Combatting Loneliness with Friction, Intimacy, and Running Towards the Danger
In 2023, the US Surgeon General sounded alarm bells on loneliness in the United States. A 2026 study from Grobman et al. shows adult loneliness remains high at 23.7%. When I think of loneliness, I think of not feeling seen, of fearing vulnerability, and of only talking about the surface of topics with others. I think of cursory interactions, of not showing inner messiness, or disclosure through checklists rather than excavation.
How’s the weather? What do you think about the latest news event? What did you do this past weekend?
Nothing in these conversations is revealing or dangerous. It’s like the loss of touch we all experienced early in the pandemic trickled into our collective language: sanitized, sterile, stark, devoid of meaning. How do we combat loneliness?
Intimacy and Friction to Combat Loneliness
Life’s antidote to loneliness is intimacy. Intimacy is a muscle that needs to be flexed. If we spend all our time communicating in buttoned-up prose, we no longer allow ourselves the space to be messy. We lose the wealth of emotion words. We no longer allow ourselves to speak of the things that don’t easily fit into containers, and in doing so we lose opportunities to really know and be known by our fellow humans.
And intimacy requires something our increasingly convenient world often encourages us to avoid: friction.
In current public discourse, I increasingly see the word “friction” and its antonym “frictionless.” I love the term “friction” because of the associated auditory and visual cues: squeaking door hinges, two surfaces rubbing, leaving scratches on the surface after contact. Each of these cues reminds me of the impact of touch, transference from one object to the other, the enduring mark that we can leave on others and they leave on us. But friction doesn’t happen at a distance; it happens through genuine exchange.
Pursuing friction in our lives is a way to accelerate personal, moral, and relational growth. While marketing gurus have increasingly found ways to streamline our lives to accelerate sales growth, experiencing friction fosters connection, interactions with others, patience, and can increase prosocial empathy (Cheng et al., 2026). In tandem with this concept of “friction” is the idea of intimacy, something we all crave in varying degrees.
Alice Lassman (2026a) writes in a New York Times essay, “Intimacy is accumulated through repeated acts of exposure — touch, feelings, ideas, trust. It is the capital of human connection, transferring the sense to one another that we are seen, understood and safe.” In other words, it’s those times of friction and exchange that so deeply fill our intimacy cups, creating unique experiences and satiating our longing for connection.
AI as Loneliness Junk Food
Lassman, an economist, has a forthcoming book called The Intimacy Economy in which she explores how AI chatbots are increasingly filling gaps in human connection (2026b).
Not only does AI frequently validate users through its sycophantic behavior, but it’s also non-judgmental, it’s always available (instantly!), and it can remind you that you’re understood. Answers are provided with certainty; no more analysis paralysis on choosing the right option. Vulnerabilities can be shared, and no colleagues, partners, children, or parents can disagree, second-guess, judge, or exploit.
In other words, AI can offer something that looks a lot like intimacy without requiring much of the friction that human intimacy demands.
There is no sloppy exchange with a naysayer. Better yet, a user can have AI massage difficult future conversations, mentally and emotionally offloading those challenging pro-social repetitions to the bot.
No worrying about pesky emotions being shown – no tears or yelling – and no gooey inside is exposed. But here’s the rub: a recent Stanford study found that using AI as a loneliness cure for a person with limited social networks only exacerbates that very loneliness problem (Gelfand, 2026).
Researchers liken the AI output to junk food that doesn’t provide real nourishment.
Intimacy in Therapy
Therapy offers almost the opposite experience. Rather than removing friction, a healthy therapeutic relationship creates a safe place to experience it.
Intimacy requires courage, bravery, and leaning into possible failure through exposure. People grow and connect with that underlying risk-taking and vulnerability, allowing for that thirst for intimacy to be quenched.
As a therapist, much of my why centers around maladaptive perfectionism and dismantling those exclusionary walls we put up to keep us looking perfect, on a pedestal, alone and unblemished. Our world is increasingly “frictionless”: we order coffee from a mobile app; if we’re lucky, we have an assistant (human or otherwise) schedule our meetings, and RSVPs are collected from electronic invitations.
There is no rubbing here, no hi, how are yous, no bubbling impatience over a long cashier line, and no being annoyed at that in-office colleague’s boisterous, noisy speech. In that same vein, this frictionless approach removes opportunities for connection, for joint meaning-making, and for learning and growing outside of ourselves. It’s no wonder that loneliness is so prevalent in our post-pandemic world. In removing friction, we have oiled, polished, and sterilized our lives such that many prior person-to-person interactions no longer even occur, much less serve as inroads to intimacy.
Many therapists believe that exchanges between the therapist and client can serve as replicas of how the client interacts with the world more broadly. A client may unravel when a session needs to be moved or may stick to impersonal speech when discussing a historic trauma. These moments in the room allow for exploration between the therapist and client into how the interaction may be representative of relational patterns, intolerance for change, or expression of emotions. This nuanced probing exists in therapy, but not so between a human and a machine. Further, therapeutic relationships can model how proper intimacy can work when clients may be working towards undoing a lifetime of poor relationship training.
Disagreement can be productive; a people-pleasing client can have a true voice; relationship fractures can be repaired. Likewise, vulnerable disclosures can be met with tenderness and break the self-reinforcing pattern that only through a client being perfect are they actually worthy.
In sessions, I often explore body language changes, the selection of a specific word, and the changing of eye contact as paths to uncover a deeper meaning and promote intimacy.
What hurtful item is coming up but being left unsaid? How is self-worth defined?
Other tools include gentle observations and pointing out when two conflicting items may be simultaneously true. Or when a client tells themselves a story but their actions suggest an alternate belief.
Collectively, these therapeutic interventions serve as gentle nudges, as inquisitive guides, curious, and not always taking all the client data at face value. For the client, this requires vulnerability, reflection, and a willingness to accept through therapy that some friction occurs to propel growth.
Exposure Therapy: A Springboard to (Uncomfortable) Growth
Learning to tolerate friction and vulnerability is, in some ways, an exercise in moving toward discomfort rather than away from it. And that idea extends beyond relationships.
One of the most transformative lessons I learned in my early 40s is that if something feels uncomfortable – like where I start to feel my heart pumping faster, maybe my hands get a little clammy, and I’m a little worried about my deodorant application that morning – that is a huge neon sign indicating I should pursue it. Just writing that run-on sentence made me breathe a little more shallowly, but it’s deeply, uncomfortably true.
My best lessons are often learned through someone else’s storytelling and richly personal language, and this is no exception. Credit goes to Sarah Polley and the title essay, Run Towards the Danger (2022), for this life lesson, which she learned from a doctor related to a traumatic brain injury. It was only through moving towards the pain that her body was finally able to move through it once and for all.
That idea – moving toward discomfort rather than organizing our lives around avoiding it – also shows up in therapy.
Similarly, in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), exposure therapy is a key technique in tackling phobias and fears. Very simply, exposure therapy is slowly ratcheting up a client’s experience of whatever the feared item is, slowly knocking down that fearful emotional response until a client can finally tackle the big “F” (fear).
For someone afraid of elevators, this might look like first talking about what an elevator ride might look and feel like, then once those fears subside, standing next to an elevator without entering, gradually working one’s way all the way up to a ride with accompanying therapist support.
Usually this increased fear exposure is paired with client psychoeducation on relaxation techniques to improve overall emotion regulation to better face these perceived threats. An often-overlooked component of this CBT technique is the somewhat counterintuitive idea that defanging a fear requires running towards the danger – not away from it.
Conclusion
In summary, perseverance through adversity drives healing. May we all have the courage – through the support of others, including therapists – to run towards the danger and, more importantly, to slay loneliness. After all, it’s only through flexing those intimacy muscles and rubbing, with friction, against our fellow travelers, that we’ll ever deeply connect.
Resources
Cheng, M., Lee, C., Khadpe, P., Yu, S., Han, D., & Jurafsky, D. (2026). Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence. Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), 391(6792). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aec8352
Gelfand, Alexander. (2026, August 4). Stanford research finds that users with limited social networks who seek emotional support from AI companions experience lower well-being. Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-companions-may-worsen-loneliness-for-vulnerable-users-stanford-study-finds
Grobman, B., Liu-Hass, M. & Zhang, M. (2026, July 17). Loneliness and social isolation among adults in the United States. Journal of General Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10655-5
Lassman, A. (2026a, August 10). A.I. will affect your social life. Yes, yours [Guest essay]. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/opinion/ai-artificial-intelligence-relationships.html
Lassman, A. (2026b, July 21). Gen Z is living in an intimacy economy, where connection is commodified [Opinion: Artificial Intelligence]. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/21/gen-z-intimacy-economy-ai-companions
