memetic collage

mad-lib writing

My friend Max Falkowitz asked me to explain paragraphs of Gen-Z writing that rang as inane. I sent him about fifteen texts back working through the strangeness of the piece we read.

The writing in question was essentially a memetic collage — phrases so online that they’re almost mad-libbed and placed into sentences instead of earnest ideas with meaning. It’s a balloon, I suppose. A person runs to a store to procure a seven-dollar matcha with some type of heavy cream and floral note, “Just to feel something.”

Erasing the personal and adding a relatable meme format, closing in on a monoculture that dumbs us down. So quickly it becomes repetitious, and then the most millennial of them all cling to the phrases — “Hot Girl Walk” was invoked by Josh Scherer, Mythical Kitchen's Last Meals host. He describes the jaunt as essential thinking time before he interviews a celebrity, the precious coalescing of questions and new occurrences that will eventually shape the show we will enjoy. I think of all the little ways to announce a walk, like Marguerite Young’s character Miss MacIntosh who “takes her constitutional,” or how my mother and I take our trots. We can all call our movements whatever we wish, but in Scherer’s case, it trivializes and irony-poisons his routine.

Do you ever say a phrase and realize it flew from your mouth, and matches nothing within your little mind palace?

Rather than focusing on our speech, one has to look at how this filters into pieces in magazines, whether digital (mostly) or print.

I find that memetic phrases replace real thoughts sometimes for people, and it gets into the writing, of course, because the brain is so dishonest with itself. Perhaps I also think that it is what happens in writing when people stop reading long-form things, but go to write them.

Is it a purported self-awareness? The internet is in our entire bodies, and that is how it is. But why is it so patchy and, quite honestly, sad? It reminds me of the “sweet treat” phenomenon, where one (on camera/over text/even in person) cannot have a cookie after lunch without it being brightened into a self-care and pseudo-therapized thing. Again the earnestness of regular behaviors is monocultured into a reason and thus filled with a memetic phrase or two.

Going to get my sweet treat just to feel something.

It’s to do with attention, as Adam Aleksic explains quite well in recent videos. Our exclamations of “wait,” “no but like,” and “are you kidding me,” keep the user watching. Perhaps the relatable yet meaningless use of “just to feel something” keeps a non-reader reading. Clutched by an easy repeated thing that worked before. Humor gets boring. But people laugh. I’ve heard it’s how many relate to coworkers in offices (I haven’t been in a normal office ever).

So we say less to each other, and the distance is replaced by an easy feed. I can hear sosmeone saying oh I got it from ___, I don’t gatekeep! There’s a pointlessness here, a phrase injected into an interaction. A ‘slay’ (dated) follows.