There is a particular kind of woman who becomes very good at being impressive. She learns early that there is always another way she could be better: prettier, thinner, smarter, more successful, more interesting, more desirable, more gracious, more grateful. She learns to carry a lot without looking burdened by it, because struggle ruins the illusion. She becomes accomplished and calls it ambition, useful and calls it love, exhausted and calls it a busy life. Eventually, she can construct something that looks remarkably like success from the outside. The dangerous part is how long she can live inside it before asking whether any of it actually feels like her.

I have been thinking about that while listening to Ariana Grande’s Petal. There is something brutal about the image at the center of it: a flower against pavement, softness existing where softness has no business surviving. We love stories like that. We point at the flower and call it resilient, beautiful, extraordinary, as though surviving terrible conditions somehow makes the conditions beautiful too. We rarely look at the concrete and ask why the flower had to fight so fucking hard just to reach the sun. I know something about being proud of how well I survived things I should never have required myself to survive so gracefully.

This year, my life has changed so completely that sometimes I barely recognize it. I finished my degree, ended a twenty-five-year marriage, changed my name, watched my body change, tried to build a career, tried to build something of my own, fell harder into love, tried dating again, got rejected, deleted the apps, made money however I could, applied for jobs I knew I could do, and collected rejection letters anyway. I went to Burning Man and came home and kept renovating and working and writing and planning whatever comes next. On paper, there is an obvious story here about reinvention. But living through it hasn’t felt like a triumphant montage. Mostly it has felt like waking up every morning and asking myself what else I need to accomplish before I am finally allowed to believe I am doing well.

That question follows me everywhere: Am I great yet? Not good. Not okay. Not happy. Great. There is something almost embarrassing about admitting how much that matters to me, except I don’t think I invented the desire entirely on my own. Women are taught that ordinary happiness is somehow insufficient when extraordinary womanhood is available for purchase through enough discipline, beauty, emotional labor, productivity, and self-improvement. There is always another version of yourself waiting to shame the current one.

Greatness is a moving target. You lose the weight and discover a different body to want. You finish the degree and immediately start worrying about the career. You find enormous love and discover that being loved does not magically make you incapable of fearing its loss. You build a beautiful life and somehow find yourself standing in the middle of it with a clipboard, conducting an inspection. Paradise arrives and you grade it. Worse, you grade yourself for not enjoying it correctly.

That may be the part of Petal that hurts the most. The song understands the strange bargain between suffering and achievement, the temptation to make pain useful so that at least it meant something. I understand that impulse intimately. If something hurts me, I can write about it. If my life falls apart, I can rebuild it better. If someone rejects me, I can improve myself. If I am frightened, I can work harder. I can turn almost anything into fuel, which sounds admirable until I wonder why I am so uncomfortable simply putting the fuel down.

I am very good at taking care of people. I am very good at anticipating what needs to happen next, solving problems before they become problems, making things beautiful, making things work, making people comfortable. Most of that comes from love, and I don’t want to pathologize one of the things I genuinely like about myself. But generosity and anxiety sometimes wear exactly the same outfit. Somewhere along the way, I learned to believe that if everyone around me was happy, then I must be doing everything right. If nobody was disappointed in me, maybe I could finally relax.

Except there is no amount of greatness that can make a person rejection-proof. I can be beautiful and someone will still choose someone else. I can be qualified and still get the rejection email. I can love someone extraordinarily well and they can still be frustrated with me. I can write something beautiful and someone can hate it. I can give people everything I have and discover that what they wanted was something I could never have given them. There is no final version of me so exceptional that she gets to escape being human.

…perhaps that is where the flower matters.

I used to think resilience meant becoming harder. Concrete is hard. Flowers are not. Yet somehow flowers crack through concrete, and maybe I have spent too much of my life misunderstanding which one is powerful. The flower does not survive by becoming more like the thing trying to contain it. It remains completely, almost offensively soft.

I want that.

I don’t want another life built around becoming impossible to reject. I don’t want to choose relationships because they create the correct silhouette of adulthood, chase jobs because their titles make me sound impressive, date because having more partners would prove something about how successfully I practice polyamory, or make myself beautiful because I think beauty can protect me from being unwanted. I don’t want to keep trying different versions of womanhood on for size and asking the mirror whether this one finally makes me worthy. I want to know what my life looks like when the question stops being Will everyone approve of this? I want to know what happens when the question becomes Does this feel like me?

For most of my life, paradise has been scheduled for later. After the weight loss. After the degree. After the relationship worked. After the divorce. After the job, the money, the house, the next transformation, the next accomplishment, the next version of me. But paradise is a dangerous thing to keep postponing because eventually you look around and realize you are standing inside pieces of the life you once begged the universe to give you. And there you are, still grading yourself.

I am not finished. There are careers I want, places I want to see, things I want to create, money I want to make, rooms I want to renovate, art I want to put into the world, and entire versions of my life I haven’t imagined yet. Wanting more is not the problem. Believing I have to earn the right to enjoy what I already have is. Unfinished is not the same thing as inadequate. Becoming does not require hating the person you are becoming from.

There is a flower growing through the pavement. It isn’t supposed to be there. It isn’t growing under ideal conditions, and nobody cleared a path for it first. It did not become concrete to survive concrete. It stayed soft and reached for the sun anyway. I have spent so much of my life trying to be a woman everyone could be happy with that I am only now learning to ask whether I am happy with her. Maybe paradise begins there.

Petal in the Pavement was originally published in Beloved on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Maybe I just need to burn differently

After one of my hardest years in Black Rock City, I’m realizing that loving Burning Man doesn’t mean I have to keep doing it the same way.

I don’t know how to feel about the Burn this year. That may be the most honest thing I can say about Burning Man 2026.

The weather was terrible, and that made everything harder than it generally is. Every kind of weather that can define a difficult Burn seemed to make an appearance. We had wind, heavy dust, daytime whiteouts, nighttime whiteouts, rain, and mud. At one point, the dust was getting through my goggles and my filtered face mask. Kyle’s N95 was caked. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe.

By Wednesday, I was sick. My face and lips were wind- and playa-burned. My entire body hurt, and I was waking up with coughing fits.

But the weather wasn’t the only thing that felt different this year. There seemed to be a new crowd coming through Black Rock City that was poorly acculturated and didn’t understand how Burning Man actually works. There was weird energy from certain camps. The Portos were being used as trash cans.

Something felt off. And, if I’m being fair, some of what felt off was me.

I’m 45 Now

I love Burningship. The people are lovely. They are truly family, and when I left, I hugged and kissed everyone through tearful eyes.

But I also felt weird about camp this year.

Everything we had to do to make camp pop off the way it did felt so ambitious. Kyle and I were up before everyone else pitching the bar carports. We helped create and host events. We fed people. We built things. We fixed things. We struck things. We brought the fire and the big communal effort we wanted to bring, and we both suffered for it.

I found myself feeling resentful about the responsibility I had taken on, including things I chose to help with that weren’t actually my responsibility. That is a terrible attitude to bring into a theme camp, and it wasn’t anyone else’s fault. So I didn’t talk about it while I was there.

But doing my part had started taking from my own experience.

By Thursday, I realized something that gutted me: I had barely done Burning Man. I hadn’t really explored the art. I hadn’t even seen the Man up close. I had spent most of my week working, recovering from working, getting sick, dealing with weather, and then working some more.

I had sacrificed my Burn to help create everyone else’s.

Years ago, I told myself I didn’t want to participate in theme camps anymore unless I was leading one and doing it myself. The problem is, I don’t really want to do that right now either.

Maybe those aren’t the only two choices.

The Ghost of My First Burn

There is another thing that happens to me in Black Rock City that is harder to explain. My mind at the Burn always seems to run laps around the trauma I experienced at my first Burn.

My heart races. I get insecure. I start worrying that the people around me could fall apart and I would suddenly be alone, responsible for figuring everything out myself.

So I prepare. I make sure I know how I could leave. I know where the keys are. I know what I would do if everything went sideways.

This year required me to do something different.

I trusted Kyle.

He has never done anything wrong to me. He treats me like a princess. He reminds me to eat and drink water. He tells me he loves me a million times a day.

So this year, I rode in with him. I didn’t bring my escape vehicle.

That meant when the weather became terrifying, when I got sick, when I was exhausted and crying and saying I wanted to go home, I couldn’t simply jump in my own vehicle and leave. I had to trust the person I came with, and he was exactly who he has always shown himself to be: patient, loving, understanding.

There is something quietly enormous about realizing that the emergency you keep preparing for isn’t happening.

That you can spend years keeping one hand on the exit, making sure you know where the keys are, calculating how you will get yourself home if everything falls apart, and never realize how much of you is still standing guard. Then one day, you look around and understand that no one is asking you to guard the door anymore.

The storm came. The sky disappeared into dust. I got sick. I got scared. I got overwhelmed. I cried and wanted to go home. All of the conditions were there for that old instinct to rise up and tell me that ultimately, I was on my own.

Except I wasn’t. Kyle was there every single time.

He didn’t become impatient with my fear or make my exhaustion inconvenient. He didn’t need me to pull myself together so that he could have a better Burn. He loved me through it exactly as I was. He reminded me to eat and drink water. He took care of me when I was sick. He let me cry when I was disappointed. When I was frightened, he was steady.

And slowly, almost imperceptibly, something inside me stopped looking for the exit.

Maybe that was one of the most important things Burning Man gave me this year. Not another lesson in radical self-reliance. I already know how to survive. I already know how to get myself home. This time, I learned what it feels like to trust that I don’t always have to.

Then Burning Man Did What Burning Man Does

Friday morning, I woke up to a beautiful sky and horrible mud. I had one pair of dry boots left, so I grabbed the dress that matched them, and Kyle and I walked out to the Man.

Normally the Man base is closed on Friday, but it was still open. We waited in line for two hours. Then we finally climbed to the top and communed with him.

Finally.

Saturday, we got on our e-bikes and actually explored the playa. After a week of feeling like I had somehow been at Burning Man without getting to be at Burning Man, we covered an enormous amount of it.

Those last few days brought enough redemption that I found myself back on the familiar roller coaster: Do I really never want to come back here?

I say some version of that every year.

This is also why I don’t vlog myself at Burning Man. I know better than to treat whatever I am feeling in one exhausted, overstimulated playa moment as my final verdict on anything. After Tuesday, I mostly left my phone in the boat.

Some experiences need a little time before they become opinions.

Maybe the Problem Isn’t Burning Man

Once Kyle and I started talking about what had been difficult and what we could change, something became obvious. We don’t necessarily need to stop going. We need to stop Burning like we are younger versions of ourselves.

We are buying an RV. That is step one.

We still want to bring the boat. That ridiculous, wonderful boat belongs out there. We want it to become a public space where people at camp can lounge, gather, dance during events, and enjoy what we built. And that mast was an absolutely unbeatable destination beacon.

But there are plenty of other things we can do to make Burning Man easier and more accessible for two scrappy, Type B Burners over 40.

Our bikes need some work. I love riding on the back with Kyle, but my seat fell off his bike, so that needs fixing, along with some foot pegs. Mine needs better lighting and probably a better battery pack. Functionally, though, having the e-bikes out there was incredible.

We are also planning to spend only seven days on playa, Sunday to Sunday. That may not sound revolutionary, but it represents a larger change in how I’m thinking about Burning Man.

The goal is no longer to prove how much discomfort we can tolerate. The goal is to make it sustainable enough that we can keep coming back.

Burning Man Is Aging Too

I don’t think this is only about me getting older. Burning Man is aging.

The younger generation does not seem to be as into this thing as we are, and that creates an interesting problem for a culture built around participation, communal effort, and radical self-reliance. The people who built, sustained, and fell in love with this culture are getting older.

Eventually, we have to ask what radical self-reliance looks like when the people practicing it have bad knees, old injuries, less tolerance for sleeping in brutal conditions, or simply no desire to destroy themselves for ten days to prove that they still can.

Maybe using an RV isn’t giving up. Maybe an e-bike isn’t cheating. Maybe using modern technology to make the experience safer and more physically accessible isn’t contrary to Burning Man culture. Maybe adapting is how the culture survives.

Because our talents are much better served by the art and magic we bring than by destroying our aging millennial bodies.

What I Couldn’t Receive Out There

There is one part of this Burn that I understand better now that I’m home. I felt an enormous amount of love and respect from my camp family for what Kyle and I brought this year, but I was in such a negative headspace that I had trouble receiving it.

That matters.

Resentment has a way of convincing you that nobody sees how much you’re carrying, even while people are standing directly in front of you thanking you for carrying it.

The answer isn’t to demand more gratitude. The answer is to carry less.

I don’t want to return to Black Rock City resentful of the work I volunteered to do. I don’t want to spend my Burn maintaining an experience that leaves me too exhausted to experience it myself.

I want to make things. I want to feed people. I want to create ridiculous, beautiful spaces and throw parties and bring something magical to the city. I also want to get on my bike with the person I love and disappear into the playa.

Those things should be able to coexist.

Maybe that is what I’m taking home from Burning Man 2026. Not that I am finished with this place, but that I am finished believing there is virtue in making it unnecessarily hard.

I can trust Kyle. I can carry less. I can sleep in an RV. I can stay seven days instead of pushing my body past its limits. I can contribute without sacrificing the experience I came there to have. I can stop treating suffering like proof that I belong there.

And maybe radical self-reliance was never supposed to mean that we must do everything alone.

Maybe part of becoming truly self-reliant is knowing ourselves well enough to understand what we need, building a life that can sustain us, and learning the difference between I can do this myself and I have to.

I already know how to survive. Maybe this chapter of my life gets to be about something else.

The Man will burn either way.

Maybe I’m Not Done With Burning Man. Maybe I Just Need to Burn Differently. was originally published in Rock n’ Heavy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Ariana Grande has spent an extraordinary amount of her life being observed.

Not simply listened to or watched as a performer, but observed. Her voice, relationships, personality, clothing, makeup, hair, and body have all become objects of public analysis.

Grande described the experience herself in 2024. She said she had essentially been treated like “a specimen in a petri dish” since she was 16 or 17. She has heard, she said, “every version” of what is supposedly wrong with her. Perhaps the most revealing part came next: “And then you fix it and then it’s wrong for different reasons.”

She called our comfort with commenting on other people’s bodies “really dangerous.”

That sentence is difficult to separate from the arc of her career.

There were years when Grande was criticized for being too tan, wearing too much makeup, dressing too provocatively, or presenting herself in ways people considered artificial. Now her aesthetic has changed, and once again the public has decided something is wrong.

The criticism changes.

The entitlement to criticize her does not.

In 2023, Grande took the unusual step of directly addressing speculation about her appearance. She explained that the version of her body people were nostalgically comparing her to had actually coincided with an extremely unhealthy period of her life. Her larger point was one we should already understand: you cannot determine another person’s health by comparing photographs.

Then she became even less subtle.

In “yes, and?” she tells listeners plainly: “Don’t comment on my body, do not reply.”

And yet we replied.

Ariana Grande and the Problem With Diagnosing People From Photographs

I understand the initial human reaction behind some of the conversation surrounding Ariana Grande’s health. When someone’s appearance changes significantly, people may wonder whether that person is okay.

Wondering is human.

Diagnosing a stranger from photographs is something else entirely.

I have my own observations about Grande. After watching her interviews and career for years, there are aspects of her mannerisms, intensity, sensitivity, communication style, and relationship with performance that remind me of characteristics I recognize in neurodivergent people.

But recognition is not diagnosis.

Ariana Grande has not, to my knowledge, publicly identified herself as neurodivergent. I cannot diagnose her from interviews any more than someone scrolling through photographs can diagnose her physical health.

That distinction matters.

The internet has become remarkably comfortable declaring that Grande has an eating disorder. We do not know that. We do not know whether she has another medical condition. We do not know whether medication, stress, genetics, lifestyle, or something entirely outside our speculation has affected her appearance.

We simply do not know.

Grande has repeatedly reminded us that appearances do not tell us what we think they tell us.

She is also an enormously successful adult woman with access to medical care and, presumably, the ability to seek physicians, specialists, therapists, nutrition professionals, or whatever other expertise she might need.

Whatever is happening with her health, if anything, does not become our medical jurisdiction because we bought an album, watched Wicked, or followed her Instagram account.

There is a strange parasocial leap happening here:

I am worried about you, therefore I am entitled to publicly investigate you.

Those are not the same thing.

Parasocial Relationships and the Illusion That We Know Ariana Grande

Psychologists have studied parasocial relationships for decades. The term describes the one-sided relationships audiences can develop with media figures. We repeatedly see someone, hear their voice, learn pieces of their history, watch interviews, follow relationships, hear songs about heartbreak, and eventually develop a feeling of familiarity.

Social media has made that familiarity more intense.

Ariana Grande is an especially interesting example because millions of people have essentially watched her grow up. She entered the public eye as a teenager. Fans have watched her move through relationships, grief, professional triumphs, public tragedies, marriage, divorce, enormous musical success, and an increasingly serious acting career.

For longtime fans, that can create the subjective feeling of actually knowing her.

But familiarity is not intimacy.

We know what Ariana Grande has chosen to tell us and what the entertainment industry has made visible to us. We do not know what happens in her doctor’s office, what appears on her laboratory results, what medications she takes, what she eats, what her closest friends know, or what conversations happen privately with her family.

Parasocial attachment can blur that distinction.

The thought becomes: I’ve watched you for fifteen years. I know when something is wrong.

But watching someone for fifteen years is still watching.

It is not knowing.

Body Shaming, Skinny Shaming, and a Cultural Double Standard

Our culture has spent years learning that publicly dissecting someone’s weight can cause real harm.

Research supports that shift. A systematic review of 242 studies found a consistent relationship between weight stigma and disordered eating thoughts and behaviors. Weight-based commentary is not necessarily a benign tool for encouraging health. It can itself contribute to psychological harm.

Eating disorders themselves have also become an increasingly visible public health concern. A major systematic review found that measured point prevalence increased from 3.5 percent in studies conducted from 2000 — 2006 to 7.8 percent in studies conducted from 2013 — 2018, although differences in diagnostic criteria and methodology make simple comparisons across time difficult.

At the same time, some of the shame surrounding eating disorders has begun to change. We increasingly understand eating disorders as serious illnesses rather than evidence of vanity, weakness, or moral failure.

We have also made substantial cultural progress in recognizing fat shaming as harmful.

We increasingly understand why telling a larger person what we believe their body says about their health is humiliating, stigmatizing, and medically simplistic. We understand that strangers cannot diagnose diabetes, cardiovascular disease, eating habits, or overall health from an Instagram photograph.

Yet our norms around skinny shaming remain remarkably different.

When someone appears unusually thin, many people seem to believe the rules disappear.

Suddenly photographs become laboratory results.

Comments become diagnoses.

Cruelty becomes “concern.”

This does not mean fat shaming and skinny shaming are socially identical. Weight stigma against larger people has extensive structural, medical, employment, and social consequences, and the research documenting those harms is substantial.

But we can acknowledge those differences while recognizing a simpler ethical principle:

Another person’s body does not become public property when its size makes us uncomfortable.

If we have learned that publicly diagnosing a larger stranger from photographs is harmful, we should at least question why we remain so comfortable doing it to someone who appears thin.

Ariana Grande and the Psychology of Online Mob Mentality

This is where Ariana Grande becomes less interesting to me as celebrity gossip and much more interesting as a social psychology problem.

Individually, thousands of people may genuinely believe they are expressing concern.

Collectively, those comments become something else.

Social psychology has long studied deindividuation, the ways self-awareness and personal accountability can change when people experience themselves as members of a crowd. Online environments can amplify some of the conditions associated with it: distance, anonymity, enormous audiences, and reduced exposure to the immediate emotional consequences of our behavior.

Something a person might recognize as invasive if said directly to another human being can feel surprisingly reasonable when typed beneath a photograph alongside 20,000 similar comments.

Then comes social proof.

Humans naturally use other people’s behavior as information about what is normal, appropriate, or true.

If everybody is talking about Ariana Grande’s health, talking about Ariana Grande’s health begins to feel socially legitimate.

If thousands of people say she has a particular illness, speculation begins to acquire the psychological texture of established fact.

People stop asking, How could I possibly know this?

Instead, they ask, How could all of us be wrong?

The crowd begins validating itself.

When Bullying Becomes Morally Justified

There is another powerful ingredient in online mob behavior: moral justification.

We’re worried about her.

Someone needs to say something.

Her team isn’t helping her.

Someone needs to intervene.

We’re trying to save her.

Once aggression acquires a moral purpose, people can participate in behavior they might otherwise recognize as bullying while maintaining an identity as the compassionate person in the interaction.

That is one of the most dangerous characteristics of mob behavior.

A crowd does not have to believe it is cruel in order to become cruel.

In fact, believing that cruelty serves a righteous purpose may make it easier to participate.

There is no contradiction between genuinely feeling concern for Ariana Grande and behaving toward Ariana Grande in ways that are invasive, dehumanizing, or harmful.

Intent does not automatically determine impact.

Maybe We Should Listen to Ariana Grande

This entire conversation feels particularly bleak because Grande has not been ambiguous about wanting it to stop.

She has addressed body commentary directly.

She has explained that people previously praised an appearance she associates with a profoundly unhealthy period of her life.

She has called public commentary about bodies dangerous.

She has described what it feels like to have strangers continuously evaluate her appearance.

She has even put the boundary into her music.

And still, somehow, the public conversation keeps arriving at:

Yes, but this time we really need to talk about her body.

At 33, and at another enormous point in her career, Grande has announced plans to step away from public visibility after completing her current tour. She has also withdrawn from a planned 2027 West End production of Sunday in the Park with George.

Importantly, Grande has said that decision was considered long ago and was “not a reactive or impulsive thing.”

We should believe her about that too.

It would therefore be unfair to claim that online bullying caused Ariana Grande to step away from public life.

But perhaps her decision should still make us consider what kind of environment we have created around people like her, and what we believe celebrities owe us in exchange for being famous.

Ariana Grande owes us the album we purchased and the concert ticket she sold us.

She does not owe us her medical records.

She does not owe us an explanation of her body.

She does not owe us a diagnosis that makes her appearance sufficiently understandable to strangers.

And concern does not create that entitlement.

The Danger of Thinking With the Crowd

There is a lesson here considerably larger than Ariana Grande.

When thousands of people are doing the same thing, our own behavior becomes harder to evaluate objectively.

Consensus feels like evidence.

Repetition feels like confirmation.

Participation feels harmless.

Moral certainty makes cruelty surprisingly easy to rename.

Social media gives us access to crowds larger than anything humans evolved to navigate, and those crowds can create powerful distortions in what we perceive as normal behavior.

Sometimes the most important moment to examine your behavior is precisely when everyone around you agrees that you are doing the right thing.

Ask yourself what your comment accomplishes.

Ask yourself whether you actually possess the information required to make the claim you are making.

Ask yourself whether you would say the same thing if the person were standing directly in front of you.

And perhaps most importantly, ask whether the person has already asked you to stop.

I do not know what is happening with Ariana Grande’s health.

Neither do you.

I hope she is healthy. If she isn’t, I hope she recovers. I hope she is surrounded by people who love her enough to tell her the truth, doctors she trusts, and whatever support she needs.

I also hope she gets to disappear for a while if that is what she wants.

More than anything, I hope we eventually learn that caring about another human being sometimes means accepting that there are things about them we are simply not entitled to know.

Maybe this time, when Ariana Grande asks us not to comment on her body, we could actually listen.

⸻

Frequently Asked Questions

Has Ariana Grande spoken about comments on her body?

Yes. Grande has publicly addressed comments and speculation about her appearance on multiple occasions. In 2023, she explained that an earlier version of her appearance that some people were comparing her to was actually associated with a period she described as unhealthy. In a 2024 interview, she discussed experiencing intense public scrutiny of her appearance since she was a teenager and described society’s comfort with commenting on other people’s bodies as dangerous.

Has Ariana Grande said she has an eating disorder?

Ariana Grande has not publicly confirmed that she has an eating disorder. Claims assigning her a specific diagnosis based on photographs or videos are speculation. Appearance alone cannot establish whether someone has an eating disorder or any other medical condition.

Why do people feel entitled to comment on celebrities’ bodies?

Several psychological and sociological processes may contribute. Parasocial relationships can create a sense of familiarity with celebrities despite the relationship being one-sided. Social proof can make speculation appear credible when thousands of other people repeat it. Online environments can also reduce feelings of individual accountability, allowing comments that might feel inappropriate face-to-face to become normalized within a crowd.

⸻

About the Author

Jan Dominy is a Relationship Scientist with a background in psychology and sociology who writes about relationships, human behavior, culture, technology, and the ways social forces shape how we connect with one another.

By: Jan Dominy aka Problem

Only two of HBO’s four episodes of The Man Will Burn have been released, so I don’t consider this a review. It’s simply my reaction at the halfway point.

I’ve been attending Burning Man for years, and I live in Reno, Nevada, close enough that Burning Man isn’t just a week in the desert. It’s part of the rhythm of life here. Over the years, I’ve gotten to know many of the people who spend months building Black Rock City before most of us ever arrive. I’ve visited Gerlach. I’ve spent time at the Ranch. I’ve shared meals and conversations with members of the Department of Public Works and others whose work is largely invisible to participants. I’ve seen firsthand that Black Rock City doesn’t simply appear each August. It is built through an extraordinary amount of planning, labor, and dedication by people who believe deeply in what they’re creating.

That perspective undoubtedly shapes how I’m watching this series.

So far, I think HBO has done something that most media about Burning Man fails to do. It treats Burning Man as something worth taking seriously. For decades, most documentaries and news stories have reduced it to one of three narratives: a giant party, a playground for wealthy tech executives, or a gathering of eccentric people in outrageous costumes. The Man Will Burn acknowledges those elements, but it also asks larger questions about community, leadership, culture, and how an organization evolves while trying to stay true to its founding principles.

That alone makes it worth watching.

One of my favorite parts so far has been seeing John Law included in the story. Burning Man’s history has never been simple, and it shouldn’t be told that way. John Law’s perspective reminds viewers that the event grew out of collaboration, disagreement, experimentation, and competing visions. Communities are healthier when they’re willing to acknowledge the complexity of their own history rather than smoothing it into a neat origin story.

I also appreciated hearing Marian Goodell say she would step down if someone demonstrated they were capable of leading the organization forward. Whether you agree with every decision made by Burning Man Project or not, I found that comment refreshingly honest. Succession is one of the hardest challenges any organization faces, especially one built around a culture rather than a product. Leadership isn’t simply about replacing a person. It’s about preparing the next generation to steward something that thousands of people care deeply about.

I also found myself uncomfortable seeing billionaire Kimbal Musk serving on the board. For me, Burning Man has always represented a community built from the ground up by artists, volunteers, and people willing to give their time and labor. While I recognize that organizations of this size often seek board members with fundraising experience and resources, I can’t help feeling that the board should more strongly reflect the people who have spent decades building Black Rock City.

I also can’t ignore that Kimbal Musk’s name has appeared in public reporting related to Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t agree with minimizing the significance of that association. I believe that any connection to Jeffrey Epstein represents a serious lapse in judgment, and for me, that alone is disqualifying. Even so, I believe organizations like Burning Man should be especially mindful of how board members are perceived. Fairly or unfairly, associations that raise public questions can become distractions from an organization’s mission. At a time when public trust in institutions is already fragile, I think Burning Man should hold itself to an exceptionally high standard, not only in its governance, but also in the public confidence its leadership inspires.

Where the documentary has lost me a little is in its portrayal of the 2021 renegade burn.

I understand why so many people remember that year fondly. For some, it felt spontaneous. It felt raw. It reminded them of an earlier era. I don’t dismiss those experiences. It, however, wasn’t Black Rock City, and that distinction matters to me.

The reason I return to Burning Man every year isn’t simply for the art, the music, or the freedom to express yourself. Those things are wonderful, but they aren’t what I find most fascinating.

I go because tens of thousands of people voluntarily build a functioning city in one of the harshest environments imaginable.

A city with streets, neighborhoods, emergency services, infrastructure, art support, Rangers, Greeters, placement teams, sanitation, and countless volunteers who quietly keep everything running.

That’s the experiment.

The city itself is one of the greatest works of art Burning Man has ever created.

The renegade burn may have captured pieces of the culture, but it wasn’t the same social experiment. Watching people gather in the desert is interesting. Watching people build and sustain a city together is extraordinary.

That leads to my biggest disappointment with the series so far.

Where is DPW?

Where are the people who spend months in the desert making this impossible place possible?

Living in Reno has given me opportunities that many participants don’t have. I’ve spent time with the people who build Black Rock City long before the gates open. I’ve seen the scale of the work. I’ve watched the pride they take in creating something that will exist for only a few weeks before disappearing almost completely.

Without them, there is no Burning Man.

If The Man Will Burn wants to tell the story of Black Rock City, I hope the second half spends more time telling theirs. Burning Man isn’t just experienced by participants. It’s created by builders.

As someone with a background in psychology and sociology, I think that’s the part of Burning Man that fascinates me most.

Every year, tens of thousands of strangers voluntarily cooperate to create a functioning society. They establish norms, solve problems, resolve conflicts, care for one another, and collectively maintain a city that didn’t exist a month earlier and won’t exist a month later.

Maybe that’s why I find myself slightly at odds with some of the documentary’s framing. So far, it has done an excellent job telling the story of Burning Man as an organization. I’m still waiting for it to fully tell the story of Black Rock City as a living, breathing community. Fortunately, we’re only halfway through.

I’m genuinely enjoying the series, but I wouldn’t call it one of the most thoughtful portrayals of Burning Man. For that, I still prefer the yearly documentary 24 Hours at Burning Man, directed and produced by longtime Burner Mark Day. His work consistently captures the spirit of the event in a way that feels more grounded in the lived experience of participants. That said, I’m still hoping the final two episodes shift some of their attention toward the people whose names rarely appear in headlines, whose faces most participants never know, and whose work makes the entire experiment possible.

The burn may be what the world remembers.

But the city is what keeps me coming back.

By: Jan Dominy

It is two o’clock in the morning, and someone has been talking to ChatGPT for hours.

Not because they need help writing an email or debugging code, but because they have spent the last three hours replaying an argument with their partner. They cannot decide whether they were unreasonable, whether they overreacted, or whether they have somehow become impossible to love. Ordinarily, this might be the moment they wake a friend, fill pages in a journal, or count the days until their next therapy appointment. Instead, they open an AI chatbot and begin typing.

They describe the argument in exhausting detail. They explain the history leading up to it, recount the exact words that were exchanged, and work through years of context that no search engine could ever understand. The chatbot asks thoughtful follow-up questions, points out cognitive distortions, suggests alternative interpretations of the conflict, and gently challenges conclusions that had felt obvious only minutes earlier. An hour passes almost without notice.

When they finally close the conversation, nothing about their circumstances has changed. The relationship may still be in trouble. Tomorrow’s problems have not disappeared. Yet something undeniably feels different. Their breathing has slowed. Their thoughts have become more organized. The emotional knot that seemed impossible to untangle now feels loose enough to examine.

If that scenario sounds familiar, you are far from alone.

Millions of people have quietly begun using artificial intelligence to process emotions, organize difficult thoughts, rehearse uncomfortable conversations, or simply think out loud without interruption. Increasingly, people describe this experience as AI therapy, whether or not a licensed therapist is involved. The practice has sparked predictable debate. Some therapists view it as a dangerous substitute for mental health care. Others dismiss it as little more than sophisticated autocomplete wrapped in comforting language. Meanwhile, the people actually using it often report something much simpler.

“It helped.”

I believe them.

That statement should not make psychologists defensive. It should make us curious.

Over the past year, I have spent hundreds of hours exploring how people use generative AI for reflection, creativity, communication, and increasingly, emotional support. The more I study the technology, the less interested I become in whether AI can replace therapists and the more interested I become in what it reveals about us.

If conversations with artificial intelligence genuinely help people feel calmer, think more clearly, or better understand themselves, then perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. Rather than debating whether AI can replace therapy, we should begin by asking what therapy actually is. Only then can we understand which parts artificial intelligence performs remarkably well, which parts it can only imitate, and why that distinction tells us something important about human beings.

Therapy Is Not One Thing

We often talk about therapy as though it were a single service. We ask whether therapy “works” or whether AI can “replace therapy,” as though every minute spent in a therapist’s office accomplishes the same goal.

It doesn’t.

A good therapist performs many different roles, often within the same session. They teach psychological concepts that help clients understand themselves, identify patterns that have remained invisible for years. Therapists challenge distorted thinking, encourage healthier behaviors, and provide accountability when old habits begin pulling someone backward. Sometimes they simply witness another person’s pain without rushing to solve it.

All of those experiences fall under the umbrella of therapy, but they are not the same psychological process.

Once we recognize that, the conversation about AI changes dramatically.

Artificial intelligence excels at certain aspects of therapeutic work. It organizes scattered thoughts into coherent narratives, explains attachment theory, cognitive behavioral therapy, or family systems in language that matches a person’s level of understanding, patiently explores an idea from multiple angles without becoming frustrated or distracted. It remembers conversations from weeks ago and notices recurring themes that many people overlook in themselves.

Those abilities matter because thinking clearly changes lives.

The mistake people make is assuming that because AI performs some therapeutic functions exceptionally well, it must therefore perform all of them equally well. That conclusion misunderstands both psychotherapy and artificial intelligence.

Why It Works So Well for Me

My own experience with AI probably differs from many people’s because of my background in psychology and sociology. I don’t expect it to diagnose me or tell me what to believe, and I don’t mistake confidence for expertise or fluency for wisdom. Instead, I use it as an extraordinarily capable thinking partner.

When I write, I use AI to pressure-test ideas, identify weaknesses in an argument, explore competing perspectives, and organize concepts that would otherwise remain scattered across dozens of browser tabs and notebooks. When I reflect on my own life, I ask it to challenge my assumptions, point out possible cognitive distortions, and remind me of theories that might explain what I am experiencing. Sometimes I agree with its conclusions, oftenI don’t.

The disagreement is part of the value.

Unlike a journal, AI talks back, never grows tired of hearing me revisit the same problem for the twentieth time, understands the context surrounding the question instead of forcing me to start over every time I ask something new.

For someone who already possesses a foundation in psychology, the experience feels less like consulting an oracle and more like collaborating with an endlessly patient colleague.

I don’t think AI replaces my thinking.

I think it gives my thinking somewhere to happen.

The Loneliness Question We Keep Avoiding

The more I watch this conversation unfold, the more convinced I become that AI therapy is not really a story about artificial intelligence.

It is a story about loneliness and the growing shortage of meaningful human connection.

The American Psychological Association has devoted enormous attention to the growing epidemic of loneliness and social isolation in the United States. The former Surgeon General described loneliness as a public health crisis, comparing its health consequences to well-established physical risk factors. Whether we measure fewer close friendships, declining participation in community organizations, increasing geographic mobility, or the simple reality that many adults struggle to find someone willing to listen without judgment, the pattern remains remarkably consistent.

People feel alone.

Against that backdrop, it should surprise no one that millions of people have begun talking to software.

AI did not create our loneliness.

It revealed it.

People are not flocking to chatbots because machines have suddenly become superior companions. They are using them because attentive, patient, emotionally available conversation has become increasingly difficult to find. Friends have jobs, families, responsibilities, and limits. Therapists have waitlists. Many people cannot afford weekly appointments. Others simply need somewhere to think at two o’clock on a Tuesday morning.

Artificial intelligence arrived at exactly the moment society created enormous demand for uninterrupted conversation. Recent surveys from the American Psychological Association found that nearly seven in ten Americans needed more emotional support than they received during the previous year. When millions of people share the same unmet need, it should not surprise us that many eventually seek conversation wherever conversation is available.

That should concern us far more than the technology itself.

Harry Harlow’s Wire Monkey

Long before anyone imagined artificial intelligence, psychologist Harry Harlow conducted one of the most influential and controversial experiments in developmental psychology. Infant rhesus monkeys were given two surrogate mothers. One consisted of little more than wire and a bottle of milk, while the other offered no food but was covered in soft cloth.

The monkeys consistently chose the cloth mother. Whenever something frightened them, they did not run toward the source of nourishment. They ran toward comfort.

People often summarize Harlow’s work by saying that babies need affection, but I think that interpretation misses the deeper lesson. Food and connection solve different biological problems. One keeps the body alive, while the other teaches the nervous system what safety feels like. Those needs complement one another rather than compete, and Harlow’s experiments demonstrated that nourishment alone can never produce emotional security.

Cuddling the Wire Monkey

Whenever people ask whether AI can replace therapy, I find myself thinking about Harlow’s wire monkey. The wire mother provided something essential. It kept the infant monkeys alive. Yet no amount of nourishment could replace the comfort, safety, and emotional regulation they found in the cloth mother. Harlow’s experiment was never really about choosing one over the other. It revealed that different needs require different kinds of care.

Artificial intelligence occupies a remarkably similar place in our lives. It feeds us ideas, organizes our thinking, remembers details we have forgotten, helps us untangle emotional knots, and often provides genuinely useful psychological insight. In some respects, it performs those cognitive tasks more consistently than another person ever could.

That has real value. Clarity changes behavior. Understanding ourselves better changes relationships, and organizing our thoughts often reduces anxiety all by itself. Human beings regulate emotion through language, so translating overwhelming feelings into a coherent narrative frequently lowers their intensity. AI excels at guiding that process when no other person is available.

None of that, however, allows artificial intelligence to share in the experience of being human. It can recognize patterns in grief without mourning someone it loved, generate comforting words without feeling relief when you tell it that you are finally okay, and encourage you through heartbreak, celebrate your successes, but it never experiences hope, concern, joy, or loss alongside you. It can simulate those moments with astonishing skill, yet simulation is not participation.

That distinction matters because healing is not only about understanding ourselves. It is also about being understood by another living nervous system.

The Future Is Partnership, Not Replacement

Therapists who view AI primarily as competition may be asking the wrong question.

Imagine clients arriving at therapy with weeks of organized reflections, timelines of important life events, identified cognitive distortions, drafted boundary conversations, and thoughtful questions that emerged through conversations with AI between sessions.

Instead of spending valuable time reconstructing the facts of a situation, therapists could spend more time exploring what those facts actually mean.

Artificial intelligence could become one of the most effective preparation tools psychotherapy has ever seen. It can shoulder enormous amounts of cognitive work, leaving therapists free to focus on the parts of healing that require another human being.

The future of AI therapy may not involve choosing between psychologists and artificial intelligence.

It may involve understanding exactly what each does best.

We Were Never Trying to Replace the Cloth Monkey

The growing popularity of AI therapy does not convince me that human connection has become obsolete. If anything, it convinces me of the opposite. Millions of people are searching for somewhere to think and communicate honestly without interruption, judgment, or exhaustion. Artificial intelligence has met that need with remarkable effectiveness, and I suspect it will continue doing so for years to come.

Thinking and communicating, however, have never been the same activity.

Harry Harlow’s monkeys understood something profound long before any of us carried powerful computers in our pockets. When life becomes frightening, confusing, joyful, or unbearably painful, information alone is never enough. Mammals reach for warmth, presence, and responsive connection because those experiences shape us in ways knowledge never can.

AI can help us think. In many cases, it can even help us begin to heal. Healing, however, has always depended on more than insight alone. Eventually, every healthy nervous system reaches toward another living one.

Artificial intelligence has not replaced that truth.

If anything, it has reminded us how deeply we still need each other.

Originially published on jandominy.com.

Every August, as Burning Man gets closer, my house slowly transforms into a staging area. Clothes hang from every available surface. Jewelry spreads across tables. Boots line the floor. Storage bins appear from closets. For a few weeks, my life revolves around one question.

How am I going to organize two weeks’ worth of clothing for one of the harshest environments on Earth?

This year I added something new to the process. I used generative AI to help me visualize every outfit, create printable look cards, and organize my packing in a way I had never attempted before. The experience reminded me that AI can be an incredibly practical creative tool when you use it thoughtfully.

That realization also felt a little ironic.

Burning Man has become one of the most openly skeptical communities when it comes to generative AI. I understand why. There are legitimate conversations to have about copyright, environmental impact, artist compensation, misinformation, and the flood of low quality AI content filling the internet. Those concerns deserve attention.

At the same time, Burning Man has always celebrated experimentation. It embraces technology, engineering, fabrication, digital art, and creative problem solving. We gather in one of the most inhospitable places imaginable to build temporary cities and enormous works of art simply because we believe creativity has value.

That spirit of experimentation is exactly what drew me toward using AI for this project.

Not to replace my creativity, but to extend it.

My Slightly Obsessive Burning Man Packing System

People often ask how I manage to pack for nearly two weeks on playa without completely losing track of my wardrobe.

The answer is surprisingly simple.

Every complete outfit goes into its own gallon Ziplock bag.

Each bag contains everything I need for that look. Clothing, jewelry, accessories, matching socks, and usually two pairs of underwear all stay together. Nothing gets separated. Nothing disappears into the bottom of a storage bin. When it’s time to get dressed, I grab one bag and everything I need comes with it.

The bags have another advantage that experienced Burners will appreciate.

Dust.

Ziplock bags are not airtight, but they do a remarkably good job of keeping playa dust off clothes that haven’t been worn yet. Instead of unpacking my entire wardrobe every morning, I only expose the outfit I’m wearing that day. Everything else stays relatively clean until I need it.

The system works so well that I’ve used it for years.

My work build clothing follows the same idea with one small difference. I usually arrive for Work Build and stay through Monday or Tuesday after the event, so I need several days of comfortable work clothes before Burning Man officially begins. Those bags contain tank tops, shorts, comfortable socks, and practical clothing for building camp. I don’t assign those to specific days. I simply grab whichever work bag comes next.

Organization has always been part of my Burn.

I am exactly the kind of person who would spend six hours color-coding a spreadsheet to save myself fifteen minutes later. This packing system isnot normal, i know this. I also don’t care. The week before Burning Man is chaotic enough without trying to remember which pair of goggles went with which coat.

The Problem I Wanted to Solve

A few weeks after packing, I rarely remember every accessory that belongs with every outfit. The details that felt so clear when I was assembling everything start to blur together, and I find myself second-guessing even the simplest combinations. Did the silver belt go with Tuesday or Thursday? Which necklace did I buy for the white party? Where did I put the bunny ears? Those small uncertainties add up quickly, especially when everything is sealed away in separate bags.

What I realized I needed was something visual to anchor all of those decisions. Instead of opening every bag to check its contents and piece things together from memory, I wanted a printed card that showed exactly what each completed outfit should look like. Alongside that image, I wanted a checklist of everything packed inside so I could confirm at a glance that nothing was missing.

In other words, I wanted adult paper dolls.

Using AI as My Wardrobe Stylist

The workflow turned out to be surprisingly straightforward.

I started with a full body photograph of myself wearing ordinary clothes in a neutral pose, making sure the lighting was good so the AI would have a clear reference for my proportions and posture.

Next, I collected product photos from the websites where I had purchased each item. Jackets, skirts, dresses, boots, belts, hats, jewelry, gloves, coats, accessories, and everything else already existed as clean product photography from the retailers, which made them easy to use.

Then I asked ChatGPT to dress me. The prompts were simple at first: replace the outfit, use these boots, add this jacket, keep the white background, make it photorealistic.

As each outfit became more complex, the prompting became more detailed. Sometimes the AI nailed it on the first attempt, while other times we went through several revisions before everything looked right.

That iterative process became the real creative work.

Teaching AI What I Actually Look Like

One challenge became obvious almost immediately.

Generative AI likes to invent people. Sometimes my face changed, my hairstyle changed, or it garbled color a bit. Often, it quietly decided I had lost twenty pounds. Instead of accepting those mistakes, I corrected them.

I uploaded additional reference photos of my face until it consistently resembled me. When the hairstyle drifted away from reality, I added more reference images showing my shoulder length hair. Whenever my body proportions changed, I reminded the AI that I am five feet tall, weigh about 165 pounds, wear a size 12, and have measurements that reflect my actual body instead of an idealized fashion model.

Every revision made the results more accurate. People often imagine AI as something that magically reads your mind, but it doesn’t. Better information produces better results. Just like working with a human artist, the quality of the outcome depends heavily on how well you communicate what you’re trying to achieve.

Building My Look Cards

Once each outfit looked the way I wanted, I turned those images into printable packing sheets that could travel with the clothing itself. I designed each page to be both functional and easy to read at a glance, making sure the visual layout matched how I actually think about getting dressed.

Every page includes a large rendering of the completed outfit, paired with a clearly organized list of the clothing, jewelry, and accessories packed inside that specific bag. Seeing everything together in one place makes it much easier to confirm that nothing has been forgotten before I seal the bag.

Those pages slide directly into the Ziplock bags, so each outfit carries its own reference guide. When I reach for a bag, I don’t have to rely on memory or dig through layers to figure out what’s inside.

Now every outfit has its own visual inventory, which adds a surprising level of clarity and confidence to the entire packing process. Instead of guessing or second-guessing myself, I can quickly verify exactly what I have prepared.

If I forget what belongs in a particular bag while unpacking after the Burn, I simply look at the card and immediately know what should be there. If something goes missing during the event, I also have a clear reference for what I’m trying to track down.

The entire system feels less like packing and more like building a personal costume archive, where each look is documented, preserved, and ready to be recreated whenever I want.

AI Didn’t Create My Style

One misconception I see often is that using AI means allowing a computer to make creative decisions for you. That couldn’t be further from what happened here.

I chose every piece of clothing and bought every accessory myself. I coordinated each outfit, deciding exactly what jewelry belonged with each look and how every layer worked together. Every creative decision was mine from start to finish.

The AI didn’t invent any of it. Its role was simply to assemble pieces I already owned into realistic visual references that helped me stay organized. If anything, it functioned more like a very patient stylist who never got tired of trying another combination.

AI Isn’t Automatically Slop

One of the easiest assumptions people make about generative AI is that it produces instant results with almost no effort from the person using it.

That wasn’t my experience at all.

I worked on this project off and on for an entire day. Spent hours shopping online for pieces I had already purchased so I could download clean product photos. I organized reference images, uploaded clothing one piece at a time, wrote prompts, revised prompts, corrected mistakes, adjusted body proportions, replaced faces, fixed hairstyles, swapped accessories, and repeated that process over and over until each outfit matched the vision I already had in my head.

None of that felt lazy.

It felt creative.

The difference wasn’t that AI removed the work. The difference was that it changed the kind of work I was doing.

Ten years ago I probably would have attempted something similar in Photoshop. I would have cut clothing out by hand, layered every piece individually, warped fabrics to fit my body, corrected shadows, adjusted perspective, and repeated that process dozens of times. Creating a complete collection of outfit cards could easily have taken several days of meticulous editing.

With generative AI, I accomplished the same goal in hours instead of days.

Burning Man and AI Have More in Common Than We Admit

Burning Man has always lived where art, technology, engineering, and experimentation intersect. Artists weld steel into impossible sculptures, engineers build mutant vehicles that look like science fiction, programmers create interactive installations, and designers imagine entire temporary worlds that disappear a week later. None of those things diminish human creativity simply because technology played a role in bringing them to life.

Generative AI deserves the same thoughtful evaluation. That doesn’t mean ignoring its problems. Environmental costs matter. Copyright matters. Fair compensation for artists matters. These are important conversations, and we should continue having them with care and intention.

At the same time, rejecting every practical application simply because the tool exists doesn’t move those conversations forward. Using AI to organize my wardrobe didn’t replace an artist; it helped me solve a problem. Sometimes innovation looks revolutionary, and sometimes it looks like a stack of labeled Ziplock bags that make getting dressed in the desert a little easier.

Final Thoughts

When I arrive on playa this year, every outfit will already be packed, organized, and waiting inside its own labeled bag. Every accessory will have a home. Every look will have a printed reference card. I’ll spend less time digging through bins and more time enjoying the experience I came there for.

AI didn’t design my wardrobe, create my style, or replace my creativity.

It simply helped me organize something I had already imagined.

To me, that’s where generative AI shines. Not as a replacement for human creativity, but as a tool that helps creative people spend less time wrestling with logistics and more time making the things only they could have imagined in the first place.

____________________________

About the Author

Jan Dominy is a relationship scientist, writer, and AI enthusiast exploring the intersection of human behavior, emerging technology, and modern life. Her work spans relationships, psychology, creativity, and the practical ways new tools can expand, rather than replace, human expression.

This article continues a second year of writing about the rituals, preparation, and culture surrounding Burning Man through a personal lens, documenting not just the event itself, but the creative process of getting there.

Originally published on JanDominy.com.

By: Jan Dominy

I can’t stop thinking about that question.

We tell people not to trust AI to write their term papers. Every hallucinated fact becomes another reminder to verify its output. We caution people to double-check its medical advice, question its legal information, and never take its answers at face value.

And then, without missing a beat, we ask it:

“Am I autistic?”

“Do I have ADHD?”

“Is my partner a narcissist?”

“Do I have trauma?”

“Why am I like this?”

Somewhere along the way, we turned diagnosis into the destination instead of the starting line. Let me be clear: mental illness is real. Neurodevelopmental disorders are real. Therapy changes lives.

Clinicians sometimes misdiagnose people. They also miss diagnoses entirely. For decades, psychology overlooked many women, minorities, and adults, and the field is still working to correct those blind spots. None of this article argues otherwise. This article is about something different: what we’ve started doing after the diagnosis — or more accurately, what we’ve stopped doing.

The DSM-5 Isn’t a BuzzFeed Quiz

The DSM-5 isn’t a BuzzFeed quiz.

The American Psychiatric Association created the DSM-5 to help clinicians diagnose and treat mental disorders, not so people could scroll through symptom lists at one in the morning, relate to four bullet points, and walk away with a new identity.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is a clinical reference. Mental health professionals use it to compare symptom patterns, rule out competing explanations, evaluate how long symptoms have been present, determine whether those symptoms create meaningful impairment, and ultimately decide which diagnosis best fits the whole picture.

That’s a lot different than asking, “Does this sound like me?” In practice, diagnosis is not a simple exercise in matching a few familiar traits to a checklist; it involves careful clinical judgment that takes into account context, duration, severity, and the ways symptoms affect a person’s daily functioning. Clinicians weigh multiple possibilities, rule out alternative explanations, and consider the whole person rather than isolated characteristics. Most importantly, diagnosis has always had a clear purpose: to guide treatment. It is meant to answer a single, practical question:

What is the best evidence-based path to help this person suffer less?

That is the point. A diagnosis is not the finish line where understanding ends; it is the starting point from which meaningful change and support can begin.

When Did Labels Become the Goal?

Something has shifted culturally in the way we think about mental health and diagnosis. Not long ago, receiving a diagnosis was typically understood as a step along the path toward treatment, a way to clarify what was happening so that a person could begin addressing it. Today, however, it often feels as though the diagnosis itself has become the destination. For many people, once they arrive at a label that feels accurate or validating, the urgency to pursue treatment seems to fade.

I understand why this happens. A label can be profoundly relieving. A label can bring clarity to years of confusion and frustration. Patterns that once felt random suddenly make sense. It gives people words for experiences they never quite knew how to explain, making conversations with others, and even with themselves, a little easier.

It can also open the door to community. Finding people who genuinely understand your experience can reduce isolation, validate your struggles, and remind you that you aren’t the only one walking this path.

In some cases, a diagnosis can also provide practical benefits. It may open the door to accommodations in school or the workplace, make it easier to access insurance coverage, or offer legal protections that improve a person’s quality of life. These are meaningful and important outcomes, and they highlight why labels can matter so much.

But labels, on their own, do not heal people. A diagnosis can explain suffering, but it does not automatically reduce it. Understanding what you are experiencing is an important step, but it is only the beginning. Without some form of treatment, support, or intentional change, the underlying challenges often remain exactly as they were before the label was applied.

The Internet Loves an Identity

Social media didn’t invent mental illness, but it has dramatically changed how we talk about it and how quickly those conversations spread. Platforms that were originally designed for entertainment and connection have become major hubs for psychological language, where complex clinical ideas are distilled into short, highly shareable content.

Today, it’s entirely possible to spend an evening scrolling through videos where creators explain autism, ADHD, OCD, attachment styles, trauma responses, personality disorders, and nearly every other psychological concept imaginable. For many people, this is their first exposure to these ideas, and in some cases, it can be genuinely helpful. Some of this content is thoughtfully created, grounded in real knowledge, and encourages viewers to seek professional help when needed. It can reduce stigma, normalize difficult experiences, and make people feel less alone in ways that traditional systems have often failed to do.

That part is undeniably positive.

At the same time, social media platforms are built to reward clarity, confidence, and emotional resonance. Content that feels certain and personally meaningful tends to perform better than content that is cautious or nuanced. As a result, the stories that rise to the top are often the ones that make us feel immediately understood.

Algorithms then amplify this effect. They are designed to notice what captures our attention and give us more of it. If one video about ADHD feels relatable, the platform will likely show you many more just like it. Over time, this repetition can create a powerful sense of recognition. What begins as a possibility — something to consider or explore — can gradually start to feel like a definitive answer.

Eventually, it stops feeling like a question.

It starts feeling like a conclusion.

Community Is Powerful

Finding people who understand you can be life-changing. I’ve watched communities help people feel less alone, reduce shame, and encourage people to seek therapy and build healthier lives. Community is one of the most powerful forms of healing we have.

But communities have blind spots too. Sometimes a community becomes so focused on helping people feel understood that it stops asking whether the conclusion is actually correct.

Psychologists have studied confirmation bias for decades. Humans naturally notice information that supports what we already believe and often overlook information that challenges it. That tendency doesn’t disappear just because the topic is mental health. If anything, identity can make it even stronger.

Belonging feels good. Being wrong doesn’t.

Enter AI

Now we’ve introduced something entirely new into the equation. Millions of people are using AI to think through their emotions, relationships, childhoods, and mental health.

For the record, I’m unapologetically pro-AI, and I’m also unapologetically pro-human. Those are not competing values.

I use AI almost every day. It helps me research, organize complicated ideas, write more clearly, and challenge my own thinking. I believe AI is going to become one of the most important technologies of our lifetime. I also believe we have to be thoughtful about what we’re asking it to do.

Can AI Be Your Therapist?

This is where the conversation usually becomes polarized. One side insists AI should never be involved in mental health, while the other treats it like the inevitable future of therapy. I think reality is much more interesting than either extreme.

AI is incredibly useful in ways that are already helping people. It can support journaling, explain psychological concepts in accessible language, and introduce evidence-based techniques like cognitive behavioral strategies. It can even help someone prepare for therapy by organizing their thoughts or identifying patterns they want to discuss. For people who can’t afford therapy or are sitting on a six-month waiting list, those capabilities matter. Access matters.

But therapy has never been just information. Back in the 1950s, psychologist Carl Rogers argued that one of the foundations of effective therapy was something he called unconditional positive regard. Along with empathy and genuineness, he believed that the relationship itself was part of what helped people grow.

That raises a fascinating question:

Can a machine genuinely offer unconditional positive regard? This idea, rooted in humanistic psychology, suggests a deep, authentic acceptance that goes beyond surface-level understanding. It implies a presence that is not only responsive but also emotionally attuned in a way that fosters trust and growth.

Or is it simulating empathy well enough that our brains respond anyway? Perhaps what matters is not whether the empathy is real in a human sense, but whether it feels real enough to produce meaningful effects. If our minds interpret the interaction as supportive and understanding, the outcome might still be beneficial, even if the source lacks true emotional experience.

I don’t know the answer. It’s a complex question that touches on both the nature of consciousness and the mechanisms of human connection.

I’m not convinced psychology knows the answer yet either. The field is still grappling with how to define and measure empathy, let alone determine whether it can be authentically replicated by machines.

But I think it’s a question worth asking.

Validation Isn’t the Same Thing as Treatment

One of my biggest concerns isn’t AI. It’s what we expect from it.

Validation feels wonderful, and sometimes it’s exactly what we need. Feeling seen and understood can be deeply comforting, especially when we’ve spent a long time questioning our own experiences. But validation and treatment are not synonyms, and confusing the two can quietly limit our growth.

A good therapist doesn’t only tell you that your feelings make sense. They also challenge cognitive distortions, notice inconsistencies, and ask uncomfortable questions. They gently point out patterns you may not see yourself, helping you connect dots that are difficult to recognize from the inside.

Sometimes they tell you something you don’t want to hear, because helping you grow is more important than helping you feel immediately validated. That’s a very different job.

Keeping the Humanity in the Humanities

I don’t think AI is the enemy. Fear has never been a particularly good innovation strategy, but neither is blind enthusiasm. Technology should make us better thinkers, not replace thinking. AI should help us ask better questions, not become the unquestioned authority on the biggest questions of our lives.

A diagnosis can be life-changing, and a community can be life-saving. AI can become an extraordinary tool for education, reflection, and accessibility. But none of those things should replace curiosity. None of them should replace treatment. And none of them should convince us that understanding ourselves is the same thing as healing ourselves.

A diagnosis can tell you where to begin.

Even an expert opinion, grounded in real understanding and empathy, can’t walk the journey for you.
______________________________
Originally published on www.jandominy.com
Jan Dominy is a relationship scientist and writer exploring the intersection of psychology, relationships, and artificial intelligence. She enjoys good science, difficult conversations, and making both humans and AI explain themselves.

There is something deeply funny about watching people argue with AI like it is a bad boyfriend, a lazy coworker, a psychic assistant, a therapist, a search engine, and a mildly haunted intern all at the same time.

I say this with love because I have absolutely done it.

I have snapped at AI when it gave me something bland. I have praised it like a golden retriever when it finally understood the assignment. I have overexplained myself. I have underexplained myself and then gotten annoyed when the response was wrong. I have said “no, not like that” with the energy of a person sending back an undercooked steak.

The more I use AI, the more convinced I am that our chats with these tools are not just about technology. They are also about communication style.

This is part of why I do not hide my use of AI. I am not interested in pretending every piece of writing arrives fully formed out of pure, untouched inspiration. I use AI to organize, sharpen, research, and pressure-test my thoughts. It does not replace my taste, my lived experience, my anger, my humor, my boundaries, or my sentence rhythm.

That last part matters. As AI becomes more embedded in creative work, emotional processing, research, and everyday life, our relationship with it starts to reveal something about us. Not because AI is human. Not because it “knows” us in the way a person does. Because communication is never only about the other party. Communication is also about how we make ourselves understood, how we react when we feel misunderstood, how we handle feedback, how specific we are willing to be, and how much responsibility we take for the exchange.

That is where things get interesting.

Some people approach AI with direct communication. They give clear instructions, state the goal, name the tone, describe the audience, and correct the output without making it a whole emotional event. These people tend to get better results faster because they understand that clarity can be firm without being harsh.

Some people approach AI with a passive communication style. They ask vaguely, accept whatever comes back, and then feel disappointed because the result does not sound like them. They may not want to be “too demanding,” even with a machine. The outcome is usually content that comes across as flat, overly refined, or strangely detached from any real point of view.

Some people go fully aggressive with it. They bark commands, insult the output, demand perfection, and treat every bad draft like a betrayal. This can produce better revisions in the short term, but it also suggests a need to control the process at all costs. If every interaction becomes a fight for control, even with software, it may be worth asking where else that pattern is showing up.

The best AI interactions tend to be assertive, not just direct. Assertive prompting knows the goal, gives context, corrects the output, and stays engaged without becoming dramatic about the fact that the first draft was not perfect. It is the difference between “write this for me” and “help me get closer to what I actually mean.”

Then there is a slightly darker version of passive-aggressive communication that I keep seeing, which is people setting AI up to fail and then acting like they caught it in a lie. They will give it incomplete or misleading prompts, strip out context, or ask leading questions designed to produce a wrong answer, and then screenshot the result like they just exposed a scandal. It is less about curiosity and more about proving a point. And honestly, it feels familiar. People have been doing this to each other forever. We ask questions we already have an answer to. We leave out key details. We test instead of communicate. The difference is that now we are doing it to a machine and still expecting it to read between lines we never wrote.

This is where AI becomes strangely useful as a communication mirror, not just in the output you get, but in the patterns you bring into the interaction. If you cannot tell an AI what you want, it is worth asking where else you might be expecting people to guess; if you accept writing that does not sound like you because you do not want to revise it, where else you might be outsourcing your voice; and if you keep demanding better results without learning how to ask better questions, where else you might be mistaking frustration for standards.

This is why I keep coming back to the whole “AI slop” conversation. Yes, there is a lot of bad AI-generated content out there. You have probably seen it. It often feels like generic, over-processed writing that prioritizes polish over substance. Everything is technically fine, but nothing actually lands. It is all “navigate the complexities” and “unlock your potential” with zero personality behind it.

I remember the first time I tried to use AI to draft something I planned to post. It gave me a clean, polished paragraph that, on paper, was completely acceptable…I hated it. It was so smooth it felt fake. I ended up rewriting almost the entire thing, but that moment stuck with me. The problem was not that the tool failed. The problem was that if I had posted it as-is, I would have been the one disappearing from my own writing.

That is why I do not think the issue is simply that AI exists. The issue is that people are publishing things without taste. They are using the tool without a point of view. They let the machine sand down the edges, remove the weirdness, flatten the emotion, and strip out the little contradictions that make something feel human, then they hit publish because it sounds “good enough.” But “good enough” is not the same as sounding like yourself. That is not really an AI problem. It is a communication problem, because good communication requires participation, revision, knowing what you meant, noticing when you were misunderstood, and staying in the conversation long enough to repair the meaning. That is true with partners, friends, and readers, and apparently it is true with the robot in the browser too.

When I work with AI, I am not asking it to become me. I am asking it to help me hear myself more clearly. Sometimes it gives me a structure I could not find on my own. Sometimes it spits out a line that makes me physically cringe, and weirdly, that’s what snaps me back into what I actually want to say. Sometimes it hands me something so generically polished that I immediately know what I do not want to sound like.

That has value. A bad AI draft can be useful if you have enough taste to reject it. A decent AI draft can be useful if you have enough voice to reshape it. A good AI exchange can be useful if you understand that prompting is not magic. It is communication. The people who are going to thrive with AI are not the people who ask it to replace their thinking. They are the people who learn how to collaborate without disappearing. They know how to say: this is close, but softer. This is too polished. This sounds like a brochure. This lost the anger. This needs more lived experience. This is structurally useful, but emotionally wrong. This sentence is cute, but it is not mine.

I think our communication styles are going to matter more as AI becomes more normal. The tool may be artificial, but the way we relate to it is still deeply human. We bring our habits into the chat box. We bring our fear of being misunderstood. We bring our perfectionism. We bring our people-pleasing. We bring our control issues. We bring our longing to be helped without having to explain every little thing.

So yes, I use AI openly, curiously, and critically. Sometimes joyfully, sometimes with suspicion, and sometimes while muttering “absolutely not, George” at my screen.

AI did not make me a writer. It simply made it harder for me to abandon the writing I was already trying to do.

I had a voice before a model could imitate one badly. I had opinions before I had prompts. I was a writer before I used AI.

That is the part I keep coming back to.

The future of AI and creativity is not just about what machines can generate. It is about how we use the tool. AI is closer to a paintbrush than a painter. You cannot just press a brush to canvas and expect a masterpiece. You have to know what you are trying to create, how to guide the strokes, when to adjust, and when to start over.

AI works through communication. And right now, a lot of people are using it without knowing how to communicate clearly, specifically, or with intention. That is why so much of what we see feels flat. Not because the tool is inherently bad, but because the skill of using it is still underdeveloped.

Until we get better at that, AI slop will keep showing up everywhere.

But that is not the future I am interested in.

I am interested in what happens when people learn to use powerful tools without abandoning their own voice, and how developing deeper connections and communication skills shapes that process. The better we understand ourselves and others, the more intentional and precise our interactions become, whether with people or with technology. That same clarity leads to more thoughtful and personalized outputs.

Because the machine can generate language, but it cannot feel the weight of what you are trying to say, or the quiet urgency behind it. It cannot sit with your contradictions, your memories, your instincts, and choose what matters enough to be spoken.

Only you can decide what you mean.

About the Author: Jan Dominy is a writer, relationship scientist, and psychology graduate exploring the intersection of AI, communication, creativity, and modern human relationships. Through her work with Modern Polyamory, she writes about non-monogamy, emotional intelligence, identity, technology, and the messy, beautiful art of learning how to relate on purpose.

Read more at ModernPolyamory.com.

Imagine your phone lighting up on a quiet afternoon. A message arrives, maybe it’s a quick “thinking of you,” maybe it’s a long paragraph, maybe it’s nothing at all. Somewhere in that moment, without realizing it, you’re already interpreting what it means.

Before you read through these communication styles, pause for a second and think about how you actually reach for people. Do you send little updates throughout the day? Do you wait until you have something meaningful to say? Do you ask a lot of questions when something feels off? Do you need plans to feel secure? Do you respond when you have the mental capacity to respond well? Do you need space before you can even find your words?

Everyone thinks they are being reasonable. The person who wants a good morning text thinks consistency is basic care. The person who needs space thinks autonomy is basic respect. The person who wants a plan thinks follow-through is basic maturity. The person who replies when they have capacity thinks flexibility is basic adult life. The person who asks fourteen clarifying questions thinks they are creating emotional safety. The person who wants one deep conversation instead of twenty tiny updates thinks they are protecting the meaning of connection.

And then everybody sits around confused, irritated, and personally offended because somehow the people they love did not receive the instruction manual for “how communication obviously works.” That is where so many relationship conflicts begin.

People do not usually experience their communication style as a style; they experience it as common sense. So when someone communicates differently, it can feel like disrespect, avoidance, neediness, pressure, immaturity, or chaos. Sometimes someone really is being disrespectful. Sometimes someone really is being avoidant. Sometimes someone really is asking for more access than the relationship can hold. But a lot of the time, the conflict starts because two people are using different communication rhythms and both of them think their rhythm is the normal one.

So let’s talk about it — not as a personality test, not as a diagnosis, and not as another excuse to call your ex emotionally unavailable in a slightly more educated font. Let’s talk about communication styles as patterns, because these patterns can show us how people seek connection, manage uncertainty, protect their autonomy, and try to feel loved without losing themselves.

Communication Is More Than Talking

People love to say, “Communication is key.” Sure. But that sentence has been dragged through enough bad relationships to deserve a retirement plan.

Communication is not just talking more. Some people talk constantly and still avoid the truth, while others say very little and communicate beautifully through consistency, presence, and follow-through. Communication includes timing, rhythm, emotional tone, how fast someone responds, how much detail they share, how often they check in, how they ask for reassurance, and what they do when they feel overwhelmed.

In interpersonal relationship psychology, this matters because people experience connection through responsiveness. Harry Reis, Margaret Clark, and John Holmes have written about perceived partner responsiveness, which is essentially the sense that someone understands you, validates you, and cares about what matters to you. That does not always require a grand speech; sometimes it is a thoughtful reply, remembering something small, or simply not treating someone’s emotional needs like an annoying pop-up ad.

Attachment theory also matters here. John Bowlby argued that early relationships shape our expectations about whether others are safe, available, and responsive, and Mary Ainsworth later helped identify attachment patterns through her work. Adult relationships are not a simple copy and paste of childhood, but our histories absolutely influence what we interpret as closeness, distance, rejection, pressure, or safety.

This is why one person can see silence as peaceful while another experiences it as emotional distance, why one person sees planning as care while another feels pressure, and why one person sees questions as connection while another feels interrogated. The behavior matters, but the meaning attached to the behavior matters too.

The Daily Check-In

The Style

The Daily Check-In person feels connected through small, steady touchpoints. They like a good morning text, a tiny update, a random meme, or a quick “thinking of you” — little signals that say, “You exist in my world even while life is happening.” This style is built on emotional continuity, where the smallness itself becomes part of the intimacy.

Nobody is asking for a dramatic love letter before breakfast or a full itinerary with timestamps and supporting documentation. The Daily Check-In person usually just wants a thread of connection running through the day. For them, silence may not feel neutral; it can feel like distance, like being forgotten, or like the relationship has gone a little cold around the edges. That does not make them automatically needy — it makes them someone who feels loved through consistency.

Why Someone Might Communicate This Way

Someone may develop this style because consistency helps their nervous system relax. They may have had past relationships where silence meant withdrawal or emotional drift, or they may simply want a relationship to feel alive within the ordinary rhythm of the day. Sometimes it comes from a genuine love of small rituals, where a simple message or shared moment carries real meaning.

John and Julie Gottman’s work on bids for connection fits here. A bid can be small — a comment, a question, a joke — and daily check-ins are often made of these small doors into connection.

Most Compatible Styles

The Daily Check-In often works well with the Planned Connector because both value consistency, creating a relationship that feels steady and cared for. It can also work with the Over-Communicator when both enjoy frequent contact, though boundaries are important so that small moments do not spiral into over-analysis. The Real-Time Responder can also be compatible if they offer small acknowledgments, because even a quick “I saw this and will answer later” can prevent unnecessary tension.

Where It Can Clash

The Daily Check-In may struggle with the Space Enthusiast, where one person seeks connection through contact and the other through distance. It can also clash with the Quality Over Quantity person, where one sees small messages as care and the other sees them as noise.

The Over-Communicator

The Style

The Over-Communicator wants clarity, reassurance, and emotional information. They ask questions, notice shifts, and want to understand what just happened, what a tone meant, or why the energy changed. At their best, they are emotionally brave, willing to name what others avoid and address tension before it grows.

Why Someone Might Communicate This Way

This style often develops because ambiguity feels unsafe. Someone may have learned to scan for emotional changes in unpredictable environments or relationships where truth was avoided. Sometimes it comes from anxiety, sometimes from being under-informed, and sometimes from being the only person willing to acknowledge discomfort.

Attachment theory can help explain this without reducing it to labels. People with more anxious tendencies may seek reassurance quickly because uncertainty feels threatening. The challenge arises when information-seeking becomes overwhelming, turning connection into pressure.

Most Compatible Styles

The Over-Communicator can pair well with the Daily Check-In, where frequent contact reduces guesswork. The Planned Connector can also be a strong match, as structure can calm urgency. The Quality Over Quantity person can work if deeper conversations happen consistently.

Where It Can Clash

This style may struggle with the Real-Time Responder, where delayed replies feel like avoidance, and with the Space Enthusiast, where one seeks closeness and the other needs distance.

The Planned Connector

The Style

The Planned Connector feels loved when communication and time are intentional. They like knowing when they will see someone, when conversations will happen, and that plans will be followed through. They are not trying to turn love into a meeting; they are trying to make sure connection actually happens.

Why Someone Might Communicate This Way

This style often develops from experiences where unplanned connection became neglected connection. Planning provides clarity and a sense of security, giving the relationship a defined place in real life.

Most Compatible Styles

The Planned Connector pairs well with the Daily Check-In and the Quality Over Quantity person, creating a balance between consistency and depth. It can also work with the Real-Time Responder when expectations are clear.

Where It Can Clash

It may struggle with the Space Enthusiast if planning feels restrictive, or with highly spontaneous people who resist structure.

The Quality Over Quantity Person

The Style

The Quality Over Quantity person values depth over frequency. They prefer meaningful conversations and real presence rather than constant contact. When they engage, they are fully there, offering attention and emotional substance.

Why Someone Might Communicate This Way

This style often comes from finding constant messaging draining or valuing depth over surface-level interaction. For them, responsiveness is about quality, not speed.

Most Compatible Styles

They pair well with the Planned Connector and the Space Enthusiast, and can also work with the Real-Time Responder.

Where It Can Clash

They may clash with the Daily Check-In or Over-Communicator, where expectations around frequency differ.

The Real-Time Responder

The Style

The Real-Time Responder replies when they have capacity. They may care deeply but not respond immediately, preferring to engage when they can be present rather than rushed.

Why Someone Might Communicate This Way

This style often reflects a demanding life, a need for focus, or a boundary around constant availability.

Most Compatible Styles

They pair well with the Quality Over Quantity person and the Space Enthusiast, and can work with the Planned Connector when expectations are clear.

Where It Can Clash

They may struggle with the Daily Check-In and Over-Communicator, where delayed responses can feel like distance.

The Space Enthusiast

The Style

The Space Enthusiast needs room to breathe. Space helps them regulate, reconnect with themselves, and return to relationships with presence.

Why Someone Might Communicate This Way

This style may come from introversion, overstimulation, or a need for independence. It can also reflect avoidant tendencies, where distance feels safer.

Most Compatible Styles

They often work well with the Quality Over Quantity person and the Real-Time Responder, and can pair with the Planned Connector when space is respected.

Where It Can Clash

They may struggle with the Daily Check-In and Over-Communicator, where expectations around contact differ.

Compatibility Is Not About Being the Same

The most compatible communication style is not always the one that matches yours. Two people with the same style can still run into problems, while different styles can work beautifully with awareness and effort.

Compatibility comes from self-awareness, not sameness. The magic is not in finding someone who communicates exactly like you, but in finding someone who can talk about communication without turning difference into a character flaw.

When Your Style Becomes a Stress Response

Every communication style has a healthy version and a stressed version. The Daily Check-In can become anxious monitoring, the Over-Communicator can become overwhelming, the Planned Connector can become rigid, the Quality Over Quantity person can become distant, the Real-Time Responder can become inconsistent, and the Space Enthusiast can disappear.

Your communication style may protect something important, but it also asks something from others. That does not make your needs wrong, but it does mean they exist in relationship with other people’s needs.

How to Talk About Your Communication Style

The goal is not to announce your style like a warning label, but to communicate it in a way that gives others something to work with. Clear language creates understanding and reduces guesswork.

The Point

Everyone has a communication style, but the problem begins when people mistake their style for the universal standard. Your way of communicating may be valid and meaningful, but it is not the default setting for love.

The real work is learning what your style protects, what it asks from others, and where it begins to cause harm when left unexamined. Because if you cannot name your communication style, you will likely keep calling it “normal,” and everyone else will keep feeling like the problem.

I have spent the last year watching people argue about artificial intelligence, and what fascinates me most has very little to do with artificial intelligence.

At first, the conversations seemed predictable. Some people were excited. Others were alarmed. New technologies have always produced some combination of optimism and fear, and there is nothing particularly surprising about that. What surprised me was how quickly discussions about software stopped being discussions about software.

Someone would post that AI was a useful tool. Within hours, strangers would be digging through years of social media posts, examining photographs, mocking accomplishments, and questioning whether that person deserved to be taken seriously at all.

Someone else would express concerns about AI’s impact on creative industries. The response would not be a discussion of economics, ethics, or labor. Instead, they would be dismissed as fearful, outdated, resistant to progress, or incapable of adapting.

Again and again, I watched conversations move away from ideas and toward people. The technology itself often became secondary to a much older and more familiar human behavior: the desire to sort one another into categories of right and wrong, enlightened and ignorant, ally and enemy.

The longer I observed these exchanges, the less interested I became in artificial intelligence and the more interested I became in what the reactions revealed about us.

We Are Not Just Arguing About AI

Most of us grew up with some version of the same cartoon. A tiny angel sat on one shoulder while a tiny devil occupied the other, each whispering competing advice while the person caught between them tried to decide which voice deserved their trust.

As children, the lesson seemed simple. One voice represented good judgment. The other represented bad judgment. The challenge was identifying which was which.

Adult life rarely offers such clarity.

Many of our most difficult decisions are not battles between right and wrong. They are negotiations between competing values. One part of us is drawn toward curiosity, possibility, and change. Another part urges caution, skepticism, and protection. Both voices often have something useful to contribute.

The debate surrounding generative AI feels remarkably similar.

For some people, these tools represent creativity, accessibility, and opportunity. They see new ways to learn, create, communicate, and solve problems. They are excited by the possibility of lowering barriers that previously excluded people from certain forms of work or expression.

For others, AI represents something far less hopeful. They see threats to creative labor, professional expertise, intellectual property, and economic stability. They worry that work requiring years of practice and dedication may be devalued by systems designed for speed and scale.

Neither reaction is particularly difficult to understand.

What strikes me is how often people assume these perspectives are mutually exclusive. In reality, both emerge from concerns that are deeply human. Most people are not arguing about technology in isolation. They are responding to what that technology appears to mean for their identity, their livelihood, their community, and their future.

A photographer who has spent twenty years mastering a craft is not simply reacting to software. A writer who worries about the future of creative work is not merely reacting to an algorithm. Likewise, a person excited about AI’s potential is not necessarily indifferent to ethics, labor, or artistic value.

The internet often frames these positions as opposing tribes. Human reality is usually far messier than that.

The Internet’s Addiction to Certainty

One of the most interesting patterns in online discourse is how uncomfortable people seem to be with uncertainty.

A statement like:

“AI creates opportunities, but it also raises legitimate concerns.”

should not be controversial.

Yet in many online spaces, that position satisfies almost no one.

People want to know whether you are for it or against it.

They want to know whether you are on their side or the other side.

They want to know whether you are part of the solution or part of the problem.

Social psychologists have long observed that people naturally form groups, particularly during periods of uncertainty. Group membership offers stability and a sense of belonging. The problem is that loyalty to a group can sometimes become more important than curiosity about reality.

Social media often accelerates this tendency. Nuanced positions require explanation. Certainty fits into a caption.

Complexity requires patience. Outrage can be consumed in seconds.

As a result, discussions frequently become less about understanding and more about signaling. The goal subtly shifts from exploring a complicated issue to demonstrating allegiance to a particular narrative.

The pressure to choose a side creates the illusion of clarity while often reducing our ability to think clearly.

When Disagreement Becomes Punishment

The moment I became truly interested in this topic was the moment I realized that many arguments were no longer about AI at all.

Someone would express an opinion, and before long participants were scrolling through Instagram profiles, examining personal photographs, mocking appearances, questioning intelligence, and searching for evidence that the speaker was somehow unqualified to hold that opinion.

I have seen people criticized for their careers, their education, their follower counts, their relationships, their age, and even their hobbies, all because they expressed a view someone else disliked.

At some point, the conversation stops being:

“Is this idea correct?”

and becomes:

“Can I prove this person is not worth listening to?”

The distinction matters.

A healthy society depends on our ability to challenge ideas. It does not depend on our ability to publicly discredit everyone with whom we disagree.

Researchers who study online behavior have repeatedly found that digital environments can encourage forms of hostility that are less common in face-to-face interactions. Distance reduces accountability. Audiences reward performance. Moral outrage attracts attention.

None of this makes people uniquely cruel. It makes them recognizably human.

The problem is that these environments often encourage some of our least productive instincts while rewarding them with visibility and approval.

What Relationships Teach Us About Change

As someone who spends a great deal of time thinking about relationships, I find these patterns surprisingly familiar. When people encounter change, they often experience it as a threat long before they understand it as a reality. I’ve seen this dynamic play out in families adjusting to new circumstances, in friendships strained by shifting priorities, and in romantic relationships where one person begins to grow in unexpected ways. The details differ, but the underlying challenge is often the same: change arrives before we feel ready for it, and our first response is rarely calm analysis.

A partner changes. A child grows up. A career shifts. A life plan falls apart. The immediate reaction is often emotional rather than analytical because change forces us to confront uncertainty.

Technology functions much the same way.

Many of the strongest reactions to AI are not really about artificial intelligence. They are about what people fear losing or hope to gain. They are about status, security, identity, belonging, and meaning.

The same skills that help people navigate healthy relationships also help them navigate social change. Curiosity is more useful than certainty. Listening is more productive than labeling. Understanding someone’s concerns does not require agreeing with all of their conclusions.

Most importantly, healthy relationships teach us that complex situations rarely fit into simple moral categories.

The Space Between the Angel and the Devil

The longer I watch debates about artificial intelligence unfold, the less interested I become in determining which side is winning and the more interested I become in understanding why so many people seem desperate for certainty.

The old cartoon image of the angel and the devil remains useful because both voices reflect something real. Curiosity has value. So does caution. Innovation matters. So do consequences.

Problems emerge when we become so attached to one perspective that we stop listening to the other.

Generative AI may ultimately transform creative work in ways that prove beneficial, harmful, or, most likely, some complicated combination of both. At this stage, many of the strongest claims being made by supporters and critics alike remain predictions rather than settled facts.

What concerns me more than the future of the technology is the future of the conversation.

If we cannot discuss a technology this consequential without reducing one another to caricatures, the problem may not be the technology. It may be our diminishing capacity for nuance.

The future does not require us to worship AI, nor does it require us to fear it. What it asks of us is something far more difficult. It asks us to remain curious in the face of uncertainty, thoughtful in the face of disagreement, and human in the face of change.

The question is not whether AI is the angel or the devil.

The question is whether we can remain thoughtful in the space between them.

About the Author

Jan Dominy is a relationship educator, writer, and behavioral science enthusiast with a background in psychology and sociology. Her work explores human relationships, social change, communication, and the ways people adapt to uncertainty. Through her writing, she examines the intersection of culture, technology, and human behavior, with a particular interest in how individuals and communities navigate complex conversations in an increasingly connected world.

You can find more of her work at ModernPolyamory.com.