this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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"It's dark in here" Said when the room is expected to be lighter than usual.
"Finally some quiet" said when there was a noise that is now gone.
"Doesn't smell like anything in here" Said when a smell was expected but is not found.
People do say it, this meme is weird.
We already concluded that Lemmy will upbean anything, not surprised this meme is popular.
On the corner hand I unsubbed from the meme Reddit because it was horrible cringe. This meme doesn't make sense (don't really think it even qualifies as a meme), but it's at least bearable and I understand the joke it's attempting to make.
"I swear I left a dead body somewhere here three days ago. Why can't I smell it?"
Also not smelling is neutral while the other two aren't. Nobody said "there is an appropriate amount of light in here" or "there's an expected amount of background noise".
Dark and quiet are the extreme ends of the spectrum. I think smelling bad and good are the ends of the spectrum for smells, although smell is much more multi dimensional, but no smell is neutral.
In the quiet sentence it is implied that it was loud enough before for the commenter to appreciate the quiet.
The smell equivalent would be "it finally doesn't stink anymore" or something like that, and it doesn't sound weird at all.
I think it's about how we calibrate our expectations relative to the default. I do think there is something different about smell.
For example, if I wake up one morning, my implicit expectation is for it to be reasonably light because of the morning sun, and I'd expect to hear some low level noise because I live in the city. The other day, I woke up and I noticed it was darker than usual because of terrible weather. Recently, I also noticed it's much quieter than usual near where I live, because it's a student town and many have gone home for Summer. I didn't immediately notice, but I had a sense of uneasiness until I consciously registered this, because I had a subconscious sense of what's normal.
I can't imagine what waking up and there being less smell than usual would be like. For example, if someone came in and tidied up while I was asleep, without waking me. I'd notice it if there was a particularly strong smell when I went to sleep, because as you highlight, people do comment when an expected smell is not to be found. However, because of how we acclimatise to scents, the normal level of smelliness of an environment is often undetectable, so I don't think people would generally notice a subtraction of a background smell.
It makes sense in the context of human perception though, our olfactory system is underdeveloped compared to many other animals because we don't use it much, relatively