My magazine-editor friend occasionally sends me advanced copies of books she likes. Her latest offering was Touch by Courtney Maum, which has since been released. It’s been over a month since I finished it, and I’m still thinking about the main question it raises—whether in-person interaction will cease to be important.

The main character, Sloane, is a powerful, well-respected trend forecaster for fashion, lifestyle and tech companies. At the beginning of the book, she declares that “The world is overpopulated, and with unemployment, college costs, and food prices all on the rise, having children is an extravagant indulgence.” A major tech company hires her to lead their annual conference, a celebration of “the voluntarily childless” as a new target market.

Maum impressed me with her ability to imagine a future, 10 years from now, that’s just two or three steps ahead of our current reality, teetering between now and almost-now.

Not far into her contract, Sloane begins to sense indisputable signs of a movement against the hyper–use of technology. She predicts people will instead embrace compassion, empathy, and ‘in-personism’ again. Her newly realized predictions are now hopelessly out of sync with her employer’s mission. And to push things even further out of whack, she admits that her closest personal relationship is with her self-driving car…

(Sloan’s car is pretty cool! It has a sense of humor and asks her some rather heartfelt questions. Reading it, I thought about how cars fulfill our deepest desire to explore; they’re technology and humanness riveted together by steel.)

For the remainder of the book, we watch Sloane follow her instinct and blow up her life.

The books speaks to something the world needs and StoryKeep aims to offer: in-personism. We’re about affirming a person’s value, clarifying a person’s purpose, sharing a person’s impact, listening in-person, documenting in-person.

In person. We ache for it. And it’s not too late to create a future that values it, too.

(You can buy Touch at your local bookseller or order it on Amazon here.)