Superbowl Tuesday: the crown jewel of American indignation. Whatever your profession, creed, or station in life, your citizenship guarantees an evening of awkwardly shuffling between couch and kitchen, inhaling mass-produced foodstuffs as people you don’t like scream at a television screen about people they don’t know.
It’s an annual tradition that seems as resilient to external pressures as our immune systems are to the common cold this time of year, which is to say, it’s pretty good at ignoring them.
Yet for all the controversy the cultural institutions at play stirred up, both during the game and during its coveted advertising spots, none seemed more egregiously embarrassing than President Joe Biden’s campaign joining TikTok. In the wake of a disastrous special counsel report that made damning remarks about the president’s mental acuity, Biden forewent the traditional post-Superbowl televised interview for a second year in a row, instead heading to social media to post Dark Brandon memes and a short video on TikTok with the caption, “lol hey guys”.
Don’t read the comments to these videos. I was hoping to find the voices of angry Gen Z’ers calling for a ceasefire to the bombing in Gaza, or at the very least a critique of the president’s lack of transparency surrounding his fitness for office. Instead, all you’ll find is the hare-brained (all apologies to hares), woefully repetitive remarks from Trump supporters, all making the same misinformed invectives about American government.
Yet if Gen Z’s absence in the comments was disappointing, it’s not particularly surprising. Gen Z has more important matters to attend on TikTok, and starting a fight with a bunch of Red Bull-fueled White House interns doesn’t rank up there with sharing AI-generated images of Lana Del Ray shoving Timotheé Chalamet in an oven. Chalk this up to political differences, but I believe there’s another dynamic at play here: a generational one.
While an older set of users is struggling to exploit TikTok, Gen Z has been using it for some time. According to a recent poll, 57% of Gen Z respondents say that TikTok is a primary source of information. This tracks with broader user data: 36% of TikTok users are between the ages of 18 and 24. TikTok is home turf for Gen Z, who’ve made the platform the behemoth hard-for-Ted Cruz-to-pronounce bogey-man it is, and used it as their generation’s online hangout spot.
Yet Gen Z’s setting of TikTok’s tone doesn’t mean that older users aren’t a large subset of the platform. 32% of users are between the ages of 25 and 34. While this is far from threatening to Gen Z’s mantle, compare this number to five years ago, when users aged 16 to 24 comprised 41% of the application.
I don’t mean to split statistical hairs, nor am I unaware of the fact that part of this dynamic is TikTok’s base aging, but that doesn’t explain everything. I believe we’re seeing TikTok gain in cultural credibility and pedigree to become something coveted, if not yet understood, by online users across age demographics. This encroachment from older users was bound to rear its head in the form of TikTok trends eventually, and it’s done so in spectacular fashion. Do Millennials use TikTok? They certainly try.
MillennialCore is less an actual trend rather than a pejorative label given to TikTok creators whose content appears dreadfully Millennial. Look it up on TikTok and you’ll find videos of mostly cis, mostly white, mostly women in their late 20’s to mid 30’s in various states of euphoria over something fairly mundane. Take this video for instance, in which a woman gobbles down pumpkin-flavored cream cheese with cannibalistic fervor. Or this video, in which a woman screams with glee upon finding that Olive Garden sells its cheese graters.
Even between these two examples, there’s a struggle to precisely define MillennialCore. The user whose cream-cheese obsessions prompt foraging behavior exhibits a put-on, ADHD-inspired hyper-energy. I remember this behavior from middle school, and all I have to say is that I didn’t find it appealing then from children, and I don’t find it appealing now from adults.
The second user’s attitude is just as wrapped up in the procurement of consumer goods, albeit with a more faux-debonair, (dare I say “bourgeois”!?) undertone. Yes, she’s screeching, but the joke is that she’s seemingly put together and screeching. This brings us to the crux of what makes MillennialCore so deliciously disgusting to Gen Z: upwardly mobile white (mostly) women who revel in the trappings of childlike Americana.
In this MillennialCore video, a woman goes to great lengths to describe her elation that Taylor Swift gets to be “Smol Gurl” next to Travis Kelce’s “Large Boi.” Nothing is more patently Millennial than obsessing over the personal lives of wealthy, white celebrities (trust me, I’m guilty of it too.) Furthermore, the culturally ancient terms “Smol Gurl” and “Large Boi” feel like they belong on a title card in a turn-of-the-century nickelodeon (the 19th Century that is.)
There are several more videos I found while looking for MillennialCore that were more sincere: videos of men and women talking about their disillusionment over home ownership, wealth distribution, and professional success. Yet even these underscore an acute generational difference. Whereas Gen Z came of age during the election of Donald Trump, COVID, the rise of online living, rampant school shootings, and a spiraling Climate Crisis, Millennials got to achieve some sort of socioeconomic standing before feeling disenfranchised (or so the reductive narrative goes.)
Yet the most severe example of MillennialCore is this one, in which a woman jokingly tosses glasses and containers around, gleefully declaring herself a “28-year-old toddler.” This is where I have to credit FunkyFrogBait for their great video detailing MillennialCore. Every video I mentioned was listed in FrogBait’s video, and while they were also the top results when I went searching myself for MillennialCore on TikTok, FrogBait’s analysis was pointed and informed. FrogBait makes the case that a huge part of Gen Z’s disgust with these millennials’ videos (aside from some ugly discriminatory hatred in the comments) comes from the idea that these adults are acting “like children.” FrogBait claims that Gen Z had to come of age early due to the circumstances listed above, and that that’s the source of frustration.
I think this is true to a point. While Gen Z certainly has had its defining, rallying-cry catastrophes to contend with, the same could be said about any generation. You could make the point that Millennials had to grow up early due to the aftermath of American military disasters in the Middle East following 9/11, the 2008 Recession, or the rise of gentrification. This can also be said about the 90’s: AIDS, corporatization, the mainstreaming of the far right. Or the 80’s: Reagan’s election, the mass-incarceration of Black men in the name of the Crack epidemic, nuclear catastrophe anxiety, and the evaporation of the American middle class.
What I find most particular to this generational divide is part and parcel to our use of platforms like TikTok. We know everything all of the time. We’re constantly inundated with the information of every world event. In this context, it can become frustrating that there are people who aren’t as “informed” as we are, and aren’t as enraged at the systems that are so clearly broken.
I’m using “we” loosely, as I’m obviously writing from a certain in-between generational perspective, but I sympathize much more to Gen Z on this issue. Watching people a few years older than “us” use our platform to talk about cheese graters, Taylor Swift’s personal life, and their quirky childishness is totally at odds with how so much of Gen Z experiences TikTok. A good deal of Gen Z uses TikTok to understand their place in the world, not to express a bashful, privileged complacence.
I realize this is a vast oversimplification. Gen Z aren’t an exclusive contingent with uniform ideals and beliefs. And Millennials aren’t just wealthy, white Americans helplessly failing upward. One can also scrutinize why the Millennial-targeted vitriol on TikTok seems to be so overwhelmingly aimed at women. Yet as a generational divide becomes heatedly political in an election year, it’s easy to see why a certain subset of Gen Z is repulsed by MillennialCore.
TikTok is more than something to be exploited for views, likes, and votes. It’s the lens through which a large portion of a generation experiences social, political, and economic issues. To build off FrogBait’s point, if Millennials really want to use TikTok like Gen Z, they’ll have to grow up quickly. But hey, there’s always Pinterest.
So, do Millennials use TikTok? What are your thoughts on #Millennialcore? Let us know in the comments!
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