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The hot new breakup line: 'It's not you, it's my startup'
BI By Amanda Yen You're currently following this author! Want to unfollow? Unsubscribe via the link in your email. 2026-05-10T08:11:01.248Z Among the more unexpected effects of the AI race is the rise of a breakup line: It's not you, it's my startup.Lee Beckman, the 30-year-old founder of an ed-tech startup, had been dating his girlfriend long-distance for about five months when he realized he was so drained from building his company that he had little energy left to build his relationship. When he called her each night, he says, "my mind was so jam-packed with information and trying to do so much at once," that "I didn't feel like there was any room left in my brain.""I found myself relying on her for my mental health and I didn't find it to be fair," Beckman says.Archish Arun, 21, had been dating his girlfriend for about six months when he decided to drop out of Stanford and work on his Y Combinator-backed video production-tech startup full-time. He became so enmeshed in the breakneck pace of an early-stage company that he grew impatient when she needed time to process a disagreement — he wanted a resolution as quick as a bug fix. Living on startup time, he says, "brought out a lot of the issues" between them "in a much quicker way."This also happened to me. Like many young founders, my ex-boyfriend believes that in the next few years, the spoils of the AI boom will go to the people who capitalize on it now, while the rest of us will be trapped in a permanent underclass. We'd been dating for nine months when he told me he was moving to San Francisco to become a new media fellow at Andreessen Horowitz and to scale his media startup, and that he needed to leave our relationship in New York."I feel like I owe it to myself to chase this dream that I've had since I was a kid," he told me. "And if we stay together, I'll just spend every free minute trying to get back to New York to see you."Woof. I was blindsided by the complete lack of control I felt. I developed a parasocial one-sided beef with Marc Andreessen, who I felt stole my boyfriend without even trying. I also realized I was far from alone. Dating, always chaotic for career-minded 20-somethings, is in disarray. Diagnoses abound: swipe culture, ghosting culture, the loneliness crisis, the growing gulf between men and women's political views, economic uncertainty pushing people to prolong marriage. And, for a certain class of aspirant today, add one more particularly fraught factor: the pressure t...
Is Everyone's Next Lover The Blade Runner AI? - The Daily Wire
David Brooks recently described the skeptical attitude toward romantic relationships, particularly among younger Americans, as “the Great Detachment.” Brooks views our collective renunciation of binding romantic ties as the logical development of a culture that worships the self, prizing individual autonomy above all else. For Brooks, the modern self chiefly exerts its autonomy through the pursuit of professional success. But while the self may be freer and lighter than ever before in terms of obligations to others, Brooks sees it as rootless, friendless, and partnerless.Brooks’s diagnosis gets at something real. Marriage rates stand near all-time lows, and the share of never-married 40-year-olds has reached record highs. Since 2020, over half of U.S. adults have said that dating has gotten harder. Despite research evidence to the contrary, single women increasingly doubt the significance of marriage for well-being.Today’s dating culture often treats potential romantic partners as a means, rather than ends in themselves. The swipe logic of dating apps implicitly conveys that other people are disposable and replaceable, not flesh and blood humans with their own hopes and dreams. And modern romance’s increasing emphasis on the beloved as an engine of personal growth and fulfillment echoes the individualist logic of our culture, emphasizing what others can do for us.The rise of frictionless AI relationships with virtual entities, designed to maximize user engagement and psychological comfort, will likely amplify these tendencies. An Atlantic article described how young people are increasingly forgoing relationships because of fears of intimacy and rejection, even as a recent survey found that nearly one in five highschoolers in its sample have had a “relationship” with an AI. Another study found an even higher proportion (28 percent) among adults.We might better understand the implications of such AI relationships through the work of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, often considered the father of existentialism. Kierkegaard was preoccupied with the question of how to live and the interrelationship between our choices and selfhood. He understood romantic love as part of a larger project of ethical maturation, with profound implications for our relationship to ourselves and others.Kierkegaard might see the development of human-AI romance as a continuation of the aesthete’s spiritual condition, as described in his masterwork, Either/O...
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