Aerial view of patchwork farmland and vineyards under a warm pink and gold sunset sky

I've been thinking about one trade-off of the digital world: we can reach almost anyone, while spending less time actually being with people.

I don't say that as a judgment. 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. Most of that is simply part of functioning in the world we have built.

But one thing does stand out. Many of these tools also make it easier to spend a day with surprisingly little face-to-face contact.

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: a normal day can move from phone to commute to laptop and back to phone without much unstructured time with another person. You work, often with other people, but through the interface of a screen. You come home and disconnect again.

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. Scale that pattern to a household and everyone can be physically together while paying more attention to the outside world than to one another. That's how you deepen loneliness at scale. The broader data suggests this is more than a personal impression.

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 one reason I value mentoring, coaching and workshops built around actual interaction with another person. That matters more when everyday life leaves fewer spaces for this kind of contact.

I see the tension quite clearly in technology work and in mentoring sessions. So many of the people I sit across from - entering the job market, or even before that, starting their studies, stepping into adulthood, or coming out of university into work - are 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.

I don't know what it was like in the 1980s, but right now I think mentoring matters a great deal.

Perspectives that go both ways

The part I enjoy most is hearing someone look at the same problem from a completely different angle - how I see a thing, and how a person just entering the field sees the very same thing.

People repeat that mentoring isn't only for the mentee, and it's true: I've changed my own view on things after conversations with mentees. The mentor gets to see the world through someone else's eyes.

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 turning their experience into instructions.

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. Listening properly is harder than it sounds - the temptation is always to prepare your answer while the other person is still talking. The discipline is to stay present and actually hear what's underneath the words. 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.

Mentoring obviously cannot replace friendship, close relationships or professional help when that is what someone needs. 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 the mentee usually defines a goal, or several, that they want to move toward. Goals can change as the conversations develop, and that is often part of the value. Every session I've had has stirred thinking, and not only during the session itself, but between sessions too.

Some of those conversations follow me back into product work. 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?

The satisfaction of watching someone grow

There's also the plain satisfaction of it. When you see someone make a decision, try something and come back with a different perspective, 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. The difficult part is finding the balance: enough structure to make progress, but enough freedom for the real issue to emerge. Learning that sense of pace and planning is a valuable skill in itself.

A conversation still needs somewhere to go

It's lovely to talk, but a good session should still end with some clarity: what changed, what matters now, and what happens next. That way the mentoring process becomes something with a structure, something moving toward a point.

At the same time, goals matter, but the useful part is often what you learn while trying to reach them. Even when we're building products, or selling services, we set ourselves a goal, and it's great when you reach it. But what you pick up along the way stays important much later - long after the goal itself is achieved and done.

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).

Those programmes also connect me with other mentors and with people who approach similar problems very differently. That mutual support pays off later, across very different areas of life.

Where AI mentoring fits, and where it doesn't

AI adds an interesting complication to all of this. There are already many tools where you can talk to an artificial intelligence cast in the role of a mentor. An AI mentor can ask questions, challenge an assumption, suggest options or let you rehearse a difficult conversation at any hour.

Those are real uses - thinking out loud, practising sitting in the mentor's chair or the mentee's - and I wouldn't steer anyone away from them. But it's worth being clear about what such a tool 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.

For someone with no mentor within reach, an AI tool may be the only door open, and that is a real good. The more interesting risk is habit: using AI for a conversation we could have had with another person, and letting it quietly take the very time we could be giving to people.

There isn't a universal ratio of screen time to human contact that makes sense for everyone. Those are things each of us has to 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?

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.

I don't think the answer is to use fewer tools. I think it is to notice when a tool has started replacing a person. Thanks for reading.

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