Enough with the meme moralising

Done with dissing Andy Byron and Kristin Cabot? You know, the two caught in a cuddle last Wednesday not by the Taliban in downtown Lashkar Gah, but by a kiss cam in a Coldplay gig in Foxborough near Boston. It turns out that in circa 2025, our feelings towards people 'having an affair' hasn't changed much since Michael Madhusudhan Dutt left his wife Rebecca McTavish and four kids for Henrietta White in 1858. The thing about grown-ups is that they can form romantic-sexual bonds outside the contract of matrimony. It's not ideal, not always nice-for the spouse left outside the proverbial kiss cam. But it is what it is, and as real as normal people telling lies or non-smokers smoking on the sly.

Sure, it's also human nature to relish in some schadenfreude: taking pleasure in someone else's woes, the woes in this case being 'outed' for engaging in guilty pleasures. But to relish this much, and with such self-righteousness, may provide clues to something else: subterranean envy in finding two people sharing something that you don't have, or once had. All this moralising camouflaged in memes is really old testament to the vicarious pleasure that villagers with smartphones (instead of pitchforks) are taking in having caught two people in flagrante delicto. While the only real sin that they committed was going to a Coldplay concert. How could they?!