The next iteration of gaslighting is already here: That it’s no big deal anyway since you can just use an ad blocker. Riiight, let’s all just turn our eyes away to make the monster go away. Surely, it’ll get bored and stop listening and recording, and surely, it will not sell its collected data off to banks, insurance providers, the government, law enforcement… right?

Normative nihilism is going to get us all.

What in the world is going on with Elsie’s hand in the “second of the five photographs?”

Cobb: “I’ve come back for you… to remind you of something. Something you once knew. That this world is not real.”

Are you sure about being ghosted? Or is the app just cutting your connection?
Same thing you described happened to me so many times I’ve lost count. Furthermore, I’ve compared profiles with some women I did met IRL and wouldn’t you know, what you see in your “profile preview” or whatever is not necessarily how anybody else gets to see you. We’ve seen profile pictures being removed or entire profile texts being wiped out, sometimes just before the first date.
Some people became aware of the enshittifaction/ gamification many years ago and resorted to putting their IG handles or phone numbers into their profiles “in case we get interrupted.” When some dating sites starting cracking down on that, too, they started putting this info into their pictures instead.
And that’s not even mentioning the bots and “controllers,” as they used to be called, whose only purpose is to extract private information from you. At least in the EU, dating apps have had to disclose their existence in the TOS for some years. They all do.
TLDR; The game is rigged beyond belief.

Yeah West in his seminal “Scale” kind of corroborates the whole story.

It seems, though, that the molecular changes you are undergoing do not immediately translate into increased mortality, so you’re going to have several more years of - presumably - feeling well until the big drop-off starts for all of us at about 60.
BTW, because of its wide range of topics, its solid scientific underpinnings and its excellent intellectual accessibility, this is one of two books I positively think should be taught at any school, the other one being Solé’s “Phase Transitions.”

Can’t escape capitalism.

*Sniff*

As the old and venerable neuromonkey once said:

Welp. Just let the nukes fly, then. First it’s “on accident,” and before long you’ve got meth addicted baby prostitute warlords running the local Walmart.

♪ Hinckley couldn’t shoot straight, hit a guy in the forehead ♪ :-(

In the B2B world, there’s no escaping these banners. It’s as if GDPR never happened.

I believe it was Marx who first observed that superfluous jobs, as well as unemployment, are inextricably linked to capitalism.

EDIT: Found a relevant Marx quote in Grundrisse:

Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary.

See also Marcuse, 1969:

The absorption [i.e. disappearance] of unemployment and the maintenance of an adequate rate of profit would […] require the stimulation of demand on an ever larger scale, thereby stimulating the rat race of the competitive struggle for existence through the multiplication of waste, planned obsolescence, parasitic and stupid jobs and services.

When I was little, I asked my parents why they don’t smoke and they just laughed. I didn’t understand why. Because 100% of the other adults I knew were smokers.

And let’s not forget politics. When you’re golf buddies with the right politicians, winning those extremely lucrative public tenders will become a cakewalk.