Christmas traditions, at their best, require attentiveness and time and the rituals force us to engage in ways we frequently neglect. There’s the setting up the tree, working your way through an Advent calendar, buying the best ham or prawns. You need to plan for gifts and get-togethers and carefully manage certain relatives! As Paul Kelly’s perennially popular How to Make Gravy attests, the best Christmas lunches are long and lazy celebrations and commemorations of family and longing, loss and love.
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And if the “devil’s” plans to corrode the human spirit are aided by making everything a marketplace, life lived on smartphones seems the perfect vehicle. “If every experience – play, art, sex, spirituality, even friendship – becomes commodified, then nothing remains sacred,” writes ChatGPT.
The Christmas season is hardly without crass commercialism, yet it can also involve generosity and the satisfaction gained from gift-giving, not just receiving. It compels an orientation towards others that all the experts tell us is the key to satisfaction.
ChatGPT’s diabolical deliberations would have us replace real relationships with digital substitutes. “People will accumulate ‘connections’ while feeling lonelier than ever,” said its extended response to Haidt’s question.
There was a 33 per cent rise in searches for “AI girlfriends” in 2024. The loneliness epidemic in this country is most acutely present in Gen Z, and Mark Zuckerberg’s assurances that the AI companions he is selling will solve this challenge somehow don’t inspire confidence.
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When we consider the confected nature of the “intimacy” to be found in AI chatbots, the claims of Christmas stand out as radically countercultural. The idea of God himself becoming a vulnerable child born in blood and straw and danger encapsulates a determined physicality – an earthiness that suggests divine affirmation of our embodied reality, as messy and inconvenient as that can be.
As such, the old Christmas story serves as a startling counterpoint to the increasing virtuality of modern life. It is also an invitation to us – ever more lonely – and to our anxious, online generations to think again about the value of physical presence where we might source real and lasting connection, deep satisfaction and ultimate meaning.
Simon Smart is the executive director of the Centre for Public Christianity.
