TikTok & the universal parents’ house aesthetic
GUYS I spent so much of the long weekend back home watching literal hours of TikTok, and while my brain is probs. visibly mushier from the overall experience of observing preternaturally confident teens dance, what was so oddly interesting to me was how these videos give us a peek inside the extremely normie houses so many of us live in??
ICYMI, a huge part of TikTok are these meme/challenge videos that teens film inside their (parents’) homes, and so the end result is that you end up seeing the sort of same beige carpeted interior aesthetic over and over — the middle class home in its natural state, complete with laminate floors and unmade beds and lumpy throw pillows in the corner — and I’m kind of obsessed.
i.e., it’s not photogenic at ALL, which makes it a total palate cleanse from all the overly styled Apt. Deco porn that we’ve been mainlining through other influencer-mediated platforms. And it makes TikTok kind of endearing, as if watching kids attempting chores in the driveway and cute dogs running down hallways in spaces that feel oddly familiar remind us that, actually, most of us exist in an imperfect plane of the physical universe not being curated by professionals.
Also TBH, we could probably all stand to draw inspiration from the way TikTok teens manage to be endlessly inventive while working with the limited spaces available to them (namely, school, shared rooms at home, the car, and of course, their own room — which the NYT recently noted is fast becoming a kind of pseudo-professional creative headquarters for the kids these days). Like o.k. damn how can we all get better at working with what we have??
Anyway: interesting TikTok-related reading on Amish influencers here, and a few more vids that I would’ve texted you over Thanksgiving if like, we were on that level:
this one about THAT guy at the hometown bar we all know
and ok one for cat people
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