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Notes -
Yeah.
It used to be comprehensible. You more or less knew the sum total of your realistic options. And presumably knew your approximate position in the rankings.
I did undergrad on a small campus, and thus it was generally known who was dating whom, who was available, and you crossed paths with potential partners a lot. For better or worse.
Did law school on a MUCH LARGER campus, which felt like jumping from a fish tank to a large lake. Couldn't track everybody, but could at least know where to look for potential partners.
And while I was in law school, Tinder became a thing. And over the next couple years it was like swimming out of the lake into the Pacific Ocean.
But now there was literally no way my tiny little guppy brain could appreciate the entire biodiversity I was being exposed to, and eventually you have to collapse everyone down to their shallowest representation. "Oh that's a rainbowfish, a clownfish, a barracuda, a tuna... and oh so many whales."
At which point I could genuinely FEEL myself unable to care about the people flashed in front of me. Rather than a comprehensible set of people I sort of knew and cared about... it was an endless stack of nobodies and whatever infinite 'opportunity' these represented was overwhelmed by pure ennuie/apathy of any individual connection becoming meaningless.
Only exception was early OKcupid, which let you go "spearfishing" for the exact types you wanted to see. But that didn't last.
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