Each phase change in civilization is also hollowing out of the previous phase.1 In some way, agriculture took away land for forage and hunting. Industry poisoned land for agriculture. And digitization and informatization reorganized human needs and living patterns so that industrial production could no longer sustain an economy and living wages for most.
Political economy might be a matter of phases and tides: a fixed amount of energy shifting around, rippling and falling back. And our historically conditioned individualism might be a matter of whether we're on the crest of a wave or in the trough, experiencing the rising civilization or a crashing one, or an eddying pool in the aftermath of a crash.
A post-Tinder view of relationships has to be dialectical. Whenever my mind rests for too long on my Brooklyn Living, Tinter Swiping, mid-2010 self, or on a kind of retro-Bush-era, evangelical, suburban notion of monogamy and commitment suddenly en vogue again, I feel dissatisfied and unsettled. Maybe this is why one of my favorite books has always been Either/Or by Kierkegaard, which constructs a dialectic between the sensualist-romantic and the family man. I don't think you can actually suppress these sides of yourself; I don't think you can actually eliminate them. Most people either mute one or the other.