We live in a world that has undergone rapid sociological transformation with the advent of mobile communications, social media, and working from home. With generative AI, automated call centers, and algorithms writing, reading, and acting on our behalf, we are rapidly being removed from the functional part of human interactions.

As a collective, we spend less time face-to-face with our family, our friends, our colleagues than ever before. The outcome can be debated: a more broad, active network and/or depression; increased productivity and/or loss of human connection. But that is not my goal.

I have this past few years paid close attention to when I am at my best, and when I am not. When I feel elation at my worksite, and when am I drowning in the anaerobic slurry of anxiety. When do I feel alive, capable, and my vision clear in all directions, and when do I find it difficult to look to tomorrow, let alone next week.

The answer is often about how I feel connected to or isolated from my colleagues, family and friends. Do I have proactive or only reactive support? How many of my daily interactions are with people I have never met, and yet they have control over me as governed by fear-based regulations put in place by zealous lawyers to protect an entity far too large to care about individual well being.

On the closing night of the Analog Astronaut Conference at Biosphere 2, a half dozen of us talked for an hour, maybe two. At one point our conversation moved to anxiety, and how we carry it in our bodies. I asked each person in the group to point to the part of their body where they could feel the burden of anxiety. Everyone did, without hesitation: stomach, chest, neck, and temples.

That opened a discussion about why we pull our hands back from the heat of a flame but continue day to day burning ourselves on the inside, knowing the source of the pain.

I don’t have the solution. I don’t know where this goes, exactly. But I do know that for me, now in my mid-fifties, joy comes to me when my team members succeed, doing things beyond what they have done before. It has been a very difficult four years as I once again reinvented myself at the University. What I have learned, what I can share at this moment is that no algorithm, no automation, no technology will ever satisfy that place inside that craves human connection.

Each day, I encourage you, at the start of each phone call, each Zoom session, each in-person meeting make time to tell stories. Just talk, for a few minutes. Make eye contact and laugh. Tell HR to go to hell and make human contact: shake hands, clasp shoulders, and hug.

Keep it human, because that is the only way we will make things better.