In the age of social media, the mechanism of desire is caught within the machinery of repetition and addiction. Nowhere is this clearer than in online dating, where the exchange of affect is indistinguishable from mass production. The platforms that claim to liberate the subject by granting them access to infinite potential suitors only further entrench their unfreedom. Companies prey on humankind’s most fundamental desire—our desire to feel loved—and use it as a means of exploitation.
The Age of Addiction
We have reached the pinnacle of addiction. In 2022, nicotine and weed usage hit all-time highs among Americans ages 19-30; that same year, 35 to 50-year-olds broke records for binge drinking. We abuse the internet, too. In 2023, over half of U.S. teenagers spent over four hours on social media daily. Adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media are twice as likely to display symptoms of anxiety and depression, and almost half say it makes them feel worse about their bodies.
This is no accident—social media is designed for addiction. Platforms engineer engagement through the Hook Model, created by behavioral scientist Nir Eyal in his book “Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.” The model operates in four phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment.
Every addiction begins with a stimulus. Social media platforms deploy external triggers through notifications and, more insidiously, internal triggers—the subconscious feelings of boredom, loneliness, and self-doubt that drive individuals back to the platform. Once triggered, the user is led to perform a simple, immediate action—scrolling, liking, commenting. The frictionless design ensures that engagement is effortless, with every action strengthening the habit.
Then, there is the variable reward: the user never knows what their next interaction will bring. Social media would lose its grip if every reel in the endless stream were equally as enjoyable. Finally, investment and the sunk-cost fallacy. Having spent time crafting a profile, engaging with content, and accumulating likes, the user becomes emotionally and psychologically invested. To abandon the platform now would mean forfeiting that investment. Thus, the addiction is self-sustaining: the more one uses, the harder it is to leave.
Social media adds one further dimension to the Hook Model: it enlists its victims among its ranks. The user, despite believing themselves to be consuming, produces content for their peers. The two become inseparable, and every interaction deepens one’s addiction while simultaneously fueling that of others. The system sustains itself not by creating content, but by ensuring that its addicts become its labor force. In this way, there is no content beyond its victims. The consumer becomes the commodity.
And yet, no one leaves. The system thrives not because it is loved, but because it is necessary—or at least, it has made itself seem so. To unplug is to risk exclusion, to uninstall is to fall behind. This is the tragedy of the commons, rewritten for the digital age. If every user collectively abandoned the platform, all would be better off—but because no one wants to be the first to leave, everyone stays. The platform extracts value from its users, not by offering something irreplaceable, but by ensuring it feels so.
Social media was the proving ground for this methodology. The dating app is its most insidious realization.
Dating Apps: Social Media Vilified
Dating apps rely on a single premise: humans are terrified of being alone. Everywhere we turn, this fear is confirmed. In 1990, only 29% of adults ages 25 to 54 lived without a romantic partner; today, that figure has risen to 38%. The progression is not incidental but systemic, a byproduct of a world in which intimacy has been subsumed by the market. It comes as no surprise that Gen-Z, the first generation to come of age in the digital world, is the loneliest in history—twice as lonely as their parents and four times as lonely as their grandparents.
As we came to embody English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s vision of humankind outside society—solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short—we cultivated the conditions that dating apps exploit. Developers added other triggers to remind us that the solution to our condition is a few clicks away. The Hook Model follows with mechanical inevitability: ritual swiping, variable love, and profile investment. The final, cruelest addition is abundance—virtually infinite partners render every choice moot.
History Speaks
For the skeptic reader, history provides an indictment. Tinder launched in September 2012; by October 2014, its users were already spending 90 minutes per day on the app. A decade later, 18 to 30-year-olds’ usage fluctuates around 80 minutes per day. This is no sign of equilibrium—it is acceleration disguised as stasis. New dating apps have not expanded the time we spend searching; instead, they have compressed the process itself. Most dating apps now impose daily limits on the number of profiles a user can like, meaning that as total engagement time holds steady, decisions are made faster and with even less consideration.
Swipes have outpaced thought, attraction reduced to a meaningless flick of the thumb. The process was always mechanical—now it has been optimized. It does not slow to accommodate human deliberation; it forces the human to speed up to match the machine. As the system accelerates, the space for individuality collapses.
A conveyor belt of curated identities remains: witty captions and candid photos that scream of a manufactured sameness. Seasoned Hinge users will recognize the tired “I’ll fall for you / if you trip me,” and “First round’s on me if / I would never say this.” Users do not select from the infinite possibilities that dating apps claim to hold; all casts are of the same mold.
Strive for Something Real
The system sustains itself through illusions—abundance, choice, and fulfillment. This is a facade—no apps are “designed to be deleted.” Their goal is not to facilitate love but to ensure the search never ends. The average American spends eight months on dating apps before going steady, and only 10% of partnered adults met their spouses online.
Yet, to leave is unthinkable. The apps have made themselves indispensable, not by offering something irreplaceable, but by pretending there is no visible alternative. The social contract of dating has been written; to reject it is to risk exclusion from modern romance.
And so, we stay. We swipe, we match, we ghost, we get ghosted. We refine our profiles, adjust our prompts, and optimize our presentation from the same set of “ready-made cliches.” We are not seeking love; we are performing eligibility, molding ourselves into our most palatable version.
But we do not merely consume—we produce. We are workers. With every like, match, and message, we generate the very content that keeps the system running. Dating apps have no product beyond their users. They require us, not merely as participants, but as laborers—performing the work of self-marketing, feeding the algorithm, and ensuring that no one ever truly finds what they are looking for. We are Tinder’s factory workers, Bumble’s gig economy, and Hinge’s unpaid interns, producing the very conditions of our entrapment. That’s their dirty secret: they need us more than we could ever need them.
But what if we stopped? What if we refused the premise that love must be mediated, curated, and commodified? The dating app presents itself as an inevitability—but what it truly fears is our refusal to play the game. The system holds power only so long as we accept its terms. To leave is not to resign oneself to loneliness; it is to reclaim the possibility of connection on terms that are not dictated by swipes and algorithms.
We are employed to our detriment in the manufacturing of misery, inadequacy, and perpetual longing. Our suffering is extended, optimized, and fed back into a few lines of code. Dear reader, turn elsewhere this Valentine’s Day. Dare to reject the commodified illusion of connection; strive for something real instead.
Jonah Karafiol ’26 (managingeditor@harvardindependent.com) is the Managing Editor of the Independent.