Goblin Mode and Gaslighting

I have been think­ing for weeks now about my word of the year. I’ve nev­er not cho­sen a guid­ing word. And yet here we are, close to February, and I have adopt­ed and dis­card­ed many, many inten­tions because noth­ing feels exact­ly right. I am strug­gling to define how I feel and which direc­tion I need to head right now.

Seems I am not alone in feel­ing wob­bly these days. Every year the Oxford English Dictionary selects a word of the year that is meant to speak to the times and the zeit­geist of the pre­vi­ous year. For 2022, the pub­lish­er chose gob­lin mode as its word of the year, and I have questions. 

Firstly, why is it a phrase and not a sin­gle word? While that’s just seman­tics, we are lit­er­al­ly talk­ing about the dic­tio­nary, the final word (haha) in linguistics. 

My grand­ma always said, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” Today’s ver­sion might be, “Argue with trolls, become a dif­fer­ent kind of ogre.” 

Secondly, does every­one except me use this term? Or even know what it means? Goblin mode refers to a type of behav­ior that is unapolo­get­i­cal­ly self-indul­gent, lazy, sloven­ly, or greedy. Evidently, last February, some­one tweet­ed a fake head­line claim­ing that rap­per Kanye West and actress Julia Fox broke up because he didn’t like when she went gob­lin mode. 

So to recap, our cul­tur­al ethos is being decid­ed by a fake tweet about a men­tal­ly ill racist that glo­ri­fies being greedy and self-absorbed. 

A lit­er­ary agent recent­ly told me I would nev­er get a pub­lish­ing deal with­out a strong Twitter pres­ence. But if this is what lives on that plat­form, you can keep it and any pos­si­ble accom­pa­ny­ing book deal.

In March 2022, SimpleTexting sur­veyed 1,018 social media users across the United States ages 18 to 75. They found that Twitter was the most tox­ic of all social media apps as far as sow­ing dis­cord, per­mit­ting hate speech, and spread­ing mis­in­for­ma­tion (and this was well before Elon Musk got involved — but Elon is a rant for anoth­er day). But 90% of respon­dents say they have seen harm­ful con­tent regard­ing race, eth­nic­i­ty, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, and cul­tur­al back­ground on all social media plat­forms, includ­ing Tik Tok, Facebook, and Instagram, even after care­ful­ly attempt­ing to curate their per­son­al algo­rithm to pre­vent that con­tent from show­ing up in their feed.

Are these the sorts of places that should be decid­ing our social mores? My grand­ma always said, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.” Today’s ver­sion might be, “Argue with trolls, become a dif­fer­ent kind of ogre.” I might not have fig­ured out my 2023 word of the year, but I know I want it to be some­thing more con­struc­tive and affirm­ing than gob­lin mode (or gaslight­ing, which was what Merriam-Webster Dictionary chose as their 2022 word of the year).

I’m ashamed of us. I’m sad for us. I’m wor­ried about us. 

Today, my heart will beat about 100,000 times, each beat bang­ing out a per­cus­sive rhythm. I get to decide what track I lay down on that beat, and what instru­ments and lyrics I allow into the song that is my life. I might not have fig­ured out a sin­gle word to encap­su­late that song, but I know I won’t hear it online. 

 I don’t know exact­ly how to com­plete­ly untan­gle myself from the online world. But I would rather walk away from a mil­lion things I don’t need to get to the sin­gle truth that I do.