Mark Fisher once named the mood of our culture “depressive hedonia”: not an inability to feel pleasure but an inability to do anything else except pursue it, the compulsion to keep scrolling, consuming, circulating even when nothing satisfies. It was a sharp diagnosis of the mood, but it began mid-symptom. The cause is much older. Over centuries, enclosures, bans and state takeovers stripped culture of its role in keeping people alive.
For most of human history, culture was infrastructure. Medieval guilds pooled dues to cover injury, funerals, and widows’ pensions—while the same pot funded communal feasts. On the Pacific Northwest coast, potlatches redistributed food and blankets to guarantee no one went hungry. Islamic waqf endowments sustained hospitals and schools. West African esusu clubs let households rotate pooled resources to weather illness or crop failure. Harvest festivals bound joy to survival by redistributing surplus grain. Rituals pooled risk; celebrations doubled as insurance.
That organ was cut out. Enclosure fenced off commons and pried people from subsistence into waged dependence. Colonizers banned potlatches. States outlawed feast days as “idleness,” absorbed endowments into bureaucracy, and hollowed guilds into ceremonial shells. What remained looked like culture—parades, calendars, performances—but the teeth were gone.
The compulsion Fisher named grew in that hollow. Once culture lost its buffering function, it mutated into mood management. Unable to redistribute risk, it numbed the pain. Hustle culture became a stimulant, reframing exhaustion as progress. Grind irony worked like an opioid, turning futility into jokes. The “soft life” sold sedation as lifestyle. Goblin mode packaged dissociation as quirky identity. The pharmacy kept expanding because the pain kept compounding.
Platforms perfected the delivery. Algorithms reward circulation and have no measure for resolution. A meme about burnout moves faster than a strike fund. A soft-life aesthetic outpaces a union drive. Style is legible to ranking models; redistribution is not. What once stabilized life now converts pain into content before it can harden into politics.
Permanent anesthesia has costs. Anger that might become a demand gets flattened into a meme. Burnout that could spark solidarity is rebranded as a vibe. Injury that should escalate into grievance is downgraded into mood. The core-ifying churn of aesthetics—from girlboss to goblin—keeps precarity processed as novelty, ensuring nothing ever settles long enough to be contested.
Relief is real; coping matters. But vibes aren’t buffers.
Platforms sealed the mutation as well as accelerating it. Enclosure took away culture’s protective role, and platforms keep it from coming back. They filter for what anesthetizes and bury what redistributes. The things that travel farthest turn pain into style, because style repeats; repair concludes. Engagement metrics reward what can be consumed forever.
Mutual aid ends when the rent is paid. A meme never ends.
Here “resilience” does its dirtiest work. It markets endurance as virtue while sanctifying dispossession. Resilience, in practice, is evidence of displacement: individuals absorbing risks institutions refuse to carry. The more we celebrate it, the more we normalize exporting turbulence into households and clapping when they don’t break.
Once its protective work is gone, culture also loses track of its own history. Festivals stripped of redistribution get recast as frivolity. Potlatches and rotating funds are recast as quaint. Collective grain stores disappear from memory, replaced by coping aesthetics on feeds. The past is recoded as stagnation so markets can be sold as progress. Cultural narcosis, the numbing churn of coping content, sits on top of that forgetting and makes the loss of those protections hard to see.
🟢 Optimistic Hustle Memes (stimulant)
- “Rise and grind” memes / Sigma grindset reels – reframing exhaustion as ambition.
- Bullet journal / StudyTok content – productivity aesthetic as coping mechanism.
- AI side hustle memes – treating overwork as opportunity.
🔴 Despair Hustle Memes (opioid)
- Wage slave Wojaks – tragicomic acceptance of the grind.
- “We working 2 jobs just to survive” memes – despair repackaged as flex.
- Finance Wojak charts / stonks irony – numbing futility through gallows humor.
🔵 Optimistic Retreat Memes (sedative)
- Soft life / clean girl TikToks – scarcity recast as “aesthetic choice.”
- Cottagecore moodboards – withdrawal presented as curated lifestyle.
- Lazy girl jobs – precarious retreat repackaged as empowerment.
🟡 Despair Retreat Memes (dissociative)
- Goblin mode – collapse stylized as quirky identity.
- Bare Minimum Mondays – exhaustion turned into a meme genre.
- Collapse-core TikToks – nihilism dressed up as relatability.
This is not a call to sneer at humor, rest, or relief. Painkillers matter, after all 💊
Our objection is to the centuries of enclosures and bans that left culture with only its sedative functions intact, and to the ranking systems that keep it that way. The problem isn’t an individual reaching for anesthesia; it’s a political economy that amputated buffers and now rewards only affective circulation.
So the test: does a cultural form redistribute risk, or just circulate affect? Does it guarantee survival, or only soothe symptoms? If it redistributes, it’s a buffer. If it only circulates, it’s an anesthetic.
Fisher was right about the compulsion. But symptoms have histories. Memes and moods may get us through the day. An injury or a failed harvest takes pooled resources, the kind waqf endowments and esusu clubs once provided.