On Dating: On symptoms of the modern world, modernity and its effects on the human heart.
"To love is to burn, to be on fire" - Jane Austen
The complications and effects of the nuclear bomb eroded not just the territories of Japan, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but the core of the human heart. This aftershock of the nuclear bomb has disintegrated global trust. Henry Kissinger's dream of the world machine is slowly fading, with the ever-escalating global conflicts in Pakistan, India, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, and the United States and North Korea. Postmodernism has taken over. Art, movements and ideas are all self-referential, a parasitic mindworm that slowly eats away at originality and perspective. Things that already exist are more profitable (reruns, Marvel, clothing coming back in style from the 1980s, Coachella-style festival wear.) New ideas are frightening, to both investors and the population. Ben Shapiro makes his money speaking on ideas that are so-called offensive, meanwhile college campuses let him speak and spew his rhetoric nationwide. His platform is that his ideas are offensive, but they are the same mainstream conservative beleifs parroted by Pat Buchanan, Bill O’ Reilly and Buckley. His newest ventures include building a movie studio to spread his stale propaganda worldwide and to have billionaire donors help him build his empire. If the billionaires support you, are you actually saying or doing anything?
Is anyone threatening to deplatform Amazon?
And what is the great social gospel of this time? We are all just the same person and once our needs our met, we can retreat further into our shells and hide from one another.
People have become a commodity, which is the birth-pangs of late-stage capitalism. We sell ourselves like little trading cards to the silicon overlords, who are slowly mining away at our data so they can build better versions of us to also enslave for means of generating capital, and most likely jetting away on their blue spaceships from the very real reality of a scorched and poisoned Earth they exploited for the same fortune. Sounds bleak, I know. Meanwhile, targeted ads, Tiktok Dances and Marvel movies provide a needle-injected panacea in the midst of the schizophrenia.
And what is a byproduct of this new era, other than the fetid waste of internet dating? A further disconnection away from reality, another retreat into the cybercube and away from the weight of existence.
In my late teens, I had a Tinder account with 2,000+ matches in college. After graduating and moving home, searching for something deeper and more real, I deleted it; it felt wrong. Should any human meet, let alone have any sort of intimate interaction with 2,000+ people? What is the cost of something like this on the human mind? It transforms the self into a commodity, one to be bought and sold to the highest bidder, for dreams of a greater profit from a “new” relationship. You are not being forced to grow, to change, to interact and feel, but being further leashed and having the chain tightened to one who matches EVERYTHING about you.
What is the cost of these transferrals of data and emotion? The wage of this is death -- death of the soul. The self is transferred into hyperspace, translated into zeros and ones and given to the algorithm so to achieve connection, but not growth.
Internet dating has replaced the highs and lows of dating, interactions, creation, and growth.
No longer do people see the world as a place to roam and create, but as a place to shop and purchase.
We purchase our loved ones now.
How does one build a family according to this?
Are people just zeros and ones?
To the apps, to the algorithms, you, dear reader, an entity, are made monolithic by the very experiences, snapshots, and revelations imprinted within your neuronal pathways and those have already transformed into a spreadsheet of engagement, interaction, and clicks. You are not a person to these apps and robots, you are data, and a very powerful computer with your dopamine-driven engagement and interaction with these websites.
The process of dating, feeling together, growing together, has now become a checklist.
Life is not a checklist, life is a dreamlist.
Our ever-connectedness has eroded our hopes and dreams, the cancellation of the future, just like Mark Fisher predicted.
"The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied
by a deflation of expectations."- Mark Fisher.
The invisible chains of capitalism, ala Kurt Cobain, surround us from our very birth, with hospitals benefitting from unpaid bills and charging exorbitant rates.
Can we rebuild from this? I do not forecast a future of friends, but of those who help us equalize and survive. Our communities, cultures, and feelings becoming evermore isolated from one another.
