Yearnposting is a new kind of wellness

There is a place on the internet where mourning doves coo all day, cicadas buzz softly, and trees rustle in the breeze. You can burrow yourself in its haze by following its growing network of creators, but you are more likely to stumble upon it as you’re scrolling through TikTok or Instagram: it comes to you. This is a place online where room-temperature fruit is eaten slowly and words in sans-serif type float over hazy landscapes or still-lifes to speak simple, oracular truths like, “time is spacious” or, “I know that love is real”. These posts can feel like portals that transport you to those infinitesimally small moments where the light, the air, and the thoughts roaming through your head all click into place.

This style of posting is about the sad, melancholic, yearnful, comforting, and achingly mundane. On Instagram, popular accounts like @gendersauce, @nimity.online, @hammuraber, and @chicfeast.art post text and image slideshows that can cut right through you. “Everything is sacred. Everything is mundane,” can read as either glib, corny, or devastating. But the comment sections on all these accounts seem to indicate that we want to be devastated (in a good way). On TikTok, @ahecksis posted a slideshow of nostalgia-themed Tumblr posts where commenters share their devastating (“i feel like i’ve been shot by this post”) and wistful (“do you remember how we used to run?”) reactions.

To cite some of the internet’s most overused words, this genre of post can be described as both liminal and tender. Liminal, in its slippery in-between-ness: They’re not exactly web weavings, although they are emotionally charged. Nor are they digital rest stops, even if they do interrupt the overwhelm of the typical feed. They’re not aesthetic collages either, despite a cohesive use of sound, image, and text that merits the frequent use of tags like #nichecore, #corecore, and #sotfcore. Tender, because despite being so aesthetic, they always deliver a message that grazes over our emotions like a finger to a bruise. Their words combine the warmth of a wholesome meme with the hope of a motivational post and the raw emotion of a trauma meme. It’s the kind of content you look through in bed, before falling asleep, while soothing your “inner child”. It’s the kind of post you only send to people you’ve been vulnerable enough to share your dreams with.

Most of these posts come from face-less creators, as if sprouting from some abandoned cybersoil through the cracks of the algorithm. But one entity has grown from this trend with a recognizable name and face: Sotce. On TikTok, @sotce has over 400,000 followers. One of her most popular TikToks zooms in on a fingered tub of lotion and says, “my lotion just reminded me that on one person in the world knows where i am right now.” In another, she demonstrates a meditation pose for “the little girl feeling of why isn’t anybody helping me”. The hashtag #sotcecore has over 2.1M views, there you’ll find tributes to the creator’s lessons in mindful living. On Spotify, there are dozens of user-generated Sotce-inspired playlists that include repeats of Mazzy Star, Sweet Trip, Lamp, Weyes Blood, and early Grimes. Sotce is, to employ another overused word, a vibe.

The thin white 23-year-old is perfectly poised to build the kind of wellness brand that leads to sponsored trips to Bali and dinners of ice-cold smoothie bowls. On Patreon, Sotce expands her offering with more blogs, advice, and guided meditations. But her content is for those who want to contemplate the wound instead of rushing to heal it through the Wellness Industrial Complex. And for those who talk to their shower heads.

In March, Sotce told Nylon she was moved to dedicate herself to TikTok by a “dream that had a certain quality to it” where “these angels were telling me to make TikToks”. This corner of the internet deals in the articulation of “certain qualities”. Teacups are always posed a certain way. Sotce eats fruit, cuddles, or simply just faces the camera in a certain way — childish, coy, ironic, and animal. 

Ambient sound plays a central role. Under #sotcecore, people post stills of leaves or naked cherry pits to sounds of ringing piano keys or clips of movies where waves crash over fading dialogue. They compel you to listen closely, as if you’ll eventually make out the name of that feeling or answer to your question from the TikTok audio of morning doves. Along with mundane still lifes and nature imagery, ambient sound helps give this corner of the internet its signature oracular vagueness. They don’t always offer much meaning — which is why they’re easily dismissed as drivel for the too-online — but what they do offer is a place for you to give things meaning. They create space for a liminality of emotion that brings people to comment things like “I will never be a lotus flower” and for the creator to then respond with, “this hurts”. It’s emblematically, and in some cases parodically, hard to define as either earnest or ironic.

Permission to play around, be silly, and practice an almost accidental vulnerability makes these memes approachable, as opposed to intimidating. On their website, Gendersauce describes their content as “ridiculous and oracular memes, poetry, and mischief”. My favorite @nimity.online post is a picture of laid out trinkets, each slide has a different text like “I will love you in every form you take” and “today I am a lost-and-found of memories”. The caption for the post reads: “a small collection of objects. A small collection of words that I cannot find a place for”. And my favorite comment is: “pulled these straight out of my urethra”.

Both TikTok and Instagram are homes to a growing number of artists and poets that post this style of meme or slideshow as an extension of their offline artistic practices that often spill over into self-help and advice services on Patreon. Collectively, they all offer writing prompts, diary entries, access to Close Friends stories, answers to specific questions, encouragements, and a smattering of “musings” to paying subscribers. Many sell prints, paintings, sculptures, or have poetry books to promote. Gendersauce also teaches self-help classes like People Please, “a class on letting go of your need to please and leaning into your ability to connect”.

None of these creators offer easy answers. But they do meet an audience eager to plant the seeds of meaning, and maybe even connection, in their zany plots. The meme is a form that can never be taken seriously, nor can it be dismissed. These memes walk the line between vulnerable and dejected, obliquely offering wellness resources that just so happen to be a part of a robust artistic practice. Tender and liminal. They work to capture, convey, and dig into “certain qualities”, the haziness of feeling, and remembering, and looking inward and trying to find connections with the world around us.