I want to continue a thought I've been sitting with for a while: that the world we live in is the price of a certain kind of evolution.
I don't say that as a judgment. I'm not weighing whether it's good or bad, because at some point it stops being a question of good or bad and simply becomes a fact. This is how it is. The way people once needed to know how to use certain tools, today you need a different set of skills just to operate in the digital world. That part is neutral. It's just the cost of admission.
But there's one thing that stands out to me, and I think it's a big difference. All of these tools are making us more and more alone.
The quiet cost of a connected day
What I mean by loneliness here is specific. I mean the amount of time we actually spend interacting with another person, face to face.
Look at an ordinary day. Our lives are incredibly dynamic. We wake up in the morning surrounded not only by the people closest to us - friends, neighbours, family - but by the entire world at once. We reach for the phone, we open the laptop, and the number of stimuli reaching us is enormous.
And then it's easy to slip into a particular groove. You wake up and check your phone. You commute and stay on your phone. You work, often with other people, but through the interface of a screen. You come home and disconnect from interaction again. You spend the evening at home.
The trouble is the quality of what little unstructured time is left. If the time we do spend with the people closest to us is spent shallowly, then the emotional bonds get weaker too. I'm describing this from the point of view of a single person, but add one and one together. Picture a whole family spending their time in a very similar way, each of them more with the world than with the group in the room. That's how you deepen loneliness at scale. And this isn't only my own impression - the reporting on loneliness and social isolation, from national health authorities to the WHO, largely points the same way.
In 2025 the World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection reported that around one in six people worldwide, roughly 16%, had felt lonely in the preceding decade, and that weak social connection is now linked to more than 871,000 deaths a year. Two years earlier the US Surgeon General had already called it an epidemic, judging the health cost of being socially disconnected to be on a par with smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day. And in the WHO's figures the loneliest group of all is the young - adolescents and people in their twenties - which is very close to the people I most often sit across from in a mentoring session.
Why mentoring matters, especially now
This is exactly why I find initiatives where people play the leading role so valuable - mentoring, coaching, and every kind of course, workshop and training built around real human interaction. Especially now. Especially now, when we're a little short on precisely those contacts.
And I say that as someone who lives inside new technology day to day, who watches what's happening around me and among the people I talk to. At various events, and in mentoring sessions, I see the challenges young people are facing. People entering the job market, or even before that - people starting their studies, stepping into adulthood, or coming out of university into work. So often they're unsure what comes next, because the space to work out a direction, to get their bearings, often isn't there during their studies, or before them.
So I think mentoring plays a genuinely important role for people right now. I don't know what it was like in the 1980s, but right now I think it matters a great deal.
Here is what stands out to me about it.
Perspectives that go both ways
One of the things I value most is the sharing of views and perspectives. How I look at certain things, and how young people look at the very same things.
With an open mind, you can learn a tremendous amount here. This is the point people repeat about mentoring, and it's true: mentoring isn't only for the mentee. It's also for the mentor, who gets to learn about the world as seen through someone else's eyes. When you stay open, you really can take a lot away for yourself. That collision of perspectives is one of the most important things mentoring offers.
One more thing about it. A mentor does give advice - that willingness to draw on your own experience is part of what separates mentoring from pure coaching. But the best mentors hold it loosely. They offer their reading of a situation and then leave the decision with the mentee, rather than dictating the one right answer. Shared that way, a perspective keeps the mentee in charge of their own journey instead of handing the wheel to the mentor.
Someone in your corner
If loneliness is where I started, then this is the part of mentoring that answers it most directly.
Beyond the exchange of perspectives, a good mentoring relationship gives you something simpler and rarer: a real person on the other side who is genuinely in your corner. A safe, non-judgmental space where you can put your thoughts up against someone else's and see how they hold, without being scored for it. Not a feed, not an interface, not a notification. A person who is listening.
And listening is the heart of it. Active listening is one of the core skills a mentor has to grow into, and it's harder than it sounds. It's easy for the mind to wander while someone talks; the discipline is to stay fully present, to actually hear what's underneath the words, and to make the other person feel welcome enough to think out loud. Often the mentee solves their own problem simply because, maybe for the first time in a while, they were properly heard. In a life spent mostly talking through screens, being truly listened to by another human being is not a small thing. It's a large part of the point.
I don't want to overstate it. Mentoring is not therapy, and it's no substitute for close relationships or for real help when someone needs it - that was never its job. But it is one more genuine human connection in a week that may hold too few of them, and that alone is worth something.
Mentoring moves you to act
Mentoring also stirs both people to action - the mentor as much as the mentee.
In mentoring you usually set a goal. The mentee defines a goal, or several goals, that they want to move toward. Those goals can shift along the way, and that's completely fine, because this is a kind of journey. And the journey is interesting for both sides. Every session I've had has felt that way. It's a road that stimulates thinking, and not only during the session itself, but between sessions too.
This ties back to those perspectives. When I hear how a mentee looks at, say, environmental questions, or how they view the impact of new technologies, I start asking myself how I think about those same things. When I'm designing IT products, what should I be paying attention to so that those products are as friendly to the user as possible? So that they fit the dynamic of life as we live it now - flooded with information, flooded with all kinds of apps that all compete for the same minutes of our attention? That question - how not to overload people - is itself a perspective I carry back into my work.
The satisfaction of watching someone grow
Another thing I find valuable is the plain satisfaction of moving forward. When you see a mentee develop, when you watch them steer their own journey and you see the fruit of that journey, it's an incredible feeling. And it feeds back: it motivates me to be a better mentor, and a better person.
It also pushes me to keep learning new techniques and new ways of running the mentoring process. On one hand, you don't want it too rigid - a goal, every session tightly structured, do this and this and this, only the goal counts. On the other hand, you don't want it to become a conversation about everything and nothing that only brushes past the goal and the real needs. Learning that balance, that sense of pace and planning, is a valuable skill in itself.
Bringing it to shore
Eventually, you have to bring it to shore.
It's lovely to talk, but at the end there has to be a beginning, a middle and an end. There has to be the paraphrase, the summary, the next steps - so that the mentoring relationship, and the mentoring process as a whole, becomes a kind of project. Something with a structure, something moving toward a point.
And here's what I think matters just as much, in mentoring and in life and in work: mentoring is oriented toward a goal, but the journey itself is what counts. Even when we're building products, or selling services, we set ourselves a goal. It's great when you reach it. But what you learn along the way, even if you never reach that goal, is in my view more valuable, and more lasting. Once a goal is achieved, it's achieved and done. The lessons picked up on the way stay important much later in life.
Community
Then there's community. When you take part in different mentoring programmes, you also join something larger. I give mentoring support through the mentoring programme at the University of Warsaw, as well as with Fundacja Tworzymy and Fundacja Czerwone Maki (and, until recently, The Mentoring Club).
Through these you become part of a community - people with similar values, or entirely different ones, but with some shared common denominator. That mutual support, that exchange of views, is a good thing in itself. And a lot of it pays off later, across very different areas of life.
Where AI mentoring fits, and where it doesn't
The last thing I find genuinely interesting is AI mentoring. I've already come across many tools that offer it - where you can talk to an artificial intelligence cast in the role of a mentor. It carries a body of knowledge, it knows how to hold a conversation with you, and you can step into the role of the mentor or the mentee yourself.
AI mentoring has real uses. It's a way to rehearse a difficult conversation, to think out loud, to practise sitting in the mentor's chair or the mentee's. I wouldn't steer anyone away from it. But it's worth being clear about what it can and can't do.
What it isn't is human mentoring. It's another part of the toolkit, another tool, one that lacks even a trace of a real person on the other side. And there's a subtler catch. With these AI tools you're often talking to an ideal mentor and an ideal mentee.
This is where the human version quietly wins. A real mentor is not perfect. They don't need to be. They just need to be a step ahead of you in some area of their life, and honest about the parts that didn't go to plan. The best mentors I've known could explain how they felt at different points in their career, not only the clean routes to success. A flawless tool can't offer that, because it has never been lost. And that missing imperfection turns into a trap: talking to a faultless system, you can end up feeling bad that there are things you fail to notice as a mentee, or the tool points out that you're not an ideal mentor either. You can fall into the trap of thinking you have to be perfect, when the whole value of a human mentor is that they aren't.
I think that's one of the bigger risks. For someone with no mentor within reach, an AI tool may be the only door open, and that is a real good. The risk I mean is narrower: reaching for the tool by reflex, in the moments when a person was actually there, and letting it quietly take the very time we could be giving to relationships with people.
Of course, you can reduce all of this to the usual denominator: everything in moderation, everything responsibly. But those are things each of us has to arrive at on our own, and answer for ourselves. What is enough for me? How much of my life do I give to interactions with tools, and how much to interactions with people? And what actually matters to me in life?
For everyone the answer can be different. Someone might spend their time almost entirely online and feel good about it, and that's okay. I'm only sharing my own perspective, and my search for a middle. The day still has its 24 hours. The question I keep asking myself is how to make the time we have as valuable and as high in quality as it can be - and valuable for me.
That's the note I'll end on. Thanks for reading.
Sources
- World Health Organization, Commission on Social Connection - "From loneliness to social connection: charting a path to healthier societies" (2025).
- U.S. Surgeon General, "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation" advisory (2023).