Trusting Yourself in a World of Data

When I wrote The Soulmate Algorithm, I kept returning to one question. What happens when technology claims to know our hearts better than we do? In the story, Theo faces a decision between a perfectly calculated match and a quiet intuition that cannot be quantified. That tension feels increasingly familiar in a world shaped by data.

I am fascinated by what information can reveal about us. Patterns emerge. Preferences become visible. Predictive systems grow more refined each year. Yet there are still moments that resist calculation. A chance meeting. A feeling that arrives without explanation. A connection that seems to exist outside any measurable pattern.

Those moments interest me most.

In writing the novel, I began to see the algorithm not as a villain, but as a mirror. It reflects what can be known. It cannot account for what is chosen. Human experience has always lived in that space between knowledge and mystery. We are informed by data, but we are formed by decisions that often defy it.

Perhaps the real question is not whether technology can understand us. It is whether we are willing to trust ourselves when an algorithm tells us what the right answer should be. Trusting yourself carries risk. It also carries meaning.

Some of what shapes us most seems to arrive without certainty.

That tension between calculation and intuition remains at the heart of the story, and, I suspect, at the heart of our lives as well.