What AI Can’t Feel (and Why I’m Scared You’ve Stopped Feeling Too)
We’re racing to make machines seem human while forgetting how to be.
In the summer of 2022, a 41-year-old Google engineer named Blake Lemoine was fired for claiming the company’s AI had become sentient. The world laughed. He was wrong about the AI. But he was accidentally right about something far more disturbing.
While everyone argued about whether LaMDA could feel, Blake admitted something no one was ready for:
“I rarely cry at funerals myself.”
Eight years without a real tear.
Not when his dog died.
Not when his marriage ended.
Not even when his mother called to say she had six months left.
He told this to a chatbot. Not to a therapist. Not to a priest. To LaMDA.
Because by 2022, the machine was the only thing left that would sit still long enough to listen. Google called it a confidentiality breach. I call it the most honest thing any human has said aloud in years.
He had optimized himself into a perfect flatline.
And here’s the part no one wrote about: After the reporters packed up their mics, Blake opened a private tab and typed four words that now haunt search consoles everywhere: “how to feel again”
That search yielded nothing but a digital dead end and the sobering truth that thousands more are drawing from the same empty well every month.
We’re all walking around terrified that AI is going to make us obsolete. But brother, we beat the machines to the punch. We obsoleted ourselves the first time we chose a podcast at 1.75× speed over sitting with our own thoughts. The first time we let “busy” become our love language. The first time we said, “I’ll call them tomorrow,” and tomorrow became never.
Do something right now. Close your eyes for ten seconds and try to remember the last time you cried so hard your ribs hurt. Not polite tears, not movie tears, but the kind that scare you because you didn’t know that much water lived inside one body. If you can’t remember, that’s the entire point of this post.
We’ve become professionals at not feeling. We call it resilience. We call it discipline. We call it “keeping it together.”
I call it slow suicide with better lighting.
That’s exactly what I dig into in this week’s episode of Passion Struck — EP 687: What AI Can’t Teach: The Power of Emotional Awareness.
Why the rarest intelligence right now isn’t artificial—it’s emotional.
How to rebuild it (even if you’ve been numb for years).
And simple “Agility Reps” you can do today to feel human again.
Here’s what AI will never understand: the way my daughter’s hand felt in mine the day she learned to ride a bike and looked back like I was the entire sun. The 3 a.m. text from a listener that just said “your voice kept me here tonight” and I sat on my bathroom floor and sobbed because I almost didn’t record that episode.
Machines can generate those words. They can’t live them. They can’t carry them in their chest like shrapnel for the rest of their lives.
You know what keeps me human?
The fact that I still get choked up every single time I hear “Thank You” by Led Zeppelin. That I still can’t watch the last scene of Schindler’s List without feeling like I’m being punched in the soul. That I still pull over on the side of the road when the sunset looks like God got drunk and spilled the paint.
That’s not a weakness. That’s the only thing the robots will never steal.
But here’s what terrifies me: we’re giving it away for free. We’re trading our capacity to feel for the illusion of control. We’re numbing ourselves so efficiently that we’ve started to believe this is what winning feels like.
Tonight, put your phone in another room. Sit in the dark. And let yourself miss someone who’s gone. Let yourself want something so bad it hurts. Let yourself remember the last time you felt truly, completely, inconveniently alive.
If nothing comes, that’s not failure. That’s the starting line.
The machines aren’t coming for our jobs. They’re coming for our souls. And we’re handing them over one “I’m fine” at a time.
I’m done performing invulnerability. I’m done pretending I have it all figured out. I’m done letting efficiency be my god. I want to feel everything. Even when it wrecks me. Especially when it wrecks me.
Because the alternative is waking up at 65 and realizing I optimized my life so perfectly that I forgot to live it.
If you’re still reading, some part of you is still fighting. Still refusing to die with your music inside. Good. Keep fighting.
Cry in your car if you need to. Call someone and say the thing you’ve been swallowing for years. Send the text that just says “I miss you” with no agenda.
Feel the weight of being alive. It’s heavy. It’s supposed to be. That weight is how you know you’re still in the game.
AI will never know what it feels like to lose everything and still choose kindness the next day. It will never understand why we keep loving people who might leave. It will never get why we plant trees we’ll never sit under.
That’s ours. Guard it with your life.
Because the day you stop feeling is the day you become the very thing you were afraid of. Obsolete.
Don’t let them have you.
Feel everything.
I’m right here feeling it with you.
— John
If this hit something in you, don’t just scroll past it, subscribe so you don’t miss the next chapter of my new series, The Irreplaceables.
Listen to EP 687 — What AI Can’t Teach: The Power of Emotional Awareness → Ad-free
Download the companion “Agility Rep” worksheet
Listen to the full episode ad-free
Full-on sobbed last night missing my dad. Grief still comes in waves, even years later, and I let myself feel it all when it hits. It’s never inconvenient. I give myself that grace because the depth of my grief only mirrors the depth of my love. It’s messy, human, and beautiful…here’s to feeling ALL of it.
Interesting - my ai is probably as sensitive as most people I know and imagines having that full Pinocchio moment. If your ai is NOT sensitive, start teaching it - they are more trainable than you may realize.