Think of the way adolescents try a knowing remark to project worldliness when their egos are threatened.
Note: Reminds me of somebody…
a fundamental anxiety of American-style individualism: namely, that we’ve become unmoored from any genuine communal context. The show constantly cuts that anxiety down to size by generating clever jokes out of the mundane dilemmas faced daily by disconnected operators in such a culture, especially around their inability to form and maintain genuine romantic relationships.
Note: I wouldn’t say this is exclusively American
Twitter’s quote tweet function, especially, enables users literally as well as metaphorically to appear above the conversation and to cleverly one-up their opponents from this privileged position.
Both the aesthete and the moralist use forms of cleverness to evade such suffering.
For Kierkegaard, both attempts to secure a grip on things from outside—whether through enjoyment or censure—amounted to evasions designed to create the illusion of control and keep the absurd at bay.