Late at night, while scrolling TikTok, you might encounter a video of beautiful landscapes, a cloudy sky with lo-fi piano music playing in the background, often accompanied by captions and voice-overs saying things like, “You’ve come so far” or, “It’s okay to rest.” This is ‘hopecore’: a micro-genre of digital media built around affirmation, nostalgia, and softness. Hopecore arises in response to constant online pressure, offering small doses of reassurance for viewers navigating social comparison, burnout, and anxiety.
Take, for example, a clip where a calm voiceover whispers, “You’re doing so well” over a woodland scene, or another where the text reads, “You’ve come so far, and you don’t even realise it” against soft piano and fading light. These short videos function as algorithmically delivered ‘care packages’, small moments of reassurance in the middle of the infinite scroll.
But there is a paradox here. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer might see hopecore as a textbook example of pseudo-emotion. Within the culture industry, they argue that emotions are prefabricated and mass-distributed, allowing viewers to recognise feelings rather than truly experience them (Horkheimer & Adorno 1997, 95). Hopecore is often templated, with soft filters, serif captions, and ambient audio, making its comfort instantly legible but arguably hollow. On TikTok, hopecore videos are algorithmically amplified to elicit recognition on repeat engagement, reflecting the very dynamics Adorno critiqued. One might ask: is this reassurance felt in the clips authentic, or is it closer to what Mark Fisher calls a ‘prefabricated affect’ (Fisher 2014, 28), a kind of capitalistic realism of comfort?
At the same time, dismissing hopecore as mere kitsch misses its subtle power. Walter Benjamin wrote that mass reproducibility can strip art of its ‘aura’ (Benjamin 1969, 3). However, he still hinted at new democratic potentials in accessible media. Hopecore operates in this liminal space; its reproducibility makes it formulaic, yet that formula allows it to reach millions of anxious or lonely viewers at once. Although reproduced endlessly, these videos provide moments of shared affect that feel intimate precisely because they are designed to be widely accessible. For someone stuck doomscrolling at 2 a.m., the phrase, “You are not a burden” may still hit with the force of a revelation. The industrial logic of the genre doesn’t necessarily nullify its resonance.
The emergence of hopelesscore, however, complicates the picture further. Using the same dreamy visuals and lo-fi fixtures, hopelesscore embraces melancholy rather than reassurance, involving videos with audio and captions that read, “You’re not meant to be okay all the time.” Instead of insisting on positivity, it validates sadness. Where hopecore consoles with, “You’re okay,” hopelesscore offers a quieter solidarity: “It’s okay that you’re not okay.” By acknowledging sadness without requiring resolution, hopelesscore offers an emotional honesty absent in conventional wellness content.
This shift matters. In a cultural economy where self-help and wellness are often co-opted into productivity logics, hopecore and hopelesscore represent small refusals. They slow down the demand to optimise and instead create what Lauren Berlant calls ‘affective atmospheres,’ which are shared feelings that spread among people without resolving into instruction or rules to follow. Their softness is political precisely because it suspends into the imperatives of hustle culture (Berlant 2011, 15).
A newer and more popular version of hopecore, ‘meme hopecore’, adds yet another layer. These videos combine the aesthetic and softness with irony, absurdity, and the general brain rot that comes with internet culture. The visuals are sweet, yet the captions and voiceovers are memes and jokes, intentionally exaggerated or humorous. Meme hopecore often, although subliminally, acknowledges the performativity of online comfort, poking fun at the softness as content trend while still producing a calming effect due to its visuals. The ironic layer allows viewers to recognize the constructed nature of comfort while still feeling genuine emotional resonance, highlighting postmodern awareness in affective consumption, where viewers recognize the constructed or ironic nature of online comfort while still experiencing genuine emotional resonance.
This blend of sincerity and self-awareness mirrors postmodern critiques of media: the viewer is intended to laugh, relate, and feel simultaneously, suggesting that even when emotional content is mediated through irony, it can still serve a genuine affective outcome. Meme hopecore then demonstrates that digital comfort doesn’t always have to be naïve; it can be playful, critical, and affective all at once.
Of course, the risk remains. Hopecore, hopelesscore, and meme hopecore can all be unintentionally subsumed into the very circuits they resist, monetised through views and hashtags and turned into what Adorno might term ‘administered feelings’ (Adorno 2002). Together, these micro-genres illustrate a shift in online affect. Emotional spaces are increasingly shared and navigable within algorithmic systems and offer both critique and care in digital culture.
But to leave it at critique would be incomplete. What these micro-genres do, however briefly, is puncture the cynicism of online life with fragile sincerity. They remind us – whether through luscious landscapes, a caption telling us we’re not behind in life, or a slightly absurd meme – that feeling is still possible even within the culture industry’s endless and mindless scroll through life. If the internet teaches us anything, it’s that a moment of gentle feeling can be revolutionary.
Works Cited
Adorno, T.W. 2002. Aesthetic Theory. London: Continuum.
Adorno, T. W. & Horkheimer, M. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. (Trans. by J. Cumming). New York: Herder & Herder.
Benjamin, W. 1969. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Arendt, H. ed. Illuminations. (Trans. by H. Zohn). New York: Schocken Books.
Fisher, M. 2014. Ghosts of my Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Wiltshire: Zero Books.
Pedwell, C. 2023. Introduction: Lauren Berlant and Media Theory. Media Theory. 7(2), pp. 127-152.
Witkin, R. W. 2000. Adorno on Popular Culture. London: Routledge.
By Zamangwe Mazibuko
Zama Mazibuko is a South African scholar whose work focuses on critical theory and the philosophy of history. She has recently completed her Honours degree at the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), where her research explored the philosophical dynamics of historical understanding, critique, and socio-political transformation. Her ongoing research engages with questions of historical narrative, critique, and the philosophical conditions that make collective social change possible.