Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

In the age of COVID-19, finding a romantic partner is no longer a niche activity. Starting with Tinder, dating apps gradually went from a novelty for digital natives, to a commonly accepted way to meet strangers, supercharged by various physical distancing guidelines during the pandemic that restricted changes for real-life encounters in physical events. While social desirability bias means precise data for prevalence remains unavailable, anecdotal evidence shows that many youngsters now see dating apps as the primary method to go beyond their immediate social circles in the quest for love. With their increasing popularity, dating apps have induced their own sense of fatigue among both newcomers and long-time users. The ease of expressing affection and initiating conversations with new people means that the cost of acquiring new opportunities for dates is drastically reduced. As a result, the value of each opportunity is decreased in relative terms. After all, if it is so easy to meet ...

Every few years, a movie would come out that extols the need for people to relax, escape the dog race, and enjoy the moment. As unrealistic as the prospect of workers, living paycheck-to-paycheck, suddenly being freed from the daily grind might be, the idea of being somewhere else (really, anywhere else) is such a commonly dreamt dream that such escapist movies continue to be made. To ensure that the remotest prospects of freeing oneself from the capitalist system of labor have at least some sort of tantalizing feasibility, the escapist genre would add familiar storylines and twists to bring the exotic down to earth.

The term "international exchange" can be ambiguous and all-encompassing. Everything from having foreigners presenting the basics of foreign foods and customs to kids in elementary schools  to much more serious seminars in which businessmen get together to discuss how to market their products in foreign lands can be defined under the umbrella of international exchange. In between these two extremes lie a plethora of community events, supposedly held by people with the casual, non-monetarily incentivized hobby of knowing about what's outside Japan.