COMPARISON BETWEEN OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM SERIES
Carolyn Fan, the creator of another anti-nihilism series on TikTok, said that it was important to her that her content not advocate for a kind of “toxic positivity” mind-set that refuses to acknowledge real suffering. Part of the trend’s success comes from its ability to acknowledge hardship while also encouraging viewers to persevere anyway. Today, the hopecore hashtag has more than 700 million views on TikTok and overlaps with other hashtags like #hopeposting and #optimisticnihilism, and more recent trends like #webweaving, and #positiveslideshows. “We’re all going to make it,” wrote another. “This trend is seriously helping me since it’s been really rough lately,” wrote one commenter on the Camus video. In one video, a user responds to the statement “I hate living” with the caption: “All my homies rejoice in the day the Lord has made.” In another, a man gazes into the camera with the words of the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus written above him: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” The appreciative comments on the videos suggest that the message has struck a nerve. Like the corecore trend before it, the format uses images or videos to evoke an emotional reaction in the viewer, ranging from the profound to the sentimental. The trend takes on many forms: a series of inspiring sports clips or video game scenes spliced together a slide show of quotes, tweets or web comics or front-facing camera videos expressing some hopeful idea.
“I think that’s just a very easy rabbit hole to fall down when you’re using the internet-feeling like, ‘Oh my god, everything sucks, we’re all doomed,’” Khan, 25, said.īut toward the end of 2022, he noticed a new trend emerge on TikTok, often accompanied by hashtags like #hopecore and #antinihilism, that offered a different perspective, promoting a kind of radical optimism. Zaid Khan has spent most of his life on the internet, and though he considers himself optimistic by nature, doom-scrolling through news stories and being bombarded with fatalistic content online can make that natural positivity difficult to maintain.
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