Why do kids today love something as pointless as 67?
The people complaining about 67 today are the ones who were planking and doing the Harlem Shake ten-odd years ago, and the pointlessness may have been the point all along.
Most of the people complaining about 67 right now are the same people who, ten-odd years ago, were taking planking photos and doing the Ice Bucket Challenge, right?
Why do kids these days love pointless things like 67 or brain rot? There’s no substance, it doesn’t look good, it isn’t fun, it makes no sense, at least in adults’ eyes. So how can kids like it?
Please. As if humans had been rational creatures all through history.
People have been doing this for ages
No need to go far back. Just ten-odd years ago.
Why did we lie face-down, stiff as a board, on a table here, a kitchen counter there, and take planking photos?
And the Harlem Shake, putting on weird costumes and dancing like mad all at once: what did that mean?
The pointlessness is the point
If a meme had a clear meaning, adults would understand it and could join in.
But when it’s pointless, knowing what it is becomes the group’s secret code. Those who get it are one of us. Those who don’t are outsiders.
It doesn’t only happen with memes
Look at religion. I’m not saying religion isn’t true. But there are a great many religions in the world, and many of them don’t agree at all. On some things they contradict each other almost completely.
Yet every one of them has stayed with people for a very long time, and still works well.
Which means a religion doesn’t need to be proven true in order to work, because one of its jobs is binding people together.
Durkheim and collective effervescence
Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist, argued in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) that religion binds people together through rituals they perform together.1
The surge of excitement you feel when everyone does something at the same time, he called collective effervescence.
So what does 67 have to do with it?
I think kids shouting 67 together and us doing the Harlem Shake ten-odd years ago run on pretty much the same mechanism. However pointless the content is doesn’t matter. What matters is that we do it together.
In ten years, these kids will be complaining about the next generation’s memes, and history will repeat itself.
What about you? What meaningless thing were you into as a teenager?
Footnotes
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Durkheim, É. (1995). The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (K. E. Fields, Trans.). New York: Free Press. (Originally published in French in 1912 as Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse.) ↩