The Indomitable Human Spirit is my new favourite Tiktok trend
This new Tiktok trend is pretty wholesome and it has coincided with both my reading of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk and my watching of Aziz M. Osnan’s Leftenan Adnan (whose story I will be covering in a soon-to-be-published article), so I’d say that fate is propelling me to write about it.
So what is the Indomitable Human Spirit and why has this trend made me feel a lot more optimistic about life?
The first time I read the phrase ‘Indomitable Human Spirit’, I misread the first word as ‘abominable’ and thought that this was some spin-off of the snowman. But no, ‘indomitable’ means — from the definition on Merriam-Webster — being ‘incapable of being subdued’.
Know Your Meme defines this trend best:
The Indomitable Human Spirit is an axiom expressed in memes about the power of human will and perseverance against the indifferent cruelty of the universe. The term and catchphrase were popularized in memetic use around mid-2022, which spurred a series of wholesome memes about the value of hope and love in a difficult world.
The Know Your Meme page covers the spread of this trend quite extensively so do give it a look. What I’ll be covering in this short vomit of words, before my laptop dies in ten minutes, is how I got hooked on this trend and why I think the Indomitable Human Spirit is the best thing I’ve encountered on Tiktok, aside from thirst traps of Arataka Reigen.
Tiktok, specifically this video below by @cvswalmart, introduced me to this wholesome trend:
Initially, I wanted to skip it because I was pretty done with going through slideshows of screenshots and memes showcasing cheating, assault, racism, etc. Yeah, the dark humor made me chuckle a bit but I’ve seen and experienced enough of it in real life and I didn’t need it invading my virtual safe space.
Then I saw the #happypost and stopped myself from refreshing my feed. And thank God I did, because what I read next was such an uplift for an otherwise gloomy day. Somehow, nothing tugs on my heartstrings more than motivational quotes on the familiar landscape of memes. An example is this:
“We are not ‘born to die’. Does a book begin just to finish? Does a song open with a beautiful chord purely to end? Yes, we are born with the inevitable fate of death, but that is merely the final act of the play. We are born to love. Be joyous to move, learn, cry and feel. We are in fact born to live.”
I won’t lie. If this prose was shown to me as just words on a solid colour background, I wouldn’t have been as impacted. But as a low-res shitpost with the background image of an elephant (?) in the backseat of a car, it really hit home.
Since the day I gained a sense of consciousness, at the good age of sixteen, I’ve been spiraling quite often and honestly dreading to live because I feared death. This trend has given me temporary respite.
Perhaps it’s the humility and nostalgia of memes that opened my heart to the philosophical concepts of existentialism and the likes, and introduced me to Søren Kierkegaard, whose wikipedia page is so interesting that I am going to work on an article on his misadventures with Corsaren, a Danish language weekly satirical and political magazine.
But also, it’s great timing that I’m being exposed to this trend just as I’m transitioning from being a university student to a real-life working adult. To live well, I need to see the beauty in life and this world instead of being overly pessimistic.
On an a more academic note, The Collared Writers would love to explore the philosophical themes, such as Nihilism, Absurdism and Existentialism, in this trend and we will be publishing an article on it. We are considering releasing it in the 2nd week of September so that we can have ample time to research.
To our readers, what are your favourite social media trends? We’d love to explore more of them!
If you would like to read similar articles on culture, religion and politics, or enjoy fictional stories and lifestyle recommendations, do clap and follow TheCollaredWriters on Medium! We are a team of graduates with a specialty for variety and some time on our hands, so we love writing and our readers. Do share your thoughts and feelings with us, and thanks for reading 😊
