Ugh… am I really writing this essay? Dear reader, I want to let you know that as I type this, I am struggling. I’ve gone back-and-forth on writing this multiple times — for many reasons. (A) I don’t know… there is just something deeply, immediately, viscerally off-putting about discursively combining the topics of children, Freud, and literal sh*t. (B) My instinctive repulsion aside, something about “old man tries to sincerely analyze hip kid stuff” makes me feel incredibly un-hip and old. (C) A Freudian analysis of Skibidi Toilet seems to me incredibly, incredibly obvious — too obvious. I tend to want to write these essays only when I feel that I have an interesting philosophical intervention that I’m not otherwise seeing. And yet, while a Freudian analysis of Skibidi Toilet feels to me incredibly, incredibly obvious, I’m just not seeing the analysis done. I’m honestly puzzled by this. The consensus among millennials (a generation that loves its psychobabble) seems to be something approximating, “Wow, Skibidi Toilet is super weird and I can’t explain it.” (“The Infographics Show” on YouTube does briefly touch on Freud in their analysis of Skibidi Toilet, but the Show completely mis-explains the Anal Stage, and then continues to miss the point — failing to apply even their incorrect understanding of the Anal Stage to an analysis about Skibidi Toilet’s viewers and the larger societal context.)

It is with profound, profound reluctance that I continue to type this out…

(1) For those not in the know, Skibidi Toilet is a web series depicting a war between an endless army of toilets with heads that pop up from the toilet bowls and an endless army of people with cameras for heads. (Skibidi Toilet is receiving approximately 1.5 billion views per month. The vast majority of these views come from Gen Alpha. Skibidi Toilet has become Gen Alpha’s first real entry into Internet meme culture.) How have so few people pointed out that the central tension within Skibidi Toilet clearly maps onto Freud’s structural model of the psyche? Again, I’m not exactly enthused to be writing this essay, so let me be lazy and quote Merriam-Webster here. Id: “One of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that is completely unconscious and is the source of psychic energy derived from instinctual needs and drives.” The id is the toilets. (Jesus Christ, did I just write “the id is the toilets”? Ugh…) Superego: “The one of the three divisions of the psyche in psychoanalytic theory that is only partly conscious, represents internalization of parental conscience and the rules of society, and functions to reward and punish through a system of moral attitudes, conscience, and a sense of guilt.” The superego is surveillance, depicted by the people with cameras for heads. Where is the ego — the self that mediates between the id and the superego — you might ask? Just like in real life, the ego has disappeared. Look no further than the front-runner for United States President as a representation for where our society is headed — pure, unadulterated id, everywhere, all the time. And also just like in real life, winning — and winning even against the neoliberal State apparatus. The id has destroyed the ego and continues to battle the super-ego — the toilets continue to battle the humans with cameras for heads.

(2) But why toilets of all symbolic representations? Surely there could be a dozen other poignant representations of the id? Well, this time instead of consulting Ms Meriam, let’s consult Ms Brittanica. Anal stage: “Anal stage, in Freudian psychoanalytic theory, the period in a child’s psychosexual development during which the child’s main concerns are with the processes of elimination. The anal stage, generally the second and third years of life, is held to be significant for the child’s later development because the acquisition of bowel control is presumed to be connected to other forms of self-control, such as cleanliness and orderliness.” In an age when the future of humanity is genuinely put in doubt due to climate change, when millions have needlessly died in a worldwide pandemic, when the right-wing have co-opted political violence and the neoliberal State is failing, when we feel more and more that society is crumbling, when social media/algorithms/artificial intelligence/a dead Internet are fracturing our consciousnesses — does it not precisely feel like we don’t have our sh*t together?

(3) Again, I hesitated writing this essay because — among other reasons — the connection between Skibidi Toilet and Freud felt almost too obvious. Yet, I just haven’t seen this connection explicated properly. Perhaps the seeming lack of this seemingly obvious connection speaks to the chaos of our present reality, particularly on a medium (i.e., the Internet) that is actively destroying both our individual egos and any sense of a sort of collective Hegelian progress. To be absolutely clear, I am not saying that Gen Alpha understands Freudian theory (or anything I’ve mentioned above). I’m quite aware that Gen Alpha is, like, 5 y.o. Quite the contrary. What I’m saying is that the spirit of Freud understands Gen Alpha. Gen Alpha may not yet be conscious of why their generation is so attracted to Skibidi Toilet, but… oh sh*t, how Gen Alpha will soon grow up to find out.