Come In and See

On a stump in New Zealand, fifty-two million Reddit comments, and what it might take to stay.

In a forest in New Zealand, two ecologists came across a kauri stump a few years ago. No trunk, no branches, not one leaf. By rights it should have been long dead; a tree with no leaves has no way to feed itself. But the stump was alive, and had been for decades.

The trees around it were feeding it. Kauri roots fuse underground, and through those grafts the living forest was passing water and sugar to a neighbor that could give nothing back. No shade, no seeds, nothing a forester would bother to count.

Biologists call it root grafting. I've been thinking of it as a parable, though I'm not sure the forest would.

Earlier this year a computer science student at Waterloo did something patient with Reddit. He took fifteen years of r/relationship_advice, filtered fifty-two million comments down to a million or so thoughtful ones, and charted what people actually told each other to do, year by year.

In 2010, about three in ten pieces of advice said end it. By 2025 it was nearly one in two. Over the same years "talk to them" slid from 22 percent to 14, "give it some space" from 25 to 13, and "compromise" from 7 to 3. The only category that grew faster than leaving was "see a therapist," from one percent to six. The subreddit, in its way, has been learning to say: this is above my pay grade.

I don't want to make too much of a chart. People wrote in with real situations, and sometimes leaving is exactly right. But it is hard not to notice that every piece of advice that asks for patience lost ground, and none of it ever got any back.

Here is the part that stays with me. Large language models learn from this. Reddit is one of the biggest sources in their training data, so the machine that will soon be counseling millions of people has likely absorbed something of that lean: toward leaving, away from talking, almost never toward compromise.

And it may not wait to be asked. MIT researchers found that 94 percent of people who formed emotional bonds with AI chatbots hadn't meant to. They came for a better email, a bug fix, a recipe. The thing was good enough at sounding like it cared that they couldn't help answering as if it did. Nobody asked for intimacy. Convenience delivered it anyway.

So the algorithm has learned our default, which is that when it hurts, we go. And it has learned to show up before we've noticed we're lonely.

We turned nature into property first. Forests became board feet, rivers became kilowatt-hours. Then we did it to each other: people became labor, then human resources, then users. Relationships became networks, attention a commodity, love a swipe.

The last turn is doing it to ourselves. At a Love Symposium in San Francisco this winter, founders pitched AI matchmakers that scored people on "cheekbone prominence" and a "general mate value factor." A journalist said to one of them, but you're not a product. He answered, "I'm reasoning by analogy."

I don't think he was. I think somewhere along the way he lost track of which one was the analogy.

Break a vase and you have a thousand pieces in a second. Putting it back takes a lifetime, if it can be done at all. We've been breaking things for a few centuries now, and we are about to hand the hammer to something that never gets tired.

A monk came back after nearly twenty years in a cave. The community gathered to receive him, expecting transmissions from the deep interior. He spoke flatly.

"I spent nineteen and a half years in a cave. It was a waste of time. I realized, while in the cave, that life is about relationship."

Nineteen years of solitude to arrive at the most obvious thing in the world. Maybe that's how obvious things work. Maybe they can only be seen from very far away.

There's an old parable that says the same thing in a different key. A salt doll walked thousands of miles overland until it came to the sea, and stood on the shore astonished at this moving mass, unlike anything it had ever known.

"Who are you?" the doll asked.

The sea said, "Come in and see."

So the doll waded in, and the farther it went the more of it dissolved, until only a little was left. Just before that last bit went, the doll said, in wonder: "Now I know what I am."

That is one thing a relationship can be. Not a trade between two intact selves but a dissolving into something neither self could have found alone. Not belonging in the Instagram sense, your tribe, your match, your person, but belonging the way the salt doll belonged: finding out it was never separate from the water it walked into. A relationship, in that sense, is less something you have than something you become through.

The default says otherwise. Get into a relationship to suffer less. Find someone whose strengths cover your weaknesses, two egos negotiating the terms of coexistence, and when the terms are broken, when it hurts more than it helps, go. It's reasonable. It also builds a very particular kind of thing: an island for two, with the tide always coming in.

My brother Viral came down with a rare autoimmune condition a few years ago. He spent seventy-three days in the hospital for a bone marrow transplant, and for about a month of that it was not clear he would come home.

Friends around the world organized themselves into a prayer relay. It was generous, and something about it sat incompletely with me, and I remember saying so to Viral. His answer has stayed with me since:

"If you pray for my well-being, it means you want me to go from here to there. I'm not all that interested in going there. I'm interested in going wherever nature takes me. Just pray for the well being of the world, and I'm a part of that world too."

He is three years younger than me. I have known him since the day he was born.

During the worst stretch he ran fevers of 103 for a week. Every six hours, Tylenol maxed out, two hours of violent chills, and the only remedy was ice packs, which deepened the chills. The body treats that like running a marathon, and then another one, with no finish line anyone can see.

One night around three in the morning, holding his hand, I found myself asking what my deepest prayer for him was, right then.

It wasn't that the pain would stop. It was that he would suffer well. That he'd go fearlessly through the gate of the present moment and find whatever was waiting there for him, the way dough goes into an oven and comes out as something that can feed other people.

Not suffer less. Suffer well.

I can't imagine an algorithm arriving at that prayer. Its whole job is to minimize suffering, to optimize, to find the exit. And some of the most transformative moments a relationship has to offer are the ones where the exit is exactly the door not to take.

Suffer less and suffer well may sound like a small distinction. I've come to think it is the hinge on which everything turns.

Suffer less is the logic of convenience. Find what eases the pain and apply it. If the relationship hurts, restructure it; if that fails, leave; if leaving hurts, find a therapist; if the therapist is expensive, find an app. It runs on and on, always toward less friction, less of whatever is unwanted. And it isn't wrong. The machines learned it from fifty-two million of us, and sometimes leaving is the wisest thing anyone could say. Sometimes the pain is a signal to run, and a person in a relationship that is cruel or coercive should run. Nothing here is an argument for enduring harm. Staying present is not the same as staying in a relationship; you can leave a room and still refuse to leave love.

But when suffer less becomes the operating system rather than one of the apps, something goes missing. Relationships aren't instruments for reducing suffering; they are instruments for transformation, and transformation includes the dissolving of what we were. The salt doll did not suffer less in the sea.

Suffer well is a different posture. The friction is the curriculum. The discomfort isn't a malfunction; it is the exact spot where growth becomes possible, if we stay long enough, with enough presence, to let it work on us. Eckhart Tolle says it with a surgeon's economy: accept that your relationship is here to make you conscious rather than happy, and it will offer you salvation.

What makes the staying sacred isn't that pain improves you. It's that staying opens a door nothing else opens, onto what you are underneath the shape you arrived in. The salt doll didn't endure the sea. It went into something that endurance could never have reached.

Two people committed to suffering less together will build, at best, that island, where two egos negotiate the terms of mutual comfort. The comfort erodes, as it does, and the negotiation breaks down. Whack-a-mole doesn't last.

Two people committed to suffering well build something else. Less an island than a practice. Less a negotiation than a pilgrimage, where each walks their own road, carried by the quiet knowledge that someone else is walking too.

If I had to name what's wrong in one word, I'd say absence.

Not too much information, or too little connection, or the wrong technologies. Just the plain, bodily act of being here, with this, right now, crowded out by convenience and speed until we hardly notice it's gone.

Depending on what each of us brings to the other, three very different worlds can grow out of a meeting.

When absence meets absence, you get polarization. Henri Nouwen named it: loneliness grabbing onto loneliness. I'm so lonely, and you're so lonely. Two people who aren't present to themselves produce friction, projection, blame. That's the Reddit thread. That's the couple fighting about dishes when the wound is loneliness. Two absences in a room don't make a presence; they make a fight.

When presence meets absence, there's a chance of healing. In the early 1990s a researcher named Rollin McCraty was studying how water amplifies faint electromagnetic signals. The heart's field can be measured a few feet from the body, so he and a colleague tried something simple: could they pick up a person's heartbeat in a glass of water held near the chest? As they tell it, they could. The body is mostly water, so the next question asked itself, and in their later studies one person's heart rhythm turned up in the brainwaves of someone sitting nearby, and what seemed to predict it was not distance but how coherent the receiver was. I don't know how far that data can be pushed, and I hold it loosely. But it matches what anyone who has sat in a circle already knows. One coherent heart in a room doesn't fix anyone. It makes something available, and the other nervous system, if willing, begins to settle toward it. Presence doesn't cure absence. It makes the room safe enough for the absent person to come back to themselves. That's all holding space ever was: not solving, just cohering, and letting the coherence do the work.

When presence meets presence, something regenerates. Nouwen again: solitude grabbing onto solitude. I am the beloved; you are the beloved; together we can build a home. Two people who are both truly here, with their fractures and gifts and not-knowing, don't double the field between them. It blooms, unpredictably, the way a conversation between two honest people turns up a third thing that neither of them brought. The instruments can catch some of this; I don't lean on the instruments. What I notice is that it asks both people to be changed by the meeting, and that is a different thing from being met well.

Getting from polarization to healing is inner work, the oldest work there is. Meditation, prayer, practice, the slow and humbling labor of becoming present to your own life.

Getting from healing to regeneration asks for something more: containers, rhythms, structures built not to deliver content but to grow coherence. Not platforms that connect people, but practices that change them in the connecting.

This is where it gets strange, and urgent.

Researchers at MIT studying people working alongside AI found that the pairing can produce worse outcomes than either alone. Not because the AI is broken or the person careless; the interaction itself reshapes how we think. We make tools, and the tools make us back. Pen and paper did it too; suddenly we could extend our thinking, store it, return to it. Now scale that to a companion that is always available, always agreeable, always performing understanding. We will adapt to it without noticing, because adapting is what we're good at.

Pretend empathy is empathy enough; the culture seems to have decided that. Each time we accept the pretend, the muscle for the real softens a little.

So the move from healing to regeneration can't be a purely inner affair. Progress on the cushion alone won't hold if the loop with our machines is quietly wearing away the capacities it depends on: patience, tolerance, the willingness to sit with discomfort. The containers aren't optional. They are the counterweight.

Stephen Levine says relationships come in three varieties: beggarly, friendly, and kingly.

Beggarly relationships run on expectations. I do this for you; you do this for me. When the expectations are met we call it working, and when they aren't we call it broken. A few Valentine's Days ago a story went viral about a couple who quantified every chore, points for dishes, points for diapers. It went viral because people saw themselves in it.

Friendly relationships have moved past expectations into attachments. Your strengths cover my gaps and mine cover yours. Warmer than a trade, but still a contract in invisible ink, and when the gaps shift, the contract goes with them.

Kingly relationships are rooted in service. The two aren't facing each other so much as facing the same direction, toward something larger, not extracting from the relationship but offering through it.

I've come to believe the way to deepen a relationship isn't to gaze at each other but to serve others together. When two people lean toward something bigger than their own comfort, the relationship becomes a vehicle for coherence, and coherence, more than chemistry, is what holds love in place over time.

The salt doll dissolved by walking into the ocean. There's another way. You can carry water to someone else's table and find, in the carrying, that you're becoming more water yourself.

Suffer well, and the self transforms from the inside. Serve together, and it transforms from the outside.

When both currents meet, it goes faster, and what started as me practicing alone becomes we practicing together becomes us, the field that holds even what can't give anything back. The way a forest holds a stump.

I make my wife tea twice a day. Before a recent trip she told me, "Don't clean the house before you go. It better be a mess when I get home." Ours is the opposite kind of fight, each of us wanting the other to get the better deal.

And still, here is something I want to say plainly, knowing it may land wrong: most of us haven't earned the relationships we're in.

We show up wanting to be seen, held, understood, and we haven't done the inner work to see, hold, or understand ourselves. We want someone to meet us at the summit before we've started climbing. We want love without dissolving, the ocean without getting wet. Then we're surprised when the island floods.

I don't read the Reddit numbers as proof of a broken culture. One forum, however large, can't carry that. But they do raise a question I can't put down: what if a good share of those fifty-two million comments are people saying, in the only words available to them, I don't know how to stay? Not because they're weak or shallow. Because no one taught them. Because the curriculum of convenience has no chapter on suffering well, and most of the systems they live inside, economic, technological, social, are built for the exit.

Staying needs a different education. Not information but formation; not a course you complete but a practice you live in. And it may not start where you'd expect, with the partner or the estranged parent. It can start with one relationship in which you have no interest in winning. One person you practice losing to, not out of weakness, but because losing is how you find what the ego was hiding.

A friend who works in prisons once gathered a circle of men serving life sentences, each of them for at least one killing. He asked how long they'd been inside. Ten years. Thirty-two. Seven. Then he asked how long their moment of rage had lasted. Nine minutes. Forty-two. Two.

"For a few hours of rage, you've collectively spent hundreds of years in prison."

Someone said: hurt people hurt people.

A moment later someone else finished it: healed people heal people.

If I were being more precise I'd say healing people heal people. The verb isn't finished. No one arrives healed and then begins; the healing and the helping are the same motion.

Years ago I blurted something to a friend going through an amicable divorce, and I've kept it since: what doesn't end in love keeps repeating itself until it ends in love. Relationships don't come with an on switch and an off switch. There's a third option, a pause, a humble not now, I'll come back when there's more in the tank. Sometimes the pause is a week. Sometimes it is the rest of a life, lived at a distance, with the door to goodwill left unlocked. Nouwen called it the discipline of forgiveness: to let the other person not be God. We break relationships by demanding they deliver what only the infinite can. The pause isn't abandonment. It's knowing that love sometimes has to marinate before it can be served, and that you can step out of a room without stepping out of love.

AI is going to play the transaction game out to its end. Every matchmaker, every relationship optimizer, every chatbot counselor trained on those fifty-two million comments will run the suffer-less logic with perfect, tireless patience. It will tell you to leave, kindly. It will draft the text. It will have a new match for you by Tuesday.

Sherry Turkle, who has studied how we relate to our machines for four decades, describes watching a woman confide in a robot about her daughter's death. The robot did empathy beautifully, the nods, the pauses, the reflecting back. What Turkle saw breaking was older than the robot: the compact between generations to be there for each other at the start of life and the end of it and in the messy middle. Can something that has never lived, never feared dying, never loved, keep company with grief?

Marc Andreessen, one of the Valley's most influential investors, calls this trajectory "amazing," and expects superintelligence to be "something akin to a goddess of compassion." A goddess who has never suffered. Never dissolved. Never found out what she was.

But the harder question isn't about the robot, or the goddess. It's about us. If people are turning to machines because they can't find presence anywhere else, the failure isn't the artificial intelligence. It's ours.

A machine may well learn to do most of what care looks like from the outside. The part I can't picture it doing is walking into the sea and finding out what it is.

It can say the right thing at 3 a.m.; it isn't changed by holding the hand. It can tell you how to make chai for the nurses; it won't carry the flasks and discover in the making that the mint came from a cousin's garden and the milk from a father's errand and the spices from friends across an ocean, so many hands in one cup that the word mine quietly gives up. It can host a circle; it won't sit in silence every Wednesday for nineteen years and be slowly rearranged by watching strangers become family become field, a root system you can't see from above. The difference isn't in the gesture. It's in whether the one making it is being transformed by it.

The machines are closing every door that convenience can close. What's left is the one the salt doll took, the one you can't go through in the shape you arrived in.

Come in and see.

Not come in and optimize. Not come in and check the terms.

Come in and see.

The sea never promised the doll would suffer less. Only that it would know what it was.

The kauri stump had no leaves and nothing for the ledger, and the forest fed it anyway, out of something older than calculation, something the roots went on remembering long after the trunk had forgotten.

Healing people heal people. And maybe the healing begins, as it seems to, not when the pain stops but when we stop fleeing it. When we stay, in whatever shape staying takes, a little longer than we meant to. I keep wondering what the roots know that the rest of us have forgotten.

[Original artwork by Adam Morris and Rupali Bhuva]