Bo Burnham's Inside and the Burden of Existing

Background

Bo Burnham’s Netflix Special Inside is a look into life during a pandemic. The songs each have a little something to say about the weird, the depressing, the hilarious, and the mind-blowing of life, the world, and the internet during “these crazy times.” He shows the small moments in between his songs too, of setting up, editing, overthinking, random thoughts, deep thoughts, existential thoughts, etc.

It talks about the pandemic and the weird experience of always staying inside, not seeing real people, and substituting that stimulation for something even more stimulating, called the internet.

The Songs

Bo’s song “Welcome to the Internet” is literally just an introduction to the internet or “everything all of the time.” He runs through anything you could possibly find online from weird fanart to DIY bombs to quirky quizzes that don’t fill the empty feeling in your chest when you lay in bed at night like you thought they would.

His other songs like “White Woman’s Instagram,” “How the World Works,” and "Jeffrey Bezos" describe the snippets of what we experience online and the different emotions we can feel in fifteen seconds before it switches to another emotion. We see something comedic, something depressing, something maddening, something political, something cute, something comedic again and before we know it we’re stuck in the cycle.

The Themes

One of the big themes I see here is the overwhelming need to be seen. When you can’t leave and see people who care about you and your existence, you find other ways to see people. You watch live streams of people playing video games and doing mundane tasks like cleaning their room or watering their plants. “Why do people even watch this stuff?” You wonder as you actively click on a ‘Morning of my life as a stable 25-year-old’ video.

Another major theme is the overstimulating nature of the internet that we probably weren’t meant to experience. Bo’s song “That Funny Feeling” perfectly describes the anything and everything of the internet, but more through the lens of someone not quite in touch with their environment.

Here are some good things, here are some bad things, and there it is again, that funny feeling. Here are some more bad things and our attempts to deal with them; our attempts to ignore them. Here are some things that don’t matter, here are some that do, and there it is again, that funny feeling.

That Funny Feeling

Everyone seems to have slightly different interpretations of what “that funny feeling” is but I think it mostly all falls under the category of that-funny-feeling-the-internet-gives-you. For me, it’s not a good feeling, it’s not a bad feeling, it’s almost bittersweet but that isn’t quite the right word. It’s just the funny feeling of being overstimulated by anything you could possibly want and not want to know.

“The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door.”

It’s the knowledge that you can know anything that’s going on at this very moment, anywhere in the world. It’s the understanding that this isn’t healthy, that you should stop looking, turn away and just breathe for a second but you can’t. It’s like watching a train wreck but you’re on the train. You can’t stop what’s happening, but maybe if you know everything that’s happening, it could stifle your helplessness a little.

But then you feel even more helpless as you realize how big the world is and how out of your control everything is, and how much of “everything all of the time” there is.

You begin to feel small and insignificant. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything. If life is like this, if this is existence, what is living but meaninglessness?

How do you even know you exist, what would your existence impact?

You wake up and need a distraction.

You can’t go outside, you can’t see your friends and family, so you watch. You watch a random live stream of someone brushing their teeth and eating breakfast. You think you should probably do those things but can’t make yourself move. You can’t find a reason to care when the planet is dying and you still have to pay taxes and you don’t know how you’re going to move out and people are buying all the toilet paper and someone across the globe can’t pay for their food and there was just another mass shooting and some random famous person cheated on their wife and people are still dying because other people are ignorant and cruel and this must be the end of us and…

It's too loud.

You need a distraction.

So...

I think Inside is about the insidious nature of what happens when we’re left alone with the internet. It changes the way we see the world, whether that’s good because it brings awareness, or bad because it alters our sense of reality and what we should care about. It’s about existential dread, depression, anxiety, absurdism, all the things. It provided something relatable for me during the pandemic when everyone suddenly realized what a mess we are.

It's hard to say I know what the moral of the story is here, it might be too late for that. But it’s certainly food for thought.