In defense of regressing online
Little frog on a lilypad, just a baby, and the need for no thoughts.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, from Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci.
HomerSimpsonMonkeyCymbals.gif —Kate
There’s a GIF I use whenever anyone around me is talking about horrific current events (the COVID death toll, the possibility of nuclear war, climate change, etc.). It’s a small monkey in striped purple pants banging two cymbals together inside of Homer Simpsons' brain while Marge attempts to have a serious discussion with him in The Simpsons Movie. I use it to signify that, unfortunately, I have completely disassociated from whatever conversation is being had, in order to protect my increasingly fragile mental stability.
We all have our own version of HomerSimpsonMonkeyCymbals.gif. On TikTok, it’s a little frog on a lilypad.
It all started, as far as I can tell, with TikTok user @nonbinarycowboy, who posted a video in January that began as follows:
“Before I do anything, I ask myself, is this something a little frog on a lilypad would do?”
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Those things include wearing a vest, playing a banjo by the riverbank, fashioning a boat out of newspaper. There are certain things a frog on a lilypad would never do, like be unkind, but also participate in the economy or vote.
The video took off, and the creator turned it into a series and landed a picture-book deal with illustrator Paige Tompkins.
Later, director Josh Ruben made a video titled “Guy Wants To Hop in Quick and Say He’s a Tiny Tiny Tiny Little Frog” (it's self-explanatory). My For You page keeps surfacing frog art and people referring to themselves as frogs as a reference to being idle or awkward.
But frogs are just one part of it. The TikTok sound “just a baby” (a reinterpretation of 2019’s “I’m baby”) recently took off. It's an even more obvious way of indulging in the fantasy of being helpless, maybe even useless. An adult isn’t allowed to not show up to work, not figure out their taxes, not do their part to counteract the many crises around the world—but frogs and babies are.
Longtime Embedded readers may remember my obsession with tradwives during the first year or so of the pandemic. I felt trapped not just in my own home, but on planet earth—there was literally nowhere I could go where COVID wasn’t a thing. Except, according to my Instagram feed, a remote house in the country, where I could harvest food from my back garden and sew aprons and homeschool my many, many children, all completely uninterrupted by the pandemic. I still turn to that fantasy from time to time, even though what I’m really saying is I’d give up my bodily autonomy in exchange for not being retraumatized every time a new variant appears. (And, hmmm ... that still sounds tempting!!)
But of course, in all these cases—frogs and babies and tradwives—people are just play-acting online. Babies and frogs can’t hold phones and posts TikToks, and tradwives are still lit by their MacBook screens as they edit their aspirational “off-the-grid” pictures for Instagram. But given the fact that it’s our phones that connect us to all the horrors of the world, it’s only fair that we can use them, even just for 15 seconds, to pretend those horrors don’t exist.