Pizza, Beyonce, and the Need to Be Relatable

On one rare afternoon when I had a small enough amount of homework to engage in extended youtube-watching, my sister showed me a video that I think makes a good point about the way people on the internet try to be relatable. The video begins with a brief discussion of how annoying "relatable" people are, cut short by one such person bursting in and explaining that he was late because the desire to eat pizza and listen to Beyonce led him onto a small detour. However, when pressed for details on what song he was listening to and what kind of pizza it was, he breaks, and it turns out the story was all a lie; he was just trying to be relatable. I would recommend that you watch the whole video, but the first couple minutes that I just summarized make its point fairly clearly.

The trend of everyone trying to be relatable is new enough that Microsoft Word does not recognize relatability as a word, but at this point it is a huge one. The internet is littered with people who complain about not wanting to do anything but eat ice cream or pizza and listen to Beyonce or watch TV, and comments on such people's posts indicate that many others can relate to them. But why is this going on? I think it may have something to do with the trend of niche marketing that the internet has brought us.

At this point, so many people have so much information about just about all of us that personalized marketing has become the norm. As shown in "The Persuaders," political campaigns can now go door to door with a message they know will appeal to you, and as shown by the ads that pop up whenever I use the internet, Google and plenty of other companies can send you ads for products you were probably already thinking about buying. This is great when you are a massive entity with lots of employees or a reach that extends all across the web, but it poses a problem if you want to maintain broad appeal as an individual. In an era where we are all used to getting messages we agree with and relate to, staying relevant means being relatable to a lot of people. Thus, pizza, Beyonce, napping, procrastinating, and the like become important things to do and enjoy, because a significant proportion of the population will share that with you and few will be turned off by someone who admits that sometimes they just want to lie down and forget about their problems. Paradoxically, the more specific marketing becomes, the more broadly individuals must market themselves to survive in the internet today. I would finish this with a generic "relatable" statement as a joke, but that would be too much work--you all know how that feels.