Dating apps, discipline, and Sisyphus

Returning to dating apps

A binge-like approach to life

I tend to go through life in binges. Binging one TV show, book, project, friendship, hobby, type of food, and then moving onto the next one. (I’ve been eating the same Ban Ban Shop grain bowl for lunch for the past month and a half.)

So when I decided to get back on dating apps again, I approached it with a similar… all consuming style.

Pushing off work deadlines and crapping through my meetings with shallow promises for the future, I spent the past week swiping through 400+ men.

A renewed version of myself

I first spent an hour perfecting my own profile, scrolling through the 19,440 photos in my camera roll for the most flattering clips which showed off my personality, contained funny stories, or could be conversation starters in any kind of way.

After updating my profile, I bit the bullet and pressed unpause.

Likes started rolling in, across people of all different strata of life. After a semester of redefining myself from the ground up, I felt a renewed clarity in my own tastes—I was looking for smart and interesting people, first and foremost. People to have fun conversations with.

A library of interesting people

Early on, I matched someone who looked like a huge nerd (my type!). We talked about his Lego Death Star, my current obsession with mechanical keyboards, and on the hierarchy of energy drinks.

I spent the rest of the week talking to person after person, getting to know what makes them tick.

• One that was insanely smart, got into Harvard Law School, and was 2nd in the world at Clash of Clans at one point—while also being a nicotine addict and a chronic class skipper.
• One person whose laptop exploded in their backpack when they were a kid.
• Another that was doing an investment banking internship, lamenting on its soulless-ness. He loved birdwatching, and had changed all of his contact photos to different Pokemon.
• Another that was astonished at how many mutual connections we had on Instagram (we had three.)
• A guy named “Chalant.”
• And a CS+BME who was addicted to his Google Calendar.

Math and inebriation

I went on date after date, drinking with friends, going clubbing? in the meanwhile talking about how humans are topologically 7-holed doughnuts, and arguing over why my Theorems are like libraries poem was sh!t because computer science has no fundamental axioms which are Turing-complete. (Though I think this guy missed the point of the poem.)

And the consequences of my actions

But I was spending ALL of my time on this all-encompassing side quest. I started getting stress dreams about failing my high school AP tests. Every meeting felt like an extended apology.

Crashing out to Raghav

Loneliness and betrayal

I crashed out last night to Raghavendra. How I suspect my current inability to focus on non-dating endeavors is because I was so emotionally starved for the past 3 years—that I overcompensated and gave into every random thought or cute guy that came across my phone.

But that in doing so, I felt like I was betraying the people who I promised I would deliver good work to. That while it’s healthy to experience these things in moderation, that I was overindulging at the expense of my responsibilities.

Self restraint: A human problem

I thought back to when I read Augustine’s Confessions in my freshman year literature class. And felt a little less alone when I realized that people were writing about the struggle against one’s base desires in the pursuit of enlightenment back in 400 AD as well.

The Hinge-Sisyphus

Feeling exasperated, I jokingly explained to him how I felt like Sisyphus, pushing up Hinge matches up the mountain of my iMessages.

Rag remarked that it’s about enjoying the journey! Of pushing up our boulders, trying to diffuse my self-judgement.

And I elaborated that my issue is more so that my life has many mountains, each with their own worker-Sisyphi climbing them; that we have a limited bank of energy to spend amongst them all. And that right now, I’m spending too much of my energy into the Hinge-Sisyphus.

A system of discipline?

The conclusion of this long winded and emotionless saga of events, was that I need to find a system of discipline which works for me. One which is aware of the power of working inertia, of our human energy constraints, and is aligned with my life goals.

So I paused Hinge. Maybe I’ll come back to it once I’ve figured my life out.