There is a specific kind of cultural humiliation that comes from having a busy week. I can spend my time in all the ways that are supposed to make a life feel full: seeing friends, going on a date or to a museum exhibition I’ve been meaning to see, cooking dinner, calling my grandma, volunteering somewhere. I can spend nearly every free hour doing things with other people, in actual places, and feel unusually socially satisfied by Sunday night.
Then I open TikTok, and, all of a sudden, I feel left behind.
There are phrases I’ve never heard being used like they are in the dictionary. A new shoe everyone already owns. A new microgenre of woman. A celebrity did something three days ago and everyone has already cycled through outrage, backlash, counter backlash, and ironic nostalgia for the outrage. Somehow, while I was out participating in society, society seems to have moved on without me. It is entirely possible to spend your week surrounded by other human beings and emerge less culturally informed than someone with twelve hours of screen time a day.
Historically, cultural participation and social participation were difficult to separate. To know how people were dressing, what music mattered, and which ideas were circulating, you generally had to encounter other people. Culture travelled by word of mouth. You learned what was happening because somebody told you, invited you somewhere, played you something, or wore something you had never seen before. Being informed on these topics required paying a bit extra attention to the world around you.
Even mass media didn’t fully eliminate this. Magazines, television, radio, and newspapers could tell you what was happening elsewhere, but culture still had to be metabolized socially. Being “in the know” was a form of social fluency because it implied proximity. You knew the right people, or went to the right places, or belonged to a scene where information circulated. Now, being “in the know” mostly implies that you have a phone. Social media has detached cultural knowledge from cultural participation.
Today, it’s possible to know what twenty-two-year-olds in Copenhagen are wearing without ever meeting one. You can know which Brooklyn restaurant has become impossible to book without having eaten there, or even living in New York. You can be intimately familiar with the discourse surrounding a movie you have not watched, a book you have not read, a city you have never visited, and a relationship dynamic you have never experienced.
This produces a peculiar inversion. The person who spends the most time participating in ordinary social life may actually have less time to keep up with culture. Meanwhile, the person who is most culturally current may have acquired that fluency in almost total isolation. We have separated knowing what people do from actually doing things with people. And I think this separation explains something otherwise strange about contemporary American life: we have become extremely invested in individuality while remaining remarkably anxious about deviation.
Individuality and self-prioritization are very much in vogue. Follow your own path. Protect your peace. Set boundaries. Choose yourself. Yet at the same time, genuine deviation seems to terrify us. We are surrounded by increasingly precise guidelines for how to present ourselves to the world. Entire personalities are sorted into increasingly specific aesthetic categories. We increasingly choose friends who confirm our worldview rather than complicate it. We are encouraged to think of ourselves as radically self-defined while constantly absorbing information about what kind of person each choice makes us.
There has already been plenty written about algorithmic sameness, and I am not especially interested in making another argument that TikTok made everyone buy the same lamp. What interests me is why sameness feels so appealing in a culture that otherwise places enormous moral value on individuality.
I think part of the answer is that aesthetic conformity is increasingly doing work that community once did. Looking like other people can create the sensation of belonging to them. Wearing the right shoes and making the right restaurant reservation tells the world what kind of a person you are. Knowing the references and engaging in all the “right” cultural markers places you within a social world, even if the actual people who make up that world are nowhere around you.
This has always been part of fashion, to an extent. Clothing has always communicated membership, whether to class, occupation, generation, or otherwise. Humans like to resemble people with whom they identify. There is nothing inherently sinister about that. What has changed is the amount of proximity membership requires. You can now acquire the visual language of a scene without participating in the scene itself. You do not have to know the people, go to their parties, live in their neighborhood, or even encounter them in person.
This might be why contemporary conformity can coexist so easily with contemporary loneliness. The conformity is not necessarily evidence of strong social bonds. Instead, it may be evidence of our desire for them. We perform membership in groups we do not meaningfully belong to.
We dress as though we are embedded in a scene. We can identify increasingly narrow aesthetic categories on sight. We possess an extraordinary amount of information about other people’s social worlds. But there is something specifically tragic about being able to recognize the exact handbag carried by a particular kind of woman in London while not knowing the name of the person who lives three doors down from you.
I have started to wonder whether some of our most cherished language around self-care is connected to this too. The original idea of self-care is obviously not frivolous. People need rest. People need boundaries. No one should be required to sacrifice themselves indefinitely in the name of being agreeable, but somewhere along the way, we have developed an unusually expansive definition of what counts as an unacceptable demand.
If I am tired, I should stay home. If an event makes me anxious, I do not have to attend. If a friend becomes too emotionally needy, it is best to distance myself. If a commitment interferes with my career, my health routine, my romantic relationship, my sleep schedule, or my personal goals, perhaps the mature thing to do is prioritize myself.
Individually, each of these decisions can be perfectly reasonable, but collectively, they produce something bleak. Meaningful relationships are made partly out of inconvenience. Sometimes being part of a group means going to a birthday dinner when you are tired. Sometimes it means helping somebody move when you would rather spend Saturday alone. This is not glamorous work. It is not optimal. Frequently, it does not make you feel your best. But a village is largely made out of people agreeing to be mildly inconvenienced by one another, and if nobody is willing to do that, there is no village.
And, it seems, this is when we become even more dependent on the aesthetic performance of community because the real thing has become harder to find.
This tension becomes even more obvious in politics. There is an odd gap between how politically angry Americans seem and how difficult sustained collective action can be. Every crisis produces an enormous amount of commentary, outrage, and online expression, but organizing over time asks for something much harder. There are obviously structural answers to this. Time is scarce, work can be precarious, and participating in strikes, protests, or organizing can carry real financial and professional risks. But I also wonder whether the habits required for collective action sit uneasily alongside the habits encouraged by a highly individualized life.
Organizing asks people to tolerate frustration, sacrifice time, cooperate with people they disagree with, and occasionally subordinate their immediate preferences to a shared goal. A strike only works if people risk something together. A protest requires people to physically show up. Mutual aid means giving something to somebody whose life may have very little to do with your own.
This is one reason I hesitate when individualism and collectivism are described as simple opposites, as though protecting individual freedom requires minimizing our obligations to one another. The question is not whether the individual matters. Of course the individual matters. The important question is what happens to communal life when we become increasingly unwilling to be inconvenienced by anyone outside the narrow perimeter of their own lives. And what happens to individuals when communal life breaks down?
Solidarity, like friendship, is something you practice. The habits it requires are built in mundane ways, long before anyone asks you to march in the street. This is where the seemingly trivial question of fashion becomes revealing again. Why, in a culture obsessed with individual choice, do we so urgently want to know what everyone else is wearing?
Because we still want the group. We have not, by a long shot, transcended the human desire to belong. We have just built a culture that increasingly treats truly belonging as burdensome. So the desire reappears in aesthetics.
We passively study trends through short-form content and become fluent in the visual and linguistic codes of the moment without really meaning to. We adopt these codes into our own lives, whether it’s through what we wear, whose music we listen to, or what we read. And for a moment, maybe, it’s effective. There is comfort in seeing somebody on the subway wearing the same shoes as you, in knowing why a certain bag matters, in recognizing the visual language of a restaurant before you even sit down. The brushed steel, the tiny menu, the exact shade of butter yellow all tell you what kind of place you are in.
This recognition feels a little like belonging, but it’s not the same thing. Recognition asks almost nothing of us. Belonging does. The distinction becomes increasingly important when our cultural lives are taking place through screens while our social lives atrophy around them.
The strangest consequence of the internet may not be that it has made us more alike. Humans have always imitated one another, that’s not novel. What is new is our ability to conform without contact. To belong, aesthetically, to people we have never met. We can know what everyone is wearing without knowing who needs help moving on Saturday.
Maybe that is why contemporary life can feel simultaneously so crowded and so lonely. We have never had greater access to other people. We are surrounded by constant evidence of the group, but evidence of the group is not the group itself.
At some point, you actually have to leave the house.