066 Intro to Season 3: Conscious relationships at the dawn of AI with Silas Rose

Intro to season 3: Conscious relationships at the dawn of ai with Silas Rose

After an extended hiatus Awake In Relationship is back on the AIR with season 3! In this short episode Silas discusses the origins of the loneliness epidemic and the evolution of his mission in the brave new world of super intelligent machines to help people reclaim time and attention from devices to invest in conscious relationships and deep work in the real world.

Episode Transcripts

Silas Rose: It is been a while since I’ve been behind the mic. Last year I was focused on schooling, some education around leadership coaching and other projects, so it feels good to be publishing again. One of the things I really love about podcasting is it really feels like a conversation that you can kind of dip in and out of.

As any content creator knows, it can sometimes feel like a bit of a grind, so it’s good to refresh and wait for the muse to inspire you. In the past year, I’ve really been, doing a lot of reflection on that. Inspiration on the big why behind the podcast. I launched a show back in 2020 with a desire to platform solutions to the loneliest epidemic with different experts in the relationship and personal development space.

What I didn’t realize at the time of starting this pod is that this challenge is a deep rabbit hole. It affects so many of us and for to believe the stats, one in four people in the so-called developed world regularly experience loneliness, with over 8 billion of us on the planet right now, and ubiquitous connectivity why is it that so many of us right now struggle to stay connected and maintain a baseline of social wellbeing. In his seminal book, bowling Alone published 25 years ago, Robert Putnam points to this decline in the connective tissue of society, namely the shared values in institutions that make things work.

Putnam points to large social demographic changes, particularly in the post-war era, that point us towards living lives of greater loneliness and isolation. Simple things like driving a car rather than walking, or more recently, the movement towards remote work have had huge impacts on our sense of connection. Feeling connected to our neighbours and our coworkers and our family. There seems to be this inverse relationship between our financial, economic mobility and a decline in social capital. I’m no social scientist, but I really feel in the past 10 years that there’s been a massive acceleration of this process while there’s no single cause.

For the loneliness epidemic. It’s become really clear to me, at least in the course of doing this podcast and exploring the topic of conscious relationships, that probably one of the single biggest factors is in your hand or back pocket right now. We are not just isolated behind walls in the suburbs anymore. We’re also isolated behind a screen. If you’ve ever walked into a busy cafe or gone on public transit and everyone around you has their face buried in a phone, you know what I mean? It feels like a gut punch to our human sensibilities, and the worst part of this is that we all do it, including me, your humble host.

As the saying goes, you’re not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. We all do it. We know it’s bad. We know it’s hurting us, it’s hurting our kids. But it’s hard to imagine another way to live in the modern world when this technology is just so woven into our lives. So the basic question for me around how do we solve the loneliness epidemic has become much more personal and granular.

How do we live and love as freethinking beings in a world saturated with attention grabbing dopaminergic devices, including now artificial intelligence? I’m already getting pushed ads for AI companions promising instant relief of loneliness. It truly is a brave new world. For me personally, the awake part of Awake In Relationship is recognizing that we have a choice.

We can choose to be fully present, embody mind and heart, and turn towards connection in the real world. Our attention and presence is the gift that we give each other. To have more to give requires setting some hard boundaries with the algorithms and the digital tools of daily life. For me, the antidote to the loneliness epidemic is the union of mindfulness and social fitness.

We have to start reclaiming our attention and reinvesting it in the deep work and relationships that actually matter. I hope that Awake In Relationship becomes kind of a learning lab to do this. I also hope dear listener, that you will join me in this mission and that we can explore this topic further in season three.

I so love hearing from my audience and welcome your feedback and inspiration for future episodes. I. I can sometimes be found on social media though. Better to contact me through the contact page on my website awakeinrelationship.com. I can also be found on LinkedIn and Substack. Till next time, dear listener, stay connected.