There are (sometimes overlapping) fads in movies and popular
entertainment: the noir of the 40s/50s, the Westerns of the 50s/60s, the scifi
following the success of Star Wars, and
so on. Examples of each genre turn up after its fad generally has passed, to be
sure, but those examples stand out just for that reason. Since 2000 comic
book-based superhero movies have consumed ever larger studio budgets and
generated (despite the occasional bad miss) ever larger box offices. A few are
solid works of art by any standards, but most are at best forgettable even if
entertaining in the moment. It is remarkable just how long-lived this fad has
been. A slew of films with budgets in the hundreds of millions of dollars are in
production and post-production at this moment, while comic book publishers
explore new characters in hopes of creating the next massive franchise.
Superheroes must speak to something in 21st century public psychology.
Fantasy and wish fulfillment are at the bottom of it of course, but that is the
case in every genre of entertainment. Plenty of psychologists and social
observers have tried to identify what the current appeal of superheroes in
particular might be. I don’t have any special additional insights, so I’ll
leave the head-scratching about it to them. I do insist, however, that it is the villain who makes a
superhero movie watchable at all. (Not an original view, I know, but true.) The
villain provides the necessary challenge and is almost always the better role.
The best written ones are not mindless thugs, sadists, or psychopaths. The real
world has a full share of those, and they cost us dearly without any upside.
The best fictional villains are understandable on some level. Some are even
sympathetic. Dr. Horrible is a case in point. Four years before he was handed
200,000,000 studio dollars to write and direct The Avengers, Joss Whedon whimsically made the silly but enjoyable Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blogfor virtually zero dollars and then gave it
away for free on the internet. The hero, Captain Hammer, is a pompous posturing
ass, while Dr. Horrible just seeks love and respect. Dr. Horrible is still on
the wrong side, but we the viewers can’t help liking him more. So, too, with villains
with better studio funding. It’s not enough for one to say “I want to rule the
world” to be interesting. Rather, it’s more understandable to hear, “I want to rule the world to
make it a better place, and it will
be a better place when everyone just shuts up and does what I say.” This is
every bit as villainous as the simple egotism of the former quote, and in many
ways scarier, but we get it. After all, reader, wouldn’t the world be a better
place if everyone would do what we say?
Becoming a superhero is a little out of reach. There is
never a radioactive spider when you need one, and getting belted by gamma rays
won’t make you the Hulk. It will just kill you. Fortunately, award-winning
comics writer Ryan North tells us that it is entirely possible to become a
supervillain in the real world in his book How
to Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the
Aspiring Supervillain. No superpowers are required. Money is. However, all
the schemes in the book together add up to a cost of some 56 billion dollars.
This is a lot, but not more than Congress commonly tacks on to some existing spending
bill just as an afterthought. (One of the schemes in the books involves hacking
elections, so that is one indirect way to raise the cash.) He makes a point of
sticking to the scientifically possible, albeit often difficult: e.g. cooling
the climate with high altitude sulfates (as volcanoes do naturally) with all
the blackmail possibilities that suggests. He distinguishes between practical
and possible. A secret lair, for example, is most practically and economically hidden
in plain sight as a sublevel under a commercial building or even a private
home, but it is possible to float a high altitude sphere for your lair. This
idea actually dates to 1958. Buckminster Fuller noted that the cube volume law
(volume increases according to the cube of linear dimensions, so a person twice
as tall as another will have eight times the volume if relative body proportions remain the same) means that if you made a
geodesic sphere large enough, the mass of the structural elements would become
a mere rounding error when calculating the total mass including the air inside.
Heating the air inside (transparent greenhouse panels would do the trick) would
make the whole object lighter than the surrounding air at normal altitudes and
up it would go. North calculates a sphere 1.6 kilometers in diameter would work
great. However, one can see how a 1.6 kilometer floating sphere would make a
pretty easy and fat target. North says his book “identifies hitherto unexploited
weaknesses in our global civilization… In other words, this is a book of
non-fiction about becoming a literal
supervillain and taking over the world.”
Since North himself hasn’t tried any of his schemes (to my knowledge), I
suspect none is easy. But it is nice to know it can be done. Anyone have $56
billion to spare?
I visited an old friend with cognitive issues (and no internet presence) recently. He is
no longer good at distinguishing between events he imagines and events that
actually happened. Under the circumstances, in his case this is mostly a
harmless quirk. He told me he had purchased a house, for example. He didn’t,
but he seemed to enjoy thinking he had, so I saw no reason to contradict him. We are all Walter Mittys with elaborate fantasies spinning in
our heads in which we are the stars. We generally know they are fantasies. When
we believe them they are delusions. (We all harbor some delusions, too, but
that is a subject for another time.) What is surprising is just how much time
an average person spends daydreaming: “watching your own mental videos” as Yale
professor emeritus Jerome Singer put it. According to numerous studies it is
between 30% and 47% of our waking hours. Sometimes it’s intentional and
sometimes we just zone out when reading something boring or performing a dull
task. We usually snap back to the real world fairly quickly.
1947 adaptation of James Thurber's short story
Recent research suggests daydreaming ought not be considered
a bad thing, assuming it doesn’t crowd out too much of real life. On the
contrary it helps us form our values and sense of self by testing them in
extraordinary situations without actual risk. It exercises our brains to recall
the past, imagine the future, and make novel connections among disparate pieces
of information. It thereby enhances creativity. It is positively correlated
with productivity at work. Smithsonian
Magazine notes that “researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the
Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, suggests that a
wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working
memory.” “Working memory” is what it sounds like: an ability to retain and call
up memories even when faced with distractions. The upshot is that all the
mental work we put into making coherent daydreams enhances our capacities in
ways that are transferable to the real world. Daydreams most obviously inspire authors and artists. Woody
Allen, Tim Burton, and J.K. Rowling all credit their best work to daydreams.
This is not a new observation. Sigmund Freud noted, “A piece of creative
writing, like a daydream, is a continuation of, and a substitute for, what was
once the play of childhood.” Yet they inspire scientists and engineers too. Robert Goddard, father of modern rocketry, credited his childhood daydreams of
flights to Mars for his work in the field. Are there downsides? Sure, for some people it is like a drug.
For them real life can’t compare. Addicts of any kind have a hard time paying
bills and keeping friends, and chronic daydreamers are no different. Others get
depressed that real life never measures up to their imaginations. But, of
course, it’s not supposed to measure up. I do not know, but I’d be willing to
bet Elon Musk daydreams about colonies around Alpha Centauri. That is not
happening in his lifetime or the lifetime of anyone alive today, but that
doesn’t make what SpaceX has accomplished so far any less remarkable. Still
others set their hearts on aspects of their fantasies, which of course is a
recipe for heartbreak. In general, though, we benefit from our mental excursions
provided we remember the difference between the real and make-believe. If the
day ever comes, however, when I say (and clearly believe) I bought a house when
you know I didn’t, be kind and don’t argue.
The representatives of every nation say its weapons and
military exist to deter aggression. No one ever believes it. This is nothing
new. The Romans famously claimed all their conquests were in self-defense. The same
goes for individual weapons systems; they are supposed to be scary enough to
deter aggressors. The modern industrial arms race really picked up steam
(literally as well as figuratively) in the late 19th century,
especially (but not limited to) with regard to naval weaponry. Better armor
called forth better guns to defeat it. New classes of vessels such as torpedo
boats begat counter-vessels such as torpedo boat destroyers. On land (and,
later, air) the firepower race accelerated. For a few decades, many people
really believed these developments were making war “unthinkable.” Hiram Maxim,
inventor of the Maxim machine gun, said, “Only a general who was a barbarian
would send his men to certain death against the concentrated power of my new
gun." In World War I, generals from every combatant army did exactly that. Yet there was a hint by the end of WW1 that some weapons
really might be too scary to use. Poison gas was not used on the battlefield in
World War 2. Experience in WW1 had indicated that there was no military
advantage to be gained when both sides employed it; gas just pointlessly increased
suffering without changing the balance of forces on the ground. So in WW2 even
in desperate circumstances no party resorted to it on the battlefield. However,
later in the 20th century not all militaries were so circumspect,
notably in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). So far, however, nuclear weapons truly have been different.
Since 1949 when the US monopoly of nuclear weapons was broken, they really have
deterred. The risk of retaliation has made them too scary to use. Nine nations
currently possess nuclear weapons, eight of them openly. (Israel doesn’t
acknowledge possessing them but everyone assumes it does; South Africa
dismantled its nukes after 1989.) Only China has announced a “no first use”
policy; all the others reserve the right to use them not just in retaliation
but in circumstances where the existence of the state is at risk. Possession of
these weapons has not deterred proxy wars, but it has deterred the nuclear
armed powers from tangling with each other directly. It must have occurred to
both Moammar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein that things might have gone differently
had they been so armed. It clearly occurs to the leadership of Iran. The risk,
of course, even assuming sane leadership all around, is miscalculation during
diplomatic brinkmanship games. If one side or another feels existentially
threatened, a limited tactical demonstration of nuclear force could escalate out of
control. This always has been and remains the most likely scenario for a nuclear
exchange if one ever happens.
M65 "Atomic Annie" tactical artillery
The West, at present, has been deterred from direct
intervention in Ukraine as one obvious example, and for good reason. If anyone
has doubts about that reason, I suggest visiting the website NUKEMAP, which allows the user to choose a geographical location,
choose an explosive power in kilotons, and see the results. (Strategic ICBMs
and SLBMS typically have warheads in the hundreds of kilotons; gravity bombs
from bombers can be in the thousands of kilotons [aka megatons].) According to the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, “As of early 2022, we estimate that Russia has a
stockpile of approximately 4,477 nuclear warheads assigned for use by
long-range strategic launchers and shorter-range tactical nuclear forces, which
is a slight decrease from last year.” Of these, 1,588 strategic warheads are
deployed: 812 on land-based missiles, 576 on submarine-launched ballistic
missiles (SLBMs), and 200 at heavy bomber bases. 977 strategic warheads are in
storage, though they could be activated in short order. 1,912 tactical warheads
are operational: some are seaborne and others are intended for land battlefield
use. (What is tactical and what is strategic has more to do with how a weapon
is used than explosive power per se, but in general tactical nukes are in the
10s of kilotons while strategic nukes are in the 100s of kilotons or more.) Another
1,500 warheads are retired but upgradable. This is a total of 5,977 warheads. US forces are comparable. So perhaps some caution – in both
directions to be sure – is justified. If unconvinced, use the NUKEMAP
calculator 5,977 times.
Two years ago at the beginning of the pandemic the local
supermarket reserved the hours 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. for shoppers over 65, those
being in the age group most at risk. Much to my own surprise (my life feels
shorter than that) I solidly qualified, so I arrived at 7:30, figuring that
there would be few shoppers. My mistake. The store was jammed with old people.
“Are there really all these seniors in town?” I wondered. Yes, there are.
Thereafter I shopped after 9 with the general population; the store always was
much emptier then.
I should point out that Mendham is no retirement community.
The home prices are high while the taxes and living costs are simply
ridiculous. I live here only because I reside in my family home that my father
built; my mother grew up (and is buried, next to my dad and sister) four miles
from my door. I’m as local as one can get, and so will stay for sentimental
reasons as long as I can somehow afford it. But it is, in a general way, a
terrible place to retire. Instead, the town long has been known as a bedroom
community with a reputation for good schools that draws young (or young
middle-age) families with children. Yet somehow all these old folks are walking
around nowadays. Thinking about it, I realize I see more of them than kids. This reflects a trend that is not just local or national but
global. The world is getting older, a consequence of declining birthrates and
increasing longevity. In 1980 worldwide, children aged 0-9 years outnumbered
persons aged over 60 years 1.1 billion to 0.4 billion. According to the UN by
2030 those over 60 will outnumber those under 10 by 2.1 billion to 2.0 billion.
Those over 80 are increasing the fastest, from 137 million in 2017 to a
projected 425 million in 2050. In advanced countries the trend is more pronounced.
In Japan the median age is 48. It is 46 in Germany, 47 in Italy, and 45 in
Lithuania. In the US the median age is 38, which sounds young by comparison
until one remembers that in 1960 it was 29.5. A higher fertility rate (though
still well below replacement level) than most 1st World nations
along with immigration have kept the US median age rising more slowly than
elsewhere, but the trend is steadily upward all the same. There are economic consequences to an aging population. Fewer
younger workers means a shortage of skilled labor which restrains production.
On the upside, this should mean rising real wages. (I know they are falling at
the moment due to inflation, but on a longer scale the pressure is upward.)
This in turn promotes automation and thereby increases productivity per worker.
On the downside for those workers, any higher wages will probably be taxed away
in order to pay for the health care needs of the elderly as the dependency
ratio rises. Accordingly, economic growth in aging countries tends to be anemic
in all aspects other than health care and retirement services. Advanced countries
with low immigration (e.g. South Korea and Japan) are facing absolute declines
in population, with the biggest drop among the young. The growing proportion of
elders in the population is well positioned to vote itself more benefits as
well. At the current time my taxes (federal, state, and
[especially] local) well outweigh any benefits, and I don’t see that changing
anytime soon – maybe never. So, I am not at the receiving end of any dependency ratio – rather the reverse. Still, I can understand the grumpiness
so many of the young express toward gray hairs. All I can say is that you’ll
join us (actually, replace us) sooner than you think. And you’ll then outnumber
the kids by even more than we do you. Maybe you should start practicing now the
art of shaking a rake and yelling “Get off my lawn!” But if stores offer senior
shopping hours, I recommend skipping them.
A week ago Sunday I indulged in a “healthy” snack of freshly
cut strawberries and blueberries. The quotation marks in the last sentence
would not be necessary had I been a little less lackadaisical about thoroughly washing
them first. Some hours later began that special agony, which most (all?) of us
experience more than once in life. (I don’t know for a fact it was the berries
– I didn’t take them to a lab for testing – but the only other possibilities
are unlikely, each for its own reason.) I’m normally known for an iron stomach.
I have omnivorous habits, no known food allergies, and a taste for the spiciest
spices. But I met my match in berries. In the past I’ve shrugged off the occasional food poisoning
episode quickly. Not this time. Either this was a sterner bug, or I’m less
resilient these days on account of age, or both. In the past, digestive system
turmoil (the details and consequences of which I’ll politely decline to
describe) was the whole of it, and it was over in 24 hours or so. This time it
was almost the least of it. Instead, Chills and Fever opened the show. Intestinal
Distress (accompanied by backup singers Torpor and Sleepiness) soon joined the
act and occupied Center Stage for the next five days. Even now, though I feel
OK finally, I still feel the need to be uncharacteristically gentle and cautious with
my food choices lest I risk an encore. Prior to the 19th century, food poisoning was
understood only in the chemical sense, e.g. a dash of arsenic mixed in the
mashed potatoes from an impatient heir. An understanding of the biological type
had to await the confirmation of the germ theory of disease. The first microbe
to be identified as a specific culprit behind a specific illness of this type was
Salmonella. In 1885 some very good early medical investigative work not only
identified the bug responsible for an outbreak of food poisoning in Britain but
traced it to a specific slaughtered sick cow. The list of known harmful
food-borne biological contaminants (bacterial and viral) since then has grown very
long indeed: Campylobacter, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli, Hepatitis
A, etc. They all wreaked havoc long before people knew they existed, of course.
According to two medical historians at the University of Maryland, Alexander
the Great died in 323 BCE most probably from typhoid fever, which is caused by
Salmonella typhi: it was something he ate.
Salmonella
No matter how proactive a country’s health system may be,
individual cases and wider outbreaks will happen. Germ contamination, picked up
from the soil, are just a feature of fresh produce, whether home grown or from
the market. Any fresh raw poultry probably does carry Salmonella or Campylobacter, though proper
cooking kills it. Hence the advice always to clean and cook food well. The CDC
publishes a list of Foods That Can Cause Food Poisoning. Not many foods are absent from it. Some 48 million Americans get food poisoning every year. This
is an estimate, of course, since most of those afflicted don’t seek medical
help. 128,000 are hospitalized, however, and 3000 die. So, if last week was an
average one, 923,000 Americans were sharing my unpleasant experience. 2519 had
a far worse time of it. I’ll be taking precautions to avoid rejoining those
statistics again any time soon. I know it’s entirely the wrong lesson, but the
canned fruit and vegetable aisle at the market is looking more attractive to me
at the moment than the fresh produce aisle… at least until the next time one of
those canned labels gets recalled. Maybe the wine aisle is best of all.
Nothing in this world is permanent. The world itself is not
permanent: civilization far less so. The odds favor civilization getting
through the next 100 years, but there is a small risk it won’t. The risk of
disasters – natural and anthropogenic – occurring that don’t threaten
civilization but nonetheless kill millions is so high as to approach certainty,
e.g. the Spanish flu of 1918-19 and the Asian flu of 1957-58, the latter of
which was as deadly as COVID-19 though the public response at the time was pretty
casual. Back in 2008 the Future of Humanity
Institute at Oxford took a stab at calculating odds of human-caused
catastrophic global events prior to 2100. The researches divided risks into
three categories: events causing at least 1 million deaths, events causing at
least 1 billion deaths, and extinction events. The chance of extinction from a
genetically engineered virus was given at 2% by 2100. The existential risk from
Artificial Intelligence was estimated at 5%. The extinction risk from war came
in at 4%. The total risk of extinction from any and all anthropogenic causes
combined by 2100 came in at 19%. FHI focused on human-caused disasters, but natural
phenomena have in the past caused and will again cause global mass extinctions.
An outburst of vulcanism on a scale that formed the Deccan and Siberian traps
could do it. So could gamma ray bursts from a close enough supernova: one such
may have caused the Devonian extinction. Asteroid impacts are not just the stuff of
science fiction. Current estimates are that some 2000
asteroids large enough to threaten civilization have orbits that cross earth’s
orbit. Most are unidentified despite ongoing cataloging efforts by NASA and
other space agencies. Many times that number are too small to be globally
catastrophic but still large enough to obliterate a city. This was demonstrated
on many a dashcam in Chelyabinsk Russia back in
2013 when a 20-meter diameter meteor vaporized with an explosive force
estimated at 500 kilotons. (This is about equivalent to the W88 thermonuclear
warhead carried by some US and British Trident missiles; the Hiroshima bomb was
15 kilotons.) Fortunately the rock exploded at an altitude of over 25
kilometers, which limited damage on the ground though 1000 people were still
injured by flying glass from the shock wave. A rock about this size enters
earth’s atmosphere every few decades, mostly over the ocean. Near misses by far
bigger ones occur with similar frequency.
Chelyabinsk meteor
In 2029 the large asteroid Apophis will
pass inside the orbit of geosynchronous communications satellites. It will be
visible to the naked eye from the ground. The odds of it striking earth are
vanishingly small on that pass, but when it returns in 2068 the odds, while
still small, are not vanishingly so. It is impossible to calculate all the
possible perturbations to an asteroid’s orbit from gravitational interactions
and small impacts, so there is always some degree of uncertainty to these
predictions. The most dangerous rocks of all, of course, are the ones that no
one sees until they arrive. Sooner or later a big one will. The good news is that (probably) nothing so earth-shattering will happen
within the lifetime of anyone alive today. Individually, we are much more likely to be done
in by mundane events than by anything celestial or geologic. Leaving aside
death by natural causes, which all of us who live long enough will face,
ordinary accidents pose a non-negligible risk. According to the Insurance
Information Institute the lifetime risk of accidental fatal poisoning is 1 in
63 (1 in 4990 in any one year). The lifetime risk of dying by automobile
accident is 1 in 107. Falling down stairs is 1 in 1652. The chance of death by
firearm is 1 in 289. The total lifetime risk of dying by an accident of any
type is 1 in 17 (1 in 1306 in any one year). Those are still pretty good odds
that our own klutziness won’t kill us. Most of us will get to live out our 4000
weeks.
4000 Weeks is the title of a book by Oliver Burkeman, long time
columnist on psychology for The Guardian.
He believes that calculating in weeks rather than years improves our sense of
just how fleeting life is. He does this not to be depressing but to nudge us
into focusing on what is important to make that limited span better. He reminds
us that every activity will have a “last time,” and we do well to treat each
one with the reverence we would show if we knew for a fact it was the last: “there
will be a last time we visit our childhood home, or swim in the ocean, or make
love, or have a deep conversation with a certain close friend.” And that is
without a rock falling on us from space. By and large, Burkeman makes good
points, but in a world filled with office hours, quarterly taxes, and monthly
bills that impose from the outside an order on our time, his advice is easier
to give than to follow.
Like many people, I’m single at heart. This is something that
took me an inordinate amount of time to learn, but which all my romantic
companions discovered much sooner. (The maximum length of any of my
relationships, including my ill-fated marriage, was 3 ½ years.) There was, of
course, dating along the way to this self-discovery, done the old-fashioned way
via in-person encounters. “Old-fashioned” may be the wrong qualifier, however. Many
people made use of personal ads during my halcyon dating years, but not a
majority. In the 21st century the personals have largely (yet not
entirely) been superseded by dating sites and apps. A majority of Millennials
and GenZs do use online dating sites. (A substantial minority of older folks currently
use them, too.) These sites are really just a more complex incarnation of personals
ads, which have been a feature of newspapers for more than two centuries. In the American colonies personal ads first appeared in 1759
– a century later than in England. Francesca Beauman writes about the history
of advertising for romance in her book Matrimony,
Inc.: from Personal Ads to Swiping Right, a Story of America Looking for Love.
But for phrasing (the old ones are better written) little has changed in the
content of such ads since then despite radical social changes over the
centuries. As evolutionary psychologists would predict, men posting such ads mostly seek someone young
and pretty (many 19th century ads specify 18-24) while women mostly ask
for someone financially secure and reliable (many 19th century ads also
specify no drunkards). The 21st century is strangely not much
different than the 18th. Notes an article in the Telegraph,
“Research gathered in a scientific speed-dating study [http://www.pnas.org/content/104/38/15011.full]
reveals that when it comes to the rules of attraction people behave like
stereotypical Neanderthals.” The same pattern is reflected in ads and in dating
site behavior as in in-person speed dating.
From a modest start in the 18th century personal
ads in America saw an explosion in the 19th century. A common type
was ads from men who had homesteaded a farm or built a business out West but were
unhappily single. Wrote, for example, A.B. Collins in the Leavenworth Times (1870): “I wish to make the acquaintance of a
lady of good character, between the ages of 22 and 30; good looking, good
disposition, understands and likes housekeeping, would like to live on a farm,
and if understands music please mention it.” As for female posters, this from
the Public Ledger, November 5, 1845,
was fairly typical. “WANTED – A HUSBAND. The qualifications requisite are
industry, sobriety and honesty; one that is capable of making a wife happy and
a home comfortable, not over 40 years of age and of gentlemanly appearance.” The ads are weirdly fascinating, and were at the time even to
those who had no intention of answering them. Wrote Mark Twain (1867), “You may
sit in a New York Restaurant for a few hours, and you will observe that the
very first thing each man does, before ordering breakfast, is to call for the Herald – and the next thing he does is
to look at the top of the first column and read the personals… There is such a
toothsome flavor of mystery about them!” Unsurprisingly, professionals used the personals to promote
business, though because of newspaper policies their intentions were thinly disguised,
e.g from an 1872 Cincinnati Enquirer,
“A young lady of 20 would like the acquaintance of a nice middle-age gentleman
of means: object, pleasure during the summer months.” If anything, late 20th
century ads of this type in respectable publications tended to be even more
discreet, offering such services as “relaxation therapy for the tired executive.”
(Discretion isn’t a big feature of comparable 21st century internet
ads.) At least these ads were for voluntary trade, legal or not. But there was
always a legitimate fear among interested readers, as there is today, that an
advertiser was a more dangerous sort of criminal. In general, women had to be
more cautious, but men, too, could encounter the likes of Belle Gunness. In the
late 19th and early 20th centuries the enterprising Belle
placed newspaper ads for men seeking “companionship with wealthy widow.” The
ads required that the men have at least $1000 (about $35,000 today) to prove
they wouldn’t just be leaches. The men who answered the ads, mostly
Scandinavian and German immigrants, then disappeared. The number is still
uncertain but a couple dozen bodies were discovered buried at her farm after a
1908 fire brought things to light. More graves are probably still undiscovered.
Belle presumably died in the fire but her remains were never identified. The bulk of the ads, however, were from people legitimately
seeking romance. The personal ads faded for a while in the mid-20th
century but never went away entirely. In the late 20th they made a
comeback and then were largely replaced by dating sites and apps in the 21st.The self-advertising on these sites is more
thorough and indeed more personal (though probably no more reliable) than the
old personals. Once again, a majority of Millennials and GenZs use them.
Despite the ease of using them, oddly Millennials and GenZs in general date
less than their parents and grandparents did at their ages. Whether dating apps
somehow contribute to that decline is an open question. Other social factors
may be more important. The biggest complaint from social critics about the modern apps
is that they promote class tribalization. The filters allow one to consider
only those of similar class, education, politics, and values, and most users do
precisely that. My own suspicion, though, is that the use of filters in this
manner simply reflects the tribalization that already exists. I doubt the apps
make a big difference As that may be, I’m just glad to be out of it. For many of us,
(Pace Tennyson) tis better to have
loved and lost than to have loved and found. It’s relaxing to make peace with
that.
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