Commentary: 'I am Punch': How a baby monkey made us laugh, cry and see ourselves in his struggle to fit in

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“I am Punch and he is me.”This is what my daughter recently texted in our family group chat.Her older sister had just asked us if we were “on the baby Punch-kun side of TikTok” because she had become like a “Facebook Mom, watching videos of him all day.”If we weren’t before, we are now.Punch is, as millions of his fans know, a 7-month-old macaque monkey living at Ichikawa City Zoo, outside Tokyo.

Rejected at birth by his mother, he was initially cared for by zookeepers before being reintroduced to the monkey enclosure.His early attempts to fit in did not go well; the other monkeys gave him either the cold shoulder or a very hard time.

Until recently, his only comfort was a large orangutan plush toy that some brilliant member of staff gifted him as a tool for muscle building and maternal replacement.Videos of the shy and utterly adorable Punch tentatively circling the larger monkeys, only to flee to the solace of his stuffy after being rebuffed, have drawn increasingly large crowds to the zoo and mesmerized millions on social media.The digital age has made us a DIY economy in which millions of jobs no longer exist not because computers do the work, but because the work has been shifted, via computers, directly onto the consumer.Messages of encouragement, often accompanied by memes of women (and men) sobbing into their phones over the sight of a yet-again-rejected Punch wrapping himself in the arms of his orangutan “mother,” or cheering as he slowly begins to be accepted by other monkeys, are almost as plentiful as the Punch videos themselves.“I am Punch and he is me” is clearly a sentiment shared by many.

Including those who, like my youngest daughter, were not (as I swiftly pointed out in the group chat) rejected in any way by their own mother.Everyone knows what it’s like to feel small and bewildered as you circle a social group, seeking a way in, ju...