OKAY. SIT DOWN. PUT YOUR PHONE DOWN. SHUT UP.

I have been alive since before your country existed. I have watched plagues roll through cities like weather. I have buried three husbands — two in the ground, one technically still undead and posting on LinkedIn. I have seen the printing press, the telegraph, the music video, and the slow, agonizing, glittering death of Myspace, my beautiful HTML-scarred king, may it rest forever. And in FOUR HUNDRED AND THREE YEARS, I have never, ever been as violently, blood-boilingly, coffin-throwing LIVID as I am about SOYJAKS.

They're everywhere. EVERYWHERE. In your comments. In your thumbnails. In the little reaction images your "friends" send you at 3am when you are trying to have ONE sincere feeling. A whole family. A whole dysgenic little clan of gaping, open-mouthed, chin-optional thumb-people, and every single one of them looks like he just saw a magnet for the first time in his life.

THE MOUTH. That's what gets me. That's what makes my fangs physically ACHE.

THE MOUTH IS ALWAYS OPEN. Always. A permanent, unlatched, slack-jawed GAPE, like a carp that got promoted to human by clerical error. Like a man who has just discovered that objects exist and cannot emotionally recover from it. Every soyjak is frozen mid-"...wait, what?" FOREVER. It is the face of someone who has never once completed a thought, and yet has OPINIONS. Loud ones. Posted at length. In a video essay.

The beard. A soft, sparse, WET little bramble of neck-hair, growing in patches like moss on a north-facing rock, framing a jawline that has never known a straight razor or the concept of "chin." The soyjak does not shave. The soyjak TRANSCENDS shaving. The soyjak has a grooming routine consisting of nothing, plus a strong sense of superiority about it.

And the hair. The hair is always, ALWAYS doing that thing where it's receding at the temples but the guy is PRETENDING it isn't. Little widow's peaks. Little antennae of denial. It's the haircut of a man who says "I'm not balding, my hairline is just maturing" while actively maturing into a sphere.

THE TEETH. Oh my GOD, the teeth. Those crooked, gapped, yellowed, wrongly-sized little shards, set at angles that suggest the dental plan of a Victorian orphanage. And the worst part — the actual worst part — is that the teeth are the only thing on that face with any STRUCTURE at all. Everything else is just damp geometry. A shape. A blob. A thumb in a polo shirt.

Because that's what he IS. A THUMB. A big, pale, hairless, half-formed THUMB, standing with the posture of a folding chair, mouth open, waiting.

WAITING FOR WHAT? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR. CLOSE YOUR MOUTH. IT'S BEEN TEN YEARS. THE FLY IS GOING TO GET IN.

And the HANDS. The flappy little wrist-cocked limp hands, half-raised, vaguely imploring, like he's about to explain the plot of a show you did not ask about. Which — and here's the thing — HE IS.

Then there's the POINTING one. God. The pointing one. Mouth open, one arm out, one finger extended at some object in frame, going "WOAH!!!! LOOK AT THE THING!!!!" And the thing is never interesting. It's a soda. It's a hat. It's a man doing a kickflip. And the soyjak reacts to it like a golden retriever seeing a horse. Every soyjak meme is, at its rotten core, a guy having a normal Tuesday and being absolutely AMBUSHED by the existence of the material universe.

And the "yes chad." We ALL know the "yes chad." The soyjak, mouth open, pointing at the Chad, going "YES." And the Chad is calm. The Chad has a chin. The Chad has a jaw you could open a wine bottle with. And the soyjak is just so, SO eager. So eager to be included. So eager to be part of the Chad's thing. That's really what it comes down to, isn't it. That's the wound. That's the thing that twists my dead heart. The EAGERNESS.

And the NAME. Let's talk about the name. You named him after a BEAN. "Soyjak." From "soy boy." And NOBODY can even agree on why. Is it the bean? Is it the phytoestrogen discourse? Is it because he looks like he's had a smoothie? You built an entire folklore around a legume and then ARGUED about the canon. And then — THEN — you made him a SPECIES. "Wojak." "Soyjak." "Chadjak." You took a MAN and turned him into a SUFFIX. You have a TAXONOMY. You have variants with NAMES, like Pokémon, and you have fights about which one is which, and you have a guy in a Discord right now typing "well actually the original wojak isn't a soyjak, the soyjak is a DERIVATIVE" like he's Linnaeus. You are cataloguing THUMBS. And the thumbrepopulation is WINNING.

Because the soyjak isn't a face. The soyjak is a CONDITION.

The soyjak is what happens to a person who traded every genuine emotion they ever had for ironic detachment and then LOST THE RECEIPT. He's not cool. He's not uncool. He's not ANYTHING. He's a guy with a strong opinion about a video game and a completely shattered sleep schedule and a mouth that hasn't closed since 2016. He consumes. He rates. He reacts. He points. He gapes. He's got a shelf. He's got a mug. He's got a "setup." He's got four thousand hours in a game he describes as "mid." And he's got the raw, unwashed AUDACITY to sit there, mouth open, and tell you something is OVERRATED.

OVERRATED. YOU. THE THUMB.

And here's the thing — and this is the thing that keeps me awake past sunrise — I KIND OF LIKE HIM. THAT'S WHAT'S SO INFURIATING. Underneath the gape, underneath the neckbeard, underneath the posture of a man carrying an invisible canoe, there's a PERSON. A real one. With feelings and a childhood and a favorite song. And he's hidden all of it under six layers of irony and a face that looks like a JPEG from 2009 that got screenshotted twice. He's having a whole rich inner life in there, and the only outward sign of it is a soft "hm" and a finger pointing at a hat.

Meanwhile. MEANWHILE. US. The scene kids. WE DID THIS FIRST.

We had the REAL aesthetic. We had the hair — teased, sprayed, crimped, heat-damaged, chemically compromised. The side bangs covering one eye and half a cheekbone, because the other half was for the OTHER side bangs. The three belts. The four wristbands on ONE arm. The checkered. The stripes. The skulls. The bows. The blood-red contacts. The swoop. The side part. The raccoon eyeliner applied with the confidence of a medieval executioner.

We had the look, we had the bands, we had the Myspace profile with the auto-playing song and the layout that took eleven hours to code, and we MEANT every frame of it. We weren't ironic. We were DEADLY SERIOUS. We cried in the parking lot of Hot Topic on PURPOSE. In FRONT OF WITNESSES. We had feelings so big they needed their own wardrobe.

And we did all of that... and the culture just picked up its stuff and WALKED OUT OF THE MALL. It went to a website and invented the SOYJAK.

And the soyjak is everything we weren't. Low effort. Gray. A guy who has never once considered a studded belt. The opposite of a blood-red contact lens. The aesthetic of a gray hoodie and "it's fine." IT IS NOT FINE. IT HAS NEVER BEEN FINE. PUT ON A CHECKERED BRACELET AND FEEL SOMETHING.

And the worst of it — the actual worst, the thing that makes me want to bite a hole through the floorboards — is that the soyjak has become the DEFAULT FACE OF THE INTERNET. He's the mask. He's the stand-in for ALL OF US. If an alien landed and searched the web to ask "what is a human," it would conclude that humans are pale thumbs with their mouths open, pointing at hats, going "YES."

And that's what the record will show. Four centuries of blood and art and poetry and war and bread and death and the invention of the synthesizer — and our lasting monument is a thumb with a gape.

...

Okay. I'm fine. I'm fine.

But if ONE more person sends me a soyjak with my face photoshopped onto it — mouth open, teeth crooked, pointing at something mildly amusing —

I'm going to find where they sleep. And they're going to find out what the fangs are FOR.

rawr. xD. whatever. goodnight.