The Algorithm is Eating Our Friendships: Aesthetic Survivors of a Dying Intimacy

When the Feed Becomes the Friend

There’s a particular kind of friendship loss that doesn’t come with a breakup or betrayal. It comes with a quiet shift—subtle enough to question, persistent enough to feel, and devastating all the same. One day, you realize the person who used to send you sweet voice notes about nothing is now hard-launching their new aesthetic. The friend who once stayed up for late-night heart-to-hearts is now managing her personal brand. And you, once central to her life, are now just a background character in her feed.

I’ve lost a few friends this way. Not to drama, but to something more elusive: the convergence of Northeast society, status, and the algorithm.

These were women who, at one point, were grounded. Real. Intelligent, beautiful in ways that weren’t yet commodified. Women who ate dollar pizza on the sidewalk and made impulsive plans. Who went to underground poetry readings and hugged you like you meant something. Who loved the rain and didn't care if their Dior got soaked or if their mascara ran.

Then they moved to New York City. Some chased glow-ups. Others leaned into wellness trends, fashion cycles, or micro-influencer clout. On the surface, nothing changed. Underneath, everything did.

The algorithm didn’t just steal them. It reshaped them in a dystopian way that I still try to make sense of. Their identities, their values, their social lives, now curated for content.

Curated for Consumption

First came the clothes: entire wardrobes overhauled, curated around visibility. For the social gaze. For the feed. For the story tag. For the city.

Then the poses, the friendships, the boyfriend, the job, the pilates classes..now rebranded as content. Once, her birthday parties were park picnics with a few close friends. Suddenly, they were boat parties and Hamptons trips with curated lists of mid-tier influencers. Less a celebration, more an aesthetic project signaling strategy, power, and upward mobility.

Personal milestones become content farms, bodies posed under ring lights, hands clutching rose like brand ambassadors, intimacy stages like a marketing campaign. What should have been a memory, becomes a slideshow. The gatherings become photo shoots, cakes curated for the camera (and aligned to your personal brand colors that year). You're not invited because you're loved, but because you'll look good in the third carousel image.

Eventually, the invitations shift. Certain people make the cut. Others don’t. Old friends become collateral. Suddenly, you’re navigating an unspoken dance—a shifting hierarchy of closeness where no one says anything, but everyone feels it. Authentic friendships become performance maintenance. Intimacy, trust, and emotional care are now fed to the algorithm in exchange for a few likes.

One friend once cried in the passenger seat of my car, venting about the women who had hurt her while aligning herself with someone who had hurt me, citing “social optics.” I opened doors to underground spaces, held her tears, offered her a ride home only to be erased from every photo she posted that night. A transactional opportunist with a strategy of quiet extraction: my time, my emotional labor, my access to authentic spaces, now transformed into short-form content for her "Instagram empire".

Then there are the women who enter your orbit, quietly map who you're connected to, and begin the slow process of value and connection extraction to build their own curated aesthetic and clique, while erasing you.

There are the “burned insiders”—women who’ve been undermined, sidelined, betrayed so many times that while they remain socially powerful, they’ve become guarded, cautious, their trust fractured, their circles tight.

There are the women who’ve, perhaps in the most tragic form of all of this yet, learned to emotionally detach from it all—who attend the events, play the algorithm, fake the smiles, and feel nothing.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re part of a larger pattern I’ve observed among women navigating social spaces shaped by performance, optics, and quiet hierarchy. We live in a system that teaches women to compete gently—through curation, through access, through aesthetic dominance. It encourages soft power plays: Who gets tagged? Who gets cropped? Who gets mentioned in the caption?
The rules are unwritten, but the implications are deeply felt.

A Systemic Cultural Mutation

All of this ties directly into what I call the rot.

The rot happens slowly. It looks like ambition. Like self-care. Like glow-up culture. But underneath is something far more insidious: a loss of depth, of memory, of intimacy.
Friendships become transactional. They are now alliances, optics.
Vulnerability becomes content.
Intimate celebrations becomes a flex.

Women begin participating in what I call the aesthetic economy, especially South Asian American women in elite spaces, an especially brutal space where women are incentivized to conform, compete, and disappear nuance in favor of image while holding the generational trauma of an unforgiving patriarchal system.

The cultural pressure in this lens is specific. South Asian and diasporic femininity often demands obedience, aesthetic discipline, emotional suppression, and internalized competition. Many of these women were conditioned to perform before they were ever given space to be.

I’m not saying I’m immune. I live in this world too. But I am observing it, critically and clearly. I name this pattern not from a place of moral high ground, but as an indictment: of the system, the algorithm, and the women who have been swallowed by it. Including a past version of me, one I have now outgrown.

I don’t think these women are bad people.
But I do think they are adapting to a system that rewards appearance over substance, performance over connection.
And I’ve learned that if you’re not willing to play by those rules, if you still value honesty, loyalty, emotional reciprocity, you will eventually become inconvenient. Too much to hold, Too complicated for the narrative, for the feed, for the followers.

I don’t mourn the friendships themselves as much as I mourn the conditions that make these transformations feel inevitable. This dystopian algorithmic redesign of womanhood and friendships. The soft violence of aesthetic conformity. The emotional fallout of curation-as-identity.

In many ways, these women are victims too, swallowed by the feed and repackaged for consumption. I've done it too. And I've survived it as well.

So now, I choose to name the rot.
To study it.
To write through it.
And to protect the parts of myself that refuses to curate my way out of real connection.