I was scrolling through my Facebook feed the other day, laughing at all the funny memes I was reading when I suddenly realize that every single one I had read was just sending me negative messages about myself masked by humor. I am all for humor and making fun of myself, but the messages in these memes were low-key depressing. I do not want to be that person who can’t take a joke, but when I thought about it I just couldn’t believe how much of what I found humorous was self-deprecating.

I found this trend not only with myself but with my friends and peers too. Take a second to scroll through your Facebook and Twitter feed, and you will see that much of what we consume in our daily scroll of social media is self-deprecating.

The meme that sparked this whole reflection was this:

I laughed when I saw it, then tagged my best friend so that she could appreciate the humor too. That is when it hit me, since when did we decide it was okay to call ourselves trash?

Maybe it would be acceptable if we just had one of these memes circulating, but in today’s world, these are the messages we constantly see.

Here are a few more examples of memes I have seen that I found really funny, but then realized how self-deprecating they were:

I am not saying that we shouldn’t laugh at these memes or stop producing them, but I just find it very interesting to see the type of images our generation finds humorous.