The TikTok girl knows not who she is. She smiles vacantly into the camera, gesturing aggressively as she makes a video like the hundreds that already exist. She paints her face in the same products as every other girl obsessed with creamy contours and luscious lipsticks. She imitates all day and edits all night to curate her videos, the way these personalities tend to do. But, this personality is not really hers. In fact, she finds herself unfamiliar with her reflection, unsure of what differentiates that person looking back at her from the masses.
It is too simple an argument to claim the patterns and replications of mannerisms and habits seen online are an infection specific to the age of social media. Copying and repeating have always been standard procedure. When someone or something strays away from the mob and illuminates on its own, the crowd generally sniffs it out. And suddenly, thousands of people have the same hairstyle, same way of talking or are eating the same avocado on toast recipe. What was once taking inspiration from others has become a deformity, a perversion of admiration. To define oneself as original or unique has lost its inherent meaning, no longer existing as a comprehensible notion.
Following the new adaptation of Caroyln Bessette Kennedy’s marriage, she is a prime example. Admired for her elusive simplicity, Caroyln had an air about her all women of the 90s yearned to achieve. Her unpretentious structured skirts ,and delicate necklines, combined with her aversion to jewellery of any kind, led to a frenzied need to emulate her. Calvin Klein was the new go to and tortoiseshell headbands were sold out in all the nation. She stood alone in her sense of self, with an indestructible knowledge of who she was and her very mode of being.
Where Carolyn exuded individuality in the way she so effortlessly threw something on or lit a cigarette in an unbothered manner, the TikTok girl is starved of anything distinctive to her. She has focused solely on Carolyn’s stylistic choices, and suddenly every remotely blonde girl online is in a black turtleneck and a pair of loose but intentionally fitted Levi’s jeans. The caption reads some regurgitation of the video just before, featuring the same baseless content.
The oscillation between duplicating what has been done before, and simply copying mannerisms down to the exact way of speaking and gesturing suggests a truly lifeless community of individuals, if you can even call it that anymore. The internet yearns for an interesting piece of unplagiarised content, something that excites and catches one’s attention for more than five seconds. Yet, we regard ourselves so low that we render our actual creative ideas obsolete, craving the approval of strangers instead.
Perhaps it is easier to copy and paste someone else’s personality and ideas onto ourselves, as that way we can avoid the fact that we might just be boring. Studying the endlessly available ‘how to be chic’ lists will not change anything other than provide a temporary spur of validation from a sea of random comments. But, we must stop being so afraid of being disliked. To be truly unique is to be genuinely free from the shackles of society’s opinion.
Living our lives with the sole purpose of seeming interesting to others is so much more exhausting than actually just being interesting. We are fed (more than we know) streams of content that wire us to feel like we should act, look, talk in a certain way to achieve the golden status of individuality. Yet doesn’t that defeat the whole point of existing for oneself? It is actually chic to not care. In understanding the power behind regaining back our own identity, the fakeness falls away and is replaced with a uniqueness specific to us. However, I am not sure the TikTok girl is quite there yet, and so she continues to eat, sleep, and breathe someone else’s way of life.