A like is rented. A week is a relationship.

Day four in the Tian Shan, and dinner is the best meal any of these people have ever eaten, which is strange, because it's mostly rice.

They're wrecked. Properly. There's a woman who cried somewhere above four thousand metres that afternoon and is now laughing so hard she can't breathe, and a man who barely spoke for the first two days and has just told the table a story that's left them all quiet. None of them knew each other a week ago. None of them would have booked a holiday together, would not have crossed a street to meet, and by the look of this table they would now cross a continent for one another. Something happened up there that nobody at the table can quite name, and all of them know it happened, and that shared not-knowing is the thing knitting them together over the rice.

A year later that WhatsApp group is still going. I've seen it. It does not stop.

Now hold that against the other thing. The number. The follower count. Two hundred thousand people, say, who tapped a heart once and scrolled on and will never, as long as they live, know your name back. We've all agreed to call that an audience, and in some thin sense it is, but it's the thinnest possible version of the word. A like is rented attention too. It costs nothing, it means almost nothing, it evaporates by the time your thumb's moved. You can have a million of them and sit in your kitchen feeling completely alone, because a heart on a screen has never once, in the history of the thing, turned up when it mattered.

Here is what I've come to think, after watching enough of these trips. Shared adversity does something to a group of strangers that a beautiful view never will, and that a feed full of likes could not do in a thousand years. You suffer next to someone. You're both cold, both frightened, both a bit past what you thought you had, and you get through it together, and on the other side of that there's a bond that is simply a different material to anything the internet makes. It's older than the internet. It's probably older than language. Twelve people who chose the same hard thing and held each other up through it are not followers. They're something with no good modern word, so I'll use the old one. They're a community.

And the strange, almost unfair part, if you're an athlete, is this. Those twelve don't go back to being numbers afterwards. They come home changed and they're yours now, really yours, in a way two hundred thousand hearts could never be. They tell people. Not "you should follow her," but "you have to do this, I can't explain it, just trust me." They come back. They come back for your next one, and then, this is the bit that still surprises me, they come back for somebody else's, because the thing they fell for wasn't only you, it was what happens when you put the right people in a hard place and let it work on them.

That's the asset. Not the count. The count is rented and you don't even hold the lease. The relationship, the real one, forged on day four over the rice, that's the thing that compounds, that pays for years, that no platform can switch off and no brand can take when the budget turns.

You can spend your life farming hearts from strangers who'll never know you. Or you can take twelve people up a mountain and come down with twelve people who'd answer the phone at 3am for the rest of their lives.

I know which one I'd call an audience.

"We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness." — Desmond Tutu