Your New Digital Pimp

The problem with the world isn’t the lack of answers. We’re drowning in answers. The problem is we’ve forgotten the right questions. I stare into the bottom of this coffee cup and it stares back with the same black, empty void I’ve got behind my own eyes. Just another morning where the sun has the goddamn audacity to shine. Outside, the world hums along, full of people trying to get somewhere, buy something, be someone. Inside, it’s just the hum of the refrigerator and the ghost of last night’s bourbon.

Then I see it. News from the digital gods at Meta. They’ve got a solution for our broken hearts. They’ve looked down from their glass fortress at the pathetic masses swiping left and right on their little glowing rectangles, and they’ve diagnosed the ailment: “Swipe Fatigue.”

Swipe fatigue. Christ. It’s a beautiful piece of corporate poetry, isn’t it? It sounds so clinical, so manageable. Like carpal tunnel of the soul. But let’s call it what it is: the bone-deep exhaustion that comes from staring at an endless conveyor belt of sanitized, filtered, carefully curated versions of other human beings. It’s the crushing weight of realizing that you’re just another product on the shelf, next to the guy holding a fish and the girl with the “Live, Laugh, Love” sign. The fatigue isn’t in your thumb, you morons. It’s in your spirit. It’s the slow, grinding death of hope.

And what’s the cure for this spiritual malaise? An algorithm, of course. Two, in fact.

First, they’re giving us a “Dating Assistant.” A little AI genie in your phone to help you on your “dating journey.” It’s a chat assistant that gives you “personalized help.” I need another drink just thinking about it. You can tell it what you want. The example they give is golden: “Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech.”

Good god. It’s like ordering a sandwich. “Give me a girl, five-foot-seven, works in code, holds the ironic detachment, and a side of student loan debt.” What happened to the beautiful, stupid chaos of it all? What about the mystery? You don’t find a woman by running a search query. You find her because she’s sitting at the end of the bar reading a book you hate, or because she laughs too loud, or because she has a look in her eye that says she knows life is a goddamn joke and she’s just waiting for the punchline.

You can’t put that into a search prompt. What would I type? “Find me a woman who’s tired of everything but is still willing to get into one last bar fight.” The assistant would probably just send me a link to a therapist. This digital matchmaker doesn’t want to find you a soul. It wants to find you a collection of data points that align with your data points. It’s not looking for a spark; it’s looking for statistical compatibility. It’s the romance of a spreadsheet. They’re taking the one part of life that’s supposed to be pure, dumb, animal luck and turning it into an Amazon search.

I light a cigarette. The smoke curls up and joins the general haze of my apartment. It’s more real than whatever this assistant is promising.

Then comes the real masterpiece of absurdity: “Meet Cute.”

A meet-cute. You know, like in the movies. Where two people accidentally grab the same book or their dogs get their leashes tangled. It’s spontaneous. It’s a happy accident. Facebook’s version of a meet-cute is a weekly, algorithmically-generated “surprise match.” It automatically pairs you with someone the machine thinks you’ll like. It takes the “indecision” out of dating.

That’s the part that really gets me. They think indecision is the problem. They think the messy, human process of choice, of risk, of making a goddamn fool of yourself, is a bug that needs to be fixed. Real meet-cutes are messy. Spilling a drink on a woman’s dress. Getting into an argument over the last horse in the 7th race. Finding out you both got fired from the same shithole job. It’s not a scheduled event. It’s a beautiful disaster.

This “Meet Cute” is the opposite of that. It’s a pre-arranged, data-approved blind date disguised as serendipity. It’s a corporate team-building exercise for lonely people. “Congratulations, user #85739B! Our algorithm has determined with 87% confidence that you and user #C46621A will have a tolerably pleasant interaction. Now, connect! Be cute! We’ll be monitoring your engagement.” The whole thing feels sterile, shrink-wrapped, and about as romantic as a performance review.

You see what’s happening here, don’t you? It’s not about helping you find love. It’s never been about that. It’s about keeping you on the app. “Swipe fatigue” is just a business metric that means users are getting bored and leaving. It means eyeballs are straying. So they have to invent a new game, a new little dopamine hit to keep you hooked. They’re not selling love; they’re selling the illusion of love. They’re selling you a subscription to hope, delivered once a week by a machine that thinks a “Brooklyn girl in tech” is a personality type.

They’re trying to engineer the human heart. To optimize it. To make it efficient. And in the process, they’re stripping away everything that makes it worth a damn: the risk, the pain, the terrible wonderful chance that you might get it all wrong and have a great story to tell. They want to save you from the rejection, the bad dates, the awkward silences. But that’s the whole game. That’s life. You can’t have the staggering highs without the gut-wrenching lows. You don’t get the winning ticket without buying a hundred losers first.

I pour some bourbon into the coffee cup. It’s a little early, but some news just demands it. I look at the screen, at the smiling stock photos of happy young couples who probably met the old-fashioned way: through a casting agency.

So go on. Ask your little assistant to find you the perfect match. Wait for your scheduled “Meet Cute.” Let the machine hold your hand and tell you who to love. Outsource your heart. See how that goes.

Me? I think I’ll take my chances out there in the real world. The stinking, glorious, unpredictable mess of it all. I’ll take a crowded bar over a curated profile any day. I’ll take a real, flawed human being with bad taste in music and a crooked smile over an algorithm’s idea of perfection.

It’ll probably end in flames. It usually does. But at least it’ll be a fire I started myself.

Time for a refill.

Source: Facebook Dating Adds Features to Address Swipe Fatigue