Lol means a lot of things to us. It’s hard to put into language. A signal we’re kidding, we’re uncomfortable expressing an emotion through text, we’re nervous, we don’t want something taken the wrong way, we’re expressing casual empathy. There’s more to lol than laughing, I’m sure someone has done a study on it by now.

Edit: for some background context, we’re the children of the most successful generation in human history. They were born in a time that had some of the most favorable conditions for success at any point in human development. People paid for college with part time jobs. People bought houses on one wage. People could afford a nice vacation, and had a pension.

Things changed, but our parents didn’t notice. They couldn’t handle failure so they invented participation trophies and then ridiculed us for them when it became convenient. They used their money to make investments in property, drove up rent and prices and then called us lazy for not owning a home yet.

We are a nervous generation. We were told things that aren’t true anymore and then held up against that untrue standard to measure our success in a game that was always rigged. So we say lol.