If you have ever ventured into the strange realms of internet echo chambers known as TikTok, the author offers her condolences for time and innocence lost. Wading through the bewildering snippets of video produced by visibly self-conscious people speaking to themselves in parked cars and gazing into mirrors, one discovers utterances of principles in which many people seem to put stock. Ever barbed with sarcasm, few if any of the people on video would admit to consciously adopting and living by the principles they espouse. If anything, they might scoff and say the principles are held ironically. Yet, how often do the ideas we obsessively ridicule become the very ideas we live by? Whether spending time with ideas to make fun of them or living with them to imitate what they contain, the end result can be remarkably similar.
What are the principles shaping lives on TikTok? (Granted, the themes here are gleaned from precious little time in that cesspool, but it’s not a stretch to think some of them are indicative of larger trends).
One man inspired outrage—OUTRAGE—after proclaiming that the face-riding weight limit is 140 pounds. If you at first wondered what face-riding could possibly mean, put yourself back in a desk at the average American high school with phallic imagery graffitied on every flat surface and you can begin to put yourself in the mindset needed to interpret these weighty discussions happening on TikTok. Of course, the outrage was not because a man proposed that many women would be desirous of riding his face, a lewd and foolish thing to suggest (one might hope), but, no, it was that he so inexcusably singled out “plus-size” women and publicly announced that his face could not bear their girth.
Here lies clear proof that our culture is all muddled about the questions to be asking: 140 pounds is a reasonable and healthy weight for the average woman. Though rude, it’s not inherently offensive for a man to suggest that most women should be within that range. On the other hand, it is grotesque and debased to propose engaging in such graphically articulated carnal activity with loads of strangers.
All that to say, there were scores of videos of concerned faces responding to the man with the weight limit. Many people, from scrawny adolescents to gruff women well beyond the proposed limit, proclaimed that they had a message for any and every woman excluded from the coward’s criteria: their faces could take the weight! That’s right, fat-bottomed women of the world, there are braver faces for you to ride. That said, many acknowledged the perils. The phrase that came up frequently with a nonchalant shrug was, “If I die, I die.”
These may be silly videos made in jest, but that proclamation is startling. In a culture willing to give up so very much of life for all manner of overblown paranoia, the assurance that so many people expressed in facing the possibility of death to give someone a titillating time is surprising. Is that a cause worth dying for?
In contrast to the faces of TikTok, Cornel West speaks arrestingly of the purpose of education and living: learning how to die. The machismo of proclaiming one’s readiness to die in service of a stranger’s brief thrill reveals people who do not have a compelling reason to live. We can dismiss it all as joking—but then it’s not really that funny, anyway. The proclamations we make about our lives still reveal something.
Most of us are such that novelty does not occur to us. Surrounded by a sea of faces waiting to be ridden, we think that is the only path available. The truly heroic reveal to those prepared to receive something new that there is another way of being, there is a way of laying down one’s life with transcendent purpose that resounds in eternity. To be fully alive requires knowing that which is worth dying for.
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