The Decay of Relationships in the Modern World
Article by Potash
What happens when you put a polar bear in Death Valley? Or a gorilla in the Antarctic? Of course, disastrous consequences will follow. You can’t take an animal out of an environment which it has spent millions of years adapting to and expect it to prosper when thrust into radically different conditions. And yet, that is exactly what the technological system has done to the human race.
The decay of dating we see today is not a random product of chance, it is an inevitable byproduct of the larger problem of disruption in community ties caused by the technological system. The perversion of social relations brought about by dating apps is a prime example. This essay will look at dating apps and their effects in particular after considering the wider social context in which these apps operate.
The human race has spent the overwhelming majority of its existence living under a set of relatively stagnant and unchanging conditions. Over time, we adapted to these conditions, and evolved traits that would best suit us to living under them. To a great extent, the agricultural revolution disrupted these conditions. But no other change in human history required such radical changes in so little time as the industrial revolution. Societies are complex organisms, dramatic changes in any one section of a society will inevitably lead to radical changes in all other parts of a society. So it should be no surprise that the industrial revolution's effects went far beyond merely increasing efficiency.
Prior to the industrial revolution, one's loyalties were primarily to one's family or local community, such as the tribe or village. These groups have provided community, purpose, and fulfillment to their members for millions of years. They were an integral part of pre-industrial life. Unfortunately these familial/community bonds have been shattered by the industrial revolution. Rather than relying on one's tribe or village and one's own labor for the necessities of life, the vast majority of people are now completely dependent on the technological system to provide for them. Rather than wearing clothes that have been sewn for you by your family or tribesmen, you wear clothes that you bought from Amazon and were stitched together by sweatshop workers. Rather than eating food that has been hunted or farmed by you and your immediate community, you eat highly-processed food that you bought from the grocery store. Rather than living in a dwelling that you built with the help of your fellow tribesmen or villagers, you rent an apartment. Since the technological system now plays a much larger role in our lives than our family or local community, and we are more dependent on the technological system than on our local group, our loyalties have evolved to be primarily to the system; our families and local communities necessarily come second. So it should be no surprise that the family is in decay. Rates of single motherhood have risen dramatically, now affecting as many as 1 in 3 children[1]. In 1960 only around 5% of children were born to unmarried mothers, now 4 in 10 are.[2] But the technological system’s damage to the family is not limited to single mother households, even the families that have managed to stick together have been weakened by it. The average family only spends around half an hour a day together[3]. It should come as no surprise that the family is as weak as it is, as it seems nearly every part of modern life requires isolation from the family. Children are required by law to spend a majority of their childhood in the school system, the average child spends over 17,280 hours at school[4]. Sure, we might technically have the option to homeschool our children. But in reality, very few parents have the time or energy necessary to homeschool their children, juggling a full time job and the responsibility of homeschooling is a very difficult endeavor. And so, for the vast majority of parents, their only choice is to send their children through the education system.The education system forces children to be raised more by the state than by their own parents. Since both parents have to work in order to economically sustain a family, they have very limited time to spend with their children. After a long day's work, they may feel too tired and worn out to spend the rest of the day raising their children, and so they have no choice but to delegate more and more of the efforts of raising a child elsewhere. Electronics appear quite tempting considering parents' situation: they offer to entertain children for hours with no effort on the behalf of the parents. So it is no wonder that so many parents have opted to let iPads raise their children, even at ages as young as 1[5]. Of course, even though it may seem convenient to do so at the moment, the effect of prolonged screen addiction on children has castrated the family.
With the decline of the family comes a decline in the desire to create a family. If one's family has had a weak influence on one's life–and if the practical benefits in power and survivability that used to come with having a family are largely replaced by the power and survivability that come with devoting one’s energies to the technological system–then it is quite likely and reasonable that one will feel less need or desire to start a family of one's own. Industrialization has led to a universal decline in birthrates seen across nearly every nation on earth. Of course, this is due in part to the increased availability of contraceptives, which itself is a technological innovation deeply dependent on modern industrial scientific and logistical infrastructure. However, the reasons for the decline go beyond birth control, as we’ve seen birth rates continue to drop decades after contraceptives have been made widely available. The birth rate drop is not solely due to the decline in unwanted pregnancies, it has much to do with the overall decline in dating and romantic relationships. As in nearly every measurable way, romantic relationships have decayed. Marriage rates have cratered. Americans are 61% less likely to get married now than they were in 1990[6]. Even high school dating has seen a remarkable fall. Dropping by a staggering 36% in only 2 decades[7]. It is clear that the romantic world has fallen out of order. The romantic experience of new generations lacks the soul that their parents and grandparents had.
Dating apps have much to do with this problem. The technological system seeks to infiltrate every aspect of life, and dating is no exception. They lure us in by offering us “convenience,” rather than having to search for a partner out of the amount of people we know or through mutual connections, we are provided with hundreds of options all only a few miles away at the tap of a button. Of course, this may sound very appealing theoretically, but in reality it has eliminated the soul of dating. It reduces one's entire being to a profile picture and maybe a few sentences of text to be sorted through in seconds. It has made dating like filling out a job application. Obviously, this is not a sustainable route for forming a serious relationship, and it’s not meant to be either. Once an individual finds a relationship, they have no use for dating apps, and the developers can’t make money off of them. But, if one is single then they will continue to use dating apps in an attempt to find a partner, and will be tempted to use premium features to boost their success. And so dating apps are incentivized to keep their users single. But sadly, the poison of dating apps doesn’t end with the app. Since dating apps have given people a convenient way of finding a partner, many feel no need to search for one outside of the digital sphere of the app and naturally through real-world interactions. Why go through the hassle of awkwardly searching for a mate in real life over the course of years when you can swipe through hundreds of potential mates on your iPhone in minutes. This problem is exacerbated by the rise of online pornography, which degrades many men’s motivation to search for a partner even further. This is why there has been a substantial decline in in-person forms of dating.
Many people have decided to stop putting up with the nonsense of online dating. Online dating websites have been losing activity recently[8]. But unfortunately, this does not seem to have solved, or even mitigated, the problem of online dating. In fact, online dating seems to have engulfed in-person dating as a source of finding a partner, and continues to account for an even higher percentage of how couples met[9]. If online dating apps are losing members, but are simultaneously taking up a greater share of the dating world, then the people leaving these apps aren’t just giving up on the app, they are giving up on dating as a whole. In other words, dating apps have developed so much of a monopoly over the dating world, and people have grown so dependent on them, that when individuals quit these apps due to their sour experience, they find traditional dating so difficult that they stop dating entirely. Furthermore, traditional in-person dating is not quite the same as it once was. When a new technology (which was initially optional), becomes widely adopted, we begin to become reliant on it, and eventually society restructures itself in such a manner as to make the new technology a necessity. This pattern has held true for almost all of the most impactful technologies known to man, and dating apps are no exception. Dating apps have greatly weakened in-person dating, and have made it harder for those who chose to pursue it. Since the majority of the populace have become so used to communicating and finding a partner through social media and dating apps many people have forgotten how to do so in real life. It is even considered creepy to approach the opposite sex in public. Moreover, why would anyone who uses online dating apps have any interest in the few options they have in real life when they have so many more options online?
It should be obvious that dating apps are a source of the romantic loneliness of the modern age. But, although they have certainly contributed, they are not necessarily the only cause. It appears that dating has been in decline since before the arrival of dating apps[10]. And besides, if the dating world was healthy before dating apps, people would have never felt the need for the quick “fix” they offered in the first place. Or at least, not to the same extent that modern people do. The death of small-scale communities has played a much larger role in this disaster than it has been given credit for. Those who have grown up in tightly knit small-scale communities tend to develop stronger relationships and a higher level of social adeptness than those who have not. Whereas those without a strong sense of community will typically find socializing, including romantic relationships, more difficult.[11] Now that the technological system has led to the death of small-scale communities, we have become much more isolated. The World Health Organization has even gone as far as declaring loneliness a “global health threat.”[12]
The acceleration of technological progress is the root cause of the loss of small-scale, close-knit communities. Rapid technological change always leads to rapid changes in society as a whole and inevitably degrades traditional ways of life by forcing us to live under radically altered conditions. It’s very likely that some of the many changes brought by technological progress are largely responsible for the decline in dating.
The conservatives have been conned, and they have allowed it to happen by not recognizing the driver behind the loss of tradition. They want to eat their cake and have it too.[1] They desire the values, communities, and lifestyle of the past, along with the technology that has made them obsolete. The technological system changes rapidly, and once it does it has no use for the outdated and incompatible ways of life of the past. But the conservatives have failed to realize this. They have bought into the lie that technology is neutral, and for that they have paid the price. They are losing. Every battle that they try to fight they lose. Christianity is declining, rates of transgenderism are increasing, pornography addiction is affecting more and younger men, immigration is rising, and leftist values have infiltrated powerful organizations[13]. The conservatives will continue to lose as long as the technological system remains in power. No matter how many seats in government they may gain, or how much power they may seem to have at the moment, they will lose in the long run.
Dating is yet another example of how the technological systems will seek to rewire every inch of human society, and the disastrous consequences of such an approach. The negative social consequences of online dating and dating apps are pervasive and inevitable given the technologies themselves and their interaction with human nature and social relations. Though troubling, they are merely one manifestation of a broad range of technological disruptions to human society and the inevitable perversion of human relationships they all entail. Just as the technological system has rotted dating and romantic relationships, it has rotted the family, it has rotted our sense of community, it has rotted every corner of human life and it will continue to do so until it is killed.
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NOTES:
[1] “Child Well-Being in Single-Parent Families.” The Annie E. Casey Foundation, August 1, 2022. https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-well-being-in-single-parent-families.
[2] Livingston, Gretchen, and Anna Brown. “Birth rate for unmarried women declining for first time in decades.” Pew Research Center, August, 13, 2014. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/08/13/birth-rate-for-unmarried-women-declining-for-first-time-in-decades/.
[3] Renner, Ben. 2022. “American Families Spend Just 37 Minutes of Quality Time Together per Day, Survey Finds.” Study Finds, April 1, 2022. https://studyfinds.org/american-families-spend-37-minutes-quality-time/.
[4] “Years in School.” 2013. Prepwise. April 6, 2013. https://www.prepwise.com/answers/years-in-school/.
[5] “The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Age Zero to Eight in America, a Common Sense Media Research Study, [United States], 2013, 2017.” 2021. May 3, 2021. https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/ICPSR/studies/37491.
[6] “USA - Marriage Rate 2021 | Statista.” 2024. Statista. July 5, 2024. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195951/marriage-rate-in-the-united-states-since-1990/.
[7] Faerm, Steven. 2020. Students’ Cognitive and Emotional Development during the Transition from High School to Design School. The International Journal of Design Education. 14. 61-78. 10.18848/2325-128X/CGP/v14i04/61-78.
[8] Carr, David F. 2023. “Online Dating Activity Down 14% on Apps, 22% on the Web.” Similarweb Blog. February 9, 2023. https://www.similarweb.com/blog/insights/ecommerce-news/dating-apps-valentine-day/.
[9] Buchholz, Katharina. 2020. “How Couples Met.” Statista Daily Data, February 13, 2020. https://www.statista.com/chart/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-heterosexual-us-couples/.
[10] Faerm, Steven. (2020). Students’ Cognitive and Emotional Development during the Transition from High School to Design School. The International Journal of Design Education. 14. 61-78. 10.18848/2325-128X/CGP/v14i04/61-78. High School dating has been in decline since the early 90’s, however dating apps only started to gain prominence around the late 2000s and early 2010’s, with grindr being founded in 2009 and Tinder in 2012.
[11] Michalski, Camilla A., Lori M. Diemert, John F. Helliwell, Vivek Goel, and Laura C. Rosella. 2020. “Relationship Between Sense of Community Belonging and Self-rated Health Across Life Stages.” SSM - Population Health 12 (December): 100676. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2020.100676. “Weaker community belonging exhibited an association with both poorer general and mental health.”
[12] “WHO declares loneliness a global health concern. Here’s how to recognize if someone in your life is at risk.” 2024. BJC HealthCare. January 4, 2024. https://www.bjc.org/news/who-declares-loneliness-global-health-concern-heres-how-recognize-if-someone-your-life-risk.
[13] I offer neither approval nor condemnation towards any of these realities. I included them to illustrate that what conservatives value is being degraded by the technological system, regardless of whether this is a positive or negative development.
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