Last month, Collins Dictionary published its top 10 words of the year. Alongside the mic drops, Brexits and hygges was JOMO, short for Joy Of Missing Out and defined by Collins as “pleasure gained from enjoying one’s current activities without worrying that other people are having more fun”. It’s a concept that owes much of its popularity to big-name Instagram accounts such as @fuckjerry and @thefatjewish. Both post memes that have as their MO an urge towards almost total apathy that manifests itself in a dread of social engagements, a love of sleeping and eating too much junk food, and a fetishisation of the state of arrested development (talking to people you don’t want to talk to is, after all, a problem only adults face). Although it’s arguable whether the acronym JOMO is actually that widely used, as a concept it doesn’t get much more zeitgeisty; there are without a doubt more people luxuriating in a Netflix dependency than are dropping microphones or cultivating cosy Danish ambiences.
Yet the Collins definition is perhaps too simplified, suggesting the trend relates to a serene appreciation of your own company. Instead, JOMO comes from a place just as anxiety-ridden as its counterpart FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). It’s a small rebellion against the world of social media, where people try to make out they are having fun at social events all the time, and a rejection of the pressures faced by the generation that came of age during the 00s recession, who were told there was no time for laziness or messing about if they ever wanted to become financially independent.
It’s this same cathartic airing of the conflict between desires and duties that helped fuel one of the month’s big memes. You may remember Kermit The Frog from such memetic content as But That’s None Of My Business and #tealizard; now you can add Evil Kermit to that list. This month, a screengrab of a moment in the film Muppets Most Wanted when he meets his evil twin was turned into meme shorthand for the internal conflict between what one should do (as spoken by normal Kermit) and what one secretly wants to do (as articulated by evil Kermit). It’s a meme for this era of dark impulse indulgence, that’s for sure, but as many iterations of the meme proved – such as Twitter user @FreddyAmazin’s version, who captioned his with “Me: I’m not even that hungry. Plus, I need to save money, I’m broke. Me to me: You’re starving” – it’s also another way for millennials to air their ambivalence towards the oppressively perfectionist world of social media with their banal and very human follies.
US politics continues to spawn meme after meme, but while Trump has gone from punchline to president-elect, American broadcaster Glenn Beck looks set to remain the former. After a career spent sowing the sort of rightwing rhetoric that informed this election – he called Obama “racist” and stoked Islamophobia – he changed tack last month, coming out in opposition to Trump and revealing that “Obama made me a better man”. A photo of Beck sporting a trendy new look to match his newly liberal credentials spawned the Woke Glenn Beck meme, which cast the firebrand as a man trying to infiltrate hipster life. Captions mocking both the clothes and views he had belatedly donned proliferated on Twitter (“*listens to Father John Misty once*”, went one). Another drew parallels to the “how do you do, fellow kids” meme, which shows a scene from 30 Rock where Steve Buscemi is a cop badly attempting to infiltrate a high-school student body. All of which left Democrats asking the question: who is Glenn Beck and what does he want?
The Daily Mail has claimed to have invented the “misguided narcissism” genre of clickbait in 2012 when it published Samantha Brick’s infamous work There Are Downsides To Looking This Pretty: Why Women Hate Me For Being Beautiful. This month, the Mail continued this trend by running a story asking Is THIS Britain’s best-looking couple?, in reference to reasonably attractive twentysomethings Mel and James from Essex. This weak excuse for journalism was meme manna from heaven. Soon, there were all sorts of other duos vying for the newspaper’s best-looking couple in Britain title on Twitter, from Jeremy Corbyn and a marrow to two orange traffic cones. Any opportunity for a comfortingly cathartic joke about the sad, grey and grotty British aesthetic should be pounced upon, even when it comes from the saddest, greyist, grottiest publication around.
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