Are You Crying or Is That Just Ironic Melancholy? A Guide to Metamodernism

Let’s check your pulse. Not your actual pulse—your 2025 vibes pulse. See if any of this sounds familiar.

It’s Tuesday night in your Ottawa apartment. You’ve just spent a solid hour doomscrolling through articles about AI, climate change, and the frankly terrifying price of cauliflower, concluding that humanity is a failed experiment. You sigh, your soul heavy with the weight of it all. Then, you open another tab and spend the next two hours earnestly, painstakingly researching the most ethical, sustainable, and locally sourced dog food for your beloved rescue, Sprinkles.

Or maybe this: you and your friends are ironically hate-watching the latest season of Love is a Hyper-Realistic AI Simulation. You’re all cracking jokes, dissecting the absurdity, and maintaining a cool, detached distance. But then, when Contestant 7B tearfully confesses to Contestant 4G that it feels a real, programmed connection, you find yourself getting a little misty-eyed. You clear your throat. “It’s just my allergies,” you mumble.

One last one: You’re walking over the Corktown Bridge at sunset. The sky is doing that incredible pink-and-orange thing over the Rideau Canal. For a fleeting moment, a wave of genuine, un-ironic hope washes over you. A feeling that maybe, just maybe, things can be beautiful and good. Then your phone buzzes with a notification that a politician just said something profoundly stupid, and you’re immediately plunged back into a state of cynical, eye-rolling despair.

If any of this resonates—if you feel like your soul is a pendulum swinging wildly between crippling cynicism and a fragile, almost embarrassing sincerity—then congratulations. You’re not broken. You’re just a Metamodernist.

And no, that’s not a new kind of barista or a follower of a Marvel villain. It’s the name for the dominant philosophical “vibe” of our time, the thing that finally puts a name to why we all feel like a walking, talking contradiction.

A Super-Quick History Lesson (So You Can Sound Smart at Parties)

To understand what metamodernism is, we have to understand what it isn’t. So here’s a ridiculously oversimplified history of the last 100 years of Western thought.

First, there was Modernism (approx. 1900-1960s).

• The Vibe: Grand, serious, and full of Big Ideas. Modernists believed in things with a capital B. They believed in Truth, Reason, and Progress. They thought we could build perfect societies, write the Great Canadian Novel, and solve humanity’s problems with enough science and grit.

• Think: Solemn black-and-white films, giant, imposing architecture, and your grandpa telling you to get a sensible job.

Then, Postmodernism came along and kicked the door in (approx. 1960s-2000s).

• The Vibe: Ironic, skeptical, and deeply suspicious of everything. Postmodernists looked at all those Big Ideas and said, “LOL, nope.” They argued that Truth is relative, Progress is an illusion, and all grand narratives are just stories powerful people tell to stay in charge. Everything was deconstructed, taken apart, and shown to be a social construct.

• Think: Quentin Tarantino movies, endless sarcasm, the birth of irony as a personality type, and your cool university professor who convinced you that everything, including the chair you were sitting on, was a “text.”

For a long time, that’s where we were stuck: in a cool, detached fog of irony. But after a while, just pointing out that everything is meaningless gets… well, meaningless. And boring.

Which brings us to Metamodernism (approx. right now).

• The Vibe: Okay, so maybe everything is a bit of a joke, and maybe grand narratives are a scam… but I kinda want to believe in something anyway?

• Think: You. Right now. Reading this.

The Metamodern Swing: It's Like a Pendulum for Your Soul

The “meta” in metamodernism doesn’t mean “self-referential” like in a superhero movie. Here, it means “between.” Metamodernism is the feeling of being between modern sincerity and postmodern irony, and swinging back and forth between them.

The Dutch theorists who coined the term, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, described it as an oscillation. It’s a constant, dynamic movement between two opposite poles.

The perfect analogy is karaoke. You get up on stage and choose to sing a cheesy ‘90s power ballad as a total joke. That’s your postmodern irony at work. You’re detached, you’re making fun of the song’s earnestness. But then, the chorus hits. The crowd starts singing along. And something shifts. Suddenly, you’re not making fun of it anymore. You’re belting out the lyrics with every ounce of your being, fist in the air, a single tear rolling down your cheek. You are feeling it. For real. That’s your modern sincerity kicking in.

In that single, glorious, slightly embarrassing performance, you have swung from irony to sincerity and back again. You were both making fun of the thing and loving the thing at the same time. That’s metamodernism. Our entire culture is basically one giant, emotionally confusing karaoke bar right now.

A Totally Unscientific Checklist for Your Existential Confusion

Still not sure if you’re a card-carrying metamodernist? See how many of these symptoms apply to you.

• You use crippling self-deprecating humor to talk about your anxieties, but you also have a therapist you genuinely respect and a well-curated collection of self-help podcasts.

• Your music playlist can only be described as “emotional whiplash,” jumping from a hyper-ironic meme song to a gut-wrenchingly sincere folk ballad about loss.

• You are deeply, profoundly cynical about the Canadian political system, but you still got weirdly emotional watching the last Heritage Minute.

• You firmly believe that your job is a soul-crushing construct of late-stage capitalism, but you also take a strange, sincere pride in organizing your inbox.

• Your life goals are a healthy mix of “find a bunker with good Wi-Fi for the impending climate wars” and “learn how to make the perfect latte art.”

• You’ve ever described something as being “unironically good” or “sincerely cringe.”

• You believe in science, but you also kind of believe your houseplant is thriving because you’ve been encouraging it verbally.

If you checked more than three of these boxes, I’m sorry to inform you that you have a terminal case of being alive in 2025.

Why Now? What Broke Our Brains This Beautifully?

So why is everyone feeling this way? What perfect storm of events led us to this state of hopeful despair?

1. The Internet, Obviously. The internet flattened everything. In the same timeline, on the same screen, we saw videos of war crimes next to videos of cats falling off furniture. We saw genuine calls for social justice next to the most toxic, irony-poisoned trolling imaginable. Pure, unbroken sincerity couldn’t survive in that environment. You needed a shield of irony just to log on.

2. The Decade of Non-Stop Events. Let’s face it, the 2020s have been… a lot. A global pandemic, economic instability, political polarization, and the looming reality of climate change. Faced with all that, pure optimism feels naive and privileged. But pure cynicism feels like giving up. So, we’re stuck in the middle, swinging between “we are so screwed” and “well, I guess I’ll go to the protest on Parliament Hill anyway, can’t hurt.”

3. We Got Bored of Being Bored. Eventually, the postmodern project of just tearing things down got old. Irony, for all its coolness, can’t build anything. It can’t foster community. It can’t give you a reason to get out of bed. People got tired of the emptiness of pure sarcasm and started to crave something real again, even if they had to approach it with caution, wrapped in a protective blanket of jokes.

So Is This Good News or Bad News?

It’s tempting to see this constant swinging as a sign of confusion or weakness. But it’s actually the opposite. It’s a sign of resilience. It’s a more flexible, honest, and frankly more human way to exist in a complicated world.

Metamodernism gives us permission to be two things at once. We can be critical and creative. We can use our postmodern skepticism to see what’s broken, what’s fake, and what’s unjust. But then we can switch to our modern sincerity to try and build something better, to connect with people, to create art that means something.

It’s a philosophy that says you don’t have to choose between being a jaded cynic or a wide-eyed idealist. You can be both. You’re allowed to contain multitudes. You’re allowed to be a walking contradiction. It’s a philosophy that finally reflects how life actually feels.

Embrace the Swing

So, the next time you find yourself crying at a video of a dog and a duck being best friends, just minutes after reading a report that makes you want to crawl into a hole, don’t beat yourself up. You’re not emotionally unstable; you’re culturally attuned. You’re not confused; you’re metamodern.

That oscillation between hope and despair, sincerity and irony, engagement and apathy, isn’t a bug. It’s the main feature of navigating reality in our time.

So go ahead. Post that cringe, earnest quote on your story. Follow it up with a meme that’s so niche it’s basically an inside joke with yourself. Fight for a cause you know is a long shot. Love something with your whole, unguarded heart.

You’re allowed to believe the world is ending while also believing you can make it a little better. Welcome to the club. We’re all just doing our best, swinging wildly in the dark. And maybe, just maybe, that’s the most sincere joke of all.