It was the spring of 2020, my junior year of college at Georgia, but I was back in my childhood bedroom in Texas. Because everyone was displaced if you were in college during COVID. The sticky heat, the Zoom classes, the fear and lockdowns and oddness of it all — that’s when TikTok first entered the chat, my group chats at least.
My friends would send the dance videos that’d been posted on this new app (to us) called TikTok. The girls dancing in the videos were at least five years younger than me — girls like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae, both of whom became famous via TikTok during COVID and are now multimillionaires.
You could still watch the videos even if you didn’t have the app downloaded, although the app that the dances were on didn’t really matter to me. I used to be a dancer, so I liked learning the catchy little routines for fun. There was something playful about it — a break from the boredom. I remember the viral “Renegade” dance to the song “Lottery” by K-Camp. There were also the dances to “Savage” by Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat’s “Say So.”
It feels funny to look back on those dances like this — to write them in words and think them aloud, so formally and distinctly — like they’re now part of some moment in time. They are, though, and I mention them here because those dances mark my first and last time ever engaging in a TikTok-related trend.
Removed from the chat
Unlike the majority of my generation, I don’t have TikTok. I’ve never had TikTok. That’s not to say I think I’m any better than my fellow Gen Zers or that my online habits are any healthier. I wouldn’t say I’m the type of person who prefers to live under a rock either (though I did live in a tiny mountain town for three years after graduating from college, which probably contributed to me never having the urge to download the app). Nevertheless, I’ve never downloaded the app. That is the point.
Even now, at 26 years old and living in New York to pursue journalism, TikTok is absent from my life. It’s actually pretty ignorant when I think about it — an aspiring culture writer avoiding the very app that captures the zeitgeist and fuels a lot of it, too.
The short-form video app has become a predominant engine for my generation, churning out discourse, culture and language, and even replacing sites like Google as a primary search engine. According to a Her Campus Media survey, 74% of Gen Z use TikTok to search for brands, products and services, and 51% prefer it to Google.
There’s a whole other language that happens on TikTok that I don’t understand and probably never will. When the app’s dialect manifests in real life, which happens a lot, I am the one having to ask things like, “Remind me what ‘demure’ means again?”
I never really got the whole “brat summer” thing. I’ll forever fall behind on all the “girly” trends; “clean girls,” “no-makeup makeup,” #coquette, #tradwife — it goes too far. It always does. And when someone had to explain to me who The Rizzler was, and how this kid and his face (formally known as “rizz face”) was so funny that it went viral, I stared blankly. “You don’t get it,” my friends tell me. I know.
I picked up what “girl math” meant from context clues and watched Pookie and Jett do their fit checks on Instagram. ABBA music was suddenly back and playing at every pregame — that one, I loved. I missed the vabbing trend and the “Gorilla Glue Girl” and Chef Pii’s controversial production of The Pink Sauce. #TikTokmademebuyit, #POV, #OOTD. All the “Get Ready With Me’s” (GRWMs). I’ve never watched Alix Earle get ready or get real, nor have I tried Emily Mariko’s salmon bowl. I missed out on the baked feta pasta and cucumber salads and the Sleepy Girl Mocktails.
I’ve had my fair share of “girl dinners” throughout my 20s, but I never imagined they’d be officially termed into TikTok’s lowbrow lexicon. And — like so many trends that go viral on this platform and then infiltrate culture beyond the screen — girl dinners, a Vox article reported, “seemed as though this was a thing young women were doing en masse, as though putting together a plate of leftovers was a novel idea that could therefore be designated as an eating disorder or otherwise problematized.”
Avoiding utter brain rot
“Problematized” seems like it could be its own TikTok trend at this point. I respect the hustle and vulnerability of all the influencers and creators who are constantly sharing their stories and their skincare routines, how to style a ballet flat and where to find the best foundation. But the ways in which girlhood and womanhood are portrayed on the platform is exhausting, overwhelming and confusing. I’m thinking about the girls on the younger side of my generation growing up with this constant circulation of pretty girls in videos telling them how to dress, what to buy, who to be.
I was in middle school when Instagram first came out. I remember it being such a funny concept to us at first. We’d post “duck-face” selfies or a picture of our dog, with some saturated edit and a caption like #artsy. But as I went through puberty, the app was growing, too, and it turned into something much more governing than just a place for silly photos. It became a token of validation — likes, comments and followers mattered — and it was impossible not to compare yourself, so you lay in bed and scroll until your eyes are red and sting.
With the advancement of technology and the inevitable shift in media consumption, TikTok, I’d argue, has upped this playing field — it dominates the game. I understand the soothing nature of listening to the ASMR sounds of someone chopping a cucumber or making a coffee. Those sometimes show up on my Instagram feed, and I’ll watch them. I’ll watch the visually compelling videos on the best new bars in NYC and the trending sandwich shops or places to go see art.
I’m not trying to be a hypocrite here; much of the content that originates from TikTok trickles down to the media I also consume. Instagram Reels and memes, of course, but even the playlists on Spotify that compile popular TikTok songs, most of which are sped-up versions.
The app is all about speed. It’s about catering to short attention spans and populating customized feeds. To me, it’s chaotic. To me, it’s too much. There are even subcultures and subcommunities on the app like BookTok and FoodTok and FilmTok, I’m told, which is great for publicity and shedding light on realms of culture, but it scares me to think about the more extreme subcultures out there.
I understand that TikTok, like other social media, is supposed to be a forum of ideas. But in reality, its algorithm — first revealed by a Wall Street Journalism investigation — steers you toward what it thinks you want, churning out endless echo chambers of personalized content. Competitors, including Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, have had to follow suit. This leaves us in a cyclical kind of consumerism, which can shrink a thought process to something so small, we might as well be walking around with the word “brain rot” on our foreheads.
With TikTok now caught in the crossfires of a geopolitical conflict between China and the United States, I don’t have much else to say about it, except that the 2020 dance era is where it’ll forever lay at rest for me, buried under a pandemic and the sticky Texas heat.