Blame points inward

When a friendship is failing, people do not ask what is wrong with the friend. They ask what is wrong with themselves. The ending they describe is not a fight. It is a fade.

The corpus is the collection of phrasings this report is built on. It holds the words people use about their own repeating behavior.

One note before the numbers. No number here counts searches, people, or how often anything was typed. Each one counts phrasings: the words recorded in the corpus, on public record or built from it.

According to The Archivist Method's 2026 report, "am I a bad friend" recurs in five friendship territories. A territory is one area of life the corpus maps. The corpus maps nine friendship territories in all. Typed public questions confirm the frame. The corpus's own word for how a friendship ends is "fade." It comes from the people typing.

A marriage ends with a conversation. A job ends with a letter. A friendship ends with nothing. So the person inside the ending has nothing to point at except themselves.

The verdict question and the fade are the same pattern, seen from two ends. One end is the withdrawal that never announces itself. The other is the person awake afterward, asking what kind of person does that. The archive's answer is that a pattern is not a kind of person.