Let’s talk about the favour you almost didn’t ask for.
You know the one. You needed help moving a couch, or a lift to the airport at five in the morning, or someone to sit with your dad for two hours while you drove back from Nelspruit. And before you picked up the phone, something in you hesitated. Not because the people in your life are unreliable. Because you’d already run the maths. It’s a hassle. They’ve got their own problems. And honestly, there’s probably an app for this now.
So you didn’t call.
The machine is very happy about that.
Here’s the quietest promise in the whole pile of promises being sold to us right now. Not that machines will be smart. Not that they’ll be fast. That you will never have to depend on another human being again. Your assistant reorders the groceries, books the plumber, remembers your mother’s birthday, drafts the awkward email, files the claim. Every small act of leaning on somebody — covered. Every favour you’d have had to ask for, absorbed.
And it’s sold as freedom. Which it is, from one angle. Freedom from owing people things. Freedom from the phone call. Freedom from being the guy who’s always asking.
But the debt was the point.
Think about the last time somebody really showed up for you. Not a transaction — no invoice, no favour kept on a balance sheet. I mean the person who drove across town for something that wasn’t convenient. Now think about why that changed anything between the two of you. It isn’t that they did the thing. It’s that they paid a price to do it, and you were worth the price. That’s the whole ledger. Trust doesn’t get built by people agreeing with each other online. It gets built by people carrying each other’s inconvenience until the carrying itself becomes the relationship.
Being needed is not a cost in a human life. It’s the mechanism. It’s how you find out whether someone actually means it.
The machine can’t see that. It reads burden as friction. Every un-optimised hour, every unnecessary favour, every “don’t worry, I’ll bring it myself” shows up in its books as waste — because in those books, it is waste. There’s no metric for it. Nobody’s dashboard has a tile that says: this person’s friend network is still load-bearing. So the system does what systems do with anything they can’t measure. It routes around it. It offers you the efficient version. And the efficient version is always the same instruction — don’t involve a person.
Now look at what that does over ten years.
You get very good at not needing anyone. You become fluent in the polite decline. And the people around you quietly learn the same thing back. Everyone stops calling, because everyone else also has a way to do it without them. It doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels like competence. You’re organised, you’re independent, you’re fine.
You’re just not connected to anything that would hold any weight.
And the person who feels this first isn’t you. It’s the one who used to be needed. The mother nobody calls for the recipe any more, because the model knows it. The mate who used to fix your car and now watches you book the dealership on your phone. The older colleague nobody asks anything of, because why would you — the answer arrives in four seconds. We talk a lot about the dignity of work being taken by machines. We barely talk about the dignity of being necessary.
There’s a line here and I want to keep it sharp, because it’s easy to slide into nostalgia and start arguing we should all make life harder on purpose. I’m not saying that.
The machine should take the admin. Take the forms, the queuing, the hold music, the reconciliation, the entire tax of modern bureaucracy that has nothing to do with being alive. That stuff isn’t a bond. It’s an obstacle. Anyone telling you to preserve the pain of a call centre in the name of human connection is selling you a cheap romance.
The thing worth protecting is smaller, and it’s easy to lose. It’s the part where you still choose a person over the efficient alternative, even when the machine has already handed you the shortcut. Especially then.
If you run a business, this one’s yours. The obvious move is to automate the client relationship — agent handles intake, agent handles follow-up, agent handles the boring parts. Fine. Do it. But watch what else goes with it. The day out nobody needed. The call you made just to check in. The customer you drove to because they were in a jam and you had the time. Those aren’t inefficiencies in a business. They’re the reason the business has a customer at all. A client who owes you nothing and you owe nothing, connected by a system that runs itself, isn’t a relationship. It’s a subscription waiting for a cheaper option. Keep a human path, and keep it expensive in your own time, on purpose.
And for yourself — the harder version. Keep one or two people in your life who are allowed to pay for you. Let them drive you to the airport. Ask for the favour that costs them something, and let it cost them. Not because you can’t manage without it. Because that transaction is the relationship. If you never run it, there’s nothing there to run.
Doing everything alone isn’t strength. It’s just the last stop before the room goes quiet and nobody notices you stopped coming.
The principle that has to survive is this. The right to be a burden, and the obligation to carry one. A country full of people who need nobody isn’t a society. It’s a few million people living very efficiently, side by side, in the same city, alone.
The machine can do the work. It can’t do the wanting.
And you’ve still got this. Needing someone, and being needed back, was never a flaw in your life that technology was supposed to fix.