Give me: an on-brand childhood anecdote. Your bad-roommate stories. The most famous person to go to your high school. Give me these, give them to the world. Don’t question it, just do it. Offer them up, in exchange for validation but of what sort? The usual social media thing of likes and shares, or maybe impressing the prompt-giver, or is it more? It is more.
The genre is varied but the ultimate prompt meme, the one returned to most regularly, is the first-jobs one. You know it, the thing where someone tweets that you need to list the first few jobs you ever had. Maybe they’ll go first and list theirs. The list will be a bunch of things (fast food, etc.) that mean one thing as a teen job and another in adulthood. The unspoken part: the prompt-giver and participants alike no longer have to work such jobs. Now, the reason for this is likely that they are no longer 17 years old. But it feels like it hints at an upward ascent. Self-made trajectories. Bootstraps. There’s an implied Other, whose first job was corporate lawyer, at age 26, and who literally never did anything for pay until that time. As though having had a summer job that one time makes a person first-gen.
A variant of the jobs-prompt meme involves asking about bad bosses, shitty jobs. These prompts make it extra-clear that to participate, you need to know I mean truly know that the period of your life when you might rely on those bosses for a reference, on those jobs for sustenance, is behind you. Or rather, it ought to be obvious, but is it? The prompt meme sweeps up participants. It’s an invitation to share, and everyone’s doing it, and there’s camaraderie, and performance (more on that in a moment), so the participant doesn’t consider consequences. Should that bridge be burned? Should this material be wasted on the ephemeral ether of Twitter? Who even stops to think about this? Someone with a lot of followers (or just a very popular tweet) said, ‘Tell me your equivalent anecdote. GO!’ and you simply did. And I don’t blame any of us for doing so. It’s hard to resist!
The latest, the one that prompted (sorry) this newsletter, was a prompt asking people to name the time they realized how rich rich people actually are. The prompt-giver learned this at NYU, where apparently people wear $4,000 coats. (I feel prompted to digress that I do not remember this from my many years at NYU, but maybe French PhD programs are the exception.) The prompt-giver simply had not known a coat could cost so much. So naive!
Which… I don’t even know. What does it mean to know that a coat could cost $4,000? I can’t say I knew-knew this, either, but it also stands to reason. A brand-name winter coat of the sort you see throughout Toronto is close to $1,000, and high-end designer stuff costs more than that, so sure, why not. Probably somewhere a coat costs $10,000. Where does it stop? Is there, somewhere, a diamond-encrusted Canada Goose that even Jeff Bezos couldn’t afford? Whatever.
The point of the meme is to share that you, too, ascended from humble origins. You are someone who didn’t always know about these coats, but now, today, you do. The meme invites a deeply selective, dare I say deceptive, presentation of one’s socioeconomic past and present. You can be and always have been extremely well-off and still balk at $4,000 for a coat. That is quite a lot for an item of clothing! Hope it’s a nice coat at least.
To participate in a meme like that is on one level to share a lighthearted story. On another, it’s a performance. A branding of the self (see, again, the on-brand childhood anecdote), for public consumption.
The prompt meme is a US college admissions essay in miniature. Personal writing where the idea is to convey a savviness about privilege, a mix of self-awareness and upward mobility. Nothing was handed to you, but you have plenty now, of course, as do we all. (‘We.’) But you’re low-key about it.
I used to think my problem with prompt memes was mainly about the wasted material. Do you really want to be freely giving away your best stories, ones you might have used in your own writing, and that may now land in, I don’t know, someone else’s novel? But now I don’t think it’s that. Most people aren’t publishing novels, and even if they are, the same anecdote could be melded into different fictional situations. (Kidneygate forever.) I don’t like the way the memes—again, like college admissions essays—encourage participants to unthinkingly dispense with privacy, but I think most people do have the sense not to share anything too damning. It’s mostly a bit smug, a bit dull.
Maybe the reason these memes make me wince is the way they’re these sorts of college or job applications or dating profiles or who even knows that go into the void. But… people are always trying to present themselves in the best light! That’s just life, online and off, and maybe not in and of itself all that interesting.
I think, then, that it does (how on-brand of me I realize) come down to the class thing. To the annoyingly persistent tendency of online to facilitate upward-mobility narratives, regardless of whether they’re individually accurate, and in a way that, in the aggregate, gives the misleading impression that an upward ascent is the norm.
My least favorites are the, "You can only choose one" that was a meme a couple years ago.
Actually, no, I can have them all.
Nice essay! Really speaks to an upwardly mobile, "online presence" who didn't know Twitter prompts and know does