The “Let's do it” button

I worry that human beings, adults and children alike, are spending too much time staring at screens and not enough time communicating face-to-face.

Rather than engaging in the messiness of human interaction, people simply send text messages.

Rather than speaking directly to a colleague who has upset you, a scathing (and oftentimes cowardly) email is written and sent instead.

Rather than telling the person that you’re dating that it’s over, it’s become perfectly acceptable to ghost that person.

Just imagine: You have dinner with someone on Monday, have sex with that same person on Tuesday, visit the farmer’s market together on Thursday, and then just stop answering their text messages and phone calls forever.

This was not the way we did things back in the day. Break ups were never fun, but the expectation was always that it would be done face-to-face. Breaking up over the phone was the coward’s way out.

Now the coward’s way out it to simply disappear.

We’ve devolved quite a bit in the last decade.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get worse, it did.

Introducing LoveSync, a two-button system where you and your partner each place a button on your respective bedside tables. If you’re hoping to have sex that evening, you push the button.

“Anonymously push the button,” according to the Kickstarter video, which is bizarre, since theoretically there is nothing anonymous about the person sleeping alongside you.

If your partner has also tapped the button, your respective buttons will both light up.

It’s time for sex. The buttons said so.

If only one of you has tapped, no light notification, and therefore, no sex for you.

The draw here, according to LoveSync’s description, is that you won’t feel the sting of rejection or embarrassment should only one of you want to have sex.

The truth is that communication between you and someone you theoretically love (or at least like a lot) is sanitized and depersonalized. Rather than suggesting sex or enticing your partner into sex or putting on some Barry White and hoping for the best, simply press a button and wait for the light.

Hope for the light. Pray for the light.

I know what you’re thinking:

Who would buy something as stupid as this?

So far, 428 people, who have invested more than $20,000 on Love Sync’s Kickstarter campaign.

Not an enormous number, thank goodness, but about 428 people too many.

856 if you count their their presumably agreeable partners.