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Maybe you have seen a video or post like this recently:

In the video with low-fidelity music and low-definition images, a decadent and confused stick figure of a man is in the corner of the screen. Sometimes he wears a black knitted hat, has a scruffy beard and holds a cigarette. Sometimes he shows his bald head with several layers of wrinkles on his forehead.

Its background may be an old photo full of age, and the BGM is usually Клетка by the Belarusian post-punk band Molchat Doma.

In the video, there are several lines of boldface characters, imagining another possibility in the past, and the format is basically: In XX year, you did XXX. And this thing you did is usually a major event related to a person's fate, and it is very likely to leave a mark in history.

This type of video and text post has become the darling of creators on major content platforms, with a popularity that is almost as great as the previous cat meme craze.

You can see similar videos telling all kinds of stories, with a hundred schools of thought contending and a hundred flowers blooming in every corner of the Internet.

In these stories, a fictional "you" is at the turning point of fate. At that time, we knew nothing and felt that what we experienced was as ordinary as eating breakfast.

For example, you were once assigned to study computer science, and after graduation you joined a small company called ByteDance. It seems like you are lamenting your fate, but in fact it is pure Versailles.

Some were unlucky souls who chose to stake all their belongings and resell their PHS phones in 2006, the eve of the popularization of smart phones.

Some people choose to use this type of video to record historical events that have a public memory point, and many viewers have even been eyewitnesses of the events.

Xiaofa guessed that some of my friends might have drunk Sanlu milk powder when they were young, just like me.

Many people should still remember the famous Ma Jiajue. Because of this person, they treated their roommates like their old father from then on.

People who make videos are not limited to the past five thousand years, sometimes stories from the Cambrian period also appear.

You don't understand why he made this video, the Internet, it's very interesting, right?

Some depict the distant past, others the distant future.

Yes, on August 20, the day when Black Myth: Wukong is released, bosses will receive a flood of leave requests. That day is probably also the peak day for computer and game console players to be online at the same time in August.

Some videos are very targeted and are basically no different from @ing a person.

I believe that when you see the word "Litang", you will know who the video is talking about.

Some videos are just casual works and may be meaningless.

In the story, you are Zhang Huaimin, and today, your cowardly friend Su Shi stays up late at night and comes knocking on your door again.

Yes, no matter what it is, even if it is a video recording of an unknown man who rushed to his death when disaster struck in the ancient city of Pompeii, there will be more than 100,000 people willing to watch your video.

I believe you can see that this kind of video is extremely simple, so simple that I can’t even add an animated picture because there is only a still picture in the video.

It may take you less than half an hour to create such a simple video, and you can do it as long as you know some entry-level editing techniques.

But this kind of low-tech video, which is even easier to make than a cat meme video and is purely based on pictures, is quite attractive to audiences.

A video of just a few dozen seconds can easily end up with hundreds of thousands or millions of views, which can make a lot of bloggers who make long videos very angry.

At this point, some friends may not have realized why this type of video can be so popular.

Indeed, it is difficult to describe the shock of this video with words and pictures alone. You have to watch it with Kliputka and put on headphones at night to appreciate it.

It is like a glass of vodka, as clear as the icy water of Lake Baikal, but when it goes into your stomach, it feels like swallowing a ball of fire, and you can't help but get seven parts drunk.

Coupled with the feeling of loneliness that permeates the night, people's thoughts are in a mess, and they fall into memories that are as tangled as a ball of wool, feeling the embarrassment of being teased by fate.

The beauty of these videos is that you don’t have to actually understand every historical moment, just know that it’s important.

Because in every comment section there will be enthusiastic netizens who will tell you what happened in the video, and then others will like it crazily.

So the question is, why do these videos have such a strong staying power? Why do they become so popular online?

If you split the video, maybe you can understand it better.

First of all, the background music of the video, Marula's little song Клетка, is actually relatively new, coming from 2018, but its post-punk style gives it a Soviet feel from the 1980s.

In fact, the band Molchat Doma also did this. The website emerging-europe said that the band wanted to depict the reality of Belarus under historical images, which is full of thoughts and irony.

For the audience, the Eastern European style of tragedy is very obvious. When closing their eyes, they seem to feel the cold, desolate, lonely and depressed.

Compared with the music that seems a bit more professional to analyze, another focus in the video, that is, the story of the stick figure in the corner of the screen is even more legendary.

This decadent and confused image actually has its own name, it is called doomer, a person who is depressed and feels that his life is empty. Note that it has nothing to do with the protagonist of the game "DOOM" who defeats demons and undead.

Doomer is also an old meme. If we really want to trace its origins, we have to start from 2008.

At that time, people saw that the resource problem was becoming increasingly serious, and America was about to end. A lot of people felt that the sky was falling. The Globe and Mail said that these people called themselves doomers. They began to learn how to store food, recycle feces as fertilizer, and study canning technology in order to prepare for the end of the world.

As you know, the energy crisis did not break out, and the world is still the same. But doomers still exist. They no longer pursue social interaction, nor do they get happiness from anything, because they firmly believe that the end of the world will come.

This doomsday may not be a natural disaster such as a volcanic eruption or global cooling that suddenly destroys the world, but rather a solidification of social structure. People are lost and can't find their way. Cigarettes and alcohol have become the last anesthetics. More and more people are beginning to think about the meaning of life.

In 2018, on 4chan, a world-renowned online forum, the banner of making doomer concrete was taken up.

Here we have to mention an art style that is very popular on 4chan, which looks like sloppy stick figures cartoons: Wojak style.

Doomer is based on this image, with unkempt stubble, wrinkles and eye bags. It seems that he is suffering from depression, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and lives in despair.

There is also an image of a female doomer with short black hair and eyes that seem to be red from crying.

In the beginning, fans of the male and female doomer images actually disliked each other, because the female version did not look like a doomsday theorist at all, but more like a lovelorn gothic girl. But later, the two images were inexplicably paired together by netizens, which confused fans of both sides.

However, both the song Kletka and the image of doomer are too far away from us, so far that we cannot fully empathize with them.

Because our generation has not experienced any major lows or setbacks, the first half of life for many young people is like a car driving on a highway, without even a speed bump on the road until today.

The mobile Internet has exploded, BAT has risen, and the AI ​​wave has arrived, but for ordinary people, these things do not happen in the car, but are more like billboards flashing by on both sides of the road.

The times have undergone many dramatic changes, and in most cases, we are just spectators, which makes people feel a little sad, a little melancholy, and even fall into a state of nothingness.

We may not be doomsday theorists or pessimists, but we have indeed missed out on Bitcoin, used PHS before the era of smart phones, and have seen and even drunk Sanlu.

As witnesses of history, many people would like to put forward a hypothesis like in the video, standing again at the crossroads of fate that they have already passed, and embarking on another life path with no choice.

But the fact is that we can't, so we just put on a cold line hat and light a cigarette.

It is for this reason that countless people feel that this unshaven doomer is exactly like themselves.

We are all equally powerless and empty. We think that other people are as hopeful as the sun, while we ourselves, wallowing in the muddy life, are full of despair. So when we see doomer videos, countless people will click on them and contribute a playback volume even though they know what is in the video.

So what is the meaning of life? This question may be a bit difficult.

If you haven't got your answer yet, don't be too anxious and go to the pier to get some chips.

Written by: Zhang Dadong

edit: Mangshan soldering iron tip

Art: Huan Yan

Image, source：

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