More terrible and better than ever
Did Limp Bizkit accurately predict the future?
There’s a Limp Bizkit-related meme I often return to in my head: “Did Limp Bizkit predict the future? Because everything is f***ed and everybody sucks”.
The earliest instance of it I could find was in 2023, but it may be older. The song itself is from 1999, a tale of adolescent rage released when Fred Durst was (checks notes) 29.
Anyway, the meme stayed with me because it sums up the vibe of the post-COVID world.
The effects of the climate crisis are right on our doorsteps, and yet some elected officials continue to rail against it in the name of political point-scoring.
Conflict continues to rage in Ukraine and Gaza.
The news headlines ten highlight what terrible rich people have been posting about online.
On so many levels, things are demonstrably bad.
And yet there’s a dichotomy at play: by many measures, life has never been as good as it is right now. I saw Stephen Pinker talk at SXSW in 2019, promoting his book Enlightenment Now. The book details all the various ways life has been getting progressively better over the past 300 years.
Health, wealth, inequality, human IQ - everything is better than ever, says Pinker. If we believe in this zoomed-out, long-term version of progress, then we can expect more of the same for the next three hundred years.
You can also look closer to home for additional statistical evidence that life hasn’t got demonstrably worse. The ONS recently released its updated “UK Measures of National Well-being Dashboard,” which tracks “59 measures of well-being” on an individual, community, and national level.
Of those 59 measures, there are only two results when you filter for measures with short-term negative change. Voter turnout is way down, and there is a rise in adults feeling “fairly or extremely unhappy in their relationships”.
Reading through the data, you also find that both depression and anxiety have increased in the past 10 years, and the abundance of priority species has fallen drastically since 1970 (neither particularly surprising statistics).
However, the numbers for many of the measures ONS uses for well-being, such as life satisfaction, hope for the future, and loneliness, have remained relatively stable over the past few years. More grist to the “everything is great, actually” mill.
But perhaps it’s actually this ongoing stasis, against a backdrop of technological progress and the rich seeming to get ever richer, which contributes to our feeling that everything is terrible.
While on a surface level, it may well be good news that the number of people who find it difficult to manage financially has remained stable over the past 12 months.
But you might also reasonably ask why we haven’t managed to improve financial stability for nearly a quarter of the population.
You might also find it concerning that 14% of people in the UK feel they don’t have anyone they can rely on if they run into a serious problem in their lives. You might also examine the relationship between that number and the number of homeless people in the UK.
However, it is of course foolhardy to try and use numbers to explain why the Limp Bizkit vibe rings so true in 2024. Human beings aren’t rational creatures, and as any good campaigner knows, you need some emotion in your story to get some cut through.
So, what is it about that Limp Bizkit meme that speaks to me so much?
One of my favourite writers on Substack may point the way to an answer.
, author of , talks about how humans have two imaginary cups in our heads: a good cup and a bad cup.Our bad cup fills up quicker because we “pay more attention to bad things vs. good things in the world”. The news doesn’t write about all the thousands of planes that landed successfully; it covers planes that crashed. This is what Adam (with his coauthor Dan) calls biased attention.
But our good cup stays fuller for longer because “when bad things happen, we try to rationalize them, reframe, distance, explain them away, etc., all things that sap the badness.” Good things stick around and “keep their shine”. Adam and Dan call this biased memory.
Consistently comparing our good cup to our bad cup makes the past feel more positive while the present feels worse because there are more bad things, and they haven’t had the chance to dissipate yet.
So, as Adam says in his post:
That can explain why things always seem bad and why things always seem like they’re getting worse. Which is exactly what we see in the data: every year, people say that humans just aren’t as kind as they used to be, and every year they rate human kindness exactly the same as they did last year.
The two things can be true at the same time - we can feel like Limp Bizkit were right and that everything sucks. But we can also feel that, by a lot of measures, everything is actually the same level of OK it ever was.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still question whether everything is the same as it ever was, particularly if we look at the media’s role in our exposure to bad news and how we feel about the times we live in.
Obvious point klaxon: the move away from print and broadcast has fundamentally changed our relationship with both the news and how news is reported.
Yes, headlines and front pages (particularly The Sun’s) have always been designed to grab attention - an early form of clickbait. But our attraction (and our predilection to share) bad news headlines have been amplified by the speed and scale that the social internet offers. It certainly feels as though the bad news is louder than ever, and that noise has led record numbers of people to actively avoid the news.
But do we have any empirical evidence to back up those vibes of bad news being louder than ever?
Thanks to an article I read in the Journal of Communication late last year, we have evidence suggesting an active trend toward publishing increased amounts of bad news.
A team of researchers analysed crisis-related media coverage in the media (using The Times and The Guardian as their initial test outlets) to see whether we are indeed living in an age of “perma-crisis”.
The answer to that question was a definitive “no”, but the full-blown crises we experienced most recently (the aptly-named financial crisis in 2008 and COVID) reverberated so much through society that they certainly contributed to a feeling of perma-crisis.
But while there have been fewer full-blown crises in recent years, there has been an increase in what the researchers call “crisis labelling”, which they interpret “as a pronounced increase in crisis frame building efforts and crisis rhetoric”. In other words, national news outlets report more on stories they believe to be crises or could transform into full-blown crises than ever before.
And that’s because bad news is good for business in an increasingly fractured and competitive media environment. We bias our attention towards bad news, so why wouldn’t media outlets look for opportunities to publish more of it, and to try and turn such cycles into full-on crises that can rumble on for days or weeks.
So everything does suck, but everything is actually also OK - but with the looming threat of crisis colouring our relationship with the news. Limp Bizkit, in describing their world in 1999, also predicted the future, because plus ca change. But most importantly, what does it all mean for comms people trying to get campaigns away in 2025?
An obvious, boring, but important takeaway to kick off with - brands and businesses must ensure their crisis preparedness is on point. In a world where journalists look for the next bad thing to fuel a cycle, being prepared to swiftly and effectively respond to being the subject of such a bad thing is of paramount importance.
Secondly, there’s an increased need to ensure you’re reading the room and judging the tone of your campaigns accordingly. Abstract notions of what “people” think are helpful shortcuts to guide planning, but you should take as many opportunities as you can to focus on what your specific target audiences feel about a particular topic. And always remember that humans are joyously paradoxical and irrational creatures - what we say and do on a given topic can be highly context-specific.
And finally, there’s that concurrent thread running alongside the “everything is bad now” narrative of nostalgia. If everything is bad now, let’s reminisce about the times before it went bad. And for campaigns, nostalgia continues to be a rich seam for brands to mine - but it’s not without risk. An analysis of 2023's Super Bowl ads analysis by Strands of Genius and Zappi found that while nostalgia-themed ads scored highly on likeability, they led to a 5% decrease in brand linkage. As Don Draper says in his iconic Mad Men pitch to Kodak, “nostalgia - it’s delicate, but potent”. Too much yearning for the past could end up making your campaign seem old-fashioned and out of touch with how audiences feel today.
Happily, we no longer live in a world where Limp Bizkit release number one singles and not many people are nostalgic for that slice of history to return. But the Limp Bizkit meme strikes a chord because, like all good memes, it taps into feelings we share but can’t always articulate. And while that feeling may have been part of our meta-narrative for 2024, so there’s no way to truly assess its accuracy until we get the benefit of distance. We need to know whether life will get better or worse before assessing where we are right now.
And if you need some positive vibes to help counteract the Limp Bizkit ones, I can happily point you in the direction of Nick Cave’s peerless Red Hand Files newsletter. Writing about hope this week, Nick said:
Hope is optimism with a broken heart. This means that hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralisation becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change.
Here’s to a 2025 that’s more Nick Cave than Limp Bizkit.