The medium, as they say, is the message. And the message of social media is that you don’t owe anyone anything, that connection is vulnerability, that life is a series of transactions, and that anyone who tells you differently is just trying to exploit you.

“Here’s the thing: Small acts of kindess that are mostly domestic labor just add up to work at the end of the day,” a TikTok momfluencer named Paige Connell explained in a recent video.