The weekly roundup is generally the piece I look forward to writing most each week, because it allows me to self-indulgently muse on things that happen to be of interest to me, as opposed to, say, the public in general. In that sense, this has been something of an odd week because – aside from the big stories about Palestinian recognition and events in Ballyogan and the ongoing EU and local elections, not much happened.
One thing that did catch my eye, though, was this meme that’s been doing the rounds on Tiktok of a young woman saying that she’s looking for a man who works in finance, has a trust fund, is six foot five, and has blue eyes. It’s captured the zeitgeist so much that various DJs have been busy turning it into a dance track and playing it in nightclubs. I’m endlessly fascinated by the perils of modern dating, and I think this speaks to the single biggest problem with it: The way people can – and are indeed encouraged to – set out a series of filters or preferences for people that they might meet, as if they were picking a product rather than a person. Dating seems to have become more like buying a new car than it is about genuinely meeting new people: Just as I can go on carzone and filter used cars by year, make, transmission, colour and so on, so can kids these days go on to Tinder and literally filter out their preferences by height, weight, political views, and the rest.
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