DII: Preface —Meta-Pattern Essay — How Technology Stabilizes Insecurity

If dating feels exhausting, confusing, or strangely hollow, you’re not imagining it.

This book is an exercise in diagnostic sociology. It does not offer advice, prescriptions, or moral instruction. It attempts to describe a structural condition clearly enough that readers can recognize it and decide, for themselves, whether to continue participating under its terms.

What’s changed isn’t that people became worse, colder, or more selfish. What’s changed is the structure around dating.

To understand why, it helps to use a word sociologists have relied on for over a century: anomie.Technology does not create insecurity. It stabilizes it as a state.

It does this by making several conditions permanent:

• Attention becomes measurable
• Silence becomes ambiguous
• Alternatives remain visible
• Replacement is always possible
• Delay carries little or no cost

The result is not cruelty, immaturity, or emotional dysfunction.

People learn to regulate anxiety instead of build bonds.

This pattern recurs across platforms, demographics, and stated intentions. It is not psychological pathology. It is incentive alignment. When insecurity can be managed indefinitely without consequence, systems will select for that management over resolution.