Last week was my first full week back in the office, and with it came a number of comments about my weight that left me feeling a bit awkward.  Naturally I said thank you.  But each comment seemed to come with the expectation of an explanation; like I was supposed to substantiate myself somehow.  Usually I just chalked it up to nursing (which burns beaucoup calories) but, like most things, there is more to the story than that.  That “more” is threefold.  1) I went to painstaking lengths to manage my weight gain during pregnancy.  And 2) as soon as I got the all-clear from my doctor, I resumed my normal workout routine.  And… 3) I am lucky.  But which answer do I  give?

This conundrum reminds me of interviews I’ve read with Gwen Stefani and Sarah Jessica Parker.  When asked about her (literally) rock star body, Gwen Stefani always states quite plainly that she works for it, and hard.  Those abs are the result of intense effort in the diet and exercise arenas and she doesn’t try to hide it.  SJP, on the other hand, is much more evasive about her svelte (sinewy?) figure.  She usually claims that she’s just been blessed with a thin frame.  I recall one interview I read wherein she claimed to have eaten steak, mashed potatoes, creme brûlée, and myriad other indulgences in a single meal for dinner the night before.  (“Yeah, right!” I thought.)  Of course there are women who have won the genetic lottery and came out with lithe figures and fast metabolisms.  But I would wager that most women who have bodies that qualify as enviable do so because they work for them.  Even the Heidi Klums of the world maintain a regular exercise regimen.

But which version would we rather hear such people lay claim to?  What is the most socially acceptable answer?  When one person compliments another’s body it almost always comes with either the explicit or implicit desire for more information.  What is her diet like?  What is her exercise routine?  And how unrealistic would it be to incorporate such (presumably intense) measures into our own lives?  Or, did she just luck out?  Which answer would we rather hear?  Each one comes with implications that we may or may not like.

If the answer is Gwen’s – “I have this body because I work my tail off for it” – then are we relieved to know that we too could have abs and shoulders like hers if only we were willing to put in the gym hours?  Are we relieved to know that this beautiful and successful woman at least has to sweat it out like a normal person to look like she does?  Or do we take it as a referendum on ourselves in the vein of, “You could look awesome too if you were willing to work for it, but you’re not.”

Conversely, if the answer is Sarah Jessica’s – “I was born with this body and it’s just my natural build” – do we hate her for it?  Or are we relieved to learn that we can sit on the couch guilt free knowing that she drew the long straw, we did not, and we will never look like that so we’d might as well just enjoy our bon bons?  (Side bar – what exactly is a bon bon?)

I think for me I’d rather have this conversation with Gwen Stefani than Sarah Jessica Parker.  I’d rather know that she’s a human being who works and struggles along with the rest of us.  I’d rather know that I’m not utterly devoid of the chance to achieve a rock star physique, even if I never avail myself of the opportunity.  But I don’t know if I’m in the majority here.

So what about you?  Would you rather hear about hard work or good luck?  Or do you just avoid such topics altogether?  I’m not sure there’s a right answer here.  But I’m curious about the nature of our gut reactions.

This movie qualifies in one of my favorite movie genres – the “stunt movie.”  In Gale parlance a “stunt movie” is basically any kind of heist movie.  The Sting, of course, is the all-time classic stunt movie.  Ocean’s Eleven and The Thomas Crown Affair (Pierce Brosnan version) are my modern day favorites.  In the stunt movie the protagonist is usually the thief, and the bad guys are law enforcement or other such jerks on the side of the establishment.  The stunt movie is action-packed, but not violent; suspenseful, but not scary; and usually contains some sort of romance, humor, or luxury as a subplot.  There’s nothing not to love.

So back to Inside Man.  It was a classic stunt movie and throughout it I was hooked.  But the ending left me cold.  Without giving anything critical away, there was  something off about the character development.  Denzel Washington’s detective was mostly the protagonist to Clive Owen’s mostly bad villain.  Neither one of them totally won or lost.  And we are led to believe that the true bad guy will get his comeuppance, though we never get the satisfaction of seeing it.

All of this is well and good, and not necessarily that interesting on its face.  Gale had a lukewarm response to a movie. So what?

Well, what’s got my wheels spinning five days later is the fact that I cared so much.  I consider myself to be a reasonably evolved person.  I’m comfortable with nuance and greys and the loose ends of real life.  Measured by that yardstick Inside Man should have fallen squarely into my comfort zone.  It contained all manner of true-to-life complications and double standards.  Yet in a movie setting it turned me off.  Why?  Why do I need movies to be tied off with a bow when in real life – when it really matters – I’m usually at peace with much messier results?

I suppose it’s because in real life I know that I can never expect things to resolve as cleanly as they do in the movies.  But in the movies, they can.  That’s part of why we go.  So often in real life the bad guy gets off, the good guy gets overlooked, the kiss-up gets the promotion, and the jerk gets the girl.  But in the movies things tend to pan out the way we think they’re supposed to.  So when it doesn’t work out that way on screen we (or at least I) feel shortchanged.

Life is an untidy endeavor most days.  If I can come home and see the good guy win and the bad guy lose, and suspend my disbelief long enough to find satisfaction in that then I suppose it’s a good thing.  Last weekend’s selection left me cold.  Perhaps this weekend I’ll schedule my date with Paul Newman or George Clooney.  I know they won’t let me down.

The long and short of it is that impending death – not surprisingly - changes our outlook on things, particularly our own lives.  A psychiatrist named Harvey Chochinov who counsels the dying took particular note of this and wanted to explore what about death caused such a shift in our vantage points.  According to the NPR piece, “[w]hat he found was that what people found most assaulting and annihilating was this idea that who they were would completely cease to exist after their death.  And so Chochinov decided to do something about it.”

The solution was to work with his clients to document their lives.  This documentation provided his clients the assurance that something about themselves will live on beyond their deaths.  For some of his clients they were assuaged by the mere knowledge that their stories would continue.  Others – those whose lives were troubled – told their stories to serve as a warning to younger friends or family members.

NPR’s recount of Chochinov’s work mentions that, “[t]he stories we tell about ourselves at the end of our lives are often very different than the stories that we tell about ourselves at other points.”  We remember things differently when faced with death, and this quite normal.  What fascinates me about this is not that we do it in the first place, but that whether or not we look back over our lives with accuracy has no bearing on how therapeutic the retrospective exercise is.

Apparently when it comes to evaluating the whole of our lives we may reframe many parts of them.  We may choose to remember only the good or only the bad, and this is okay.  When we look back over an entire life we have the benefit of seeing how a particular event played out, and what light best to cast it in for others.  Much like an author crafting a story, dying people can see the whole picture, understand how each of the moving parts interacts, and emphasize or downplay various events based on their ultimate significance to the larger narrative.  This isn’t something we can do with such events as they play out in real time.

I think someday (hopefully not for a very long while) I will find peace in such retrospection.  But I wonder if it isn’t a good thing not to have such context in the present moment.  We live our lives as though nearly everything is important.  Even in situations where we can see that something good or bad going on really doesn’t carry significant weight in the long run, we don’t stop experiencing it because of that.  I’m inclined to think it is beneficial to our lives that each moment is lived on roughly equal footing – that is, with comparable significance ascribed to it in the present tense.  Otherwise we might be inclined to behave lazily toward moments we know to hold no long-term meaning, or to overly stress about those we know will live with us for a long time.

The most comforting thing about these little rewrites that we make in the face of death, though, is that we can ultimately render any moment in any light we choose.  The successes can be painted with humility, the failures with grace.  Our hindsight is nearly always nearly perfect.  It is a balm to me to know that even my foibles will be salvaged in some way when I look back on them.  And in the meantime I don’t have to concern myself with which moments may or may not be “major” in the long run, but just live my life as best I can in the present moment, and count on seeing the larger portrait of my life only after it is complete.

Author James McWilliams posits that large scale animal husbandry divorces humans from the unique welfare of individual animals; that commoditizing them eliminates the unhappy business of seeing an animal you carefully raised be slaughtered because the rancher no longer has any kind of relationship with each animal whose demise might cause him guilt or remorse.  McWilliams comments that in the bluntest terms, factory farming allows the rancher “to kill thousands of animals a year and remain a happy person.”

As I pondered the implications of that statement I surprised myself.  I thought that, upon reflection, I would reach the conclusion that the bond between animal and rancher should exist for its own sake; that animals have a right to such a relationship.  Interestingly, though (at least to me…) that’s not where I landed.  I think the psychology of factory farming is dangerous not because the animals are deprived of any relationship.  I find it more important that they are deprived of the byproducts of such a relationship.

When we have a relationship with an animal we treat it accordingly.  We ensure that it is healthy.  We ensure that it isn’t overly stressed.  We ensure that its life is reasonably comfortable.  These qualities translate differently for steers than for lap dogs, naturally.  But they still exist in some measure in both situations.  When our level of concern for an animal relates to its ability to produce a profit, and not to our personal relationship to it we treat it much differently.  We don’t worry about its levels of stress or comfort.  We worry about its health only to the extent that such health affects profit margins.  We allow ourselves to get away with behavior which under any other circumstances we would find abusive.

I believe that in the long run we only hurt ourselves with this approach to animal husbandry.  We poison our land with petroleum-based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides that grow the grain that feeds the animals.  We increase the strength and drug resistance of various bacteria by pumping animal feed full of antibiotics.  We increase the saturated fat content and decrease the omega-3 and omega-6 content of the meat we consume.  And, by supporting an industry that produces meat so cheaply we ultimately consume more meat and animal fat than is healthy.  We lose on every count.

Don’t mistake me, though.  It’s not only about the human fallout for me.  I don’t view livestock as pets, but I still believe that animals deserve some base level of care that is not met by factory farming.  Further still, as humans I believe it is innate to us to develop relationships – with each other, with pets, with working animals, and with food animals.  In the case of food animals our ability and desire to bond with those animals in some sense protects us from ourselves.

With factory farming we have managed to turn a blind eye to one of our basic human predilections and many people think that it’s a win-win situation because hamburger meat costs $1.49/pound.  But the fact remains, we pay the price somewhere, even if it isn’t at the grocery store checkout line.

Many thanks to loyal reader Rebecca at It’s Kili Time for recommending this article to me.  I love getting blog fodder from readers!

If you had a cup of coffee with my mother and asked her about me as a little girl I would put money on the likelihood of her telling you the story of my purple jumper.  It was corduroy and bright grape in color.  Apparently I was a big fan of it because when I stood in front of a full length mirror the words that spilled forth from my mouth were an unabashed,  “I so pretty!”  (This was evidently before I got the hang of verbs.)  I cannot tell you how many times that moment has been quoted.  And while I have gotten much more discrete in expressing my vanities over time, I still have the same penchant today for looking in the mirror and being happy with what I see.  I think we all do.

It is a commonly held belief that when we look good we feel good.  I’m no psychologist, but the annecdotal evidence of my own life tells me this premise is true.  When the haircut is new, and the makeup is fresh, and the shoes are just right, and the scales tell us what we want to hear we pretty much feel like we can conquer the world.  Or at least that particular day.

None of this has anything to do with the quality of our character or the state of our general health.  Yet I still say it matters.  And that is why I was a bit dismayed to read Ramona Braganza’s article on The Huffington Post telling me that I shouldn’t aim for a “Hollywood body.”  She writes:

What I can tell you, though, is that the key to successful weight-loss and toning is choosing the right motivation. When [celebrities] train they not only do it for their images and their careers, they do it for a greater motivation: They do it for themselves. [Jessica Alba] trains for her health knowing osteoporosis runs in her family. Halle [Berry] trains to keep her diabetes under control. … The right motivation is health-driven — not image-driven.

I understand Braganza’s premise.  For starters, most of us will never look like Halle Berry or Jessica Alba (or Matt Damon or Ryan Reynolds, if you’re a man).  So making a spcific person’s figure your end goal is almost guaranteed to end in disappointment.  Also, we have to want better bodies for ourselves.  We should want them so that we can chase our kids around, or enjoy puttering around our gardens, or carry our grandkids up a flight of stairs.  Of course we should want those things most.  But I’m here to cast a second vote in favor of old-fashioned vanity.

If looking at a picture of a perfectly toned celebrity helps me get myself to the gym after a long day at work, what’s the harm in that?  If the satisfaction of getting back into my pre-pregnancy wardrobe will help me make healthy choices when I sit down to a meal, why is that a problem?  If I floss my teeth each night, remove every speck of makeup before bed, exfoliate once a week, exercise regularly, monitor my diet, drink eight glasses of water a day, and sleep eight hours a night just for the satisfaction of looking into the mirror and seeing white teeth, glowing skin, toned muscles, and a well-rested face why can’t that be good enough?

I’ve been on a bit of a Kate Middleton kick lately. I find myself inspired by her lean physique and classic sense of style.  I know that I will never be 5′ 10″ tall.  I will never have her thick, lustrous curls cascading down my back.  And  I will never (woe is me) have a British accent.  Nevertheless, why shouldn’t I take that inspiration and use it for my own benefit?  I know my own limitations and have no intention of making myself miserable trying to become something I can never be.  But aspiration is an incredibly powerful motivator, and I take exception to Ms. Braganza’s premise that it shouldn’t be allowed to factor into our own process of making healthy decisions.

Being the best version of myself certainly requires attention to more than just my appearance.  And we should all be wary of the day that what’s within us begins to matter less than what’s on the surface.  But staying healthy is hard work, and if a little vanity helps us over the hump, then I say bring on the full-length mirror!

Of all that was fascinating about Vargas’ story, the element that most captivated me was the one that I felt was most overlooked – the circumstances under which he left his home country.  In his NYT piece Vargas describes it this way:

One August morning nearly two decades ago, my mother woke me and put me in a cab. She handed me a jacket. “Baka malamig doon” were among the few words she said. (“It might be cold there.”) When I arrived at the Philippines’ Ninoy Aquino International Airport with her, my aunt and a family friend, I was introduced to a man I’d never seen. They told me he was my uncle. He held my hand as I boarded an airplane for the first time. It was 1993, and I was 12.

In the NPR interview Vargas elaborated that he has never left the U.S. since his arrival here in 1993, and has not seen his mother since the day he left her.  He commented that he understood from a very young age that his future lay in America; that he did not know how or when that future might begin, only that some day it would.

But back to his departure from the Philippines.  I cannot fathom it.  For starters, having been lucky enough to be born in a developed nation, much less into a happy, educated, and stable family, I cannot entirely wrap my head around what it must be like to grow up knowing that everything around you is something you’re trying to escape.  Further still, I cannot imagine, at the age of 12 – old enough to understand the magnitude of what’s happening, yet not old enough to control any of it – being shipped off with a stranger with no prior warning and very little explanation.  And yet the way Vargas tells it, this was not by any means the most poignant moment of his journey as an illegal immigrant.  But I would imagine that this kind of thing happens all the time.

The promise of a better life, that’s what motivates these often-heart-wrenching stories.  Vargas beat the odds – most illegal immigrants do not go on to work for the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and the New York Times.  (Even the most advantaged journalists struggle to compete for those jobs.)  But in spite of the odds of any notable success being slim, those odds are perceived as an improvement over a person’s status quo.

So I wonder, does the promise of that better life offer enough hope to assuage the pain of being ripped from your mother at the dawn of your adolescence?  Are those wounds that can ever heal?  In his NPR interview Vargas didn’t speak about there being wounds there at all (which isn’t to say that they aren’t there and were perhaps just too personal to discuss, or simply not the point of his story).  But if this story were mine I can only imagine that that August morning in 1993 would be a pivotal moment in my experience, rather than merely the introduction.

I wonder if he thinks it was worth it.  I wonder if the promise of a better life – a promise which for Vargas was actually realized – was enough to offset what had to have been a traumatic moment.  Even more so I wonder about the people who do not end up as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists – the people who end up picking fruit or cleaning hotel rooms.  For those people was that promise, which America maybe didn’t make good on, enough to soothe the loss of what they left behind?

Ever since then I’ve considered retail therapy a privileged person’s excuse for placating her materialism.  (Which certainly isn’t to say that I haven’t indulged in it myself.)  So I was surprised to learn this week that a study has proven that retail therapy is psychologically legit.  I made my way through the article waiting for the other shoe to drop.  As I neared the end I expected to read that the temporary mood boost afforded by shopping is short lived, and gives way to buyer’s remorse and feelings of guilt.  Conversely, while the article conceded that the negative moods that lead to retail therapy can spike impulsive behavior, the net effect is that ”…retail therapy has lasting positive impacts on mood. Feelings of regret and guilt are not associated with the unplanned purchases made to repair a bad mood.”

My mixed response to this news surprised me.  On one hand, I though, ”Hooray!  Affirmation!”  On the other hand I thought, “Really?  Is this how we want to encourage people to work through bum moods?”

I think my second response stems back to a particular moment of my adolescence when I experienced exactly the same feelings of guilt and remorse that the article said don’t correspond to retail therapy.  As a kid I was a huge penny pincher.  I collected my allowance for weeks and weeks in a hinged wooden piggy bank.  I remember that at one point in second grade I had accumulated $80 thanks to my miserly ways.  And while, for the most part, I enjoyed counting my pennies and congratulating my incredible fiscal restraint (yes, GAP, this is all true…), there were moments when I felt like a prisoner of my own piggy bank.  Eventually I snapped.  When I was 15 I decided to let my hair down for once and go on a bit of a shopping spree.  Wielding my Loony Toons checkbook with conviction I spent about $350 in the course of a few hours.  I experienced an incredible high in the process, but that happiness quickly gave way to the sense that I’d made a huge mistake.  Sitting in my bedroom surrounded by shopping bags I felt deflated (much like my checking account balance…).

In retrospect I think it was the extreme swing in my behavior that left me feeling like I’d gotten in over my head.  The article mentions that most people spend about $59 to perk up a bad mood, and $115 to celebrate an achievement.  And those figures are for adults, who, presumably, earn more than $15 per week doing household chores.  This context allows me to see that my $350 spending spree as a 15-year-old was far more impulsive than I realized.

As an adult I have settled into more moderate spending patterns.  Part of me is happy to learn that whatever emotional boost I get from a new blouse or trip to the cosmetics counter is psychological fact.  But I also worry that this study may lure people into the belief that they have carte blanche to solve their problems with spending.  I hear stories on the news about how many Americans have no savings accumulated, how much credit card debt we carry, and how our proclivity to spend money we don’t have has gotten us into trouble time and again.  Nevertheless, whether your splurge is a $500 handbag or a $5 cappucino, it’s still nice knowing that with some regard for our relative means, we can indulge ourselves without major regret.

Epilogue – My ill-advised shopping spree did help me stumble into my favorite retail therapy trick.  When I’m in the mood to shop, but don’t actually need anything, I go about it as I usually would, perusing clothing racks, trying things on etc.  Once I’ve settled on the collection of things I want to buy I take them to the counter and ask the salesperson to put them on hold for me.  If I really want them, I’ll continue thinking about them for a couple of days and be willing to go back for a planned purchase.  But nine times out of 10 I don’t.  I’ve sated my impulse desire to shop without actually spending anything.

I took a little cruise around the World Wide Web yesterday to see what other people had to say about the American fascination with this wedding, and not surprisingly there was no shortage of opinions.  One Slate writer Mark Oppenheimer called for all Americans to boycott the royal wedding, claiming that our forefathers gave their lives to win us freedom from the monarchy, and that to wax romantic about it today is downright unpatriotic.  I think he takes his position a bit far.  We aren’t talking about a ruling monarchy.  The Windsors are merely symbolic today, and our interest in them has, I believe, more to do with glamour than power.  Thomas Paine once aptly pointed out once that a hereditary head of state is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer.  And he was right.  But thankfully that’s not on the table in this situation.

Moving along to other trains of thought on this topic I came across Anne Applebaum who gives the nod to fate as the source of our intrigue.  She comments:

In fact, it is not talent, ambition, intelligence, or even wealth that has made William famous, but fate—an accident of birth. Kate will now share that fate, and that, I reckon, is exactly what makes her wedding so compelling to read about, to write about, and to discuss. … None of us knows exactly how our lives will turn out, but William has a better idea than most—and now Kate does too.

I really scratched my head at this one.  True, William was born second in line to the throne.  But beyond that, I think fate has little to do with any of this.  It isn’t the presence of fate (which I don’t believe in, by the way) that lures anybody in.  William just as easily could have been “fated” to be born to an aboriginal medicine man as the House of Windsor.  It is the wealth and luxury that lure us in.  Further, where was Ms. Applebaum during the Diana years?  Her statements about Kate Middleton today could just as easily have been made about Diana Spencer in 1981.  But no one then would have predicted the estrangement, the cheating, the tell-all interviews, and the hideous Paris car crash.  Was that Diana’s fate?  Or did she make a series of choices in her life that led her there?*

So I return to my own motives, which are still not fully clear to me.  It isn’t just the wealth that fascinates me.  For surely there is no ticket to a life of wealth with more strings attached than marriage into the British royal family.  It isn’t just the glamour that fascinates me.  For the life of a royal is more than castles and vacations; it also entails a great amount of civic activity and regard for duty.  And it isn’t the idea that life as a princess is a fairy tale.  For Diana and Fergie made it quite plain what a difficult life that can be.

But in spite of all these things, I will record and watch the wedding.  And I suppose this is due not to what I know to be true about life as a royal, but due to what I wish were true.  We all wish for the fairy tale.  We wish for a lavish existence of happiness and grandeur.  And we know that on this one day – their wedding day – we will see the perfection we wish could be true in reality.  Kate will be ravishing.  William will beam.  There will be horse-drawn coaches and balcony kisses.  We will tune in and see the fairy tale. 

This time around we know that the couple have taken their time in this decision (eight years to be exact), know each other well, and are hopefully better poised for success than Charles and Diana were.  So we feel justified in our giddy anticipation.  And we choose, for a day (or a week if you’re really swept up), to believe that this one will work out.

*For the record, I think Princess Diana was a fabulous, if flawed, person.  I point out her choices here not to speak ill of her, but merely to highlight that fate plays no role in any of this.

We go to petting zoos and look at rabbits.

We show tiny piglets to our tiny children.

We encourage them to reach their sweet little hands out to pet their new friends.

And somehow we live vicariously through their curiosity and wonder.  We think about what it must be like to experience these things for the first time.

If our kids are old enough to articulate their (and our) wonder they might ask us why new life matters so much.  We might come up with a decent answer about circles of life and nature and so on.  If we are being totally honest, we might just say, “I don’t know exactly.  But it does.”

Yesterday afternoon IEP and I drove six hours to my parents’ house.  They have a place in the country about an hour outside of town.  It is home to horses and chickens and sheep.  And at about this time every year the sheep have their babies.  The first lamb was born this week and I want IEP to experience the farm in the spring.  I want him to see and touch a newborn lamb.  I want him to run around in fresh grass and wildflowers.

I can’t tell you precisely why I want these experiences for him.  But it seems important to me.  Important enough to spend 12 hours in a car with a two-year-old who likely won’t remember much of this particular visit as he grows up.

New life is precious.  We know it the moment we see it or touch it, even if we can’t express it in words.

*The photos above were taken by Nanny at a commercial farm in our area yesterday morning.  Our family farm outing will happen this weekend.

“Plastics?”

“No.”  He blew right past my joke.  “Robots.”  And then he went on to tell me how we are standing in the doorway of a whole new era of robotics.  I felt like I’d traveled back to the early eighties but still listened attentively while he told me of an article he read about recent advancements in robots.

Then, driving to work one morning last week I heard this piece on NPR about… robots.  As it turns out GAP was not so far off the mark after all.

Apparently there is, in fact, a new wave of robots being designed, built, and actually used in society.  Up to this point most robots (C-3PO notwithstanding) have been utilitarian in nature.  They performed repetitive physical functions like assembling car parts.  They lacked distinctly human characteristics and they presented no threat to our understanding of interpersonal relationships.

However, the nature of robots is changing.  Per NPR robotic babies are being used to comfort the elderly, and robotic nannies are helping look after children.  According to Sherry Turkle, author of Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, the evolution of robots to fill human emotional needs is cause for concern.  Turkle was interviewed in the NPR piece and commented that the difference between new robots and old robots is that the new robots are, “proposing themselves to substitute for human beings in these more intimate roles.”

Turkle goes on within the interview to explain that the people she has interviewed have expressed interest in robot companions because of the disappointment they experience in other people.  She even told of one woman whose boyfriend was such a slouch that she envisioned replacing him with a robotic boyfriend.

Really?

Maybe I’m naïve.  Maybe it’s all written on the wall in front of me and I’m still not seeing it.  But I just don’t see this actually happening.  There may be a sad, lonely, person here or there who dreams of life with an inanimate companion, but I think that person is the exception.  The reason I believe this is that we know the difference.  (Did anyone else see Lars and the Real Girl?)  We know that programmed affection from a machine is not the same as real affection from a person.  No amount of technological sophistication can change that.

What interests me more, though, is a tangent to the robot premise.  I wonder about the increasingly robotic nature of our relationships with other people.  We keep up via Facebook and Twitter.  We hit Reply All on e-mail threads.  My MBA girlfriends and I try to connect for one breakfast or dinner per month, but even that has been hard now that most of us are mothers of very young families.  Apart from the three colleagues with whom I eat lunch most days, the sweeping majority of my interaction with my friends is electronic.

This is largely due to convenience, but there is also a safety net in mass electronic communication.  If I’m sitting in a one-on-one situation with you I have to be tuned into you.  I have to read you.  I have to respond to you.  That’s a lot of work, not to mention the fact that I could really screw it up.  Conversely, I have an audience of one.  If something I say doesn’t resonate with you, it might hit me hard.  But in the electronic realm we communicate with a panel of friends.  We only have to talk about ourselves.  Chances are good that someone among our online friends will see fit to endorse what we post.  And we only have to respond to people if we really want to.  Most of what we read goes untouched.  We could never get away with this kind of behavior in real life.

I don’t think we will ever rely on robots the way we rely on people.  It just won’t happen.  But I do worry that without practice our interpersonal skills might atrophy over time, and with that atrophy our in-person relationships will become unsatisfying.  The risk here is not that robots will replace people as companions.  The risk is that without practice our social skills become so scant that we might, even if only for a moment, want them to.  And that, to me, is scary enough.