Allow me a little grace with this confession: Pete Wentz (bassist and resident wordsmith of the emo band Fall Out Boy) is my favorite lyricist.

Please note what I’m saying. I am not saying he is the “best” lyricist. I am fully aware that Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, and Kendrick Lamar — artists with Nobel Prizes and Pulitzers orbiting their names — exist. I am not even necessarily saying Pete Wentz is a “good” lyricist.

Part of Pete’s charm is that sometimes his lyrics are NOT good. His lyrics are completely ridiculous. Occasionally overwrought to the point of parody. Sometimes I’m not sure what his lyrics even mean. But they are operatic. They take teenage sadness and stage that sadness like a Broadway production, just like how adolescent heartbreak feels.

When I was thirteen, blasting Fall Out Boy’s third album “Infinity on High” on a boombox, I heard this line: “The best way to make it through with hearts and wrists intact is to realize two out of three ain’t bad.”

Something in me cracked open when I heard that line. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t tasteful. It was maximalist despair dressed up as wisdom — and it hit. It hit so hard that nearly two decades later, at age 31, I named my debut album “with hearts & wrists intact.”

Across Fall Out Boy’s entire catalogue, there is a deep perspective.

There’s the grand cynicism: “If you knew what the blue birds sing at you, you would never sing along.”

There’s a deep romantic yearning: “I thought I loved you / It was just how you looked in the light / A teenage vow in a parking lot / ‘Til tonight do us part / I sing the blues and swallow them too.”

Bitchiness: “I got your love letters, corrected the grammar, and sent them back.”

Romantic despair: “The truth hurts worse than anything I could bring myself to do to you.”

Even when the lines are cringe, they feel authored. You can sense the same mind circling the same body for decades. It’s a posture, sure. But it’s a posture held so deeply and sincerely — and communicated so honestly — that tens of millions of people have connected with it all, myself included.

At the time of this writing, Pete has been writing lyrics for Fall Out Boy for three decades. In this way, Pete has staked his career — and life — on these words.

***

Texts, calls, e-mails, Slack messages, Zoom meetings, in-person meetings, Instagram notifications, YouTube pre-roll, TikTok videos. The billboard on the way home from work. The Hinge response. The conversation with your wife about where you’ve been. (Long-form essays posted online.)

We live in a communication-saturated world, so much so that we don’t often take a step back to ask: What is the purpose of communication? Why do we use words?

Here’s one obvious answer: to get something from people.

If you’re a car salesman, you use words to sell cars at the highest possible price. If you’re a lawyer in court, you use words to secure the best possible outcome for your client. In both cases, language is a tool. The only real question is: Did it work?

I’m sure you can imagine scenarios in which transactional language may be necessary. I’m also sure that in social settings, you’ve felt the ickiness of transactional language. It’s the guy approaching every woman in a bar, regardless of social context and using the same tactics and lines to try to get laid. It’s the businessman at the networking event whose niceness feels overeager and so feels slightly predatory.

Purely transactional language feels icky because it reduces people to instruments. “You,” strictly speaking, don’t matter. Only your utility does.

Transactional language is the opposite of Pete Wentz’s lyrics — or any type of engaging writing, really. Engaging writing feels authored — yet it can also be unpredictable at the same time. Because engaging writing is an expression of one’s honest interiority, there’s a sense of aliveness, spontaneity, even messiness. You can sense the frames someone chooses. The words they reach for. The way they tilt a sentence toward melodrama or restraint. The awkwardness. The overreach. Even the failures tell you something.

Words, at their richest, are not simply the delivery of intent. They are a revelation that invites.

Intent says: I need you to do this. I’m going to try to make you do this, regardless of who you are or your desires.

Premise says: This is part of who I am. Here is a frame to engage with me. Who are you? Who are we?

That distinction matters because when words are only about intent, the receiver of those words becomes an object. A target. A means to an end. But when words are a revelation, the receiver is invited into dialogue. You may disagree with the words. You may roll your eyes. You may be transformed. But you are encountering a person, not merely a strategy.

That is why I can be inspired by Pete Wentz even when I think he is overwrought. Even when the line makes me cringe. The cringe is part of it. The risk is part of it. The fact that someone is publicly staking their identity on words — that they will stand behind those words for decades — is part of it.

There is vulnerability in authored language. There is something at stake.

***

For the first time in history, we have the ability to mass-produce language that is entirely untethered from a person who must live behind it.

When we outsource writing to artificial intelligence — when we treat language purely as something to be generated in order to achieve a result — writing collapses into pure transactionality.

The text may contain intent. It may be effective. It may even be elegant.

But it does not reveal the messiness and honesty of who someone is.

When you perceive that text is AI-generated, the text becomes un-engaging. It’s often bland and boring. Even when it is not, AI-generated words weaponize words and turn all of us into objects to be used by one another.

In this way, AI-generated words are inherently alienating. They are literally anti-social.

***

A common critique of my essays is that they meander.

Especially in the age of AI, I take that critique as a compliment.

I stand by my textual and narrative messiness. Welcome to my world.

You do not have to like these essays. That’s your call to make.

Regardless of whether you enjoy this essay, I’m grateful you’ve taken the time to make it this far. I take pride in the fact that I’ve put something of myself at stake here. You are free to accept or reject this essay fully and honestly. That freedom — yours and mine — is the point.

***

Two years ago, a good friend and I were sitting in her hot tub. She got extremely drunk. So drunk she was slurring, barely verbal, unreachable through my words.

I already knew she was deep in alcoholism. What I didn’t expect was what happened next.

In her stupor, she pinned me against the wall of the hot tub with one leg, harder than I thought she was capable, and began kicking me with the other. It was violent. I knew instinctively that there’d be bruising on my body. I was shaken. More than that, I was disoriented by the fact that I could not stop her with my words.

Later, I learned she was into two-way violent, combative sex, and this had been her attempt to engage with me.

I had to dig and dig for this explanation of what happened. She and I had been intimate a few times before the physical assault happened, and she’d never disclosed these preferences. After the physical assault, I broke contact. Then, after a year of no contact, I reached out. When I reached out, she repeatedly made it clear that I was not allowed to talk about what happened.

That was the part that lingered.

The actual physical assault faded quickly. What stayed was her prohibition on words. The refusal to process. It wasn’t the physical force that did the most damage. It was the collapse of communication.

We use language not merely to transact, but to metabolize experience. To think. To repair. To reveal. Without words — especially messy, unpredictable, human words — we become unable to integrate what has happened to us in life.

I’ll never know — today, she and I no longer speak — but I suspect she carries a lot of shame. I certainly carried lots of confusion. Neither of us could move toward clarity because clarity requires dialogue. It requires people staking themselves on speech.

This is why words matter. (This is why this essay matters — even as I’ve long felt I have healed from this traumatic event.)

When language is real, when it is owned by someone who must live behind it, something is at stake. There is risk. There is revelation. There is the possibility of transformation.

On an individual level, we literally need words to move forward as human beings. As a society, we need words to progress.

***

Can you understand why I believe AI-generated emotional labor — and god forbid AI-generated therapy — is a bad idea?

Here’s an over-explanation.

Therapy is not the optimization of sentences, designed to produce the best outcomes. Therapy requires the risk of speech in its full humanity.

The opposite of therapy is objectification. At its most extreme, objectification is violence. Within a textual frame, objectification is AI-generated text.

***

Of course, the best of humanity can be found in community.

But community does not emerge from perfectly optimized sentences. It emerges from people risking themselves in front of one another, even and especially when it’s not pretty.

Words, at their best, are not about extracting outcomes from other people. They’re about placing something of yourself into the shared space between us and saying: Here. This is me. Who are you?

And it is the only way we become human to one another at all.