Relatability is the chief psychological lubricant that glides you thoughtlessly down the curated, endless scroll of your feed. The word is now so pervasive that the #relatable hashtag has become a kind of winking gesture at its own utter meaninglessness as a form of social connection. Why do we want to share what is relatable? The French critic and philosopher René Girard suggested that all desire is mimetic, that we like things simply because we observe other people — our friends, Rihanna — liking those same things, too. Though it now feels as common as air, the modern meaning of “relatable” is a relatively new addition to the lexicon, first used in education journals in the late 1940s.

Source: New York Times January 08, 2019 10:00 UTC