“I’m going to become the Joker” is some of the Internet’s most poignant shorthand. Referencing Todd Phillips’s 2019 film noir, the phrase describes becoming so thoroughly disillusioned that one loses faith in everything.
The process is a dark descent: individual indignity after interpersonal insult after institutional injustice prompts a downward spiral from George Costanza screaming, “We’re living in a society!” to nihilists barking, “We believe in nothing, Lebowski” to finally just a depressed clown laughing at the idea of anything mattering at all.
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