The thumb moves without permission. Left. Left. A blurry photo of a man holding a fish. Left. A group shot where you can’t tell who he is. Left. The screen is slick and warm under my thumb, the only warmth in the entire transaction. Each flick is a tiny, silent judgment, a dismissal of a life I will never know, all happening while I’m sitting here, waiting for the coffee to brew. It’s a sorting mechanism, not a search for connection. It feels less like dating and more like clearing an inbox full of spam, each message promising a prize but delivering only a pixelated void.

We were promised a solution to loneliness, a digital cupid using sophisticated algorithms to find our other half. What we got was a catalog. It’s the Sears Wish Book for humans, delivered to the glowing screen we hold 7 inches from our face. Remember those? Flipping through pages of perfectly staged products, circling the ones you wanted, knowing you could never have them all. The difference is that the products in this catalog can swipe left on you, too. The catalog judges you back.

The Flattening of Thomas J.P.

Last night, I came across Thomas J.P. His profile was… adequate. He was 47. His first picture showed him with a golden retriever, a move so common it’s practically a uniform. His bio said, “Hospice Volunteer Coordinator. I enjoy kayaking and finding the best tacos in the city. No drama.” It’s a perfectly constructed profile to signal stability and kindness. But the app flattens him. It reduces a man who shepherds people through the final, most terrifying moments of their lives-a job requiring a level of empathy I can barely comprehend-into a guy with a dog and a penchant for tacos. The algorithm doesn’t measure empathy. It measures clicks. It measures how many of the 237 women who saw his profile in the last day paused for more than a few seconds.

And I’ll admit it, right here, that I almost swiped left. Why? The photo was slightly out of focus. That’s it. My brain, trained by this relentless interface, registered “low effort” and prepared to dismiss the man who holds the hands of the dying. I paused only because the dog was cute. I am part of the problem. I criticize the system while my thumb remains its most loyal soldier. I want depth and meaning, but I filter for high-resolution photos and clever prompts. This is the quiet hypocrisy of the modern search for love: we want a soulmate who also happens to have perfect lighting.

The Business of Loneliness

We keep thinking the problem is the people. “Everyone on here is so flaky,” we say. “Nobody wants to commit.” But what if the problem isn’t the people in the catalog, but the catalog itself? The interface is designed for browsing, not for stopping. Think about it. The “match” is a fleeting dopamine hit designed to keep you playing the game. It’s the jingle of a slot machine paying out a few coins to make you pull the lever again. A successful relationship that causes two people to delete the app is a failure for the business model. Their revenue depends on the search, not the discovery. It’s a 7-billion-dollar industry that profits exclusively from your continued loneliness.

This isn’t just a theory. I used to work in user experience design, not for dating apps, but for e-commerce. The principles are identical. We called it “infinite scroll” and “gamified discovery.” The goal was to keep the user searching, to convince them that the perfect product was just one more scroll away. We never wanted the customer to feel satisfied with their purchase; we wanted them to feel a momentary thrill, followed by a desire for the next thrill. We’re not customers looking for a partner. We’re the product, and our attention is what’s being sold to advertisers and premium subscribers for a fee of, say, $47 a month.

The “Catalog Brain” Effect

A Refuge from the Marketplace

I was talking to a friend, Mark, who confessed something unsettling. After a particularly brutal month of ghosting and dead-end conversations, he found himself exhausted by the sheer performance of it all. The effort of presenting a curated, desirable version of himself to a parade of strangers felt draining and pointless. He told me he started spending more time just creating things, building worlds that made sense and didn’t require him to be anything other than what he was in that moment. It became a refuge from the marketplace of people. He mentioned off-hand how he’d been experimenting with an ai nsfw image generator not for the obvious reasons, but because it was the antithesis of the dating app experience. It was about creation, not selection. It was a space where the specifications were his own, where there was no disappointment, no rejection, no catalog. It’s an extreme endpoint, maybe a strange one, but it speaks to a deep human desire to escape the feeling of being just another product on a digital shelf, to find a connection, even a synthetic one, that doesn’t require you to first be sold.

Paralysis by Abundance

That’s the core of it, isn’t it? The disposability. The feeling that everyone, including ourselves, is replaceable. You have one slightly awkward phone call, and instead of pushing through it, the little voice in your head, the one trained by the swipe, whispers, “There are thousands more out there.” This abundance of choice doesn’t empower us; it paralyzes us. It creates a state of permanent, low-grade dissatisfaction. We’re all holding out for a perfect that doesn’t exist, while swiping left on a sea of “good enoughs” that could have made us truly happy.

I think about Thomas J.P. again. I wonder how many people have dismissed him. I wonder if he ever finds his taco partner. His profile is probably still out there, floating in the digital ether, waiting for someone to pause long enough to consider the man and not just the pixels. He is a good man, I can just tell. A man who understands things about life and loss that this app can never quantify. He sits in quiet rooms and offers comfort as a final act of human grace. And then he goes home, maybe opens an app, and becomes just another face in the catalog, another item to be sorted, judged, and, more often than not, dismissed with the flick of a thumb.

The coffee maker beeps. The brew is done. My phone screen goes dark, but in the reflection, I see my own tired face. Another product, waiting to be sorted. A notification lights up the screen. It’s a new match. The thumb twitches, ready to get back to work.