It’s just not that serious.
Or at least, that’s what we say anyway.
In a since-deleted Tumblr post, artist Ethel Cain broadly proclaimed that “we are in an irony epidemic” — meaning there’s a “lack of sincerity in the world these days.” It’s not hard to find examples of what she means.
Former One Direction member Liam Payne, who tragically passed away earlier this year, had his funeral this past Wednesday. While family and friends mourned the tragic loss, X was flooded with tweets joking about Zayn Malik’s attractiveness, with one user even saying “bring zayn to my funeral looking like this and i WILL resurrect.”
When Diddy’s sexual assault and harrassment allegations came to light, many on the internet joked about the amount of baby oil Diddy had and how they would love to attend one of Diddy’s infamous parties. Currently, Diddy stands accused of rape, sex trafficking and physical abuse, with many of the plantiffs being minors.
Back in 2020, Black Lives Matter movement led to the creation of the meme Hello Kitty ACAB. What does this cute cartoon character have to do with the protest against institutionalized racism? Well, nothing. Instead, Hello Kitty was used to aestheticize the movement, part of a trend that continues today.
Instagram story activism is a beast of its own now, with story reposts of cute 80’s groovy themed infographics about global events like Israel-Palestinian conflict often reducing complex and nuanced issues into bite-sized, aestheticized content designed for quick consumption.
In terms of Ethel Cain’s own work, she has dealt with jokes since the release of her debut album “Preacher’s Daughter.” A conceptual album, it follows a fictional Ethel Cain as she attempts to escape her abusive father and falls in love with a man named Isaiah who abuses and murders her. However, many fans have reduced this hauntingly tragic tale to a joke. Cain even wrote in her deleted post about how sick she is of hearing the same joke “yes you ate that like Isaiah ate Ethel” over and over again.
We live in a culture that makes memes of everything it encounters. Social media, which began as a place for connection, has become a place of disconnection from the real world, art and even each other. We no longer take time to digest the news of a tragically short life or the disgusting nature of an assaulter. Instead, we make jokes, we dilute these things down.
Of course, humor is not a bad thing. It can help relieve stress and build stronger bonds within a community. But when it is used as a mechanism to avoid uncomfortable realities and a sense of sincerity, it becomes dangerous. Art often grapples with serious and uncomfortable topics like death, heartbreak and abuse. When we dilute this media down to memes and jokes, we are robbing ourselves of the opportunity to engage deeply and fully. We are robbing ourselves of the chance to truly consume.
After all, to consume something is to fully eat and digest it, to take in something that might change us. We say that we are consumers of media, but when we fall back on humor to avoid sobering truths, we are not consuming, we are simply letting the information wash past us.
I will admit, I have participated in this “ironic” culture before, joking about how something is “cringe” or someone is “doing too much”. But, like Ethel Cain writes in her post, I miss genuine passion. I dream of a world where Billie Eilish’s song “What Was I Made For?” was not memeified, its lyrics replaced with AI cats meowing, and was instead met with genuine discussion of its deeply personal message. What would our social culture be like if we had discussions about what it means to be young and alive and deeply confused about our place in the world? If we really sat down to process what its melancholic feeling means to us as listeners?
We are lucky enough to live in a society where we have endless access to media, art and news. It is the norm now to wake up and be able to scroll through Instagram, X and other social media to learn more about the world. Instead of wasting this on only overused jokes and redundant memes, it’s time to engage sincerely and deeply, to truly consume media.
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