A Tale of Two Babies
nmjc switches the flow again....that's right...essay mode....
greetings, chillers!
randa here. this week we are ~ trying something new ~ that some might refer to as Essay Mode. below you’ll find a piece written by Harry, edited by me, about the state of adult babies.
we’ll be back to business as usual (Hanging Out and Chilling) next week. speaking of… do you want to be featured? let us know! even if, and maybe especially if we don’t know each other super well. we’d love to have you.
-RS
In March 2020, Vice published an article called How the 'I'm Baby' Meme Became a Cultural Obsession.” In it, Leah Mandel tracks the rise of the then-popular “im baby” meme. The article is cohesive, thoughtful, and thorough. (It’s hilarious how many times there have been moral outcries about certain groups of people being babies.)
Broadly, Mandel argues that there is maybe something a little transgressive about the “i’m baby” craze. She cites artist and meme creator Aiden Arata’s I’m Baby meme flip.
She also generally thinks of this baby-mode trend as a good thing, or at the very least understandable. She writes:
In a world where we are bombarded by headlines about the failings of our healthcare system, the inevitability of a recession, climate disasters, and the stripping back of reproductive rights, many of us find ourselves just wanting to feel safe, to be baby.
It’s funny, in a dark way, to imagine Mandel writing this article in mid-march of 2020 being like “stuff’s so bad, we deserve to be a little baby sometimes,” knowing what we know now about how ass everything got. We really were babies…
Fast forward almost exactly three years, to March 10th, 2023, Dazed political editor James Greig wrote another essay about the spirit of “im baby” in the zeitgeist. He had a very different take.
Greig’s piece is called “Everyone needs to grow up” and his first sentence is “We are a generation of adult babies.” His piece is also thoughtful and thorough, expertly outlining this Adult Baby trend. Greig writes:
“You can see it in Disney adults; the rise of cuteness as a dominant aesthetic category; the resurgence of stuffed animals; people who identify as Hufflepuffs on their Hinge profile; people throwing tantrums when their Gorillas rider is five minutes late; people lip-syncing, with pouted lips and furrowed brows, to audio tracks of toddlers.”
Baby mode, to him, is not a subversive reasonable response to life being difficult, but something much more sinister. “Make no mistake,” Grieg writes, “the capitalist elites want you to think of yourself as a silly little goose.” (this is a bar btw).
So what are we to make of these two baby takes, dropped almost exactly 3 years apart from each other, with a global pandemic in between?
I remember reading that Vice article in 2020 and being like…she’s spitting… And as I read this dazed article this March I was like…….he’s spitting…..how can both of these be true?
The first thing worth looking at is how susceptible I am to a vaguely internet-related takey cultural critique, but tabling that for a second, I do think there’s space for both these competing sentiments about Adult Babies.
In my own life, there did seem to be a moment where I thought Going Baby was going to work. Rayne Fisher-Quann in her piece “no good alone” articulated my modus operandi towards my mental health in this early pandemic moment. She writes:
Somewhere between hyper-capitalist motivation videos, pseudo-spiritual tweets, and Instagram therapy infographics, a predominant mental-health narrative has emerged on the internet. It takes many forms, but is perhaps best defined by its penchant for isolation: it begs you to “focus on yourself,” to “protect your peace,” to sever relationships that don’t serve you and invest your newfound time and energy into self-improvement
As much as the next mentally ill person, I was swept up in the hope that I could somehow transcend myself by doing breathing exercises from a weird orange app, and “setting boundaries” with girls I kissed. Neither worked, of course.
I didn’t label it as such at the time but there is something very Baby about this line of thinking. What maybe looked like radical self-kindness was actually banal baby mode. Babies have no understanding of delayed gratification, of the notion that there might be something valuable on the other side of discomfort. I don’t mean that in some corny grindset kind of way, I mean it almost in the way that sometimes the healthiest way to live is counterintuitive, especially when navigating discomfort. If going Baby is shorthand for something less memetic, I think it is the desire to live a frictionless and easy life.
Thankfully even in my most Baby-ist of times I still had good taste and disaffected hinge prompts and watched cool movies, but I do think the underlying vibe-level critique still lands. But I don’t beat myself up for trying to go baby, nor do I look at Mandel’s piece as naive. It all felt right at the time.
Now, though, I stand more with Greig, turning my nose up at weird TikTok children dancing and Patti Ann's making baby food for adults.
Here is maybe my biggest intellectual leap, but I don’t think I’m totally alone in wanting to leave baby mode behind.
The sex-charged music of this downtown New York scene seems anti-baby, the slow reckoning with a broken media apparatus seems anti-baby, and even my ig explore page, full of more maximalist design seems slightly less baby.
My only theory on how we went from pro-baby to anti-baby in 3 short years is that because of the pandemic, and the explosion of internet self-care bullshit…we all got to look at what going Full Baby would feel like. We all got to work from home and ignore loved ones and pity ourselves and invest in therapeutic self-love healing. We didn’t just get to try it, we got to bask in it. We got to try it all and sit there with our eyes closed and think to ourselves “is it working? Is it working? Is it working?” It does not, in the end, work.
So maybe I’m not anti-baby as much as I am post-baby. (lol)
If there is a place I disagree with Grieg, it’s in my slightly more optimistic read on all this. Grieg’s piece is somewhat harsh (perhaps like scolding a baby), but after reading it I actually felt hopeful. I’m glad we tried to go baby, and I’m also glad we’ve realized it won’t work.
i'm baby