If you still believe COVID left the population “unchanged”, open a dating app. It sounds absurd, but stay with me…

If you still believe COVID left the population “unchanged”, open a dating app. It sounds absurd, but stay with me here. The cognitive bluntness is so widespread that the dating platforms themselves have had to acknowledge behavioural deterioration since 2020. It’s not subtle🧵

Since 2020, apps report the same pattern: shorter messages, less reciprocity, fewer follow-ups, lower meet-up rates & a collapse in sustained conversational ability. This isn’t just “people being tired”. It’s a measurable degradation of attention, initiative & social cognition.

The cause? - repeated COVID infections impairing cognitive stamina/reward processing - chronic low-grade fatigue - dopamine systems altered by COVID/crises - widespread emotional numbing - increased avoidance as default coping mechanism All the above = social “flatlining”

It mirrors broader post-COVID shift: people struggling to focus, plan, engage & sustain emotional presence If dating apps feel like talking to NPCs now, it’s because they’re capturing, at scale, the behavioural signature of a population running on diminished cognitive bandwidth.

The irony? People who insist they’re “fine” are often the most dulled. The denial comes packaged with reduced introspection. If you’ve noticed the change, it’s not because you’re sensitive, it’s because you’re still capable of noticing.

This isn’t simply just “everyone being busy”. We had “busy” before. We didn’t have this level of cognitive disengagement, emotional vacancy and social inertia. Pre-2020, people were spontaneous. They responded. They showed interest. Now it feels like talking through fog.

Dating used to be about novelty, anticipation, spark, spontaneity. Now it’s marked by fatigue. People aren’t choosing to be boring, they’re just exhausted in ways they can’t articulate. And the collective pretense that nothing has changed is making it worse.

If you feel like you’re interacting with a population that’s strangely blunt, avoidant, and cognitively thinner than before… you’re not imagining it. You’re perceiving a post-2020 psychological landscape that most people are too depleted to notice.

MRI studies. Cognitive testing. Behavioural studies. All confirm COVID damages the frontal lobe: responsible for executive function Depersonalisation: zoning out, emotional detachment, disconnection from one’s own actions… is also a frontal lobe linked failure of self-anchoring

When people’s attentional and emotional circuits are damaged, they slide into “observer mode”, not fully inhabiting their own decisions. People on dating apps now behave like their executive functions are blunted: - Sudden vanishings mid conversation - No follow through

- Zero planning ability - Disinhibited aggression - Grandiosity - Emotional flatness - Treating matches like disposable objects - Pathological indecision - Effort dropping to absolute zero This is the behavioural fingerprint of frontal lobe dysfunction.

Multiply this across hundreds of millions of people with repeat infections and you get a dating market where: - Empathy collapses - Long-term thinking collapses - Emotional presence collapses - Moral reasoning collapses - Impulse control collapses

- Objectification skyrockets - Attention span evaporates This isn’t simply about “modern dating is hard”. This is what a society starts to look like when its prefrontal cortex is under sustained biological assault.

Dating apps aren’t designed for post-COVID brains. They amplify every executive function deficit: -Infinite scrolling for impaired impulse control -Disposable options for impaired empathy -Instant stimulation for impaired attention -No consequences for impaired moral reasoning

People aren’t forming connections because they aren’t functionally capable of connecting in ways they did pre-2020 It’s a warning sign of collective neurocognitive decline, not a moral failure of individuals Dating apps are the symptom. Frontal-lobe dysfunction is the disease.

Worth adding the frontal lobe regulates emotional intelligence, empathy, reward processing & affection. It’s highly sensitive to neuroinflammation & microvascular injury. SARS-CoV-2 repeatedly hits these pathways. So yes, you should expect social & romantic behaviour to degrade

“Oh so it was the virus and not screen time?” Well, given that screen time doesn’t cause vascular inflammation, microglial activation, microclots, or measurable cortical thinning… yes, it was the virus.

Lions Outsider@LionsOutsider · Nov 26, 2025

@JamesThrot Oh so it was the virus itself and not 12 hours a day or more on screens. Oh, ok