Blog

Finding a partner in the fast life

So this is the fast life. We are trying to pass our intentions and thoughts through to other people in the shortest way possible, fyi and emojis in 140 characters (history) or in 15’’ videos. We are trying to get to places the fastest way possible, we’d better have an idea about the total cost, though. We are trying to get to the point soon enough. Tl:dr to save some of our time. There is always the question open: was the medium (that chat in the app or the platform) part of our message (our intentions) as well? Is the destination only the last point on the map we end at? Could the meaning that is left over after the distillation process truly fit all that was discussed in the long text?

I think not. But we have to continue accepting the fast lane, because it is taken for granted that we will do so. Which means that if we don’t, we will face consequences. Our boss is going to ask us why it took us so long to come to work or to finish the task. Our friends will get upset with our assiduous communication methods and industrious explanations. Our colleagues will grow tired of our efforts to fully illustrate every issue. So we have to go on. We have to keep up the pace, or we will get left behind.

I think not. But we have to continue accepting the fast lane, because it is taken for granted that we will do so. Which means that if we don’t, we will face consequences. Our boss is going to ask us why it took us so long to come to work or to finish the task. Our friends will get upset with our assiduous communication methods and industrious explanations. Our colleagues will grow tired of our efforts to fully illustrate every issue. So we have to go on. We have to keep up the pace, or we will get left behind.

But there are aspects of life where the consequences of shortcuts will pertain only to ourselves. No outer part to enrage, nobody to judge us for the outcome but us.

I think not. But we have to continue accepting the fast lane, because it is taken for granted that we will do so. Which means that if we don’t, we will face consequences. Our boss is going to ask us why it took us so long to come to work or to finish the task. Our friends will get upset with our assiduous communication methods and industrious explanations. Our colleagues will grow tired of our efforts to fully illustrate every issue. So we have to go on. We have to keep the pace or we will get left behind.

But there are aspects of life, where the consequences of shortcuts will pertain only to ourselves. No outer part to enrage, nobody to judge us for the outcome but us.

Finding a partner

A major aspect where this is true is the process of finding a partner (and if this is not true, then we have some serious work to do with ourselves and our immediate social environment). We need to be fast and we need to be exact. It has to be done at a very particular point in our lives, the one we are at now. It has to be perfect because time is not a given and half-hearted attempts cannot be excused. But at the same time, we all know that everything involving another human being and the relationship to it is a complex beast, a devious labyrinth, you can’t just strap it together and be done with it.

So what to do? If luck hasn’t helped us so far, when things were simple, when we were younger, when we were still in the neighborhood where we grew up, where everybody knew us, when we were still around our big old circle of friends, colleagues, fellow students, then we hear that the answer for us most times is “dating apps”.

It’s reasonable. It puts luck, or better said, the possibilities, back in the game: a system of big numbers (user base), algorithms and personal information (your selections). Even better when you combine it with a rapid decision-making handle: yes/no buttons, swiping left and right and the like. Most of those who swipe and tap on the like buttons, accept that a personality, and as such, a pairing candidate, cannot be reduced to a number of photos and some clever stuff one says about oneself. But we have to keep up the pace. After all, we are free to choose. And who knows, luck might get us where we need to be. The more times you spin the slots, the better.

It’s not hopeful to describe this process as a game of luck, but, especially if we examine the whole of it till the very end, it surely seems so. Because when the time comes for human interaction, then we pay the price of our fleetness of life. We, as usual, strive to fit whatever meaning we can into witty communication chunks. But this communication suffers from a more serious problem than parcels of bone-dried meaning.

No middle ground

In this highway-lane life, entertainment and sociability couldn’t escape the same norms. The discussion of the effects of social networks on our lives is old news. What is very relevant to our topic is the following: the various platforms’ algorithms tend to provide us with content that we seem to like. So we get offered more of that content, to the point that everything that doesn’t fit the pattern gets completely omitted. If you combine that with the diminishing of real-life sociability, especially in our post-covid era, and of the testing of the different ideas and notions each one of us has, under a randomly selected audience, like what everyday life open-handedly provides, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to suggest that we follow ever diverging paths from each and every other member of our societies. This phenomenon of diverging “realities”, of missing the common ground is too nothing new: big dogmas died a long time ago (or they lost their soul), new dogmas are only grains in size, magnitude and standing in comparison to the older ones, high-profile societal figures get easily recycled and all this happens at an ever increasing rate. So if our world is observed through so many different lenses, do we have the same reality underlying our words? If our representations of what is true or virtuous are so thinly stretched and far from one another, is there a middle ground to reach? When we try to communicate, do we really speak the same language?

Solutions have already been proposed for this issue. Which these are and if anything more can be proposed will be discussed in our next text. See you soon!