How should we explain the phenomenon of evading an object one has never even experienced? Looking closely at the recently skyrocketing percentage of "forever-alones" (those who have been single their entire lives) and their proclamation that "being alone is freedom," we encounter a strange paradox. How can those who have never been burned by love, nor ever felt the warmth of that sturdy lifeline, be so certain of love’s futility and willingly choose isolation? The framework of being "exhausted and fleeing from the pain of a breakup" does not apply to them. After all, you cannot flee from a trauma you never experienced.
The real reason they evade love is not due to a fatigue they personally endured. Rather, it is the byproduct of "defensive driving" and the "data of vicarious bankruptcy" gathered by a generation that learned about the world through screens instead of flesh-and-blood portraits.
The Risks of Love Learned via YouTube Summaries
Though they have never stepped onto the canvas of love’s boxing ring even once, they have witnessed countless others bleeding and crashing down from that very ring—either from the spectator seats or through their smartphone screens. In online communities, romance and marriage are depicted like contracts riddled with toxic clauses that mutually erode one another, while the news is saturated with dating violence and the cruel sagas of breakups. In a society that enshrines cost-effectiveness as the ultimate virtue, they learn in real-time to view love as a "hyper-high-risk asset with no principal protection."
Consequently, they have already mastered the ending without playing the game. They arrive at the conclusion that there is absolutely no reason to personally play through that hellish game at the expense of their own blood-like time, emotion, and capital. They are spectators who have pre-watched a horrific bad-ending summary of a game they haven’t even started; such is the portrait of the inexperienced in this day and age.
Certainty Born of Ignorance, and the Deferral of Choice
The changing of the "default setting" regarding values in this generation also plays a part. While love was an essential quest of life for previous generations, for this cohort, "my ego, my career, and my comfort" are the absolute default settings that must be guarded at all costs.
To those who have never loved, the "dense freedom" or "psychological elasticity" that love provides is an unknown territory they have never tasted. Lacking data, it is impossible for them to even imagine it. Conversely, the "safe freedom" of ordering delivery food while watching Netflix alone in the corner of one’s room during the weekend is tangible, certain data held right in their hands. What fool would sacrifice a certain happiness completely under their control just to obtain an unknown, mysterious reward?
Furthermore, to those who have long remained in a state of infinite freedom where they can go anywhere, the act of choosing "just one person" and anchoring their universe feels like sheer terror. Because making a single choice implies the extinction of tens of thousands of other possibilities, the longer one remains single, the harder it becomes to find a motive compelling enough to shatter that state of infinite potential.
Where Their True Exhaustion Lies
When they say they are exhausted, they are not lying. It is just that the object of their exhaustion is not "love." Long before they could even initiate love, their energy was already thoroughly depleted by the task of meeting the survival credentials demanded by this cruel society and keeping themselves afloat. They simply lack the surplus energy to share with an uncertain variable called "another person" when they barely have enough to optimize their own probability of survival.
Therefore, their belief that "being alone is freedom" is not an arrogant disparagement of love’s value, but rather the shrewdest yet saddest optimization simulation for survival. Behind that chillingly cold rationality evading an unexperienced love lies the lonely defense mechanism of modern individuals—those who, under the crushing pressure of the system, lack the emotional margin to endure even a single scratch of trauma, and thus choose to remain forever in the spectator seats.
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