goblin mode

As is often the way these days, this expression began its life on Twitter almost a decade ago, moved through social media and finally became mainstream this year with a story about Julia Fox,  the model, who split up with Kanye West. A fake tweet purported to be her saying that West didn’t like her going into goblin mode.  She rebutted this but it all went viral. There was also a remark made by Elon Musk, that buying Twitter was him in goblin mode.

Initially goblin mode was something chosen mostly by women who rejected the carefully curated images of media influencers presented to them on social media and opted for a don’t-care, slovenly, hedonistic style of living at the opposite end of the spectrum from those photoshopped women who spruiked a health and fitness lifestyle and said it was so easy to be beautiful. Women who went goblin wore pyjamas (T-shirt over undies) all day and pulled cold pizza out of the fridge and ate it on the floor while binging on a Netflix series.

This was reinforced by pandemic lockdowns so that now goblin mode is associated with living in trackie daks and resisting the idea of going back to work with its dress and behaviour norms.

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Year was goblin mode, voted in by 300,000 people.

It is perhaps indicative of a certain amount of pandemic depression.