Love people and use things. Loneliness begins when the order reverses.
This note grows from the intersection of assertiveness, neediness, boundaries, and human-meaning-dependency-problem. The question it answers: why do modern relationships feel crowded but thin, close but lonely, full of contact but short on intimacy? The claim: instrumentalization is the hidden failure mode. We do not merely become selfish. We start treating people as tools for managing the self.
Simple Picture
ELI5: a thing is good when it does what you want. A person is good when they can remain a person even when they do not do what you want.
If you use a phone, chair, spreadsheet, or apartment, nothing is violated. Things are built to serve purposes. But when you use a person as an approval machine, status marker, emotional sedative, punching bag, rescue fantasy, or reward dispenser, the relationship stops being a meeting and becomes a control interface.
The modern loneliness problem is not just “people are isolated.” It is sharper: many people are surrounded by humans they cannot meet as humans. They have proximity, roles, messages, plans, marriages, families, teams, and feeds. What they do not have is mutual personhood.
Proximity without intimacy is inevitably destructive. — Robert Bolton, People Skills
This is the architectural nightmare: two people physically near each other but relationally absent. The body is in the room. The self is not.
The Modern Inversion
Several modern forces make the reversal easier: materialism, mobility, family uprooting, bureaucratic organizations, and the replacement of local obligation with abstract coordination. The common denominator is that things become more reliable than people.
Things do not misunderstand you. Things do not confront you. Things do not ask for repair. Things do not force you to become more honest than your self-image can tolerate. So a culture trained by convenience starts seeking consolation in objects, interfaces, systems, and purchases while treating human beings as unpredictable obstacles inside the workflow.
This connects directly to human-meaning-dependency-problem. AI, delivery apps, recommendation systems, and consumer abundance do not create the human dependency problem from scratch. They reveal a prior failure: the human layer already started to feel unreliable, optional, and interface-like.
Materialism is not merely liking nice things. It is the emotional substitution where objects absorb the attention meant for people. Bureaucracy is not merely paperwork. It is the institutional substitution where people become cases, tickets, metrics, roles, and liabilities. Both train the same reflex: the world is easier when persons are reduced into manageable objects.
The tragedy is not that we own things. The tragedy is that things become easier to love than people.
Submission Uses People Too
Aggression is the obvious way to use people. Submission is the hidden way.
The submissive person appears selfless, but the structure is transactional. They forfeit themselves to buy approval. They crowd themselves into what they think is another person’s picture of what is lovable. This looks generous from the outside. Internally it is a covert bargain:
I will erase myself, and in exchange you will keep me safe.
That bargain does not respect either person. It denies the self by making honest desire unspeakable. It denies the other by implying they are too fragile to hear truth, handle confrontation, or carry their share of responsibility.
This is why assertiveness matters. True assertiveness confirms your own worth while maintaining the worth of others. Submission sacrifices the self. Aggression sacrifices the other. Assertiveness is the rare stance that refuses both sacrifices.
George Bernard Shaw names the cost:
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself. — George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
Self-erasure does not produce love. It produces resentment with a halo. The person who cannot say no eventually cannot say yes cleanly either, because their yes has become a survival behavior. This is the emotional logic behind boundaries: a trustworthy yes requires the real availability of no.
Aggression Fears Equality
The aggressive person reverses the moral order more openly. They love things and use people. They respect what can be possessed, optimized, displayed, consumed, or won. People become objects inside the strategy.
But aggression carries a double bind: the aggressor cannot respect anyone they can dominate, yet they fear any relationship where domination stops working. Equality threatens them because equality requires presence without control. It asks them to meet a person who can refuse, answer back, leave, criticize, desire differently, and remain real.
That is why dominance produces emptiness. Compliance is not intimacy. Victory is not love. If you need someone beneath you to feel safe, you have made connection impossible in advance.
dominance-signaling distinguishes real authority from performed dominance. Real authority steadies the room. Performed dominance tries to force the room to confirm the performer’s importance. One creates space for persons. The other converts persons into mirrors.
Praise, Punishment, and Reward
Even praise can become a way of using people.
Evaluative praise says: I am above you, judging your performance. Descriptive praise says: I see what you did. The difference is subtle and enormous. “Good job” often feels warm, but it places the speaker in the position of judge. “You sorted these by color” gives reality back to the person without converting them into a grade.
That is why descriptive praise beats evaluative praise. It supports contact instead of control.
Punishment is the crude version of control. It hardens people, sharpens alienation, and strengthens resistance. The only people who respond well to punishment are often the ones who least need it, because they still have enough relationship to the punisher to care.
Rewards are the polite version of the same mistake. They look positive, but they can still convert participation into a transaction: “what’s in it for me?” Once that frame takes over, the reward economy escalates. No reward finally satisfies because the person has been trained away from contribution and toward extraction.
This links to dopamine. External reward turns the relationship into anticipation machinery. The system starts chasing the next payout instead of experiencing the dignity of freely given participation.
The non-instrumental alternative is not permissiveness. It is responsibility without manipulation: clear limits, accurate reflection, honest consequences, and enough respect to treat the other person as capable of meaningfully responding.
Communication as De-Instrumentalization
“As far as communication is concerned, many of us are victims of victims.” Bad relational habits are inherited. Parents who were never met as persons struggle to meet their children as persons. Couples who do not understand each other raise children they do not understand, who then inherit the same poverty of contact.
This is where communication becomes moral technology. The point is not to sound polished. The point is to stop converting people into functions.
One simple rule: every question can be converted into a statement and reflected back.
“Why are you always late?” becomes: “I feel unimportant when I wait and we have not agreed on what happens next.”
“Don’t you care?” becomes: “I want to feel chosen, and right now I am reading your distance as indifference.”
“Why can’t you just help?” becomes: “I am overloaded and need a concrete commitment from you.”
Questions often disguise accusations because accusation wants leverage without ownership. Statements restore ownership. They say what is happening inside the speaker without pretending to be an objective audit of the other person’s soul. This is the same discipline as radical-honesty and honesty-as-alignment: truth becomes connective when it stops masquerading as control.
The Marriage Without Intimacy
Modern couples often do not lack contact. They lack relational skill. They know how to coordinate calendars, share expenses, decorate a home, raise children, and maintain a public identity. They do not know how to be affected by each other without defending, collapsing, correcting, evading, or performing.
The result is the parallel marriage: two people living side by side, each privately certain the other does not understand them. Children then grow up inside the emotional weather of non-contact. They learn the script before they can name it.
This is the family version of loneliness: not literal political isolation, but the loss of inner company and trustworthy relation. People live near each other while losing the ability to think, feel, and speak in the presence of another person.
The cure is not more proximity. More time together can intensify the damage if the channel is dead. The cure is restored personhood: clean anger, clean affection, clean refusal, clean repair.
Affection and anger are linked because both require a self. Repress anger long enough and affection thins too. The system cannot selectively kill only the inconvenient emotions. This is why emotional-wisdom treats emotion as information rather than noise. Anger often says: something in the relationship is trying to use me.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “people matter more than stuff.” True, but too vague to guide behavior.
The midwit take is “capitalism and technology made everyone lonely.” Partly true, but too external. Systems matter, yet they become intimate through habits: covert bargains, evaluative praise, reward manipulation, conflict avoidance, and the refusal to let others be separate.
The better take is that love fails when personhood gets subordinated to regulation. We use people to regulate self-worth, anxiety, status, desire, boredom, guilt, resentment, and loneliness. Then we wonder why the relationship cannot breathe.
desire-vs-love names the romantic version: the other person becomes a delivery mechanism for relief from the wound. neediness names the approval version: the other person becomes a scoreboard. boundaries names the repair: recover separateness so the meeting can be real.
Main Payoff
The love-people/use-things distinction is not moral decoration. It is a diagnostic tool.
Ask of any relationship: what is being treated as a person, and what is being treated as a tool?
If your phone receives your tenderness while your partner receives your irritation, the order has reversed. If your child receives performance management but your career receives devotion, the order has reversed. If your friend is valued only when they validate your preferred self-image, the order has reversed. If your spouse is useful as a stability object but unbearable as a separate mind, the order has reversed.
The repair is not sentimentality. It is the hard discipline of meeting people as people: telling the truth without domination, receiving refusal without collapse, praising without ranking, helping without purchasing approval, leading without humiliating, loving without possession.
Use things. Love people. Every other arrangement eventually turns the room into a warehouse full of lonely tools.
References:
- Robert Bolton, People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts
- George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists