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a couple months ago, a fellow millennial colleague and I tried to explain the 'whimsy' fad of the early 2000s to our gen Z colleague. we were like, you don't understand how bad it was. we participated in public pillow fights — we did graffiti that said 'you are beautiful' —
I realized we were both talking about it with palpable shame and disgust, like we'd been in the stanford prison experiment or something
I said it was a time marked by popular belief in the beauty and serendipity of strangers. it was the era of amelie poulain, michel gondry, free hugs, flash mobs, manic pixie dream girls, leaving a hand-annotated book on a bench and someone finds it (??) and you fall in love (??)
to this day I cringe when I see something with the same spiritual circuitry as that fad, like 'little free libraries' or strangers in opposite high-rise buildings sending messages to each other via signs in their windows
I think that fad feels shameful to me because it's a confluence of things I don't believe in anymore — pushing intimacy instead of letting it grow at its own pace, performing community/connectivity instead of building it, seeing boundaries as obstructive instead of protective etc
it was also a time in which *performing* spontaneity was seen as an act of spontaneity. like, you could be 'spontaneous' by acting out a pre-rehearsed skit in a public place
if I had to sum up the whimsy fad, I'd say it was a failed mass attempt to make reality itself into a movie
lots of people dunking on garden state but to be clear, I have reclaimed garden state https://twitter.com/pangmeli/status/1024676914395525120
someone just argued that 'little free libraries' may make people 'feel more connected'. I agree that acts of civic whimsy give some people the sensation of being connected. but by contrast, actual libraries — big free libraries, if you will — *actually make* people more connected
that's why I find the whimsy fad so movie-like — it traffics in affect, not actuality. it's about *feeling* connected, *feeling* special, *feeling* spontaneous, *feeling* beneficent — whether you *are* or not. it's disinterested in any reality beyond the affective one
