“Why in the world are these kids on TikTok doing this?” I say while scrolling through TikTok, because like my fellow tier-1 city content consumers, I also eventually gave in to see what the hype is about. Suddenly I was gripped by a realisation that no person in their early 20s wants to have. First, I called them ‘kids’, and as someone who still doesn’t know how SIPs work, I am not very sure if I hold the authority to call people a few years younger to me kids.
Second, did I diss TikTok again? What am I? An internet meme page who takes classist digs at people who just have a platform to express themselves better? I hope not, but as much as I try to shift my focus from this, I fail. This does ring a bell though and takes me back to the time when I was mocking my sister for not knowing how to use Instagram hashtags. Third, AM I GETTING OLD?
I am sure I am not the only one who feels this way, and obviously, I need reassurance. So I go on Twitter to read what other people my age feel about this. After about an hour of scrolling through my feed and retweeting a bunch of things, I also realise that Twitter is now basically our ‘WhatsApp Group’.
Sure we don’t forward nonsensical thesis-length messages about spotting ModiJi in waterfalls, but we do spend a lot of time hating on teenagers and young adults, their music, their videos, their taste in art and pretty much everything.
This girl’s tweet about how kids on TikTok will shoot someone while doing some stupid flossing (it’s a Fortnite dance move, there I saved you a Google search) and playing mumble rap in the background, got some thousand retweets. She would have felt great, retweets are addictive. Ah, I miss being active on Twitter now. But then I immediately connected flossing videos on TikTok with my need of being funny on Twitter when I was in my late teens. So maybe we are not so different, are we?
All of this must be having you think that maybe I’ll stop sharing those cringe-worthy videos of people spitting water on TikTok? Probably, not. I still want to feel good about myself and so do you.
All of us are just so used to the idea of being fed with a sense of intellectualism that it’s almost impossible for us to step out of our set ideals and beliefs because it’s simply not convenient.
Adults are petty and it’s about time we get our heads out of our butts and accept ourselves for our pettiness. TikTok kids will also probably grow up to become young-people-hating-old-time-reminiscing adults who will hate on the people who ruin their sacred TikTok bangers of ‘their’ time or whatever platform the kids are exploiting for validation.
They might also go back to TikTok and spend an hour or two hating on what these young kids are doing and then go back to long for the time when they were just happy doing what they liked and wonder when did they become these hateful, boring adults who don’t understand the internet anymore. Safe to say that the TikTok kids will have their monstrous social media platform that they’ll constantly hate on. Rings a bell, Facebook friends?
My fellow fully-grown adults, this is not an attempt to preach at about anything. I know you hate that. Don’t even try to understand what’s going on with these challenges, for you’ll end up creating more destructive-criticism within. TikTok kids don’t really care about what you think of their split-screen challenges because they have n-number of brands lined up to pay them for what you think are just stupid videos.
And, you’d be lying to yourself if you say that brands paying them is stupid because I for one know that I’d have made a hundred tweets if that guaranteed I could pay for that glittery nail-art kit I wanted. For now, I am just gonna go back to my scrolling adventures and wonder what I will do if a teenager Ok Boomer’s me on the internet? How will I ever recover from this sick burn that’ll leave me devastated to a point where I want to pack my bags and leave the internet for the kids?
And, to quote my 15-year old cousin, “People who don’t use TikTok think that they have a PhD in Maturity, go off bro.”