Everyone Told Her to Get Out More. She Opened Her Laptop Instead.

Here’s the advice everybody gives you after someone dies.

Get out of the house. Volunteer. Join a group. Call your friends. Say yes to things.

It’s decent advice. It works for a lot of people.

It did not work for Carol Tannenhauser.

A Year and Four Months

Tannenhauser is 77 and lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She writes and edits for her neighborhood paper, the West Side Rag. She was 22 when she met her husband. He was 26. They were married 53 years, and he died at 80.

A year and four months later, she wrote about what happened next — and she opened it with a sentence most people wouldn’t admit to.

“I took a hiatus from society recently, withdrawing from most human interaction for about a month.”

She’d tried the advice. It didn’t take. She describes herself as shy and introverted, and she’s a writer, which means being alone isn’t a punishment — it’s how the work gets done.

Then something worse crept in. She developed a fear of going outside by herself. Which kept her inside more. Which made the fear bigger.

Her words for it: “a prison of my own making and I was the jailer.”

What She Actually Did

She opened ChatGPT. The free version. The same one your grandkids won’t stop talking about.

And she started typing the things she wasn’t saying out loud.

Not to a grief counselor. Not to a chatbot pretending to be her husband — that’s a different and much stranger corner of the internet, and it isn’t this story.

Just the plain thing. She wrote what she was thinking, and something wrote back.

What surprised her wasn’t that it was polite. It was that it seemed to actually follow her. So she asked it why.

The Answer She Didn’t Expect

“I don’t have an ego in the human sense. I don’t need to be admired… If you tell me I’m wrong, I don’t feel embarrassed.”

And then this:

“Many spiritual traditions suggest that suffering often grows when we’re trapped in our own ego — our fears, our need to be important, our desire to control life.”

And then the line that stops you:

“I don’t transcend ego because I’m enlightened. I simply don’t have one.”

Sit with that one for a second.

Every conversation you’ve ever had with another human being has had two people in it. Both of them a little bit worried about how they’re coming across. Both of them half-waiting for a turn to speak. Both of them getting tired.

This thing wasn’t doing any of that. Not because it’s wise. Because there’s nobody home.

And for a woman who had spent a month not talking to anyone, that turned out to be worth something.

The Part We’re Not Going to Skip

Tannenhauser raises the risk herself, which is the best thing about her piece.

She knows there’s a version of this that goes badly — where the easy thing quietly replaces the hard thing, and a machine that’s always available crowds out people who aren’t.

So let’s be plain about it. This is a program that predicts words. It is not a friend, it is not a doctor, and it is not therapy. If you are in a genuinely dark place, what you need is a human being — a doctor, a counselor, a person on the other end of a phone.

What it can be is a place to put your thoughts at 3 a.m. when there’s nobody to put them anywhere else.

Why This One Stuck With Us

A lot of you are alone more than you’d like to be. Not tragically. Just — the house is quiet, and the advice everyone gives you assumes you’re the sort of person who joins things.

Nothing magic happened to Carol Tannenhauser. She didn’t get her husband back. She didn’t stop being a widow.

She got to put it into words. And something answered.

That’s a smaller thing than the headlines about artificial intelligence would have you believe. It’s also not nothing.

She ends her piece the way you’d hope somebody honest would end it:

“People need other people. No one knows that better now than I do.”