livin’ la vida extremely online
the internet has some problems and not even books can deal with it
This is a sort of essay sort of collection of thoughts sort of book review. It is very long and very unedited.
Contains very mild spoilers for Patricia Lockwood’s ‘No One is Talking About This’, Olivia Laing’s ‘Crudo’ . and Ali Smith’s ‘Companion Piece’.
It also contains brief references to the Heard/Depp trial.
i. we do not love to see it
In my first year at university, the hallowed halls and dreaming spires of Oxford were swept by a plague. No, not covid (yet). For a term and a half, the student population of the second best university in the world found themselves suddenly and invariably afflicted by a linguistic tic. All anyone could say, in response to just about anything, was ‘We love to see it’.
Looking back on the craze, I can’t tell you where it came from, why it spread so fast, or even, really, what it means. While friends at other universities didn’t have the same experience, a quick Google suggests ‘we love / hate to see it’ was more widespread than simply Oxford, and indicates it originated amongst sports fans weighing up successes and failures with black and white simplicity. It feels a little like the ubiquitous ‘mood’, ‘big mood’, ‘me’, or ‘same’; a sort of catch-all response expressing solidarity and similarity at a relatable experience or image, no matter how absurd, without necessitating any real emotional heft behind it.
A few things still interest me about ‘we love to see it’. First off, unlike ‘mood’ or ‘same’, no one seems to say it anymore, either on or offline. Perhaps it was simply too clunky, too ill-suited and poorly stripped back. Or perhaps it simply went the way of all memes (remember ASDF movie? I like trains). Then, the way it spread in person, like wildfire, the way memes do online — someone would say it, and you’d express irritation, then say it once, but ironically, and then again, and again, and again, and suddenly it wasn’t ironic at all. Picking up sayings from your friends is pretty normal if you’re exposed to them enough, but this felt different. The weirdest thing was that you couldn’t control yourself, couldn’t stop yourself from saying it. It was literally the contagion of ‘we love to see it’, a kind of dancing plague for the pre-covid twenty-first century. I eventually made the inevitable joke, and obviously tweeted about it, thereby transmitting it back online months later — ‘the 2020 lockdown happened just to get oxford students to stop saying we love to see it’. After March 2020, nobody loved to see it.
I’ve been thinking about this craze today for a few reasons. Recently, I’ve noticed something worrying. I seem to have lost the ability to speak like a normal person. I respond unthinkingly to meaningful statements with things like ‘so true bestie’ ‘hot take’ and ‘big mood’, ‘hot girl shit’ and ‘girlboss’. Not that long ago I even had a lengthy, in person conversation about the ‘male’ version of ‘gaslight gatekeep girlboss’ — this, during the Heard/Depp trial, when concepts like ‘gaslight’ and ‘girlboss’ meant a whole lot more than a catchy little slogan. (We decided on mansplain, manspread, manipulate, btw). When I asked my friends what words they’d picked up from the internet, almost everyone said ‘it’s giving’ — though my own default expression of engagement has become a simple little ‘vibes!’. When I recieve sincere texts I often respond with emojis or worse, memes. I think with, write about, and identify through aesthetics or tropes cultivated online — ‘Former Gifted Kid’, ‘2014 Tumblr Girl’, and so on. I’m still prone to write in lowercase.
It feels impossible to escape the onslaught of information and identity online, especially when it infiltrates our language in real life. The other day, about to start a conversation with my mother about Kim K wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress to the Met Gala, I felt the urge to begin with ‘you probably haven’t seen the discourse, but…’. She had, actually, on the BBC, but by this point the discourse online had accelerated at light speed. We were now talking about Beanie Feldstein and Lea Michele warring it out over Funny Girl, the intricacies of Love Island, and Nancy Pelosi’s incessant emails. My mother was reading about the Tory leadership candidates. But I’d already watched the Grant Shapps TikTok twice. I knew Tom Tugenhat’s logo looked like it said ‘tit’. Relatedly, I knew that Andrew off Love Island sucked a girl’s breast at Casa Amor, despite not having seen a single episode this year.
I am, it has to be admitted, ‘Extremely Online’.
(Consider. Seeing a new NASA image of the far off wonders of the universe, I think ‘galaxy brain’. A story about an elephant invading a woman’s funeral has me joking about the ‘feminine urge to bite’.)
ii. extremely online
There’s nothing wrong with irl references to memes and internet culture, but when they become the sole lens through which you relate to the world, it might be more worrying. Am I no longer able to think for myself? Is being Extremely Online perhaps less an identity than an affliction?
After a frenzied last minute Waterstones trip before going on holiday last week, I ended up poolside reading not one, not two, but three novels about the internet, and the way it has subtly yet totally infiltrated our lives, loves, and language. Olivia Laing’s Crudo, a real-time depiction of summer 2017 through the eyes of a wayward, newly middle-aged and middle class artist, segued into Patricia Lockwood’s tenderly overwhelming novel of life in ‘two halves’ No One is Talking About This, then Ali Smith’s latest Companion Piece. The internet features to different extents in each novel, from the omnipresent yet unmentioned driver of culture in Companion Piece, to the all-pervasive ‘portal’ to which the narrator of No One is Talking About This is addicted. I enjoyed, and had strong feelings, about each of the novels, but it was No One is Talking About This that rang most true to my current concerns.
Told by a narrator who, like Lockwood herself, has become famous in part for her banal yet humorous posting, the novel demonstrates just how easy it is to get lost in the ‘portal’, forgetting the world of beauty, wonder, and horror beyond it. The first half of the book is made up of short, snappy paragraphs, only a little longer than a tweet themselves. Run on sentences are punctuated with texts and posts, images ingested by the protagonist — a snippet from an article about warty tree frogs living in solitude is followed by the inevitable ‘me / me / unbelievably me’.
When a family emergency pulls her forcefully back into the real world, Lockwood’s language opens up with startling luminosity. The things we experience when we look up from our phones — sunlight, flowers, the small wonder of ‘touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence’ — everything is imbued with new meaning by the crisis. When she tries to ‘reenter the portal completely’ she finds only that ‘everyone was having an enormous argument about whether they had ever thought the n-word with some people actually professing that their minds blanked it out when they encountered it in a book, and she backed out again without a sound’.
Like her protagonist in the first half of then novel, Lockwood has defined herself as Extremely Online. Itself a lovely little bit of internet slang, the extremely online, according to the Daily Dot, are those who ‘never log off’. They are obsessive about the culture and discourse of the internet, and know what ‘everyone is talking about’, even though ‘in practice, “online” usually means “on Twitter,” and “everyone” is just a small core of media professionals and microfamous humorists who are all fluent in the same particular set of references.’.
It became a part of internet slang in the 2010s, but I think in 2022 we’re all extremely online. For young people, and increasingly during the age of covid and WFH, our elders, the internet is an inescapable part of life. Our interactions and communities are mediated through social media from Instagram to Slack, whilst our ways of accessing information increasingly move online and become integrated with advertising and filtered algorithms. As Facebook’s recent, and frankly terrifying, Metaverse project forces us all to see, the internet and irl worlds are closer than ever before.
The internet is no longer contained. It breaks into our realities, from face ID technology to the terrifying proposition of real-life targeted ads, to the new Instagram update which insists on playing every five second video aloud as you scroll past it. And it breaks into our minds, infiltrating our ways of being, our identities and then our micro-identities. In the language of the internet, one isn’t just a girl but a ‘that girl’, a ‘hftwt girl’, a ‘dark academia girl’, and so on. New flags for tiny facets of the LGBT+ community pop up every few days, invariably generating controversy.
On a different note, some memes we reference regularly are so referential they require the knowledge of years of online culture to fully understand. In a way, this compulsion to relate through memes and online references are a little like when people burst into song, or poetry. On seeing a flock of birds, high and free, they might think of Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese. ‘The world offers itself to your imagination’. Except are they really the same? I hesitate for fear of sounding reactionary, but is there really anything that really matters at all behind the pixelated, goggle-eyed emoji, emblazoned with the lowercase words ‘i am looking’, which pops occasionally into my head, like a weird, yellow, blurry memento mori?
Probably not, but I’m still going to tweet it.
iii. the collapse of language
Much been written on social media’s corrosive influence on politics — the targeted advertisements, the cushioning echo chambers cultivated to fuel our confirmation bias, the Trumpesque Tweetstorms, the fake news. Just today a tweet labelling Anne Frank ‘privileged’ went viral for all the wrong reasons. But trends don’t happen in isolation; the internet hasn’t just infiltrated our political lives, but our entire lives. The bite sized, biased, empty-of-meaning lingo of the internet is infiltrating our language, from how we grieve to our poetry to our ways of expressing love. I’m guilty of this — I tell my boyfriend he’s gained a red flag for enjoying Nietzsche, then five minutes later accuse him of being a simp. Overused and misconstrued as they are, these words don’t really mean anything anymore. They’re stripped of any importance they might once have held — in the case of ‘red flag’ relationships, real warning signs of an abusive partner — and turned into little bubbles of noise which create a surface level ‘discourse’ in real life as well as online.
I agree with Saeed Jones, who responded to a tweet asking users to share ‘the weirdest or most striking use of therapy-speak/the language of mental health that you've seen outside of a therapeutic context’ by arguing that ‘The words “gaslighting” and “toxic” are being overused to the point of being rendered useless.’ People hurl around terms like ‘toxic’, ’emotional labour’, and ‘gaslight’ to the point where they lose all meaning, doing potentially serious damage to abuse victims attempting to understand and find solidarity in their experiences.
Similarly, many Black critics have pointed to the way the internet and pop culture have led to the adoption of AAVE, or African American Vernacular English, into common parlance. The widespread usage of words such as ‘tea’ and ‘shade’ without an awareness of their cultural origins and collective meaning, and the linguistic stigma which has long been attached to them, seems to represent the hollowness of internet culture.
Stripping words of their important cultural context has harmful implications — such as how ‘woke’ has been coopted not only by the mainstream, but also by conservative critics of left-liberalism and ‘political correctness’, becoming a shorthand for issues such as anti-racism and LGBT+ activism. Sydnee Thompson writes for Buzzfeed that ‘The terms “cancel” and “woke,” for example, having been stripped of their original, more nuanced meanings among Black people, have illuminated how the internet and social media can both oppress and empower marginalized groups’. AAVE is seen as ‘Gen Z slang’, rather than a linguistic marker of a rich African American culture with a history of both oppression and empowerment. An article in Voice Magazine called this the ‘whitewashing’ of language, a kind of cultural appropriation which sees AAVE as simply ‘funny words’ rather than part of a culture deserving respect. This can be compared to online gentrification — the gutting of a diverse yet marginalised community and language to make it more socially ‘acceptable’ and its concurrent cooption by the mainstream. And it’s a trend occurring primarily online, under the influence of pop culture, then shifting into irl spaces.
Collective vernaculars such as AAVE or that derived from drag culture, and serious terms such as the ‘therapy-speak’ mentioned by Jones are increasingly repurposed and stripped of meaning online. Yet at the same time, a reverse trend seems to be occurring. In response to content moderation on apps like TikTok, users have developed a new kind of language to avoid censors, increasingly termed ‘Algospeak’. Terms like ‘unalive’ to refer to dying or committing suicide, ‘seggs’ to refer to sex, or more traditionally the leaf emoji to reference smoking weed, help users avoid bans or content removals. Others have called this ‘Voldermorting’, after the euphemistic, fearful re-naming of the Harry Potter villain. This new language may have creative, playful potential, but much of it feels euphemistic, simplistic, and childish, like some of our older, redundant, and frankly cringe-worthy meme-speak, such as ‘doggo’, ‘pupper’, and ‘smol bean’, or newer iterations like calling the pandemic the ‘panini'. The Washington Post cite ‘spicy eggplant’ instead of ‘vibrator’ and ‘nip nops’ for ‘nipples’ as examples of coded Algospeak. Frankly, I’d rather be banned than say either, but thankfully I’m not a teenaged TikTokker.
As the Washington Post notes, Algospeak has developed for often important reasons, namely, to hold important yet controversial conversations about issues deemed inappropriate by censors like TikTok, often regarding marginalised peoples, such as the LGBT+ community or women seeking abortions. On the flip side, radicalised and dangerous communities, such as the pro-ana community, which romanticises and promotes eating disorders, also use their own kind of Algospeak to evade removal.
There’s also something deeply worrying about a world which can’t talk about death, sex, or human bodies frankly, without euphemism. When used outside the Algospeak context of circumventing censors and repeated incessantly in everyday conversation, ‘unalive’ is the Gen Z’ers ‘passed away’, a euphemistic cushioning which denies the reality of death and grief, and makes a casual joke out of a serious issue like suicide. I remember as a teen hearing classmates laugh about how they wanted to ‘commie sue’. I could never find it funny, laughing thirteen year old banter transposed upon something serious, something which must be named and faced to understand it. But now the whole internet seems to have adopted this kind of teenage slang.
The conflict over ‘tenderqueers’ in the LGBT+ community online reflects this to a degree. Called by Vice the ‘softbois’ of the queer community, ‘tenderqueers’ are often young, new to the LGBT community and consider themselves as moral gatekeepers, policing sexual standards and ‘problematic’ behaviour, particularly in the infuriatingly cyclical debate over kink at Pride. Alex Arrelia on Twitter writes of these teenaged ‘tenderqueers’ that their 'discourse actively undermines our ability to collectively organize, because it’s primary function is to exile people who can’t make the grade’. Much as ‘unalive’ ignores the real and complex issues of suicide, turning death into a sarcastic joke, this discourse, which Arrelia labels ‘self-righteous’, prioritises a particularly online mode of discourse and call outs, whilst neglecting to address the manifold and complex issues facing LGBT+ people in the real world, from homelessness to alcoholism.
From Algospeak to Twitter discourse to the cooption of AAVE, no matter how the trend manifests, our nuanced, diverse, and rich system of human communication appears to be collapsing in on itself, replaced by meaningless, invasive buzzwords often lacking their original nuance. This is a trend worth examining — what is the internet actually doing to us, our relationships, and our communities? What is it turning us into? And, perhaps most scarily, what next?
iv. irony poisoning
In an interview with Lockwood for the New Yorker, David Wallace asks her about ‘irony poisoning’ — ‘an “online” attitude in which everything is a potential meme, even a historical atrocity’ which he fears may be ‘distorting our ability to think about one another, about the world outside?’. It’s often noted that the modern world uses irony as a coping mechanism — part of the distinctive ‘Gen Z humour’ made up of layered references, snarky wordplay, and dark absurdism — but sometimes this humour goes too far.
We see irony poisoning in action when it comes to misused terms like gaslighting or toxic, as well as real-world cases of violence, abuse, and cruelty. The Amber Heard / Johnny Depp trial, called ‘trial by Tiktok’ by the Guardian for the extreme and accusatory involvement of the internet in the court-case, presents a recent manifestation of this. From poisonous attacks on Heard’s appearance to nonchalant jokes about abuse, often made by young women, a so-called feminist dynamic, the internet culture around Depp/Heard was vile. Many noted how, even if you had no interest in or were actively avoiding the trial, it was impossible to escape on social media. Personally, I found myself idly watching a makeup tutorial on Instagram Reels, only to realise the MUA was attempting to recreate Heard’s bruises, in order to prove they were feigned. All to a catchy bubblegum pop soundtrack, of course. Something online seemed to have shifted, since our collective fury over the crimes of powerful men erupted against figures like Trump and Weinstein. In 2022, Amber Heard wasn’t a potential MeToo victim — she was meme material.
Similarly, the 2020/21 meme labelling the coronavirus pandemic as the ‘panini’, ‘panettone’, ’panorama’, may have been textbook gallows humour with a detached, ironic tone, but it also shrouded a serious global event in babyish Algospeak. The more up to date version, ‘panny d’, does the same, as does its partner ‘menty b’ for mental breakdown. Importantly, the online ‘irony-poisoning’ of covid was occurring at a time when serious discussion — about the necessity of lockdowns, the vaccine program, and masks — was also being coopted by partisans and purveyors of fake news. The covid memes might have been funny, their irony might have helped us cope in the face of overwhelming horror, but were they really good for us? In my view, no. The internet has severely damaged our language, by encouraging a communicative shift which permits the violent and hurtful, but perhaps just as worryingly, the apathetic, the banal, and the meaningless.
In No One is Talking About This, when a real world catastrophe comes to her door, the protagonist can’t fall back on joking and irony. Instead she thinks, incessantly, about whether she’s been wasting her time. Lockwood writes in her New Yorker interview about the novel’s two halves that ‘Drinking a triple espresso and calling Ted Cruz “baby brain” on Twitter was fun, on the one hand. But, on the other hand, as the second half of the novel shows, this shorthand can do violence to a real human being’. Meme culture and internet speak have enormous creative potential — but they can also do real harm, and cannot be the sole lens through which we relate to the world.
(Consider: A conversation with my boyfriend. ‘Did you realise you speak in tweets?’. I’m affronted. ‘They’re just quips. What came first, the witty quip or the tweet?’. Chicken or egg. He raises his eyebrows. ‘Are you going to tweet that?’)
Did people used to talk like this? Laing, Lockwood, and Smith tackle the task of capturing the internet’s polyphonic yet homogenised voice in different ways. Crudo is a work of autofiction, mingling fiction with elements of Laing’s own life and a bastardised version of the cut-short life of counterculture writer Kathy Acker. Once, like Acker, a wild punk artist, the protagonist is now more like Laing — comfortably middle class — yet her life is still punctuated by anxieties both personal and political.
One of the problems with Crudo is you feel Laing wants to be doing what she does best — essay writing. The writing is over-indulgent and at times too thin, but as it races along at breakneck speed through the summer of 2017 and the protagonist’s life, we do get a sense of an internal monologue punctuated and disturbed by the ongoings of a troubled world. Early in the novel, two pages take in soaring temperatures, the death of Jimmy Savile, and, after Kathy’s admission of a migraine, the statement that ‘on Twitter a Chinese photographer had gone missing’. This is something that occurs ‘on Twitter’ yet it infiltrates Kathy’s, and the reader’s, mind. The lines between offline and online seem sharply cut — anyone who spent 2017 on social media remembers the constant discourse — yet in reality they are of course incredibly blurred.
Later, after the firing of James Comey, a friend texts Kathy ‘twitter’s ABLAZE gurl’ and another opines ‘he’s taking a giant shit on our nation’. Their reaction to political terror is to retreat into the comfort of glasses of wine and shit-talking, at a time when political language itself is collapsing in the mouth of the President, who in No One is Talking About This is known, Algospeak style, as the ‘Dictator’.
Lockwood, I think, is a better master of the stream-of-consciousness style, capturing the onslaught of information the protagonist is exposed to as she lives her Extremely Online life. Having got famous for tweeting ‘can a dog be twins’, she says things like ‘our mothers could not stop using horny emojis’, and imagines a conversation with her future granddaughter about the word ‘binch’. Were this style to extend into the second half of the book, with its more cautious, considered tone (I won’t spoil too much), it would be nauseatingly over the top and frankly, facile. Yet isn’t that exactly what being on the internet is like? And increasingly, isn’t it what real life is like too?
Companion Piece is a little different — slower, more understated, less explicit in its depiction of the online world. Smith is a master of connection. In her Seasonal Quartet, to which this novel is the postscript, past and present and even future mingle together, darting seamlessly as a swallow from the art of Barbara Hepworth to a post-Brexit immigration centre to a young man growing up post-war. In Companion Piece, the word ‘companionable’ appears over and over again, most notably in the cracked voice of the narrator’s ailing father, isolated in a hospital at the end of the first lockdown. Similarly, a characteristic digression on the etymology of the word ‘hello’ prompt us to consider the deep roots and powerful meanings of our most common words. You feel it is Smith’s older protagonist, rather than the narrators of Crudo and No One is Talking About This, who might be most willing to interrogate the language she uses, both its origins and implications. Against her, we meet two younger characters, one of whom proclaims ‘Boomer alert’ when she fails to understand what working in ‘eye tee at eye gee’ means. The twins, for whom we gain more sympathy later in the novel, seem to stand as an emblem for Gen Z humour, culture, and at times, callousness. The internet purports to bring us closer together, broadening our range of connections, yet it also makes our connections feel shallow and surface level. Companion Piece forces us, along with its narrator, to extend a companionable hand, and to tell each other our stories, in the real world, even if from behind a mask.
After completing Companion Piece, I found myself thinking about Virginia Woolf, about Mrs Dalloway — modernity at the gates, cars and airplanes, political turmoil, complacent elites, Freudian psychology, the Great War, exhaustion in the air yet everywhere, when you look for them, flowers. It is hard enough to cope with the mere fact of human life without the aggressive intermediary of the internet, the grand publicity of our tiny lives. Ever since I studied her work, I’ve loved the way Woolf tracks such intricate webs of human connection — in Mrs Dalloway like a great ‘web’ or ‘gauze’ across London. How might she have coped with the twenty-first century’s World Wide Web, when relatability and solidarity, human suffering and meaningful relationships, are reduced to shallow, hollow, ironic platitudes? ‘Same’. ‘Mood’. ‘Vibes’.
(Consider: The meme. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa a ‘gigantic insect’, trapped on his back in bed. Caption, lowercase arial: girl, not this.)
v. new normal?
I said at the start of this essay that I felt I’d lost the ability to speak like a normal person, to think for myself without the crutch of the internet guiding my words. But is this the new normal? For children growing up in today, it could be. It’s hard not to be concerned when you see parents handing toddlers their phones for a moment’s respite, children’s faces washed in blue light, and it’s worth questioning whether growing up immersed in the internet is good for developing brains. Multiple studies have shown that babies born during the coronavirus pandemic face a ‘development dip’ in cognitive performance — which is unsurprising, given some of them, like my own godson, went months without seeing another human bar their parents. Meanwhile, a 2013 Microsoft survey showed that the average age children are given internet access is eight — with the pandemic stifling real world interaction, might that have dropped lower?
From the cooption of AAVE as ‘Gen Z slang’ to the Heard/Depp TikTok trial, from the tenderqueer phenomenon to Ali Smith’s fictional teenagers, numerous people have pointed out how Gen Z, for all its left-liberal politics, can be unthinking when it comes to the internet. Memes are funny and creative, but when they become the entirety of one’s digital diet, they may be more malicious, from the extremes of radicalisation (remember when Pepe the Frog was a thing?) to the more everyday effects on our communication that I felt with ‘we love to see it’.
Gen Z was the first generation to grow up almost entirely immersed in modern technology — I only just meet the category, but even I was online by ten, albeit in child-centric communities like Club Penguin which are now broadly obsolete. It’s hard not to see how even earlier exposure to the online adult world may raise issues around mental health and the formation of meaningful social relationships and offline communication. It’s not necessarily all doom and gloom — in an article for Wired, for example, linguist Gretchen McCulloch suggests that young children communicating through emojis learn positively about communication and connection, the way older generations may have through ABC fridge magnets or picture books. But thinking of my little godson, I can’t help but feel despair for a generation born into devastating global trauma tied to covid and climate change, immediately exposed to an onslaught of information which is overwhelming yet in many ways emotionally empty. If our species survives long enough for them to reach maturity, what will this intense yet isolated upbringing have taught them? How will their brains look? How, for that matter, will they communicate?
How will any of us?
It’s a big question. I don’t know how to go about answering it — I don’t think anyone really does. But we have to address it, have to cope with it, somehow.
There’s only one thing I really can say.
Bad vibes.
Referenced.
no one is talking about this / patricia lockwood
crudo / olivia laing
companion piece / ali smith
mrs dalloway / virginia woolf
‘wild geese’ / mary oliver
References.
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/you-love-hate-to-see-it-explained
https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/what-does-it-mean-to-be-extremely-online/
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/sydneethompson/aave-language-appropriation
https://www.voicemag.uk/blog/10958/gen-z-slang-a-blatant-appropriation-of-aave
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/04/08/algospeak-tiktok-le-dollar-bean/
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/algorithms-suicide-unalive
https://www.wired.com/story/voldemorting-ultimate-seo-diss-resident-linguist/
https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/patricia-lockwood-11-30-20
https://nitter.net/i/status/1512161806034386951
https://www.vice.com/en/article/939aap/tenderqueer-meaning-define-what-dating-type-introducing
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/11/amber-heard-jonny-depp-trial-tiktok-fans
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00027-4
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2013/10/14/how-old-is-too-young-to-go-online/
https://www.wired.com/story/children-emoji-language-learning/
"The internet has severely damaged our language, by encouraging a communicative shift which permits the violent and hurtful, but perhaps just as worryingly, the apathetic, the banal, and the meaningless." we do not love to see it:( – but also this is fab !! <3<3