I am far from the first to observe that while TikTok’s persona is defined by its teenaged users its reality is defined by adult users who would like to think of themselves as one of those teenaged users. It’s not a symbol of actual teen culture; it’s a symbol of the adult yearning to be a teen. The reality seems to be that when you hand people a front-facing camera, they look into it hoping to find someone who looks younger than they really do. This is a human impulse, an understandable one, but with the notion that adulthood is something to prize and maturity nothing to fear long dead, when there’s no counterweight, you end up with a culture that can’t look at itself in an honest way. Print the legend, I guess. […]
The more depressing thing about the short-lived TikTok freakout, to me, was the deepening sense that adults are not just refusing to ever adopt interests that are appropriate for their age, but increasingly shameless about doing so, unconcerned with even appearing to move on. That’s scarier, to me. Because while I believe that everything should be embraced in moderation, including maturity – yes, I did buy The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered – I also think that a little guilt about our vices is a good thing. And what adult addiction to TikTok and FunkoPop and JoJo Siwa shows is an America that has rejected the idea that permanent childhood is a vice at all.
…What gets to me, these days, is not so much the fact that more and more people seem utterly resistant to acting their age. That’s an old story. What gets to me is the fact that more and more people are utterly unembarrassed about it – that they don’t even feel the need to pretend to act their age. The sensation that we should feel shame about a refusal to grow up now seems somewhat quaint to me. As in so many other domains of human socialization, it seems like many people feel like it’s too hard to object, and so just go along with wherever culture is blowing.
As a Millennial, I’ve gotten a front row seat to observe a generation reach middle age and decide, instead, to continue acting like we’re in the flower of our youth – delaying the trappings of adulthood like marriage and children, job hopping, obsessing over beauty and appearing young, drinking and smoking weed with the same frequency as the young, refusing to ever graduate on from the media and pop culture of one’s youth and towards something more mature, insisting to everyone and everything that you are still a work in progress or other expressions of responsibility-shucking bad faith, and more than anything, an all-encompassing belief that one should still be extended the affordances we give to people whose youth implies a lack of wisdom, knowledge, and grace. People love to unapologetically proclaim that they’re “a 33 year old teenager” or similar. Well, what cultural force exists now to pressure them to act their actual, numeric age? […]
I think the refusal of adulthood has many, many causes. But the identification of the death of context, here, is quite helpful. Ami and I are ingesting a lot amount of information about young babies, for obvious reasons, and it’s interesting to think of what it’s like to be a newborn – so many things are undifferentiated. I read that for infants colors bleed into each other, sounds can’t be separated, and in fact young enough babies are apparently not even aware that there is a difference between themselves and their environments. The point is that the cultural substrate has shifted in such a way that this undifferentiated affect, this sensory flood without context or development, has become a feature of not just infancy but of adult consciousness. The baby doesn’t know the difference between a lullaby and the hum of a refrigerator. Likewise, the adult in the algorithm doesn’t know the difference between sincerity and irony, the tragic and the comic, an actual person’s emotional unraveling and a bit. And crucially, more and more, they don’t want to know. Discernment is exhausting, and the vibe is everything. “Is this real?” becomes less important than “does this vibe?” Which is how you get people openly crying about a cat video one moment and then openly mocking someone else’s pain in the next, with neither leaving any mark. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Nothing matters. […]
So what’s left? If you abandon the moral authority of adulthood, if you abandon taste, if you abandon the concept of context, if you even abandon shame, then what remains is a kind of permanent ambient performance of “relatability.” That’s all TikTok is, at bottom: endless pantomimes of your internal life, designed to be recognized, not judged. It’s not about being funny or clever or beautiful or interesting, although all of those qualities are occasionally present. It’s about performing your proximity to the audience, performing sameness. I’m just like you, and you’re just like me. Which sounds democratic until you realize that the price of entry is the annihilation of self-differentiation. You can’t grow up if your prime directive is to remain legible to everyone else.
People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.
This, for me, is the core anxiety around TikTok and TikTokification: not that people are having fun, or even that people are being silly, but that so much of adult life is now defined by explicitly disavowing adulthood. Not by immaturity, but by a performative allergy to maturity. It’s not that we’re aging poorly, but that we’re pretending we’re not aging at all. And as always, once something becomes the dominant cultural mode, it becomes invisible. The fact that grown people spend multiple hours a day watching strangers lip sync and point at words in the air doesn’t strike anyone as odd anymore. We’ve all agreed not to be the scold, not to be the buzzkill, not to be the person who says “this might be a little bit sad.”
…There’s more people my age who want to live like teenagers than you may know. They like to believe that they’re still waiting for their lives to begin and they will do so even after they have the financial means to grow up. Again, undifferentiated – the denial of aging allows for the perpetual right to say “I am still unformed.” Adults cosplay as “neurodivergent” rather than admit to the mundane pains of being anxious or bored; adults refer to their spouses as “my partner in crime” and their dogs as their “fur babies”; adults find meaning only in being seen, rather than being responsible for anything. Adults brag about having no opinions, no preferences, no convictions, only vibes. It’s not a subculture. It’s the culture. […]
…The culture now rewards you for saying yes to everything. Yes to the 40-year-old’s toy haul, yes to never traveling anywhere but to Disneyland, yes to celebrity divorce gossip, yes to fake ADHD self-diagnosis, yes to the Spotify feed tube of pop dross that thrills 13-year-olds, yes to the holy algorithm. It’s so easy to say yes. And if that’s your prerogative, fine. But the more people who choose that route, the fewer people are left to say no: no to cruelty, no to laziness, no to willful ignorance. No to being less than what you are capable of becoming. Adulthood is hard. But it’s not a trap. It’s the mechanism by which we build a world worth living in.