No Place to Land: A Personal Reflection on the Emotional Cost of Modern Love

Sometimes I sit back and wonder why I chose to incarnate into this timeline.

This world - this moment in history - feels impossibly complex. We’re trying to navigate love, intimacy, and connection while the very ground beneath us keeps shifting. Technology promises us connection but so often leaves us lonelier. Capitalism has seeped into even the most sacred spaces of human closeness. Intimacy isn’t just eroding on a personal level - it’s happening culturally, systemically. And no one really teaches us how to be human anymore.

Writing my MSc dissertation broke me open.

Not because of the academic pressure, but because, for the first time, I gave voice to a pain I’d been carrying for years - a pain I didn’t even know had a name. It was like stitching language to a wound I hadn’t realised could heal. I cried as I wrote, not just from exhaustion, but from recognition.

Because I had the realisation of how we are all living through this shitshow that is the modern era and we are all confused and unmoored.

So many of us are quietly carrying the same ache:

• The fatigue of performative connection, where every interaction feels curated, strategic, or subtly inauthentic.

• The loneliness of being surrounded by people, messages, and likes, yet never truly being met.

• The grief of watching romance morph into something transactional - swiped through, optimised, filtered - as if love were a product to be packaged.

• The confusion of trying to date, relate, or even feel in a world that has flattened the emotional landscape into a scrollable feed.

We know something is off. But because it’s everywhere - ambient, systemic, normalised - we don’t always know how to name it. Or what to do with it.

It’s not just that things have changed. It’s that the frameworks we once relied on - the rituals, the shared rhythms, the unspoken rules of emotional engagement - have fragmented, collapsed, dissolved into noise.

Love used to exist within a structure: time, community, shared values, storytelling. Even if imperfect, those structures held us. Now, we’re floating in a kind of emotional limbo - where connection is constant but rarely deep, where romantic ideals are distorted by algorithmic logic, and where vulnerability feels risky, even naïve.

And while I’m not anti-capitalism - I love the finer things, the beauty of craftsmanship, the sensuality of art and elegance - I can’t ignore how hypercapitalism and technological acceleration have distorted the very conditions we need to feel safe in love. We’ve learned to approach relationships like consumers. We shop for soulmates. We optimise our personalities. We become brands instead of beings.

And it’s making us sick.

Not just mentally, but emotionally, relationally, even spiritually. We’re exhausted! Hyperstimulated but touch-starved. Busy but yearning. Independent but craving closeness.

We’re living in a culture that tells us to be self-sufficient while simultaneously feeding off our need for connection.

And yet, amidst all of this, there was one moment - quiet, surprising - when I realised why I’m here. Why I chose this lifetime, this work, this exact cross-section of culture and psychology.

Because I’m not here to escape this mess.I’m here to help make meaning of it.

To hold space for the ones trying to love in a culture that has trained them to dissociate. To give voice to what feels invisible. To turn confusion into clarity, and ache into insight.

We are living through a collective crisis of intimacy. But that doesn’t mean we’re lost forever.

It means we’re being invited - called - to relearn how to love. Not the performative kind, or the gamified kind. But love that is slow, regulated, rooted in presence. Love that honors the body, the nervous system, the tenderness of being alive.

This is why I wrote my dissertation, “No Place to Land: How Technocapitalism Created a Crisis of Intimacy in the Postmodern Era.” And it’s why I’m sharing this now. Because this isn’t just academic. It’s personal, cultural, societal. And it matters.