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Tech

Sad Apple Watch Owners Seek Equally Lonely Apple Watch-Owning Friends

Tap me, please.
Image: Flickr/Jon Fingas

3 AM. San Francisco. Rain. Another night alone, ordering Seamless and staring down at my Apple Watch. I bought it on launch day to save myself from the late capitalist mental hellscape of never-ending notifications. I look up from the watch's beautifully designed sapphire face and stare deep into the white of my tastefully minimalist wall. A cruel irony. How could I own an Apple Watch, and yet be so… lonely? Was I not to be a god among the Apple Watch-less? I guess even God is lonely, sometimes. Up there with his Apple Watch. I bet he has the gold edition.

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Thankfully there's /r/lonelyheartbeats, a subreddit where Apple Watch owners who don't actually know anybody who owns an Apple Watch can congregate and ask others to send them a drawing, a heartbeat, or a tap. Those are three of the ways Apple Watch users are able to communicate with each other. It's filled with posts with titles like "Please oh please come tap me," and, "It's been a week, need some taps." Is that so much to ask from a gadget? A heartbeat? A real connection? Maybe it really is lonely at the top, after all.

Maybe the subreddit is actually doing some good, though, as Wired points out—at least one user has made a real friend of sorts. They talk "maybe" every two days. One post on the fledgling subreddit features someone venting about how their girlfriend cheated on them, with the /r/lonelyheartbeats community responding with condolences and, of course, taps.

So far, there are about 100 subscribers commiserating in the affective void left by a shiny new piece of tech on their wrists—alone, yes. But alone together.