The Ecology of Goblins: Deconstructing 'Goblin Mode' & Millennial Burnout

Transcript

You're listening to No Plot Only Lore, a podcast about games and the tables we play them at. Your DMs tonight and every

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Welcome back to No Plot Only Lore. This week brought to you by the pile. Do you

not have enough energy to fold all your laundry? The pile. Just put it all on

your couch. You'll find it later. You know, I I saw a real on Facebook today that was like, "The true sign of

adulthood is that you no longer have the chair." And I'm like, "Couldn't be me."

There was another one that I saw that was like, "I've never had the chair." And she was like lording it over people.

And I was like, "Well, lah dah. I just put mine on the [ __ ] floor." Yeah. That person's a monster.

You don't get to think you're cool, lady. Just cuz you aren't, you know, a a feral manchild or whatever.

I have admittedly always kind of been a feral manchild.

That's I mean, I don't think that's going to surprise anybody. It I How do I say this? It comes with

the territory sometimes uh in the circles that we go in. Um

that's true. I will say I've seen one of my worst examples this week, but it's not the

first time I've been to a a friend's house and been like, "Oh yeah, you you didn't get raised right because your

parents kind of left you in the corner for a long time." Do you do you remember the fridge that I

taped shut? I do remember that you were like, "This is this is a nightmare. We're just going to tape this clothes

and toss it." Yeah. The uh the fridge stopped working

and rather than call my land lady to replace it, I just taped it closed with a sign on it that said that if you love

life, do not open. And I just lived without a fridge for six months. That's That's such a long time to live

without a fridge. I Yeah. Yeah, it is.

Like I go camping for a weekend without a fridge and I'm like, "God damn it. How do people survive like this for

centuries?" A lot of dried food. I had a lot of dried food. Yeah, true.

Like cans. I ate it on a lot of cans. But like Yeah. No, I I just I kind of stopped like I I would eat a lot of food

on my way to places. So like at the time I was working at the comic

shop, right? And so I would walk past a 7-Eleven every day. Okay.

And while I was walking past the 7-Eleven, I would usually pick up like a little jug of milk or some juice or

something like that. A thing that would normally be refrigerated and I would take it to work with me. And

that that was how I would get all of my cold goods. Just just enough of like a kind of

normal thing to like trick yourself into thinking that you had fresh goods in the house.

Yeah. Yeah. Vegetables were a no. There there were

no there was no crisper. Right. Yeah. Lettuce did not exist in my home

for a long time. Um I'm so disappointed in you.

You are not the only one. Oh man. Okay. So, I have very recently

um I have a friend who has been like my companion in never dating again for a

while, right? And she has recently started up on the apps again.

Oh, no. and I gained some amount of curiosity and so I installed an app and

as I've been flipping through this catalog of people that I am not dating the one thing that keeps going through

my mind is I am not nearly put together enough for this. Oh,

I I mean, yeah, I I understand there was

I I unlike you, I am sort of uh making efforts at kind of trying to date or

something. And I took a a big gap

period. Mhm. And the first thing I had to contend with was like, oh, I'm I'm not

in a state that, you know, anyone would want to consider this option.

If I were on offer, yeah, I would not take me.

That's that's a good way to phrase it. Yeah. Like I I I think that I I would

look at myself and go, that is somebody who needs some time to work on themselves. Yeah. Um because I've I've spent a lot

of years in goblin mode. Yeah. So you I've

I've heard this phrase before. I'm not fully

privy to like the context of it. So why don't you kind of give me the the 411 as

it were on what true goblin mode is? Yeah. So, goblin mode is one of those

things that got popularized on the internet. I think primarily

like the the time that it took off was early co, right? But there was like some leaning towards

it before that of just like being a feral little creature

and kind of reing in being a feral little creature. Okay. Right. So, like rather than beating

yourself up about the fact that your house is always a mess or that you

aren't cooking food, you're just like shoveling crackers into your face at 3 in the morning or that you have the pile

um or the chair as I guess is currently the thing. You you just kind of accept

those things as being part of your goblin identity and you're just like, "Fuck it. I'm I'm a goblin. I I am reing

in chaos and squalor and that's fine. I'm just gonna

be a weird little toad. Okay. So, that's weirdly different from

how goblin mode was sort of described to me. Okay. I I was under the assumption that

Goblin Mode was more about um

enjoying the collection of weird little trinkets and knickknacks and and you

know being okay with just being like an oddball collector of things.

There's like a a subset of like goblin mode/cottage

core that's just kind of like into fungus and moss.

Yeah. Just like a a good rock just going out into a swamp and finding

a good rock. I mean Yeah. Like that's that is the the male experience.

Yeah. Well, I mean, the male experience is you find yourself a good stick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. A good stick.

I uh I posted on Reddit with a good stick and

boy howdy was he thrilled to see the attention that he got. I think we talked about that literally

last week and we're still talking about it because like there is one thing that all men will gravitate towards and it is

a good stick. You get me like a proper Yeah. proper wizard staff. If it's

shaped like a sword, um, if it has like some gnarly stuff happening at one end

of it that makes that side cooler and then the other one is just like a point. Yeah. [ __ ] prime,

right? So many good ways to have good stick. But like, yeah, finding a good shiny rock, similar experience.

Yeah, fair. Um I I would almost consider those like

parallels to one another. So like the goblin mode that I am most familiar

with is mostly just like I I guess kind of the difference between

goblin mode and goblin core. Ah okay. Right. Like goblin core would be like the aesthetic of goblin.

Right. Right. like accepting that you are going to live in a little mud hut and have

your moss and your ferns and like not worry about having anything on the floor.

Yeah, there's like bottles everywhere. So many bottles. Um, and then goblin mode would

be that little hut being a disheveled warren

and you're just like sitting in a corner putting bead work together, ignoring the fact that the place is a

huffle. Okay. So, the the way I'm hearing this from you is that goblin

core is cutesy and fun and whimsical and goblin mode is distressing.

[Laughter] feral. Yeah. Just like

more more like being an apossum, right? Like Yeah. You you come into a a

goblin's home and you find them under the bed hissing. [Laughter]

U you're not you're not selling it, that's for sure. It's

it's a vibe. And I think that's probably like the whole thing is that it is just kind of like

you either catch the vibe or you don't. Yeah, I guess that's fair. And

it it's kind of a a rejection of like the the perfectly put together

influencer vibe, right? Those those guys are the worst.

Ye Yes. There was a great video that I saw today of like a girl running up to a

stranger and being like, "Kiss her, slap." And he became an NPC.

He He started walking with like a walk cycle that he had clearly practiced and when she said, "Hey," he turned around

and like waved exaggeratedly. Good for him.

just like that that entire like subset of content is something that I will never properly understand. And I think

like the the whole idea of goblin mode is just like a lot of people's lives are never like that.

Right. Yeah. Right. Like I have rampant ADHD

that keeps me from being able to do basic tasks because I found a shiny rock, right?

And now I need to go find a whole bunch of more shiny rocks. And I'm researching shiny rocks for 4 hours. Um,

shiny rock core. Shiny rock core. Yeah, I'm I'm digging real. It's they're for [ __ ] minerals,

Marie. Um, but like,

yeah, I I I don't think that I'm ever going to have that like put together like that girl aesthetic.

Makes sense, right? Like I'm not an it girl. Not even a girl.

Yeah, fair. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. Like, yeah, you you lack the desire or the

basic startup to be girl, let alone a girl. Yeah. Yeah, man.

Every once in a while, I'm like, it'd be kind of neat to be like a different

thing than I am, but try it out.

Yeah. Like every time I've thought about it though, it's just like my that there is a part

of my brain that's just like why you doing that? Yeah, it's dumb.

Yeah. That's a part of your brain that's hard to Well, it it won't ever turn off. No, it's like the experimenting in

college phase where it's just like, yeah, you kissed a dude, but you know, didn't do anything for you. Sorry, bud.

Yeah, sorry, chef. Was yours named Jeff, too? Was it the same

Jeff? Jeff Jeff gets around. He seeks out those, you know, nervous uh you know,

religious upbringing kids who are just like, "Well, maybe maybe the big city's different.

He He's He's looking for nerds whose hands are shaking." Yeah.

If you look like you should be in an anime, like Yeah.

Um, yeah, I think what Jeff is a predator. Stay away from him.

Um, I I think one of the things that's interesting about like goblin mode is that it does seem to be kind of like the

adopting of an archetype as a way of coping. Gotcha. Right. like

millennials in particular and like I I Okay, small side rant that generations are

stupid and arbitrary and don't actually mean anything. Like growing up with a cohort is going

to have you have similarities with that cohort, right? But if you limit yourself to

experiencing only the things that that cohort has experienced because you have some preconceived notion of like

belonging to an inroup and that every other group is your out group. That's just [ __ ] stupid and self-limiting.

I I don't think that's what generational divides are talking about. But I think what it comes to is like defining

uh a set of shared experiences for a group and like so like you know uh

millennials of a certain age all kind of experienced like okay that's a bad

example but all experienced like 911 right and like we all you know there there was popular

culture for our age was like a specific thing and like fads and and music and um

attitudes were all sort of generally similar no matter where you were aside

from like extremely sheltered uh kids and stuff like that. But like

though the things that were familiar for all of us vary wildly

within 10 to 20 years and I think that speaks to a lot of what like they're

talking about when it comes to like these generational gaps and divides. Um and

that I think is very like real thing. Yeah. For me, it's a little weird

because like I I grew up on a cusp between generations. Like for one thing,

nobody actually knows where generations begin or end. And anybody who tells you that they have like a definitive time

for when a generation begins or ends other than like the baby boomers where it's [ __ ] obvious. Oh. Uh

war ends and suddenly there's a bunch of babies. It's okay. They just declared Gen Beta is like starting this year or something.

[ __ ] sure. Okay. Like I was born in 1982. Yeah.

And according to some people's divisions of the generations, I am either an

incredibly late Gen X. Yeah. Or an incredibly early millennial.

Yeah. The 80 to 85 is kind of no man's land in the generations. Um you're

either like an elder millennial or a baby Xer. And it kind of depends [ __ ] what you

did with come up with a new one. Yeah. Right. They they're all like there's a zenial now. on. I'm like, "Fuck you. I

don't I don't need that. That's stupid." Like, yes, I have shared experiences

with my cohort, with the people that I grew up with. We were the last generation to grow up without an

internet. Right. Right. And that has fundamentally changed the way that we interact with

the world and the promises that were made to the people who grew up at the same time that we did,

right? But like that's not all that different from somebody who was born in 78. Right.

Right. And like they're firmly in the the Gen X category, right? Or somebody

who was born in 86. Well, right. Like they had a time that they

lived without the internet. Sure. But especially when it comes to like the prevalence of the internet. um

when that thing came along and hit your life, I think really does influence like

how you behave and interact with like strangers

and the the internet as a whole. And now that it's like such a pervasive part of our lives, it's it's more and more

important. Like, okay, when a boomer gets tricked by a fake

Nigerian prince, no one is surprised. If a millennial did, they would be

horrified. And and a lot of that comes down to like,

yeah, like you're right, the first, you know, let's say 10 to 12 years of my

life there, the internet was not a thing. But even me growing up on like an acreage outside of town, we got internet

and a Pentium computer and it was like, "Oh, now so much of like what defined

like my sense of humor and common cultural references from like animated

stuff that was just like I hate to use the phrase meme, but like

that's those were like true memes as defined by that one weird

evolutionary scientist. Um, and it was stuff that like, yeah, spread

naturally through the culture, through, you know, the internet and our high school.

But like everyone I meet who didn't go to my high school but is the same age.

If I if I tell them like, "Nice, Gorb," like, they know what I'm talking about.

you know, you you can usually get a pretty good idea of how old somebody is by their

reaction to meat spin. Yeah.

If you show meat spin to somebody and they burst out laughing, they're probably around our age.

Anybody older, anybody younger, that they're going to be horrified. Yeah, because at our ages, they definitely

have seen it before and was just like a the worst things on the internet were jokes that we played on our friends.

Yes. Yes, they were. But like Okay. So, anyways, I I don't hold a lot of truck with the

idea of like generational attributes, I guess, like other than

things that are just like demarked by history, right? So, like the the idea that millennials um were like wasting their

money on avocado toast and that's why we were never going to get a job was always [ __ ] ridiculous to me. And the fact

that like younger generations now have Have you heard about the Gen Alpha stare?

Oh, yes. And I have witnessed it. I uh I've seen it in action. Not directing

at me, but yeah, I think good for those kids. don't tolerate that level of

stupidity from people. That is one thing that I have noticed from people in our age range is that we

are significantly more happy about the like rebellious streak

for the people that are younger than us than our parents were. Which is funny because they were Gen X and they were all like the the two

middle fingers up like [ __ ] you, don't do what like I won't do what you tell me type people,

right? But the second they were the ones that were, you know, in as soon as the tables turned, they're like, "Wait a

minute. Actually, yes, this is great." It's actually kind of interesting to me how

many things just kind of skipped Gen X, right?

Right. Like everybody was like fretting about the boomers. Mhm. And then everybody was like [ __ ] on

the millennials for a minute. Mhm. And then Gen X just like squeaked by. Yeah.

Right. But okay, so all of that generation, yeah, all all of that to say that

people in our age range, people who are like late millennials to like mid

millennials or like early millennials to to mid-millennials, um we have this concept of adulthood

that is a little bit different than generations before us. Sure. And that is that adulthood is an

activity. Okay. Right. So, like for Gen X and for

boomers, adulthood was a role that you filled. It was a defining characteristic

of a person who was over a certain age. For millennials, again, because there were like all of these promises that

weren't necessarily kept for like if we did certain things, certain outcomes would occur,

right? Whenever we have to engage in the idea of an adult behavior, it's quote

unquote adulting, which I will say I hate that, but you

know, go on. Just the word or the fact that we uh

interact with adulthood in that way. the fact that we have put like normal

responsibilities and part of like just having to live your life into this box

and said that is like you know uh

a compartmentalized part of being a human being. It's just like it's okay.

How do I explain this? Yeah, because I find that interesting. I I actually like a as a very big

proponent of sectioning that part of my life off. [Laughter]

I I I find it interesting that that is something that you are against. Okay. Like paying my bills and doing my

laundry and cleaning my house is not don't get me wrong, I don't think it's

like fun. Some people do. I don't. But it's also just like what you have to do

to survive. It's such a basic skill and to say that that is like the compartment

of only adults do this and this is just like this absurd thing that I hate doing

but I'm forced to do is like it's so dumb to me because like this you have to

do it. Someone has to do it. Like you can't you can't go forever off of like

never cleaning and never doing laundry and never like [ __ ] meal prepping and paying your bills and having a mortgage.

Like sorry, you just have to do some things. And back in the day it was I you

have to go out and hunt and you have to [ __ ] till the fields. Like at some point there's just survival tasks that

need to be done and right it doesn't

it doesn't make them easier to say like ah only adults do that and it doesn't

make life better for your kids by saying ah that's just an adulty thing. It's just like no like everyone does this.

This is just part of the human experience. It's it's breathing and eating. Like you just got to do it. So

don't villainize it by saying this is just a nasty part of being an adult. This is just being alive. Like if you

were a child and everyone around you died now you would have to do this. I I think that

there is a weird amount of pressure on people in our age range to not fail at

any of those things though. Okay. Like previously when people had closer knit

communities and there was less individualism and there was a

um a better social safety net and like that things were just kind of turning up

better for people, right? Like the the job market was better and the economy

was better, your buying power was better. Like all of those things were easier

in a previous time and they are all now significantly harder than they used to

be. Mhm. And if you fail at them and you believe that

that is a fundamental aspect of personality, then you have just failed

at a fundamental aspect of personality. Whereas if I failed at adulting,

right? Like I just I didn't adult good. Yeah. Yeah. You're you're failing at

just being a independent whole person or I'm just a cozy swamp creature.

And I think that's I think that sort of gets at where my frustration is. is that like

you're now defining yourself in like

a childlike state, I guess, forever. And these are just like the unfortunate

burdens of adulthood that have been thrust upon you as opposed to just like the natural progression of your life.

See, I would actually look at it as more of like a a refraraming of burnout as

play, which I mean, not necessarily the most psychologically healthy thing to do,

right? But like instead of obsessing over and feeling anxious about

and being sad about your own burnout in a era where everything has gotten

significantly harder and people are significantly more stressed, when you are experiencing those things,

you're just in goblin mode, right? Like it's it mythologizes a

little bit the act of retreating from some of those responsibilities and

just like focusing on your own thing a little bit, right? Like your kitchen is dirty. It's just going to stay dirty for

a minute. Do whatever it is that you were going to do. Just be a little creature,

right? Get get your energy back to where it needs to be for you to be able to

quote unquote adult.

I I'm having difficulty expressing my thought and that's fine. I think I think

there's something to be said on a whole separate long conversation about like the

explosion of infantilism in our society in general.

And and I think a big part of that is like you said the fact that the world has gotten a lot tougher and a lot less

certain. like it's a lot harder to be clear about like your role in society and how society

should function and what you should be doing with your life. You know, there's uh

there's this this biblical concept that like without a vision, people perish, right? And so I think we're seeing that

sort of on mass now. um is that like the younger and younger generations don't

have a vision or hope for their future and therefore they are you know

staying in this this weird transition stage of adolescence for a very long time. Um, and then that's

I wonder how much of that is like the infantiliz like self-infantilization versus like

the the fact that nobody can buy a house. Yeah. Right. Like you you don't have a choice

but to live with family for a while because it is so expensive not to.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. And like I I think that sometimes

things like this like we we were going to talk about a couple of the other like mythical identities that people have

been taking on recently like raccoons and like bog witches and things but like

I I think part of the reason that people adopt these is as a way of coping with

the loss of that promise. Yeah. Right. like you if you go to work, if

you go to school, if you do well, you're going to succeed, you're going to be able to buy a house, you're going to be

able to have a family. All of these things that were promised to not just our generation, but the

generation after as well. And the generation that's coming up after them are growing up without a

promise at all. And that I think is just [ __ ] horrifying. Oh, 100%. Yeah.

But yeah, I think that like part of the coping that is happening with that

comes in the form of not necessarily trying to justify

the behavior, but provide the

permission to not always succeed when everything is stacked against you.

Yeah, that's fair.

Anyways, what was our point? Goblins are pretty good. And you you

have a you have a pile. If you if you have the chair, you're

doing fine, right? At least all your laundry is in one [ __ ] place.

Yeah, that is these days. That's all I can ask for. Hey, thanks for making it all the way

through this episode of Noplotonly Lore. If you're looking for more, you can always find us at noplotonlore.com

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