By, Rutu Mody-Kamdar
Spend enough time on Indian Gen Z internet and you begin to notice something odd.
Someone posts about being unemployed for eight months, followed by a laughing emoji. Someone jokes about the absurdity of earning less than the EMI their parents expect them to take on. Someone turns parental disappointment, career anxiety or the impossibility of buying a home into a meme.
It is easy to read this as a generation that refuses to take anything seriously. I think the opposite may be true.
For many young Indians, humour has become one of the few socially permitted ways of saying that something has gone wrong. Indian middle-class life has always been very good at announcements. Results. College admissions. Packages. Promotions. Engagements. New homes.
We have elaborate scripts for progress. We have far fewer scripts for stagnation.
Try saying plainly at a family lunch that you have been looking for a job since March. The information rarely remains simply information. Concern arrives. Advice arrives. A cousin’s number is produced. Someone begins wondering what went wrong.
And somewhere, almost before sympathy, shame enters the room. The meme changes the conditions of disclosure.
Put the same anxiety into a joke and suddenly it becomes shareable. The laughing emoji after “eight months unemployed lol” isn’t decoration. It is almost an instruction to the reader: I am telling you something difficult, but please don’t make this difficult for me to tell you.
Irony, in this context, isn’t attitude. It is permission. Which makes memes far more interesting for brands than we currently allow them to be. Because beneath the humour is an extraordinary body of testimony about what it feels like to be young in India right now.
The old middle-class contract of study, get placed, settle down is becoming less dependable. Money anxiety has travelled downwards into the early twenties. Young people are negotiating the distance between the lives their families prepared them to expect and the lives the economy can actually offer.
And they are talking about it constantly.
The mistake brands make is to notice the format and miss the confession. So Gen Z becomes a tone-of-voice exercise. Add some internet slang. Use the meme correctly. Write the clever caption. Perhaps even say “delulu” before legal asks what it means.
But copying the container while ignoring its contents is precisely how brands end up sounding young without understanding youth.
There is a much simpler research technique available. Read the comments. Look at what people begin volunteering about themselves once the joke has made the room safe. Notice which anxieties repeatedly acquire humour around them. Treat those not merely as social-media trends, but as evidence about aspiration, constraint, status, work, money and belonging.
Because your audience may already have told you, in extraordinary detail, what it is afraid of. You just filed it under humour.
The author is founder, Jigsaw Brand Consultants.
Disclaimer: The views expressed are the author’s own and do not reflect the official policy or position of Financial Express.