Dear Tinder,
All across the country, drunken college students and broken-hearted business professionals swipe through you in a desperate attempt to find someone to spend a night with or maybe their whole life with. Encompassing all that is sexily impulsive about hookup culture, you allow America’s pathetic public to search for love in the classic 21st century way: as convenient and instant as possible. All it takes to find love is one swipe.
Your growing popularity has been equally met with growing controversy. You’ve received a lot of backlash from social justice activists and feminists for being sexist and embodying everything that is superficial and grimy about hookup culture, as your users shuffle through potential companions like a deck of cards. Hopeless romantics spit at you in all of their intellectual superiority, saying that love consists of more than appearances and sexual attraction. How can you know if you like someone solely based on a couple of pictures? And yet, we keep on swiping. Just keep swiping.
Sometimes I wonder… why? Why are you so addicting? Why do we feel so productive when tapping through digital profiles of strangers only to send a couple of pseudo-genuine messages their way, usually resulting in a long string of half-assed conversations? Well, it’s because of the American Dream. It’s because, for so long, it has been ingrained into our “American dreamer” mentality that the harder we work, the more we work, the more we contribute to capitalist society, the more worthy we are. The more money we’ll have. In this system, we are machines who work and work and derive our personal worth based on how much we work and, through this, Americans have come to treat productivity like a currency. And it is because of this toxic, capitalist mentality that millions of Americans use you, Tinder, just like any other application or device they might use solely in the name of productivity. In the few minutes before our bus arrives: we do some swiping. In the line for the bathroom: swipe a little here, swipe a little there. Walking down the street: sure, why not walk and swipe? Maybe I’ll find my future husband while waiting in line for Starbucks.
And maybe your inherent instantness is thrilling; I could find a date in a matter of minutes if I play my swipes right. However, it is this craving for that which is instant that makes me believe that you, Tinder, are indicative of our country’s greater cycle of toxic capitalism. You operate under the same capitalist mentality that makes our country a booming economic force of commercialism and instills that annoying little voice within each and every American that we could always be doing more or working harder.
So Tinder, just know that you seduce productivity-obsessed, dream-chasing Americans every single day; you are a manifestation of toxic American capitalism. Because a minute without swiping is a minute wasted.
Best,
Grace