"6 7": The Semiotics of Meaninglessnesss

"

“Every age is marked by its illusions; ours is that we have none.” — Daniel J. Boorstin“Irony is the song of a bird that has come to love its cage.” — Theodor W. Adorno

The New Language of Belonging

Every generation invents its secret codes of belonging—words, gestures, or phrases that serve as subtle badges of inclusion. In the Jazz Age, it was slang; in the counterculture, rebellion; in the digital age, it is meme culture. These are the cover words of the online agora—lightly ironic, whimsical, self-referential. They signal not only that one belongs, but that one understands the joke.

The latest iteration of this phenomenon is the viral “6-7” meme, a quick, almost nonsensical exchange: one person says “six,” another replies “seven,” accompanied by rhythmic up-and-down hand motions. Its genius lies in its semantic emptiness. It means nothing, and everyone knows it. But that is precisely why it spreads so quickly.

The phrase “6-7” functions as a linguistic shrug, which is a postmodern “whatever.” Its symbiotic meaning is not meaning but meaninglessness. It is the Gen Z equivalent of a knowing grunt, a shared smirk that virtue-signals one’s attunement to the absurdity of the age. It says: I know that none of this means anything, and that’s the joke.

“6-7” is the new tribal handshake of irony—belonging through disbelief.

Irony as Social Glue

The digital world has perfected irony as a mode of belonging. What earlier generations used as rebellion—satire against hypocrisy—has become a default tone of voice. Memes, slang, and inside jokes form what sociologists call affective communities: not built on shared convictions, but on shared amusement.

The function of “6-7” is not to communicate content but to perform awareness. It signifies a generational mood—what philosopher Byung-Chul Han calls the transparency society, a place where everything is visible, and people believe in nothing. Meaning is flattened into a play of signs. Even nonsense becomes signal.

For those who live perpetually online, irony is emotional armor. It protects against sincerity, commitment, or belief—those relics of a pre-digital world. The ironic stance says: I refuse to be fooled again. It is a survival strategy for a generation formed amid institutional collapse, political cynicism, and algorithmic manipulation.

But the very tool that shields from disappointment also isolates from meaning. To laugh at everything is to stand at an infinite distance from life. It is a gesture of defense that becomes a confession of despair.

The Meme as Metaphysics

“6-7” is not just a joke; it is a microcosm of late-modern metaphysics. It expresses a worldview without articulating it. Beneath the laughter is an unspoken creed: the world is absurd, meaning is arbitrary, and the best one can do is play along.

In this sense, the meme is tragicomic. Its humor depends on its emptiness. It unites through shared detachment—what Charles Taylor calls the buffered self, sealed off from transcendence. What was once a sacred order that structured a digital simulacrum, a network of fleeting signs has replaced meaning.

This is what Philip Rieff warned when he wrote, “Where there is no sacred order, there can be no social order.” We live downstream of that loss. The sacred canopy has collapsed, leaving us with the thin air of performative irony. Our new symbols no longer point beyond themselves.

The meme has become both symptom and sacrament of a disenchanted age.

Its ritual gestures—hand motions, laughter, reposts—mark the communal acknowledgment of the void. To “get the joke” is to belong, but to belong is to consent to the absurd.

The Cost of Knowing Everything

Ours is the first civilization to drown in information while starving for meaning. The internet has democratized knowledge and pulverized wisdom. To be “in the know” today no longer implies understanding; it simply means awareness of the latest trend, the newest meme, the current scandal.

The illusion of omniscience conceals a deep cultural amnesia. We have become experts in fragments, fluent in irony, incapable of awe. “6-7” is the linguistic heir of that condition—a ritualized gesture of detachment that celebrates its own superficiality.

What was once the intellectual confidence of modernity—the belief that knowledge could save us—has curdled into the cynicism of late modernity. We know too much to believe, yet too little to hope. The result is a civilization fluent in sarcasm but mute in prayer.

The Tragedy Beneath the Humor

There is something deeply human in our capacity to laugh at absurdity. Humor has always been a way of coping with finitude. But in an age where irony is the only shared language, laughter becomes the last refuge of despair.

The “6-7” meme, in its mindless repetition, is both funny and heartbreaking. It is the humor of those who no longer expect coherence, the chuckle of a culture that has forgotten transcendence. It echoes the existential wit of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus: we push the boulder up the hill, we make the gesture, we say “six… seven,” and we laugh—because the alternative is silence.

And yet, to name this absurdity is already to resist it. To see the tragic beneath the comic is the first step toward recovery. Irony may mark the exhaustion of belief, but it can also awaken the hunger for meaning. Every shrug conceals a longing for reverence.

To laugh at the void is one thing; to fill it with truth and beauty is another.

What our meme-saturated world needs are not more insiders who “get the joke,” but outsiders willing to risk sincerity—to speak meaning in a culture that worships its absence. The next renaissance will not begin with a meme but with a confession: that meaninglessness is unlivable.

Only then will our gestures—up and down, six and seven—once again point toward heaven.

David John Seel, Jr., Ph.D. is a writer, cultural analyst, board consultant, and author of Liminal Leadership: Navigating a Change of Age (forthcoming 2026). He writes on the intersection of culture, philosophy, theology, and leadership.