Dating platforms and social technologies are built around the chase rather than the consummation of intimacy, emotional resonance, or the recognition of social worth. Research on dating app use has shown that the systems rarely deliver enduring outcomes, but rather incentivise continual pursuit, endless swiping, and repetition of cycles of hope and disappointment (Bonilla-Zorita, Griffiths […]
Depression exposes something inverted about social logic. It is treated as a personal weakness, yet the condition of not fitting in is the very pressure that gives the idea of “fitting in” its force. The loops of belonging expand endlessly, always moving the target, ensuring that nobody ever quite succeeds. In practice, exclusion is the […]
It’s easy to think the difficulty lies in you, but more often than not, the problem is structural. Friendship itself has been hollowed out by the systems in which it now has to exist. Communication has shifted into commercial frameworks where attention, presence, and even intimacy are reduced to tokens of exchange. Whether or not […]
Friendship is slipping further into mediation, filtered through technologies and codified social structures. The weight of loneliness grows as connections are rerouted into circuits and systems that promise togetherness but deliver distance. In the unfolding horizon, the future looks stripped of unmediated presence, leaving companionship as an echo carried by machinery. Systems themselves betray the […]
Technologically-mediated communication is creating the global epidemic of loneliness. Alienation and emptiness is a signal amplified by our ubiquitous and omnipresent sense and experience of contemporary connectivity, an inward-turning inflection of systemic extensibility for which we are quite poorly prepared by the majority of our evolutionary history. Kindness fades in these moments as everyone struggles […]
It’s quite unpalatable but is also true that for the overwhelming majority of us, access to the means of digital self-expression remains inversely proportional to either our reach or effect upon others and the world at large. Subsequently, almost all of our heartfelt longings, witty aphorisms or philosophical insights and literary anecdotes are bound to […]
I’m a disavowed “swipe left” in this world of manifest superficiality and instantaneous digital gratification; not much interested in the narcissistic hedonism of commercially-mediated myopia and all these profoundly narrow behavioural games and shallow conceptual vocabularies, I really am completely out of place here. Nevermind that all we ever do by embracing and chasing all […]
More moments of poignant melancholy loneliness over Sunday morning breakfast; alone with a nice hot coffee, my withered notebook and some reflective words and thoughts. Of course, we’re never really alone. There is always that internal narrative of monologue and observation that accompanies us as a silent partner and confidante, as friend and – often […]
It is kind of hard to believe that there’s someone out there for all of us, somewhere. It’s a nice idea and I even think I know who my “someone” is, regardless that I will for many diverse and complicated reasons never meet her. Perhaps the necessary condition for there to even be the possibility […]
Have you ever noticed the ways in which love has a tendency to empty and hollow out our world every bit as much as it inflates it with meaning and purpose? I find myself dreaming, desiring, longing and imagining the effective fictive fantasy of Other, of closure and reflexive psychological completion, of unity and hope […]
As I get older and, reluctantly, more mature – my social life has become dominated by sitting in cafes by myself, wistfully scribbling obscure observations on the nature of mind and systems theory into personal notebooks. It is very lonely and in very many ways. Something which occurred to me, mid-scribble, today was more generally […]
Some days it all just gets away from me. I try to value and appreciate the words and worlds of those around me but they ring so hollow and haunted that I just seem to end up clutching my own similarly fictional, if ever so slightly better-informed, reality to my chest as a treasured possession […]
Daedelus Kite 