Why Does Swiping Make Us Lonelier?

This piece is entertainment and satire, not journalism. Sources and statistics referenced by the characters are part of the fictional setup.

Cover image created using an AI image generation tool (ChatGPT/DALL·E).

Ever open your phone, start swiping, and feel something in you quietly wearing thin — like each swipe costs a little more than it should?

Now that algorithm-driven dating apps have become part of everyday infrastructure, a heated debate has emerged: has this fundamentally broken the way we see love and relationships?

A March 2026 survey on contested public issues, published by the discourse platform VersyTalks, found that whether online dating is making relationships and the dating market worse has become one of the most polarizing questions in public opinion.

The critics' view:

• Decision Paralysis (Choice Overload): With endless options on tap, committing to any one person starts to feel impossible.

• Spec-Sorting and Commodification: People get screened by income and looks like items on a spec sheet, turning relationships disposable.

• Diluted Connection: The price of convenience is that flaky behavior — ghosting chief among it — becomes the norm.

The advocates' view:

• Breaking Old Constraints: You're no longer limited to whoever happens to be in your office or hometown.

• Smarter Matching: You can zero in on people who actually share your values, cutting down on wasted mismatches.

• Personal Agency: Free from old social obligations, you get to choose for yourself.

Is the tool to blame — or is this really about the human heart? Here's a heated debate between commentators who couldn't disagree more.

In this piece: Round One: Did Algorithmic Matchmaking Break Love? Round Two: Finding Resolve at the Bottom of Despair (coming in Part 2)

ROUND ONE: Did Algorithmic Matchmaking Break Love?

THE REALIST — Rearin

Come on, "the apps broke love" — isn't that a bit much? Honestly, arranged marriages were always brutally spec-driven too — income, job title, the works. All that changed is it's now visible on a phone screen and moves faster. Human nature hasn't changed one bit.

And this idea that "relationships have become disposable" — isn't that just what a bigger market looks like? Back in the day you had to settle for whoever was in your tiny office pool or your last group mixer. Give people infinite options and of course they'll second-guess themselves wondering if someone better's out there. That's just basic consumer psychology.

For guys like me grinding through the workweek, the efficiency is genuinely a lifesaver. Nobody wants to blow a whole Saturday and a pricey bar tab on someone you have zero in common with. These days, optimizing for time-efficiency even in dating just makes sense.

That said, I do relate to the "too many options to choose" thing. Swipe long enough and you go numb — you end up not meeting anyone all weekend (lol). But that's on us, the users, not the tool.

Sure, it's less romantic, but I'll take the lack of wasted effort. People complaining there's "no sincerity" probably expected too much from an app in the first place. Just treat it as "making acquaintances who check the right boxes" and you'll be fine.

THE CONSPIRACIST — Toshio

Hmm. Rearin, your view is thoroughly modern and rational. And yet — I'm afraid you're only seeing the surface of things.

"Time-efficiency." "Optimization." Convenient words, aren't they? Have you not noticed you're dancing to their tune?

Consider this: why do you suppose "algorithmic matchmaking" spread across the entire globe this quickly? Do you honestly believe it's nothing more than tech companies chasing profit?

The answer is obvious. That is no dating-assistance tool. It is a vast selection-experiment platform, built to program the genes and emotions of the entire human species.

You believe you are choosing your own matches. But tell me — who decides which candidates appear on your screen? The black-box algorithm that rules the app.

Location, facial bone-structure ratios, income, education, hobbies — even your typing speed and the hesitation in your swiping finger — every scrap of data is harvested. And with it, they deliberately control, behind the scenes, who is allowed to meet whom — and who must never, under any circumstances, cross paths.

Engineering mismatches on purpose, trapping you in decision paralysis so you keep paying — that alone would almost be quaint. Far more unsettling is the possibility that a "population-culling program" is built in, deliberately isolating individuals with certain biometric data or beliefs from one another, accelerating both the falling birthrate and the spread of loneliness.

The thinning of human bonds, the epidemic of ghosting — all of it, calculated. Stripping away our capacity for empathy and our drive to reproduce, isolating each of us alone before a phone screen.

The old matchmaking system had meddling — but it was warm-blooded, human meddling. You, on the other hand, are simply devouring whatever convenient bait some faceless AI god dangles in front of you, mistaking it for free will.

Rearin — you are not the one swiping the screen. The algorithm is swiping through you, appraising your worth.

If you wish to escape this managed society's trap, put your phone face-down this instant. Stop walking along rails whose probabilities were calculated in advance, and throw yourself into the chaos of unpredictable, chance encounters. There is no other way to reclaim your true humanity.

THE REALIST — Rearin

Toshio, you've been watching too many movies! Gene selection, population culling — that's so over-the-top I nearly spat out my beer.

Real business is way grubbier than that. What the operators are running isn't a conspiracy — it's the simple commercial logic of "keep the subscriptions coming." They want to keep paying members paying, so they don't let you match and leave too easily — they dangle the occasional almost-perfect match to get you tapping that upgrade button. That's really all it is.

I'll grant you the algorithm appraises people. But wasn't that true at office mixers too? "His salary's too low," "not my type" — real people were sizing each other up just as bluntly. The machine's just doing it faster now.

And "throw yourself into chance encounters" — get real. The average office worker doesn't have the energy or time to gamble like that. You come home exhausted from overtime — who's got the nerve to approach a stranger? Try that at the office and you'll end up in an HR complaint.

Put the phone down and what's waiting for you isn't "recovering your humanity" — it's just staying in on your day off. Nobody's expecting a perfect match. We're just efficiently buying a shot at meeting someone. It's not about being played by the tool — it's about using it with your eyes open.

THE MYSTIC — Miruyo

My, you two are really going at it.

Rearin's "efficiency" and Toshio's "trap of unseen forces" — from where the stars sit, you're both just dancing on the same board.

In astrology, we're right at the turbulent hinge point where the "Age of Earth" finally gives way to the "Age of Air." Love used to carry Earth's nature — built slowly, on solid ground, through blood ties and workplaces and well-vetted circles.

Now it's all been swept up by Air — information and speed riding the airwaves. The apps didn't break love. Love's very texture just weathered down, from heavy devotion into light, breezy exchanges of information.

In the language of the I Ching, swiping a screen a thousand times is chasing the illusion of "Fire" — the Li trigram. Fire is bright and flashy, but without fuel, it's gone in an instant. So your finger keeps moving, chasing the next flame. That's the real shape of decision paralysis. You're trying to love a passing shadow, not a soul — of course your heart stays hungry.

Rearin, you laugh about being "efficient, no wastage" — but look at your palm. The people with the deepest heart lines are the ones who found the right person precisely through life's "pointless detours" and "painful failures." A love with all the risk of heartbreak stripped out is like miso soup made without dashi — bland, and eventually you tire of it.

And Toshio's "algorithmic trap" — I wouldn't laugh that off as pure occultism either. What should be heaven's own arrangement, fate brushing two sleeves together, is being pre-empted by calculations from a machine humans built. The more unnatural filters you stack on, the further you're pushed from the person meant to resolve your soul's karma — and the more you're handed hollow, counterfeit connections instead.

So what should you do? I'm not telling you to quit the apps. Just — don't judge someone by the spec sheet on your screen. Trust what you feel the moment you actually meet them: the scent, the presence, that unexplainable shiver of intuition.

Keep swiping with your sixth sense rusted shut, and all you'll ever catch is an empty husk of numbers the algorithm spat out. Don't let the machine use you — use the app to wake up your own wildness instead.

Heh. Why don't the two of you trust your own flesh-and-blood instincts a little more — instead of everything on the other side of a screen?

THE REALIST — Rearin

Miruyo, the Age of Air, soul karma — there you go again, going full spiritual! But that last bit — "trust your gut the moment you meet someone" — that part's actually dead practical. I'm fully on board with that one.

All that time spent scanning specs on the app is basically a paper screening. Better to skip the endless texting and just meet up fast to check the vibe in person. That's the real time-efficiency win.

That said, "love your pointless detours and failures" — that's a luxury for people with time to burn. A guy who's back on the packed morning train tomorrow doesn't have time to wade into a flavorless swamp on purpose.

So instead of waiting on fate or the stars, I use the tool to run up the numbers and improve my odds. Meet, and if it's off, move on immediately. Hunting down the flesh-and-blood person your gut actually clicks with, using your own legwork — that's the toughest, most modern way to do this, if you ask me.

THE CONSPIRACIST — Toshio

Hmph. It seems neither of you sees the full picture at all.

Miruyo, what if I told you that even your "wild instinct," that "scent" you speak of, has already been hacked?

Rearin boasts that meeting in person is "the ultimate efficiency." But consider — the background music, the lighting, even the ambient signal environment of the cafés you're told to meet at — all of it, calculated. What if frequencies are being broadcast that deliberately suppress your pheromone response and plant a sense of unease?

Yes — their true aim is not to bring people together. It is to implant, in your brain, an unshakable sense of dissatisfaction that always makes you want to move on to the next one.

Meet, break up, meet, break up — over and over, forever logged back into the app. Even your instincts have been artificially thrown off course, and you are merely deceived into believing you are choosing, and rejecting, of your own free will.

Understand this: modern humans have already had even their sixth sense domesticated by the keepers of digital space.

If you wish to break this cycle of a vast biological experiment, there is only one way: power off your phone, and go somewhere free of noise, beyond the reach of the algorithm's signal. Only in a place no calculation can reach can a human being ever meet a true "other."

Even once we see the trap, why can't we put the phone down?

In Part 2, the debate goes further still — from the depths of despairing distrust in other people, all the way to the one resolve that might lead us out of the hell of infinite choice.

[Part 2 coming soon]