If you had this growing up, you were rich. But also, if you didn’t have this, then you were definitely not rich. Isn’t this the worst kind of person? Your ex was a narcissist, and here’s why. Your mom is probably a narcissist, too. This friend secretly hates you. You have a personality disorder. If you haven’t done this by this age… literally what are you doing? You’re the problem. She’s the problem.
If you’ve been on Reels or TikTok for more than five minutes, you’ve probably seen videos like these. They start off with a bold conclusion – a judgement on yourself or the people in your life. That one annoying kid in class. That one super out-of-touch rich kid. That girl who wants your man. They don’t ask you to relate; they tell you that you do.
These videos generally take one of two forms. The first parodies the subject in question, saying things as if they were the character in question. The out-of-touch rich friend might be saying, “I spent the summer in Mallorca, it was soooo boring” or “why can’t your parents just send you the money?” Then, users flood the comments with things like “I’m getting PTSD,” or “I actually had to go calm down” over this made-up scenario.
The second form generally consists of an authoritative (and typically conventionally attractive) creator just telling you the “signs.” This creator typically briefly refers to a relevant personal experience to give themself the ethos they need to then make judgments on the lives of viewers. If your friend is always late? Girl. She doesn’t value you at all. These statements, often made over a GRWM or other absent-minded task, are said with such confidence that doomscrollers almost have to find themselves nodding along.
Videos like these are broadly relatable because they poke fun at common archetypes and universal experiences. I think we all have been in conversations where we’ve observed that another person clearly comes from a different socioeconomic background than ourselves. As well as met people that were vaguely annoying for one reason or another. We may have all come to the realization that a friendship was probably reaching its end.
My issue is that this type of content ignores all nuance, and while it may be fun to relate to, it should not be taken seriously. Videos like these both reflect and contribute to the greater Gen-Z trend I believe is: the need to categorize everything, typically in a very binary sense. Everything, including people, I feel are currently being judged as fundamentally good or bad. Im my opinion, it feels like we’re not allowed to have aspects of ourselves that are annoying, or just different, but rather everything is a polarized judgement of character.
It feels almost conspiracy-ish. If you take all of this content seriously, you find yourself believing that nobody in your life is meant to be there, everyone is out to get you, and everything is probably due to a diagnosis. The intersection of this content with mental health and neurodivergence is especially concerning. I’m not going to get into the controversial intricacies of the current epidemic of online self-diagnosis, so I will simply say that nobody should be accepting mental health declarations from unqualified internet users. Oftentimes, this content vilifies or at least paints inaccurate portraits of real conditions that heavily impact real people’s lives. Not everyone’s ex can be a narcissist, and co-opting such labels to make sense of difficult feelings towards another is a slippery slope.
The “diagnosis” of it all seems to be at the core. Complex issues, like breakups, friendship fallouts, or our own self-perception can be difficult to make sense of. I feel like we don’t want to deal with the messiness and the layers of it all, so we accept the easy shortcut handed to us. We want to quickly diagnose the “problem.” It’s her fault. It’s his fault. It’s because of this. It creates a worldview that is just all too negative, dependent on some ultimate judgement that momentarily creates an artificial sense of justice. It seems like we see this mindset in similar trends, like story-times or AITA posts. Somebody has to be right, and somebody has to be wrong, in order for it to all make sense.
However, chances are, the situation in your memory was not quite the situation in the moment. We want to look good to ourselves because it makes life more bearable. Videos like these, whether humorous or seemingly tame, I believe allow viewers to reinforce their own (often incorrect) perceptions of those around them without critically thinking of their own role in the world or in relationships.
I think that this content insists that every situation or individual is some part of a larger universal experience so that we don’t have to figure out our own lives for ourselves. Humans inherently long for pattern recognition, but holding an element of truth does not make something true. The presence of a (very general) commonality should not serve as verification that the conclusion is appropriate to make, yet it makes accepting said conclusion – especially if it is one that serves us – feel a whole lot more legitimate. It’s easier to pretend it’s all a part of some larger pattern and let some stranger tell you what it all means or why someone didn’t fit into your life exactly the way you would have preferred. But just because the girl onscreen has a full face of Charlotte Tilbury does not mean she has interpersonal relationships completely sorted, and just because it fits into your narrative of events does not make something the truth.
I also think that there’s the issue of hindsight bias. If you look in the comments of videos like these, you notice that almost everyone is looking back, asking how did I not notice, or reflecting on all of these “signs” that were missed at the time. How did I tolerate this person for so long? They ask. All of the evidence was there. We all have our own boundaries, but the thing is, in life, we have our own discrepancy. You missed those signs because maybe at the time they weren’t what they now appear. Maybe your boyfriend being five minutes late to pick you up actually didn’t feel like the ultimate betrayal at the time. Maybe that friendship didn’t truly feel fake at the moment. Maybe you just think it did now, because of the way it all ended.
Please don’t let the internet tell you who you are. We should be able to make up our own minds about who is good for us, how we can improve ourselves, who we are, and where we fit into the world. The desperation to create characters out of people, I think reduces them to one-dimensional ideas that are harder to sympathize with or bother to understand. No matter how well we seem to fit a certain mold, we are all complex human beings with our own lives, backgrounds, and feelings. We deserve the chance to make mistakes, and so they are not just a thing that should be sorted into categories of good/bad, right/wrong, forgivable/unforgivable to be listed out by strangers in some video optimized for retention. Our transgressions should always be considered on a case-by-case basis, because no two are truly exactly alike.
And so, if you need a call-to-action or a moment of epiphany delivered from a stranger online, maybe it’s not truly kismet. Maybe it’s not a sign meant for you, but rather one flooded out to hundreds of thousands of users around the world, each with their own completely different situation.
Also, I realize there is a deep irony to me making broad declarations about how this content is affecting audiences in an article complaining about how making broad declarations is affecting audiences. I want to say something clever about this, but I think what it really comes down to is that everything I do is correct and I am the universe’s special exception. I mean well, I swear (lol).