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In both my professional and personal life, I take pride in being like a penguin. Through lurking on the occasionally educational app TikTok, I have learned that I, like the noble penguin, deepen my bonds with friends and colleagues through pebbling. On a David Attenborough level, pebbling is a gift-giving ritual where one bird brings pebbles to a mate to (hopefully) use as the cornerstone for building nests. It is a very romantic sentiment that stood no chance against being co-opted by TikTok-speak to explain why people can go days at a time without meaningful conversation but share memes, funny videos, or the dreaded news article just to show we’ve been thinking of someone. This brings me to my “old man yells at cloud” blog about how turned off I am by how I’m constantly pushed to connect when I don’t want to.