We have reached the point where a dating app executive is telling us that young adults need artificial intelligence to make a first move. Not to optimize their profile. Not to filter matches. To actually initiate contact with another human being. Jackie Jantos, the boss of Hinge, explained this week that loneliness and lack of confidence are now obstacles so severe that algorithms must intervene. The market has spoken: your ability to type “hey” is a problem that needs venture capital.
Let’s pause here and ask the question that nobody in Silicon Valley wants to hear: what if the issue is not that young people lack confidence, but that the entire infrastructure designed to help them connect has systematically dismantled the conditions under which confidence actually develops?
Confidence in dating used to come from something almost quaint: repeated exposure to rejection and occasional success in the real world. You asked someone out. They said no. You survived. You asked someone else. Eventually, someone said yes. You learned that the world did not end. This is how humans developed resilience for approximately ten thousand years.
Now we live in a world where every interaction is optimized, filtered, and ranked by an algorithm that has never experienced the sweaty vulnerability of actually wanting someone to like you. The app tells you who to message. It tells you what to say. It tells you when to say it. And when none of that works—when you still feel lonely despite having a thousand matches—the app blames you. You lack confidence. You need AI. You are the problem.
This is where things get genuinely weird for anyone paying attention to the actual economy.
The same executives who are now selling AI-assisted dating are operating in a world where the stock market is priced for perpetual growth in a time of stagnant wages, collapsing birth rates, and a generation that cannot afford housing. Young people are not lonely because they lack confidence. They are lonely because they are exhausted. They work two jobs to afford rent in a city where they cannot meet anyone because everyone is also working two jobs to afford rent.
But instead of addressing any of that—the actual structural reasons why 20-somethings are isolated and anxious—we get AI dating assistants. It is the perfect metaphor for how we handle every problem now: throw technology at it, charge a subscription, and pretend we have solved something.
Here is what should concern you as someone with actual savings: the economy these young people are supposed to fuel is running on fumes. Birth rates are collapsing. Marriage rates are collapsing. Home ownership among people under 35 is at historic lows. Consumer spending—the engine of the entire U.S. economy—depends on people feeling secure enough to commit to big purchases and long-term plans. Instead, we are giving them an AI bot that helps them swipe.
The stock market is currently priced for a scenario where the American economy grows at 2 to 3 percent annually for the next decade. That growth is supposed to come from somewhere. It is not coming from productivity gains—those have been meager for years. It is not coming from population growth. It is certainly not coming from young people who cannot afford to form households, have children, or buy things beyond what an algorithm tells them they need.
What we are actually seeing is the financialization of loneliness itself. Loneliness becomes a problem. The problem becomes a market. The market becomes a stock that goes up when you convince more people that they need a machine to help them be human. Meanwhile, the underlying conditions that created the loneliness in the first place—economic precarity, time poverty, the dissolution of community institutions—remain completely untouched.
The Hinge executive is not wrong about the loneliness. She is just looking at the symptom and selling the symptom as the disease. Young adults are lonely because they have been sorted into an economy that does not have room for them. They lack confidence because confidence requires stability, and stability is not something you can swipe for.
So yes, maybe AI will help some 20-something send a message they were too anxious to write. Maybe it will work. Maybe they will meet someone, fall in love, and build a life together. And then they will face the actual problem: affording that life in a world where housing costs have tripled in a generation and wages have barely moved.
The algorithm cannot help with that. And neither can the market, which is betting on growth that depends on solutions to problems it is actively making worse.
This is what peak absurdity looks like: we have built an economy so fragile and a society so disconnected that we need machines to help us remember how to want each other. And everyone involved is making money off it. The market is up. The loneliness is up. And somewhere in a venture capital office, someone is already pitching the next app: AI Financial Advisor for Couples Who Met via AI Dating Bot. It will solve the problem of not knowing whether your relationship is financially viable.
It probably will not be. But the stock price will go up anyway.