The Irony Epidemic: Ethel Cain and the Death of Sincerity in the TikTok Age

In a world seemingly addicted to irony, where dark humour and absurdity have become daily forms of cultural currency, it’s hard to shake the sense that genuine emotion is increasingly seen as cringe or passé in contemporary discourse. Call it the “Irony Epidemic.” TikTok’s endless stream of sardonic “it’s giving trauma” memes and X’s detached one-liners about tragedy reflect not just an impulse to joke but a collective form of anesthesia. This irony, rather than merely entertaining, has become a reflexive, self-medicating shield against a bleak reality in the face of late-stage capitalism, post-covid malaise, the brink of World War III, and a distinctive cultural flattening. It’s a cultural disposition Ethel Cain, on the precipice of releasing her sophomore album, directly confronted in a recent Tumblr post. “Nobody takes anything seriously anymore,” she wrote, calling out the digital culture that trivializes her deeply personal work. “The number of times I’ve had to read the same stupid joke like ‘yes, you ate that like Isaiah ate Ethel’… It makes me SO mad.” Her frustration strikes a nerve with anyone observing how today’s meme-obsessed culture erodes the meaningful into the ironic, draining art of its emotional intensity and insulating audiences from potential psychological discomfort.

Cain’s reflections on the irony epidemic and meme culture echo a coping strategy as old as modern art itself, drawing striking parallels with the avant-garde movements of the early 20th century. The Dadaists, surrealists, and other early modernists turned to absurdity in response to a brutal world rocked by global war and social upheaval. Just as Ethel Cain’s fans reduce her work’s tragic themes of family trauma, mental illness and abuse to quippy ironic pastiche, the early avant-garde artists of the 1920’s watched as traditional modes of artistic expression failed to articulate the trauma of a fractured world. Artists like Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, and Max Ernst deliberately rejected coherence and sincerity, their works mirroring the absurdity and chaos they saw around them. Duchamp’s readymades, Ball’s nonsense poetry, and Ernst’s chaotic collages abandoned meaning to reflect a world that seemed to have lost its own. In much the same way, today’s digital irony serves as both expression and escape—a way to laugh, cope, and disengage from the traumatic undercurrents of our own disoriented world.

Social Contagion and the Spread of Absurdist Irony

This irony epidemic, however, has metastasized in digital culture to a point where it can no longer be dismissed as just a subversive style; it’s a widespread social contagion, shaping how entire generations interpret reality. Social contagion theory, as described by scholars like Susan Blackmore, suggests that behaviours and attitudes are infectious, spreading rapidly through close-knit networks, especially in high-contact environments. In The Meme Machine, Blackmore explores how ideas, emotions, and even cultural attitudes can replicate like viruses, mutating with each repetition and consuming cultural discourse along the way. Memes, whether in the form of tiktok sound bites, or text-based comment trends (think: “mama a girl behind YOU 💜”, an amalgamation of at least 3 different niche tiktok pop-cultural references that obliterated the comment section of anything making it’s way onto gay tiktok in October) are a powerful vector in this contagion—they replicate endlessly across social media, trivializing and diluting emotions into easily consumable fragments. The fairly newly termed “brain-rot” content, affectionately termed by those tiktok user’s who proudly and openly admit to consuming content that is essentially rotting their psyche, is a perfect example of this phenomena, the constant exposure to which breeds a pervasive reflexive irony, where even the most tragic subjects are stripped of substance and repackaged as distinctly ironic and disengaged humour.

On platforms like TikTok, tragedy is instantly memeified, from environmental disasters (tiktokers doing viral dance trends during Hurrican Milton) to personal traumas of all kinds, with each reposting reducing the event’s gravity. No longer are we discussing how climate change is increasingly propagating catastrophic storms in the global south at an alarming rate, we’re instead discussing and resharing the hilarious memes that ensue from these natural disasters. Social media’s algorithms amplify this effect, prioritizing viral repetition over nuanced engagement. As theorist Jean Baudrillard argued in Simulacra and Simulation, hyperreality—a realm where representations replace and precede reality—has transformed the way we process events. In this digital environment, irony operates as a simulacrum, a hollowed-out version of empathy, where the emotional engagement swallowed by irony becomes completely disengaged with the source material, becoming something altogether different. Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal resonates with today’s hyper-ironic tiktok culture quite neatly: as tragedies transform into ironic regurgitated trends and recycled soundbites, they lose their emotional weight, becoming symbols of a reality that’s increasingly indistinguishable from its digital reflection.

As Cain notes in the wake of this cultural dearth of sincerity, even the title of her upcoming album, Perverts, is preemptively co-opted by meme culture, primed to become the punchline of jokes that will ignore its thematic complexity. In the digital landscape, her work is effectively stripped of its contextuality and sincerity before it’s even heard, leaving the artist trapped in a cycle where she can never fully control how her creations will be received. The personal becomes public, and the public becomes parody.

The Irony Epidemic as Shield and Commodity: The Capitalist Logic of Detachment

This desensitization and detachment are no accident—they are central to the logic of late capitalism, where sincerity is replaced by irony as a form of emotional capital. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Frederic Jameson argues that contemporary culture is characterized by pastiche, a form of expression where meanings are borrowed and recycled, stripped of depth or critique. This cycle is endemic to capitalism which is historically notorious for siphoning the revolutionary, subcultural or emotional impact of just about anything in the hopes of draining its ability to incite dissent against hegemony. Jameson describes pastiche as “a statue with blind eyeballs,” a blank parody that lacks the critical edge of satire. This is precisely the form irony takes in meme culture: it’s pastiche without purpose, a repetition of symbols that mimics engagement while sterilizing it. The irony epidemic is both an expression and a product of capitalist commodification, where even our emotional responses are packaged and sold back to us as entertainment.

Platforms like X and TikTok thrive on this kind of commodified irony, rewarding engagement that keeps users scrolling, often at the expense of nuance. Tragedies, traumas, and even personal pain are repurposed for likes, retweets, and comments, driving social media’s endless demand for new content. Every repost dilutes the original, echoing Jameson’s argument that postmodern culture endlessly recycles itself, creating an “imaginary museum” of flattened meanings and forgotten emotions. Irony becomes the default response not because it offers any insight but because it draws engagement, numbing us to the point that empathy feels like an outdated indulgence.

Reclaiming Sincerity in a Numb Culture

Cain’s frustration with the irony epidemic hints at a broader desire for a return to sincerity—a radical act in a world that prioritizes irony. As David Foster Wallace noted in E Unibus Pluram, irony, once a subversive tool, has become tyrannical, trapping us in a perpetual loop of detachment. Wallace argued that in a society saturated with irony, the truly rebellious act is new-sincerity: engaging deeply, feeling openly, and refusing to mask emotions behind layers of humour. Cain’s call for sincerity isn’t an invitation to abandon humour but a challenge to recognize its limits, to acknowledge when the joke ceases to be cathartic and starts to harm.

This irony epidemic, this cultural anesthetic, is a contagion to be sure, and Cain’s frustration reflects a deeper truth: that some art—and some human experiences—demand more than a passing laugh. They require us to linger, to allow discomfort, and to engage sincerely. In a world where sustained emotional and critical engagement can feel at times like a luxury, and further to this at times, even unbearable, sincerity becomes not just a choice but an act of resistance.

Perhaps Nietzsche paradoxically warned us of this when he wrote, “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” In a culture ensconced in this irony epidemic; so quick to laugh off darkness, we risk losing ourselves instead in that void of detachment. Maybe it’s time to stop peering into irony’s abyss—and dare instead to confront what stares back.

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Cody Rooney is the Editor in Chief and senior contributor at liminul.

He is a PhD candidate, digital content specialist, writer, editor, multi-media artist, and photographer.