Confirm Humanity

I found myself staring at one of those CAPTCHA boxes the other day. You know the ones - click all the squares with traffic lights, type in the wavy letters, check the box that says "I'm not a robot."

Confirm humanity to continue.

We do this constantly now. Prove we're human to access a website, send an email, make a purchase. Multiple times a day, we confirm to computers that we're not automated. But here's what struck me: We've become incredibly robotic in how we actually engage with each other.

We're more engaged than we've ever been. Multiple messaging apps ping us throughout the day. News feeds scroll endlessly. Email notifications compete for attention. Videos autoplay one after another. We can reach anyone, anywhere, anytime. And yet loneliness has become a public health crisis. Study after study shows increasing isolation despite - or perhaps because of - our constant engagement. We're surrounded by activity and somehow feeling more alone.

I think I understand why now. We've mistaken engagement for connection.

What Engagement Has Become

Engagement used to look a lot closer to connection. We wrote letters to specific people - sitting down with paper and pen, crafting our words with care, thinking about who we were writing to and why. There was effort involved. Grace. Intentionality. You knew exactly who was on the other end. We called friends and had actual conversations. We showed up in person and spent time together. Even our disagreements happened face to face, where we had to see each other as whole humans.

We've mistaken engagement for connection

But somewhere along the way, engagement became something else entirely. Now we scroll through feeds, scanning for something we agree or disagree with - as if finding our tribe or identifying the opposition is the same as connection. We read posts searching for the piece that confirms what we already think or triggers our resistance. We share memes without reading the articles. We reshare stories from sources we don't even know. That moment of "yes, exactly!" or "absolutely not!" feels like connection. But it's just sorting. It's categorizing. It's not interchange.

And when we do respond? We're often recycling the same phrases we've heard before. The talking points from podcasts, the familiar language from news commentary, the responses we've seen in a hundred other threads. We're not crafting something unique to this conversation with this specific person. We've automated our responses for efficiency, for expediency. We've chosen quantity over quality. We're automated.

A few days ago, I experienced this forgetting in action. I was having an online discussion with a friend - someone I know, someone I've shared meals with - about a topic we disagreed on. We were going back and forth when someone else jumped into the thread. Someone I didn't know, but apparently a friend of my friend's. This person launched into assumptions about who I am based on my point of view. Personal attacks about my identity and ideology. Not engaging with what I was actually saying - just attacking me as a person.

My friend clicked "like" on that comment.

Maybe he was being cruel. Maybe he was trying to hurt me. Or maybe - and I suspect this is closer to the truth - he saw "agrees with my point of view" and reacted automatically. He engaged with the content alignment and completely missed everything else - that this "support" for his view came in the form of personal attacks on someone he actually knows. Someone he's sat across a table from. Someone who's a real person to him, not just a viewpoint to oppose. He'd forgotten to confirm the humanity involved. Mine.

The next day, I had a very different conversation. I was talking with a caregiver who spends a lot of time at home, isolated by her responsibilities. I'd shared a blog post I'd written called When Did We Stop Seeing Each Other? and as we talked about it, something clicked for her. "I'm sure that being isolated at home has an effect on my ability to accurately receive the intent of each comment," she said. "We are not created to just read conversations."

In her realization that she'd fallen into this trap too, she nailed the bigger issue informing all of our engagements. We're not built for one-way consumption of text and images. We're built for connection - for the back-and-forth rhythm of actual conversation, for tone and pause and presence, for being WITH each other, not just observing each other's content.

What Real Connection Requires

Connection, even in our electronic world, doesn't have to be lost. Years ago, during my coaching training, many of my sessions were by phone - just voice, no video. Several classmates said they could never do that because they were concerned about missing vital cues from body language and facial expressions.

But I discovered something important: When you can't see someone, you don't lose the ability to connect. You learn to listen more deeply. You become intentional about it. You listen for pace, for pauses, for the slight shift in tone that signals something important. You receive what the whole person is offering, not just the grabbable pieces you can respond to.

That takes effort. That takes practice. And that's exactly what we've stopped doing. We should be compensating for what online communication strips away by being MORE intentional, more present, more committed to confirming the humanity on the other end. Instead, we've let ease replace effort. We've automated our responses to each other.

And we've done the same thing to ourselves. The same way we scroll past others' complexity, we scroll past our own. The same way we react to posts without really receiving the human behind them, we react to our own thoughts and feelings without really listening to them.

So what does it actually mean to confirm humanity - in others and in ourselves? It starts with recognizing what we've lost. That felt sense of genuine connection. Of being WITH someone rather than engaging with their content.

We should be compensating for what online communication strips away by being MORE intentional. Instead, we've let ease replace effort.

Real connection requires pausing before we respond - online or in person - to remember: there's a whole human here. Not just a message to agree with or attack. A person with their own complexity, their own concerns, their own experiences, their own vibrancy. It means remembering we are not connecting with a post or a like or a comment. We are reaching out to actually exchange with another human - in all our messiness and depth and realness. And if we're not reaching out to actually connect, then what are we doing? What are we actually accomplishing?

It means being - as ourselves, alone or with others. Receiving what's actually being offered. Holding the fullness of who someone is, not reducing them to their latest post. Seeing the vibrant, complex human, not just their message. To do the same with ourselves.

Humanity Confirmed

We are not created to just read conversations. We're created for connection. For genuine exchange. For the felt experience of being WITH each other and WITH ourselves.

We're losing the muscle of genuine connection everywhere, but we can rebuild it. The ability to BE with another person, to receive what they're offering, to engage with the whole human. To do the same with ourselves.

When we remember that - when we practice confirming humanity before we engage - something shifts. The loneliness doesn't disappear instantly, but we start to experience moments of actual connection again. Real interchange. The sense that we're not just broadcasting into the void but actually being received by another human. That we're not just scrolling past ourselves but actually present to our own complexity.

Connection isn't optional for wellbeing. It's foundational. But we can't create it through consumption or automated engagement. We need the actual thing - the genuine back-and-forth of being with another human, receiving what they're communicating, holding the fullness of who they are. With others and with ourselves.

So maybe the next time you see one of those CAPTCHA boxes asking you to confirm humanity, let it be a reminder. Not just to prove you're not a robot to a computer, but to remember what it means to be human with each other - and with yourself. To pause before responding. To receive rather than just react. To remember there's a whole, vibrant, complex human on the other end - including you.

If this resonates, I'd be grateful if you'd share it. I think we need more conversations like this. Know someone who's feeling lonely even when they're surrounded by people? Or struggling with how transactional our interactions have become? Feel free to share this with them.