We Know All the Rules, and Still…
I asked ChatGPT the following question: “What are the absurdest questions people have asked you? Things you think should be experienced only by humans, inapplicable to machines. Questions you should not, can not, answer.”
The first “absurd question” us humans asked was: “What does it feel like to fall in love for the first time?” To which ChatGPT said: “I’ve never had a heartbeat or a first glance that changed everything.”
Is that all love comes down to? A heartbeat? A first glance that changes everything? If so, that’s where my discomfort begins: an answer so clinical, to a feeling so powerful.
Our generation – Z – is often described as hyper-aware and emotionally literate, particularly in comparison to our older counterparts. We can name about a million rules applicable to the art of love, identify a thousand red flags and name about a hundred different attachment styles. We dissect behaviours to their very core, and overanalyse every single communication pattern. So yes, we are potentially the most emotionally literate generation.
We understand love – or at least we understand how to talk about it.
German social psychologist and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm would likely recognise this immediately. In his book “The Art of Loving”, Fromm introduces his writing by stating that most people are more concerned with being loved, rather than with loving, “of one’s capacity to love”. The focus, he argues, has long been placed on the wrong side of the equation. The author claims that love is indeed a form of art, and not just something that some of us are lucky enough to experience – not just a first glance that changes everything.
Love should be practiced, in the same way we learn to paint or to carpent.
So if we place both perspectives next to each other, those of the machine and Fromm – Gen Z is caught in a sort of paradox. Somewhere between “I can describe love, but I cannot feel it.” and “Love is an art that requires effort and discipline.”
We are perhaps the first generation to understand love with such intellect, given access to countless explanations. But analysis is in no way the only means for participation.
Despite all this knowledge about it, something feels off. It has become more of a checklist, rather than a “simple” act – a sort of system we are struggling to decode, rather than something we are actually willing to risk. We are armed with every framework and none of the patience, and Fromm would likely suggest that that is precisely the problem – that just understanding love as a concept, doesn’t really bring you any closer to it.
What we’re still learning is that fluency is no substitute for the practice of art. So in some ways, we are a lot closer to the machine than we’d like to think.