It’s just a house of prostitution on wheels

The common denominator in all of our problems is us.

External factors may play a small part in our dissatisfaction, but most of the time, the call is coming from inside the house. Whatever we are blaming is merely the symptom, not the source.

It’s like my coworker who complains ad nauseam about the dating scene in this city. After several years without meeting someone special, he is convinced that he must be using the wrong dating app. That’s got to be the problem. Maybe if he studies the reviews and signs up for highest rated platforms and hedges his romantic bets, he will finally be able to say goodbye to loneliness.

Have you ever heard this argument before? Not just about dating, but about any personal goal?

It doesn’t work. People are just blaming some external thing enough so that they won’t have to reckon their own part of it. In fact, we’ve been making this exact argument for over a hundred years.

Ling’s book on the early history of the automobile shows that after the first world war, many people had mistakenly generalized technology as having a deterministic role in our lives. In response to an uptick in sexual activity among young people in the early part of the century, one judge famously explained that the automobile had become a house of prostitution on wheels.

Compelling imagery, but just because one curmudgeon in a black robe blamed a trend on technology doesn’t mean it’s true. Hence the classic quotation in the software industry, technology is only as good as the user.

Meaning, the problem is not the app, but the attitude of the person holding it.

Which brings us back to dating. When you’re trying to meet a potential partner, chemistry isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. And so, whatever energy we bring to that romantic process, it’s going to flow right into our device and.

It doesn’t matter which app we use. This is the argument I have been making about nametags for twenty years. They only work to the degree that one wearing them is approachable.

All the nametags in the world aren’t going to make people friendlier if you’re an asshole. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What problem are you blaming on everything other than yourself?