What we stand to lose
Grounded in current research, from Robert Bjork's desirable difficulties to Lisa Feldman Barrett's emotional granularity to the Gottmans' work on repair, and a decade of frontline observation.
i.
The willingness to stay in a conversation you didn't prepare for and find something to say.
ii.
The capacity to decide before the answer is available, built only by deciding before the answer is available.
iii.
The ability to name what you feel precisely enough to do something about it, not outsource the naming.
iv.
The clumsy, essential work of reaching toward someone mid-argument, without a script that smooths it.
v.
A relationship with difficulty itself, formed in childhood and dissolved by a tool that answers instantly.
vi.
The part of purpose that comes from mattering to someone. No one needs an AI. The AI is never changed by the encounter.
“A relationship in which you are never needed is not a relationship. It is a service. And a world that quietly converts its relationships into services erodes meaning one unasked question at a time.”
— From The Quiet Cost
Inside the book
Prologue
Sixty couples, one scenario, and the gap between what we can imagine losing and what we're actually losing.
Chapter One
The printing press, the railway, the factory: costs predicted, costs ignored, and the transformation that happened while we argued.
Chapter Two
Television, GPS, the smartphone, the internet. We had the tools to measure the harm in advance and we missed it anyway.
Chapter Four
The structural sycophancy of AI, the research on companions and loneliness, and why the short term benefits of AI reverse after heavy use.
Chapter Eight
What the first generation that never has to wonder stands to lose, and what parents can still protect.
Chapter Twelve
Six capacities worth protecting, six practices grounded in the research. None of them requires giving up AI.
…and six more chapters, complete with full notes and bibliography.
Coming 2026
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