From the SRC...

Normalisation of Self-deprecation, and why it is bad

A lot of us seem to cringe at the idea of hearing dad jokes repeatedly because the jokes are not funny to us. While that may be true due that most of the time adult jokes are cringeworthy, are our jokes any better?

Well, at first glance, the answer is obviously yes. Why would we want to stoop down to the level of “Hi Hungry, I’m Dad” jokes? Humour is a big part of our everyday lives because the topics we choose to make jokes of indicates a lot of things about ourselves and about our view of life. 

One thing that annoys me about jokes and remarks that are made nowadays is that a lot of are self-deprecative. In other words, most jokes poke fun at ourselves, bringing ourselves down to make other people laugh. Things like, “I hate myself” or “I’m so dumb” along with other phrases that are inappropriate to include in this article, are all examples of self-deprecative jokes. 

It was made popular through the internet, by things like commentary YouTubers, meme subreddits, and multiplayer video game interactions. As everyone can be as anonymous as they like, people usually are very hostile and toxic online, causing a lot of negative emotions to flow around. Eventually, since the internet has such a big impact on our generation, it seeps into our everyday life and before we knew it, we incorporated this into our everyday lives. 

We might not realise it is a problem because literally everybody does it. I was guilty of this myself; it is so engrained in our culture that at this point, I would argue that it’s second nature—and that’s a real problem. 

By bringing ourselves down using jokes, remarks, and during everyday conversation, we increase our own social anxiety and decrease our self-esteem. It affects us by making us think more negatively towards all things, so we end up being unenthusiastic about events and in some worse cases, even hinder our ability to do the most basic interactions. 

For example, someone might think of themselves as “dumb”, and so they’re afraid to even ask a question during class because they’ve been telling themselves over and over in conversations that they’re “dumb”, so they don’t see the point of asking a question, even though it might be really important and the key to help them understand a topic. 

Because of this, we lose confidence in our abilities, and we stop striving and reaching for things for our own sake. We then lose our individuality and prefer to follow the crowd instead, because then we won’t get judged by other people. 

The second problem I find with this is that we make jokes about mental illnesses way too often. I said before that dad jokes are outdated, but the same can also be said for jokes about depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses. We know it causes real problems for real people every day, so we simply cannot use it as a shield against social judgement just for the sake of it. It is wrong, end of story.

Change is not immediate, and speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that is a proven fact. It took a lot of self-correcting and general discipline to get rid of my self-deprecating expressions. But once I did, I felt a lot more confident about the things I wanted to pursue. Getting rid of that mindset is partially one of the reasons I was able to put myself out there on things like the SRC, and College Council. Although, my biggest takeaway from getting rid of that habit is that I was able to be a little bit more like myself in front of others, and not be embarrassed by it. 

This goes without saying but, everyone’s takeaways and benefits will be different, but rest assured, by giving yourself some extra comfort and confidence and knowing that everyone else is going through a similar experience, you’re also able to get rid of this negative mindset and look unto life with a little more optimism. Remember, even if you have 100 people supporting you, if you don’t believe in yourself first and foremost, you won’t be able to reach your goals. 

Richard Ha

SRC President