• MrMamiya@feddit.deEnglish
    32·
    11 months ago

    Lol means a lot of things to us. It’s hard to put into language. A signal we’re kidding, we’re uncomfortable expressing an emotion through text, we’re nervous, we don’t want something taken the wrong way, we’re expressing casual empathy. There’s more to lol than laughing, I’m sure someone has done a study on it by now.

    Edit: for some background context, we’re the children of the most successful generation in human history. They were born in a time that had some of the most favorable conditions for success at any point in human development. People paid for college with part time jobs. People bought houses on one wage. People could afford a nice vacation, and had a pension.

    Things changed, but our parents didn’t notice. They couldn’t handle failure so they invented participation trophies and then ridiculed us for them when it became convenient. They used their money to make investments in property, drove up rent and prices and then called us lazy for not owning a home yet.

    We are a nervous generation. We were told things that aren’t true anymore and then held up against that untrue standard to measure our success in a game that was always rigged. So we say lol.

    • dmention7@lemm.ee
      English
      15·
      11 months ago

      “lol” is punctuation. A carryover from a time before we had a thousand different emoji to pick from, and also when casual IM communication was not yet so ingrained our culture that conveying subtle tone came naturally. Lol

    • Mothra@mander.xyzEnglish
      6·
      11 months ago

      It used to annoy me a bit first, but after a while I realised this. It’s true. So I incorporated lols in my conversations with millenials, in moderation of course. Definitely an improvement

  • Tigbitties@kbin.social
    7·
    11 months ago

    I used to use “aal” to be edgy. “Actual audible laugh”. No one knew what the fuck I was talking about. Yeah, I’m embarrassed about that.