In late summer last year, young people across the German-speaking world met by the dozens in parks and public squares. At a designated time, they took out small cups of pudding and plastic forks, then used the latter to eat the former. They did it because someone posted to TikTok that it would be a fun thing to do.
Pudding mit Gabel Essen was silly fun, and from the participants I’ve spoken to, no one there thought much of it beyond that. Observers, however, weren’t as restrained. In the press coverage I read, analysts described the gatherings as symptoms of the international loneliness epidemic, rebellion against the collapse of the old order, and a way to forget the troubles of the world for a moment. It wasn’t enough that there were Pudding mit Gabel get-togethers or that the participants had fun, the entire concept needed to be an Event—packed with meaning. The people describing it as an event, as far as I could tell, did not attend. They watched online.
Concurrent with Putting mit Gabel was “six-seven.” Young people said it, older people were confused by it, and hundreds of commentators raced to explain what it meant. I saw analyses calling it a secret language, a triumph of postmodernism, and a failure of postmodernism. No one could agree on what it meant because it didn’t mean anything. Still, lots of people wanted it to mean something. None of these people were the ones who said “six-seven,” though. They were older.
In December, the musician Cameron Winter played Carnegie Hall. I’m sure the people in attendance liked the music, but I didn’t hear anything about it from them. The critics, writers, and podcasters I follow who went to the show mostly described it as a momentous occasion. They mentioned that Paul Thomas Anderson was filming it, that aftermarket tickets cost four-figures, and a few said they felt guilty for posting photos from the show instead of enjoying it. Pretty much everyone compared the show to a young Bob Dylan’s performance at the same venue decades earlier. This comparison wasn’t based on music, but on the attendees’ assurance that this would be a world-historic event. At least one person called it “generation defining.” Which generation? It wasn’t clear.
Critics tend to look for connections, patterns, or meaning, but it seems that everyone with a column, handful of followers, subscriber list, or a USB microphone is looking through a critic’s lens with a hopeful eye. There’s a desire, mostly among people over thirty and especially among people over thirty five and under fifty, to understand every new occurrence in the timeline of history. Armies of online millennials are hoping to prove cause and effect through brute force hot take posting, even when there is no cause and the effect is hardly worth noticing.
A few posts from disappointed fans are labeled a “backlash” (to a new Taylor Swift album or a new season of Stranger Things). A reasonable point of disagreement is seen as a souring of consensus (to a new Paul Thomas Anderson movie). This is beyond the usual overhyped trend-spotting of the early 2000s, when three people wearing a certain cut of jeans could inspire a few articles. This is a search for meaning that leads to applying a label to anything and everything that exists. Overzealous cultural taxonomy combined with armchair sociology.
The result of this isn’t a deeper understanding—it’s the exhaustion that comes from confusion. We’re panning for gold miles from the seam. Meanwhile, culture is being crushed under the weight of expectations.
I have a few theories for why this is happening…
One: Commentary Travels Faster and Farther than Art
I said it a couple paragraphs ago. There are a lot of people posting online. They post to platforms that are thirsty for Content. These platforms amplify whatever gets a reaction. Creating new culture or art is difficult and risky. Sounding off is fast and fun.
Plus, all of this Content is ephemeral. How often have you seen a Reel or a TikTok video and then, when you try to find it later, it’s gone…lost in a sea of Content that’s made unnavigable by its size and by poor search capabilities? Why bother making anything deep enough to warrant watching again?
Commentary and criticism are both valuable, but this value comes from consideration and conviction, neither of which the platforms reward. Saying any old nonsense to get a little bit of attention paid forward to your next bit of nonsense is the winning strategy.
Two: Nothing Means Anything
We’re in a crisis of meaning. Meaning—as in the importance embedded in an object or an occurrence—often comes from effort. Effort, in the form of time or energy, is worth something. This is pretty much the basis of our economy, but you can apply it to the intangible value of cultural goods. If you work hard to make money to afford a CD, you’ll have a different relationship to the music than if you stream it for (almost) free. If you have to carve out time and make a trip to go the store to try on a shirt before you buy it, it’ll mean more to you than next-day delivery of a one-click purchase. Going to the movies isn’t like watching TV. Streaming isn’t like going out to rent a video.
It also doesn’t help that the streaming business model thrives on passive consumption of background noise or that ecommerce is so often built on race-to-the-bottom sacrifices of quality for quantity. It’s easy to find stuff, harder to find the good stuff.
Automation and ease have pulled the need for effort out of so many parts of life, the biggest struggle is affording all the costs of living. The rewards of this work are diminished, the comforts are cold. Of course there’s a desire to give everything meaning.
This didn’t happen overnight. Meaning drained away slowly. We gave up on effort naturally. The emptiness of the new experiences, the isolation of the easier technology, snuck up on us.
Three: We Label By Default
Of course we’re more likely to see everything as an event. Anyone under a certain age grew up with the idea that they needed to have a Personal Brand—a label for themselves that could travel easily online. For years, we put all our activities—from work meetings to casual hangouts—into Google Calendar with a start and end time. We sent e-vites for dinner parties and made Facebook pages for college movie nights. When we pay bills or clean our apartments, we call it “adulting.” We gleefully attach the suffix “maxxing” to any show of effort. Even laying around needed a brand—“bedrotting.”
When activities have so little meaning and seemingly no consequence, then labels are a way of showing they exist, of trying to impart some kind of importance because there’s a word for it.
The rush to make everything an event leaden with meaning coincided with the rise of “performative” as a descriptor of just about every activity. A guy reading in public was a “performative male.” Any action—or any political stance—that didn’t seem to align with a previous lifetime’s worth of leadup was performative. Pointing out that there’s an element of performance inherent in public existence was performative. Everything has a label, and nothing seems authentic.
Each of these theories is connected; they’re part of the same tech-driven Way We Live Now.
My concern is that this cycle is only going to get worse and push us further away from enjoyment of events or art or culture. In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag argued that the search for a true meaning focuses on what a work of art says, while simply experiencing that work of art focuses on what it does. When art, culture, or even silly teenage hangouts become first and foremost things to be analyzed and defined—when we expect them to say something in particular—they stop being whatever it is they were in the first place, and they can no longer do whatever it is they need to do. We approach them with the expectation that they will make us feel a certain way.
This is bound to cause disappointment.
