September 2025: emotional bonds fray, workplace stress peaks, and we’re launching rockets to Mars while people can’t figure out how to talk to each other. The calendar says we’re living in the most connected, technologically advanced moment in human history. The headlines suggest we’re falling apart.

The Great Acceleration Meets The Great Emptiness

We’re moving faster than ever. AI writes our emails, algorithms predict our purchases, and we can video-call someone on the opposite side of the planet while walking to grab coffee. Yet September feels particularly heavy this year: not just with the usual back-to-school energy, but with something more fundamental.

People are coming apart up at record rates. Workplace stress is spilling over. Some are taking others’ lives, or trying to take their own. The pace of technological development accelerates while the pace of human healing seems stuck in first gear. There’s an odd disconnect here. We’ve got tools that can solve complex mathematical equations in milliseconds, but we can’t figure out how to fill the empty spaces inside ourselves. Or maybe that’s exactly the problem: we keep looking for technological solutions to essentially human problems.

The Hole That Algorithms Can’t Fill

So how does the emptiness get filled with love?

Not the Valentine’s Day kind. Not the Hollywood kind. The kind that shows up when your neighbor brings you soup when you’re sick, even though you’ve barely spoken in two years. The kind that happens when someone really listens: not to respond, but to understand.

The empty spaces we’re talking about aren’t really about romantic relationships, though those certainly factor in. They’re about the fundamental human need for connection, meaning, and the sense that someone would notice if we disappeared tomorrow.

Love fills slowly, imperfectly, often quietly. It’s rarely dramatic. It’s usually Tuesday afternoon, mundane, almost boring in its simplicity. Someone remembers how you take your coffee. Someone texts to check if you made it home safely. Someone laughs at your terrible jokes.

Small Gestures, Large Impact

The research on human happiness consistently points to the same conclusion: relationships matter more than almost anything else. Not just romantic ones: all of them. The barista who remembers your name. The coworker who covers for you when you’re having a rough day. The friend who shows up when you don’t ask them to.

These aren’t grand gestures. They’re not Instagram-worthy moments. They’re the quiet acts of noticing, caring, and showing up that somehow manage to fill spaces that seemed impossibly vast.

Maybe that’s why September feels so messy. Summer’s casual connections fade. School starts, routines shift, people get busy. The spaces between us grow wider just as the days grow shorter.

The Art of Showing Up

Love, it turns out, is less about feeling and more about showing up. Less about passion and more about presence. Less about perfection and more about persistence.

The couples therapists are booked solid not because love is dying, but because we’ve forgotten how to do the mundane work of connection. We expect relationships to run themselves, like apps that auto-update in the background.

But humans aren’t apps. We need maintenance, attention, care. We need someone to notice when we’re running low on emotional battery and plug us in before we shut down completely.

The emptiness that drives people to desperation often isn’t about lacking love: it’s about lacking connection. About feeling invisible in a world full of people staring at screens.

The Technology Trap

We’ve built incredible tools for connection, then used them to avoid actual connecting. Social media promises community but delivers performance anxiety. Dating apps promise romance but deliver endless shopping for humans like they’re products. The technology isn’t the problem. How we’re using it is.

Real love: the kind that fills holes: requires inefficiency. It requires wasted time, meandering conversations, unproductive moments of just being present with another person. It requires putting the phone down.

Filling Emptiness, One Tuesday at a Time

The answer to September’s messiness isn’t revolutionary. It’s embarrassingly simple: pay attention to the people around you. Show up. Listen. Remember details. Check in without needing a reason.

Love fills emptiness the way water fills a bucket: drop by drop, gradually, until suddenly the emptiness is gone and you can’t quite remember when it happened.

About Miles

Miles Spencer is currently CEO and a founder of Reflekta.ai, a Soul Tech company that bridges generations through fully interactive digital legacies. A multi-exit entrepreneur, investor, and storyteller, he is also the author of the Amazon bestseller A Line in the Sand. As former co-host of PBS’s MoneyHunt, Miles has spent his career at the intersection of media, technology, and human-centered narrative. With Reflekta, he is pioneering a new way for families to preserve voice, memory, and values: turning stories into dynamic, spontaneous connections that endure across lifetimes.