If you’ve been on the internet in the past week, you know about Punch, the 7-month old Japanese macaque whose sad tale of abandonment and loneliness has spread around the world via video clips and still photos of the baby snow monkey being roughed up by other macaques and turning to his surrogate parent, a stuffed orangutan, for comfort. Punch’s mother rejected him shortly after he was born last July at Japan’s Ichikawa City Zoo, and he was hand-reared by keepers. Baby macaques generally clutch tightly to their mother’s body to build muscle strength, zookeeper Kosuke Shikano told The Guardian, and the fuzzy IKEA orangutan eventually did the trick.

Punch’s reintroduction to the zoo’s troop of macaques has been rocky and very public. When videos of Punch curling up with the toy on the concrete floor of the zoo enclosure went viral, well, people had feelings — most of which can be summed up by the phrase “I WOULD DIE FOR PUNCH,” which has pervaded social platforms in varying degrees of sincerity and satire in recent days. We are all, forgive the phrase, Punch-drunk.

Typing “Punch the monkey” into search engines triggers a shower of animated hearts featuring Punch’s face cuddled up against his fuzzy friend. The zoo has been swarmed with visitors clamoring to see Punch, and IKEA outposts worldwide have sold out of the plush orangutan. Jon Stewart roasted the baby monkey, to mixed reviews; Punch’s mother is being read to filth in YouTube comments; and a notorious duo of d-bags tried to buy him as a pet. Every aspect of Punch’s ordeal and the viral fame that has followed is a reminder that the times we live in are uniquely dystopian, venal and disheartening — and that a majority of us think we have no choice but to accept it. For Punch’s sake, and our own, we might want to reconsider.

“My mental state is currently 50% staring at the horizon like a Werner Herzog penguin and 50% Punch the Monkey defending his stuffed toy against the world. There is no in-between,” wrote a commenter on one clip of Punch, in hyperbole both performative and familiar. For almost as long as there’s been an internet, it has been ruled and animated and possibly held together by a shared need to look at cute animals several times a day at minimum. Even in increasingly divisive times, cute animals are our common language, offering points of connection and escape routes for disagreements. (Your friend’s dating a MAGA chud and hanging out with them is excruciating? Bummer — but until they break up, your friendship can survive on Moo Deng memes.)

Every aspect of Punch’s ordeal and the viral fame that has followed is a reminder that the times we live in are uniquely dystopian, venal and disheartening — and that a majority of us think we have no choice but to accept it. For Punch’s sake, and our own, we might want to reconsider.

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