Demure and Other TikTok Bullshit
It's not very thoughtful!
I wouldn’t say that I have been dancing around this, but when you are a 32-year-old millennial aging out of being cool, you start to worry about the increasing frequency of your old man yells at the sky moments. It’s not that I am unaware that this is an inevitable part of life; I stand somewhere between realist and skeptic as to whether humanity is getting dumber or if social media has just exposed what we always were. It’s just when you find yourself consistently outside of mass media trends and the cultural zeitgeist, the experience of getting old carries a bit of thudding literality. Working at a PR agency during the last season of Game of Thrones as someone who has never watched the show was my first taste of feeling disconnected from pop culture, but that felt more like a conscious choice to disengage from a relatively niche faction of the mainstream. Whenever I’m out in public and I overhear every other sentence containing “demure,” I’m not only bewildered by the use of a fairly uncommon word, but it also feels like a culmination of a number of micro- and macro-scale failures and fractures of broader society.
If you are unaware, “demure” is a recent TikTok trend, a word of the day for grass-eating subliterates who communicate in a Spanglish-like hodgepodge of sentence fragments and emojis. In many recent hangouts, I’ve been caught in the churn of collective gabbing about the latest TikTok phenomena, but in a way that is both “making fun of it” while obsessively blathering about other such “dumb” trends. It’s clear the people around me are drowning in content slop, which has a compounding effect of sucking me in. I should ask people if “demure” is the same as skibidi toilet and maybe that will shut their gyatts up.
It’s like there’s this breakdown of any sort of originality. None of these heavily repeated phrases are funny or clever or particularly interesting. I can’t help but lose respect for people my age who suddenly pick up the phrase of the month because, at least theoretically, we’re supposed to be growing out of this new wave of meme culture. What was once awesomesauce will eventually become cringe. Keeping up with slang is perfectly normal and excusable for teenagers and young adults, but I wonder how a 28-year-old female coworker could talk about having “girl dinner” without cringing at the prospect of giving off second-wave embarrassment to everyone around her.
Being moderately online in the days of DSL and Ebaums and onset Facebook was a vaccine against today’s terminally online vibes. Elder millennials and Gen Xers back then generally thought computers were for nerds and social media was lame, but some of them got hooked and now they’ve devolved into online busybodies fumbling through posts that any healthy society would condemn as crimes against the timeline. I’ve checked out TikTok once and an hour felt like 15 minutes, the feeling of dopamine glaze washed over my eyes. I decided it wasn’t worth accelerating my brain death just to passively consume deep-fried clips of people barfing the same fucking words and phrases over and over. It’s like going out of your way to become heroin dependent. I still encounter this content through Instagram.
Like “demure,” I had never heard “It’s giving” until recently and now I detect it in every other sentence. It’s like a switch gets flipped and suddenly everyone I know is saying a phrase overnight. It is also off-putting and concerning to observe a social media app rapidly steer language because its most prominent content creators are trying to avoid algorithmic suppression. Someone making serious videos about mental health will have to say “unalived” instead of “committed suicide,” a woman’s rights advocate will have to say “graped” instead of “raped,” a sex therapist will have to say “corn” instead of “porn” or “seggs” instead of “sex.” I understand language is consistently evolving, but this is a warped and demented version of English that is metastasizing and being maximized for algorithmic approval and dissemination.
As I exist somewhat outside of these satanic trends, it’s what I imagine my father’s impression of my friends must’ve been back when every conversation had to reference a bit from Family Guy. These phrases are like inside jokes that the general population is in on, which makes them inherently lame. They just give suggestible people the feeling of being in on a joke without having to actually be a part of a friend group with its own social dynamics, history, and punchlines based on lived experiences. Instead, they get to pretend to have those experiences alongside millions of others parroting the same hackneyed jokes and phrases riding a tidal wave of algorithmically optimized drivel purpose-built to capitalize on their obsession with apps and trends.
This is probably my cope for existing within a timeline that only seems to get more brainfried, but instead of getting frustrated or confused, I just let it fuel a sense of intense superiority. This is completely unearned since I’m engaging with this nonsense, but at the very least, I have a stronger attention span.
I don't think they're using "demure" properly. "Demure" means shy, meek and retiring- TikTok is none of those things.
I live by one acronym: JOMO.