If you're over 30 or so you may have no idea what to expect here. If you're under that age you probably know exactly what I mean when I say "Internet Culture". I'm talking memes here folks. Whether you're getting them from a shitposter on twitter, a depressed kid on Tumblr, fucking Jerry on Instagram, or you're too meirl for meirl on reddit, you get your memes one way or another and they're one of the most popular ways to express thoughts on their internet. Recently, a friend in a linguistics class of mine did a presentation on the language on the internet. In particular, why the majority of it makes such little sense or is horribly dark and depressed. Well, there may be a reason for why those are the two largest topics coming millennials.

Growing up with the internet adds an entirely different perspective on life for a pre-teen and teenager. Personally, I like the phrase we were raised by the internet. A lot of questions growing up were answered by google. As we grew up and school became harder, the internet is where we went for information for papers or homework. Then facebook gained popularity and the other social networks followed, and that was a big part of high school: who followed who, getting enough likes on Instagram, if you were savage enough sliding in DMs. All this is much different than how every other generation ever was raised.

You could pick and choose what other people saw of your life. All the fun things going on that week, and if you weren't there you felt like your life was worse. This is a major contribution to the depressed memes and jokes on the internet. People feel depressed online and the best way to handle it is to make jokes and laugh. Maybe that's why we see so many "I'm depressed" jokes online, but what about the ones that make no sense?

Well, eventually the news filtered onto social media, albeit real or fake. We began seeing headlines of so many horrible atrocities going on in the world. If you have a news app you receive updates to your phone and about 75 percent are negative. This didn't just add to the depressed jokes, but to the ones that make no sense. All this constant news leads one to the constant confrontation that there are 7 billion people on this earth. That is an unfathomable number. Having 2000 friends on Facebook is unfathomable. So when one is constantly confronted with the realization that there are so many other individual humans out there, life can feel meaningless. Humans have an innate desire to interact with one another and how are we supposed to interact with 7 billion other people. That is quite disheartening and is hard to make any sense of. So, again, we make jokes about it. Ones that make no sense, because that is how we are feeling.

I hope this was somewhat insightful into what the hell is going on with internet culture.