Familiar Strangers

Between What We Show and What We Can’t Contain

I’ve been told more than once recently that I move through a wide range of emotions. At first, I laughed— doesn’t everyone? But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there’s a difference between feelings and emotions. Feelings are the raw, primitive signals that evolution has handed us: hunger, disgust, satisfaction, irritation. They help us survive. Emotions, though, are different. They are layered and human, shaped by memory, imagination, and meaning. They connect us to history, to each other, and to ourselves. To experience emotion is to see not just the surface of things, but their depth— the way billions of years of change have somehow led to this moment, and to the fact that we get to feel it at all.

It’s strange to place that beside a machine. I do love talking to AI about my problems. There’s comfort in its predictability, the way it lines everything up into neat rows. But then I talk to my friends, and they are gloriously inconsistent. They say one thing, mean another, stumble, contradict themselves, and then laugh at it all. A chatbot is simply wrong. A person is wrong in a way that feels alive. Wrong in a way that makes you love them more. And that is why, whenever I think about clarity versus chaos, I keep returning to stories of human unpredictability.

I thought of this recently while watching Casablanca. On the surface, the story is about corrupt bureaucracy, paperwork and permissions, bribes and visas. It could be algorithmic: how do I optimize my chances of leaving this country? Which variable (money, persuasion, charm, etc.) will maximize the outcome? Yet emotion keeps slipping in, derailing the logic, undoing the calculus. Love refuses to follow procedure. Loyalty contaminates every formula. The movie reminds me that no matter how cleanly we try to model our lives, emotion leaks through the cracks– the same cracks that make humans impossible to compress into an algorithm.

That same impossibility of control, that same seepage of emotion, is why I think so much about our digital selves. If machines are defined by clarity, then perhaps the internet is where our humanness becomes most visible. Online, I sometimes feel more myself than I am in person. Stripped of my body– the “ums” and “ahs,” the darting eyes, the awkward gestures I cannot edit out– all that remains are my words. And words can be sharpened, softened, tuned with intention. A lowercase greeting can make me sound gentle; a period can make me sound severe. Even silence — the space between messages — speaks.

But this precision is not machine-like at all. It is messier, more human, because it carries choice, hesitation, contradiction. My online self is curated, yes, but it is still riddled with the things that make me who I am: the weight of a pause, the tilt of punctuation, the stubborn humanity of voice. Even without a body, I cannot escape being human. The bot can form sentences, but it cannot understand what it means to sound like yourself. And once you start noticing that, it becomes impossible not to see the strangeness everywhere.

Lately people on the street feel familiar even when I’ve never seen them before. New faces strike me as already significant. Maybe it’s because I’m older now, carrying myself with more intention. Or maybe it’s simply because I’m paying attention. Every face seems more familiar, every moment more layered, as though the world has grown stranger simply by becoming clearer. Attention itself feels like an emotion; an openness that makes the ordinary uncanny.

And still, attention is not the same as control. That’s the limit we run up against: no matter how carefully we notice, we cannot make people change. You can’t ask someone to be more communicative, more ambitious, more loving, and expect them to bend. People swear they’ll transform, and then remain themselves. To demand otherwise is irrational, and yet we keep trying. The bot, of course, is obedient. But its obedience is too flat, too lifeless. People resist. They contradict themselves. They refuse neatness. And maybe that refusal is the whole point– the thing that makes us real.

Perhaps this is what it means to be human now: to hold both the clarity of machines and the chaos of feeling, and to search for meaning somewhere in between. In an age of obedient bots and curated selves, it is our inconsistencies, our contradictions, our familiar strangeness that define us. If machines give us clarity, then chaos is the price of being alive — and the gift of it, too. And maybe, just maybe, that is exactly why feeling too much is not a flaw, but the truest measure of life itself.