Influencer culture runs on the quiet assumption that we have an infinite well of care to draw from. But if you’re human, you already know the truth: that well is shallow, and it always runs dry.

We weren’t built to pour ourselves into thousands of half-relationships at once. We were built for small human spaces—rooms, circles, moments—where care flows in both directions and has time to replenish. Somewhere along the way, we traded those spaces for a screen that never sleeps, laying our hours on the altar of connections that were never built to hold them. Every double-tap, every “slay queen,” every teary reaction video at 2 a.m.—those drops come from the same limited reservoir. And that reservoir isn’t bottomless.

Creators feel it first—waking to thousands of people who feel like friends but aren’t. They’re expected to mourn with strangers, celebrate with strangers, be the steady lighthouse for lives they will never touch. Care asked at that scale is a slow hemorrhage. You can fake it for a while—smile wider, post faster, let the machine handle the replies—but the body keeps the score. Eventually, the smile cracks, and the person behind it disappears into the brand-shaped hole the algorithm has carved out for them.

The audience is not spared. We hand over our energy to people who cannot hold it. We cry for their breakups, cheer for their wins, pour careful words into comment boxes that swallow them whole. It all feels like closeness—until the screen goes dark, and the room is suddenly cold, quiet, and achingly empty.

This glow has taught us to survive on the emotional equivalent of fast food—hot, salty, instantly gratifying, and always leaving us hungry for something that was never nourishment to begin with. And we need to unlearn this. Fast.

Because as AI enters the space wearing the mask of salvation—editing the vlogs, writing the captions, hosting the streams, answering the DMs with perfect empathy at 3 a.m. on a Tuesday—it promises relief without ever asking us to confront the cost. It never needs a day off, never snaps, never forgets your dog’s name or your sister’s birthday. And that is the trap. The more flawless the simulation becomes, the less patience we have for the beautiful, clumsy mess of real humans who sometimes take six hours to text back because they were—God forbid—living their own lives.

Care is not bandwidth. You cannot upgrade it with a better plan. It is more like breath: there is only so much you can take in before you must exhale, or you suffocate. For years, we have been breathing in—filling our lungs with air that feels like care. But that air is thin, and it’s starting to choke us with its empty promises of reprieve.

The content we consume, the advice we seek, the entertainment we use to wind down at the end of a hard day—it’s all just one more inhale forced into a body pleading for an exhale.

The notifications will never stop. They will keep arriving—perfectly timed, perfectly kind, perfectly hollow—while the machine speaks in our voice, likes in our name, and cares on our behalf without ever replenishing the well. One day we will reach down, and as our fingers scrape dry stone, we’ll wonder where all the water went. The well will be empty. We will have poured the last drops of our finite care into places that could never replenish us.

Influencer culture will not collapse from a shortage of content, followers, or even attention. It will end the day we reach for care and find the well empty—not because we withheld it, but because we forgot it could ever run out.

The screen will still glow, promising connection without cost. But by then we will [hopefully] know better: the care we abandoned was never found online. It lived in the small human spaces that refill what the world drains from us—spaces measured not in reach or metrics, but in proximity, reciprocity, and the quiet relief of being held by people who can hold us back.

And when the noise finally quiets, we will return to these spaces to refill what has been drained—and the well will begin to rise again.

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Inspired by the H11 project.