The children are uncomfortable with their mortality
While many people think that the COVID-19 lockdowns worldwide have become something akin to ancient history, there is still much to discuss about the negative impact the pandemic had on the young people who lived through it. One of these effects is a desire for connection beyond just friends and family, because surviving the pandemic required us to become hermits, kept away and distanced from everyone – especially those we loved. Of course we looked for something more, like parasocial relationships.
We’ve heard it all before. Apps like TikTok, YouTube and Instagram offer anyone with a phone and a dream a place to talk to a celebrity or influencer of their choice. Ever since we were able to talk to our friends online, those authentic friendships started mixing with the completely random emotions we felt towards celebrities. This created a dark tunnel for a growing bond between celebrities and their fans. For example, a 16 year old me was in a parasocial relationship with actor Josh O’Connor when I watched season 3 of The Crown while I rotted on my bedroom floor.
Bed rot became a kind of daily ritual. This was obviously a response to the brutal mass catastrophe, isolation, and death of the pandemic, but also part of the wave of overly corporatized indie sleaze and “messy girl” aesthetics. As a result, this ritual took a questionable turn.
Young people growing up during lockdown suddenly started trading in their imaginary friends and Discord relationships for a “dead man with emotional support.” A since-deleted tweet that catalyzed this trend was posted on October 23, 2022 by @saintpdf – also known as baby bri – which simply stated that “every girl has a dead emotional support.” No punctuation, no automatic capitalization, just a random train of thought.
But Baby Bri’s words didn’t go unsung, and suddenly there were countless photo slideshows of Elliott Smith, George Harrison, Heath Ledger, Kurt Cobain and more, racking up thousands of likes on TikTok and X.
One of my best friends has a spiritual connection with the late chef Anthony Bourdain that goes beyond the average celebrity-fan relationship. These emotional support dead boys aren’t just your friends: they’re your brothers, fathers, and spirit guides.
Another facet of the Dead Man with Emotional Support that you need to understand is the way grief was perpetuated through TikTok. Many believe that it is not a new criticism that it is not normal for people to be bored if a video is longer than 30 seconds. However, as many of us grew up with this fast-paced content, we started consuming everything online with the same superficial mentality. Real-life tragedies quickly become the subject of layered irony posts, and the era of “taking serious things seriously” seems long behind us.
I can only assume that the reason emotional support for dead men has overtaken everyone’s for-you page the way they did is because the internet has changed the nature of grief. Creators and news media alike exploited death for content. To cope, many young people chose just one person – often someone who died young and tragically – to pour their grief into. We sat at home with nothing to do, consuming media, rotting in bed, and making celebrity slideshows to the sound of TV Girl and Big Thief.
The emotional support dead guy will stay with you even after the trend dies. Without my friend’s passion, I would never have honestly sat down and enjoyed myself immensely Parts unknownand finally started cooking for myself without hating every second of it. The slightly twisted origins of internet trends can be eradicated forever, but the truth is that everyone needs emotional support, dead man.
