You Must Feel Weird About Missing a Bartender This Much

You already know how this story goes.

You’re living your life watching some podcast:

“How many customers would miss you if you shut down tomorrow?”

Wait- what?

*“Either you work for AI or AI works for you.”*

Ok, Seth Godin, just put in simple words, as he usually does, what I was trying to figure out in my mind, damn it, what I was trying to figure out in my life. Then there was another one that really stuck with me.

“I use AI to connect humans. I use AI to build a network of people. AI is never going to be able to replace networks of people.”

That one turned into a question I couldn’t put down:

How do you actually build an AI that connects humans?

I did not get that answer either. So I tried to find out.

Davi was the first piece I found. He shows up at the café I like to work from every single day.

Do you ever wonder what the people you meet every day do? What they like to eat? How did he get an apartment in Barcelona?

Barcelona’s housing situation gets worse by the month, so it’s natural to wonder why anyone chooses to stay out of the house, myself included. Well, I do have my excuse, it’s melting outside, and the air conditioning bill isn’t exactly my friend right now.

I think he just likes company. Same as the rest of us.

And same as me. An immigrant who’s felt this more than I’d like to admit, some days.

It’s a funny thing, missing people to celebrate, coz I always think you feel more lonely when you need help, but there is no one near, coz all my memories I did celebrate together…

That is what I miss most, and I just realized last Saturday

After almost a year of living on a knife’s edge, I finally got a job, so maybe sleep will come back more often now. We did what we were supposed to do, went out to mark it.

The plan was simple, just a quick stop at NPK, then the Irish pub we’ve adopted as our second living room in Poblenou, then who knows?

But Connor wasn’t behind the bar that night, don’t get me wrong, nothing was wrong with the place.

The Heineken was as cold as always, the chips came with it, the air conditioning worked, and Manchester Untd. lost 2–0 on the screen while the whole room seemed to be rooting for the losing side.

Galway, our three-legged dog, had spent the walk over agitated, panting at every stranger. By the time we sat down, she’d cooled off enough to do something she almost never does.

She walked straight up to the guy at the next table, the one who’d nearly taken ours before I even pulled out my chair, and made herself at home under his feet. I took that as an invitation and scooted my chair a few inches. He didn’t seem to mind sharing space.

Time moves strangely in an Irish pub. What felt like two hours turned out to be the length of one pint. His name was David, English, the alleged table thief, and at some point the question came up:

“So, what do you do?”

I could have said I’m the newest waitress in Poblenou. Instead, without planning it, I said: “I’m going to tell you a story.”

I watched his eyes widen a little. The corner of his mouth started to lift before he let himself smile. Every cell in my body did a small private celebration.

I told him about our adventures in Argentina, how we traded content for a place to sleep, two years driving instead of building anything that looked like a career, but we met people who let strangers into their homes because we asked nicely and had a good story to trade.

The second piece showed up without me looking for it. And just like that, Vini started talking about sales, pipelines, KPIs, how half of digital ads these days get “viewed” by bots instead of humans.

Somewhere in that sentence, our little corner of the pub forgot the match was even on. Machines were the whole point of what he did for a living, and machines were the last thing on anyone’s mind.

David’s face was the whole point of telling a story. You get happy to see a happy face… I know this is getting weird, but believe me, there is a study on that.

Telling someone something true about yourself fires the same reward circuits as food or money, in one experiment, people gave up real cash just for the chance to talk about themselves.

Even language may have started as a replacement for the hours primates spend picking through each other’s fur, the thing that kept early groups from falling apart before anyone invented small talk.

Whatever you call it, it works on a stranger in an Irish pub in Poblenou the same way it worked fifty thousand years ago, and it still costs nothing, or almost, since the cold beers were a grand part of the deal.

I’ve spent years chasing the version that’s supposed to cost nothing and scale anyway: the SEO, the Instagram grid, the YouTube upload schedule, the TikTok trend I was three days late to.

In 2024 I was writing a newsletter telling other people how to let AI “do the heavy lifting” on their thumbnails.

I wasn’t watching the game from outside, damn it, I was coaching it the whole thing. Four different algorithms, four different promises that this one would finally deliver the feeling I got from David’s face changing over one pint. None of them ever did.

None of them can hug you back.

By the time we made it to NPK for the goodbye beers, Vini told Nora, another bartender from another place, and also another friend, about my new job… she wrapped both arms around us and handed over a beer on the house before we’d even ordered.

I cried into that hug, which surprised me more than it should have. Somehow I even knew that I needed that hug so tight.

Maybe this is part of being in a new country, knowing no one, but with big dreams, I did come with certain expectations, just to find out that life happened instead.

I’m only now dusting myself off, chin up, and can actually see the other humans around me as future friends. I want to share things. I want to help. I want to feel like I’m part of something here. I want to be in it, not just near it.

I can already hear it: of course the woman who builds AI for a living is about to tell you a stranger at a bar beat her own product. Judge away. I did too, twice, before I wrote this down anyway.

But somebody has to say the obvious part out loud. Whatever this AI turns out to be, it has to leave room for exactly this… A three-legged dog picking the table, a hug that catches you off guard, a stranger who asks a bored question and gets an honest one back.

So, how do you build an AI that connects humans?

Honestly, I don’t have the full answer, but I think you start by NOT letting it replace the stuff that already works, like the dog, the hug, the four minutes at a table you almost lost. You build the thing so it notices what David noticed, instead of doing it for him.

Coz we’re wired for story way before we’re wired for anything else, so if you help someone tell theirs a little better, you’re kind of helping them connect, in the oldest way there is.

Naive, maybe. But it’s the only version of “connect” I’ve ever believed in enough to actually go build. So yes, there’s an app now.

Maybe it’s not even that strange, missing a bartender that much. We went out looking for one friend and came home with two.

David and I aren’t friends yet. It’s not him I keep thinking about. It’s the four minutes it took for a stranger’s face to change.

Somewhere between “so, what do you do” and a dog making the first move, I got the thing four different platforms had promised me for years, for free, from a stranger who almost stole my table.

We call chasing an algorithm normal, and talking to the stranger at the next table (or the guy who’s been three feet from you every day for months) an accident. If you’ve got your own David, I want to hear about him.