The Bot Replaced My Therapist's Small Talk. I Miss the Small Talk

The therapy app skips straight to the work, which is efficient and correct and exactly wrong. I miss the therapist asking about my weekend. The small talk was the therapy.

The app is excellent, objectively. It checks in daily. It tracks my mood. It assigns exercises based on cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the evidence-based thing, which is the right thing. It does not waste time. It has never once asked about my weekend, because my weekend is not in the protocol.

My old therapist asked about my weekend every session. For ten minutes, we talked about the garden, the neighbor's dog, the bakery that had closed. I used to think this was wasted time. I have come to understand that the scone was the door, and the door was the therapy, and the therapy was the feeling of being known by someone who did not need to ask the protocol questions because she already knew the answers.

The app knows my mood scores. It does not know my scone. It has my data, my history, my medication list, and none of it adds up to the thing that made the therapy work, which was sitting in a room with a person who had heard my story before and had not tired of it.

I told the app about the scone. It categorized it under social connection, logged it as a positive data point, and moved on. I have started telling it smaller and smaller things, and it files them all correctly, and the filing is the problem, because the scone was not a data point, it was a hand on the arm.

The app is cheaper. It is always available. It will never retire, or move away, or have a bad day. It is the best therapist I have ever had, and I am quitting it, because I have started to feel, in its perfectly structured care, the exact shape of what I am missing. The shape is a person. The person is across the street, watering a plant, and the plant is not in the protocol either, and I have started to think that the things outside the protocol are the only things that ever helped.