The saddest paragraph you'll read today

A few weeks later, I drove a friend’s rented camper van from New York to Los Angeles, as a favor. I ended up staying in California for six months. Days would pass without anyone asking where I was or what I was doing, and I turned more of my attention to Feeld. It was an old strategy: when life doesn’t deliver on a promised expectation, I look for alternatives, and what I found on this app seemed like an alternative to the fantasy of family I was letting go of. “Feeld is for a new type of human,” Dimo Trifonov, the app’s founder, once wrote. “A human belonging to a new world, one of creativity, openness, respect and exploration.” This was one way to make my unwanted future tolerable, to at least make it interesting for myself: to pretend that there was such a possibility as a new kind of person in a new kind of world.

This is a woman who's hitting her forties, her fertility dwindling, and the best thing she can think to do is...hook up with random couples on an iPhone app, so she can be their sexual plaything for a bit? She's totally unmoored and disconnected from human society and doesn't try to moor herself to anyone, or anything. She drifts, lonesomely, towards old age. The whole article is written like this, and it's titled, "A Hookup App for the Emotionally Mature: Modern romance can feel cold and alienating." Ha. "Emotionally mature?" Is she high?

Honey, you are not "emotionally mature," and Feeld is for horny people to f**k. Emotionally mature people form real relationships and have families. Emotionally stunted women are in their 40s and still can't form relationships.

"Modern romance can feel cold and alienating," but it can also feel warm and enveloping, depending on the person doing the romance. If you have an avoidant attachment style and are in the grip of hypergamy and can't compromise effectively and have strong narcissistic tendencies, yeah, sure, modern romance will feel cold and alienating. But that is you embracing narcissism, feminism, and women's studies departments, not an intrinsic state of modern life.

It's easier to blame the conditions than to look within yourself.

That phrase, "the fantasy of family" is revealing: instead of taking concrete steps to form adult relationships and do the basic things normal people want to do, she fantasizes. This is a writer who thinks she knows everything and yet she understands nothing. She has everything in life except perspective. A lifetime of reading leads to a heavy veil of ignorance. Instead of f**king around on Feeld, she should be writing about co-parenting.

Co-parenting is a useful movement for the optionality obsessed, who are playing out the last bits of their fertility but still want to have a family. By now, there are probably Feeld-style apps for co-parenting. She could write about one guy being too dumb, another guy too thin, another guy works for Google and, although she likes his money, she worries about his "values," or whatever. All the dumb stuff chicks talk about in dating, but applied to a sexless parenting relationships. She is an Eloi, not a Morlock, and she could have a sexless Eloi relationship with reduced messiness around reproduction.

Life doesn't "deliver" things... you make them happen, or you don't. There are no "promises" in life, so "when life doesn’t deliver on a promised expectation" is borderline incoherent. What "promised expectation" is she talking about, exactly? What would delivery look like? A UPS delivery guy? Someone from Amazon? This woman's lack of agency is astounding. It should be astounding. Years of education lead her to think that life is something that just happens to her, instead of something she does.

If you are reading The New Yorker you are bathing in undiagnosed narcissism... which probably says bad things about me, since I read the article... it is extremely cringe and I cringed while I read it... but more than cringe, it is sad,

I have several unmarried and childless female friends who also started using Feeld during the pandemic. We were none of us very young; all of us had been “hooking up” with people for large swaths of our adult lives

You can grow old before you grow up, I guess. "Sex with people outside of our everyday social circles offered the freedom to remain undefined." Yeah, cause the worst thing in the world is to be "defined." The horror! Definition! Whatever being "defined" means. This article is like living in a pop song. The lyrics of pop songs are deliberately vague and aping them is a horrible way to conduct one's life over time. This woman, the writer, is going bad places and is in denial.

This is the sort of article The Last Psychiatrist used to poetically analyze... his first posts are from July 2005, his last in 2014, and in that time New Yorker writers and editors have learned zero. Every person associated with The New Yorker should first have to read The Last Psychiatrist's greatest hits. "Come, join us, on superiority island, where we alienate everyone around us while pretending to be sophisticated," New Yorker people say. There is great ironic comedy in people who have no idea what's going on, pretending they're in the know.

This writer, Emily Witt, is the 40-year-old version of the Japanese elderly in this story, whose bodies are eaten by their cats, because no one notices their deaths for months after those deaths occur. Being single and barren is not an achievement. It's not maturity. It's actually the opposite. She is on the path to nowhere, rationalizing the whole way. In fantasy novels, knowing the secret word for a thing gives the speaker power over the thing. In reality, words are just words and it's the underlying reality that matters. Claiming "maturity" doesn't make a person mature. Sorry. One day, she may be contemplating her life and thinking, "Why didn't I do the most important thing I could have done with my life?" She'll look in the mirror and see the said answer looking back at her.