Words by: Angel Tully 
Art by: Sheyla Pandzo

I’m going to hedge a pretty confident guess that by the time this article is printed, the phrase “very demure, very mindful” will be long forgotten.

Pushed out of the realm of what is considered cool and trendy, and only used by ageing millennials who love to try and jump on the moving train after it’s already left the station.

Perhaps you forgot about the Four Seasons Orlando Baby, or the short lived Mob Wife aesthetic (I mean, that really paved the way for the return of the smokey eye in time for brat summer). Trends and viral internet moments are passing through our fingers at such an alarmingly fast rate that even fast fashion companies built on slave labour (that people seem to keep choosing to ignore??) can barely keep up. 

We have evolved into a generation so addicted to technology and social media that if we just take one day off from the screen, we will miss a whole movement. Something can be new and entertaining on Monday, on Tuesday it has spread to the masses and we’re united in our amusement and shared understanding of popular culture trends. By Wednesday, it is starting to feel overused and brands are using it to leverage their marketing campaign. By Thursday, it’s stale. And by Friday, we have already started the cycle over again. 

Back in the days where 15 minutes of internet fame landed you a prime time spot on The Ellen Degeneres Show, we actually had a small shred of care for what happened after the spotlight dims. For example, Sophia Grace who famously covered Super Bass had regular check ins over the years where people could see what she was up to. She still has a platform on TikTok to this day more than a decade later. These were icons of the good ol’ days of course, where YouTube was the only place to be discovered, and your Instagram feed actually ran out at some point. But something tells me though, that in another 10 years from now, we won’t remember the Four Seasons Orlando Baby, and we certainly won’t remember being demure.

It seems that in a bid to keep consuming content at a faster and faster rate, we as a society just don’t have the patience to create things that last. 

And it has killed timeless analogue fun.

When I look back on my childhood as one of the founding members of the ‘zoomer’ generation, I have many fond memories – none of which were internet trends. I am nostalgic about the days I used to spend making up dances in the living room with my friends or my cousins, or reading for hours a day over the summer break. Or when I was squealing with excitement because I won a Total Girl Magazine competition and got 10 new CDs as the prize. What a time.

There is such sentimentality and comfort in being able to pinpoint these memories that made up my childhood and early teen years. And yes, technology was inevitably a part of some of these. But the chokehold that the Gangnam Style music video had on me in 2012 was just as memorable as spending afternoons on the bus home making loom band bracelets. Nowadays, it feels like trends and viral moments don’t stick around long enough for these core memories to stick. We don’t have enough patience to solidify trends as iconic internet moments before another trend comes to replace it.

Therefore, I can’t help but wonder what the kids of today are going to look back on. Or whether the rush to keep consuming more and more content will thwart them from having many analogue memories at all. It would be remiss not to mention that it is not as if I’m superior and above this addiction to fast-paced technology consumption. I’m probably just as bad. So I ask myself, what will I look back on in 10 years from now? What trends and memories will go the distance? I guess I will have to wait and find out.