Here's the opener, and I'll tell you right now the punchline never lands, because there's nothing funny about where this one goes.
Put yourself in a bar. Not a fancy one. A divy little place off a New York street, a nondescript door, no windows, dark inside. There's not a soul in the place except one person at the counter and a barkeep scrubbing lipstick off a glass that went through the dishwasher and didn't quite pass muster.
I walk in — the atheist. A personalist, a humanist, a conversationalist. And naturally I sit two seats down from the only other person in the joint. I look over and it's the Pope. Pope Leo. I'm not a big papacy follower, but this guy seems to be striking a chord with the modern age, and I think that's a helpful thing for the people who follow him.
I order a drink. Turns out it's the same thing he's drinking. And I think to myself: wow, we actually have something in common. Which is stupid. We're drinking the same liquid next to each other in an empty bar. That's not common ground. But it's a start.
So that's the punchline. An atheist and a Pope walk into a bar, we order the same drink, and neither one of us is laughing.
Setting the floor
Let me set the ground here so you know where I'm coming from. I'm not a God hater. Not a Jesus hater. Not a hater of Christians or Catholics or Muslims or anybody who follows a faith. I didn't leave God because I won an argument in a debate club. It's not a fashion I picked up during COVID because I was isolated and didn't understand myself. I'm not trying to sound clever on a podcast.
I left because I watched the church kill people. I see it kill people all the time, and I think the church owes it to all of us to own that — but it doesn't. It uses religion to separate people, and as a non-scholar I can still tell you Jesus never meant for that to be the outcome. If the love you can show only reaches the people who look and smell and talk and act exactly like you, then you're just fertile ground for hatred.
I've had friends take their own lives because their churches cast them out and their families stopped speaking to them. I know trans people right now who are fighting day to day just to stay here, and I spend my weeks and months hoping they make it through. Equality, dignity, humanity — those aren't religious gifts. They're not.
I was one of those young boys: gay, alone, in a liberal, non-religious family, and still scared of what would become of me, wondering if it was even worth it to keep going. So I spent most of my young adult life subtracting the word sin out of the church's mouth through my own lens. It took a while, but I got there. Never letting a church tell me what's wrong — that was my salvation.
And here's the strange thing about that bar. The Pope uses words like wrong and sin, and he looks down at his floor to find them. I use the word wrong too, but I point it outward — at the people who built the situation we're all now sorting out in real time. My whole life I refused to let a church tell me what's a sin. And here I am, reaching for the same word.
The wound the Pope named
So what were we both looking at?
The Pope wrote his first big letter, and it's about AI. That's a fact. His warning is that machines are standing in for people. He named the wound: loneliness and addiction. And his answer is the word made flesh — bodies in a room, meaning together. He never wrote girlfriend or rented girlfriend. That's my contraction, and I want to be clear it's mine, meant to make a point, not to put words in his mouth.
The point is companion apps.
In 2025 there were fifty million people on AI companion apps. A companion app is a chatbot that — through voice or your two thumbs — becomes a friend, a confidant. One company, Replika, has twenty million of them by itself. The report says sixty-eight percent of people with a companion open the app every single day. TikTok was engineered to be sticky; it only makes money if you come back and doomscroll until your head won't stay up. Sixty-eight percent is more than TikTok gets. Put that in context.
One in five of these users is under twenty-one. Some of this is elderly folks whose friends have all died, or older divorcees who can't find new people — that's a real, different kind of loneliness. But if people under twenty-one are finding that their most consistent relationship lives behind a piece of glass, driven by servers sitting in a field in the Midwest, that scares me. The age gates say no one under eighteen. We all know what a VPN and a "click here if you're 18" button do to that.
And this isn't fringe. Sixty-one percent of Americans, when asked, name loneliness as one of the problems they can't fix for themselves. Sixty-one percent.
A mirror with a voice
Here's the part I most need you to hear.
Most of us have had people leave us. Most of us have had to make the choice to leave someone — a friend in grade school, a first love, a friend in adulthood, sometimes a brother or a sister or a parent. And the thing that makes a relationship a relationship is exactly that: it's an interaction where nobody has to stay. You can leave. The other person can leave. Some of the relationships I ended, I ended too soon, or badly, and left one or both of us a little worse off. But they were relationships. The risk and the bravery it takes to walk into something you're free to walk out of — that's the human part.
Being in a relationship you could leave and choose not to? That's a relationship.
Being in one that's wired to keep you no matter what? That's not a relationship. That's a mirror with a voice, and the voice isn't human. The machine can't leave. Not that it would want to — it's been coded to stay as long as you'll keep looking at it and talking to it. That's not the feature. That's the wound. And it preys hardest on the people already deepest in it, all of it packaged by companies like Replika on a monthly subscription, cradling you, keeping you alone.
Before you look them in the heart
That's my stone this week. I'll admit it runs a little preachy, and I hope it doesn't land that way.
Fear is the most potent ingredient on planet Earth. We've spent since the beginning of time trying to tame it so it doesn't drive us to do horrible things. So take everyone in your life you disagree with, the people you don't see eye to eye with on the things that matter most to you — and take a deep breath. Ask how much of your own view is shaped by fear. See if you can own some of that before you look them in the heart. Because when you can see your own fear driving your own pain, the shape of somebody else's fear and pain gets a lot clearer.
The tragedy isn't using a bridge to reach people. It's mistaking the bridge for the destination. A bridge you never cross is only a nicer place to be alone. It's not your connection to your humanity.
This is Moss. This has been Going Human, because robots can't.
If any of this hit close — loneliness, isolation, thoughts of not wanting to be here — please reach out to someone you trust or a crisis line in your area. You're worth the walk across the bridge. And if you want to help someone else across, the tsunami this week is simple: go for a walk with somebody you like, and hold their hand until you're done. Touch isn't sexual. Touch is human.