I got my eyebrows done for the first time in over a month when I went home for the long weekend. I kept looking at myself in all the mirrors in Macy’s after leaving the eyebrow salon in the mall. My friend noticed and asked me if I thought I had a new face. I laughed. The eyebrow lady had asked him if he wanted to do his eyebrows and he said no, so he couldn’t possibly understand my enthusiasm.
Most days I wonder if anyone can really understand me or if they pretend to because we’re all secretly masking the fact that our own thoughts are unintelligible to ourselves. I wonder if when we talk to each other we collectively meet on this metaphysical plane where the gibberish of our brains takes an agreed upon form only to melt away as soon as we leave each other. Maybe that’s why there are always two versions to every story. I notice this especially on dating apps, where for some reason it seems that it is normal to flirt unconsciously for days at a time, stalling before our schedule clears up long enough to entertain a gibberish conversation in person. I have an account anyways, if at least for the notion that human interaction gives life meaning. I think about this the way I think about god. Whether or not there is a god, there’s no harm in praying to him; whether or not human interaction is what gives life meaning, there’s no harm in loving people.
Gen Z has a hard time with the meaning of life. Indeed, nihilism has become a popular trend among my peers. I can’t say I blame us very much. Regardless of how much we want to tailor our feeds to show us the aesthetics we’ve convinced ourselves we embody, the calamities of every part of the world seep into our everyday existence, making depression a virtual trend and anxiety relatable. So we turn to Nietsche, hoping that the belief in nothingness will offset present concerns while clearing up enough brain space to start anew. We take comfort in the idea that there is no meaning in life, and this frees us to look at the world a little more objectively, making us the most informed and conscientious generation of consumers in modern capitalist society. One can find proof of this in all sorts of marketing studies, but most interestingly in the #corecore movement on Tiktok, the Gen Z media platform of choice. Likened to the Dada movement, these movements aim to conflate news, elements of nostalgia (or anxiety), music, and popular videos to produce a visual experience that represents our state and stake in the world. Anything can be nothing and everything at once. Hoping the trend doesn’t fall victim to anti-intellectualism, art critics and young philosophers try to redefine the movement over and over again. I can’t tell if it’s genius or just meta.
Anything can be nothing and everything at once, but also anything else. One of my professors likes to say that art history arose from the advent of photography, which allowed people, for the first time, to decontextualize elements of different cultures and analyze them in ways that remarked on the human condition first and the culture second. Decontextualization and conflation have become tenets of the media experience, allowing us to believe in relationships between totally unrelated things that have been promoted under the guise of creativity. Under what other principle would the New York Times publish an article arguing for the similarities between a Waffle House brawl and an Edward Hopper painting? Will wonders never cease!
In any case, my eyebrows look great.
