Someone once described friendship to me in economic terms, almost casually, saying that friendships have recessions too, (thank you, John) and I have been thinking about that ever since. There is something unsettlingly precise about the metaphor. A recession is not necessarily the destruction of an economy, I guess it’s a contraction in its activity, a period in which spending slows and resources are directed elsewhere, and some friendships end in much the same way, through a gradual reduction in the things two people once gave freely to each other.

I think about the friendships that have become distant without either person ever really deciding that they should. There are people who used to know what was happening in my life and no longer ask, people whose messages once felt inevitable and now feel almost surprising. Nothing particularly terrible happened between us, there was no spectacular betrayal to justify the distance. The friendship simply became less active, and at some point I realized that I was still carrying the relationship in my head long after it had become much smaller in theirs.

I think that is what makes these kinds of friendships so difficult to understand.

When something ends with a clear cause, we can at least give the loss a shape. We can point to what happened and decide what it meant, who was hurt, who was wrong, whether something could have been done differently. But when a friendship simply recedes, when the distance arrives without an explanation, there is nothing concrete to hold responsible, so the mind starts searching for something else to blame.

Usually, it looks inward. Maybe I was difficult to be around and never realized it. Maybe I had become selfish, or too intense, or too absent, or too demanding. Maybe they saw something in me that I had somehow managed not to see myself. Maybe I had stopped being the kind of person they wanted around. It is strange how quickly uncertainty can turn into self-indictment.

Perhaps this is because an explanation gives us the illusion of agency. If someone left because we did something wrong, then there is at least something to repair. We can apologize, become more attentive, change the parts of ourselves that caused the damage, and imagine that if we understand the mistake well enough, we can prevent the next person from leaving for the same reason.

But that assumes every ending is a consequence of something we did, and I am beginning to think that this is not always true. Sometimes people simply become different.

The older I get, the more I notice how much friendship depends on circumstances that we rarely acknowledge when everything is going well. We become friends because our lives happen to overlap, because we have similar amounts of time, because we can afford to go to the same places, because our ambitions are moving in roughly the same direction, because we understand each other’s references and habits without having to explain them. We don’t usually think of these things as the infrastructure of friendship, but they are.

Someone gets a demanding job and suddenly has very little time. Someone starts making significantly more money and begins living differently. Someone starts struggling financially and becomes embarrassed about saying no to plans. Someone moves away. Someone enters a serious relationship. Someone becomes interested in a completely different kind of life. There does not have to be any resentment involved, but sometimes the friendship simply becomes more expensive to maintain.

Money is particularly strange in this regard because we like to imagine that it has no place in friendship, even though it quietly determines so much of the life surrounding it. There is a point where two people no longer have the same idea of what an ordinary dinner costs. There is a point where differences in income begin to create differences in lifestyle, and those differences eventually create differences in proximity. Nobody has to be classist for class to affect a friendship.

There is also the economy of attention, which might be even more important than money because we rarely recognize it as a resource until there is not enough of it. We have limited hours in a day, limited emotional capacity, and only so many people we can meaningfully keep up with before maintaining every relationship starts to feel like another obligation, so we become selective.

We spend more time with the people who are nearby, or who understand what we are currently going through, or who make us feel understood in ways that our older relationships no longer do. We find new communities that reflect the person we are becoming, and sometimes the people from our past simply do not fit inside them anymore. This part is difficult because it can sound cruel when you describe it honestly.

Sometimes we like people because of how we feel around them. A friend can make you feel intelligent, funny, attractive, ambitious, interesting, connected, understood. You can make someone else feel the same way. There is nothing inherently dishonest about that exchange. In fact, that is one of the most fundamental things friendship offers us, the experience of being seen through someone else’s eyes and briefly believing that the person they see is worth knowing.

But people change, and so do the things they need reflected back at them. Maybe someone no longer needs the kind of validation you used to provide. Maybe you no longer receive the kind of understanding you once did from them. That can be painful without anyone having done anything wrong.

I think this is where the idea of friendship as an economy becomes uncomfortable but useful. We often talk about relationships as though they are either genuine or transactional, as though the presence of an exchange somehow invalidates the affection surrounding it, but perhaps that distinction is too simplistic. Most of the things we consider meaningful are sustained through some form of reciprocity.

The problem is that friendships rarely have the vocabulary for this.

Nobody sits you down and explains that the relationship has entered a period of declining investment, you just notice. And when you notice, you want an explanation.

I think I have wanted explanations because I have believed that they would tell me something important about myself. If I knew why someone stopped choosing me, perhaps I could understand what was wrong with me, but maybe that is the wrong way to think about it.

The fact that someone no longer wants the same relationship with you is not evidence that you have become less worthy of being loved, even if it feels that way when you are the one being left behind.

We tend to measure ourselves through other people’s continued interest in us, which makes sense to a certain extent because so much of our identity is relational. We learn who we are through the people who reflect us back to ourselves. But that also means that when someone leaves, their absence can feel like a missing piece of evidence about who we are.

You wonder whether there is some fundamental flaw that keeps revealing itself in different relationships, the cruelest part is that there is no way to prove yourself wrong. The person is gone. They are no longer there to tell you that you are imagining it.

There is an importance in learning to tolerate that uncertainty. Not every person who leaves has discovered something terrible about you. Sometimes people grow in different directions, and sometimes the things that once connected two people become the very things that separate them.

A friendship can be real and still become irrelevant to the life someone is living. That is difficult to accept because we tend to treat permanence as proof of value. We assume that if something mattered, it should have lasted, and if it did not last, perhaps it was never as meaningful as we thought.

But that is not really how value works as friendship can matter enormously during one period of your life and become distant in another. It can shape you without remaining beside you. It can be sincere without being permanent.

The economy contracts because there is simply less to circulate.

The temptation is to respond to every friendship recession by trying to stimulate the economy, to reach out more, offer more, become more agreeable, make yourself more useful, give more of yourself in the hope that increased investment will bring the relationship back to where it was. You cannot always spend your way back into someone’s life.

There are friendships I still think about because I never understood why they became distant, and I suspect some part of me will always want the missing explanation, because there is something deeply human about wanting to know whether you were loved until the end or simply tolerated until something better came along.

There is something strangely freeing about accepting that a relationship can decline without becoming a referendum on either person’s character, that two people can once have been essential to each other and eventually become peripheral without either person having committed some great moral failure.

The recession can be real without the economy having been a mistake.

The part of friendship I am still learning to accept: sometimes people stop investing in us, and the most painful response is to assume that they have finally discovered what we have been afraid was there all along.

The market changed, we were never the thing that needed fixing.

So I started looking for help. Then I saw the prices. Of course.

It’s almost funny how quickly your desire to understand yourself becomes an economic calculation. Consultation. Assessment. Therapy. Medication. Follow-ups. Suddenly your mental health isn’t just a medical concern, it’s a budget meeting. You start asking yourself questions that no one should have to ask. Is clarity worth skipping groceries this week? Is a diagnosis worth postponing the Meralco bill? Can I afford to know what’s wrong with me?

And the thing is, it’s everything.

Every month feels like another exercise in recalibrating what you can live without. Electricity goes up. Groceries go up. Internet goes up. Rent goes up. Public transportation goes up. Somehow your salary doesn’t experience the same miraculous inflation as everything else. Existing has become a subscription service and every month another feature gets locked behind another paywall.

People love saying “practice self-care” as if that’s a universally accessible prescription instead of one increasingly mediated by consumerism. Self-care doesn’t even sound like care anymore. It sounds like an industry. Buy the supplements. Buy the gym membership. Buy the better mattress. Buy the mindfulness app. Buy the candle. Buy the vacation. Buy the expensive coffee because apparently your nervous system deserves ethically sourced beans now. Wellness has become one of capitalism’s most elegant sleights of hand. It manufactures exhaustion and then commodifies recovery.

And before anyone mistakes me, I’m not mocking therapy. I’m trying to afford it. I’m not mocking medication. I might need it. I’m not even mocking people who buy themselves little treats because honestly, who the fuck am I to judge? Sometimes that overpriced coffee isn’t about caffeine. Sometimes it’s the only gentle thing that’s happened to you all week. Sometimes you’re not consuming because you’re materialistic, I’m not consuming because I’m materialistic, or maybe I am? I’m trying to interrupt the monotony of despair for thirty minutes.

Temporary happiness has become something people moralize, which is rich considering how little permanent happiness this economy seems interested in producing.

I keep thinking about all the conversations around AI, around innovation, around efficiency, around building the future, and every headline feels like another reminder that technological acceleration isn’t synonymous with human progress. We’re told AI will make us more productive, more efficient, more optimized, and yet I can’t shake the feeling that the more optimized the world becomes, the more exhausted the people inside it become too. Maybe I’m unfairly blaming AI, yikes, no way. BUT, maybe it’s not AI itself but the infrastructure around it, the energy demands, the relentless race to automate everything because growth must always be exponential. Maybe I’m looking for somewhere to put my anger because it’s easier to resent a server farm than an economic system so diffuse that no single person seems responsible for it.

Still, there’s something deeply unsettling about watching billions poured into machines that can generate images, write code, and replace labor while people hesitate to seek psychiatric care because they can’t justify the consultation fee. It makes me wonder what we’ve decided is worth investing in.

Maybe this is just late-stage capitalism doing what it has always done: externalizing the cost of progress onto ordinary people while privatizing the benefits. Maybe we’ve become so accustomed to hyperindividualism that every structural failure gets reframed as a personal one. Can’t focus? Optimize yourself. Burnt out? Manage your time better. Anxious? Practice mindfulness. Depressed? Build better habits. As though the solution to collective exhaustion is individual resilience!

Maybe I’m just tired.

But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many people feel like they’re malfunctioning in an economy that rewards perpetual productivity while making rest increasingly unaffordable. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that asking for help feels like a luxury, that peace has become a premium feature, or that relief now comes in monthly installments.

The cruelest part isn’t that everything is expensive, but even hope has become something you have to budget for.

I remember reading Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and lingering on her insistence that attention, not explanation, is what deepens our experience of art. Influence, in that sense, did not require closeness. It required patience.

That distance has thinned. Influence today rarely arrives alone. It comes bundled with familiarity, visibility, and the expectation of proximity. We do not only encounter what people make. We follow their routines, their preferences, their moods as they unfold in real time. The work is no longer enough. We want the person behind it, rendered legible and continuous, as though access were proof of understanding.

I know this shift not only as an observer, but as someone living inside it.

It began subtly. A resemblance here, a familiar phrasing there. At first, it felt flattering. Influence often is. We are taught to accept copying graciously, to interpret it as admiration, to avoid naming discomfort too early. Generosity, after all, is supposed to be a virtue. But then the attention widened.

I noticed not just my work reflected back to me, but my perimeter. The references I engaged with appeared elsewhere almost immediately. My digital environment, which I had assumed was porous but still personal, began to feel monitored. What unsettled me was not any single act, but the accumulation. Influence was no longer moving through the work. It was tracing my movements.

This is the moment when influence stops being abstract.

I hesitate to call this invasion outright because I am aware of how easily such language can sound defensive or self-important. I am also aware that I have learned by watching others closely. No one creates in isolation. But there is a difference between observing someone’s output and mapping their orbit. Between learning from a body of work and replicating the conditions around it.

I keep thinking about something I read in René Girard’s writing on mimetic desire, the idea that we learn what to want by watching what others already want. Desire, in his formulation, seeks proximity. It wants to close the gap between self and model. In a culture structured by visibility, that proximity is no longer metaphorical but is logistical.

Imitation today is not only accelerated, but somehow infrastructural. Platforms reward resemblance. Algorithms make networks legible. Following the same people, engaging the same references, occupying the same spaces becomes a way of collapsing distance efficiently. What once required time now requires observation.

Parasocial relationships intensify this collapse. First described by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, parasocial intimacy explains how closeness can be felt without reciprocity. When someone has sustained access to your work, your preferences, your connections, they may feel closer to you than you feel to them. That closeness can quietly turn into entitlement. Watching begins to feel like participation. Following begins to feel like belonging.

This is where influence turns invasive.

Not because admiration exists, but because boundaries dissolve. Not because copying happens, but because surveillance replaces interpretation. Reproduction changes not only the object, but our relationship to it. When a person’s creative life becomes endlessly reproducible, their social and intellectual terrain risks becoming public property.

The discomfort is difficult to articulate without sounding ungrateful. It feels petty to notice. It feels paranoid to name patterns. And yet the body recognizes something the language resists. There is a difference between being seen and being tracked. Between influence that transforms and attention that encloses.

I am not interested in innocence, either mine or anyone else’s. I do not believe in untouched originality. I believe in limits. I believe that influence needs friction in order to remain ethical.

Managing influence has become an active practice for me. I am more selective about what I share. I resist the urge to narrate my process fully. I accept that visibility invites imitation, but I no longer pretend that all imitation is benign. Some forms of attention demand more than they give back.

Distance, I have learned, is not cruelty but more of clarity. Influence requires space, or it turns extractive. When we refuse to name the moment when admiration becomes surveillance, we leave no language for the people who feel it first

.

We claim to value authenticity. We tell people to express themselves, to be honest about who they are. But that acceptance has a boundary. The world admires the “real self” only when it fits a narrative we are comfortable with. The moment honesty becomes messy or inconvenient, admiration quickly turns into critique.

This contradiction becomes clearest in forgiveness.

We don’t forgive behavior but we forgive the people we already like. We allow some the benefit of the doubt, while denying it to others entirely. The same mistake can be dismissed as a lesson for one, and a life sentence for another.

Forgiveness has become selective — a privilege extended only to a chosen few.

Some are celebrated for their “growth” or “transformation,” their faults softened by affection or familiarity. They are allowed to continue being human. Meanwhile, others are reduced to their worst moments, defined only by what they did wrong. We treat their flaws as character instead of circumstance.

Visibility only widens the gap. Those who are seen by many are punished by many, held to a version of perfection no one else is expected to maintain. Their errors are magnified, replayed, and archived, while our own remain quiet and disposable. We forget that what is recorded lasts longer than what is said offhand.

Kindness should be the simplest choice, yet we make it complicated. We ration empathy based on preference. We withhold compassion when we feel someone has already had “enough,” as if dignity is something to be earned, not something every person is born with.

Being genuine becomes dangerous in this kind of world. When honesty makes you vulnerable, silence begins to feel safer. The fear isn’t in making a mistake but in making one in front of people who have already decided not to forgive you.

Accountability matters. Accountability without understanding becomes punishment disguised as principle. We cannot pretend to care about growth while refusing to allow space for people to grow.

Maybe the real question isn’t why people struggle to be themselves.
Maybe the real question is: Why have we made being human something that requires permission?

A society that forgives selectively does not encourage honesty. It discourages it. People retreat, hide parts of themselves, and carry mistakes like anchors because they know the world might never let them move on.

Forgiveness should not be a favor. It should not be conditional. It should not depend on popularity, beauty, or how comfortable someone makes us feel.

If we want authenticity from others, we must first create a world where authenticity doesn’t come at the cost of a person’s humanity. We must stop pretending that some people deserve dignity more than others.

Everyone makes mistakes. Not everyone is allowed to recover from them.

That is not justice.

It’s meant to be a compliment, I think. Efficient. Clear. Sharp. But what I hear is: you sound like you’re not even here. That there’s no one behind the keyboard. No hunger. No edge. No mess. Just clean, correct, and dead.

They don’t mean to insult me. But they don’t realize what it takes to sound this way.

I work in marketing. I write for a living. I've written social copy, slide decks, internal comms, ad scripts, ghostwritten emails, full websites, articles, and I’ve done it while answering to brand guidelines, word counts, and tone presets that sound like they were made in a conference room and revised by twelve people who all speak in feedback. I’ve written for people I’ve never met, in voices that aren’t mine, under names that will get the credit. I’ve been paid to disappear behind language.

So of course I’ve learned to use AI. That’s what this field demands now. Everyone wants faster turnarounds. Cleaner outputs. “Inspired by, but not dependent on.” I talk to AI almost every day. I know how to prompt it properly. I know which tools are bad at nuance, which ones hallucinate sources, and which ones confidently serve you bullshit with a smile.

Sometimes I’ll get something semi-decent. Other times I’m staring at a paragraph that sounds like it was written by someone who has never had a single hard day in their life.

I know how to wrangle tone-of-voice templates, synthesize content, repackage thoughts into digestible formats. I know how to take bloated thinking and force it into structure. I know how to make the inauthentic sound persuasive. I know the cycle: ask, revise, publish, repeat.

But I also know what happens when you rely on it too much. I’ve seen how AI makes people lazy. How it turns writers into operators. How it trains some of us to stop trusting our own brains. I’ve worked with people who write with AI, not alongside it, who wait for the tool to think for them.

And I get it. It’s fast. It’s easy. It’s marketable. It spits out something that sounds like writing. But it isn’t.

AI is good at volume. It’s good at tone-matching. It’s good at sounding like it knows what it’s talking about. But that’s the thing—it sounds like it. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t remember. It doesn’t reflect. It doesn’t hold anything sacred. It just predicts. It organizes. It fills space.

It echoes the internet in prettier grammar.

It’s not curious. It doesn’t care if it’s wrong. It doesn’t stay up at night wondering if what it made was honest.

And when someone told me I write like an AI, I took it personally.

Because I know what it cost me to write this way. I didn’t wake up articulate. I worked while I studied. I rode jeepneys with books in my lap and a screen recording of a video essay playing in my pocket. I crammed insights between commutes and shift hours. I pretended to be smart until I had no choice but to become someone who actually thinks. I taught myself the difference between writing that fills space and writing that leaves a mark.

I learned to make things sound better than they felt. I learned to mirror confidence I didn’t always have. I learned how to write through burnout, through bills, through rejection letters, through jobs that drained me, through days when the only thing I could afford was clarity.

So no, I don’t appreciate being compared to something that didn’t go through any of that.

AI doesn’t know what it’s like to ask, “Am I good enough?” then show up anyway. It doesn’t know the fear of your boss hating your draft, or the shame of using someone else’s voice so often you forget what yours sounds like. It doesn’t know the thrill of finally saying something real and realizing it’s not polished, but it’s right.

Thinking takes work. That’s the part people forget.

What people call “AI writing” is usually just writing without risk. It plays safe. It gives you the right shape, the right tone, the right rhythm—but nothing sticks. It doesn’t bruise. It doesn’t sting. It’s a song with no memory attached to it. A sentence with no one behind it. It’s language designed to pass through you.

But the best writing, human writing, dares to stay. It stutters. It contradicts itself. It says too much. It breaks its own rhythm just to land on something that matters. It forces you to listen again. That’s the difference. That’s the line.

I still use AI. I’ll admit that. I use it to test ideas, to throw something on the page. I treat it like a junior. One that’s fast, confident, and wrong half the time. But I don’t mistake it for a collaborator. It can’t argue with me. It can’t resist me. It can’t teach me anything I don’t already know. It’s just a tool. And like any tool, it reflects who’s holding it.

A sharp knife doesn’t cook the meal. A pen doesn’t write the story. A prompt doesn’t mean you’ve done the work.

So no, I’m not flattered when someone says I sound like a machine. Because I’ve seen what machines sound like. And I know how much of myself I had to lose just to sound human again.

I had to unlearn perfectionism. I had to stop performing intelligence and start asking myself why I needed to be so polished in the first place. I had to confront the fact that I write better when I’m not trying to impress anyone—just trying to be honest.

I had to stop optimizing everything. I had to write badly again, just to remember how to write at all.

Sometimes, that means being messy. Sometimes, it means saying things I’ll later regret.

Sometimes, it means making less sense, but more meaning.

And sometimes, it’s ugly. Or unfinished. Or contradictory.

But at least it’s alive.

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