Stop Virtue Signaling While Pretending to Self Criticize

Recently I’ve been lamenting how little content I make. I think a lot of it has to do with simple akrasia, but some of it also has to do with my relatively high standards for my own writing. Unless something really strikes me as interesting or substantive, I don’t feel any urge to write it down. So I’ve decided that I should be more liberal about thoughts that I’m willing to share with the world.

Completely unrelated to the above tangent, I saw this meme today and it pissed me off:

Now I’ve seen this meme make the rounds a lot on twitter and on substack. On its face it might seem like a good hearted admission of fault on the part of whoever created it and whoever posts it- an innocent meme with a positive message. But I think this meme is dishonest and vicious, and people who post it are mostly bullshitting their audience.

Notice how, despite the meme seemingly being an admission of fault, there is an excuse built into it- yes I redirected a conversation to myself, but it was only because I was trying to relate to my interlocutor! I think this is the key to understanding why people post this meme. The meme references a relatable misbehavior which most people have engaged in at some point, but it absolves them of guilt for having engaged in it by reassuring them that deep down this shortcoming is borne out of completely innocent motives.

Beyond that, when one posts this meme they signal to others their desire to be a good person. Not only are your misbehaviors innocent in intention, but even then you are seriously concerned with addressing them! What an angel you are! Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, this is the reaction we’re hoping to elicit when we post such things.

Now, is it really the case that people redirect conversations to their own lives as referenced in the meme because they’re simply trying to relate to the person they’re talking to? Maybe that’s part of the story in some cases, but I doubt that’s the primary motivation for most of the people who post this stuff. I think it much more likely that people do this because they’re more interested in talking about themselves than other people. So maybe instead of coping by posting stuff like the meme shown above, we should spend more time considering why that is.

All in all, then, the meme shown above is more or less an exercise in absolving oneself of guilt through comforting lies on the one hand, and signaling the quality of one’s character to people on the other hand. One is pretending to admit fault while in reality denying the fault in question, all while trying to convince others how concerned they are with addressing their faults. And I find that all sort of distasteful.