The culture is suffering with relatability fatigue

When those five lads set up a phone to record themselves drinking pints and chatting away outside of a pub in London’s Soho, they probably didn’t expect to become the subject of widespread scorn and internet discourse. The video itself is innocuous. Embarrassing? Absolutely. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s harmless.

For anyone familiar with TikTok or Instagram, the “vibes” manufactured for the video (partly editing; partly the contentification of life) should be recognisable. These boys, with their bum-fluff moustaches, affected “British farmer” aesthetic and overpriced pints of Guinness, were simply participating in the overarching narrative of the 00s: to be relatable. After all, who hasn’t stood outside the pub with their mates, drinking and smoking roll-ups? Wouldn’t you also want your after-work drinks soundtracked by Dusty Springfield? 

The video, made by content creator Max Lepage-Keefe, was filmed and uploaded because he likely thought people would see themselves in it. Sure, it was filtered through the aspirational lens of an influencer – the pub is in a central London location, one where skateboarding brand Palace once held an event with booze brand Stella Artois, while their outfits are perfectly put together; fashionable but in a, like, totally casual way – but the goal was to share something that others could watch and find go: that’s relatable. 

Judging by the backlash to the video, it failed. Along with pointing out how cringe-inducing the clip was, the biggest criticism was the video’s inauthenticity – as one TikTok comment pointed out, “People hate it because it presents as a candid snapshot of a night out when it’s clearly consciously crafted and extremely self-aware.”

The artifice of the “pints and chat” video was later highlighted by podcaster and self-described “trend forecaster” Coco Mocoe. In a TikTok video, Mocoe points out that “relatability does not equal authenticity” and that “some of the most ‘relatable moments’ are the ones that have to be thought out and contrived”. The reason that so much vitriol was aimed at Lepage-Keefe and his pals, she suggests, is because we, as a people, are experiencing relatability fatigue. 

For Mocoe, the push back against so-called “forced relatability” stems from the audiences and their perception of a lack of authenticity; as she notes in the video, when we see “morning routine” vlogs, we know that whoever is filming has already left their bed to set up their camera, before returning to bed so they can film themselves “waking up”. It isn’t real.

However, Macoe suggests that the emphasis on relatability is a Gen Z phenomenon. She also states that the term “relatability” stems from the word “real”. Both of these are incorrect. While relatability as we understand it today – as Merriam-Webster defines it, “possible to understand, like, or have sympathy for because of similarities to oneself or one's own experiences” – is a fairly modern concept, its usage as such can be traced back to 1947. 

It was, however, the daytime television shows of the 80s and 90s, according to New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, that saw relatability “[jump] decisively to other realms of the arts and entertainment, like an interspecies contagion”. And the proliferation, and most importantly commodification, of relatability only accelerated in the 00s. “Five years ago, [New York Times] writers resorted to ‘relatable’ on only 16 occasions in a 12-month period,” Mead wrote in an article in 2014. “By last year, the newspaper’s reliance on ‘relatable’ had surged: the word appeared in 116 articles in 2013.” 

As with many of today’s ills, social media is likely to blame for this increase. In particular, it’s hard to divorce digital publishing’s reliance on Facebook’s algorithm in the 2010s and how social media sites generated mammoth amounts of web traffic. The key to this (as someone who was there in the trenches of content farming) was this concept of relatability. Framing the antics of celebrities, politicians, film and TV characters, and the growing contingent of YouTube content creators through a “relatable” lens easily led to clicks and, more importantly, shares.

The problem was that those figures being written about, the real ones at least, soon started to force this narrative of relatability: Jennifer Lawrence, for example, was so real because she ate pizza and talked about getting drunk; Blake Lively confessed to eating chocolate ice cream and dancing to the Lion King soundtrack; James Corden presented himself as a down-to-earth fanboy, bagging himself an American talk show in the process; Chrissy Teigen tweeted about building LEGO; and the Kardashian-Jenner clan harnessed average familial dysfunction to become billionaires.

With relatability now the cultural capital of the 2010s, it soon infiltrated how people approached art. While novelists like Bridget Jones creator Helen Fielding understood in the 90s that creating an empathetic and accessible character was an innovative way to hook readers in, by the 2010s if a novel didn’t have a relatable character that book could easily be dismissed as unapproachable or difficult.

This was particularly apparent in the YA space where the way a novel resonates with a reader is perhaps more important, but it infiltrated adult fiction, too. Sally Rooney is the most obvious victim of what Mead called the “scourge of relatability”. Her first two novels, Conversations with Friends and Normal People, were lapped up by the masses not because of Rooney’s idiosyncratic and often subtly experimental prose, but because the characters were, according to some, relatable.

This descriptor, one she did not apply herself, soon became the barometer of how to approach her novels: if you saw yourself in them, they were a success; if you didn’t, she had somehow failed as an artist. There was also an assumption that Rooney was funnelling her own relatability into the characters in the novels. While she was always guarded about her private life, a narrative was spun about what kind of person she was based on the characters she had written. She stopped being a writer and became a BuzzFeed headline.  

You can feel Rooney’s resistance to all this in her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which at times feels deliberately deceptive and prickly, inviting the reader to presume that the length essays written by the characters about topics like climate change are, in fact, Rooney’s own beliefs shared on the page. That Rooney deliberately places the narrative voice outside of the internal lives of the characters is, therefore, easily missed.

“Relatability has narrowed the human experience”

Another arena infected by relatability was pop music. Inadvertently ushered in by the diaristic songwriting of Taylor Swift, the proximity to artists via social media and the maximalist aesthetic of late 00s artists like Kesha, Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj, being a pop star soon meant being approachable. 

Swift would invite dedicated fans to her home to eat home-baked cookies and to listen to her music early. Lady Gaga, following the extravagance of Artpop, locked away the Philip Treacy headgear in favour of rootsy Americana steeped in familial trauma. Ed Sheeran’s ascent feels entirely predicated on the fact that he presented himself as just your average bloke – he was a pub singer who wrote relatable songs that just happened to have become one of the world’s biggest male solo artists. Appearing as normal and down-to-earth as possible was essential for relatability.

The tail end of Swift’s 1989 era proved how tricky it was to balance relatability with pervasive stardom; Swift’s antics, from the girl squad to the A-list boyfriends, disrupted her relatable narrative. Her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian also suggested a level of inauthenticity, too.

Swift lent into that for her misunderstood 2017 album Reputation, shrugging off the girl-next-door image for something sharper and acidic, hiding her usual romantic fare in among songs simmering with resentment, spite and vengeance. It proved divisive: while the record was still undoubtedly a success, critical response was more muted, causing Swift to pivot back to approachability for 2019’s middling Lover. In order to truly side-step relatability, and thus develop her artistry, Swift had to turn to her imagination, crafting songs about made-up characters for her lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore. She also no longer invites fans to her home for cookies.

The relatable celebrity narrative dropped off during the pandemic when the disparity between the super rich and everyone else became extremely stark. Not only were the attempts at relatability by the likes of Ellen DeGeneres, Ryan Reynolds and Madonna poorly thought out, they were annoying. As Emma Garland wrote in an article for Vice: “Why would I want a celebrity to be anything like me? That’s what influencers are for.”

However, as the so-called creator economy has boomed, even influencers are no longer just like us. While many start out as your average person, sharing videos or images online, their brand of relatability is almost always commodified in some manner. Soon, the thing that made them relatable – their averageness – transforms into something else entirely. They exist in a liminal space, not quite normal but not quite celebrities. Either way, they are usually rich and this usually alters the content they produce. “In my experience, when most people — especially men — get that type of attention, it’s all over,” Britney Spears wrote in her memoir The Woman in Me. “They love it too much. And it’s not good for them.”

Still, the apparent ease with which people can transcend from TikTok user to influencer leads many to lean into relatability, which leads us back to the viral “pints and chat” video. But in encouraging us to see ourselves in that video, we lose the humanity of it: what are the conversations they’re having about? How do they feel as young men living in London? What are the dynamics between them? How did that one man land upon that jaunty flat cap?

The proliferation of relatability has narrowed the human experience, pushing us towards assimilation and mundanity. And, for whatever reason, we have let it. No wonder people are fatigued – monotony is boring, and being bored makes you tired. With 2024 on the horizon, perhaps it’s time to lean into excitement, extravagance and mystery. Let’s leave the cult of relatability in 2023. After all, it wasn’t that relatable to begin with.