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Comment by yobbo | Hacker News Reader

Probably because relationships (and opinions) nowadays are becoming more and more like fashion accessories - similar to shoes and sun glasses - stuff to put on instagram.

You need the right "optics and sonics" to be a viable and valuable friend. Otherwise you are just an awkward country cousin without any connections that need excuses to made whenever in civilised company.

It seems like people have taken the saying "you become like the five people closest to you" to heart, but so few people today are desirable role models for anyone.

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I think it is more like a cold war where the other that you open yourself towards could destroy you by putting the wrong picture or video online at any moment.

Having that trust in an other person can be quite difficult in an generation where everything is, and has to be on social media.

Relationships have historically been fashion accessories. Women were once considered legal property for a father to leverage in exchange for access to his son-in-law's wealth.

Love is a selfish pursuit. The vast majority of people, historically and in modern times, didn't pursue a relationship out of the goodness of their heart.

This is not at all how it worked in the past. The elite might trade women around, but that’s such a tiny part of the human population that it’s not at all representative for how the average person lived.

Throughout history — until even today in fact - the majority of marriages have been arranged.

“According to a 2012 study by Statistic Brain, 53.25% of marriages are arranged worldwide. The global divorce rate for arranged marriages was 6.3%”

http://www.statisticbrain.com/arranged-marriage-statistics/

That's a really cynical way to see relationships, and I hope it's not becoming more popular. It reminds me of Mean Girls.

I feel like the natural progression for communities where this pattern occurs is for the misfits to band together and form a counterculture.

> the misfits to band together and form a counterculture.

They do, but they do it online, and across the entire globe, rather than by finding common cause with other local misfits, which leads to more social isolation, and the wheel keeps spinning.

Our personalities have become commodities.

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