Things That Are Not Aesthetic has amassed more than 3.4M followers who seem to enjoy the stranger than strange pictures they post daily. From silly clocks and bizarre billboards to furry skeletons, the creators continue to puzzle their fans with the most ridiculous images found online.
This Facebook page is a part of the Dank Channel project, which was started by Levi Cameron Grenko in 2013. He is a social media manager who "grew to love the internet culture of memes" ever since he made his first meme page. With this project, he strives to "make a difference on the world as a whole". By sharing funny pictures and jokes, the accounts he created allow people to let out a few laughs and share their opinions with others.
While we may feel uncomfortable looking at terrible objects or unaesthetic design, it's intriguing how we also find them weirdly attractive. Funny and perplexing pictures are the perfect attention trap—once your eyes land on them, it’s hard to look away.
An influencer marketing agency Mediakix explained that in the past couple of years, meme accounts that appeal to audiences of all types seem to be on the rise. One reason for their popularity is simply their format. Funny pictures are easy "bites" of content that can be consumed in mere seconds and always feel fresh for the audiences.
"Compared to more traditional forms of media like news articles or YouTube videos, memes require little time and effort to consume and understand," they explained. They’re designed for our fast-paced lives and can give us temporary shelter from the troubles we may have in our lives.
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Another important factor is their content. The majority of such accounts target Millennial audiences and, according to Statista, they were the largest generation group in the U.S. in 2019, adding up to 72.1M people. "Unlike other social media influencers that create content around specific niches like beauty, family, or sports," meme accounts also tend to function on a broader scale. That’s why they appeal to many different users instead of just targeting one kind of Millennial.
However, there also seems to be a growth of category-specific pages. "Themed meme accounts toe that fine line between being particularly relatable to a specific group of people, but universal enough to attract a large following," Mediakix wrote.
So when you take a look at pages and accounts like the one we feature in this list, you can’t help but think that the younger generations have a seriously weird sense of humor. Turns out, Millennials and Gen-Z were brought into a world where to live an easy life and find a well-paying job is harder than it was for their parents or grandparents. Well, if you’re drowning in student debt and have to give up on the idea of buying a house one day, the world can start to seem like a pretty dark place.
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According to Elizabeth Bruenig, one reason why Millennials' sense of humor is so dark and surreal could be that the world has stopped making sense to them. "Long-lasting careers seem out of reach; millennials are told to go to college so they can make money, but mostly they just amass debt and then job-hop in hopes of paying it off. In the meantime, they put off getting married, having kids, buying houses and so on. And waiting feels like — well, waiting," she explained.
