Funny Depressing Memes Are the Only Therapy I Can Currently Afford on My Current Salary

Look, the reason this whole thing works is that nobody under forty believes the standard cultural messaging about how to feel better anymore. The self-help is broken. The wellness industry is a pyramid scheme. The corporate optimism is a hostage situation. What is left is a generation that has, mostly, agreed to be honest about how the day is going, and the honesty is, against every prediction, the funniest thing this culture has produced in years.

The capitalist exhaustion content is where most of this lives. The job is bad. The salary is worse. The future is unclear. The dark humor memes circulating online are not pretending otherwise. They are looking at the situation, naming the situation, and finding a way to laugh at the situation without softening any of the underlying facts. The reader inside this material is not being asked to feel better about anything. The reader is being acknowledged, which turns out to be, statistically, more useful than the feeling-better approach.

The childhood nostalgia subcategory has its own particular texture. Somebody, somewhere, made the choice to take the things you loved as a kid and reframe them as evidence of how much things have changed for the worse, and the resulting funny existential memes are doing real psychological work for an audience that has been quietly mourning the cultural moment they grew up inside of. The toys are not what they were. The films are not what they were. The mall is gone. The memes are how we admit this to each other.

The larger thing happening in this content is that an entire generation has decided that gallows humor is the only available emotional response to the current set of cultural and economic conditions, and the decision is, on close examination, not actually pessimism. It is something closer to communal survival. The dark humor memes that travel the furthest are the ones that name something genuinely hard, refuse to soften it, and still manage to leave the reader laughing at the end, and the leaving-laughing is the whole point.

The funny depressing content that endures is essentially a series of small acknowledgments that nobody is doing fine, everybody knows nobody is doing fine, and we have all collectively agreed to keep functioning anyway. The memes are the proof of the agreement. The proof is also, in its own way, comforting, because the comfort is not coming from a promise that things will get better. The comfort is coming from confirmation that you are not the only one currently going through it.

The situation stays hard. The internet, however, has gotten very good at finding the joke.