Guilty Pleasures Are Dead — Long Live Just Liking Things

At some point in the last few years, something quietly broke open in American pop culture. People started just... admitting things. A 34-year-old marketing manager in Chicago confessed on TikTok that she genuinely, unironically loves the Cheesecake Factory and isn't sorry about it. A 26-year-old guy in a very cool Brooklyn apartment posted a sincere, detailed ranking of *NSYNC albums. A whole corner of the internet erupted in genuine, non-mocking enthusiasm for the mall — not as a nostalgic artifact, not as a piece of kitsch, but as a place people actually liked going.

Nobody prefaced these confessions with "I know this is bad, but." Nobody performed the ritual self-deprecation that used to be the price of admission for liking the wrong thing. They just... said it.

Welcome to the post-guilty-pleasure era. It's stranger and more significant than it sounds.

The Long Reign of Ironic Distance

To understand why this shift feels meaningful, you have to understand how suffocating the alternative was.

For the better part of three decades — roughly from the mid-90s through the early 2010s — American cool culture ran on irony. The operating principle was simple: you could like almost anything, as long as you made it clear you were aware of its badness. You watched The Bachelor "ironically." You listened to Nickelback as a joke. You went to Applebee's with the kind of self-conscious enthusiasm that signaled you were in on the gag.

This wasn't just a quirky aesthetic preference. It was a class performance. Knowing what was culturally legitimate — and demonstrating that knowledge through strategic mockery of everything that wasn't — was how certain people, particularly educated young people, sorted themselves from the masses. Taste hierarchies aren't neutral. They're almost always doing social work, drawing lines between who's sophisticated and who isn't, who belongs in certain spaces and who doesn't.

For Millennials especially, coming of age in this environment meant learning to be perpetually armored. You didn't just like things. You had positions on things. And God forbid you got caught liking something without the appropriate layer of ironic insulation.

The Exhaustion Heard Round the World

Here's what changed: people got tired.

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from performing your own taste for an audience that might be judging you. It's low-grade but constant, like a fan running in the background of your brain. And at some point — accelerated, maybe, by a global pandemic that stripped a lot of performative social behavior down to its bare essentials — a critical mass of people decided the performance wasn't worth it.

Gen Z, who came up watching Millennials exhaust themselves maintaining ironic distance, seemed to arrive at this conclusion faster. The meme formats they developed — the unironic hype post, the sincere stan account, the completely earnest ranking thread — are structurally different from what came before. They're not in on a joke. They're just enthusiastic. Loudly, publicly, specifically enthusiastic.

There's also something generationally meaningful about what they're being enthusiastic about. Reality TV. Boy bands. Mall food courts. Craft fairs. County fairs. Chain restaurants. These aren't edgy reclamations of obscure underground culture — they're a deliberate embrace of things that were explicitly coded as low-status, as basic, as uncool. Loving them openly is, in a quiet way, a rejection of the whole system that made them uncool in the first place.

Taste Gatekeeping Was Always a Power Move

This is where it gets genuinely interesting, because what looks like a personal lifestyle shift is actually something more structural.

Taste hierarchies have always been tied to power. The things deemed culturally legitimate — prestige television, indie music, artisanal everything — tend to map pretty neatly onto the preferences of educated, upper-middle-class white consumers. The things deemed trashy or basic — reality TV, Top 40, chain restaurants, mall culture — tend to be the things that are popular with everyone else. Women, especially, have watched their enthusiasms get mocked and dismissed across generations. Teenage girls who loved boy bands in the 90s were told their taste was shallow; the same music is now being rehabilitated as sophisticated pop craftsmanship.

When people refuse the guilty pleasure framing, they're not just being more relaxed about their Netflix queue. They're pushing back against a system that used cultural taste as a proxy for worth. Saying "I love this thing and I'm not apologizing for it" is, in a small but real way, a refusal to accept that hierarchy.

What This Looks Like as Community

The most interesting dimension of this shift, from where we sit at The Common Thread, is what it's doing to how people connect.

When you drop the armor, you become findable. The person who admits they've watched every season of Survivor twice isn't just sharing a preference — they're extending an invitation. The communities that have formed around sincere, unironic enthusiasm for "uncool" things are some of the most genuinely warm spaces on the internet right now. There's something about shared un-ironic love for a thing — even a silly thing, especially a silly thing — that creates real intimacy.

This is what cultural belonging actually looks like when you strip away the gatekeeping. Not a hierarchy of who has the best taste, but a web of people who found each other through honest enthusiasm. The common thread, as it were.

An Ongoing Negotiation

None of this means the concept of taste is disappearing, or that all cultural criticism should stop. There's still value in examining what we consume and why. But there's a meaningful difference between critical engagement and the reflexive performance of sophistication that passes for it.

The shift happening right now is less about lowering standards and more about honesty — about the gap between what people actually love and what they've been trained to say they love. Closing that gap, even a little, is not a small thing.

So the next time someone in your life admits they've been playing the same three Taylor Swift albums on repeat for six months, or that they genuinely prefer the Cheesecake Factory to the trendy new restaurant downtown, maybe resist the urge to qualify it. Just let them have it.

Liking things is good, actually. We should do more of it.