Spoilt for choice, screwed for life

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There is one sentence I keep coming back to. Not the breakup. Not the men. Just this one, 
I wonder if I've swiped past my person to keep scrolling toward a hypothetical one, 
because it names something I don't think we've fully admitted to ourselves yet: we didn't get worse at love. We just got worse at appreciating what is right in front of us.

I want to tell you I'm above it. I'm not. I have opened an app in the middle of missing someone real and let a hundred strangers' faces flatten the missing into something manageable, something scrollable.

Spoilt for choice, screwed for life. 

It sounds like a joke until you sit with it. The apps promised abundance. More people, more options, more chances to get it right. Somewhere in the architecture of infinite scroll, we stopped meeting people and started auditioning them. Stopped asking Do I like this person? And started asking Is this the best that is available to me? 

Those are not the same question.
One is intimacy.
The other is inventory management.

I've done it. I want to be honest about that before I say anything clever about the culture, because it's cheap to diagnose a disease you haven't caught. I have swiped through faces the way I scroll through a feed I'm not even enjoying, thumb moving faster than judgment, some animal part of my brain chasing the next hit of THIS could be THE one. I have sat across from a genuinely kind, funny, present person and felt a phantom itch to check if someone better had messaged in the last twenty minutes. Not because the person in front of me was lacking. Because my monkey brain was trained to believe that my current date was always one swipe away from being a better one.

That's the part that unsettles me most, it's not that we became shallow. It's that we became optimisers. We started treating people the way we treat everything else the algorithm touches: as a problem to be solved for maximum yield, rather than a person to be known slowly, imperfectly, on their own terms. Choice, in infinite supply, doesn't feel like freedom. It feels like a job you never clock out of. A queue that never empties. A test you keep sitting because you're not sure you've found the right answer yet, so you can't stop taking it.

And here's the cruelty of it: the people on the other end of our swiping are doing the exact same thing to us. Which means everyone is simultaneously auditioning and being auditioned, discarding and being discarded, all of us mid-scroll, looking for the one person patient enough to stop. We built a marketplace for something that was never supposed to be a market. Connection doesn't reward volume. It rewards attention. The boring, unglamorous, deeply unsexy act of choosing someone and then continuing to choose them, past the point where novelty runs out.

Love was never supposed to be a negotiation you keep leverage in.

I think about my parents' generation and my grandparents’, I’m not trying to romanticise the arranged marriage spectrum, because that had its own cruelties, but noting that scarcity, for all its problems, forced a kind of depth. You didn't have forty backup options in your pocket. You had the person in front of you, and you either did the work of loving them or you didn't. There was no queue to retreat into when it got hard.

We have the opposite problem now.
Infinite exits. Infinite almosts.
A culture so optimised for options that it's forgotten how to appreciate, acknowledge or even consider what is in front of it.

I don't think the answer is deleting the apps, though I've done that too, dramatically, more than once. I think the answer is smaller and harder than that: noticing the itch to keep scrolling, and choosing, on purpose, against the current, to stay present with the person actually in front of you. Not because they're the best that is available to you. Because you decided they were enough, and decided it again the next day, and the day after that.

Spoilt for choice. Screwed for life.
Unless we relearn, deliberately, how to stop.






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