The problem worth solving
There are not many problems in the world I care about. Space travel? Whatever. Cancer treatment? Give it to the next person. Ecology? Let it burn. Invoicing SaaS? Not today.
There is a thing which affects the quality (and arguably quantity) of life of every single one of us much more than money, career, country of residence, technological progress, and, I would even argue, health.
And yet, we neglect it. And yet, we don't study it. And yet, we are afraid to talk about it publicly. And, no surprise, we often fail it. As individuals, and as humanity.
Introducing to you — human relationships.
People need other people. Relationships are by far the highest predictor of life happiness. It’s something we hear over and over. You might’ve seen this longest experiment on happiness, and if not, spoiler: it claims exactly that. Ask your friendly billionaire, and they will tell you too that money does not bring happiness, people do.
Take, for example, your closest soul on a life journey, your significant other. This person singlehandedly defines whether your life will be happy or miserable. No amount of promotions, vacations, or affairs will compensate for it. As Tim Urban illustratively puts it:
And when you choose a life partner, you’re choosing a lot of things, including your parenting partner and someone who will deeply influence your children, your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 100 vacations, your primary leisure time and retirement friend, your career therapist, and someone whose day you’ll hear about 18,000 times.
Hearing that, an alien from another planet would assume humans spend a lot of time early in life learning how to make this choice correctly, they read and practice with experts as they grow up, governments invest huge funds in research in this direction (which directly affects the happiness of their citizens), standardized testing ensures no one screwing up their and others’ lives, and then humans continue their life-long learning as their relationships evolve to the new unseen forms. Are they? What would the alien actually think today?
We don’t know the fuck we are doing
The choice of a romantic partner more often than not is left to chance. 6 of 10 single Americans report that they are not actively looking for relationships or dates. Out of those who are putting themselves out there, the majority hates the dating process and will be happy to settle with the first decent option, or anyone who likes them back.
And it’s considered an act of magic, a blessing, a divine intervention, that we mortals can’t question. Older pals will not hesitate to remind you to get married to someone, but hardly anyone will ask how many options have you considered before deciding on a person, where you are on your personal value curve, what stops you from finding your dream partner, and what makes you sure that this is the optimal partner for you out of 8 billion options.
If you’re running a business, conventional wisdom states that you’re a much more effective business owner if you study business in school, create well-thought-out business plans, and analyze your business’s performance diligently. This is logical, because that’s the way you proceed when you want to do something well and minimize mistakes.
But if someone went to school to learn about how to pick a life partner and take part in a healthy relationship, if they charted out a detailed plan of action to find one, and if they kept their progress organized rigorously in a spreadsheet, society says they’re A) an over-rational robot, B) way too concerned about this, and C) a huge weirdo.
No, when it comes to dating, society frowns upon thinking too much about it, instead opting for things like relying on fate, going with your gut, and hoping for the best.
— Tim Urban
Mindblowing 98% will prioritize market conditions versus just 2% sticking to immutable desires. Meaning, 98% of daters are ready to settle for less, if it’s available on a stretch of hand, in contrast to expanding their dating pool for more options.
Of course, after all, that would assume active online dating, bumping strangers on the street, asking friends to hit their friends, flirting with colleagues, and making lots of short-term connections with a wide group of people, which society frowns upon, and perceives as harassment needy and desperate (and sometimes harassment).
The respectable way to meet a life partner is by dumb luck, by bumping into them randomly or being introduced to them from within your little pool.
The worst is that most of these challenges have been studied and have answers. There are actual numbers saying when men and women maximize their sexual worth and have the best chances of attracting their best partner. The question of when to stop dating and settle with the best-so-far option presents a typical exploration-utilization dilemma covered in the Secretary Problem that was also solved a long time ago (to pick your attention: the answer is 37%). And understanding what is important for you in relationships requires making a bunch of trials and errors while being analytical about them.
But people, of course, won’t talk about it and will find such an approach weird, while considering it completely normal to gamble with their love and their lives, expecting a lucky ticket on a random draw.
Fucking marriages don’t work
We expect love to last forever. Yet as many as 50 percent of marriages and even more remarriages end in divorce. Among those who are married, only 38 percent actually describe themselves as happy in that state. And 90 percent of couples report a decrease in marital satisfaction after having their first child.
— The Truth, Neil Strauss
In other words, in today’s world, it’s more likely than not that your marriage will have a net negative outcome. This fits under the legal definition of negligence if you do it.
Marriage hasn’t been designed for intimacy, for the duration of human history it was an economical and political construct. What’s worse, taking into account the life expectancy, people only spent a few years of their adult lives in marriage, not 50 like now.
It all would be fine had marriage stayed a formal contract people use for specific economic reasons, decoupled from pair-bonding, but it became entangled with actual relationships between people that are much more complex by nature, causing a conflict when relationships start changing.
One thing you can be 100% sure about is that you and your partner will change. Think of yourself 10 years ago. 10 years from now there will be two new people, that may not even be attracted to each other. It’s natural that relationships end, but marriage as a social contract makes it feel wrong, producing more suffering in unhappy marriages than would people have had they stayed alone.
Going deeper, can we really mix sex and partnership in one bowl? I can clearly see how business partnerships get stronger with time, and your spouse can be a perfect “partner in crime” fitting you in how you manage the household, use your strengths and weaknesses and support each other through good and bad, but does it work the same with sexual attraction? Chemical love dies in 3 years, but sexual attraction to other people stays with us forever.
On top of that, we expect our partner to be everything for us — the most attractive person, the best listener, the best parent for our kids, the most passionate lover, the smartest counsellor, and the funniest friend. How common is it though?
Perhaps marriage is like buying a house: You plan to spend the rest of your life there, but sometimes you want to move—or at least spend a night in a hotel.
It’s insane how people would never sign up to stay in one job all their life, or drive the same one car, or have the same one meal every day, but somehow they find it reasonable to say it about one person, putting half of what they own at stake.
*Sigh*
As a social contract, marriage can be a helpful tool that keeps people committed and dedicated to making relationships work rather than giving up on a first obstacle, but the same tool makes work those relationships that wern’t meant to work in the first place (!) like putting two beasts in one cage making them adapt to co-exist for the sake of survival which is far away from living their best lives. Not surprising that countries where divorce is forbidden by law or religion show the highest rates of domestic abuse and socially acceptable adultery.
Fucking dating doesn't work
So many dating apps, and so few relationships. Mating in real life has been mostly replaced by online experience, whether you like it or not. It’s easier than ever to find a date, and yet, we hit historic levels of loneliness, and Gen Z’s who use the apps the most show the lowest rates of coupling with 63% reporting being single in 2023, while virginity rates grew to crazy 27% for the men between 18-30.
How can it be so? Aren’t we supposed to meet more people? We are, and that’s the problem.
Dating apps created a new culture around dating where the main driver is abundance. It’s too easy to move to the next shiny thing, it’s normal to talk to multiple people interested in you at the same time, and it’s too hard to accept people with their imperfections.
Unlike social circles or work environments, where people have something in common, dating apps let mingle people from very different paths in life, different social classes, and different goals, purely based on their looks. Naturally, it creates a lot of disappointment, failed dates, wasted efforts, and eventual “unmatches”. Even after a little portion of such experience, anyone would become more thick-skinned and cynical, treating new matches with scepticism and distrust, which, surprise-surprise, does not contribute to healthy relationships.
In the end, user attention gets spread too thin, leading to the new phenomenon of “dating fatigue” when people get tired of new conversations, lose track of who they talk to, and basically stop trying after too many failed attempts.
I personally believe that access to a broader dating pool is a good thing and it presents a natural way of development of mating in the era of global connectivity, as a more optimal one, but it needs to be combined with the ability to commit. Only by having access to a large number of people, we can maximize our chances of finding the best matching partner for us. Casually and seriously, it’s always smarter to search more and find the right person than trying to change the wrong person. But when the local maximum is reached, and the person makes a good fit overall by criteria important to you (which takes experience to discover), it’s critical to flip the switch and go all-in, like there are no other people in the world. Apparently, there is a limit to optimization, and the next stage can only be achieved through the growth within your relationships.
If you’d ask every morning if this is the right person, it wouldn't be a good marriage
— Craig Federighi, SVP at Apple
Dating in the modern world presents a challenge, in which you need confidence and perseverance to stay in the game long enough despite all the rejections and STDs hurt feelings, because eventually it’s a numbers game, and sooner or later one will get their lucky ticket. And don’t get me wrong, the old way still works, but the chances to find the person that will maximize your life happiness in a small pool of people around you are comparable to the chance to discover a job you love by accepting the first open unqualified job opportunity. It happens tho, and people love such stories!
It’s impossible to make friends after 30
Unlike a biological need in sex, loneliness strikes much softer. We start prioritizing ourselves, our interests, family, career, we cut off people who don’t match our goals and interests with or who require too much attention we can’t give. New people, at the same time, don’t come into our lives, and slowly, step by step, we find ourselves alone in a room, without anyone to notice if we disappeared, without anyone close enough to ask for help or share feelings and worries with.
As we get older we become more self-aware, our personality becomes more sophisticated and nuanced, we become much better at knowing what we like and what we don’t like. Unfortunately for us, it hurts our compatibility with other people who have their own unique personalities different from ours. Kids make friends very easily, they all are smooth clean sheets that stick to each other easily, all they need is an act of kindness or evil to distinguish a friend from an enemy.
At the same time, at a young age, we often find ourselves involuntarily constrained by external factors in a closed environment (like school) with the same people we meet over and over, who furthermore share the same problems, same cultural backgrounds, and same socio-economic circumstances. The cherry on the cake is if they also share our interests. It creates the perfect setup to bond tightly, and as time goes by, this bond, if not dropped, develops into an even stronger one through more common experiences and understanding. Think now, how often do you get in such environments in adult life? The workplace is, pretty much, the only comparable playing field, with the difference that people are much more diverse, more focused on their own problems, and move in and out much faster.
Other than that, we rarely cross paths with the same people without a specific need or an arrangement. The concept of third place — a place other than home or work where adults would spend time and mingle in early generations (think of the café from “Friends” or a church) is now gone. And I would imagine the vast majority of working adults spend their life in a work-home-work-home mode, without having friendly chats with strangers for years.
These two factors play a key role in why I think people hardly make new friends as they get older. They start having less and less free time, which they want to allocate to what they want to do. We don’t just hang out with friends on the street “because there is nothing else to do”, there is always something better to do, and if we need to meet someone there should be a good reason for that.
This kills even the existing connections, let alone creating new ones. Take someone with whom you don’t cross paths naturally or share the same problems, and I can guarantee you won’t be able to nurture the friendship on the pure power of will. That’s why “dating” apps for friends are so ineffective, it requires a lot of investment upfront while the pain is not strong enough and can be silenced.
We live alone and we’ll die alone
In today’s world loneliness reached unprecedented heights with 1 in 4 adults feeling lonely or very lonely. It’s been referred to as an “epidemic of loneliness” and has already been addressed by WHO due to its harm to societal health:
Loneliness increases the risk of dementia by up to 50%, and the risk of strokes and cardiovascular disease by around 30%. It also increases the risk of premature death, depression, and suicide.
— Vivek Murthy, at WHO
The societal and cultural changes do not help it:
People became more independent and self-obsessed in their youth and neglect building a close circle of people for their mature age.
Women's empowerment led to a culture where women don’t want to commit while they are young, producing a huge market of depressed lonely women in their 40s in the next 10 years.
Pets replace kids globally, with countries like Taiwan already showing the population of pets surpassing that of children.
The birth rate flies in free fall in most developed nations, way below 2.1 needed to maintain population. East Asian countries like China and Japan, already feel the economic damage it causes. In South Korea, with a fertility rate of 0.78 only 15 in 100 adults can expect to see their grandchildren.
Remote work and mobility lead to increased loneliness among expats who live in foreign cultures, without any ties to people around them and often not even speaking their language.
Global epidemics and forced isolation like Covid caused have produced a wave of loneliness among people staying alone and broken families that were not used to staying together.
It’s not just “sad”, it’s a matter of time before we’ll see its effect on a global economy. With decreasing working population is among the main risks of bursting a bubble of fast-growing economies like the one in China.
Loneliness “takes a toll not only on the quality of individuals’ lives, but has enormous economic consequences,” with depression and anxiety costing the global economy $1 trillion each year.
If you look at it from this angle, there are hardly any problems, apart from maybe drugs, that destroy humanity faster.
We put so much work and capital into building casual games or 5- vs 15-min delivery apps, but we ignore the multi-billion market of relationships and lonely people. There is still just a handful of solutions present on the market comparing to how huge this problem is on a global scale.
The wars had started and empires had fallen because of love. It’s the power that inspires heroes to self-sacrifice and risk it all, and it’s also the power that makes people take their own lives, either because of love or for the lack thereof. No money or prestige has this faculty — they are merely tools people use to prove their worth to gain the love they want. The fundamental needs are rooted much deeper in us.
Flying to stars doesn’t matter that much when your heart is broken.
We all want to be happy, and we all want to be loved. We need other people to create our best memories and we need their support through our hardest times. We were made from love, and the product of our love is what will remain after us.
Ruins are fallen. But they are not hopeless.
No one ever quit loving. Our hearts are resilient beyond our understanding. They need to burn in fire for us to feel alive.
The void of loneliness is growing larger and it’s growing fast, it’s easy to fall into it if to not run away from the cliff. But we can’t run away forever. Reducing that void is
The problem worth solving
What a heavy piece, huh? It took a year of mental preparation and a few days of active writing. Excuse my vocab, it's not the topic I write about often, but I didn't want to rewrite it to keep the authenticity.
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