-to-peer interaction. Few would find fault with football on Thanksgiving—the tradition was downright American, damn it—and even fewer would publicly chastise someone for being inattentive as a result of being overly attentive to children.
Think of the children! And I do. I think of the children when my friends boast about their child being in the 90th percentile for height and weight, at eight months old. I think of the children when I hear about private-school interviews for two-year-olds. I think of the children when I see groups of tweens vying for social status at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant, somehow the unofficial neighborhood hang-out spot. And I think of the children when I scroll through admissions TikToks, witness the tears of those who managed to scrape into the 90th, or 94th, or 96th percentiles according to quite arbitrary factors—and those who fell short of those certainty thresholds.
But while I think of the children, I have a harder time being with children. They cry when they first meet me, sensing that I am not their mother. They babble at me, clearly wanting to communicate something which I don’t yet understand. And even when they can speak in full sentences, they still speak in dialects I don’t understand. What is Paw Patrol, and why are we calling Blue from Blue’s Clues Bluey now?
It’s not like adult interactions are any easier. As we shuffled and scooted around the oblong table, a quiet voice: “Shall we say grace?”
My heart lurched and my eyes darted around the room, trying to read everyone else. But no one responded. No one’s face even registered having heard the question. Whether this was because no one else was Christian or no one heard the question, I will never know. All I know is no one answered.
The woman fell immediately silent, said nothing more. I wanted desperately to say something, to acknowledge her earnest suggestion of spirituality—even if I did not believe in her same strain of faith—because she had tried. But I was paralyzed.
I didn’t have an org chart, filled with neat solid and dotted lines indicating who should listen to who. I didn’t have a standard operating procedure manual, flip to page 37. All I had was me, and I had no idea what to do.
I felt the vise of panic grip my chest. Thanksgiving was supposed to be fun, supposed to be connective—but how could I have fun or connect when I didn’t know exactly what to do? When I hadn’t known what to do for several hours now, apart from obsessively washing my hands after coming into contact with any of the toddlers? My fingers lightly tacky, like yesterday’s Elmer’s glue. Under the table, I pressed the pads of my thumb and forefinger together, reviled by the gumminess. Maybe I hadn’t washed them thoroughly enough.
I smiled, excused myself to the bathroom, locking the door quietly behind me. After washing my hands—the full twenty seconds, as recommended by the CDC—and scrubbing under the nails, I turned off the faucet and dried my hands. But as I reached for the doorknob, I hesitated.
I pulled out my work phone, opened Outlook. Pulled down on the screen to refresh. And even though none of the emails were urgent, I couldn’t help myself. I sat on the floor, back to the door, thumbs poised in parallel position in front of my face—and began to tap out replies. Forwarding client emails to juniors, asking them to get started on research. Forwarding deal emails to partners, proposing a timeline for the next stage of the work and their review. Easily picking between reply and reply-all. Knowing exactly the right tone to strike, a corporate voice I could put on in my sleep.
The rush of certainty coursed through my veins, like a drug.
Two knocks on the door caused me to jump, almost drop my phone. “Cece?” I heard, muffled, through the door. “It’s time to eat.”
I put a hand over my chest, feeling the thrum of almost getting caught. How long had I been here? “Coming,” I mumbled, scooting myself up from the floor.
I was addicted to work. This is both easy and hard to admit, because we live in a society that rewards certain unhealthy attachments as long as, one, they propel the gears of capitalism and, two, any attendant symptoms of addiction are largely invisible. The same way anorexia is more difficult to flag as concerning than bulimia—it is initially neater, more contained, largely invisible, maybe-it’s-just-a-diet until someone recognizes it is most certainly not just a diet and equally as deadly as its more readily visible counterparts.
But more so than work, I was addicted to certainty. I know this now because I no longer hide in the bathroom to answer emails—not because there aren’t emails to respond to, but because the panopticon of the Corporate Employer no longer exists. I am no longer surveilled and paid by one overarching authority, which also means I no longer have the One Employee Handbook to Rule Them All. For better of worse, my work involves just as much uncertainty and discomfort as my social interactions.
You’d think the increased uncertainty in my overall life makes me worse off. And in some ways, it does. I find myself worrying about my financial future more often. But I also self-isolate less frequently, am less prone to overwork. I no longer hide in the bathroom during social events to send work emails. It turns out that when work is just as uncomfortable and full of the unknown as my social interactions, I don’t flee social interactions as often. After all, there is no certainty to be gained from fleeing a social interaction—only the similarly crushing uncertainty of work.
But my addiction to certainty crops up in other ways. I fight the urge to not touch first one box of Reese’s Puffs, and then the box behind it, before grabbing the second box—or picking up one head of broccoli before putting it down and putting the second one I touch into my basket. Twos are good, I tell myself. So are threes, but not fours. When my hands get cold—often nowadays, given the weather in NYC—I can’t stop thinking about washing my hands to rid them of that disgusting clammy feeling.
And I fantasize about packing a suitcase and buying a one-way ticket to anywhere in the world but here. That’s how much I crave certainty. The certainty of a bad end—even if it would be lonelier, even if it would be against my commitments to community—is simply that alluring. I used to wonder why people self-sabotaged, do things like not show up to job interviews or watch estranged children from afar but never approach. But now I get it. The certainty of loneliness and failure can be more palatable than the uncertainty of human connection. It’s easier, even if not better, to dance with the AI chatbot you know than to reach out to the human you don’t. ◆
And now… some personal updates!
Reading: I’m juggling a few books right now: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, and Bad Lawyer by Anna Dorn. My general rule for myself is that I will read the first 100 pages and then decide whether I want to finish the book. I liked but didn’t love the Hamnet feature film, so we’ll see if the novel ends up being more compelling to me!
Listening: “Social Media on Trial” on The Daily. A novel theory of liability is currently being litigated in the courts: social media as a personal injury harm or a public nuisance. It’s an interesting argument, even if I suspect most 1L Torts professors would say the plaintiffs face uphill battles legally. For those of you interested in law and tech, keep an eye on these.
Watching: Upon a reader’s recommendation, I started Cougar Town on Hulu! It’s silly and heartwarming, with my favorite sitcom set-up thrown in: best friend(s) live next door.
Obsessing: Brad Karp getting Epstein’d (gift link). Kathy Ruemmler getting Epstein’d. It’s prompting me to reflect on all the times in my own legal career in which I swallowed my moral distaste because of people-pleasing or business development anxieties. In many ways, I’m thankful now to be wrestling with financial anxieties about my future, rather than the moral anxieties of my past.