How high school friends, college roommates, and old coworkers quietly become an audience
The Framework: A Two-Axis Map of Every Relationship in Your Life
I think about relationships on a simple grid. Two axes. Four quadrants.
The vertical axis measures depth. How much does this person matter to you emotionally? Do you trust them with the real stuff? Would you call them at 2am?
The horizontal axis measures proximity. How much do they show up in your daily life? Do you share a commute, a lunch spot, a neighborhood? Do they see you on a bad Tuesday?
Plot anyone in your life on that grid and you get one of four zones.
The Core Circle sits in the top right. High depth, high proximity. Your partner, your local best friend, a sibling you live near. These people know you in real time.
The Anchors Afar sit in the top left. High depth, low proximity. Your high school best friend who moved across the country. Your college roommate. The coworker you were genuinely close to before one of you left. The emotional bond is real, but the daily contact is gone.
The Circumstantial Network sits in the bottom right. Low depth, high proximity. Coworkers. Neighbors. The barista who knows your order. They shape your daily environment but not your inner life.
The Distant Periphery sits in the bottom left. Low depth, low proximity. Acquaintances. People you follow online. And, as I will get to, something more uncomfortable than either of those.
The Reminiscence Window
When a friendship moves from the top right to the top left, it does not die immediately. There is a window.
For a while, you still have shared memory to draw from. You can call this person, say “remember when,” and both of you feel the warmth of it. That connection is real, and some friendships live in this space for years.
But the window does not stay open forever.
As time passes, the shared memories get older. They become stories you have both already told. And at some point, the conversations shift. You are no longer reminiscing. You are reporting.
The Problem with Long Distance Friendships: Why Quadrant 2 Is Unstable
Relationships in the top left are structurally unstable. Not because the love goes away, but because love alone does not hold a relationship in its original position on the grid.
What holds it there is shared reality. The texture of being in the same world. When proximity is gone, that dissolves. And without active effort, a top-left friendship drifts downward.
This happens with high school friends after everyone scatters. It happens with college friends after graduation. It happens with coworkers after someone leaves. The relationship was built in a specific environment, and when that environment ends, the foundation quietly shifts.
The Pipeline: How Long Distance Communication Becomes Content Production
The drift moves through stages.
First comes reporting. You can no longer observe each other casually, so you fill each other in. This is natural.
Because you cannot report everything, you start curating. You pick the stories worth telling. The small, formless stuff gets left out.
Then comes performing. The curated updates get polished. You think about how to tell the story before you tell it.
And finally, if you let it go long enough, you arrive at what I call contentification. The relationship now consists entirely of two people producing digital content for an audience of one. Long voice notes. Scheduled calls. A text thread that reads like a newsletter exchange. It has all the surface features of closeness, but something essential is gone.
Mutual Parasociality: When Both People Become Each Other’s Audience
A parasocial relationship is the one-sided feeling of connection you have with someone who does not know you exist. A podcaster. An athlete. A creator you have followed for years.
What I am describing is different.
When a friendship decays all the way through that pipeline, it lands in a state I call mutual parasociality. Both people still care. Both people still show up. But what they are showing up for is a performance. Person A is consuming a curated version of Person B. Person B is consuming a curated version of Person A.
The relationship feels alive because of its history. But the thing that created that depth, which was shared reality and being seen before you had a chance to prepare, is no longer running.
Why This Matters More If You Live Digitally
Digital communication makes the content pipeline feel invisible. When everything is a message or a post or a call, it is easy to confuse activity with connection.
If you zoom out and look at where most of your connections actually sit on the grid, especially the ones you feel close to, you might find that a lot of them have quietly drifted to the bottom left corner. Not as a moral failure. Just as what distance does over time when digital tools give you the feeling of closeness without the substance.
Of the people you feel connected to right now, how many actually know what your life looks like this week? Not the version you put in a voice note. The actual texture of it.
Can Mutual Parasociality Be Reversed?
Yes. But not by messaging more often.
The way back is through shared reality, and there are a few ways to create it even across distance.
Exchange ideas, not updates. When you share an idea and someone pushes back on it or builds on it, you are thinking together. That is a form of shared reality even without physical proximity.
Meet in person. An afternoon together does more for a relationship than months of scheduled calls. You exist in the same physical moment, and that is something digital cannot replicate.
Have a real impact on each other’s lives. Ask for something. Offer something. Give advice that actually changes a decision. Connect someone to a person or an opportunity. When you matter to each other’s actual lives, you move back up the grid.
The friendships worth keeping are the ones where at least one of these is possible.
Where Do You Sit on the Grid?
Most of us carry a mental model of our relationships based on how they used to feel. The high school friend who was once your closest person. The college roommate who knew everything about you. The coworker who made a hard job worth showing up to.
Those histories are real.
But where are those relationships now on the grid? And where do you want them to be?
Jack Maguire 