*well, internet scrolling in general, which are basically memes or meme-adjacent.
During company layoffs, I went two straight weeks looking at nothing but internal memes. They were really helpful in processing the feelings of hurt and shock.
Memes with my colleagues straddle an interesting spectrum. It's "connection" with a real collective community, but the collective is across 200K employees.
Extrapolate that to an entire internet "community" and you have the state of today's media. For all the split-second entertainment that's out there, I rarely laugh. That's true unfortunately not just with internet browsing, but with life and with people too.
Is it just me? Are we not having as many belly laughs with people as with past times?
I could be conflating a number of other true things:
adult friendships don't tend to be as deep as those from youth,
raising a kid is a perpetual beatdown,
pandemic disconnection,
desensitization from working in a frenetic environment,
but let me just stick to my thesis a little longer. First, what am I calling a "meme," and why do they make us depressed? A meme (picture, short video skit, stupid Tweet™️) is basically an attempt through media to get a "Oh I know that feeling!" It's creating a "connection," and the more niche the reference the greater the payoff, e.g., in order from basic to niche: SAT -> 90skids4lyfe -> depression/anxiety/introvert/antisocial -> grad school memes with relatable themes -> NUMTOT -> MD is a cult Not a State -> Super Secret DMV bboy page. Honestly for every human experience, and I mean *every*, we've created some media.
But here's the thing. I think connection is zero-sum. At the core of it, memes create connection to a nebulous internet entity, which thus disconnects us more and more with our real counterparts. We strip ourselves the opportunity to laugh with real friends, because would-be funny convos are constantly scuttled with our mental "oh I've seen this line of humor already in a meme." I sense this constantly in my interactions. People including myself have a hard time laughing from true novelty, because there is none.
And it's even more negative than zero-sum. The meme reduces the dimensions and dignity of the human experience it's making fun of. Tokenizes and trivializes. Ironically, the more nuanced ("niche") the meme is the more the tokenization effect. Because of this, I draw a line at Christian memes. Under no circumstances I'll entertain Christian memes. That's the last thing in my life I need trivializing.
As self-proclaimed Nostalgia King, I think about how life was in the 2000s. Even though we had internet, its use was so different. We still used Facebook to catch up with real people in our lives, not random impersonal internet personalities. AIM chat was in its heyday. We connected with real folks.
Will I stop with memes? Maybe! I unfollowed a bunch of meme accounts by the end of writing this. Out of all my social contexts, I think I have pretty good laughs with bboys. The meme skills of the community are so poor it's actually a net-benefit. It also helps you're inherently vulnerable and silly when participating. A lot of the things discussed here are themes from the book "You Are Not Your Own" by Alan Noble. Excellent read, seriously cut me on specific modern problems that older religious figures don't have insight into (a la memes, porn, and smartphones).
