Just by watching five minutes of TikTok the other day, I learned how to:
- write in cursive using chocolate ink
- incubate a baby chicken in a cardboard box
- train my dog to rescue toddlers from falling OLED TVs
- clean a toilet with mouthwash
- fall correctly after failing to climb a concrete river embankment on a bicycle
I marvel at how earlier generations of humans survived without the benefit of unsolicited time-lapsed how-to videos at their fingertips. For the last two years, I’ve been saving empty toilet paper rolls, waiting for someone to post a video telling me what’s the best thing to do with them. I’m starting to think I’ll have to make a video of my own.
I realize, of course, that the main purpose of video-sharing apps is not to disseminate useful information, but to garner attention. My generation didn’t grow up with TikTok and other instantly gratifying exhibitionist apps, but we did have t-shirts. In my day, if a young person wanted to turn the heads of a large number of people, one powerful and basically legal option was to wear a provocative t-shirt or hoodie at an appropriate moment—or preferably, an inappropriate moment. Who hasn’t dreamed of going to a big celebrity event, posing next to a movie star or a politician, and at the last second before the cameras click, opening your jacket to reveal an “I’m with stupid” t-shirt with an oversized finger pointing right at them? What? You’ve never dreamed of doing that?
To be honest, I have a poor history with clothing messaging. In high school, I won third prize in a local short story contest, and I insisted on wearing my favorite purple shirt and green pants to the awards ceremony. It’s my moment, I thought, and I’ll dress how I like. Afterward, my mom remarked, “Scott, you looked like a giant bruise on the stage!”
My track record has not improved over time. While on vacation in the Boston area, I bought myself a Harvard University hoodie (My plan at the time was to wear it at job interviews and tell people, “I went to Harvard.”). A few days later on the same trip, I got on a plane in Hartford, Connecticut (near Harvard’s rival Yale University), wearing my beloved souvenir hoodie, and I was promptly confronted by a tall, imposing member of the Yale women’s volleyball team (as per the stencil on her duffle bag). She walked up to me as I stood in the aisle and said in her “game” voice, “Look, everybody! This Harvard fan’s on the wrong plane!” All 15 to 20 of her teammates, dressed in matching travel jackets, peered around her to see which loser she was talking about. I felt the blood drain from my face. “I’m just a tourist,” I whimpered, as they and other passengers started laughing at me. The team leader withdrew in triumph, but not before getting in one last dig with a smile: “You tourists should dress better for air travel.” I’d like to say they were more forgiving later in the flight, but most likely they just forgot who it was they had school-shamed, because for the rest of the trip my Harvard hoodie remained stuffed deep in my carry-on bag.
T-shirt and hoodie messaging is still around, of course, but you have to admit that its shock value and influence have waned, and it’s been largely taken over by either straight commercialism or stark nonsense. One day last week I saw three different college kids wearing “Stranger Things” hoodies. By the third time, I was thinking, “I’ve seen Stranger Merchandisings.” The next day one of my students proved my point by wearing a shirt with the kanji 有能 (yūnō; competent) written on the pocket. I asked him what it meant, and he says, “Don’t you know?”
Young people today seem less interested in going out socially than they used to, and their fashion choices tend to pivot between two main styles: sweats and pajamas. Yet on Rakuten, I found a great third option for them: a t-shirt that says, “You’ve read my t-shirt—that’s enough social interaction for the day.”
I suppose for most of us, the last chance we get in life to make a meaningful social statement is on our gravestone when we die. I realize that not all belief systems ascribe to the idea of writing transcendental messages on memorial rocks, but isn’t it nice to think you could post one last text to the world from the place in it that you’ll otherwise occupy in silence for the rest of eternity? Imagine your headstone, in beautiful, beveled, glistening, pinkish granite, and there on its face, etched in big block letters, it says: “I’m with stupid.”
