Ya'll wannaa quit yo vent vomit
just here, pulling apart a social media trend like an old person...
I’ve noticed this thing on the socials. It’s a trend - a vibe shift - that sees my various feeds full of non-sensical memes that share the most inane and often gripe-y happenings at rapid-fire speed in a truly strange ghetto-diverse shorthand. It’s a sort of frothy spewing forth of sloppy innocuousness. And it’s a thing. Like, it’s occurring not apologetically nor out of necessity, but as a stylistic affectation.
So we’re talking TikTok videos that “accidentally on purposely” cut off awkwardly or are spliced up and deep etched in the most haphazard and messy fashion. And Twitter reshares on IG with captions that disregard all grammatical and punctuation protocols and work to a mash-up of different minority groups slang. It’s like the brevity and shorthand that was once required on Twitter when tweets were 140-or-less has carried on as a self-conscious trope. You have 280 characters now, people, feel free to insert apostrophes and commas!
It’s not as though real urgency is the issue at play here. I mean, we’re talking predominantly and characteristically dumb shit that - truly - does not have to be shared. Plus, I do think that it often takes more effort to make these chaotic shares look sufficiently chaotic than it would to put them through a grammar check. As I say, it’s affectation.
Have you noticed the same? I mean, I’m writing about this as a trend that I’ve not seen fully articulated anywhere, so do correct me if I’m wrong. I might be missing something significant…🤷🏻♀️?
The content itself is achingly everyday - observations from the couch kinda stuff, often overshares and laments about life’s minutae. Memes have done rounds for years, but they definitely escalated during the pandemic lockdowns, in tandem with the rise of TikTok, which is Ground Zero for Minutae Celebration. And so the recent influx (and it’s all definitely dialled up in the past year) mostly vents about domestic annoyances, deficient partners, the stupidity of the sexes and unreliable friends. It’s shouty and and self-referencing…the language of people cooped up together for too long.
Honestly, it reminds me of a road trip with my siblings where all we’d talk was dumb “in jokes”.
What s it al ‘bout?
Clearly it reflects the need for intimacy and belonging. Humans have always needed to overshare life minutae as a way to signal, “Hey, we are all in this together, right!”. I edited women’s magazines for years; the more granular the pet peeve aired, the more traction you’ll get from readers.
Perhaps it also represents a rebellious sidestep from the sanitised, overly precise world that technology has created. The messiness is a salve.
The memes are also often funny and clever, although mostly for those in the know. The trend is like one big online “in joke”. You have to know the context and secret grammatically abhorrent language and abbreviations to “get it”. (I notice a lot of the memes are prefaced with, “you’ll only get this if [insert exclusive demographic]”.)
But there’s a dark side…
It all signals “I don’t care”.
And this terrifies me. In fact the worth of these memes - comedic, intimate or otherwise - is by virtue of the fact that they’ve been so obviously created and shared with a chaotic, “who cares” vibe. They’re funny in inverse proportion to the amount of consideration put into creating and broadcasting them, and in direct relation to the sheer volume of them.
Yes, that’s the other thing…it’s about gross content.
The information contained in the memes is not curated or care-fully hand-selected. It’s everything all at once in a mass damping for the sake of mass dumping and overshariness.
It is content spilled onto the page screen to just get content out there, off your mind, out of your psyche. It’s good to vent! My vent matters! Now let me bludgeon you with it. The
And so, I call it, as of about 2 minutes ago, “vent vomit”.
Why is this such a problem? It plays into the hands of the Big Social Giants who want us to do exactly this - bludgeon their feeds with content - to keep the algorithms going.
It’s like we are their unsuspecting worker lemmings, obligingly producing content, producing content, producing content…and feeding their beast.
Plus it’s an attention-suck.
Like excessive tattoo acquiring, I feel my main concern with vent vomit is that it entails a lot of time and resources that could so desperately be used for better pursuits - like saving the planet, or conversing with discernment and questioning our worker lemming situation!
Vent vomit is so starkly yet another distraction. The faster and more furiously we post, and the less we care and the less we consider and discern, the more we allow the planet to burn, polarisation to widen, kids to suffer, humanity to regress and potentially wipe itself out… because we weren’t paying attention!
And of course the algorithms are favouring this fast, furious, inane, distracting chaos. I risk sounding like a conspiracy theorist here, but the Big Social Giants have a vested interest in keeping us distracted by chaos (and some might argue the Chinese-owned TikTok particularly so).
Finally, it’s nihilistic
This disregard for polishing prose, crossing a few tees and developing meaningful content seems to say to the world: The f@cking planet is burning, nothing makes sense anymore, earnest activist messages don’t cut through, so here’s some insouciance in the face of it all.
It’s like it’s a nihilistic counter to the absurdity of it all. Again, a little like excessive tattooing.
But vent vomit chatter is dangerous
There’s another dimension of consternation here, which my Wild interview with neuroscientist Ethan Kross (published just this morning) brings to light.
Kross is an expert in the mechanicians of our inner voice chatter. Vent vomiting is pretty much our inner voice chatter shared to everyone’s feeds. Ethan argues that our chatter is one of the most dangerous things we face (you’ll have to listen to the interview to understand why).
However, a key takeaway from the interview is that venting our inner voice’s gripes and ruminations invariably ends badly. We’ve been long told to “share what’s on our minds” and that our chattering is “better out than in”. But as Ethan says:
“In the nineteen-eighties, the psychologist Bernard Rimé investigated what we’d now call venting—the compulsive sharing of negative thoughts with other people. Rimé found that bad experiences can inspire not only interior rumination but the urge to broadcast it.
“The more we share our unhappiness with others, the more we alienate them: studies of middle schoolers have shown that kids who think more about their bad experiences also vent more to their peers, and that this, in turn, leads to them “being socially excluded and rejected.”
Plus, as an interesting and reasonably relevant aside, when we seek out empathy from others, our intense desire to soothe the psychological effects of our problems derails our search for solutions. Yep, an attention suck.
A Quaker antidote
As a final thought, while researching another upcoming guest on Wild, I found myself digging around the whys and wherefores of the Quaker movement. (Want to guess who the guest might be? I’ll send a copy of my book to anyone who gets it right!)
From my diggings, I came across some passages from Rex Ambler’s bookThe Quaker Way. In a typical Quaker meeting, Ambler writes, community members:
“Sit in silence together for an hour or so, standing up to speak only if they are led to do so, and then only to share some insight which they sense will be of value to others.”
If they must decide an issue collectively:
“They will wait in silence together, again, to discern what has to be done.”
“To get a clear sense of what is happening in our lives, we Quakers try to go deeper. We have to let go our active and fretful minds in order to do this. We go quiet and let a deeper, more sensitive awareness arise.”
Indeed, we have to let go. We must go quiet.
I feel this is a responsibility now.
The vent vomit chatter is dangerous.
The “active and fretful” imperative of Big Social is destroying us.
It’s insane. But we can change. We need to stop off the lemming conveyor belt and say, no. People are slowly, but steadily, coming off Twitter. Millennials are quitting influencer life. “Dumb phones” (mobiles without apps) are on the up with young people.
And we can go to a Quaker meeting. (Anyone here a Quaker? Do you feel led to say something?
Me, I’m steadily shifting my focus to podcasting (longform interactions) and to being here on Substack, a chunder-free zone. Please do tell your friends about this community…I’d love to create change together.
Sarah xx
Thanks for your perspective Sarah. Personally I’ve never understood criticism of ‘bad’ grammar and spelling. It feels elitist to me but I am a terrible speller and do not understand grammar so there is defiant bias there.
Many of us who speak English as a first language weren’t taught grammar unless we learned a second language. In Australia apparently a pedagogical decision was made not to teach grammar directly because we’d learn it through reading. I’m 35 so it might be different for other age groups.
I feel like critique of grammar can serve to gate-keep and limit the voices we hear from. Social media let’s people self publish, regardless of grammar, spelling, education level or the quality of the school you went to. Shakespeare, Irvine Welsh, James Joyce all experimented with language and are exalted for it.
Maybe the memes are bad, but maybe we just don’t get them. It feels true that they are in jokes for certain demographics and I don’t have a problem with that.
Could not agree more Sarah. I have been very disillusioned with social media and the 'vent vomit' it produces for some time. After over a year away from it, I don't miss it in the slightest and feel a lightness of spirit and a renewed sense of agency that I haven't felt in a long time. I'm far more interested in long form interactions, and in who we might be as a culture without these insidious influences that steal our attention away from what truly matters. I love that you create this space for us to think about these things - thank you! And by any chance is Sam Harris going to be on your podcast?! :D