Just another day of sorting through hundreds of matches with desperate and barely literate twenty-somethings, I thought – once again regretting my decision to open the app in the first place. Why was it that not a single one of these gen Z “men” seemed capable of coming off as anything other than horny, narcissistic children rehashing god-awful pickup lines they acquired from some soyboy-pretending-to-be-alpha-male YouTube guide on picking up insecure women? They were starting to blend together into such a grotesque amalgamation of ignorant inauthenticity, unaddressed depression, and ideological zealotry, that I began to question if there was a single man belonging to my generation who didn’t deeply resent their own existence.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly searching for my soulmate and, if a guy was the least bit authentic, interesting, or funny, I would be more than happy to arrange a hookup and just have some fun with him. I was tired of going through the same old boring, unskilled, jobless, and intellectually vacant fuck buddies though, and I figured if I was going to find a new one, I should hold them to a slightly higher standard.