SAGE ADVICE: RE:Connection—Reachable, Not Reliable

On manners, mistrust, and passive inheritance.

Nobody RSVPs anymore. Not really. You get a “maybe,” a heart-react that both of you know is a lie the moment it’s typed. Or worse, you get a swift RSVP, plan them into your headcount, and then, no-show. The new platform Partiful invites go unanswered because it’s one more app to download that will notify you incessantly about events that may or may not be a business activation in disguise, rather than genuine party. Group texts die mid-conversation and nobody says—knows?—why. More often, you receive a text, an email, a Slack or Teams thread, a WhatsApp, a Signal, a DM on not one, but multiple platforms, all from the same individual for the same subject matter (or not) and find yourself completely overloaded—in communication paralysis. These are primarily examples centered around our social behaviors, but I’m observing them appearing in our professional lives as well. It is not enriching and it’s destabilizing relational norms.

We used to call this type of behavior rude, flaky if personal, and unprofessional, gauche, if work-related. Regardless of when and where it happens, it’s disruptive. And, unfortunately now it’s just another Tuesday. I’m doing a lot of synthesizing here — pulling threads from scattered critique and commentary already circulating out there, filtering it through my own tiny corner of the universe. Most of us feel a version of this somewhere in the body, even if we haven’t stopped long enough to name it. Noticing and naming it is, quite literally, my job. But it’s worth calling in, out loud: we’re feeling all of this — inside our professional identities as much as outside them — and mostly not talking about it. Not intimately, nor publicly. Avoidance tho, seems to be a dam that’s needing to break.

Manners, thoughtfulness and expressions of care and reverence didn’t disappear because we got lazy—we’re still too busy for that. But it may have something to do with our collectively being “terminally online.” Connection with others shifted to interaction[s], somewhere in the mid twenty-teens when social networks became less social and more focused on performativity, or presentation. Engaging from afar is a parasocial instinct we’ve evolved to deeply embrace. And consuming predigested content isn’t conversance. It’s strategic marketing, which isn’t genuine communication at all. (e.g. reading each other’s business newsletters and showing up to each other’s commercialized events are good ways of superficial support, but they aren’t representative of deep connection.) I fear we have leaned in without much thought and well. Here we are — Self-awareness, humility and restraint have all disappeared because the established social contracts that were once societal norms got quietly reprized, and most of us have had a hand in reprizing it. All because of the tiny computers (that also act like mirrors) we can stare into regularly—in our hands, on our wrists, through our glasses… let alone our laps or desktops—our self obsession has become so over indulged that our ability to indulge others is withering away in real time. Costing society at large quite a lot.

We are the most reachable humans who have ever lived, and somehow the least responded-to. Similarly, we have access to the most information ever, and yet typically fall into our own ideological belief bubbles or conspiracy, rather than becoming more intellectually grounded and informed adults. There are many a think piece out there sharing observations as to the negative impacts that the digital world has ended up imparting upon each of us individually, as much as society at large. Especially impactful, as most know by now, are the negative impacts social media, algorithmic search and now AI have been inflicting upon us. Degrading our capacity to engage with anything uncomfortable or foreign, truly stripping us of our capacity to learn and gain understanding, and numbing us to the point of perpetual dissociation. But also, what’s being instilled in us, I believe, is a low grade mania or panic that expresses itself as rather poor behavior on the whole.

What’s not so openly scrutinized is how relationships of any kind (social, familial, professional, etc.) are typically running across a minimum of five communication or content channels all the time, every single day. We’ve lost the signal for the noise literally.

A text thread, a DM, a WhatsApp or Signal group, a Partiful invite, all those other apps I refuse to list here, location-shares you didn’t exactly agree to but also never turned off. (Let alone the incessant emails, Slacks or Teams slop, the text directives that should be emails, the DocuSigns, the SaaS updates, etc., within your workday.) Every one of these channels was developed and sold to us as a way to be more connected. None of them were built to make anyone more reliable, more effective or more autonomous. They were built to make us more available, more distracted and more tethered, which is a different thing entirely — and it turns out those two things aren’t just unrelated. They’re often at odds. And I would argue more so by the day.

Media scholar José Luis Orihuela mapped this shift years before most of us felt it in our bones: communication moving from periodicity to real-time, from scarcity to abundance, from editor-mediated to unmediated—a full decade before smartphones made it a lived experience rather than a media-studies chart. “What we lost in the road from periodicity to real-time is the reflection,” he wrote. “What we gain is dynamism and conversational styles.” And in that same shift, the scarce resource stopped being space on a page or a broadcast slot and became something else entirely: the user’s own time. You are—we all are—that user. And our time, capacity or bandwidth, and dare I say our fuses are wearing thin or running out.

What I am observing is that availability at this volume isn’t producing [quality] connection, nor genuinely adding to the already established connections we might be so lucky to have on lock. Counterintuitively, it’s producing exhaustion and general fatigue or malaise. And selfishness. The outcome put plainly… Exhausted people stop discriminating between what’s actually urgent or important vs. whatever notification of some kind or another just showed up on a silenced phone glued to our hands. Urgency and unimportance have started to look identical from inside the flood. Everything is simultaneously an emergency and ignorable. And the overall effect is…a lot of folk completely tuning out.

This is not a communication problem. It’s a part of the Cultural Plateau I spoke about earlier this year. In this example, on the individual or communal level, it scales from a single relationship, through to group dynamics (inside our workplaces and in our lives outside of our work). This is a different angle of the same flattening I wrote about back in May. Instead of speaking to the flattening of ideas, I’m speaking to the flattening of relationships. We’ve lost the thread when it comes to human connection and the importance of said communion. We’ve also centered ourselves so deeply we can’t step outside ourselves to see how our behavior might be dismantling our social support structures that are so desperately needed for healthful societies’ survival.

This is the disconnection underneath the disconnection: We’ve lost the thread on how to actually engage with each other, while engaging with each other all the time. And with it has come a loss of decorum when communicating. Any shared sense of how, where, or why we reach each other in the first place — or how we’re even supposed to feel about it, feels simultaneously meaningless, impossible and unclear.

Call it what it actually is: an imbalance in expectations—polarity, double standards, hypocrisy. We want reliability from people we never modeled it for, or we wouldn’t extend the same courtesy to. We demand manners, but only at a safe distance we all helped to create.

And so I say… We as a society have become—the flake. Of course there’s nostalgia for a world (mythological, or real, or both) where people meant what they said and showed up where they said they would—not because anyone was a better person back then, but because canceling took real friction: an actual phone call, an actual excuse, actual consequences. That friction was doing quiet work, keeping us honest with each other almost by accident. And yet…we’re the ones who removed it.

The Guardian ran an entire piece on exactly this in early 2025, and dozens of people said some version of the same thing unprompted. One woman put it more bluntly than I would have dared: “People just feel like they don’t owe anybody anything any more, but they also just don’t want the scrutiny of others.” A film producer said the part I’ve been circling this whole essay: “All relationships are built on trust, and to flake, constantly at least, is to break that trust.” Almost nobody in that piece thought they were the villain of their own story. Most had a good reason. That’s exactly the problem.

My question here is… were we conscientiously the ones who removed this mode of operating? How complicit were we in embracing this current social degradation, or are we actual victims in yet another way to the domineering, technocratic influence on society at large.

That’s not a guilt trip. I honestly think it’s a subversive inheritance. And inheritances, unlike invitations, don’t require an RSVP. They arrive with or without assent, especially at scale in the collective unconscious. New norms entrench, while old norms fade. I am really feeling like so much of how we operate right now—collectively as much as individually—is representative of incremental, compounding acquiescence that has led to a rather fallow state in terms of communal congregation and interaction. We’ve got a serious case of the collective can’t evens, so to speak.

The tech writer Ed Zitron named this pattern “The Rot Economy”: public and private markets rewarding companies for growth regardless of whether that growth means anything—regardless of profit, product quality, or the humans on the other end of the transaction. Stock goes up, search gets worse, nobody’s punished as long as the number moves in the right direction. As Zitron put it, growth under this logic behaves like a fire: “If you build a nice, sustainable fire, it’ll keep you warm, cook food and sustain life. And if the only thing you care about is how big your fire is, then it’ll set fire to everything around it, and the more you throw into it, the more it’ll burn. Eventually, you’ll have nothing left.” This metaphor is sad and ironic when paired with a climate that is literally burning up and out due to the same extraction economics burning US up. 

We have run the same logic in our own lives—optimize for the appearance of the thing (success, availability, connection) instead of the substance of it (security, reliability, presence and perhaps even pleasure). And we shouldn’t be shocked it produced the same rot at home that it produces in a quarterly earnings call. A friend recently stated something like “Why is all the community building that is going on attached to some staged event and connected to someone’s bottom line?” And I agree, monetization of everything, which is what our country was founded on, has overtaken our social calendars. It doesn’t matter, unless it’s consumable. Forget resonant, enriching, and grounding. Even slow growth or long-term potential doesn’t cut it, anymore. Maybe this is just climate ennui rearing its ugly head again, but this time it’s relational.

Meghan O’Gieblyn keeps a line from Simone Weil pinned above her desk, and wrote an entire essay in Harper’s this year, “Backsliding,” working out what it means: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” She lands here: “Willpower does not work when it comes to our most persistent faults: the will is both the problem and the solution to the problem, and to fight will with will is to end up even more entangled.” Iris Murdoch, drawing on Weil, arrived at the same conclusion—that attention is a better method than willpower when it comes to remedying our faults.

Here’s where I’d usually shift this article to identifying tools and resources for problem solving. Our culture’s tendency towards quick fixes may proclaim the salve for said circumstances is more willpower. To communicate more often, answer more texts, show up to more things, grind through the exhaustion until you’re reliable again by sheer force of will. That our efforts, or attempts at trying harder and more earnestly will lead to… some form of liberation. I simply don’t believe that anymore, and neither should you—willpower is a finite resource, especially when our systems aren’t built for regenerative outcomes, only serving up depleting ones.

In our world, willpower means something different, and is presumed to be a resource with infinite supply. Unfortunately, tho, we cannot willpower our way out of five hundred access points a day from any-and-everybody. Something else is required, and it isn’t effort. It’s attention — and attention is not the same as focus, or gritting your teeth through another notification. It’s the older, slower skill of actually looking at the person or the moment in front of you instead of triaging it against everything else fighting for the same six inches of screen that accompanies each and every waking moment of our days. Attention doesn’t scale, at least not up. There’s plenty of research out there to attest to attention spans atrophying in real time. That’s not a bug. That might be the entire point.

There’s a useful contrast in Paula Marantz Cohen’s essay on conversation for Aeon. Good conversation, she writes, “mixes opinions, feelings, facts and ideas in an improvisational exchange... in an atmosphere of goodwill,” and it requires “extreme attentiveness to what they say.” The same attention Weil and Murdoch are talking about, just aimed at the actual person in front of you instead of a fault inside yourself. “Friendships are never over after a good conversation,” she writes; “they are sustained and bolstered by it.” Which is precisely what a text thread, a DM, and a location-share cannot do for you, no matter how many of them you’re running at once. We have to prioritize and follow through in building back our capacity for genuine, regular connection. We don’t have to do it with everyone all the time, we need to embrace discernment and double down on redeveloping our ability to follow through, to put effort into being present with more than ourselves. And we need to open ourselves back up to discomfort. If we embrace these modes of operating we might, just might, become better participants for ourselves and others.

Choosing to develop our interior self in conscious and subconscious ways is necessary for all of us—especially when thinking about social contracts. If we don’t, I fear those mutually-agreed-upon bonds will disappear altogether. And then, if that happens, so might we. To engage in a meaningful way relates to if and how we trust other people, just as much as how we trust ourselves. When connections are genuinely made, commitments can be honored and a collective embrace of our humanity can ground. That’s what feeds us, makes us not only yearn for followthrough, but seek out others who are prioritizing the same. And then, and only then, do we create room for re-connecting, re-jecting the state of dis-connection that’s been stripping so much of embodied living and room for real creation from our day to day.

This is a call-out and a call-in, in the same breath, aimed squarely at the mirror.

Trust doesn't get rebuilt by an institution, an algorithm, or a platform update. It never has. It gets rebuilt the way it always has—person by person, commitment by commitment—at the exact human scale a small values-driven business operates at every single day. This is Humanistic Economics doing its real work: reciprocity as the product, not the marketing copy around it. If you run a small creative business, you're already operating in the only economy left where showing up in all your beautiful (and ugly! We don't have to be fucking perfect, all the time) ways can still mean something. What you actually do and actually say is the currency here—nothing to apologize for, nothing to outgrow. That's the advantage, not the consolation prize. Inside your business and out. That's where embodied living, creativity and community reside, and it's sounding its call, welcoming us back into our humanity and selves.

So what is the value of human connection now, in the era of technocracy, and now AI, and online life taking hold completely? I think it’s this: connection is going underground. Personal, closely held, deliberately smaller. People are holding their lives pretty close, getting strategic about what’s shared and with whom—because mystery and discovery, as actual values, are coming back in vogue. Not as nostalgia. As a rational response to being flattened in every way imaginable.

There’s a difference between participatory relationship building and passive entertainment or useful information gathering, and most of what’s competing for our attention right now is optimized for the former — volume for volume’s sake, because volume is what the algorithm and bottom lines can measure and what competitive pressure rewards. The real opportunity isn’t in winning that competition. It’s in identifying where humans actually want to interact with each other and building deliberately from there. We need to embrace and protect a more varied world than the one being synthesized, filtered and sold back to us. More discerment, more bespoke—less is more, in this case, as I’ve been saying for the better part of 10 years now. The hunger I’m seeing and hearing about from people in this regard lately is opportunity territory.

This is where creative work has something structural going for it. What gets lost when something is summarized, automated, synthesized down to its most efficient version is exactly what made it worth making in the first place—its novelty, its meaning, its essence. You cannot dumb an idea down through automation or consensus and keep what was actually new about it. Real value was never in gathering information faster. It’s in the production of new ideas—of essence, not just content. And that only happens in relationship with other people: building community, being part of groups, and actually showing up. My philosophy is about making our lives better, at the end of the day, and different things make that possible for creative entrepreneurs—money, sure, fame/recognition, maybe, but real connections meaningfully improve your life. 

But an advantage isn’t a free pass. It’s a responsibility—to our work, to our position in our community, and to ourselves, in whatever order, and we must recommit to dropping into all three. It means finishing what you RSVP to. It means identifying, and then naming the Cadence of Creation you can actually sustain, instead of the one that performs well online. It means being the reliable one in a rot economy of flakes, which will occasionally cost you something, and will always be worth more than it costs.

We keep asking each other to participate, while failing to do so ourselves. We keep demanding standards for participation, while failing to reciprocate. I’d like to propose a hard question here: what are we willing to be reliable for? Beautiful things are easy to make right now—we have more tools for that than any generation in history has ever had. Fortitude is harder. Courage is harder. Building with the actual intention of repairing something, instead of just decorating the wreckage, is the work in front of us, and it will take more than an aesthetic to do it. It will take showing up. On time. On purpose. Especially when it’s so easy not to.