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Danya Kaufmann

Feeling Meh

On how some clever emoticons are destroying the world

Facebook offers users a platform to write a “status,” a few words sharing how they feel or what they think with their myriad “friends.” For those kind enough to want to share such precious information, and yet boring enough that they can think of nothing to say, Facebook offers a list of generic statuses, such as, “feeling hungry” or “feeling accomplished.” Each feeling is paired with a little face, to better capture the essence of the status-creator’s mood. For the highly gifted, there is an “add your own” feeling option. Although all of the statuses make me cringe, there is one that makes me lose all hope in humanity, and should be banned from Facebook: “feeling meh.” For those of you not yet acquainted with the Urban Dictionary or with teen slang, feeling meh is:

A random word [used] when people either don’t know what to say, don’t care, can’t answer a question or are too drunk to form a coherent [E]nglish phrase… a verbal shrug, which can be replaced with “bleh”, “dah” and “mih”… usually pronounced shortly, without eye contact or body movement.

Feeling meh, or being so blasé as to not even have a word for it, is one thing. But sharing the fact that you are feeling meh with hundreds of people, expecting them to care about your feeling meh, is quite another. Nobody cares if you feel meh. Honestly, most of us don’t care how you feel even you are “feeling orgasmic” or “feeling like a dead cat being run over again,” but we certainly don’t care if you are feeling meh. In fact, we feel pretty meh about your feeling meh. 

meh.

Unfortunately, though, Facebook is not like the real world, in which we can pretend we didn’t hear you, walk away, or change the subject: Facebook demands that at least some of us react to your status. And thus, your remarkably useless status about feeling meh receives “likes,” comments by others feeling meh, maybe even a link to some meh-related content. Although we don’t care about you, we’d like it if you would “like” our upcoming mehs, and therefore we pretend to like your meh. (If you don’t like our future meh we will feel sad. We will then share our new status: feeling sad). Feeling Meh is everything that is wrong with Facebook and, consequently, the world: we are a web of uncaring people who all feel equally meh. We don’t sleep enough or get enough sunlight, we eat junk and have no face-to-face conversations in which we can share our feelings. We live inside rectangles, letting our fingers take us from one “place” to another. We don’t laugh out loud when we LOL. We don’t cry when we send each other teary faces. We could, theoretically, jump out of our empty, newsfeed-scrolling existence and into the bright, bustling world around us, or we could sit right where we are and post, “feeling meh.”

About the Author
Danya Kaufmann is a third year law student at Hebrew University.