Everything Is SomethingCore
Thumbnail by @pargodina on Instagram
Every once in a while, pockets of concern for the generation of phone-good-book-bad bubble back up, and every once in a while, I ride the wave too. At least for a bit. If just to disagree (I’m doing it right now too, just for a juicy through line). Honey, come here quickly, The Teens are calling everything something-core! Soon enough, jeans will be called clothescore and depression will be called the-Bell-Jar-core and three days later, the fabric of society will start ripping apart at the seams!… or something.
This is not to say that I’m immune to trends, don’t get me wrong. It’s just to say that, by the time the trend in question has caught up with those whose first coding experience was not on their Tumblr blog at the age of twelve, the Has [Any] Gen Z Trend Gone Too Far articles are already too little, too late. By the time they try to reach me over the generational gap, I’ve already absorbed it, parsed its political and economic implications with the help of at least five video essays, concluded that it’s bad for me and kept participating in it all the same. If there is something I’m actually not immune to, it’s hypocrisy.
“I can even eat a piece of stale bread in silence and call it my mouse moment.”
The thing is, it’s nice to feel understood. I’m sure you know, and that you too have already approached the topic from every angle your YouTube front page has to offer. You’ve learned that it’s atheism or it’s capitalism, it’s alienation or it’s the death of hunter-gatherer society, it’s mommy issues or it’s marrying for love. Well, I took it one step further than you. In my exploration of my innermost complexities and of why I so badly want to boil them down to three relatable words or less, I took it to the professionals. Of course, Reddit user u/dewitt72 was onto something. In a thread about the then-recent emergence of the -core suffix, they stated: “… -core embraces an aesthetic within the confines of the rules of society and is used to distinguish from the -punk subcultures, which are countercultural.” And from all the 40-minute videos I had seen and from all the Substack essays I had read, I knew this was supposed to make me feel at least a little bad. Instead, I thought to myself: Finally, they’ve invented a way to make me feel just the societally appropriate amount of misunderstood!
“Finally: devastated? No, Mitski-coded. Haven’t left my room in days? Virginia-Woolf-core. In therapy? This is my Fleabag era.”
Finally: devastated? No, Mitski-coded. Haven’t left my room in days? Virginia-Woolf-core. In therapy? This is my Fleabag era. In that moment of divine knowledge unfolding, I felt a weight lift off my shoulders (which is so Sisyphuscore, whilst we’re at it). There is a word or a name or a show to describe every single trait I could possibly have. Everything that makes me strange can be boiled down to three words or less. The best part? It becomes just strange enough to be palatable, just quirky enough to be beautiful. It doesn’t even matter if I don’t know anything about Sisyphus except that you’re supposed to imagine him happy, or that Fleabag only went to therapy in that one episode. Yes, This Gen Z Trend Has Gone Too Far, and now even books are being sold to me through core- and aesthetic-clad syntax, but at least now I don’t have to counter the culture every time I dare to feel something. In fact, I can participate in the culture by buying things and consuming content I would most likely enjoy anyway because I’m so troubled-but-loveable-character-core. I can even eat a piece of stale bread in silence and call it my mouse moment. Who cares if I have to trim something off the side of myself to make it happen?
At the expense of coming off as excessively devil’s-advocate-core towards the point I just spent four paragraphs making (although you could, of course, see this coming), the more I thought about it, the more I participated in it - the more my concern grew. I was becoming increasingly worried that my own experience with feeling misunderstood could now be used to sell that misunderstanding back to me. In fact, I even had to delete my TikTok account because it felt as if I was constantly being bombarded with ways to better become, better embody, better be something. I’d be scrolling and a feeling would start creeping in around the third or fourth hour in, saying something like: Yes, there’s a bit of you in everything, but you can see how you could be it even better, right (and snap a good picture of it, while you’re at it)? Suddenly, it would become painfully obvious that I was but a fraud: never casual enough about my plights to be My-Year-of-Rest-and-Relaxation-core, never unabashed enough about who I was to call it Frances Ha. I would wonder why everything I did and felt was so unoriginal yet somehow, paradoxically, never quite unoriginal enough. I would get jealous, disproportionately so: why and how was it allowed for someone else to feel my feelings and like my likes better than me? I would then, of course, repeat the cycle the next time 2AM hit… because phone-good-book-bad.
It isn’t even anything new, nor is it the fault of what started as an innocuous Internet trend. It especially isn’t the fault of the art if I can relate to it to a point where I want to claim it as a piece of myself. I’d argue that’s what a lot of art strives to do - put something out there in the hopes you’ll relate. And I hate to admit it: it’s not even the fault of the TikTok people that they can make their suffering more aesthetically pleasing than I ever could. We probably all claw at things that make us feel heard, me and the TikTokers alike. I can’t help but wonder though, if my insecurities and quirks can be packaged so neatly, am I seeing the whole package or a copy of a copy of a copy? Is this literally me, or is it me through the eyes of storytellers through the eyes of directors through the eyes of the Internet? And when I call my life suffering-yet-likeable-character-core, am I being understood, or am I misunderstanding, oversimplifying? Commodifying myself, making myself at once more sellable and easier to sell to?
So maybe I do agree with you (imaginary author of imaginary outrage article I’m using as my through line), maybe This Gen Z Trend Has Gone Too Far. Maybe it’s atheism, capitalism, alienation, death of the hunter-gatherer society, mommy issues or marrying for love. Maybe it’s the one-hundredth wave of the primal desire to be understood.
I don’t know, I haven’t watched a video essay about it yet.
