Dating apps and grandma

"Swipe left. The duck face is killing me." I sat in the back of an Uber Pool, stuck near a construction zone, on the way to work. We haven't moved in ten minutes and the greasy yellow light of the Broadway tunnel depressed me. I questioned my commute decision, although not as much as this woman should question the duck face.

While my choices often leave friends dumbfounded, I am only a mildly weird person in a world of stranger things. Tech change all around us is accelerating, creating a vortex that tips our daily lives, relationships, culture and unfortunatelly global politics off balance.

Take dating for example. Talk to your married friends and they reasonably don’t understand the world of dating apps. OkCupid may have been around in their day, but nobody cool used it. It was weird. Today half of our friends met their partner on Tinder or Bumble, or Hinge, etc.

Dating is the tip of the ice berg, if you think about it. I can think of plenty of examples like education (universities are creating MOOCs), careers (a human-alarm-clock used to be a thing and now Data Scientist is the hot girl at the bar) and  Tech-generated-culture-barriers are no longer multi generational. If your college friends are confused, your grandma doesn't stand a chance. Thankfully, your grandma is willing to put up with your grandpa, so they don't really care. But the rest of us are already adjusting. 

To extrapolate, it's not abnormal to have a career change. Dating apps are here to stay. But the question of change remains, and more importantly the next iteration it something like, "How many times will we have to reinvent ourselves in our lifetime?".

Maybe reinvention becomes a new normal. In which case we have to rethink education, careers, where we live and how we commute to whatever work is.

Either way, traffic needs to disappear out of my life. As should duck faces.