“What a privilege it is to run in the rain. What a privilege it is to have a house I need to clean.” Social media is usually criticised for being a toxic space, but an emerging trend is pushing back against negativity with gratitude.
Posts entitled “What a privilege” feature everything from images of cosy beds (What a privilege it is to be exhausted after a long day) to videos of travelling (What a privilege it is to carry a heavy bag) to kitchen hobs (What a privilege it is to think about what to make for dinner everyday) have sprung up on Instagram and TikTok.
The trend has yet to reach the stratospheric heights of 2014’s hashtag blessed or 2020’s “I am thankful for … ” phase, but it is gaining traction online with some posts attracting upwards of 200,000 likes. Welcome to gratitude 2.0. The trend spans mundane occurrences such as commuting (What a privilege it is to moan about going to an office) to more luxurious experiences such as shopping for a designer bag (What a privilege it is to choose).
“It combines self-satisfaction and humble-bragging, perhaps covert gloating, in most cases unironically, in a way which might seem cloying, especially to some cynical UK onlookers, but the phrase has been circulating in US usage for some time,” said Tony Thorne, a lexicographer and director of the slang and new language archive at King’s College London. “I think it may originally stem from fulsome expressions of gratitude and thankfulness by American evangelicals and would-be lifestyle influencers, where ‘grateful’ could be deemed to be too mundane.”
Rukiat Ashawe, a junior strategist at the London-based agency The Digital Fairy believes this type of gratitude resonates best when the humdrum elements of everyday life are championed. “Online people prefer to show the highlight reels of their lives,” he said. “This can lead to a warped sense of reality – and self – which gratitude content actively works against because it grounds people. It snaps them out of the virtual reality social media creates into the real world.”
So is the internet changing the meaning of the word privilege? “I don’t think TikTok actually changes the essential meaning of the word but turns [it] into more powerful triggers or symbols, perhaps with added nuance,” Thorne said.“This is how keywords work, like buzzwords before them, tapping into a vibe or aesthetic or set of attitudes.”
