Zeitgeist

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/TSĪTGĪST, ZĪTGĪST/ (NOUN): THE MOOD, VIBE, BELIEFS, & SPIRIT OF A PARTICULAR MOMENT IN TIME

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/TSĪTGĪST, ZĪTGĪST/ (NOUN): THE MOOD, VIBE, BELIEFS, & SPIRIT OF A PARTICULAR MOMENT IN TIME

/TSĪTGĪST, ZĪTGĪST/ (NOUN): THE MOOD, VIBE, BELIEFS, & SPIRIT OF A PARTICULAR MOMENT IN TIME

DECEMBER 2021

NEW YORK

FROM THE EDITORS Beyoncé deemed “no Ashanti” in an early New York Times review. Second Life declared “the Internet’s next big thing” on the cover of Newsweek — long before the metaverse.

The rise of goth, the decline of marriage, or that infamous Esquire cover dismissing the American woman as “done at 21.”

Jessica Bennett is is an editor at The New York Times who teaches journalism at NYU. This zine was produced by her “Reporting the Zeitgeist” class.

These stories were all trying to capture the cultural zeitgeist as it was unfolding. Now they show us how much that zeitgeist can change, morph and evolve — and how often, in hindsight, our narrators don’t always get it quite right.

Perhaps no zeitgeist can withstand the test of time. And yet it is the job of the journalist to at least try to capture the way we are living at any given moment, and explain it to the world.

Today’s zeitgeist, as we have observed it over the past semester, is many things. It is the fluidity of identity; the battle against climate change and the fight for racial justice. It’s swiping for love (or sex); it’s crypto currency and NFTS. It’s the way that

work has been transformed by technology, a pandemic that runs through everything, and a generation who wants more from their jobs. It is a story of phones and FOMO and of declining mental health. It is the way we are more connected — while simultaneously polarized — than ever before.

In the following pages, you’ll read stories by NYU journalism students who are each living their own zeitgeist — and have been tasked with explaining one element of it to the rest of us. What does it mean that we’re a generation that shares every selfie, meal and opinion on social media, but also every trauma? What can a wave of job resignations tell us about what we value in our work lives? What can we learn from the ever-complicated ways we label ourselves and our identities?

Those stories may end up as time capsules, relics of an era past. Or they may be more prescient — alluding to what’s to come. But they are one small slice of the zeitgeist of 2021.

— Jessica Bennett & Sharon Attia

Sharon Attia is a photographer, social media editor and zine enthusiast who TA’ed “Reporting the Zeitgeist.”.

zeitgeist /tsītgīst, zītgīst/ (noun): the mood, vibe, beliefs, and spirit of a particular moment in time

IS THERE ANY COHESION IN THE AMERICAN IDENTITY?

By Megan Hullander

A bob-haired flapper dancing across a ballroom, beads hanging on her dress and a cigarette dangling from her lips.

A skinny, hollow-eyed family piloting a beat-up sedan with their tattered belongings strapped to the roof.

A tie-dye clad teen, toting a hand-painted sign reading, “STOP THE WAR.” For Bruce Schulman, a popular professor of 20th century history at Boston University, those images are easily placeable to a distinct period of time: the fervor of the 1920s, the depression-era 1930s, the counterculture of the 1970s.

But when we think about today — the aughts and the 2010’s, so to speak — Schulman isn’t so sure. “We might be able to come up with a similarly resonant image or set of images” for the 2010s and 2020s, he mused, “but I think it will be harder.”

The zeitgeist, as the dictionary definition has it, refers to the “defining spirit or mood” of a particular period in

history, as shown by the beliefs or ideas of that era. But for there to be one singular spirit, there needs to be cohesion, Schulman explained — or at the very least, a universality of awareness of what defines an era.

Today’s zeitgeist isn’t quite so clear cut. For me, a 23-year-old, California-born, graduate student living in Brooklyn, the zeitgeist is a barista working for minimum wage to pay off a college degree. For my roommate, a freelancer in his late twenties, the zeitgeist is an unwinnable war of comparison between himself and those who are seemingly happier and richer. For Nina Standing, a 25-year-old software project manager in the Bay Area, the zeitgeist is centered around doing too much too quickly. “It’s just this insane idea that things are cut and dry. People are no longer comfortable sitting in the grey area,” she said.

Perhaps it’s not that there isn’t a zeit-

Perhaps it’s not that there isn’t a zeitgeist of today, but that there are many geist of today, but that there are many.

Maya Salam, a culture editor at The New York Times, has difficulty pegging one piece of culture that represents us all, but said, “it’d be kind of impossible for us not to be sharing something.”

The art critic Jerry Saltz, who himself inhabits a certain niche of the zeitgeist, said it’s one of those words that nobody really knows how to define — like “Kafkaesque.”

Ramin Setoodeh, the executive editor of Variety, finds the zeitgeist to be in flux, an ever-changing entity driven by buzz. “The zeitgeist is whatever people can’t stop talking about,” he said. It’s the reexamination of feminine icons like Britney Spears and the inscrutable need to buy an NFT without fully understanding exactly what it is.

Zeitgeist is a term of German origin, with zeit meaning “time,” and geist meaning “spirit,” derived from the pro-

to-Germanic gaistaz, meaning “ghost.”

The “zeitgeist” morphed into an American concept a century ago, in large part with the emergence of mass media. Suddenly, we had a sense of shared ideologies and beliefs — or, at least, we were watching the same shows on television.

It is difficult for Schulman to summarize the zeitgeist of different periods, but here’s a crash course: The 1920s were defined by the embrace of modernity — from washing machines and vacuum cleaners to motion pictures and automobiles. The 1930s and 40s had the Great Depression and WWII, while the ‘50s were all about booms: baby boom, economic boom, suburban boom, and also the widespread fear of nuclear annihilation under the shadow of the Cold War. The 1960s and 70s were a time of political protest, cultural rebellion and experimentation, while

Every genre, subculture, and fandom are now easily accessible. the ’80s have us Ronald Reagan, Madonna, and Gordon Gekko.

Some of the zeitgeist of these eras is shared across time periods — like the fight for racial justice or women’s rights. While other times, our understanding is subject to change. There’s no widespread agreement on the defining characteristics of the last three decades, according to Schulman — though the ’90s probably had “something to do with computers and the information revolution.”

Today’s zeitgeist is driven by the mass expansion of media with the internet.

But while technology has made us more connected, it’s also made us more different. A stockbroker in Indonesia can listen to the same music as a teenager living on the Delaware river. A chef in Mexico can comment on a YouTube tutorial of how to care for a basil plant created by a retired factory worker on

the other side of the planet. A grandmother in South Korea can watch the same television shows as the President of the United States. The internet connects us.

Every genre, subculture, and fandom are now easily accessible. With the proliferation of hyper-specific interests follows the decay of a one-size-fits all mainstream culture. Even for those of us who share niche interests — whether we encounter each other in physical or online communities — it’s more difficult to find people who share more than one or two with you than it once was.

When we are all so extraordinarily different in our experiences of culture, can there be a zeitgeist?

GENERATION ME ME ME ME ME ME ME ME

By Karen Kwon

When did self-indulgence become the norm?

A series of photos, in an Instagram post from October, shows a woman with wavy brown hair in a black minidress striking various model-like poses. Normally for Instagram, this isn’t anything notable.

But, in this series, the woman is posing in front of her father’s open casket. And the caption reads, “Butterfly fly away. Rip Papi you were my best friend. A life well lived.” People on the internet were outraged, arguing that she overstepped on boundaries.

A little over a year before the open casket photos, another person was being taunted on the internet for being insensitive. This time, it was Russian influencer Kris Schatzel, who did a little photo shoot in front of a George Floyd protest while wearing a long black dress and holding a sign that read “Black Lives Matter.” There was a backlash online, calling her out for using the moment for her personal gain. “Stop treating the protests like Coachella pt 17,” wrote the Twitter account Influencers in the Wild in a now-deleted tweet.

Fast forward to the earlier days of COVID-19. In March 2020, fashion blogger Arielle Charnas was in hot water for broadcasting on Instagram live, from feeling unwell to testing positive for coronavirus, then fleeing New York for the Hamptons. Refusing to acknowledge that privilege worked in her favor throughout the process — getting tested when the tests weren’t widely available, leaving the city less than two weeks after receiving a posi-

tive diagnosis — she continued to livestream her day-to-day activity without wearing a mask, until finally, the criticism reached a breaking point, and Charnas issued an apology video.

It seems like, these days, everyone is obsessed with posting everything they see and do online, even under questionable circumstances. Under the name of “personal branding,” people post pictures of themselves working, exercising and hanging out with friends to demonstrate how multifaceted they are. They also post quotes, and sometimes black squares, in solidarity with whatever social movement they support — or claim to support.

Once upon a time, we might have called it narcissism. Perhaps not in the psychological, DMS-diagnosed sense of the word, but in the sense that there was a general feeling that appearing to be self-obsessed, or self-indulgent — particularly during trying times — was something not to aspire to. And yet, these days, it seems, the shame of such indulgence no longer exists. When did narcissism become the norm?

The widely held belief is that each generation is more narcissistic than the previous: Boomers were once called the “Me Generation”; Millennials were the me, me, me generation; Gen Z is supposedly self-absorbed. And a widely circulated 2008 research paper supported this: Americans became more narcissistic over time since 1982.

And people love to blame social media for this phenomenon — and it makes sense that they do. Facebook, one of the first social media platforms to go mainstream, was first created in 2004 when many millennials were still coming of age. The timing certainly seems to suggest that there is at least some correlation between the rise of social media and the increase in narcissism.

“I think social media is providing a platform for more narcassists to be out there in public.”

But when you look into scientific research, that relationship becomes more complicated.

Psychologist Jean Twenge has been writing about social media, narcissism and the generation gap since 2006. In a 2017 essay in The Atlantic, she argued that “the arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives.” When it comes to the relationship between social media and depression, the link is pretty clear: Teens who spend more time on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, according to research from the National Institute on Drug Abuse, which has been tracking teens since the 1970s.

But the relationship between social media and narcissism is less clear than some other mental health traits. Despite many years of research, it is still a widely discussed topic amongst experts.

What researchers do know is that narcissistic people tend to use social media more — which, in turn, means that “people who use social media are more narcissistic,” said Sara Konrath, a social psychologist at

Indiana University who had previously studied the relationship between social media and narcissism. But, “nobody knows the causal relationship. We just know those two go together,” she said.

However, Jessica McCain, a former social psychologist who published a widely cited 2016 review paper about narcissism and social media use, explained in an email that her research suggests that “social media does not MAKE anyone narcissistic,” with an emphasis on make, arguing that we do know something about the causal relationship — that there is no causation.

In their latest work, Twenge, Konrath and others found that the trend in narcissism started heading the other way since the recession in 2008 — that, in effect, narcissism scores of Americans started decreasing. “When we go through collective difficult times,” Konrath said, it actually makes us less narcissistic — in part because hard times help us to focus on others.

So why do we feel like we see more self-centered social media posts lately?

“I think social media is providing a platform for more narcissists to be out there in public,” said Lee Hammock, a TikToker who started making videos about his narcissistic personality disorder at the peak of the pandemic. And he thinks that more people who are narcissistic upped their social media use during the COVID-19 pandemic to find other ways to express themselves and connect with people.

McCain supports that theory. “It’s more that people with narcissistic traits use social media more and in more narcissistic ways,” she wrote in an email.

Which isn’t to say that everyone who is expressing themselves online is guilty of such behavior. These days, especially for younger generations, selfie culture is “a part of what it means to be a person and to have an identity,” said Susan Reynolds, co-founder of an organization that works to promote healthier attitudes toward technology. “The culture these days is telling them that “‘you need to be taking selfies,’ and ‘you need to learn how to curate your photo,’ and ‘you need to know how to look good.’” These behaviors that seem self-obsessive to older folks are now a routine part of young people’s lives.

More than worry about self-indulgence, though, Reynolds thinks that we should be concerned about self-hatred and self-criticism in young people — especially when it is so easy for teens to compare themselves with others via social media. The issue, she said, is comparison culture. “This pressure to do things a certain way … This quantified popularity that you are only as good or worthy as the number of likes or followers you have.”

In the end, narcissism is a spectrum that we all fall on, even though extremes certainly exist. In his 2015 book entitled “Rethinking Narcissism: The Bad — and Surprising Good — About Feeling Special,” Craig Malkin, a clinical psychologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School, argued that there is some narcissism in all of us. And that doesn’t have to be all bad.

“In fact, some narcissism is good — even vital — for us to lead happy, fulfilled, and productive lives,” he wrote.

I QUIT!

BY MICHAEL LOVITO

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I GREW UP ON TUMBLR. WHO AM I IF MY BLOG NO LONGER EXISTS?

BY TRISH ROONEY

At 14, I loved a few things: Harry Styles, high school theater, my Blackberry. But my deepest love was Tumblr.

I was actually late to the Tumblr era. I started a joint account with one of my middle school best friends in 2013 — six years after the blogging platform launched — but from then on I was hooked. I would spend hours reblogging photos of Harry Styles in his Jack Wills sweatshirt era, perfecting my personal Tumblr’s homepage, and writing my own FAQ — as if anyone was going to me about my favorite makeup product or what I was currently listening to on my iPod. Generally, my experience on the platform was defined by staying up half the night in the pursuit of the perfect indie girl blog — ripped fishnet tights my mother would never let me buy, cigarettes I was too afraid to smoke, and the Arctic Monkeys lyrics I wasn’t able to relate to yet. Tumblr was more than a blog platform — it was my teenage identity.

And then one day, and I couldn’t tell you why, I stopped logging in. I eventually forgot my password, replaced the time spent with college applications or my IRL crushes,

and then I couldn’t even find my blog anymore.

I didn’t spend much time thinking about this long lost relic of my middle and high school self until recently. I’m 23 now, and over the past year, while the rest of the world became obsessed with Y2K aesthetics, flip phones and a resurgence of MySpace-style sites — amid a raging pandemic, an ongoing climate crisis and volatile presidential election — I started to wonder what happened to my teenage blog. Perhaps it was the gloom all around us, but nostalgia seemed to permeate while we were stuck inside and so many of us started thinking back to who we were before COVID. It wasn’t just me that was thinking about what it was like to be online before adulthood; it was seemingly a global trend.

So, what happens when a facet of your identity is suddenly lost to the graveyard of the internet? Did I even know who I was without my Tumblr? Did anyone? I decided to find out.

‘I Spent Every Day on That Website’ Tumblr wasn’t the original place for teen expression, nor is it the

only one to have made a lasting impact. For as long as we’ve recognized “teenagers” in society, teenagers have had their own ways to express themselves: scrapbooks from one teenager are now on display at the MoMA, documenting the early days of her career in the 1920s.

Later, it was kids making mixtapes, or burning CDs, scribbling in diaries or making zines — all forms of self-expression that psychologists and researchers say is essential for development. Graffiti found in Pompeii says “we were here” — proof that every group has wanted to leave their mark and let the future know that at one point, they were here.

With the internet, of course, came a new opportunity, a different frontier: instead of a diary, your own site to experiment with how you wanted to present yourself, to post your writing or your art, to learn to code or upload your own photography. Simultaneously public to all, but private, maybe, to those that actually know you.

Ilaria Mangiardi, a 34-year-old copywriter from Milan, remembers the sound of her internet modem booting up, and still speaks to friends she made

on MySpace more than 15 years ago. “Whatever I experienced back then, when I was using MySpace or MSN Messenger, is still with me, in the way I talk to people, in the way I listen to music,” she said. “It’s just the media that I use now that’s different.”

Kate Sloan, 29, a freelance sex and relationships writer and author, said she posted photos of her outfits on Flickr for nearly eight years straight — Aeropostale tees and dresses layered over jeans, glimpses into fads past. “I was really nerdy about it,” she said. Even now, Sloan finds herself nostalgic for the community that was built around “wardrobe remix” (the name of her Flickr group). “I often miss having a community of people to discuss like personal style, but I’ve found that in other spaces,” she said.

“It’s bittersweet in the sense of, like, I have nostalgia for posting on there and for talking to people on there. But much of the utility that I was getting from it has been able to move to other places.”

Meg Showers, a 25-yearold TV producer in Toronto, was a “Directioner” on Tumblr — that is, the nickname for someone who was a superfan of the band

‘What happens when a facet of your identity is suddenly lost to the graveyard of the internet? Did I even know who I was without my Tumblr? Did anyone?’

One Direction. Her blog had more than 15,000 followers, which was huge in teenage terms. “I spent every day on that website — anywhere from, like, three to eight hours. It was all I thought about,” she said, laughing. “And now I don’t think about it anymore at all, and it was such a big part of my life.”

But what lasted in her mind, she explained, was actually the feeling that maybe it shouldn’t have been such an obsession.

“What I would say to my younger self is just, be relaxed. You started doing it to have fun, and it is fun. I didn’t let myself have fun and slow down, and I should have.”

Zach Vitale, 39 and a professional photo retoucher, started a Tumblr blog called “One Tiny Hand” in 2012 at the behest of his coworkers — as a way to break up the monotony at work. The idea was simple: Take photos of celebrities or historic moments, and edit them so that the main

character (say, Kim Jong Un, Tom Brady or Donald Trump) appeared to have… a tiny hand. “People would take cigarette breaks and go outside and I’m not a smoker, and I didn’t even really like being around cigarettes,” he explains.

“So I needed like a 10 or 15 minute thing while I was hanging out in the studio while everyone was out and gone. And this is going to sound crazy, but I didn’t have enough time to like, make two hands tiny.” The first day his blog went up, he went viral on Reddit, reaching the first page.

Software engineer Dianna Navarro, 26, was a die hard Tumblr user back in the day, and now finds herself working at the platform that shaped her. Part of her job now at Tumblr, she said, is to put in practice what her 13-year-old self would have wanted from the site.

“I was looking at my old Tumblr, and looking at my 13-year-old self in the face,” she said of rediscovering her teenage blog.

There were posts of studded high waisted jean shorts and ultra-thin models — the musings of a teenage Filipino girl. She found herself looking back on those posts, with the wisdom of age, and wondering, “What did these posts say about who I was?”

Now, she feels the pressure of working at a social media site where a new generation of young people still congregate to find out who they are. The Tumblr of her day, while providing her with the opportunity to meet other young Filipinos in New York City and find a supportive community, was also marked with the less healthy aspects of teenage life: the ultra-thin models on her feed were symbols of diet culture and insecurity.

“I ended up being exposed to things at such a young age that I’m sure impacted me today,” she said. Part of her job now, she said, is to help make Tumblr a healthier space.

YOUR BRAIN ON SOCIAL It does make sense that these experiences online, at young ages, would feel particularly important, or have a lasting impact: Teenage brains are in a rapid stage of development, which means they

have the tendency to feel things more deeply. The fact that their brains are still adapting is part of why areas for self-expression are so vital in our teenage years.

Showers, the One Direction fan, thinks the explanation for why social media ingrains itself so deeply in the minds of its young users is simple: It can be where they first find others who like what they like. Instead of joining a club at school, or going to an event, or even showing up to a physical space at all, you could search whatever you were interested in — within whatever platform — and it would connect you to people all over the world, instantaneously. It’s the same reason why Mangiardi, the copywriter from Milan, remembers MySpace so fondly, and is the promise that all social media sites seek to keep with their user base: Here, you can find people like you.

“I think high school is the time when you’re so desperately looking for friends,” Showers explains.

“And high school is such a small pocket of the world — like you really don’t have that big of a selection of friends. So you would go anywhere you could to find

friends, and part of that was going to Tumblr. It’s the whole world, it’s people from all over the world that you could be friends with.”

In her case, that meant a group chat of girls she spoke to daily about One Direction, and life in general. It proved to her that other people loved what she loved, and felt the same way.

In a study on teenagers and social media sites, the media and communications professor Sonia Livingstone writes that the “online realm may be adopted enthusiastically” by teens “because it represents ‘their’ space, visible to the peer group more than to adult surveillance, an exciting yet relatively safe opportunity to conduct the social psychological task of adolescence” In other words, online, teenagers can mold themselves into whatever they want to be, like me with my indie-girl wannabe persona when I was actually a geeky, preppy kid. Like The New Yorker cartoon says, it’s true that on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog, you can really be whoever you’d like.

Of course, once you’ve had your place to experiment — and once you inev-

itably outgrow that place — the first instinct is to separate yourself. Livingstone’s paper noted that while younger teens were found to relish the opportunity to play and display themselves — “continuously recreating a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity,” she said — older teenagers tended to favor a plain aesthetic, one that expressed that they were done with performance, and instead more interested in authentic relationships from the offline space to the online space.

Perhaps the next phase, however, the one that has not yet been discussed in the mainstream, is what happens when that space disappears altogether. When, say, LiveJournal gets bought by Facebook. Or when Instagram suddenly becomes part of Facebook.

When, one day, your corner of the internet is suddenly gone — or is, at the very least, unrecognizable from when you used it.

“I will say, it is a little bit weird to think that there is a very expressive part of myself that’s still somewhere on the internet, a part of the internet that’s still very much alive and well, but I’ve left that space,”

said my middle school best friend, and former Tumblr co-blogger, Dayna Tinkham.

“I wouldn’t say that it’s any different from going to summer camp,” she continued. “We both went to summer camp for who knows how many years, and now we’re not going back.

I have campers that are counselors now. There’s weirdly like a piece of me at camp that’s living on.

It’s the same. It feels the same.”

A Trip Down Tumblr Memory Lane To me, that early blog was a formative experience, a first love. I saw it in the way that I wanted to dress, or look, or what shows I watched. It introduced me to “Daria,” it told me I was too fat to wear skinny jeans. My teenage self was always on the other side of the screen.

I decided to track down the first marker of my identity.

First I found “Brownie and Blondie,” the blog I once inhabited with Tinkham, using the Wayback Machine, a digital archive of the internet’s past. It had an anchor themed background, and more dead links than posts, but there were also some time capsules: a

post praising JK Rowling, before she was canceled, some playful, or perhaps wishful, fiction (“ONE TIME MY TEACHER CALLED ME STUPID AND SO I SAID YOU ARE TOO AND NOW EVERYONE IS CLAPPING AND SHE GOT FIRED”). And of course, Tyler Oakley, reigning king of 2013 Youtube and Tumblr for his relatable Youtube Q&As. It was like seeing my humor, my music taste, and my personality, all in their caterpillar stages again.

I had not spoken to my former co-blogger — the “blondie” to my “brownie” — in five years, since we graduated from high school in Toronto. Now 23, she is a law student at Queen’s University in Canada; I’m a student in journalism in New York.

“I feel like I’ve come to terms with the fact that I was really cringy back then,” Tinkham told me, when we got back in touch, first on Instagram and then by phone. “I don’t know if I’d be friends with my younger self.”

Dayna and I never got “Tumblr famous,” which is what the “influencers” of the platform were called before influencer became part of our lexicon. We were never influential to any of our meagre amount of followers.

TU

R L B M

That wasn’t the goal.

We were two awkward teenagers with a blog we liked, and the site was ours to explore.

“Some of my funniest memories from middle school are definitely around Tumblr,” Tinkham explained. “It was really a formative part of all of us growing up. You find those little pockets where your interests are expressed. You can see other people that are just like you, and then bond with the people that are around you that share the same interests too.”

When I think back on my teenage self with my 23-year-old brain, it’s with joy, not cringe.

Somewhere on the internet of the future, another version of myself exists, and looks back at who I am now with the knowledge they’ve gained in however many years of internet usage, photos, tweets, posts, and life that has happened from now. I hope they’re kind to me.

IS IT TOO SOON TO LAUGH?

By James Pothen

This is comedy in the darkest era of our lifetime.

“He’s bombing real hard,” Quinlan Prieb whispered. “You can tell he’s new, like less than 3 months.” It was Open Mic night at the Black Cat LES and a “wannabe comic” — at least, that’s how Prieb, 25, another wannabe comic, referred to him — was riffing on some never-ending Human Resources drama. The crowd sat there politely, not laughing or booing. Prieb had brought me out into a dark November night to show me the phantasmagoria of a standup’s life. I was there to find out, what even is comedy anymore?

Comedian and TV Host Stephen Colbert once said, “You can’t laugh and be afraid at the same time,” which would make comedy the perfect antidote to a time in which political divides, a global pandemic, and climate change make hope feel foolish. And yet comedy itself has become controversial. Starting with Chris Rock complaining about college students and trigger warnings in 2014, to the #MeToo revelations of misconduct by Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby, to the recent backlash against Dave Chappelle’s Netflix special “The Closer,” it seems comics are

getting in trouble for something they said or did. Instead of holding the powerful to account, they themselves are being held accountable for their own faults and hypocrisies.

The backlash over certain jokes has drawn cries of “cancel culture” by established comedians. But for comics from historically marginalized groups, these battles are showing the flaws in an industry rife with sexual harassment, blackballing, and racism. South African comedian Karmen Naidoo, noticed a shift in audiences after the COVID-19 pandemic began. She says that post-lockdown audiences have a new interest in learning about social justice issues and that their attention is on the stories she tells and less on her jokes.

“They’re not really wanting to hear the jokes,” said Naidoo, 36, who is of South Asian descent and moved to New York from South Africa in 2016. “They want to hear your story. I think they’re more interested in the story. They support you more because of your whole backstory. That’s more interesting.”

Naidoo has found fresh life for old jokes that were too

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha h progressive before. And since she chooses to base her comedy on her own experiences, she has license to make jokes about difficult topics.

“I try and be authentic and all my stories are based on real experiences,” said Naidoo. “When you are telling a joke, when it’s based in truth and in your personal experience, it’s very hard to point a finger and cancel [you].”

Comedian and musician Dylan Adler, 25, agrees. He recently did a show called, “Rape Victims are Horny Too.” He says that his experience as a rape survivor give him the credibility to do comedy about that topic.

“I am talking about an experience that I’ve lived through and that I know,” said Adler. “I am a gay person. I am Asian.

And I have experienced rape trauma. So I and other people who’ve experienced that have a right to make comedy and talk about their own experience.”

The rule of personal connection is what gives comedian and writer Gastor Almonte confidence that he won’t get canceled. The East New York native says that if he doesn’t have a connection to a topic, he won’t make jokes about it.

“I don’t speak about stuff that I feel like I don’t have a personal connection to,” said Almonte. “I

feel like you need to be a part of the world in order to address it.”

Comedian and TV host Jon Stewart said at the 2021 New Yorker festival, “[We comedians] criticize, we postulate, we opine, we make jokes.

Now other people are having their say. That’s not cancel culture, that’s relentlessness.

We live in relentless culture.”

Relentless indeed. Stewart’s remarks came just two weeks after “The Closer” was released. A couple of weeks after that, The Hollywood Reporter published an article entitled, “Why #MeToo Hasn’t Transformed the Standup Scene.”

The story starts with Mona Shaikh, a Pakistani-American standup comic, recalling how she was sexually harassed after performing a set at a club.

In an interview, Shaikh said that the real cancel culture is not comics facing repercussions for offensive jokes, but industry blackballing victims of harassment who spoke up.

“That is cancel culture: you black balling me because I spoke about justice, because I spoke up about something that’s wrongly done to me,” said Shaikh. “And now I’m being blackballed and I’m being deprived of the work because I spoke up.”

For New Jersey-born come-

ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha h

a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha dian Anthony DeVito, 39, it’s all about writing the best joke possible. DeVito got his start writing jokes before taking his comedy to the stage. He suggests that part of the problem with modern comedy is that podcasts have pushed comedians to be more pundits than prophets.

“The role of comedy in my opinion was always to be funny first above all other things,” said DeVito. “There is this propensity to be a philosopher up there now, which is a little bit troubling. I think to some degree podcasts are the impetus for that. Comedy’s become a very hot take arena. It used to be that comedians pose questions but don’t have the answers.”

DeVito got his start writing jokes, then transitioned to standup. For him, a good joke makes any topic approachable. But it has to be done with care and cultural sensitivity. Unlike those who worry that changing rules will stifle

comedy, DeVito believes that the new constraints will result in better jokes. This will likely mean more storytelling based on personal experiences and identity, and staying away from topics where a comic does not have a deep connection.

“It’s not just approaching that [taboo] subject and being like, ‘Man, aren’t I edgy? I’m talking about this when I’m not supposed to.” You still need a really good joke. I don’t think anything’s off limits. If it’s funny enough, it won’t matter.”

“I think all these things weirdly make comedy better,” DeVito said. “If you can rise above the challenges that are presented, the work is going to be even stronger.”

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TRAUMA USED TO BE TABOO

By Abigail Gruskin

Now it’s normalized, even celebrated. This is “trauma dumping.”

At the end of October, Katrina Wright, 26, took to one of her multiple fitness-focused Instagram accounts, @collegecleaneating, to explain how living with bipolar disorder, which she was diagnosed with when she was younger, can make her feel like a “ticking time bomb” — both in her own life and in the lives of those whom she loves. Beneath a seminude portrait of Wright on her bed, knees hugged to her chest, with her eyes closed, she wrote: “The words running across my mind ‘you’re a burden on everyone, get over it. Be better, do better, and just be happy.’”

Wright is the founder of two businesses, a meal plan and fitness training program called “The Sculpt You” and a mental health and life-coaching platform called “The Self Care Space.” But her online presence — where she boasts over a million followers in total — is not just limited to workout regimens or parodies of awkward encounters at the gym. She often speaks candidly about her mental health struggles, including anxiety and depression, bipolar, and her history of disordered eating. “I’m sharing this story because I needed to read this story,” Wright said, explaining how she often felt alone in her own mental health challenges growing up.

If you live on the internet these days, you might have heard the term “trauma dumping.” It’s a relatively new title for a not-so-new concept: the idea of broadcasting one’s personal, and sometimes very intimate, hardships to the world. But in recent times, the sharing of such hardships — mental health struggles, self-harm, abusive relationships or eating disorders, all bucketed under the “trauma” label — seems to have entered new territory.

On TikTok, it’s not uncommon to come across videos of people following choreographed routines beneath somber text about the losses of loved ones or of eyes gleaming with tears as someone talks about a tragic accident, like a drunk-driving crash. On Instagram, people document their battles with eating disorders by showing “then vs. now” photos of their bodies or with captions documenting the time that’s passed since their last hospital visit.

For Wright, the act of sharing is about making it OK to share; not shrouding the difficult parts of life, or running a business, in secrecy.

Many of her followers say it’s exactly why they continue to keep up with

“It is much like just going and vomitting on another human being.” her — sometimes even sharing their own diagnoses in the process. “I just met a girl in the gym who said, ‘I saw your post about bipolar…thanks for opening up the conversation so I can talk to my boyfriend about it,’” she said.

Sharing one’s trauma or hardships, it seems, is no longer taboo.

Among some, it’s even popular.

Psychologists define “trauma dumping” as the act of divulging details of traumatic experiences to an audience who may not want to hear it, or be equipped to handle it, and often in a setting that’s not appropriate for healing — which, some say, has the potential to be damaging for everyone involved.

And yet there may also be benefits to sharing thoughtfully, like feeling heard and reassuring others that they’re not alone. For those who post about their own traumatic experiences, or mental health struggles, opening up can be freeing — and even forge community.

“All I want to do is have other people feel seen,” Wright said.

The term “trauma dumping” gained traction online earlier this fall after a therapist’s TikTok video on the topic went viral. (In the video, the therapist, who’s since deleted her account, seems to misunderstand the colloquial use of the term and

implies that it’s a burden when patients speak at length about trauma in a first session of therapy.) But long before “dumping,” there was “oversharing,” said Carla Manly, a clinical psychologist who runs her own practice in Sonoma County, California.

“Trauma dumping,” she said, is “a fairly new term for an old concept.”

Opening up can be healthy — especially in therapy, according to Micheline Maalouf, a licensed mental health counselor who addresses topics like anxiety and emotional well-being with her followers on Instagram and TikTok. But in a non-therapeutic setting — say, a coffee shop, or Instagram — it’s often the over part of the sharing that can become a problem.

Manly says it’s about consent, which we don’t tend to think about in an online space. Is the person who’s receiving — or scrolling past — your story in the right mental or emotional space to hear about it? Is a public forum really the best place to share?

“When we look at trauma dumping,” Manly said, “it is much like just going and vomiting on another human being instead of saying, ‘Hey, do you have a barf bag?’”

Then again, social media offers the ability to keep on swiping, or scrolling, doesn’t it? “Trauma

dumping depends more on the person that’s receiving the information than on the person who is giving the information,” said Dr. Melissa Shepard, a psychiatrist who’s also popular on Instagram and TikTok. In her mind, it’s about setting boundaries.

To Post or Not To Post In November, Paul Jinsung Kim, a 21-year-old student in his senior year at Georgia State Univer-

sity, turned to TikTok to describe his long history of struggling with body image and his more recent eating disorder, or “ED” for short.

In a video, which he has since removed, Kim plays the part of a person who asks, “How’d you lose all that weight?” as Billie Eilish’s “Burn” plays in the background.

The video cuts to Kim, as himself, in a dark room, his head in his hands beneath the written response: “missed meals with fam-

ily, ED’s, and self loathing.” The kicker: “It wasn’t worth it.” The TikTok video garnered over half a million views in only a few days.

Kim, who is Korean-American, explained that growing up, his mother served him meals as a form of showing love. Days after he posted the video, his mother, who follows him on TikTok, came into his bedroom — he’s been living at home with his parents during the pandemic — to ask in Korean what had been going on.

“It had me sweating buckets,” he said. “I was just like, ‘What do you mean?’ Just awkwardly scratching my neck, not looking at her.” But in that moment, she offered her support — and Kim felt that she was there for him, to talk about whatever he might want to. “As soon as she walked out my door,” he said, “it made me shed a tear, low key.”

Part of the reason for sharing, Kim said, was to encourage such difficult conversations — and his video brings to light the demographics of who can suffer from disordered eating. (The National Eating Disorders Association estimates that men account for one third of all people with eating disorders — though they’re stereotypically associated with women.)

“Men have always been told to keep it to themselves,” Kim said.

Serena Leyni, 25, who lives in northeast Scotland, turned to TikTok after the end of a ro-

mantic relationship — and multiple friendships, too, she said — during the pandemic. In one video, Leyni sings along to Julia Michaels’ “What A Time,” her cheek wet from tears. Text over the nine-second video, which has been viewed more than 3 million times, describes the experience of waking up while being sexually assaulted by a former partner — a memory that she said returned to her in a flashback.

Initially, Leyni said, she’d shared videos of herself dancing to celebrate the end of that relationship, but was scared to share more. “I left it in my drafts,” Leyni explained. “I’d go back and then I’m like, ‘Should I post it?’” She did, ultimately, on two separate occasions, and said the feedback from others has been uplifting. “It feels good to be able to speak up without actually having to speak,” she said.

Dr. Shepard, a psychiatrist who also teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, believes that the apparent proclivity for sharing trauma online might be influenced by the influx of people talking openly about their experiences in the immediate wake of tragedies, like shootings. In 2018, students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School started the #NeverAgain movement on Twitter — a foray into activism following the Florida school shooting that made na-

tional news. Celebrities speaking out about trauma have similarly acted as a catalyst, according to Manly. In Hollywood, the #MeToo movement spurred actresses to speak about their endurance of workplace harassment and assault; in many cases, the accused faced consequences.

The COVID-19 pandemic also likely contributed. Cases of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders rose by 53.2 million and 76.2 million, respectively, across 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the pandemic, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “People were isolated; they were looking for answers,” Maalouf said.

Maalouf has witness this firsthand; her TikTok videos on mental health topics occassionaly elicit comments expressing thoughts of suicide — and she grapples with the responsibility she has as a therapist on social media. “I’ve kind of struggled with, ‘What do I do with these comments?’” she said.

Rather than deleting them — which she initially contemplated, fearing that they could be triggering to other viewers — Maalouf responds with mental health crisis resources, like hotline numbers. She also believes in the use of “trigger warning” labels — often shortened to “TW” on social media — as a way to share in-

formation conscientiously. “That way,” she said, “people have the option to choose whether or not to watch your video.”

The Economics of Vulnerability If social media and the internet have “always been a place for oversharing,” as Shannon Palus, Slate’s health and science editor, believes they have, then what’s new about now?

“It’s increasingly becoming a place to sell stuff,” Palus, 31, said, “and to sell one’s story.”

Gillian Davenport, who graduated last spring with a master of arts in anthropology from the University of Colorado Boulder, has spent the last few years studying the online world, from examining college students’ use of dating apps to analyzing the branding and money-making strategies of Instagram influencers. Since social media’s conception — but especially during the pandemic, Davenport said — appearing “vulnerable” has become an asset to those hoping to connect with followers.

“It was no longer in fashion to share everything that you had, everywhere that you traveled, all of the luxurious things you could do and afford,” Davenport, 25, explained. “If you weren’t willing to share things that were hard on social media, it made you seem disconnected and hardened.”

Meanwhile, there’s been a greater focus on what constitutes trauma itself, according to Dr. Shepard. She says there are two kinds of trauma: “Big T” trauma — of the kind that the DSM defines as life-threatening (and which is linked with PTSD) — and “little t” trauma, or the more subjective, everyday hardships that we all face, to varying degrees, but tend to describe using the same term.

“Our understanding of trauma has changed significantly over the past several years and will continue to change,” Dr. Shepard said.

But sometimes, using medical jargon on social media might be a means to a more self-serving end. “If you diagnose everybody with trauma, then you expand your customer base,” said Palus, who recently wrote about the use of the term “trauma response” on TikTok. “There’s a profit incentive behind that.”

And the link between profit and trauma is not always so transparent. “Everyone knows that influencers use that platform to make money,” Davenport said.

“So then when they share things that are traumatic, they’re not

necessarily making money off of those posts or those stories…But, it’s that sharing that creates those bonds with their followers, that makes their followers continue to engage with their content, where they do make money.”

Davenport notes that “influencers” often get a bad rap for pursuing profit on social media — but “staying relevant is their income, so do we blame them?”

When Katrina Wright was younger, she recalls her parents advising her to keep her mental health diagnoses under wraps. Revealing that she has bipolar disorder, she remembers them saying, had the potential to end her career before it started. She’s wondered if broaching the topic on Instagram could drive away potential romantic partners, too; that “boys would be like, ‘Oh my god, you have bipolar? You’re a crazy psycho.’”

Now, Wright posts frequently about her current relationship — and has decided that anyone unable to accept her “journey” isn’t worth her time. Engagement with followers on topics from healthy relationships to depression also drives her business. “Anything that people really resonate with on the page — could be breakups — we’re like, OK, this content is what people really need.”

Still, Wright explained, sharing responsibly can at times require self-censorship. “There are

some details of my past I do not post on the internet,” she said.

Sometimes, she spends over an hour crafting the perfect caption.

“When it comes to eating disorder content, I really sit with how I’m wording something,” she said.

Cassandra Earle, a journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, has experienced a positive impact on her work life from opening up about personal hardship on social media in a slightly different way. On a dedicated Instagram page, @her_uterus, she’s posted about surgeries, about pain caused by endometriosis (and the medical dismissal of her pain), and about unsolicited questions regarding her health that she wishes she were never asked.

Sharing feels fulfilling, she said, in part because it helps others. “I wish that I had the support, hopefully, that this community gives to other people,” Earle, 21, said. “I would have killed — killed — to have this account when I was, you know, 13, 14, 15.”

And so far, it’s only helped her career. In her current job, working at a media incubator at her school, she said, she shared her account with her now-boss when asked what she did in her free time. “That is how you got that job,” she recalled him telling her, “because I saw how passionate you were about it.”

‘THEY LOOK AT ME LIKE I HAVE TWO HEADS’

BY MOLLY WILCOX

Five New Yorkers on their passions, fears, and what they admire — and just don’t get — about those “other” generations.

NICK SALEM, 22

mance I could even get near to.

And I felt like I was really sharing something.

What was most important to you growing up?

Being liked and being patient.

Now what’s important to me is that I wake up with purpose, that I havwe something exciting to do, even if what excites me is doing nothing that day.

What scares you?

I’m scared of guns and I’m scared of never earning respect in my industry.

Prospect Heights, Brooklyn He’s a bike messenger and senior at NYU, originally from Kansas.

What excites you?

I am excited about art, and music, and theatre and film, and all that: performance. I write music.

I share. I busk. I’m not technically busking right now, but I go to Central Park with an actual amp so you can hear me, which felt actually really special during the pandemic, because it was the only kind of a form of perfor-

What’s something you admire, or don’t understand, about your parents’ generation?

I admire how hard my parents work. I think they had more of a desire to make something of themselves than our generation.

I don’t understand how my parents keep things from each other. When I talk to my mom about the kind of relationship I want, where there’s open communication and no secrets, she told me she totally disagreed and “secrets should be kept.”

FERNANDO FLORES: 41

Jackson Heights, Queens He works as a food runner at a restaurant and is originally from the Puebla region of Mexico.

What was most important to you growing up?

I grew up in a place that was very different from here. In Mexico, you were just working all the time. We grew up on the land, farming corn and beans over and over and over, and one day you grow up and you say, “What else is out there?” You start imagining, like, “How is New York and how is the United States?” You hear about jobs and money. We work hard in Mexico but we’re not getting paid what we’re supposed to be, it’s totally different.

The good thing about New York, even though they don’t like us and say we’re stealing their jobs, [is that] the government takes care of you here. You have benefits. We came here to make the best for my family.

What do you do for fun?

I hang out with family, friends, make some food, and dance. We like parties, you know? The real Mexican food is something you never hear of here, mostly vegetables. Always fresh tortillas.

What’s something about your children’s generation that’s different from your own?

I always tell my son that if something goes wrong for you, part of that is my fault. The lifestyle here in the United States is totally different than ours. I hear a lot of stories. His friends are sad because their parents are always working. I think there’s an age when you can start to work more but when they’re kids, they want to be with you. They want to feel loved and safe. I think the kids in the younger generation are missing the respect. They do whatever they want because – who’s fault? They didn’t have their parents around enough.

ROCHELLE MALTZ: 66

Staten Island She’s a retired IT project manager, originally from New Jersey.

What was your childhood like?

My family came to America before the Holocaust, they came before the turn of the century.

My family lived in Irvington, New Jersey. My father’s family was from Jersey City. But there was a housing shortage in Jersey City after World War II, when the veterans came back. My father was a veteran in World War II, and so they lived in Irvington for a while.

He was originally from the Lower East Side. When we moved back to Jersey City, I knew most of the people there because I was playing with them on the weekends when I would come to visit my grandparents. It was a townhouse. Three bedrooms. And there were a lot of people my age on that block. The block was mostly Jewish, Italian, Irish.

How has the city changed in your lifetime?

The Lower East Side was a very Jewish neighborhood. They had kosher restaurants like Ratner’s and Bernstein, which was kosher Chinese food, Grandparents was kosher, dairy food, but they also had a number of other social restaurants there. Those restaurants are all gone, a lot of the synagogues in the Lower East Side are gone. And there was just a very Jewish feel to New York City.

Tell me about your family.

My family came to America before

the Holocaust, they came before the turn of the century — or they came when they were young. My grandparents on my mother’s side, they knew each other from Poland. They were from the same town. And they both ended up on the Lower East Side. But the point is, they came when they were young. But a lot of other families came as a result of World War II, either to escape the Nazis or after the war. So there were Holocaust survivors. And today that is a lesser group because a lot of them have passed away.

What’s something that’s different for young people growing up today?

One of the things that I don’t understand is sometimes how they view things. You know, they grew up having a lot of things that we didn’t have. We didn’t have computer games, we didn’t have cable TV. But on the plus side, we had friends, and we didn’t need playdates — you just went outside and you had people to play with. My cousin was two doors away. And I feel some of that is missing. Also the freedom to just get around.

From the time I was 11 years old, I went into New York City by myself and Jersey City. And today that just doesn’t happen.

ARIANA PARVIN, 27

Clinton Hill, Brooklyn She’s a personal trainer and entrepreneur, originally from California.

What was most important to you growing up?

Fitting in was really important.

Like, I really felt like middle school was trying to impress people.

What’s important to me now is being fulfilled. I meet so many different kinds of people doing things that I’m sometimes envious of, like having benefits and a job, but a lot of the people aren’t fulfilled in the job that they’re doing, and they leave their jobs and do something like what I’m doing, as a personal trainer. So I’m in a constant state of battle in my mind of: Do I do this other thing?

I remember sports were pretty predominant in my life, since a young age. My earliest memories would be always seeing the ball games on the TV when it was the holidays or something. And then me playing inside of a basketball

court, like three-year-olds running around. I was always playing some kind of sport.

What scares you?

Being alone.

What excites you?

Travel, learning about new cultures, learning new skills, always expanding what I know and learning and reading — that’s exciting to me.

What’s something you admire about your parents’ generation?

I admire the fact that they had this dream that they were like, “I want to achieve this having a home, having a family, a job for 30 years” and they stuck with it.

It takes a lot of grit. That’s like a completely different mindset to have. My dad worked so long for this company that he was able to work from home. And that was maybe more unusual at the time.

So it’s funny to see, it’s so normal now. My grandma watched us when our parents were at work on the days my dad went in.

would come up and say, “Okay, I just made a fresh batch of whipped cream.” And we would go down and have an ice cream soda or sundae.

STU FERBER, 74

Staten Island He’s a retired IT manager, originally from Brooklyn. He and his wife, Sue, have been married for 54 years.

What was important to you as a kid?

I was born and raised in Brooklyn, as was my wife, in the area called Midwood. At a very early age, we moved to Canarsie – which was just being developed from a landfill to modern tract housing. We were the first people in our family to own a home with a driveway. I grew up with 30 or 40 kids on the block. We were out in the streets from morning till night. My mom and dad both worked — we had a candy store.

What was the candy store like?

They had penny candy and they sold tobacco there. There were racks of comics, floor to ceiling. We were allowed to pick out comics, then went up to a small attic area where they had bottles of Coke and Pepsi. We’d sit there for hours. Around 3pm, my dad

What was your first job?

My first job was sorting the different sections of all the newspapers and putting them together.

I had to put The Times together, the Daily News, the Daily Mirror, The New York Post, the Brooklyn Eagle, the New York Herald, the New York Journal, The Tribune, which then became The Herald Tribune. My fingers would be black from sorting that out. But again, I was put to work behind the penny candy counter, which was a blast. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen — I mean, it’s become kind of nouveau now. But all those Penny candies I can, you know, funnily remember.

What’s something you admire, or don’t understand, about this generation?

I have two wonderful daughters, and they always worked.

They understood the meaning of hard work. I feel that maybe this generation has a little bit more entitlement, or a lot more entitlement. But I’m looking at it from an old guy’s viewpoint. On the other hand, they are so much more technologically proficient.

When I have something wrong with my phone, one of my grandkids will fix it. We have a smart TV – that to me is not smart. But my kids, they look at me like I have two heads when I tell them I don’t know what to do.

OUR LABELS, OURSELVES

Agender, vegan, bisexual, autistic, Scorpio, plant lover, goth. How many labels is enough?

BY ALEXIS BATES

Stevie Faye Harrington, 26, uses they/them pronouns and has “changed my gender label like seven times.” A campaign worker in Philadelphia, Harrington explains that “The label I’ve used for the longest is ‘nonbinary,’ but that was because it was easier to explain than ‘genderqueer.’”

Shay Commander, 22, is an animation student in Glasgow, Scotland, whose Tumblr bio notes they are an Aries, an “INTP” (their Myers-Briggs personality type), and have O+ blood. Commander is also a “goth” and nonbinary, though they explained they are actually “closer to agender,” meaning they have no gender.

Jacob Morgan, 19, is an army cadet near Tacoma, Wash., who has gained a dedicated following on TikTok with posts about being a trans man in the army and growing up in a conservative Christian household. His bio lays out his pronouns (he/him), his sexual orientation (“Pan-tastic,” referring to pansexuality), as well as his occupation and his Christian faith, all in a flurry of blue heart and rainbow flag emojis.

Identity is a complex thing.

Even the straightest, whitest, the most cisgender person is made up of dozens of components that comprise their be-

ing. But for a certain segment of the young and online — and in particular, in many queer communities — the drive to self-label has become increasingly common. The path to this kind of self-building begins with a label… or a dozen.

Essentially, the act of self identification — what might have once seemed simple — has become something akin to the Olympic modern pentathlon. For many, gender — and identity more broadly — is not just some stagnant “M” or “F” checkbox on a form, but a place to play, to discover, and to, ultimately, build themselves.

A Gallup poll from early 2021 found that around 5.6 percent of American adults fit somewhere beneath the LGBTQ+ umbrella — the “+” referring to identities not represented by those letters. In early December of 2021, the Human Rights Campaign released a report upping that number to 8 percent, stating “an additional 2 percent of reported participants identified with a sexual orientation other than lesbian, gay, bisexual, and straight.” LGBTQ+, however, is a wide umbrella, encapsulating dozens of smaller umbrellas, spectrums, sub-categories, and subcultures, many of which interlock with other categories in a complex web.

It can be hard to gather information on just how many people, for example, identify as nonbinary (though a recent Pew Research study indicates that over a quarter of Americans know someone who uses nonbinary pronouns) and harder still to suss out what other identities — ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, etc. — they might hold. Once those categories are combined with the other personal labels (knitter, dog person, goth, Doctor Who superfan, whatever) that might be affixed to their Instagram or TikTok bio, you might end up with an almost unquantifiably specific demographic.

But a quick spin through any of those platforms shows that there is someone at every one of those intersections.

Giving Experiences a Language It’s no surprise that social media has become a central component in the process of identity formation, especially for young people who are “already in the stage of identity exploration,” said Monica Gupta Mehta, an educator and founder of an organization called “The Normalizers,” which provides support to LGBTQ+ youth. The online world is dominated by the young and curious, which can make “micro-labeling” seem

like a youth phenomenon. But for any person living at the intersection of multiple identities, it can serve as a way to build community among folks whose experiences are similar — and to draw lines between themselves and those with whom they might have less in common.

Liz McConnell, a psychologist and an assistant professor at Palo Alto University who studies, among other things, the “relational world” of LGBTQ people, explains that language and social media make up two important parts of the way that young queer folks, especially those who might hold many marginalized identities, come together. This is perhaps not a new phenomenon, and McConnell explains that it’s not so much that people are feeling a new way about their identities so much as they have new ways to describe them.

“There’s this incredible menu of options,” she said, adding, “It’s really hard to make visible experiences unless you have language for them.”

Pronouns.page is one of a handful of websites that allows users to pick things off that proverbial menu, creating digital cards that lists the names they would like to be called, the pronouns they are okay with using, and titles like

“I’ve changed my gender label like seven times.”

“Mr.” or “Mx.,” the gender neutral honorific. Created last year by a Polish group called the Neutral Language Collective, the website was initially intended as a list of proposals for non-gendered terms within the Polish language. The ability to make a personal card was added later, and the website grew from there.

“Everybody was like, ‘my Polish card is great, but where do I put my they/them?’” said one of the website’s founders, Andrea Avris, whose own page describes them as agender, pansexual, polyamorous, an athiest, and a naturist.

The website also supports neopronouns, like xie or ey (as in, “Taylor told me xie has been drinking a lot of iced coffee”), “nounself” pronouns, like bun or star, (as in, “Sasha needs to believe in ‘starself’”) and “emojiself” pronouns — used exclusively in text — such as or (like, “I asked on a date, but told me to get lost”). Users can also add one or many brightly colored pride flags to represent their very specific identities.

Some users are judicious in the labels they add, while others can be … flamboyant. Avris

described a user who was having difficulty with the website format. Upon investigation, they discovered that the user had added hundreds of flags to their profile, effectively breaking the formatting of the page.

‘It Feels Good to Understand Myself’ The utility of all of these labels is multifold. For some, it’s about creating a community of other like-minded — or like-identifying — peoples, or alleviating the “sense of aloneness” that can come from feeling like you are the only one in the world with a certain experience, said McConnell. Others might use a semi-anonymous Tumblr page, for example, to move among those whose identities are similar to theirs without involving their real face or name. Some people want to educate their followers, while others might fall somewhere in between.

Shay Commander, for instance, publicizes their nonbinary identity, their goth identity, and their various personality types on Tumblr but does not directly advertise that they are autistic. For those who follow Commander’s page, it’s obvi-

ous — they regularly post jokes and memes about their autism — but Commander is wary of casual harassment by stating it up front. “For the people that stick around, they’ll know.”

For folks like Stevie Faye Harrington and Jacob Morgan, however, the identities they state in their profiles are something of an advertisement: This is what I’ll be talking about, this is what you can ask me about.

Harrington explains that they always are available to explain this to people who come in with good intentions.

In general, all this labeling seems to be a good thing — allowing people to express themselves in a way that is not harming anybody else. But McConnell cautions that focusing too rigidly on putting people into neat boxes — you can be x OR y, not both — can also cause us to lose sight of the ways these identities are “fluid and interdependent,” and can change with time or context.

“There’s no one right way to be any of these identities, and sometimes, our experiences are more complicated than what the

box can hold,” she said.

Gupta Mehta, who runs the support group for LGBTQ+ youth, emphasizes the importance of labels in her own life and process of self-discovery.

She is 43, and had gone most of her life assuming she was straight — or, rather, knowing she wasn’t, but not having the words to describe what she was. It wasn’t until her teenage child, Ash, began to explore their identity that Gupta Mehta figured out her own — she’s pansexual and demisexual, which is to say, she can be

attracted to people of all genders, though in order for her to experience attraction, she needs to have an emotional connection first.

“I’ve been married 21 years. I married my high school sweetheart, and we’re still happy together,” she said, adding, “Basically, it just never mattered to me.”

“But finding it out did matter. It does feel good to understand myself.”

Why Sudd Nos

Are enly

tal

We So

gic

?

BY LEAH FOREMAN

And how much of it has to do with wanting to escape the present?

The first thing Shawn Eric Jones, 38, will tell you about himself is that he’s an actor — one who worked alongside Ryan Gosling in the NASA biopic, “First Man,” in which he played the astronaut Wally Schirra.

But lately, he’s more famous for an Instagram page devoted to all things 1990s — like videos of old ads (think: The Pizza Hut Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles commercial), photo collages of toys like Sonic the Hedgehog 3, or Playskool in-line skates, Pizza Pocket snacks, and odes to TV shows like Frasier. He started the account a couple of years ago; but it really took off in the pandemic, he said.

Rummaging through the pop culture of his youth was his version of baking bread.

“I didn’t know if it would be something that people would follow,” Jones said.

“But I thought, I have fun finding these and kind of doing research on stuff and putting them together, and hopefully people will like it.”

Jones doesn’t seem to be alone in his sudden longing for the past. Maybe it was the boredom of quarantine. May-

be it was a feeling that these were simpler times. But over the past few months throwbacks seem to be everywhere.

Consider the rise of Neopets — the virtual pets that live in the digital realm of Neopia — and the users who won’t let their (digital) animals die, some of them 20 years on. Or Netflix’s recent deal, worth about $500 million, to acquire all nine seasons of “Seinfeld” — the idea, ostensibly, being to bring the series to a younger generation who didn’t experience it the first time. In the music world, there is a swath of films revisiting pop and rock icons of past (Britney; The Beatles; Alanis Morisette), as well as newly announced tours for bands we perhaps thought we’d never see on stage again, like En Vogue, Boys II Men, or Rage Against the Machine.

And then there’s fashion.

Crocs, the 2002 brand behind the spunky plastic shoes, launched a new line in the pandemic, and has seen record sales. Low-rise jeans — the *it* fashion item of the 90s and 00s (perfect for a chunky platform shoe or a flip flop)

—is apparently back too, according to The Wall Street Journal, as are chokers, Doc Martens, scrunchies and hair clips, and second-skin tops.

“There’s a sense of security in the familiar,” wrote Christine Persaud in “Digital Trends” earlier this year, in an article about the boom of nostalgic television viewing.

Culture is cyclical. As Patrick Metzger wrote for The Patterning, there exists a nostalgia pendulum in pop culture — with a time frame of about 30 years.

But this current wave of frenzied nostalgia may be more than a trend.

Tim Wildschut, a professor of social and personality psychology at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, said it may in fact be a reaction to this moment in our lives — a pandemic raging, unemployment at record highs, a climate crisis looming.

“You cope when things happen that are sad, you do the best you can under circumstance[s] to get through it,” said Professor Wildschut.

“And for some people that may be nostalgia.”

A Brief History of Nostalgia The word “nostalgia” has origins that date back

to Ancient Greece, coming from the word nostos (which means homecoming) and algos (which means pain).

The term was coined in 1688

by Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student, when he published a dissertation that contained the German word for homesickness, heimweh.

In English, he called that feeling “nostalgia.”

But while the term was originally used to describe people displaced from their native lands (this was the subject of Hofer’s thesis; in his dissertation, Hofer diagnosed Swiss mercenaries that felt pain from missing home) the definition has expanded vastly since its conception.

Originally in the 17th and 18th centuries, doctors only thought nostalgia occurred to the Swiss, since they were the people that were studied. But by the 19th century, doctors realized this condition was more widespread, and they began to attribute nostalgia to feelings of melancholy or depression. By the mid-20th century, it was considered a psychiatric disorder, with symptoms such as sadness, insomnia, and anxiety, according to Wildschut and his peers.

These days, “nostalgia” is

1.

2.

3.

4..

5.

6.

7.

1. Lip Smackers, 2. Boy Bands, 3.

Lisa Frank, 4. Polly Pocket, 5. Tamagotchi, 6.

JNCOs 7.

Floppy Discs

much more than just a medical disease or psychiatric disorder, it is an emotion — and most often, a useful one.

“It’s a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past,” which can apply to experiences or people, said Professor Wildschut.

Over a decade ago, Wildschut and his colleagues created something called a “Nostalgia Scale” — which is the most widely used way to measure nostalgia today. It assesses how often people experience nostalgia on a daily basis. The scale has found that people tend to have a healthier sense of self-continuity — a sense of oneself when their environment fluctuates — if they nostalgize more often.

As Wildschut puts it, a casual longing for the past becomes nostalgia-related — in more of the scientific sense — when swathes of people need to go back in time, through memories, to escape their current day-to-day life. This, he said, is happening now.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not everyone experiences nostalgia when times are hard — but for some, it can help them find meaning in their lives. According to his research, be-

ing nostalgic increases one’s sense of belonging and reinstills one’s connection between their past and present.

“It reminds you of meaningful experiences that you’ve had in the past, things that give life meaning, make life worth living,” he said.

Longing in the Pandemic In April of last year, a survey conducted by MRC Data found that more than half of TV watchers and music listeners sought out comfort in nostalgic content during the pandemic, in part as an escape from reality and as a way to remain close to loved ones.

“TV and music are top formats for those using entertainment to cheer up with many seeking comfort in familiar, nostalgic content,” the survey said, noting that among those looking for a pick-me-up or escape, 82% are choosing TV. Teens, the survey found, were even more likely than adults to seek comfort in TV or other entertainment during quarantine.

“I do think there is a certain element, particularly to the 1990s, that is appealing,” said Maya Salam, a culture editor at The New York Times, who said she too has found herself longing for the pop

culture of her youth. “And I think especially for those who maybe didn’t know the world at that time, it kind of holds, like, a special energy that really can’t ever be recaptured.”

Brooke Hatchett, 37, who early into the pandemic had to shut down the events company she ran with her husband, said she had recently began enjoying her extensive 1990s toy collection, including Polly Pocket — though these days, she joked, she has to be careful not to let her three children lose any of the parts.

“I’ve always liked Polly Pocket. I’ve always liked Lisa Frank. But I do feel like my love for those types of things has been rekindled during the pandemic,” Hatchett said, noting that she has enjoyed the process of sharing them with her sons. “I do feel I like them more right now.”

While Hatchett passed her time in the pandemic rediscovering her 90s toys with the same whimsy of her children, the mind-numbing boredom of a global shutdown led Aditi Makund, a recent graduate of the University of California San Diego, to develop hobbies that were similarly reminiscent of childhood.

Makund, 23, grew up in a home where her parents took

pictures with disposable cameras, and she fondly recalls going to collect developed pictures with her dad. When she found herself stuck at home in lockdown after graduation — and looking for a new hobby — she decided to experiment again with the analog film she’d grown up on, much of which still sits in her parents’ attic.

“There’s sort of joy that comes with developing the film, looking at it later on. And you anticipate what it will look like and all the time that you put into it, like, ‘Will it pay off?’

Like, ‘Will there be any duds?’” she said. “It’s the surprise element that I really like.”

The Past As a Coping Mechanism It makes sense that people would be inclined to turn to the past for comfort during the pandemic, as it has been a negative, stressful time worth escaping from.

David B. Newman, a social, personality and health psychologist, reached a similar conclusion when he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California, in 2019 . His study, which had students keep a diary for two weeks, found that participants were likely to feel nostalgic when things

weren’t going well in their lives. “There’s a pleasurable or positive aspect associated with that, because you’re reflecting on this positive time from the past,” he said.

Coping, in various forms, has been a major strategy to surviving the extremes of life during a pandemic, which at its worst has seen isolation, sickness and death. Use of nostalgia, and memories have worked like a beacon of light, guiding us through the darkest points of the lockdown, mask mandates and Zoom meetings.

“Some people when they experience sadness, sad events, adversity, they become nostalgic, and nostalgia helps them,” said Wildschut.

“Many people may cope with, for example, bereavement in a very different way. So they may suppress their memories of their loved ones and not want to be reminded of them because it’s too painful. And other people may really enjoy being reminded of their loved ones and nostalgizing about.”

Wildschut laments that nostalgia can happen at any time, to anyone. “This is something people do spontaneously, it’s not something you have to teach people,” he said.

But is there ever such a thing as too much nostalgia?

As Newman noted, there have been plenty of experiments that have documented that too much nostalgia can be a problem because you are looking back on a time that is no longer the present. “And so it is tinged with this sadness,” he said.

In an intense circumstance, nostalgia can be helpful; it is a way to cope with life when reality is too much to deal with. Since the global shutdown, some people got yeast starters and became sourdough savants or exercised their green thumbs, but for others, they found solace in turning back time, if only through memories and nostalgic Instagram pages.

But what would nostalgia look like in a post-COVID world?

“I would imagine that as people are spending more time with other people, those instances could elicit feelings of nostalgia,” said Newman.

“You might be seeing this more kind of negatively or more bitter, nostalgic feeling during the pandemic. And then as we stepped towards out of the pandemic, as public feelings might be relatively more sweet than bitter. That would be my prediction.”

CONTRIBUTORS N

IG S E D E N ZI BY

MEGAN HULLANDER

used to have a YouTube channel in which she remixed pop songs to be about algebra.

Now she is seeking employment covering culture or cleaning the homes of single male celebrities under 40.

ALEXIS BATES was overjoyed to discover her favorite band, My Chemical Romance, was from her home state of New Jersey. In true goth fashion, she hopes to one day cover crime.

ABIGAIL GRUSKIN

is starting a new job as a staff writer at Straus News in January. She shared her first phone, a flip phone, with her younger sister in 4th grade.

As a child,

TRISH ROONEY

wanted to be the first female Prime Minister of Canada.

Now, she would settle for an entry level media job.

MOLLY WILCOX

was grounded for two weeks in middle school for having a MySpace when she wasn’t allowed to. Now, she interns at Cultured Magazine and has been published in Architectural Digest, SFGate, and the Observer, among others.

JAMES POTHEN

‘s first music purchase was a CD of “Calling All Angels” by Train. His dream job is to report on greed in America.

LEAH FOREMAN

got her first American Girl doll in 2007, and her collection of dolls remain in a closet in her parents’ home today. Today, she hopes to land a reporter job covering the intersection of politics and culture.

MICHAEL LOVITO

started his online life early, posting on the Marvel Comics forums under the name “mutantflame” at the age of 12.

Today, he goes by @MLovito on Twitter and is a reporter in search of a job covering politics and culture.

Growing up in Korea,

KAREN KWON

frequented e-sports arenas to watch Starcraft matches.

She’s the associate editor at Optics & Photonics News.