Quick survey: who woke up this morning, or checked your phone in the bathroom at work, or looked at the news, and declared that you crave the cold embrace of soil covering your body?

Some of you reading might have raised your hands, while a lot of you are probably just confused about why your kids or younger coworkers are acting like this.

Someone on r/OutOftheLoop asked why millennial humor is so preoccupied with dying and being dead, and whether it’s just a frivolous trend, or a symptom of a serious underlying issue. The responses put it all out there: while the jokes are just there to help us cope and relate to each other, it does reflect the fact that many people who have become adults in the 21st century don’t feel like they have a lot to look forward to.

Image credits: Roller31415

This Reddit user felt “out of the loop” about why millennial memes are so dark

But the answer they got was enlightening

Image credits: Zeebuss

An eloquent explanation, but we usually just choose to express it like this

It turns out that when people are exhausted from spending most of their waking hours at their retail jobs and don’t expect to find anything better any time soon (even if they have a degree that they’re still paying loans on) because they’re a few hours away from not being able to pay rent at any given time, it doesn’t paint a very encouraging picture of how the next 50 or so years of their lives are going to go.

When you’re in a situation like this one, as many young adults are, it almost makes you want the rising sea levels to just reach your city already so you can be quickly swallowed up by a tsunami, but realistically, we know that our demise will be a lot slower and more drawn-out than that.

And even one who, individually, tries to make the best of the political tools they’re given and vote for candidates who seem most likely to invest in the future rather than business owners’ pockets, probably feels a sense of powerlessness that people who have the ability to affect change aren’t doing anything.

Add this to the fact that people in their 20s and 30s report both higher rates of mental health issues, many of them directly linked to their work, and lower stigma around discussing mental illness. There you have a recipe for people turning to the internet to vent their frustration in a setting that offers us either anonymity, depending on how we use it, or a low-pressure way of connecting with each other.

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