All consuming and no living makes Jack a dull and stupid idiot
There are times I’ll have a conversation with someone and they’ll actually say something like burnt toast theory. It’s giving. Ate and left no crumbs.
I get that language evolves, but genuinely what the hell are you talking about.
Other times, I’ll have a conversation with someone who is so detached from anything online that I am embarrassed for myself when they don’t understand a reference I’ve made (road work ahead? Uh, yeah, I sure hope it does).
In that moment, I realise some people really are just living their life away from social media influence (as intended), and others have TikTok (or Vine) fully wired into their brain. There’s a sweet spot – where you get the reference and you know what the trends are but you don’t fall victim to influencer crap.
When you’re incessantly consuming repetitive content, including “tips and tricks” from people around the world (who seem to live the exact same life, for some reason. The beauty in our differences is lost.), you also don’t really have anything interesting to talk about except the regurgitated shit you’ve read and heard.
Consequently, you can only repackage it through your own point of view that has also done nothing but go to the gym in Oner and a slick-back, eat a healthy high-protein balanced meal, take 15k steps, and use red light therapy. Or wake up and make a cup of tea, take a nature walk, write in your journal, post an article about ‘the media I consumed this week’, and be in bed with your kindle at 8pm. Everyone seems to want to be boxed up into one of few categories, and doing one is no better than the other.
Content – on TikTok, Instagram, and now even Substack – becomes a snoozefest. We’re inundated with nothing but articles and videos about how to schedule your day to be exactly like each others.
Living? Or posting about living?
You’re on the internet making content about how to have a fulfilling life, while some guy is snorting ket off the kerb with his mates during a night out. A woman is eating a Tesco meal deal on a mountain in Decathlon hiking gear. Both are unaware that people are making lists on the internet and neither have taken a video documenting what they’re doing, they’re just doing it. Who here is actually living their life? (I don’t condone drugs. I do condone Decathlon).
I blame TikTok for making people sincerely believe that making content about living is tantamount to actually living. I didn’t want this to become a cringey millennial post, but it’s hard not to identify exactly when TikTok became popular and exactly who was/is affected by it.
It’s insane to me that we’re watching the damages caused by TikTok unfold in real time – with many people even using the app to document those damages instead of just… deleting it. Ironically, I spend time on there finding bullshit to complain about. I have a collection for it.
But it seems to have just seeped into lives and sunk its claws into an entire generation of impressionable young people. I can’t really connect with writing that has come from The School of TikTok, the same way people 10+ years younger than me probably don’t connect with mine. There’s just something about the TikTokification of language, thought, and expression that I can’t engage with.
I know some may be offended at me indicating that people don’t have ‘original thoughts’ anymore, but I stand by it. People don’t allow themselves to be bored enough to find out what their interests and hobbies are; it’s easier to just get some ideas from TheIdeasGuy every week. People are commenting to stay on intelligencemaxxing TikTok rather than using their brain to find books and enrichment that will actually make them intelligent. People are using ChatGPT instead of Google – do you even know what a keyword is?
Nothing is reached organically we can have access to so much bullshit information at any given time. Having access to information should be a good thing, but it’s not when you haven’t trained your brain to be useful outside of it. Take what you’ve learnt and fact check it, expand on it, challenge it. The kids aren’t doing that. You could slap on a doctor’s outfit, pay for 100k TikTok followers, and tell people matcha is dissolving their muscles, and eventually Blank Street would go bust.
‘How you can become the most interesting person in the room’ – why do you need to be taught how to do that? Are you not embarrassed?
‘How to accessorise like a cool girl’ – cool girls aren’t making or watching videos about how to be a cool girl. They are just being cool.
‘Five glute exercises you need to be doing’ – omg just use google?
Why are people begging to give and receive instructions? What happened to personal blogs as we knew them? What happened to writing about the messy shit your best friend did to you last year? Under different names, of course.
Instead of telling me you went on a hot girl walk, along with doing these five other generic things that are good for your mental health, why don’t you tell me exactly what you saw on your walk? What it made you feel? Bring back real thinking and real writing!
The case for authenticity, no matter how horrible
I can see the way people who haven’t become addicted to that godforsaken app have been able to hold onto their ~authentic self~, especially when I speak to them in real life. That authentic self isn’t always necessarily good – but I will always choose authenticity over anything else.
They might say something slightly out of place, except it’s not, really. I’ve realised we don’t use ‘politically incorrect’ anymore – it’s a term that no longer exists because we just go straight for full-blown “phobia”. I don’t think a racist joke makes you racist. I think being racist makes you racist. I think being purposely offensive makes you a dick. But TikTok would tell you something else because nobody can separate anything anymore and nobody knows what words mean.
It’s interesting to me how a huge increase in voices online has actually led to more censorship that way. You can now post anything you want online, but you’re not allowed to talk about X, Y, or Z, because you’ll be cancelled if you do. And if you do talk about 1, 2, or 3, you need to talk about it in a specific manner and you have to account for every single personal experience in the world otherwise you’re ableist, ageist, sexist, classist, or any other -ist.
I grew up with LiveLeak and Bestgore (terrible, I know), so it’s hard to connect with people who want a trigger warning when someone has a papercut or makes an offensive joke. But I wonder how that relates to the fact that we’re now constantly fed with news and videos of murdered kids, mutilated bodies, and homes that have been blasted to dust.
I think we’ve done a weird flip of reality, where people are living in the blissful bubble of The Web, far, far away from the Horrible Violent Real World. So, they are wrapping themselves in as much cotton wool as possible. Those videos of stone-cold babies are just videos! They’re not real! If I close my brain and open TikTok, they don’t exist!
I digress, yet again.
You know what remedies delusion? Going out into the real world and having real conversations with real people in real life. Realising that the world is ugly and you can’t just focus on the highlights – but it is also good. There are huge things happening far away from you that might be beyond your comprehension (inexcusable), but there are also big things happening closer to home. You’re probably anxious because you’re trying so hard to ignore the looming sense of dread that’s following you around, but why don’t you start small by exposing yourself to the sometimes shitty and sometimes great world in your vicinity first?
Growing up the way we did probably fucked us up in so many ways, as did Chatroulette and getting smacked by our parents. We’re probably all undiagnosed because we had to just stop being a bitch, repress everything, and get on with it. Talking about mental health wasn’t ever in – if anyone self-diagnosed and put ‘autistic’ in their bio, they would be absolutely ripped into. But staying away from the real world and coddling yourself is fucking you up worse in my opinion. Telling everybody to be sensitive to your mental state is setting you up for failure.
I am so here for inclusivity, but I think we’re going too far the other way. More on that later.
The coolest thing you can do is live
Inb4 someone says “that’s insensitive to people who have died or have known someone who has died”. Stop it.
We spent an unhealthy amount of time on the internet as kids – but this was when it was just a baby and we had the entire World Wide Web to discover. I would wait for the computer to start up, absolutely frothing at the mouth at what new thing I could discover that day, and we all wanted to find something new (or we just waited for the new Ryan Higa video to drop). Everyone was desperate to be cool, but cool meant doing something different rather than being part of what’s currently trending (read: following).
But most of all, we were never afraid to do things and exist in the real world. And doing things in the real world gives you stories to tell; having stories to tell makes your writing better.
I wish people would stop getting their phones out to film content at every opportunity, because you are wasting this one life you have. It’s natural to want to take a photo or a video to capture a moment – it’s not natural to constantly think about how you can share that on social media. It’s definitely not natural to just randomly film people in public for your content, making them uncomfortable and self conscious; it might not be illegal, but it still makes you a dick. And if you put a microphone in my face, I’m dashing it in the canal.
Anyway.
Go out. Unprotect your peace. Take risks, go on a date with someone you’re not sure about, say yes to plans, wear the skinny jeans, re-wear outfits. Stop feeling bad because you aren’t able to read three books a month. Literally who cares. Be completely present all the time because the little things you don’t notice can have a big impact on you. Stop reading and writing posts about ‘how to be x’ and ‘what I did to become y’. Stop thinking the world needs to cater to your needs. Stop expecting people to be sensitive to whatever you have going on. Fuck around and find out. It is cooler to wear what you want and do what you want than it will everbe to follow what everyone else is doing. And most importantly: get off TikTok.
Now Playing: The Bad Touch – Bloodhound Gang
Originally posted on Substack. Subscribe to receive free updates via email.