Staying true to the realm of things that go viral, a woman offering to make profitable use of her Photoshop skills by way of cropping out people’s exes at fifteen dollars a pop is arguably one of the most succinct representations of the ways in which our society and its au courant generation (cough, cough–millennials) have seen fit to eradicate all sense of emotion. And all of the unpleasant “ickiness” that comes with it, or, more to the point, with the seemingly inevitable demise of relationships. Sometimes more commonly known as “situationships” for those who live in “The Big Three” cities of the U.S. called Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.
On the one hand, of course, who can blame these jilted lovers? Their passion was turned into sheer contempt by the one person they believed would not, like everyone else on this shady earth, fuck them over. Yet even the most “rock solid,” the most “ironclad” of “true romances” are not safe from the modern travails wrought by the callous and detached nature of this century known as Twenty-First. A nature that Twenty-First imbues within each of us, as we fall into the now cliched behavior of ghosting, zombie-ing, breadcrumbing, stashing, Marleying or any other number of absurdist Urban Dictionary-esque terms used to describe the crux of the millennial problem: an unbridled need to waffle and wallow in the indecision caused by their upbringing at a time (the 90s) and by parents (coddling) that made them believe all possibilities were possible. So much choice can be crippling, you know?
The same goes double for the pathetic stabs at monogamy millennials have tried their best to take, only to realize: surely, there must be better out there for me (there’s not, something that seems to come to its greatest light during the darkness of cuffing season). That millennials are desensitized to the rotisserie of swiping left, right, up, down and all around has undeniably increased the body count of exes they have in relation to their forebears–those who were forced to actually talk to people in real life in order to meet them, ergo diminishing the false projection of bravura that tends to occur when millennials “build a profile”–a term that connotes the “erection” of some grand, stately edifice when, in fact, your face and body are not as bangin’ as it seems in internet form (sometimes called kittenfishing, and others, catfishing). As though applying for a job, every millennial is guilty of painting a false portrait of themselves for the sake of likeability. For the sake of maybe, just maybe, being able to add another ex to the pile.
Enter @hexappeal, a twenty-something beacon of the gig economy selling back people’s memories to them in the spirit of Lacuna Inc. Because why should that picture of you in front of the Eiffel Tower or at your milestone birthday need to be marred with the bitter tinge of being forced to remember an ex who, in some way or other, is but only a reminder of failure? Not just yours, but of an entire species. Failure to see anything through, failure to stick around when there’s a snag in the dynamic. Naturally, who could blame their frailty in this regard when, looking at any baby boomer-era married couple that didn’t opt for divorce, it’s plain to see there’s not much love left, so much as a brother-sister accord (“We’re bonded by shared trauma; I have your back, you have mine”). And, as Gen Xer Vickie Miner once explained of her tendency toward promiscuity, “My mother goes to the bathroom with the door open. That’s A. And B… it’s disgusting. I don’t want any part of that. I want first kisses. I want passion…the whole way through.”
It’s a philosophy that seemed to trickle more pervasively down to millennials once the app meat market hit. At the same time, there are exceptions. Couples that endure for years (for many women, the “best years” before they are chucked aside like day old bread that even a stray dog shouldn’t bother with). These are the Joel Barish and Clementine Kruczynski types. The ones who truly do wish parts of their brain could be erased in order to be able to move forward without being constantly reminded in some way of the time they invested in a person who ended up jumping ship (or vice versa, though it’s usually the one who got thrown over that’s more interested in erasing the past so as to also, with it, erase the pain). Yet this speaks to an overall phenomenon millennials have never been comfortable dealing with or facing (and, for the most part, they’ve been successful at avoiding it): acknowledging that, as the opening sentence in The Road Less Traveled asserts, “Life is difficult.”
Millennials haven’t fully reconciled with this self-evident truth the way those before and even those after them have seemed to. That’s part of why the disappointment they experience can feel so intense. So in need of numbing and mitigating by way of such practices as, say, Photoshopping an ex out of existence. It’s much easier than recognizing a relationship for what it was (ultimately, one of the wounds that made you into what you are today) or even, say, “learning” from it. Which is precisely why the manic pixie dream girl that is Clementine K. remains a patron saint for millennial girls everywhere who just want to fucking forget the whole thing happened.
