These are the days of our lives.
The Wednesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. ð I can't stop watching other people's lives â[My weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago](â is, I would argue, one of the best TikToks ever created. It starts like this: A tattooed and mustachioed guy named Mike opens a Guru energy drink and explains that today is âmental awarenessâ day at his job, so he gets brunch with his friend Lizzie, which includes chicken and waffles and an electric-blue cocktail with cotton candy in it. The rest of his weekend is a similarly expensive caricature of a certain kind of hypersocial, hyper-consumerist urban 20-something: He eats, in one day, (another) cotton candy cocktail, a tower of margaritas with hot wings, small plates at a bougie-looking restaurant called Alpana followed by more small plates at Tanto, popcorn at a rooftop cafe, as well as a slew of increasingly gluttonous and unhinged meals and beverages. Total trips to the Museum of Ice Cream over the course of the weekend: four. Number of margarita towers: six. It took me until his second visit to the Museum of Ice Cream â one of those depressing and expensive venues that only exist for attendees to take Instagrams at â to realize that it was all a joke. Mike did not spend his weekend drinking six margarita towers and multiple cotton candy cocktails; all the footage was taken from other TikTokersâ videos showing off a day in their lives, with the exception of, he told me, a trip to Target. âIâd just moved to Chicago and my girlfriend and roommate were both out of town. I pretty much just walked my dog, made a sandwich, and went to Target.â That there are enough âday in my lifeâ videos on TikTok to power a robust cottage industry of satirical âday in my lifeâ videos is a far cry from the earliest days of the âvlog,â or video blog, in the early 2000s. YouTube may have made a [few dozen]( [people]( [very](, [very famous]( for taping their every waking minute and posting it online, but YouTube isnât like TikTok: It takes a lot more time, effort, and skill (and money!) to pull off a good 15-minute video. A one-minute video on an endless scroll app that invents new famous people every day, meanwhile, can get seen by a lot more people. Thanks to TikTok, there are âday in the lifeâ videos about [being in med school]( and âday in the lifeâ videos about [being a fifth grade teacher](. There are âday in the lifeâ videos about [23-year-olds with cushy consulting jobs]( and of [high school dropouts-turned-lash technicians](. You can watch [women who work three jobs]( and men who seem to do nothing besides showing off their [six-pack while getting dressed and tousling their hair]( (many of whom have extreme [American Psycho vibes](). There are vlogs of [blissfully childfree women]( and [equally blissful tradwives](, of [unhoused people in addiction recovery]( and wealthy bankers in gray apartments with [huge closets just for their shoes](. And I have seen all of them. Or, at least, it feels like I have: Every time a âday in the lifeâ video comes up on my For You page, something in me cannot know peace until I finish it. Iâve watched so many that Iâm now able to categorize them on an imaginary matrix where the x-axis extends from âlook at how beautiful a quiet, small life can beâ to âlook at all the stuff I have/all the work I did/how hot I amâ and the y-axis goes from âa mostly faithful representation of a day in someoneâs lifeâ to âa heavily romanticized fantasyâ (the vast majority fall in the âlook at all the stuff I haveâ/âromanticizedâ square). The most prevalent genre, at least on my TikTok feed, comprises what I call the âskin care-salad-girlies,â or women in their 20s living in one of those big apartment buildings where everything is white and gray and [appears never to have contained even a single speck of dust](, who has a double-digit-step skin care routine, makes [her (fluffy, white) bed]( every morning, and works whatâs sometimes derogatorily referred to as an âemail job,â or a [fully remote, white-collar position]( where the main duties seem to be attending Zoom meetings and Slacking coworkers. (There are other names for this type of existence: [âthat girl,â]( or worse, âclean girl.â) They are impossibly productive â chores are completed, smoothie bowls assembled, PowerPoints crafted, all to the beat of the music. Vlogs, and particularly these sorts, also have the tendency to make a lot of people very, very angry. Take Kendel Kay, a 25-year-old TikToker whoâs gone viral several times over the past few months for posting her [morning routines âas a stay-at-home girlfriend](,â in which she journals, exercises, tidies the house, and prepares a [shocking number]( of green juices and probiotic supplements. (Her boyfriend, who runs a startup PR agency and [posts frequently]( about his quest to become a billionaire, is also a fellow TikToker.) When one of Kayâs videos went viral on Twitter, she became the subject of a loud and lasting internet discourse about these sorts of aspirational âday in my lifeâ videos, and whether [they were anti-feminist]( or upholding [harmful stereotypes of white womanhood](. âThereâs so little self-awareness in what people are choosing to post about themselves,â says Mike Schwanke, who created the Chicago parody TikTok. Crucially, he explains, itâs the tone of faux humility and earnestness with which creators narrate their videos that he finds so grating. âThey're posting as though their lives are normal or nothing special, but to most people, theyâre a rich kid living in Brooklyn whoâs living a fucking insane life.â Kay, meanwhile, avoids the negative comments she sometimes gets. Rather, she sees her vlogs as a way to âromanticize the boring moments of my life,â she tells me. âMy videos show a very soft, slow life, and itâs a feminine trait. But I love it, and I love seeing people slowing down and enjoying their life.â Few people on the internet are afforded the privilege to [post about their personal lives without inciting a panic](, and itâs easy to see how a âday in my lifeâ video can become a straw man for our own fears and desires of what and who, exactly, is wrong with the world. For me and many others Iâve talked to, âday in my lifeâ videos are opportunities for voyeurism, sure, but they are also satisfying on a more basic human level: By watching other people be productive, we get to feel productive ourselves. In the span of a few minutes or even less, weâve seen a person get up, get dressed, clean their home, beautify themselves, prepare meals, send emails, take an exercise class, grab a glass of wine with a friend, and cuddle with their cat before lights out. And not only do we get to gape, aghast, at the dude who literally [irons his bedsheets](, but also at the fact that he has had to set up a camera in multiple precise angles to film himself doing so. Even the most [realistic-seeming](, mundane âday in my lifeâ vlogs require a pretty big lift â in an attempt to test this theory, I decided that I would record a "day in my life" TikTok video on a random Tuesday, but immediately gave up after I got out of the shower. It was simply too much work without a real point: That day, like most Tuesdays, was going to be pretty ordinary and visually unstimulating. Schwanke theorizes that this, though, is the point of âday in my lifeâ videos: to push back against the idea that social media is just a highlight reel. âIt seems like a very Gen Z thing to do, to post your everyday life as a retaliation to millennials, who grew up posting their trips to Cabo,â he says. âBut what you get is essentially like the same product. In a lot of these videos, what's funny is that in a lot of the clips you can see their friends will have their phones out, too, taking videos at the same time. Nothing is actually happening because they're all posting.â Perhaps thatâs the reason why so many âday in the lifeâ videos, no matter how aspirational or ostentatious, share a quiet melancholy. Here is a person who just wants to be seen when they are by themselves, when nobody else is around. Maybe theyâre looking for some kind of meaning, maybe their lives feel small, or maybe they feel so big that they canât help but want to share it. Itâs why I think the best âday in my lifeâ videos are the ones that give voice to all the anxieties and self-consciousness that come with being a person who spends a lot of time thinking about how they present to the world. Louise May, a UK-based TikToker, has built a following of a million with her [âday in the life in your 20sâ vlogs](, which are spoken in second person and peppered with thoughtful, funny asides, the kind that pop into your head as you walk to the refrigerator, excited about the overnight chia pudding you made yesterday, only to open it up and realize it hasnât set properly. No âday in my lifeâ video is ever going to be a perfect representation of someoneâs existence, but theyâre more fun to watch when theyâre made by people who spend the time to ask the fun kinds of questions: What are we all doing? Is this what life is? And, more importantly, how many margarita towers per weekend is enough?
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[Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Clickbait ð - Amazonâs [âTikTok-styleâ feed]( sounds particularly cursed.
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- Meet John Fettermanâs [26-year-old TikTok whisperer](. Support our work We aim to explain what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters. Support our mission by making a gift today. [Yes, I'll make a gift]( One Last Thing ð The [real, true, actual story behind the iconic Vine]( âand they were roommates!â
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