I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.

What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?

  • SnowdenHeroOfOurTime@unilem.org
    5·
    1 year ago

    I am with you on a lot of this, but I will never and I mean ever understand the impulse that so many people have to say that online dating has made life worse. Dating is much better now because of online dating. Instead of constantly needing to be vigilant for an opportunity to find a mate and then pursuing them only to often be shut down or find out about a huge deal breaker on the second date, we can filter out a lot of those cases simply by reading a profile. Yes I’m aware people lie and hide things. But if they’re on a dating site they probably are looking for a relationship of some kind and if they wrote 3 or more sentences you probably can get a feel for what they generally value in life.

    I also think it’s quite a stretch to try and say online dating = capitalism because “marketed as products” and “throw people away like trash”. It sounds like you were broken up with by one too many online dates?

    Are you somehow intelligent enough to write all of this so thoughtfully, yet somehow unaware that relationships have ALWAYS been highly “transactional”? One of many aspects I could focus on to illustrate this is just the concept of marriage period. In many cultures, since thousands of years ago, you literally paid a family for a bride. It still continues today if I’m not mistaken, you just call it “paying a dowry” instead of buying a wife because it sounds better.

    If we are talking about r/datingadvice I think there it’s a legit complaint to say that people seem to be more in the “throw that person away” camp but I don’t think there’s actually a shred of evidence that anything is new about this. We just now have a conduit for public opinions about dating to end up in our faces while we doomscroll.

    I also blame capitalism for a lot, but I think it gets tricky to link capitalism to everything bad. I’d say it’s more like all these things are symptoms of a condition and all somewhat related. Greed is what a lot of this is, and yes capitalism is all wrapped up in that but I don’t think if you somehow took it away that every problem goes away.