Topaz Adizes is the author of 12 Questions for Love and the founder of The Skin Deep, an Emmy-award-winning experience design studio exploring relationships through intimate, structured dialogue.
Communication
The goal isn’t to agree on everything. That kind of forced sameness backfires into a false sense of cohesion. The goal is to make space for difference. To develop fluency in one another’s inner world. To build a shared context—so the tension is generative, not destructive.
We should be concerned. Of course. But if all we see is the breach of ethics, we’re missing something much bigger.
We keep treating the digital space like a cheap copy of the physical one. Trying to squeeze eye contact through pixels. Mistaking silence for absence. Forgetting that intimacy is not proximity—it’s presence.
Discomfort
What are you holding together with pins and duct tape just to avoid the shatter? What truth are you dodging to preserve the illusion? Because what needs to grow in your life may require something else first: collapse.
Your name is more than a simple label—it’s an incantation, subtly casting a spell that frames your limits and defines your power. Each name holds an entire landscape of possibility. Change it, and the terrain transforms. New paths appear, old barriers dissolve.
Cling to your mission statement, and you risk walking into storms you didn’t see coming. What once was a beacon becomes a blinder. You think you’re following your north star—but it’s yesterday’s star, yesterday’s sky. What if, instead, you carried a mission question?
Artifical Intelligence
When we turn to AI for connection, efficiency, advice, even empathy, we are being confronted with something deeper: what do we expect from our relationships?
So the question isn’t how AI will take us over. The question is: will we even notice when we’ve already handed it the keys to who we think we are?