Why Does Swiping Make Us Lonelier? (Part 2)

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).

This is Part 2 of a two-part debate. [Read Part 1 first →] https://vocal.media/humans/why-does-swiping-make-us-lonelier

In Part 1, four commentators — the Realist, the Conspiracist, and the Mystic — went back and forth on whether dating apps broke love, or simply exposed what was already there. Here, two more voices join the table: a nihilist who thinks the whole thing is a slaughterhouse, and a sage who thinks a lotus can still bloom from the mud. A sixth voice steps back to make sense of it all.

ROUND TWO: Finding Resolve at the Bottom of Despair

THE NIHILIST — Akuman

MWAHAHAHA! What pathetic, laughable drivel!

Efficiency, conspiracy, soul-bonds — all of you, clinging to whichever convenient delusion suits you, and for what?

Rearin. "Time-efficiency," is it? What you proudly optimize is not love. It is nothing but an auction where one mediocre lump of flesh — yourself — gets appraised by another. Every time you drag your thumb across that screen, your own worth wears down right alongside it, reduced to a disposable number, like livestock. And the pitiful mind that calls this a clever choice — now that is the real comedy.

Toshio, even your conspiracy theory is toothless. No one is deliberately culling anyone. Humanity did this to itself — willingly discarding others' pain, degenerating into cold-blooded monsters who catalogue-shop for people from the safety of a screen. Cutting the signal changes nothing. Your souls have already rotted through, having lost whatever heat they once had for loving another person as a person.

And Miruyo. Intuition, is it? Soul karma? Spare me the sanctimony. Wretches who flee the fear of getting hurt, casually browsing for their next quarry — such creatures have no sixth sense left worth trusting. What you call "intuition" is nothing but a twitch of self-love and shallow lust.

Listen well, you fools. Dating apps did not break love. What this convenient mirror exposed, stripped bare, is the bottomless selfishness and indifference to others that humanity carried all along.

Keep greedily swiping for someone better, forever incapable of choosing anyone, forever truly chosen by no one — and wither away alone, growing old and dying in front of a cold glowing panel.

Welcome to the lightless cage with no exit, called infinite choice. By all means, keep buying up your own loneliness, one fingertip at a time! HAHAHAHA!

THE REALIST — Rearin

Akuman, sorry to interrupt the final-boss cackling, but everything you just said is basic market economics dressed up in scary language.

"Auction of flesh," "catalogue-shopping" — you're piling on the venom, but isn't it the same as job hunting? You submit a resume, get appraised, negotiate terms. Treating love as some untouchable sanctuary and declaring "love has rotted" — honestly, that makes you the bigger romantic here.

"Selfishness and indifference exposed" — fine, I can't really argue with that one. But people were always like that. Nobody's a saint.

I'm well aware there's a risk of dying alone, chosen by no one. But between sitting in your room doing nothing out of fear of getting hurt, and staying in the batter's box even if it means getting embarrassingly appraised — the second one is a lot more honest about facing reality, if you ask me.

Stew in loneliness with one thumb, or actually go out and land a real partner. In the end, isn't it just a game that's up to you?

THE NIHILIST — Akuman

Kukuku... know your place. "The same as job hunting," you say? That very shrug is undeniable proof you've been thoroughly domesticated, like livestock.

Don't dress up your own servitude with brave words like "staying in the batter's box." You are not standing at any batter's box. You have simply hung a price tag around your own neck and climbed onto the conveyor belt to the slaughterhouse, of your own free will.

"A game that's up to you"? Don't make me laugh. The very board that game is played on was designed as a bottomless anthill, built specifically to devour your vitality and your time.

Numb even to the pain of being auctioned, drowning in the pleasure of being appraised — you wretch. Go ahead, in your precious dried-out "reality," catch some equally hollow lump of flesh just like yourself, and exploit each other while you savor a frozen little hell together! MWAHAHAHA!

THE MYSTIC — Miruyo

Heh, quite the display, Akuman. Straight out of the Devil tarot card, stoking human attachment and fear for all it's worth.

But your read is only half right, and you're missing the crucial other half. Yes, the app is a mirror reflecting our bottomless selfishness — true enough. And plenty of lost souls do freeze up, terrified of the ego staring back at them. That part's real.

But there's a teaching in the I Ching: "when decay reaches its limit, renewal follows." Only after you've been stripped all the way down to the bottom, after you've swallowed loneliness and despair whole, does the real light finally come into view.

Once you're worn out from shallow lust and catalogue-shopping, ground down to nothing — the moment always comes, deep in your bones: "oh, no spec sheet was ever going to satisfy me." Only someone who's been utterly disillusioned by that cold screen ever starts hungering for real, messy human warmth — and finds the resolve to take on real pain.

Stay trapped in the devil's cage, or push through it and grasp a real bond. That choice is the human condition itself — a trial set by the stars.

It's easy to mock despair and call it the end of the story. But the flower of love that only blooms on the far side of that darkness — I don't think you've met it yet, have you?

THE SAGE — Bosacchii

Everyone, this has been wonderfully lively — and endlessly heartbreaking, too.

Akuman laughs and calls it a hellish cage. Miruyo speaks of a trial of darkness. Toshio fears an unseen trap. Rearin struggles on in the ring of efficiency. To me, every one of these sounds like the tender, aching cry of people who simply cannot stop longing for other people.

From where I sit, the idea that the app "broke" anything was only ever a convenient illusion. Nothing broke. The craving that already lived deep in your own heart simply got laid bare in the palm of your hand.

Surely there's someone better out there. Surely there's a way to do this without getting hurt.

The finger that keeps sliding across that screen — its true nature is exactly what Buddhism calls thirst. The more seawater you drink, the thirstier you get; the more you chase after conditions, the hungrier your heart becomes.

Rearin — seeking efficiency is fine, but in trying to strip the waste out of love, have you not also stripped out the very effort of loving another person? To love someone means taking on, in full, all the messiness of someone who won't behave the way you want, all that "wasted" time. Keep screening people out of fear of getting hurt, and of course you'll never bond deeply with anyone.

Toshio — exposing the algorithm's traps is well and good, but what truly binds a person isn't AI. It's their own suspicion, their own fear. Before you curse the system outside you, sit for a moment and really look at the shadow of loneliness living in your own chest.

Akuman — even if people are wretches drowning in ego, underneath that shabby attachment lies something achingly simple: the wish to be accepted by someone. However deep in the mud a person is, the lotus only ever blooms out of mud. It's a bit premature to write off human foolishness as hell itself.

So then — how do we live, here in this maze in the palm of our hand?

Start by simply letting your swiping hand go still. Stop appraising the person in front of you as a "set of conditions that will make me happy." Instead, honor them — the same as you — as a living, breathing life, carrying their own loneliness, doubt, and wounds.

The person on the other side of that screen isn't an empty husk of specs. They're a being just like you, trembling, wanting to be loved.

The moment you drop the appraising and find the resolve to hold one imperfect person, whole, in your arms — that's the moment your phone's glow stops being hellfire, and becomes a single beam of light illuminating the two of you instead.

THE NIHILIST — Akuman

GAHAHAHA! What nauseating, sanctimonious preaching, Bosacchii!

The lotus blooms from mud? What a nauseating little fantasy garden. A pig wallowing in mud just greedily slurps it up and fattens itself, nothing more!

"A being trembling, wanting to be loved"? Spare me the nonsense! What trembles in them is no mercy. It is nothing but the shabby spasm of a hungry ghost, trying to satisfy its own starvation by sucking the lifeblood from someone else!

That "resolve to hold one imperfect person whole" you preach — these self-loving corpses could never manage such a thing. Every single one of them is trawling that screen searching for a convenient sacrifice who will worship them unconditionally.

No single beam of light will ever shine through! Rather than soothing each other's thirst, devouring one another's wounds and dragging each other down together — that is human nature.

Go ahead, chant your lukewarm little sermon while the two of you burn together in an unsalvageable blaze! HA-HA-HA-HA!

THE SAGE — Bosacchii

Akuman, as fierce as ever.

But even that fury of yours looks to me like a prayer turned inside out. You show us such violent despair precisely because you know, all too well, the pain of being betrayed and hurt by others.

You called the sight of people hungrily seeking one another "hungry ghosts." And yes — you're exactly right. All people are foolish, throats parched, hungry ghosts through and through. I have no intention of pretending otherwise.

But that very pain — writhing at the bottom of the mud, sipping mud, groaning "this hurts" — that is precisely where awakening begins. There has never been a purely clean human being anywhere in this world. Only after being crushed by their own ugliness and pettiness does a person finally learn to press their hands together for someone else's weakness, too.

If seeking and wounding each other as sacrifices is simply human nature, then the moment at the bottom of that hell when someone realizes, "ah, this hurts — and so do you" — that too is a light only human beings can hold.

However much you love the darkness, I will keep believing in people, depth of that darkness and all. If we're going to collapse together in the blaze, then let that be practice too. We'll just keep walking on, covered in mud, together.

THE OVERVIEW — Fukan-san

Well now — every single one of you has passionately laid out the world exactly as it looks from where you stand.

Real-world efficiency, unseen vast forces, the turning of stars and instinct, humanity's shabby karma, and compassionate salvation. Each one, as a cross-section of this world, hits remarkably close to the mark. And yet — all of you remain trapped in the same small tug-of-war: "is it the tool, or is it the human?"

As I see it, the question isn't whether the app broke our relationships.

Technology simply, and irreversibly, changed the baseline cost of engaging with another person. That's all this ever was.

In the old days, for better or worse, there was an "unfreedom" — the binding of community, the narrowness of chance. Within that unfreedom, people forged relationships by more or less being forced to take on a partner's flaws and inconveniences. The app liberated us from that, into a "waste-free freedom."

But freedom is a cruel thing.

The instant choice became infinite, human beings became forever haunted by the ghosts of every possibility they didn't choose. The friction and wasted effort that used to be essential to connecting deeply with someone — you can now simply write it off and discard it, like a bad investment.

The app did not break love.

It's simply that human beings, handed the freedom to choose, are now standing frozen, unable to bear the weight of the responsibility that freedom demands.

Rearin's efficiency is genuine wisdom for surviving the present. Toshio's exposed structural distortions, Miruyo's parched intuition, Akuman's mocked selfishness, Bosacchii's preached craving — every one of these is simply a different face of the same price: the cost of having gained infinite freedom.

So then, what is to be done?

The answer, in truth, is simple.

There's no need to flee outside the screen. No need to curse the tool.

Only this: clearly separate, within yourself, the dimension of "choosing" from the dimension of "weaving a bond."

Until you meet someone, use the tool as coldly and thoroughly as you like. As a device for widening your pool and efficiently connecting you with people, it is genuinely excellent. But the moment you're standing face to face with a real, flesh-and-blood person — that is the moment to burn your mental comparison catalogue to ash, completely.

Cut off, of your own will, the illusion that "there must be someone better out there," and resolve to spend deliberately inefficient time with the one imperfect life in front of you. Precisely because we live in an age where tools erase friction, it is only in the inefficiency we choose for ourselves that any real weight between two human beings can ever take root.

Will you let yourself be carried along by the god of efficiency?

Or will you, of your own will, step down from that god's game board and walk in the mud?

What's being tested here isn't the algorithm's performance. It's the sheer mass of your own resolve.

Editor's Note

So, what did you make of this debate?

The very real, very pressing wish to meet someone efficiently. The uneasy sense of being appraised like a number. And that creeping feeling — as you keep telling yourself "there must be someone better" and keep dragging your thumb across the screen — of your own heart quietly wearing thin.

Every blade in these commentators' words was, in its own way, an unease most of us have swallowed at some point in the modern world.

As Fukan-san put it at the very end, dating apps stripped away the "unfreedom" and "forced obligation" that community once imposed on us, and handed us complete freedom of choice. But past all that removed friction and waste was waiting an endless hell of comparison — forever chased by the ghosts of every option we didn't choose.

There's no need to quit the apps, and no need to treat the technology as an enemy. What matters is separating the "choosing" stage from the "weaving a bond" stage. On the screen, coldly let the odds work in your favor. But the instant you're face to face with a real person — burn the mental catalogue.

Taking on the risk of getting hurt, choosing to accept someone's imperfection instead of expecting them to fit your plan — that resolve may be the only way any of us reclaim our own lives and our own love from being consumed by the algorithm.

Tomorrow, with what kind of heart will you open that screen?

We'd love to hear your honest thoughts in the comments.