The people we can't share things with

The other day I saw an ad for a new AI science product, had the reflex to send it to a friend, and then… didn’t. I already knew how it would land. She’d be annoyed. Not curious, not skeptical-but-interested — annoyed.

That tiny moment stuck with me more than the ad did. It’s interesting to me that there are people in our lives we feel genuinely averse to sharing certain things with. You know the feeling before you even hit send. It’s not that they’d disagree — disagreement is fine, disagreement is half the fun of sharing anything. It’s that with certain topics, the conversation is over before it starts.

What gets me is the timing. With AI right now, it really does feel like use it or be left behind. The ground is moving monthly. And yet some people have planted a flag and welded their feet to it. How do people stay so firm on these beliefs while everything around the belief keeps changing?

I don’t have a clean answer yet. But I’ve noticed the aversion itself is information. The topics I hesitate to share with someone are a pretty accurate map of where their identity is involved — where a thing stopped being a topic for them and became a team.

And the loss isn’t theirs alone. When you can’t share things with someone, a little channel between you quietly closes. Multiply that across enough topics and enough people, and everyone ends up curating separate versions of themselves for everyone they know.

No big conclusion on this one — just noticing the reflex, and trying not to develop too many topics like that myself.