An individual who plays Signs on repeat acquires a procedure for converting abandonment into display. The material routes the sting of being left through acquisition and drinking, and repetition establishes purchase and intoxication as the standard first response to relational loss. Grief becomes something to outperform.

Repeated exposure hardens the substitution: spending and drinking occupy the place where processing would occur. Tolerance for sitting with an ending declines while the impulse to advertise recovery strengthens, and the individual begins to assess personal repair by what an absent party can observe. Mourning terminates before it is done.

A society that takes Signs into common circulation adopts consumption as its standard grammar for loss. Communal rehearsal of the song's answer to a breakup, buy something and go drinking, establishes visible expenditure as proof of recovery, and separation becomes an occasion for demonstration before it is an occasion for grief. Recovery becomes something a population expects to see.

At the population level, intoxication settles in as the accepted first-line treatment for relational injury. People who have been left perform wellness for an audience, so the ordinary supports that surround a loss go unrequested, and observers take the performance as evidence that none are needed. Sorrow moves out of shared view and into private drinking.