The digital streets of San Diego pulsed with an unnerving energy. A torrent of “I’m in San Diego…You?” messages, punctuated by heart emojis and desperate pleas for connection, had flooded the threads. It wasn’t a celebration; it was a digital echo chamber of loneliness and a creeping suspicion – were any of these people *real*? The sheer volume of repetition, the repetitive yearning, bordered on the obsessive. Multiple users were explicitly demanding verification, accusing others of being bots, fueling a cycle of mistrust and paranoia. The repeated cries for connection, overlaid with increasingly bizarre requests – a “content partner,” a 69-year-old “man,” a “Daddy” – painted a fragmented picture of a city desperate for answers and, perhaps, someone to believe in. The obsession with origin— “I’m from San Diego!”— felt less like sharing information and more like a desperate attempt to establish a tangible identity amidst the digital noise. A palpable sense of unease, fostered by the digital frenzy, suggested a deeper, perhaps unsettling, truth about San Diego, its inhabitants, and the strange, echoing hunger for connection that seemed to consume them. It felt like the city wasn’t responding to the messages— a kind of almost 50 and a unsettling feeling of loneliness!