💔 The Lost Promise of Connection
We could have had nice things:
- Emotional honesty that didn’t need decoding
- Intimacy that didn’t need leases or lifestyle checklists
- Relationships that felt like home, not negotiations
But instead, we chose:
- Designer baby clothes over messy joy
- Co-signers over co-dreamers
- Optics over openness
We traded the sacred for the strategic.
🎭 The Performance Economy
We built lives that:
- Look perfect in photos
- Feel hollow in silence
- Reward calculation over compassion
We vilify those who see through us.
We obsess over how we’re seen, not who we are.
We enforce boundaries that protect our image, not our soul.
🧠 The Cost of Strategy
We chose:
- Leverage over love
- Control over curiosity
- Winning over wondering
And now we’re stuck with curated lives that look perfect but feel hollow. We could have had nice things like:
- Magnanimity instead of manipulation
- Relationships free from silent transactions
- Love that isn’t contingent on social capital
But no:
- The genuine are sidelined
- Vulnerability is a liability
- Truth is a relic, not a virtue
We chose strategy. We chose to enforce one-way boundaries. We chose to “get there”—never mind who we step over. Because we didn’t want nice things. We wanted leverage. And now we’re all stuck— performing, pretending, while the ones who refuse to play are left wondering if being genuine is now a liability. That’s why we can’t have nice things
Because nice things require truth.
And truth doesn’t trend.