I’m exhausted by celebrity ‘unbothered’ and Molly Shannon is the antidote

There is a specific kind of celebrity content that makes me want to lie down on the floor and stare at the ceiling until it passes. It’s the unbothered era. You know the one — the soft morning light, the no-makeup selfie, the caption that’s just a single period or a moon emoji, the way they manage to look effortlessly at peace while a whole PR team is clearly standing just outside the frame.

Everybody is doing it. And I don’t know when we all agreed that the highest form of celebrity aspiration was serene detachment, but I would very much like to opt out.

Because meanwhile, Molly Shannon is out here being actually unhinged in the best possible way, and I feel like I’m taking crazy pills that nobody else is talking about it.

What even is the unbothered era, and why is it exhausting?

The unbothered era is not a mood — it’s a marketing strategy. It’s the carefully calibrated performance of not caring, which requires an enormous amount of caring to pull off. The hiking photos with no makeup that took four tries to get the lighting right. The ‘quiet luxury’ wardrobe that costs eleven thousand dollars and is specifically designed to look like it didn’t.

The thing about performing serenity is that it reads immediately as a performance. You can feel it. There’s no texture to it, no rough edges, nothing to grab onto.

And we are eating it up, which honestly says something about us too — but that’s a whole other post.

Is Molly Shannon the last celebrity who’s actually being herself?

Molly Shannon has been doing press for various projects over the last few years and every single interview she does is completely unhinged in the most delightful way. She’s emotional, she’s loud, she talks with her whole body, she brings up weird memories unprompted, she does the Superstar pose without anyone asking. She is not managing her image — she’s just existing in front of a camera and it’s magnetic.

Her interviews feel like running into someone at a party who is genuinely excited to see you and has a lot to say. Compare that to the measured, soft-spoken ‘I’ve really been focusing on what fills my cup’ energy everyone else is radiating right now.

It makes sense because authenticity isn’t a vibe board — it’s just a person who forgot to perform.

Why does ‘weird and funny’ keep losing to ‘serene and aesthetic’?

I think we have convinced ourselves — collectively, culturally — that chaos is a character flaw and that calm is a virtue. So celebrities are selling us calm because that’s what we say we want.

But I don’t actually think that’s what we want. I think we want to feel like someone on the other side of the screen is a real person with feelings that occasionally get away from them.

Molly Shannon cried talking about her childhood on a podcast and then pivoted to doing a physical bit within thirty seconds. That’s a human being. That’s what a human being does.

The ‘I’ve done the work’ industrial complex

There’s a specific subset of the unbothered era that deserves its own callout — the therapeutic-language-as-brand moment. The celebrities who speak exclusively in therapy-speak, who have ‘set boundaries’ and are ‘in their healing era’ and have ‘released what no longer serves them.’

Look — therapy is genuinely good and I’m not throwing shade at the concept. But there’s a difference between actually processing something and using the language of processing as a personality.

When everyone is healed and unbothered and aligned, nobody is interesting anymore. Flaws are interesting. Molly Shannon doing the Mary Katherine Gallagher pose unsolicited on a red carpet in 2024 is interesting.

What Molly Shannon actually represents

She’s been in the industry for decades. She has had massive highs and quiet stretches and a whole complicated career arc — the kind of career that could have turned into a cautionary tale the way Hollywood usually frames women who age out of certain roles. Instead she just kept going. Kept being weird. Kept showing up and being fully herself.

She’s in The White Lotus, she had that incredible run on The Other Two, she did Promising Young Woman. She is not doing this from a place of having nothing to lose — she’s doing it because this is apparently just who she is.

And per a New York Times profile, she credits a lot of her fearlessness to her SNL years — specifically to the idea that committing fully to a bit, even an embarrassing one, is the only way the bit works. She committed. She never stopped.

The case for messy over managed

I want to be fair here — some celebrities are genuinely private and quiet and their low-key presence isn’t performance, it’s just who they are. That’s valid and I’m not coming for those people.

But the ones who clearly have a whole team crafting an ‘authentic minimalist’ persona for them — you can tell. There’s a texture missing. It reads like a mood board that someone forgot to turn into a person.

The counterpoint people make is that celebrities deserve privacy and we shouldn’t demand they perform their feelings for us. And that’s fair. But there’s a third option between ’emotionally available all the time’ and ‘serene moon emoji’ — and Molly Shannon has been living in that third option for thirty years.

That option is just being genuinely, specifically, particularly yourself — and trusting that it’s enough.

Why I need everyone to pay more attention to Molly Shannon right now

She is actively, presently, right now doing the thing. Not in an archive, not in a nostalgia reel, not in a ‘can you believe she used to do this’ retrospective. She is currently being unfiltered and specific and funny in real time.

If the metric for what we celebrate in celebrity culture is ‘who makes you feel something real’ then she should be topping every list. Instead we’re making mood boards about someone’s carefully curated porch furniture and calling it a personality.

I’m tired. Molly Shannon is not tired. She’s still doing the pose. Be more like Molly Shannon.

The unbothered era is going to end eventually — everything does — and when it does I hope what replaces it is something messier and more honest. Something that has rough edges and makes a noise when it walks into the room.

Until then I will be over here watching every Molly Shannon interview I can find and taking notes on what it looks like to just be a fully realized, specifically weird human being in public without apologizing for it.

That is the content I am here for. That is the only content.

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