“Goblin Mode”: what is it and why is it used to describe a new post-pandemic mental state

At some point, between the beginning of the third year of the pandemic and the dreaded start of World War III, a new phrase entered the spirit of the time. A mysterious harbinger of an era to come: people were opting for the “goblin mode”.

The term encompasses the comforts of depravity: spending the day in bed watching series in silence while we scroll endlessly through social media, eating the end of a bag of chips and only leaving the house in pajamas and stockings to search for delivery.

“Inherent to the term is the idea that it can be turned on and off,” said Dave McNamee, a self-described “real-life leprechaun” whose tweet about this behavior recently went viral. “The goblin mode is not a permanent identity,” he warned, “but a state of mind.”

According to psychoanalyst Fiorella Litvinoff, for many people one of the effects of the pandemic was to isolate themselves more socially. “This is due to the remains of the pandemic, where isolation was mandatory and because during the pandemic (but before it too) the other is placed as a source of danger, typical of a society that proclaims individualism. Compulsory isolation favored phobic behavior, avoiding personal contact for fear of being rejected or not meeting the other person's expectations. Somehow, now it's time to 're-socialize, '” the expert told Infobae.

“A perfect example of this attitude is when you wake up at 2 AM and crawl into the kitchen wearing nothing but a long t-shirt to make a strange snack, like melted cheese with crackers. This is a complete lack of aesthetics. Because why would a leprechaun care what he looks like? Why would you care about the presentation?” , McNamee detailed.

It first appeared on Twitter in 2009, but according to Google Trends, it began to rise in popularity in early February and skyrocketed after a manipulated headline attributed a quote with the phrase to Kanye West's muse and the girl of the moment, Julia Fox. “For the record. I've never used the term 'goblin mode',” Fox later clarified in an Instagram story. The Twitter user who invented Fox's quote as a joke said that while the headline was fake, she believes that the leprechaun mode is a very real phenomenon.

“The goblin mode is the opposite of trying to improve,” said Juniper, who refused to share his last name. “I think that's the kind of energy we're giving for 2022: everyone is a little wild and crazy right now.” On TikTok, #GoblinMode is attached to videos of all kinds. In most cases, it is associated with women without makeup and with outfits that do not match, speaking to the camera in the style of a confessional.

The trend represents a direct departure from the hyper-cured “cottagecore” influence of the early days of the pandemic, a prominent trend of 2020 that included pastel colors, bucolic landscapes, and the display of healthy home skills such as baking and embroidery. The cottagecore thrived under the melancholic spirit of bringing out the best of what many people assumed would be just a few boring weeks at home in 2020.

But as the pandemic continues and the chaos of current events worsens, people feel deceived by the system and have rejected such goals. Peter Hayes, a tech worker from the San Francisco Bay Area, says he and his friends have jokingly called themselves elves. The dialogue with The Guardian held that “the term has taken off as the pandemic eliminated the need to keep up appearances. At home there is no social pressure to follow the rules, so you lose the habit. There is also the feeling that we are all wrong, so why bother? ”.

On social media, although it does not explicitly use the term “goblin mode”, videos expressing similar ideologies have been gaining popularity. “My body is a garbage can with an expiration date and I don't have time for healthy things,” says one with 90,000 views. “I love just holding on to my sanity and making terribly selfish decisions and engaging in unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms,” said another with 325,000 views.

“The goblin umbrella can encapsulate many kinds of aesthetics and behaviors,” said Cat Marnell, an author who has been tweeting a lot in recent weeks about getting into goblin mode herself. Although many people who tweet about the goblin mode have characterized it as an almost spiritual embrace of our most degraded tendencies, Marnell explains that there is a “healthy goblin mode and a destructive goblin mode.” For her, it embodies a certain air of harmless mischief. “The power of the goblin mode is that it takes over your body,” he said.

We can call it a change of environment or a logical progression towards nihilism after years of pandemic-induced disappointment, but the goblin mode is here to stay. And why shouldn't I? As an audio from #modogoblin says: “If you can't handle me in leprechaun mode, you don't deserve me.” “It's great to be a leprechaun. Everyone is so perfect all the time online, it's good to get in touch with the strange little creature that lives inside you,” Marnell concluded.

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