I keep coming back to this: people are looking for something genuine.
They might call it good work, a useful tool, a decent conversation, a song that gets under the ribs, a place where they can take their guard down for five minutes. The label changes. The hunger doesn’t
You can feel the difference when somebody has tried to make contact rather than merely perform. There’s a person in the thing. A bit of risk. A lived question. Maybe a rough edge left in because polishing it away would have taken the life out of it.
Genuine does not mean perfect, pure, or terribly serious. It means the thing comes from somewhere real. It has fingerprints on it. It gives you a reason to believe there might still be somebody on the other side of the screen.