What You Call Realism Is Just Learned Indifference
The Platforms Have No Use for Your Warmth — And Neither, It Seems, Do You
There’s a feeling you’ll recognize.
People aren’t the way they used to be. Everything comes down to interests, to money. You can’t say exactly when it shifted, but you felt it — something disappeared from the space between people.
That feeling is real. I used it to explain things for years.
But eventually, it wasn’t enough.
It’s not that “people became worse.” It’s not that “this generation is too transactional.” It’s that structures are running. Capital, platforms, institutions — these things are actively designing how the world operates. And the premise of that design is treating every person as a data point.
Your value is the data you can contribute. Nothing more.
You only need to look at how delivery platforms treat their couriers to get a sense of it. They don’t gradually raise the commission cut and push down per-order pay because they’re cruel. They’re running tests. You are a variable. Your survival threshold is a parameter. In a vast model, they’re tuning numbers. They don’t need to know your name. They don’t need to know whether you’re exhausted today, or how many people are depending on you at home. They only need to know: at this parameter setting, does the data still run?
Ride-share drivers. Independent merchants. Everyone who’s been “empowered” by a platform. Same structure.
This isn’t a lack of human warmth. It’s that the system has no need for human warmth. Human warmth is for humans — and you’re not a human here. You’re a data point.
I also understand this may not be pure malice. The fact that society has developed to where it is today might, in some sense, be the result of trade-offs — the lesser of two costs. This arrangement might be cheaper than whatever alternative world we’d be living in. I don’t know. And I don’t want to make the kind of thoughtless critique that’s really just emotional output.
I just find myself thinking, from time to time: even if the cost really is “smaller” — how much longer can that stay true?
Then something began to genuinely frighten me.
Being treated as a data point — that’s already bleak enough.
But what’s more frightening is this: we’ve started doing it to each other.
Not because we were forced to. Because we don’t notice we’re doing it.
When you meet someone new, you’re calculating what resources they might bring you. When you maintain a relationship, you’re assessing the cost-benefit ratio of that connection. Before you help someone, you’ve already run the numbers in your head on whether it’s worth it.
You don’t think of this as “using people.” You call it being realistic. Being mature. Not being naive.
But what you’re doing to other people is structurally identical to what the platform does to you.
You call it a relationship. But it has a more accurate name: data exchange.
I’m not going to tell you what to do about this.
I just want to ask you one thing:
When was the last time you treated someone like a person?
Not because they were useful. Not because of what they could give you. Not because the relationship was worth maintaining.
Just — as a living, breathing human being.