One of the most dreadful ways to relate to someone or something is to turn it into a discrete matrix of points which you can assess using only your mind. 2 As mentioned above, this is what companies do with resumes, because ultimately they only care about your productive output within a very narrow context, and not a human being.
This is also what dating sites and large sections of social media do, which I would attritube to two reasons. The first one is that the interface of the screen is fundamentally limited for intimacy, because it reduces communication to text, which flattens away all nuance in tone and body language which real life interactions provide. Instead of experiencing the other in their totality, which is inevitably varied and subtle, they get reduced to words and a profile picture on a screen, disconnected from any context and even aliveness.
Of course, you could chat with someone through a voice call, but this leads me to the second reason, which is the price of convenience, in this case being exposed to lots of people in a short amount of time. Unsurprisingly, being born and growing up in a machine-world that seeks to maximize utility for as little input as possible leads to people behaving much the same, wherein relationships with others are treated almost like a convenient product which one can “buy” with enough time so as to seek the best deals.
Needless to say that all of this makes dating apps a dreadful experience from which it is better to stay away altogether. The interface is the problem, because it makes all interactions within it flat and predictable, and as such it is a game with no real winning moves, which only benefits the “game designers”.
Go back to the list of blog posts
2024-10-27