If the Other Person Always Adapts to You

This episode reflects on a simple observation: that the advice given to a second-grader about getting along with others — listen, be flexible, admit when you're wrong — turns out to be identical to what's on the handout at a high school parent information session, and identical again to what fills the relationship shelves at any bookshop. At every age, people are still working on the same thing.

It touches on a recent article about AI being used as a romantic companion or emotional support — always present, always understanding, never sulking or going silent — and the quiet unease that came from reading it.

The central idea is a simple one: if the other person always adapts to you, there's no need to become flexible yourself. Real friction with real people — saying something that lands wrong, being misunderstood despite good intentions, having to explain and apologize and listen — is exactly what builds that flexibility. Without it, the practice doesn't happen.

There's also a brief callback to an earlier experiment of asking AI to argue against one of its own blog posts, and arriving at the thought that AI can deepen your thinking, but can also function as a very sophisticated machine for generating self-satisfaction. This feels like the same thing, one layer deeper.

A quiet look at what might quietly erode as AI gets better at understanding us — not anything dramatic, just the ordinary friction of other people, and what we lose if we stop having to meet it.