Adulthood in the Zone

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I’ve been thinking about the TikTok “ban” recently. Something about the fact that it has never been implemented, and yet was also never rescinded, speaks to our increasingly surreal cultural moment, this sense that we live in The Zone, suspended between the real and the unreal. And then it occurred to me that TikTok itself is all about living in a chosen, permanently suspended state: the state between adolescence and adulthood. I am far from the first to observe that while TikTok’s persona is defined by its teenaged users its reality is defined by adult users who would like to think of themselves as one of those teenaged users. It’s not a symbol of actual teen culture; it’s a symbol of the adult yearning to be a teen. The reality seems to be that when you hand people a front-facing camera, they look into it hoping to find someone who looks younger than they really do. This is a human impulse, an understandable one, but with the notion that adulthood is something to prize and maturity nothing to fear long dead, when there’s no counterweight, you end up with a culture that can’t look at itself in an honest way. Print the legend, I guess.

This New York piece from early this year, unfortunately titled “Tell Me You’re Grieving TikTok Without Telling Me You’re Grieving TikTok,” proved like most such pieces to have overestimated the chances of TikTok ever actually being banned. Beyond that, the essay caught a lot of hell in the comments, and I can’t say I blame the commenters. The piece itself is no less overwrought than its headline. Writer Margaret Hartmann refers to the (very brief) shutdown of TikTok as devastating and asks, “I shouldn’t feel this upset about the loss of a silly social-media app, right?” To which I must say, well, no. You shouldn’t feel as upset about the loss of TikTok as you demonstrate in that piece. Hartmann describes herself as “a 41-year-old woman with a very full and satisfying life.” I would argue that, in fact, a 41 year old with a full and satisfying life should have both enough other interests to find the apparent death of TikTok annoying, rather than devastating, and self-possession enough to feel a little embarrassed to explicitly mourn for an app for children.

To be clear, I a) think that TikTok should not be shut down by government diktat, on free speech and anti-xenophobia grounds, and b) feel that TikTok is genuinely damaging for our culture and society in ways that even exceed other social media networks. Attacking this particular product of a Chinese company seems arbitrary and thoughtless to me, given some of the national security (or “national security”) concerns inherent to other industries. And if Americans want to rot their brains with shortform video, well…. While I certainly object, I can’t condone using government to enforce my own tastes. Just to get that out of the way. Indeed, everything that I’m going to criticize here is a behavior or mindset that an adult has the right to choose. It’s just that those are bad choices, bad for the individual and bad for society. En mi opinión profesional. The more depressing thing about the short-lived TikTok freakout, to me, was the deepening sense that adults are not just refusing to ever adopt interests that are appropriate for their age, but increasingly shameless about doing so, unconcerned with even appearing to move on. That’s scarier, to me. Because while I believe that everything should be embraced in moderation, including maturity - yes, I did buy The Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered - I also think that a little guilt about our vices is a good thing. And what adult addiction to TikTok and FunkoPop and JoJo Siwa shows is an America that has rejected the idea that permanent childhood is a vice at all.

Pretty much every generation gets accused of refusing to grow up, every living generation anyway. The Baby Boomers, now culturally synonymous with old people, were relentlessly accused of Peter Pan syndrome, insisting on pursuing fun and self-centered living rather than transitioning into the sturdy structures of adulthood that older generations valorized. The Gen X tendency to watch Saturday morning cartoons while eating sugary cereal, childhood as nostalgia; the Millennial obsession with the paraphernalia of comic books and video games, childhood as fantasy; Zoomers and their nervous attachment to safety as the overarching principle of adult life, childhood as ethics. Gen Alpha will negotiate their own pathological attitudes towards youth in time. What gets to me, these days, is not so much the fact that more and more people seem utterly resistant to acting their age. That’s an old story. What gets to me is the fact that more and more people are utterly unembarrassed about it - that they don’t even feel the need to pretend to act their age. The sensation that we should feel shame about a refusal to grow up now seems somewhat quaint to me. As in so many other domains of human socialization, it seems like many people feel like it’s too hard to object, and so just go along with wherever culture is blowing.

As a Millennial, I’ve gotten a front row seat to observe a generation reach middle age and decide, instead, to continue acting like we’re in the flower of our youth - delaying the trappings of adulthood like marriage and children, job hopping, obsessing over beauty and appearing young, drinking and smoking weed with the same frequency as the young, refusing to ever graduate on from the media and pop culture of one’s youth and towards something more mature, insisting to everyone and everything that you are still a work in progress or other expressions of responsibility-shucking bad faith, and more than anything, an all-encompassing belief that one should still be extended the affordances we give to people whose youth implies a lack of wisdom, knowledge, and grace. People love to unapologetically proclaim that they’re “a 33 year old teenager” or similar. Well, what cultural force exists now to pressure them to act their actual, numeric age?

As Madison Huizinga wrote in 2023, contemporary culture “releases the burdens of responsibility and replaces them with no thoughts, just vibes, much like the —blank mind of a baby.” In a more recent piece for the New York Times Magazine, Helen Holmes writes about the recent online meme obsession “The Rizzler.” As Holmes points out, the Rizzler is an interesting lens through which to consider the infantilization of culture, given that he is a literal minor; his antics invite a kind of plausible deniability, as viewers can revel in the things he does while consoling themselves that they’re merely witnesses to a child acting like a child. Holmes calls the Rizzler moment

the exemplar of a broader cultural problem, one that is accelerated by the sheer volume of infantile, short-form, TikTok-ish internet content that delights viewers for a few brief moments before they swipe on to the next awkward comedy skit, weird animal, meandering breakup story or small child mugging for the camera. Over time, digested in larger quantities, this entertainment sands away the distinctions between this and that until context collapses into a river of color and sound. To prefer one bit of media over another — to have taste — is a characteristic developed with maturity; it is babies who are hypnotized by bright colors and sharp movements.

I think the refusal of adulthood has many, many causes. But the identification of the death of context, here, is quite helpful. Ami and I are ingesting a lot amount of information about young babies, for obvious reasons, and it’s interesting to think of what it’s like to be a newborn - so many things are undifferentiated. I read that for infants colors bleed into each other, sounds can’t be separated, and in fact young enough babies are apparently not even aware that there is a difference between themselves and their environments. The point is that the cultural substrate has shifted in such a way that this undifferentiated affect, this sensory flood without context or development, has become a feature of not just infancy but of adult consciousness. The baby doesn’t know the difference between a lullaby and the hum of a refrigerator. Likewise, the adult in the algorithm doesn't know the difference between sincerity and irony, the tragic and the comic, an actual person’s emotional unraveling and a bit. And crucially, more and more, they don’t want to know. Discernment is exhausting, and the vibe is everything. “Is this real?” becomes less important than “does this vibe?” Which is how you get people openly crying about a cat video one moment and then openly mocking someone else’s pain in the next, with neither leaving any mark. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Nothing matters.

Taste, of course, is one of the primary cultural products of adulthood, or at least it was. Not taste in the performative sense, where your media diet becomes a lifestyle brand, but in the sense of constraint, of sorting, of evaluating - of being able to say “this is good and this is bad, and here’s why.” You can’t have taste if you won’t say no. And you certainly can’t have taste if you’re worried that saying no means you’re not fun anymore, not young anymore, not part of the great neural carnival. But again, we live in the era of the vibe, and vibes are ideologically unmoored. You don’t interrogate a vibe. You don’t even trust it. You just let it wash over you, and then you move on. And we have a culture industry filled with aging Millennials and Xers who are patently terrified of looking old, who think that admitting that they don’t actually like Addison Rae’s music will finalize their descent into being an old person. So the people who are supposed to observe and comment on culture and, hopefully, to guide it in a generative direction - yes, to gatekeep - have abandoned that responsibility in the face of the modern American directive to pursue youth at all costs, even the cost of basic self-knowledge.

So what’s left? If you abandon the moral authority of adulthood, if you abandon taste, if you abandon the concept of context, if you even abandon shame, then what remains is a kind of permanent ambient performance of “relatability.” That’s all TikTok is, at bottom: endless pantomimes of your internal life, designed to be recognized, not judged. It’s not about being funny or clever or beautiful or interesting, although all of those qualities are occasionally present. It’s about performing your proximity to the audience, performing sameness. I’m just like you, and you’re just like me. Which sounds democratic until you realize that the price of entry is the annihilation of self-differentiation. You can’t grow up if your prime directive is to remain legible to everyone else.

People sometimes ask me why I care. “Why do you care if a 38-year-old woman has a Squishmallow collection?” “Why do you care if a grown man cries over finally deciding on his Hogwarts House?” And I admit that this is a good-faith question. There are many things I don’t care about. If you’re not hurting anyone, if your regression is private, if you want to let your inner child out to play on weekends, go with God. But when the collective orientation of a society shifts away from maturity, and when entire media ecosystems are devoted to protecting people from the experience of being challenged or confronted, we don’t just lose some abstract dignity. We lose the capacity to solve real problems. Adults who refuse to be adults leave no adults to run the world. And somebody has to.

This, for me, is the core anxiety around TikTok and TikTokification: not that people are having fun, or even that people are being silly, but that so much of adult life is now defined by explicitly disavowing adulthood. Not by immaturity, but by a performative allergy to maturity. It’s not that we’re aging poorly, but that we’re pretending we’re not aging at all. And as always, once something becomes the dominant cultural mode, it becomes invisible. The fact that grown people spend multiple hours a day watching strangers lip sync and point at words in the air doesn’t strike anyone as odd anymore. We’ve all agreed not to be the scold, not to be the buzzkill, not to be the person who says “this might be a little bit sad.” We can’t even admit, to pick a particularly sad example, that the type of music that has become absolutely dominant critically and commercially and culturally and in every other sense is not in fact a beleaguered underdog. Because some people need to nurture the childish belief that their media preferences are oppressed, and one thing permanent adolescence is perfectly suited for is maintaining those kinds of utterly untrue but self-aggrandizing delusions.

It’s not just TikTok, obviously. TikTok is the medium; the message is the broader infantilization of life. Adults who don’t read. Adults who have no hobbies beyond consumption. Professional adults with enviable jobs who still live in grubby share houses not because they simply can’t afford to have their own place, as is true of many struggling adults, but because they never want to leave the pleasantly low expectations of adolescence. There’s more people my age who want to live like teenagers than you may know. They like to believe that they're still waiting for their lives to begin and they will do so even after they have the financial means to grow up. Again, undifferentiated - the denial of aging allows for the perpetual right to say “I am still unformed.” Adults cosplay as “neurodivergent” rather than admit to the mundane pains of being anxious or bored; adults refer to their spouses as “my partner in crime” and their dogs as their “fur babies”; adults find meaning only in being seen, rather than being responsible for anything. Adults brag about having no opinions, no preferences, no convictions, only vibes. It’s not a subculture. It’s the culture.

And the problem with a culture that orients itself entirely around “relatability” is that it creates no aspiration. You can’t look up to someone who’s always crouching down to your level. This is the fake populism of contemporary media: everything is curated to seem effortless, casual, off-the-cuff. And when nothing requires effort, then nothing can be an achievement. And when nothing can be an achievement, then how could anything matter?

I don’t think the solution is to reinstate some calcified version of adulthood, joyless, rigid, domestic, the 1950s dad who works a depressing job and yells at his kids for crying. That model failed too. But there’s supposed to be a better way, between permanent adolescence and emotional conformity. Adulthood doesn’t have to be dour or smug. It can be fun, generous, expansive. It can mean taking yourself seriously enough to imagine that your actions matter, that you could be an example to someone. That you could be worthy of being imitated, not because you’re cool or quirky or a vibe, but because you are a fully formed person who knows things and is good at things and believes in things. And who, yes, sometimes says “no.” The culture now rewards you for saying yes to everything. Yes to the 40-year-old’s toy haul, yes to never traveling anywhere but to Disneyland, yes to celebrity divorce gossip, yes to fake ADHD self-diagnosis, yes to the Spotify feed tube of pop dross that thrills 13-year-olds, yes to the holy algorithm. It’s so easy to say yes. And if that’s your prerogative, fine. But the more people who choose that route, the fewer people are left to say no: no to cruelty, no to laziness, no to willful ignorance. No to being less than what you are capable of becoming. Adulthood is hard. But it’s not a trap. It’s the mechanism by which we build a world worth living in.

TikTok will go away eventually. It might be tomorrow or ten years from now, but it’ll be replaced by something else, and then something else after that. But the deeper cultural pathology won’t change unless we learn to associate adulthood with something more than giving up. Unless we can say, with pride, I am no longer a child, and that is a good thing.

The Judd Apatow movie The 40 Year Old Virgin literalizes its protagonist’s stunted internal life through his intense obsession with his action figure collection; they literally line his walls. This plot point is repeatedly referenced, and yet there’s little in the way of an argument about it. The filmmakers likely believed that the audience didn’t need convincing that a middle aged virgin who spent all his disposable income on toys was a pathetic figure; that his life was sad rather than liberated or filled with childlike joy was obvious. Well, that movie came out, incredibly, a full twenty years ago. Nowadays, I wonder if people who watch it are moved to mount an aggressive defense of a 40 year old’s fixation on his toy collection, or if they even notice at all.