r/2meirl4meirl is a “subreddit”[1] devoted to sad memes. People commiserate there in short blasts of image and text on how lonely and shitty life as a Millennial is.I’m a Reddit latecomer. When I first stumbled upon the subreddit, its quirky despair felt sophisticated. Its name had a certain foreign mystique. Was that French for something? I’m a dumbass though—the memes here are actually supposed to represent “me in real life.” I’m guessing there was some partisan split in the original “me in real life” subreddit. The original tacked to more wholesome topics. 2meirl4meirl ventured into an “edgier” romantic nihilism. I know delving into this stuff probably isn’t good for you. Halfway through my twenties, I like to think of myself as smart enough not to run headlong down a rabbit hole. But sometimes, the rabbit hole is so warm… You cautiously approach it, sit at its edge for a bit swinging your legs. Then crawl down into its comfort.
This blend of sadness and light social commentary isn’t unique to the board. In fact, a lot of the memes are probably poached from deeper, danker corners of the web. But it’s exemplary in its universality—the feels are broad enough to appeal to different circles. It’s mainstream enough to regularly make it to Reddit’s “Top” page. The vulnerability on display is exhausted but smart. Think of the depressing first season of The Office. It’s like being stuck in that forever—everyman Jim eternally making reaction faces to the oppressive, dumbass boss.
I think this kind of malaise is a near-constant for a lot of Americans. But the concerns of this torch-bearing community speak to specifically millennial manifestations. The all-time top post reads “Yesterday, I finally achieved what every single college student has dreamed of, yet can only hope will happen to them. That’s right. I got run over by a bus on campus.” Pan to a no-makeup shot of a girl, maybe nineteen years old, irony and determination in her eyes, chilling in hospital robes. This top post is more square then most—but it definitely gives you the vibe of this type of humor. Presumably her tuition is going be paid now—and she’s got an excuse to forgo the crushing course-load for a few days. Us Millennials are like that. We pray with a wry smile for some deus ex machina (preferably a funny one) to take us away from the crushing neoliberal grind.
College and its demands aren’t the topics of all the memes. But its continual reappearance is instructive in understanding the generational sadness. The future-despair centers on vanishing social mobility. Or rather, on meritocracy’s exorbitant demands—and the decreasing likelihood of it all paying off. I don’t have a four year degree. But I do intuit enough to understand acquiring one means undergoing a very concentrated period of stress. Middle class kids, gunning to keep their family’s social standing, have to make real sacrifices of time and energy to be competitive. The doors of prosperity feel like they’re closing, and there’s a mad rush to grab whatever scraps remain. Kids from impoverished backgrounds have to hustle even harder.
These memes exist in that pressure-cooker environment. Manically scrolled past between classes, they might seem like a middling source of resistance. They sublimate college students’ revolutionary, temporary zeal to die. And besides free tuition and access to mental health services, these memes are probably exactly what they deserve. They’re a safe space where, for a moment, you can completely buckle under the overwhelming sense of doom. This might work in the context of college, where that alarm will hopefully soon mellow into success. Owning up to feeling constantly exasperated and broken is a good first step. Stopping there though, and then stretching it out into a way of navigating your twenties/thirties is where its value wanes. For what it’s worth, too, it’s a terrible way to be poor.
I think there’s real use in a certain radical vulnerability or brokenness. Sometimes in life you find yourself inside abusive relationships, nasty ideologies, or bad dichotomies of choice. Radical brokenness– shutting down in a way—is a survival mechanism in those circumstances. It’s a sensible reaction to being pushed against the wall. It keeps you from playing into dynamics you don’t consent to. And it’s not closing your eyes—denialism. Rather, it’s more like staring into the horror so long your eyes get glossy with a thousand-yard stare. It helps you not internalize the evil. But on its own it can’t do much to fight back. Staying in that place forever leaves you stuck.
I’ve been there—am there now—am fighting to wrest myself out… and I’m a mess out in public. My gut impulse is to shut down—but I have a daughter. That makes you try to white-knuckle your way through it. (Maybe young ‘uns can mirror the forced confidence—and not sense the terror behind it? Or… nah they pick up on those things. Perhaps they learn more from the intuited struggles of parents than the finished show.)
On Halloween, we went to the “trunk-or-treat” at the local community center. Kids and parents gathered to collect their candy in a centralized, roofed place. I felt a kind of autistic hypervigilance common I think amongst Millennials: reading faces, scanning the exits, nearly dropping at the sound of a popped balloon. Boomers in the room seemed to be into it. (Weirdos.)
Halfway through, I recognized someone. Lauren walked in with her two kids and newest man. She has upwards of fifteen-hundred Facebook followers (a lot out in the sticks). She’d been through some pretty horrific personal shit a while back. The community reached out with support and GoFundMe’s. She rose from the trauma. With the attention, she forged an online personality as the cocky, shit-talking survivor. She was social-media queen of the three farming counties. In documenting her struggles, from raising kids to publicly calling out unfaithful ex’s—she made peeps in the small towns dotted between cornfields feel a little more alive. Like we’re connected to something.
Unless you knew her, though, she took up very little of the room. Torn from downward thumbstrokes and the never-ending timeline, she seemed down-to-earth. Nervous, nearly shattered– a lot like myself and the couple other younger people in the room. She seemed overwhelmed by the pressing crowd. She had an exhausted deer-in-the-headlights look.
I can’t pretend to have empathized, precisely, because I don’t know what specifically was going on in her day. But I felt that look. There was that radical brokenness I knew so well behind it. After the ball she’d post pictures of her best life with her kids. She would eviscerate haters in the comments. But in real life I saw a fragility that I felt a kind of solidarity with. The online world is an escape—a game where we can work through our anxiety and sadness. But real life stands there still—like a joke, a threat, or maybe a challenge to be taken up.
There’s a time for introspection. But there’s no bottom when staring into the abject self. Floor upon floor is pulled out from beneath you. Life under late capitalism is miserable. But this dynamic—that of the freefall, voiceless scream—creates its own little hell. In scrolling through 2meirl4meirl, we get a sense there’s people out there who feel pain like us. But separated from them, by the screen and the snark, the sad memes and depression-brag tweets leave us further atomized.
The hip-sad sensibility stretches in all direction. There’s sad Reddit, sad Tumblr, weird Twitter, weird left Twitter, edgelord historical-materialist Twitter. But they’re all playing under the same set of rules I think. Whacky hard-left Twitter is ostensibly disconnected from the vulnerability and victimhood narratives. I’m not well-read enough to dispute their righteously dialectical strings of 280 characters. But these anonymous accounts often have (ironic) anime profiles pics, (ironic) names with something like “Foucalt” in them, and (ironically) harass anyone perceived as vaguely neoliberal. It doesn’t feel like we’ve moved very far. The sadness is just getting kinda rancorous. These edgy circles feel like a hivemind community of rabid individualists. That might meet someone’s definition of a workable society. But this is like, not in a good way.
Millennials are now pushing into their late twenties. Older readers don’t laugh—but time is starting to make itself felt on our bodies. The pudge piles on if we don’t keep active in a way it didn’t use to. I get this nasty recurrent lower back pain if I lift something in a dumb way. Stress lines are starting to suggest themselves on our faces. The internet, particularly mass anonymous communities, felt like a holding cell away from reality. A vacuum chamber where we could strategize against the coming storm. Maybe it helped us discover aspects of ourselves and our world we never previously considered. Everything was eternally fresh, smart, and hip. All the same, though, it’s getting increasingly hard to breathe. That’s undeniably due to real-world exploitation. But I wonder if the ways we position ourselves in that world, the ways we connect to others, can possibly make it worse. The internet’s held a gigantic mirror to ourselves. The sight is frightening and essential. But you can’t live in a mirror. It’s cold, loveless.
I think we’re frozen in that gaze. We know too much now, and we’re scared to put the mirror down. In escaping the gaze, what errant bullshit might we become? But awareness that leaves us constantly shattered can’t ultimately address the primal wrong. Pulled away from the emo panoptic, I think a lot us of might grow into different beings than we are now. Millions of flowers could grow into beautiful singularity. Some might reveal themselves to be poisonous, but I doubt we’ll be able to achieve true, actionable solidarity until that happens.
The 2010s have been strange. Millennials have been figuring out digital issues categorically unlike anything that’s come before. The underground seemingly defines itself through mediums that by nature are divorced from reality. We start to understand the accidents and injustices of our lives—from loneliness, mental illness, and poverty—through that irreal lens. Our responses may be superficially correct. But they’re tainted by that primal disconnect. Resistance peters out ineffectually. And that failure-by-design make us double down into further extremes and intolerance.
We’ve dragged ourselves against concrete down this corridor for a while now. At the end we bang our head against a door. Passage through it promises some fundamental change. It won’t open though, for all the pressure we applied. Sometimes I think there’s nothing behind it—just wall. That this whole time this hallway was a trap. I look back. In the light from the entrance I see the outlines of some figures. They look familiar. They’re working, struggling—but there’s a gay laughter amidst it all. I see two of them run towards each other. They seem to greet each other for who they truly are. They look like the men and women we’ve been struggling to become. It’ll take a while to drag ourselves back. We invested a lot in this desperate escape. But we can’t stay here or flop dead. I plan to meet you out there in the light.
Note
1 Reddit is the message board to end all other message boards. Different topics and communities have their own page called “subreddits.” There people converse and share memes.