Seth Walsh
The man in the mirror is my only threat
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- Joined
- Jan 12, 2020
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I no longer use Tinder for the main purpose.
I use Tinder as a melancholic release training app in a therapeutic way.
What do I swipe for?
Instant pattern recognition of social class based on pictures.
Tinder made me confront something uncomfortable.
I’m not talking about attraction, or standards, or “types.”
I mean this strange ability to sense social class instantly—even through makeup, good lighting, expensive settings, or curated aesthetics.
Not in a moral way.
Not as something earned or shameful.
Just as a spectrum of lived constraint.
You can strip away the obvious variables—clothes, venue, camera quality—and something still leaks through.
Not genetics. Not faces.
But wear.
Stress held in the jaw.
Skin that reflects years of sleep or lack of it.
Posture shaped by whether life has margin or constant urgency.
An ease—or tension—that no handbag or restaurant can fully disguise.
It isn’t scientific.
It isn’t precise.
It’s a probabilistic intuition built from patterns most of us don’t want to name.
What makes it unsettling isn’t superiority.
It’s grief.
Because you realise how much of life’s sorting happens before intention, effort, or personality even get a chance.
You’re not judging people—you’re seeing the imprint of unequal paths compressed into a photo.
Dating apps don’t create this.
They just surface it faster, flatter, and without context.
That’s the part that’s heartbreaking:
Not that people are different—but that so much difference is structural, silent, and already written on the body before anyone speaks.
I hereby declare social class a spectrum. There’s no maths behind it, no rigor or formula behind determination. But you cannot fake it, or hide it.
DISCUSS BELOW
I use Tinder as a melancholic release training app in a therapeutic way.
What do I swipe for?
Instant pattern recognition of social class based on pictures.
Tinder made me confront something uncomfortable.
I’m not talking about attraction, or standards, or “types.”
I mean this strange ability to sense social class instantly—even through makeup, good lighting, expensive settings, or curated aesthetics.
Not in a moral way.
Not as something earned or shameful.
Just as a spectrum of lived constraint.
You can strip away the obvious variables—clothes, venue, camera quality—and something still leaks through.
Not genetics. Not faces.
But wear.
Stress held in the jaw.
Skin that reflects years of sleep or lack of it.
Posture shaped by whether life has margin or constant urgency.
An ease—or tension—that no handbag or restaurant can fully disguise.
It isn’t scientific.
It isn’t precise.
It’s a probabilistic intuition built from patterns most of us don’t want to name.
What makes it unsettling isn’t superiority.
It’s grief.
Because you realise how much of life’s sorting happens before intention, effort, or personality even get a chance.
You’re not judging people—you’re seeing the imprint of unequal paths compressed into a photo.
Dating apps don’t create this.
They just surface it faster, flatter, and without context.
That’s the part that’s heartbreaking:
Not that people are different—but that so much difference is structural, silent, and already written on the body before anyone speaks.
I hereby declare social class a spectrum. There’s no maths behind it, no rigor or formula behind determination. But you cannot fake it, or hide it.
DISCUSS BELOW

