It isn’t a new thing.

As soon as the realisation that a dollar could be made, then every dollar was squeezed out of it.

The dot com bubble burst of the 90s was one of the earliest, but not THE earliest example of this.

Here’s a post exactly for you:

https://lemmy.world/post/963301

Then you would have had to spend most of your life meeting one person a second and doing nothing else.

You’d need to do it while eating

While poohing

While having a slash

Even if they did the chances of you meeting them are essentially 0.

I’m going to assume that “soul mate” means that there’s one perfect match for you. One person that is perfect.

I’m going to assume that you’re hetero.

There’s 7.888 billion people in the world.

Finding out how much of the population is gay/lesbian is pretty much impossible, and how “gay” is gay? Exclusively same sex relationships? 99%? What?

Anyway, let’s ballpark 3% of the population that just doesn’t share your interests in romantic partners.

That leaves 7.651 billion people

Breakdown by gender is roughly 50.42% male 49.58% female. I’m happy to have an error margin of just over half a percent and call that 50/50.

That leaves 3.286 billion people.

If you were to meet one of those per second, you’d take 121 years to meet them all. Unfortunately only one person has been verified to live that long (Jeanne Calment), so you basically have no chance to meet them.

All of a sudden?

My dear, sweet summer child.