Sam Deakin explores how technology slaughtered romance in the modern day.
Technology has changed so much in the past decade and brought incredible things to the world like airpods, memes, Sophia the Robot and Lime scooters. But as Jaqen H’ghar so eloquently put it: “only death can pay for life,” and I believe the birth of technology led to the sudden death of romance.
In our youth we were submerged in saccharine stories of true love, soulmates and “the one,” only for this to be swiftly replaced with The Paradox of Choice and the ability to swipe right should our soul-mate-of-the-day serve up an especially pathetic or offensive pick-up line. Or, even worse, be shorter than six feet (males only).
We spend less time planning dates and more time contemplating how many days to wait before replying or how many y’s are acceptable at the end of ‘hey,’ (it’s two for friends and three for, well, you know).
The people in the most stable relationships around are sugar babies, with their reliable source of income. The dream of having someone show up at your door with flowers has been replaced with a dismal 'here' text, which is still better than nothing. Inevitably, this has turned us into incompetent fools and modern romance has become an unfulfilling, toxic affair which has left us fumbling blindly through a series of three-night-stands, 'up?' texts and accidentally liking a picture of someone you were stalking; all of which we are victim and perpetrator.
I guess one consolation of this is that we are all in it together and if we don’t figure it out, well, at least some experts predict human-robot marriage will be legal by 2050.
Hot damn, I’ve seen too many episodes of Black Mirror to know that doesn’t end well - season two, episode one anybody?
Maybe we should try figuring out this dating/love/romance thing after all, or at the bare minimum, just stop ghosting people.