It’s Qixi again, so as a single virgin I get asked that annoying question a lot. The version I hear most goes something like this: “Oh come on, why haven’t you found someone yet~ Don’t give me that ’nobody fits’ stuff. Love is a skill, you get good by practicing. Just pick someone at random for now… it’s not like you’re definitely marrying her in the end, right? Get some practice in first. No need to take it so seriously at the start.” Right. This is a fast-food society, so fast that everyone wants to go from first pitch to home plate by tomorrow. Once we could read an article all the way through and then write down our thoughts; now we just scroll fast and mash the keyboard with “tl;dr.” Long blog posts that everyone wrote gave way to mindless reposts of 140-character updates. Original work used to contend from a hundred schools; now marketing bots are everywhere. All of it announces a new era: an era of fast food, an era of entertainment. People aren’t reserved anymore — they talk about sex acts and sex organs with barefaced relish, and nothing is off-limits for twisting and joking about. We gave it a philosophical-sounding name: tsukkomi (even though that’s not really what it means). And if anyone takes a joke seriously, they get one line, every time.