Dating in the Age of Superintelligence

This post isn't about AI

Death of the Author

The current arc of Second Person is my turning away from the idea of self-authoring and towards the idea of fucking around with no narrative. When I asked you all to write the story of you and your dream partner, you mostly described your current lifestyles. When I write the story of my own transformation, it only coheres in retrospect. When I think of a model for deliberate self-coaching, it looks more like gradient descent than like a well-planed voyage.

Caveat: allergy to grand narratives might just be a Jacob thing. I’ve never seriously tried one of those self-authoring programs Jordan Peterson is peddling, but I love improv. It’s how I approach my career as well. Looking at my friends who seem committed to lifelong narratives, I wouldn’t say that it helps them find happy relationships.

I can see two main benefits to deliberately writing out your story. First, it breaks you out of other people’s stories that you may unwittingly fall into, like red-pill noir or rom-com soulmate cargo culting. Second, it clarifies your values, setting a fixed guiding light for all your decisions.

Both are very important! I like to attack bad stories directly, like in the two posts linked above. You can confront the story directly to see the functional impact it has on you and, more importantly, how it’s false. Then you can dehypnotize without having to replace it with something else. As for values, I think bootstrapping integrity through ten thousand small choices is more important than having a list of “core values” published on the corporate website.

Self-authoring is so popular because other people demand that you write your own story legibly, for their own benefit. They don’t really care if it helps you or not. And we pretend not to notice that we’re all terrible at writing.

Seeing Like an App

I’ve seen a shocking number of dating app profiles whose response to the “about me” prompt is ugh, I hate writing those or I never know what to put here. Writing such a thing is a terrible indicator of your intelligence and seriousness about engaging on the app; you shouldn’t kick off your profile with I’m lazy and uncreative lol. But also: yeah, I get it. My self-summary? What the fuck am I, the wiki page for an IKEA bookshelf?

Apps mostly responded to how bad people are at writing by cutting down the space you’re given to write. My OkCupid profile in 2015 was about 600 words long, and my wife read every single one. In 2025, Hinge limits you to just over 600 characters; probably no one reads them anyway. And why would they? Writing a compelling story is much harder when you have less space to do it!