Is internet culture eroding emotional depth in children?

When Uttar Pradesh Higher Education Minister Yogendra Upadhyay recently argued that nursery rhymes such as ‘Johnny Johnny Yes Papa’ and ‘Rain Rain Go Away’ did not reflect Indian culture, the internet responded like it always does: clipped videos, instant memes and exhausted outrage, both in support of and against the minister. Yet, beneath all the noise sat a question that surfaces repeatedly in every generation: what exactly do children absorb from the stories, rhymes, jokes and images repeated around them?

The minister framed the issue as one of western influence. But culture rarely enters childhood carrying passports. Children do not inherit values through abstract categories like “Indian” and “western”. They inherit them through repetition. Through songs in classrooms. Through stories at bedtime. Through jokes that adults stop questioning because they have heard them for too long.

Nursery rhymes have always done this quietly. ‘Johnny Johnny Yes Papa’, despite its cheerful rhythm and cartoonish simplicity, is built around surveillance and confession. A father questions, the child lies, the lie collapses, authority is restored. ‘Humpty Dumpty’, meanwhile, remains one of the strangest poems routinely taught to children worldwide. A figure falls, breaks beyond repair and the tragedy is narrated with complete emotional steadiness. Nobody mourns him. Nobody even appears particularly alarmed. The rhyme simply moves forward, as though such a shattering were just another ordinary event in the day. Even seemingly innocent rhymes carry older histories inside them. ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, taught in classrooms for generations, has often been discussed by scholars in relation to class, labour and, later, race. Whether or not children understand those associations is almost besides the point. Rhymes outlive the worlds that produced them, their original meanings blur, but traces of hierarchy often remain.

Fairy tales were harsher still. Witches burned. Wolves devoured grandmothers. Curious girls wandered into danger. Beauty was rewarded; disobedience usually was not.

Stories repeated often enough settle quietly into memory and begin to feel natural. There are Indian examples, too. Poems such as ‘Vo pita hota hai’ (That is what a father is), recited sentimentally in schools and family gatherings, reinforce ideas around sacrifice and obedience. The poem functions emotionally because its values already feel sacred to the listener. Nobody pauses midway to ask why a father happily parts with his life savings for his daughter’s wedding. The sentiment arrives before the question does.

No culture hands children neutral stories. It quietly slips its preferred version of behaviour into childhood and calls it innocence. The difference, today, is not that culture has suddenly become darker. The difference is intensity. Earlier generations encountered these emotional lessons occasionally—through classrooms, bedtime stories, television or family gatherings. The internet works differently. It sits beside children constantly. In their pockets while travelling to school. In Reels forwarded in class group chats at midnight. In algorithmic feeds that continue long after parents assume the child has gone to sleep.

And somewhere along the way, the internet stopped merely reflecting emotion and began converting it into format. Earlier, emotions travelled slowly. Someone embarrassed themselves in school and perhaps carried that discomfort privately for days. Online culture works differently. A feeling barely appears before it is converted into a joke, a caption, a reaction image or a meme template. Before an emotion is fully experienced, the internet often prepares it for performance.

To older people, phrases such as ‘bro is cooked’ can sound completely absurd, which, admittedly, they often are. But they also reveal something important about the emotional habits internet culture rewards. ‘Aura loss’, for instance, treats awkwardness—a person trips while entering a room or gets ignored in a conversation—almost like a visible reduction in social value. After a while, the joke stops functioning merely as commentary. It becomes a reflex. People begin reacting to themselves in real life the way the internet reacts to them.

One sees this clearly in viral formats such as “We got .... before GTA 6”, where completely unrelated events—wars, elections, celebrity scandals, economic crashes—are folded into the same meme structure (the delayed release of a popular video game). Starkly different events slowly begin sounding emotionally similar online. The jokes about the Epstein files revealed something similar. Before the revelations had fully settled into public understanding, they had already entered meme circulation. Reaction edits, ironic captions and dark humour spread faster than serious engagement with the implications themselves. The pressure to react quickly often becomes stronger than the impulse to sit with discomfort.

Now, this does not necessarily mean younger people are becoming crueller. In many cases, humour online is emotional self-defence. Teenagers growing up with constant visibility, economic anxiety and information overload often process discomfort through memes because memes create distance. A joke creates just enough space between a person and their emotion to make the emotion manageable. Irony becomes emotional cushioning.

Anurag Minus Verma, author of The Great Indian Brain Rot, has often spoken about the peculiar absurdity of Indian internet culture, where seriousness and nonsense now exist without hierarchy. Scroll through Reels for ten minutes and the emotional transitions become almost surreal. A motivational “sigma male” edit about masculine discipline is followed by a meme about depression, then by a tragedy joke, then by a teenager dramatically lip-syncing to ‘Moye Moye’, the Serbian song clip that somehow became the soundtrack for heartbreak and public embarrassment on the Indian internet.

Children now grow up in a stream of content that older generations often struggle to decode. Skibidi Toilet, watched obsessively by children online, turns screaming heads emerging from toilets into an endless loop of hyper-stimulated absurdity. The point is not narrative coherence. The point is stimulation itself. “Delulu is the only solulu” (Delusion is the only solution), another phrase popular online, converts denial and escapism into self-aware humour.

And yet, reducing all this to “internet corruption” would be too easy, and probably inaccurate. Humour itself is not the problem.

Some of the sharpest cultural criticism in the past century emerged through comedy. George Carlin used stand-up to expose the absurdities of political language, consumer culture and media manipulation. His comedy was cynical, but never emotionally vacant. In India, comedy collective AIB’s ‘Honest’ series dissected Bollywood masculinity, startup culture and media spectacle with more clarity than many formal debates. More recently, Varun Grover’s stand-up special Nothing Makes Sense moved between absurdity, political exhaustion and vulnerability without surrendering entirely to irony. That distinction matters because good comedy does not merely mock. It allows people to confront hypocrisy, fear and absurdity without becoming emotionally numb to them.

But humour shaped entirely by algorithmic speed often does something else. It encourages people to move past emotion before emotion has had time to settle. Perhaps that is the real anxiety hidden beneath debates around nursery rhymes and cultural values. Not whether a rhyme sounds Indian or western, but what kinds of emotional habits contemporary culture rewards.

The endlessly repeating sounds and captions of today teach children not only what to laugh at, but how quickly to move on from feeling anything too deeply. And perhaps that is what makes the present moment faintly unsettling. Not that children are growing up surrounded by humour, absurdity or chaos—every generation did, in its own way—but that the doom-scrolling culture now demands instant reaction before reflection. Somewhere inside that endless stream of jokes, edits and disappearing attention spans, sincerity itself has started feeling awkward, almost unfashionable. As though every emotion now enters the world already expecting to be converted into content.