While Instagram is no stranger to suggesting seemingly useless apps and products in the middle of a well earned doom scroll, one such suggestion surprised me a little bit last week.<\/p>\n
As the glow of the Christmas and New Years cheer ground to a halt, I found myself back on \u2018the gram\u2019 scrolling through my usual ala carte menu of men falling through roofs, dogs attacking hoovers, or women leaving eye-brow dye on for too long \u2013 with hilarious results.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the midst of these thoroughly highbrow entertainments, a new service suggestion popped up called \u201cTimeleft\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It sounded a bit ominous, like a way of leaving nice messages for your loved ones (or telling people what you really think of them) before you die, but to cut to the chase, Timeleft seems to be more or less a dating app, but for finding friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you sign up for the service, it\u2019ll match you with likeminded people (either single or mixed sex) and the point of it is that you go to dinners together. Some of the reviews seemed glowing, with one user saying she had stayed at the table for four hours.\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the surface the concept seems tame enough \u2013 friends of mine will know that I previously stooped the level of using Tinder on the \u201cinterested in men and women\u201d setting to find friends outside of work while I was in South Korea, but it seemed a bit strange that this app should be a thing in Ireland of all places.\u00a0<\/p>\n
After all, aren\u2019t we known for being tremendously friendly, jovial, lovely clumps of fun? I know I am\u2026<\/p>\n
Curiosity led me to follow the link so far as to answer the prompted questions it posed. It asks normal enough stuff like your age, sex, location, interests etc, but one of the first things it asked was whether or not I was offended by politically incorrect humor.<\/p>\n
I dare say I am not.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This got me thinking that perhaps people \u2013 who don\u2019t feel comfortable sharing their most controversial takes before thousands of online like yours truly \u2013 might be feeling a little bit of a pinch when it comes to being themselves around others these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n
We all know that in modern Ireland and beyond there are certain things you have to think in order to be accepted as sugar and spice and all things nice. It\u2019s all the NGO fuelled talking points about immigration, lgbt, climate change, feminism etc.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Timeleft seems to be offering your average S\u00e9an or Theresa a way to weed out people who might stare back at them with their noses crumpled and say \u201cThat\u2019s offensive\u201d if they try to tell a joke about, well, almost anything that has a chance of being funny at this stage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe I\u2019m reading too far into this, but why was the question about how easily offended a prospective user is one of the very first?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe it is getting harder to make friends these days and maybe there are those who genuinely want a hand as Irish society becomes more atomised. It\u2019s easy to feel like a stranger in Dublin these days.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the things I really didn\u2019t like about my time spent in Japan and South Korea was how it\u2019s often (if not always) considered impolite to mix friends.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Think of it this way: If I was in a certain part of town with one friend and received word from another that they were nearby, it would be considered rude of me to suggest to friend A that we meet up with friend B if they didn\u2019t already know each other.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I love figuring out which of my friends might really hit it off and introducing them to each other, so for me this \u2018no mixing rule\u2019 always felt very unpleasant, but, when in Rome.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The point in bringing that up was this: I\u2019ve noticed more and more since I came back from Asia that groups don\u2019t seem to mix as much as I seem to remember them doing when I was in college circa 2015.<\/p>\n
\u00a0It feels increasingly as though people are keeping to themselves more in pubs and bars, when I thought half the fun of going out was the possibility of widening your social circle?\u00a0<\/p>\n
The last several times I\u2019ve been on a night out in Dublin it\u2019s felt much easier to get talking to \u201cdads\u201d \u2013 men in their fifties and sixties \u2013 than it has been my peers in the 25-35 age range. I\u2019m starting to feel like the craic is somewhat absent from those who grew up with the internet.\u00a0<\/p>\n
You might be thinking, \u2018Maybe you\u2019re not much of a hit on a night out dear?\u2019, but the thing is, I\u2019ve noticed the same trend on public transport.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Not so long ago I decided that if there\u2019s someone sitting beside or in front of me (where appropriate) I\u2019d throw out a line of small talk and see if they take the bait.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFierce cold, isn\u2019t it?\u201d, or the less frequently appropriate, \u201cLovely sunshine this morning\u201d usually does the trick. There\u2019s no need to reinvent the wheel.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m naturally quite introverted, but I like to challenge myself, and this seemed like a way to (hopefully) brighten someone\u2019s day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve often heard that a smile or a kind word from a stranger can make the world seem a lot better.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This has led to some genuinely great conversations with people I would have otherwise had to try and avoid making eye contact with for a solid hour in some cases. It\u2019s also a good way to gauge the mood of the nation, but here again, it\u2019s mostly older people who are eager to chat.<\/p>\n
You might say that my chances of chatting to people closer to my own age are limited by how much we miserable isolationists render ourselves all but unapproachable by using earphones \u2013 and you\u2019d be right \u2013 but they still don\u2019t seem all that interested in engaging when they see a lively conversation going on between strangers. I\u2019d want in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While recently chatting to an older man on the train from Greystones to Connolly station, I mentioned that I thought it was strange how people these days report feeling lonely more than previous generations while simultaneously seeming to avoid making any real effort to talk to those around them.<\/p>\n