The Algorithm Knows You Better Than They Do

Last Thursday night, my partner and I sat on the couch for forty-seven minutes choosing a movie. I know it was forty-seven minutes because I checked the clock when we started and again when I finally said, just pick something. During those forty-seven minutes, we exchanged maybe nine words. The rest was scrolling, sighing, reading synopses, and making faces at each other that communicated various shades of no, not that one. When we finally pressed play, we both looked at our phones within the first ten minutes. Somewhere between the menu screen and the opening credits, I realized that Netflix's recommendation algorithm had received more sustained attention from both of us than either of us had received from the other in the past two hours. The algorithm got our focus, our deliberation, our careful evaluation. The person sitting twelve inches away got a series of grunts and a shared blanket. This is not a story about screens being bad. I am tired of that narrative, because it is too simple and it lets us off the hook. The screens are not the problem. The problem is that we have built systems designed to be more interesting than the person sitting next to us, and then we act surprised when they succeed.

Engineered to Compete With Your Partner

The Surgeon General's 2023 advisory on social connection noted that the average American adult now spends more time engaging with digital content than in face-to-face conversation with all people in their lives combined. Not per person. Combined. Every friend, family member, partner, coworker, neighbor. The screen gets more. This is not an accident. Netflix, and every platform like it, employs teams of engineers whose explicit professional purpose is to make the next episode more compelling than whatever else you could be doing with your time. The autoplay feature, the personalized thumbnails, the algorithmic arrangement that puts something slightly irresistible at the top of your queue every time you open the app. These are not neutral design choices. They are competitive strategies, and what they are competing against is the person on the couch. The Gottman Institute's research on relationship satisfaction found that couples who spend less than five hours per week in focused, undivided conversation with each other are significantly more likely to report feeling emotionally disconnected. Five hours a week. That is about forty-three minutes a day. We spent forty-seven minutes choosing a movie.

The Conversation That Cannot Autoplay

I have started doing something that feels almost radical, which tells you everything about where we are as a culture. Once a week, I turn off the television and ask my partner a question. Not how was your day, which is less a question than a greeting card. A real question. What is something you believed five years ago that you do not believe anymore. What is a memory you think about when you cannot sleep. If you could go back to one meal you have ever eaten, which one. The first time I did this, there was an awkward silence that lasted about fifteen seconds. Fifteen seconds does not sound long until you are sitting in it without a screen to break the tension. But then my partner said something I had never heard them say before, about a summer they spent with their grandfather that shaped how they think about patience. We talked for an hour and a half. The Netflix queue went dark. Cacioppo and Hawkley's research on social cognition demonstrated that meaningful conversation activates reward pathways in the brain that passive entertainment does not. Not just different pathways. Stronger ones. The dopamine response from a conversation where you feel genuinely seen is measurably more intense than the response from any streaming service's best effort. We have the better drug. We just keep reaching for the easier one. The algorithm will never know your partner. It will never ask them about the summer with their grandfather. It will never notice the way their voice changes when they talk about something that matters. It will never sit in fifteen seconds of awkward silence and come out the other side into an hour of actual connection. That is still ours. But only if we choose it over the scroll.