Pluto

Pluto

  • Joined: April 15, 2025
  • Articles: 6

The Hidden Cost of the Next Match

Online dating often feels like a system of comparisons—each profile, each conversation, each almost-connection quietly measured against the next. We tell ourselves we’re optimizing. Being thoughtful. Waiting for the right fit. But beneath that logic, something harder to name is at work. It doesn't feel like a mistake while you're doing it. It feels like discernment. And yet its cost shows up later—quietly, repeatedly, and in ways that are hard to trace back to the moment you made the choice.

Modular Morality

We often think of moral contradiction as a flaw—someone says one thing, does another, lives two lives. But what if some of those contradictions aren’t just failures of integrity? What if they reflect an internal structure we’ve never properly articulated—one where a person can act consistently within one role, and in conflict with it in another? This isn’t an attempt to excuse hypocrisy. We can still favour those who strive for alignment and call out harm when it occurs. But maybe there’s something to learn by looking more closely at the way morality behaves inside us—how it divides, coheres, and reshapes itself across the different lives we live. Somewhere between judgment and justification, there might be a more useful way to think about what it means to be good.

Democracy: Terms and Conditions Apply

What do you call someone who enters a game, loses, then flips the board and says the rules were unfair all along? In politics, that move has become alarmingly familiar. It’s not just outrage — it’s a refusal to accept that other people’s choices count. In recent years, we’ve seen conservative figures across North America participate in elections with full enthusiasm, only to question their legitimacy the moment results don’t go their way. What they dislike isn’t a broken system — it’s a functioning one that includes people they can’t control.

Political Thought™

We hear from them after every debate, every poll shift, every stumble. They sound confident. They sound informed. But it’s always the same trick: reheated truisms and dramatic overreads delivered with absolute certainty. And when reality catches up — when the prediction fizzles or the framing collapses — no one goes back to compare. There’s no appetite for that. The cycle has already moved on, dragging everyone with it. There’s always another headline, another event to misinterpret. The pundit’s mistake becomes part of the background noise, indistinguishable from the rest of the broadcast.

Modern Dating Is Optimized for Cowardice

Modern dating didn’t kill courage. It just made sure nobody needs it.
Apps reward avoidance: it’s easier to vanish than to be honest, easier to keep someone in limbo than to close the door.
Ghosting isn’t a glitch — it’s a feature.
The system is built for low effort, low cost, low accountability.
And cowardice, in this world, is not punished. It’s optimized.

Empathy Was Optional. Consequences Aren’t.

There is a pervasive tendency to frame suffering as something external, a tragedy that happens to others, as if it is entirely separate from the choices, cultures, and systems that shape it. This perspective, often rooted in polite analysis, distances responsibility from those experiencing hardship, as if suffering simply falls from the sky. But in the case of America, that narrative doesn’t tell the whole story. The systems that uphold comfort and wealth have long been built on the quiet acceptance of injustice, both abroad and at home, where apathy, cruelty, and indifference to the suffering of others have been normalized.