If you’ve spent any time on TikTok in the past two years, you’ve probably encountered a corecore video without knowing what to call it. The format is instantly recognizable once you’ve seen a few: a rapid-fire montage of seemingly unrelated clips—a child being interviewed on the street, elderly people at slot machines, a scene from Blade Runner, footage of commuters walking through Times Square—all set to melancholic, ambient music. The clips are often layered on top of each other, edited at jarring speeds, and designed to evoke a feeling rather than communicate a specific message. Dean Erfani, who created the original tag, described his intention simply: “to compile random videos that have no intrinsic meaning, and turn them into something that makes people feel.” What people feel, it turns out, is mostly despair.
1. It’s A Visual Representation Of The Gen Z Mental Health Crisis
The timing of corecore’s rise is not coincidental. A 2023 Gallup survey found that nearly half (47 percent) of Gen Zers ages 12 to 26 report feeling anxious often or always, and more than one in five (22 percent) report feeling depressed at the same frequency. These figures are dramatically higher than those of any previous generation at the same age. Corecore didn’t create this crisis, but it has become its most resonant artistic expression.
A scene from Wall-E depicting lonely robots, footage of people staring at phones on the subway, a TikTok of someone breaking down crying, an interview clip of a celebrity looking hollow—none of these have obvious connections, but strung together they create a cumulative weight that many young viewers describe as “hitting different” or simply “real.”
2. The Trend Came From The Source Of The Problem
There’s a dark irony at the heart of corecore: it’s a critique of digital alienation that exists entirely within the digital space, causing that alienation. Research shows that Gen Z spends an average of 6 hours and 27 minutes per day on their phones—more than any other generation. The platform delivering corecore videos is the same platform contributing to the anxiety, depression, and disconnection the videos are trying to process.
Many corecore videos explicitly include footage of people mindlessly scrolling through TikTok feeds, creating a meta-commentary on the viewer’s own behavior in the very moment of viewing. You’re watching a video about the soul-crushing nature of endless scrolling while you’re in the middle of endlessly scrolling. Critics argue this creates a feedback loop that deepens rather than resolves the despair—that corecore is less a form of catharsis than a form of wallowing that keeps viewers sedentary and glued to the phones that are making them miserable.
3. It’s Doomscrolling Marketed As Art
Research published in Applied Research in Quality of Life analyzed studies involving approximately 1,200 adults and found that doomscrolling—the habit of endlessly consuming negative content online—is linked to worse mental well-being and lower life satisfaction. Corecore takes the experience of doomscrolling and distills it into a concentrated dose: instead of gradually encountering disturbing content over hours of scrolling, you get the emotional impact compressed into 30 to 60 seconds.
The structure of a corecore video essentially mimics what your brain experiences during an extended doom-scroll session. You move rapidly from one emotionally loaded image to another, never settling long enough to process any single piece of content before the next one arrives. The difference is that corecore is curated to maximize emotional impact rather than algorithmic engagement—though the line between those two things has become increasingly blurry.
4. The Nihilism Is The Point
The videos are designed to evoke nihilism—the sense that life is meaningless and that individual existence is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. This philosophy has become increasingly prevalent among Gen Zs. The comment sections of popular corecore videos are filled with statements like “this is exactly how it feels” and “why does this hit so hard,” suggesting that the nihilistic content is resonating with something viewers already feel.
The logic is similar to that of sad music: sometimes expressing negative emotions is a form of processing them. But critics point out that corecore rarely offers any pathway forward, any suggestion that change is possible, any vision of what a better world might look like. It’s all diagnosis and no prescription, which may explain why so many viewers report feeling worse after watching rather than better.
5. It Softens Complex Problems
Corecore videos frequently address serious issues: capitalism, consumerism, climate change, loneliness, and the dehumanizing effects of technology. A clip of a sweatshop worker might be juxtaposed with footage of someone unboxing consumer goods, creating an implicit connection without ever articulating a specific critique or proposing a specific response. The viewer is left with a feeling—usually guilt, anger, or despair—without any framework for channeling that feeling into understanding or action.
This aestheticization of political and social problems has drawn criticism from observers who worry that corecore encourages a posture of passive consumption toward issues that demand active engagement. When climate change becomes a vibe rather than a policy problem, the viewer is positioned as a consumer of content rather than a citizen capable of response.
6. It Appeals To People Already Struggling—And May Make Things Worse
Research on doomscrolling has found that those with pre-existing vulnerabilities for psychopathology—including histories of anxiety, depression, or trauma—are both more likely to engage in compulsive negative content consumption and more likely to be harmed by it. A study published in Psychological Trauma found that social media exposure during the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with increases in depression and PTSD symptoms, with the effect strongest among those with more severe baseline psychopathology. The people most drawn to corecore may be precisely the people for whom corecore is most damaging.
This creates a troubling dynamic: the videos resonate most powerfully with viewers who are already struggling, offering a sense of recognition and validation that can feel like connection. But that validation comes packaged with content designed to evoke despair, presented through a medium that encourages continued passive consumption rather than active coping.
7. The “Hopecore” Antidote Hasn’t Really Caught On
In response to corecore’s relentless negativity, some creators have attempted to produce “hopecore”—videos using similar editing techniques but focused on moments of connection, beauty, and human resilience. A child hugging a returning parent, strangers helping each other, natural wonders, and people dancing. The intention is to provide an alternative that offers the same emotional intensity without the despair. But hopecore has never achieved the same cultural traction as its nihilistic counterpart.
Hopecore videos often feel forced or naive in ways that corecore videos don’t, perhaps because optimism requires more justification than pessimism in the current cultural moment. It’s easier to believe that the world is falling apart than that things might get better. The negative content also has a built-in advantage: research on negativity bias shows that humans are naturally more attentive to threatening or negative information than to positive information. The same evolutionary wiring that makes doomscrolling so hard to resist makes hopeful content feel less compelling.
8. It’s Training A Generation To Consume Their Own Suffering
One of the most troubling aspects of corecore is what it models as an appropriate response to distress. The videos present overwhelming problems—capitalism, alienation, climate collapse, meaninglessness—and the implicit response is simply to feel bad about them. There’s no call to action, no suggested response, no pathway from feeling to doing. The viewer’s role is to absorb the content, experience the emotion, and then either move on to the next video or watch the same one again.
By providing an outlet for despair that requires nothing but continued engagement with the platform, corecore channels emotions that might otherwise motivate action into a loop of consumption. You feel bad about the state of the world, so you watch videos that validate your bad feelings, which makes you feel worse, which makes you want to watch more videos that validate those feelings. The political and social problems that corecore gestures toward remain unaddressed while the viewer remains on the couch.
9. The Male Loneliness Pipeline Has Co-Opted The Format
Not all corecore is the same, and some of the most troubling content has emerged from creators who’ve adapted the format to promote specific ideologies. Writing for Hyperallergic, Isabella Segalovich noted that “Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and Theo Von make frequent appearances in corecore videos,” along with “lonely, angry, and sometimes violent male protagonists from blockbusters like American Psycho, Blade Runner 2049, Fight Club, and Joker.” Some videos feature men “monologue about how everyone, especially girls, has rejected them” or “scream at their female partners.”
Researchers at GNET (Global Network on Extremism and Technology) have argued that certain strands of corecore function as entry points to incel ideology, using the format’s emotional resonance to introduce viewers to narratives of male victimhood. The same aesthetic techniques that make corecore effective at evoking despair make it effective at evoking resentment, and the line between the two is often deliberately blurred.
10. It’s Training The Algorithm To Feed You More Despair
Every corecore video you watch teaches TikTok’s algorithm something about you—specifically, that you engage with content designed to evoke sadness. The platform doesn’t distinguish between engagement that makes you feel good and engagement that makes you feel terrible; it only knows you watched the whole thing, maybe watched it twice, maybe lingered in the comments. So it serves you more.
Platforms are optimized for engagement, and negative emotional content is highly engaging. Research on negativity bias shows humans pay more attention to threatening or distressing information, which means sad content often outperforms happy content in the attention economy. By engaging with corecore, viewers are essentially training their personal algorithms to prioritize content that makes them feel worse.
11. The Comparison To Dadaism Is Misleading
Multiple cultural commentators have compared corecore to Dadaism, the early 20th-century art movement that emerged in response to World War I and rejected logic, reason, and conventional aesthetics. Both movements use collage techniques, both express despair about the state of the world, and both refuse easy interpretation. But the comparison obscures crucial differences. Dada was oppositional—it was created by artists who rejected the institutions that had led to war and who saw their art as a form of resistance. Corecore is created and consumed entirely within the platforms it critiques.
The institutional context matters. Dada exhibitions were confrontational interventions into art spaces controlled by the cultural establishment. Corecore videos are content produced for algorithmic distribution on platforms owned by corporations whose financial interests are served by keeping viewers engaged, anxious, and scrolling. Whatever revolutionary potential the form might theoretically possess is constrained by the fact that its distribution depends on the same attention-economy structures that produce the alienation it depicts.
12. It’s A Preview Of What Happens When Art Becomes Content
The form exists because the platform exists—because TikTok’s short-video format and algorithmic distribution created the conditions for exactly this kind of fragmented, emotionally manipulative content. The artists making corecore are responding to real experiences and real emotions, but they’re doing so within constraints that shape what’s possible.
The format doesn’t allow for complexity, nuance, or argument. It doesn’t allow for the kind of sustained engagement that might move a viewer from feeling to thinking to acting. It provides emotional intensity without emotional development, recognition without understanding, catharsis without resolution. It’s not that the creators are untalented or that the viewers are shallow; it’s that the medium has structured the possibilities in ways that favor despair over hope, passivity over action, and consumption over creation.
