I may be what the folks call a young, hip millennial, but if there’s one thing I have a hard time understanding, it’s the type of humor we use online. That is, self deprecating humor. Call it a category of comedy or a coping method, I’m not here to rat on it. My friends are certainly no strangers to cracking these types of jokes, and I enjoy a good self deprecation meme every once in a while. Still, the sheer volume of these kinds of jokes on the internet shakes me a little bit.

Hannah Jane Parkinson from The Guardian mentions that self deprecation humor may have stemmed from our guilt of laziness. Think about it. When you log onto Facebook, what do you see? From engagement announcements to the emotional job acceptance speech, our Facebook feed is full of friends going out and accomplishing their dreams that make you feel like the steps you’re taking in your life are wrong. So, we counter with jokes about being antisocial and living an extremely unmotivated lifestyle, and once we see that other people feel that way we grow reassured by the fact that all of us are living imperfect lives.

Despite the solidarity, I can’t help but think that some of these self deprecation jokes can come from a very real, and vulnerable place in a person, especially a young person.

Every single human that walks this earth experiences physical, mental, and emotional setbacks, and humor helps us deal with these losses and these experiences vary based on generation groups. What affected baby boomers is going to be different than what affects millennials. In this case, for millennials it could be the pressure to go into a “safe” major that will pay well, find a job, buy a house, and have kids, pay back college debt if you have any…. the list goes on and on and the stress is enough to take out that pressure in the form a joke about your dysfunctional young adult life.

So, what’s the solution? How do we get young people to feel better about themselves and boost their spirits? Well, the change won’t happen overnight. Maybe the answer is time. Transforming stress and embarrassment into this type of popular sense of humor can be liberating. Besides the validation of being funny, this sort of outlet to take out your pressures, societal or familial, can help build self-confidence. If we embrace who we are and where we’re at in life through an honest lens, we can free yourselves from the appearance of perfection that is also very prevalent (if not more so than self-deprecation) on social media.

So, perhaps it is both a style of comedy and coping method for many millennials trying to make sense of adulthood, and who am I to get in the way of that? This style of humor may not be my cup of tea, but it could soothe whatever troubles someone else is going through.