“What is a person if not memories?”
Spoken by Spencer Agnew on the Smosh Pit YouTube channel while explaining the evil lore of Resident Evil. What was meant to be a passive remark about the start of this video game readily gained traction on TikTok within the highly popular niche called hopecore. The hashtag hopecore has thousands of videos and posts spanning across TikTok and Instagram, and it really has me thinking, when did being human become a trend?
Obviously, there has always been a sense of interest when it comes to human emotions that are more complex. Stories that detail the human condition go as far back as hieroglyphics in Egyptian culture, where it highlights the lifestyles of that time. Through each passage of time, an emphasis on what makes humans human has always been at the core of art. But somehow that started to become ‘performative.’
I think it started during the pandemic. I know, a very basic take. Nearly everything became a trend during COVID. You had the Tumblr aesthetic of 2014 and the Instagram baddie of 2016. You had people who liked a look but not a feeling. Then COVID happened, and soon enough, people couldn’t be people the way they always had. Everything was virtual, and sure, art and humanity found a way to weave through the limitations, but soon after, hopecore came to life.
Hopecore is essentially the trend where people look at the world with a sense of hope– it is pretty much in the name. There started to be a whole niche where the core of it was wishing for a time where we could be vivaciously human. The videos and posts under #hopecore consists mostly of dancing, laughing, and being affectionate. There is also this major wave of collective nostalgia that I am sure everyone has felt when you leave your childhood behind– but I feel like social media (I sound like an old person, but it might actually be those damn phones) has hit a total peak. Instead of actually living, we romanticize the idea of living. Maybe that is because my generation as a whole is more aware of how scary living is. Our whole lives, we were told that we were the ones to save the world, and now, drinking water is running out, we are at war, and everything is so expensive that few of us can survive on one job alone.
It’s interesting to see, because of this frankly increasingly depressive time, that this idea of hope is gaining so much traction. We are nostalgic for a time most don’t remember. We crave making memories, yet it seems most of us are just doing this from our phones. We are making edits to sounds about people having memories, but there aren’t a lot of memories being physically made in our lives. Personally, I really love this trend– contrary to how I sound writing about it. I think having hope is the best thing we can do. We seem to be longing for a time when everything was more physical, more real, after constantly second-guessing if the rabbits were actually jumping on the trampoline (TikTok: @rachelthecatlovers).
I guess my takeaway from hopecore and the quote “what is a person if not memories” is to stop applying it only to fictional characters in a show. I have seen beautiful edits to different characters from hit television shows that I save in case I need a pick-me-up later in the day. But maybe, instead of romanticizing the fictional lives in shows and the lives our parents were able to have before the chronically online lifestyle took hold, start living that life. Over spring break, I took my first adult trip. Fully paid by myself, with three of my closest friends, and yes, we took a lot of photos on our iPhones, and we made silly TikToks like the 212 trend – because we were literally in the 212 since we were in New York. However, about 75% of our photos and videos were taken on my digital camera and my best friend’s old vlog camera. Our photos came out with the fuzzy look that comes from old thrifted cameras. It made us live more in the moment; surprisingly, my phone time went down, and so did my friends. We focused on capturing memories of our first adult trip rather than capturing photos for likes – they were still great photos because we know our way around a camera.
I think it’s possible for us to have the memories and life we crave; we just literally have to put the phone down and live a little.
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