We Are Not Okay

Some thoughts on Elmo, Black actresses, and fast cars

You know things are bad when thousands of people respond to a seemingly innocuous tweet from Elmo, a Sesame Street puppet. “Elmo is just checking in! How is every body doing?” he wrote. And who among us doesn’t want to be asked, once in a while, how we are doing, hoping that the person asking the question actually wants to hear what we have to say. When Elmo posed this question, there were cynical responses, of course. The internet and social media in particular, is often where sincerity goes to die. Lots of brands got in on the act, trying to create charming but viral moments. But mostly, it was just people sharing their sadness, loneliness, and hurt; there is so much of it. Broken marriages, fractured relationships with children, job loss, mortgage foreclosures, bank accounts with negative balances, cancer diagnoses, long COVID and the ongoing pandemic, common colds, depression, war, genocide, and on and on went the litany of human miseries great and small.

The responses were of such intensity and magnitude that Sesame Street responded with words of assurance and linked to a page of mental health resources on their website. And of course, in the age of social media driven journalism, there were dozens of articles that basically all said the same thing—the internet trauma-dumped on Elmo. What does it all mean?

We live in a lonely world. No matter how ideal our lives might seem on social media, many of us are isolated and dealing with all manner of problems. I’m not sure why we don’t talk about what we’re dealing with more but I do know there is a lot of pressure to always make it seem like everything is okay, especially when you benefit from privilege(s). This, despite somewhat of a cultural evolution in how we talk about mental health—we have vocabulary now for talking about our feelings. We extol the virtues of therapy and encourage everyone to go, if they can. We lament that mental healthcare can be expensive and that insurance coverage for it is inconsistent across plans. That is, of course, assuming one has health insurance.