Rhetorical questions round a rectangular dining table
Vol 3. Swiping left and right at internet dating. Should you believe in the future? And is long form writing now finally dead and buried?
Should you enjoy this 3rd Volume of my inner ramblings round a rectangular dining table (and I sincerely hope that you do), then here are the previous 2 Volumes in the series, and handily placed too should you reach the denouement of this particular festival of laughter and desire yet more wisdom from some wistfully firing neurons flying in all manner of directions:
There’s a video on the internet. Hardly a shocking statement in which to commence this “Dear Diary” entry and no, it isn’t one of those videos you filthy minded rascal! It’s rather sweet actually and at roughly 30 seconds a rather short glimpse into a rather wonderful world and an equally rather lovely memory for all concerned. As you are incredibly unlikely to ever see this particular video I’ll describe it for you:
On what I’m imagining is an occasion of sorts, perhaps a Wedding or perhaps a Birthday party, there’s a rather dapper and well dressed mid 40’s bald man dancing with a much younger, late teens or young adult lady. And these two human beings look as happy as happy can be and the bald man in particular looks so proud. So damn proud. Now, I’ve only seen this particular 30 second video once and I’m absolutely certain who the gentleman is as it’s a lifelong friend of mine, a good friend, a damn proud man, and a damn fine dancing partner for the young daughter in his parental arms.
So far, so unremarkable, and naturally it’s difficult giving credence to a video that you’ll never see but it gave me pause for a host of reasons. One is an old stone I’ve had for a long time in a pair of my oldest shoes and that of remembering my friends as they were when I left my hometown 23 years ago and a final one would be the quotation attributed to the main article picture above as my old friend would both appreciate it and recognise my reason for using it. Envy is indeed my sin (David) but in the nicest of possible ways and my quoting of the film Se7en is pretty much de rigueur for me and for as long as I can remember us being friends. Envy is indeed my sin and there’s no shame in that. We all have our foibles, peccadillos, frailties, and pebbles in our individual shoes, and I’m only envious here as I’ll never get to experience that video as, trust me, my teenage son has zero wish to ever dance with me! He’s even more grumpy and curmudgeonly than I am and it’s not a particular trait I wanted in an apple falling from my familial tree but it has, and that fills me with regret.
Regret isn’t a deadly sin like envy but it’s just as heavy to carry around sometimes.
So what does all this have to do with the perils and escapades of internet dating, believing in the future or a lament for the death of long form writing? Well, not a lot, really, at this stage, but we’ll get there, one tangent at a time. And talking of unwanted stones in metaphorical shoes, the surreal question that I simply can’t shake is this: Why are the friends I used to see all the time 23 years ago not the same now, in the year 2022? How come my mate isn’t the same rapscallion who used to ride his bicycle to my house, beat me mercilessly on the original pop up PlayStation console, smoke three illicit cigarettes from a packet of ten and leave me the remainder as he knew he’d get a righteous clout around the head from his girlfriend, a girlfriend that became his wife, and a wife that bore him three beautiful children and the oldest of which is clearly a fine dancing partner for her dear old Dad.
Why isn’t his wife the same young thing that bounced into a suburban living room when I first met her over two decades ago? What has happened to the generation that has passed since I first met my friend’s now wife? Why aren’t they the same as they were in 1999? Or perhaps they are? What has happened to me in those decades? Why are chocolate bars now much smaller than they used to be? And why are packets of crisps now virtually devoid of that crucial ingredient in a packet of crisps: actual crisps? And actual crisps that actually fill the packet? Like they used to do, two decades ago? These are of course purely rhetorical questions and if you’ve read my previous entries in this series you’ll know by now that I love to pose questions, obvious, rhetorical, or otherwise. But for a change, I may have an answer.
The answer of course is internet bloody dating, but we’ll get to that, in due course. You see, that smiling and bursting with pride bald man dancing with his daughter and the girlfriend who bounded into that domestic living room and firmly into his life have been happily married now for nearly twenty years and hence have never had to experience the utter living joy that is internet dating. And I envy my old friends for that, and my mate for confounding my memories of him by being a grown up adult dancing with his teenage/adult daughter and loving every damn prideful second of it. It’s clear from a distance that my two old friends are obviously the piece to each other’s puzzle and it’s a thing of beauty to see. But envy is my sin, envious of a beautiful video, of a family at one with life and envious that my dear old friend managed to escape the clutches of internet dating and left me to tread the fine line of being swiped left (or is it right?) alone.
What’s in the box in the film Se7en, I hear you ask? Probably the head of the person who thought it a fine and dandy idea to reduce dating akin to a Roman Colosseum thumbs up or down abomination. My comedic hero Bill Hicks was right on so many things and never more prescient than the quote below. Now dating is a swipe to the right (or is it the left?) with a thumb or finger and based purely upon a singular picture and probably two lines of descriptive balderdash. If I told you we used to have to write letters to “Lonely Hearts” columns before the turning of the Millennium you’d probably laugh. Then again, if you told me before Millennium Eve that my old friend would be dancing with such grace and pride with a grown up daughter in the future I’d have probably laughed at that too.
So I’m green eyed with jealousy at my friend (in a loving way) and I’m blooming annoyed that my beautiful brown eyes get swiped into oblivion in the viper’s nest (or dangerous waters that are plentiful of fish apparently) and it’s symptomatic of the emoji filled society that not only is failing to evolve, but retrogressing or devolving at a rapid pace. Now this isn’t an angry response to a personal disaster swimming with the plenty of fish in the choppy waters of internet dating, but that hasn’t stopped me from having an opinion before, so why start now? I haven’t dated via the medium of the internet for 8 years now, purely by choice, and whether or not I’ve experienced the current devolved behaviour of being swiped or judged upon a singular picture or a statement on my current medical record or favourite football team, that doesn’t stop me from having a view as well as lamenting at how far down the evolutionary chain we’re falling, and falling fast.
The rub is: I’ve already seen the vapid, vacuous and judgemental statements that litter dating profiles (“No bald men”, “Own hair and teeth”, “No over 50's”, “No children”, “I’d rather not date someone with an autistic child”) and now you’ll no doubt be swiped into the dark void of The Matrix if you fail to list your pronoun, gender, medical history, and whether or not crisp packets were full to the brim two decades ago and if you agree or not that chocolate bars are far smaller now than they used to be. You know, in the days when you had to write a letter to a PO Box for a Lonely Hearts Column in the local paper and actually had to describe yourself, your aspirations and who you were as a human being. Now it’s just a barrage of emojis, LOL’s, FML’s and probably other recently created words that I don’t understand because there isn’t a vowel anywhere to be seen so it’s not a real word! Evolve damn you!
Evolve.
So I’m furious about something I’m not currently experiencing, only experienced in the past and which does not currently affect me in the here and now? Well yes, and indeed no. Yes I’m not currently experiencing it but no too because the only way someone is going to see the beautiful pair of brown eyes that I possess (in a romantic way) is via the medium of internet dating and any potential shoal of fish swimming in my romantic direction is already paper thin as it is. Based on previous internet dating experiences I go from Godlike to Demon, Hero to Zero, in roughly three months, and the last two and a half of those months tend to be hellish as I fall from grace quicker than a Roman Empire and their opposable thumbs of death. I have “guilty feet” and no rhythm but surely I’m going to dance again? Please? Like my old friend? But I’ll need to dip my toe back into the strange waters of romantic dating again and who needs the let down that always follows? Who needs that soul destroying look from someone who thought you were a living God until realising you have feet of clay like the rest of humanity after all? Or that first argument? (my history suggests I only get one argument before the Sword of Damocles starts to rock violently from side to side). Or that left field thinker you so adored and so damn quickly, suddenly becomes a “fringe thinker”? And why aren’t you as motivated as I am Stephen? And why have I fallen out of love with the man I originally adored and why hasn’t he changed into the man I really wanted to be in love with in the first place?
I have questions. I always have questions. Even rhetorical ones. And questions such as these tend to block any and all well meaning arrows from the bow of Cupid. But the more I look from the outside in with inside information on the outside world of blind dates and internet love, the more I’m convinced the love boat left me on a desert island a long time ago. Safe, but certainly no more swimming. Wanting what so many of my friends have but unable to fully fathom how they’ve managed to achieve it, and for so long. I foresee internet dating today as a roll call of the politics with which you identify, how you identify, thousands of emojis, words that don’t qualify as a valid word in a game of Scrabble and probably passports, QR Codes and spare vials of medicine just in case you don’t pass the other “tests” the course of true love lay before us. I reckon we’re about six months away from prospective partners on first dates turning up with syringes and vials of medicine hidden in their coat pocket, taking the place of the old stagers of dating days past: a condom, a packet of mints and a fervent unspoken prayer that this adventure will be like The Matrix and you’re finally going to meet the “One”. I also foresee desperate and disparate daters all over the land having the greatest of romantic times, smiling and laughing around a roaring fire in a local pub and then, as disaster strikes and their medical QR codes don’t match, desperately injecting themselves before being sucked into a red carpet as Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” plays absently on a nearby jukebox.
I foresee lots of things and perhaps they’re allied with the questions I have and perhaps more importantly, I should just keep them to myself. I’m sure I’m blowing all of this out of reasonable proportion. Why not declare your medical status rather than your political alliance on your dating profile? Why not state you’re an old school lefty on a Twitter profile whilst you cheer on the all consuming censorship unfolding around you? Say your agnostic on religion and see if anyone gets the joke? It’s all faith anyway. But just be careful. Faiths do not always last and when they’re in the last throes of life they always seem to find time to pass around a collection plate. Do your best to avoid it is my advice. Swiping left or right, whatever the devolved protocols are today, just swipe it away is my advice.
Anyway, the question of whether or not long form writing is now dead has long vexed me and consider this as a pertinent, if vapid example: Just one generation ago, if you wanted to communicate with someone non-verbally it had to be via the medium of a long form letter. Before the advent of The Matrix you had to put pen to paper or fingers upon typewriter keys to ensure you communicated your inner most feelings to the lucky recipient of your written communique. I could lament the passing of receiving such things as handwritten letters through the post and maybe one day I will, but not here. I use it purely as a vacuous example of how we’ve digitally evolved and yet culturally devolved in just a single adult generation. Where will we be after the next adult generation from now, in the year 2040? If the use of modern day emojis can be juxtaposed against cave dwelling Neanderthals and their cave carvings and pictures, then we’ve kind of come full circle haven’t we? So I guess we’ll be grunting, thumping our chests and chasing after wild animals with a spear in 18 years time whilst no doubt hoping the silicon chip inside our head’s, provided and inserted via any number of companies owned by Elon Musk, doesn’t malfunction.
The world will indeed, and finally, be inside our heads and somewhere many thinkers of our age have posited it resided all along. But come a generation or two in the future, who will need such stimuli as a so called real world when there’s a much more real world to be had? Emojis can finally be dispensed with as your avatar can reproduce every emotion you can, but probably now can’t, due to the microchip and the fact that every last sinew of humanity has been absorbed into the Metaverse. Another added bonus is clearly that we won’t need to communicate in real life anymore and frankly why would we need to? Our shiny avatar will do all of this and more for us as we devolve further and further away from what it means to be human and part of a shared human family. Internet Dating will take on a whole new meaning as dates in real life will become extinct, replaced by a wholly digital experience as an avatar in the shape of a football dates a rainbow draped digital image called Michelle.
Long form writing will have long since deceased by then and it’s gradual descent into a literary grave can be traced back to just prior to the advent of The Matrix. 25+ years since the general acceptance and availability of that magic box of tricks otherwise known as the internet has slowly reduced written communication from the unwieldy written letter, facsimile or telegram, replaced it with text messages and emails, and now emojis, abbreviations and non-existent words that make no fucking grammatical sense. If someone responded to you by saying that something you’d said had made them “roll on the floor with laughter” you’d be narcissistically rather happy and pleased with yourself. When someone responds now with “ROFL” I want to scream. LOL! And what if you don’t understand this secret code of utter nonsense? Whenever someone responds to me with “FML” I go off in search of the missing vowels with a couple of bloodhounds and tracking dogs.
LOL!
Words, language, dialectical vernaculars, in jokes, segues, assertions, answers and questions. Questions and answers. Language can be poetic, uplifting, soul destroying, comforting, loving, caring, lilting, singing, rhyming, beautiful. But who needs such joy when there’s Twitter instead?
I have long railed against Twitter and in spite of being in my 12th year in association with that joyous platform from which to hurl angst ridden diatribes into the vacuity vortex and black hole of The Matrix. Twitter is either a worldwide community noticeboard akin to one usually seen near your village green, or the greatest social experiment known to mankind. Twitter, and Social Media in general, also provides the greatest of mirrors to that strange thing we collectively call “real life”. Yes the occasional person from a council estate in Manchester will crack the code of The Matrix and grab their 15 minutes of fame, but hundreds upon hundreds of millions won’t. The simplest way of making the fruit machine of life land on the jackpot within social media is to start with the cheat codes. Or have the hefty weight of the God Mammon in your corner. Any “celebrity” with a sizeable fortune and/or following can tweet “Hello World!” and they’ll receive oodles of likes and retweets and yet, when it comes down to the barest of facts, it’s taken them 3 seconds and 10 letters of the alphabet to secure such a feat. That and the fact they dance on frozen water in a national television show and probably play the local veterinarian in a prime time soap opera. “Pull yourself up by your boot laces” has been replaced with “anyone can make it in the Internet age” and they’re both as laughingly false as “anyone can grow up to be President of the USA”. Using Elon Musk’s tweet above, here’s what I find interesting:
“Believe in the future!”
Right, first off we’re back to beliefs and beliefs, as so excellently elucidated by Bill Hicks, aren’t real or particularly true. Next, what future? Mr Musk has decided to limit his tweet to just 4 words (and 18 letters and a quotation mark) so we have no idea as to what future we should believe in. I’m being snarky, obviously, but equally there’s a long drawn out grain of truth that should be stuck in all of our craws. “Believe in the future!” means absolutely nothing and of course it’s just a tweet and shouldn’t be taken so seriously and if you want a more elongated insight into Mr Musk’s feelings on the future I’m sure has he has a hugely successful website from which to garner this larger and longer insight. So why bother posting this on Twitter? Why waste 8, maybe 9 seconds of his life, and the life of his fingers and thumbs, in typing 4 words containing 18 letters and an added quotation mark? Why indeed?
This isn’t a personal attack on Elon Musk who although I disagree with many of his views on a dystopian future we simply can’t avoid implementing apparently, I do enjoy listening to his long form (and hours long too) interviews and podcasts. He’s clearly not of this world and a glitch and an anomaly that The Matrix often conjures up to confuse and befuddle us! Nor am I envious or jealous of his 70M followers on Twitter, or the 35,000 retweets and 253,000 likes on this tweet alone. That my friends is far too much responsibility for this daydream believer.
But if 4 words can muster nearly 300,000 responses, imagine what an entire tweet of them could do! At least do the decent thing Mr Musk and use all of your available characters! You might become even more successful. Or rather more seriously, an entire page, an essay, a book or a series of books? But then we have to delve back into the murky waters on the death of long form writing as those kinds of responses, certainly of the immediate kind, border on the impossible. Pomp and circumstance accompany the release of any book by a high profile personality but this dies soon after unless there’s a political orthodoxy to support, or a faith that needs further magical water pouring into it’s well.
Long form writing is dead, yet here I am hammering in yet another nail to it’s dusty coffin. Who’s got the time to read a book when there’s a 4 word tweet doing the rounds? Plus you have to find the time to swipe left (or is it right?), like or love your favourites on Instagram (but only the short stories. Who has the time to read all that information?). Swipe. Next!
I guess it’s the sin of envy that envelops me as I can’t write a brief tweet let alone a swift article. I have to, in almost every circumstance, have to use, have to use, all 280 characters on Twitter. I must feel sorry for the 1 or 2 characters I sometimes omit? Brevity is not a game I play and I always have questions. A simple tweet of “Believe in the future!” just makes me smile. It also reminds me of “The Future is Now!” from the Coen Brothers classic Hudsucker Proxy.
Maybe the future is now and maybe I should believe in it.
It’s just that this “future” seems rapidly devolving into a muted hell scape full of round yellow characters who seem adamant on telling me how they’re feeling and our collective ability to discuss such things is being replaced by words and phrases that are dumbing down our very human essence.
And I have questions.
Postscript
As I can’t think of a way of rounding off my points without raising yet more questions that we don’t have time for, here’s a genuine headline from Twitter as I pen these words at just past midnight on 20th January 2022:
“Video of Boris Johnson dancing with a lightsaber is not related to the Downing Street lockdown party, fact-checkers say”
Imagine reading those words just two short years ago? You’d have thought you’d gone insane. But here we are.
We have a UK Prime Minister, breaking the rules he implemented and then claiming he had no knowledge of the party and then, well, the rules. It’s only a couple of lies, no problem. We’ll add them to the mountain of others next to the Thames. Next? Dancing with a light saber. I mean, come on! A clearly drunk middle aged man dancing with a Star Wars light saber. It’s what we all want to see in the middle of a deadly pandemic. He was just cheering up his adoring public. But it wasn’t connected to the lockdown party? Well thank heavens for that I say. I have barely slept since the revelations were splurged all over The Matrix.
But we can all sleep tightly in our beds now children. Because the “fact checkers” have been on the case and by jiminy they’ve cracked it! All hail the fact checkers I say. I’m just thankful that they’re there. You know, checking the facts and, well, fact checking.
Who checks the fact checkers again?
Anyway, I can’t wait for those glorious interactions in roughly 2 years time when the long form language of our kind will be reduced to a fact checker just posting a green tick or a red cross depending on how they view the story. No words. Just a stop and go system. Right and Wrong. Binary views for a binary world. New words that make no sense as well as acronyms replacing our cherished old words, phrases, individual dialects, regions of the world and unique points of view. Who’s got time for such shenanigans any more?
I’m far too busy being envious and believing in a future of mechanical automaton and being absorbed into The Matrix and watching available words fritter away on a breeze of ROFL’s, LOL’s, WTF’s and FML’s. And if our present has a story of a Prime Minister dancing drunkenly with a Star Wars light saber, I’m imagining future stories such as:
“Fish riding bicycle in Liverpool charged with theft and being drunk and disorderly in charge of a vehicle — Fact checkers confirm”.
Now that’s a future I can believe in.
And who checks the fact checkers again?
