“LIVING with a sense of overwhelming choice means exerting an insane amount of emotional energy in making the most banal decisions. What should you watch on Hulu tonight? Make a Facebook status asking for recommendations. Tweet the question to your followers. After perusing for an hour, settle comfortably into Seinfeld, which you’ve seen a million times before. Wonder whether you made the wrong choice. Do it again anyway. There is some comfort in sameness.”
“When the mundane act of choosing a television show to watch is emotionally taxing, relationships are next-level shit. But millennials have a solution: Tinderize it. Tinderize it all.”
“In an increasingly networked society where people are always ready to connect, the pacing of emotional intimacy has to be constantly tweaked. Dating apps facilitate rapid connection and constant communication, but trusting someone still takes as long as it ever did. So Tinder demands a certain amount of emotional dissociation — to distance oneself from emotions by treating connecting to others as a game.”
“Tinder is more than a dating app — it is a metaphor for speeding up and mechanizing decision-making”
“turning us into binary creatures who can bypass underlying questions and emotions and instead go with whatever feels really good in the moment”
“Its mechanisms perfect the similar either-or options other social media platforms have offered, the yes/no, like/ignore, retweet/pass dichotomy that leaves no room for maybe.”
“Within Tinder, we sort each other into ones and zeroes, flattening away any human complexity, becoming efficient robots. Where a best friend might engage with you about the true motivations behind your choices, Tinder serves as Robot Bestie, there to make complex decisions seem easy, shorn of emotional entanglements.”
“At the point of maximum social and techno-sexual stimulation, a total withdrawal — total disconnection amid default connectivity — begins to feel like the only way to actually say no.”
“This coy form of avoidance is not about “playing hard to get”; it’s about preserving one’s sanity in the face of so much connectivity and emotional energy. But this refusal feels not only like a shutdown of others but also of yourself.”
“TINDERIZING is the millennial’s version of zoning out. Vulnerability is scary and potentially dangerous. Immediacy is comfortable and safe. Avoiding confrontation, often in the form of “ghosting,” becomes a substitute for relaxation.”
“As any exposure to Tinder teaches, nothing matters unless you want it to matter.”
“Absenting oneself from potential intimacy is to come off as “chill,” a cultivated state of being in the era of general Tinderization.”
““Passion is polarizing; being enthusiastic or worked up is downright obsessive,” writes Alana Massey in “Against Chill.””
“The concept of Chill rationalizes self-centeredness as an acceptable by-product of too many choices. To remain chill is to drop off, not reply to texts for days because you are receiving too many.”
“There are too many relationships to manage and not enough energy for your own relationship to yourself. As Massey writes, “‘Excessive Chill’ is ‘You do you’ taken to its most extreme conclusion, giving everyone’s opinions and interests equal value so long as they’re authentically ours.””
“Tinderization facilitates chill. But it achieves this through depletion as much as through saturation. So many choices become too little energy.”
“That is not to say chill is limited to such men; people of any gender can participate in chill. The only requirement is that you don’t acknowledge it. To remain chill is to ignore without intention, not because you chose to but because you don’t have the emotional energy to reply to everyone.”
“The more we Tind, the seemingly chiller we become. But really we are just overwhelmed with faces behind screens, with serial objectification and passive evasion.”
“The epitome of Chill is to ignore everyone but yourself. Tinderizing Everything totalizes that process. Tinderization takes the form of crowdsourcing decisions”
“You can only get out of the Tinderization by including your bestie, your community, a group of trusted friends, in the process. By prompting you to discuss the emotional intricacies of the conversations you’re having and the vibes you’re feeling through the smartphone screen, these rescuers force you to acknowledge that intricacies are welcome — necessary to the process of getting to know someone well.”
“To be without intricacies is to be without emotional boundaries, to disregard whoever whenever. Besties save you from your shit. They are your heart, and they transcend any efficiency that the Tinderization Bestie Robot attempts to offer you in its binary fantasy.”