"Sunday" blogs - on confessing my guilt ridden love for TikTok and Gen Z

I recently talked to my dad about the unique experience of teaching a mid to late Gen Zer. He teaches middle school age and I teach high schoolers. Although my dad detests cancel culture and overly sensitive “snowflake” liberals, two concepts born from the intersection of millennials and Gen Zers, he always talks about how he thinks Gen Zers are far smarter, sharper, and more interesting than millennials. Granted, he's biased because its all millennials that moved to San Francisco in the last 7 years to become techies and clog up the neighborhood with their Phil's Coffee and their renovated condo buildings.

This is not to say that my dad is far off here. Gen Z seems to be the core force of leading trends, ideals, disseminated ideas of gender, sexuality, binaries in general, the generation that beat out the rhetoric and logical fallacies our society is built on (i.e. that not everyone can simply pull themselves up “by their bootstraps” when facing everything from stop-and-frisk to generational poverty, or that genders have to assume a binary because of what our sex indicates). We have so much power in terms of enforcing a lack of tolerance for sexual assault, racism, sexism, and xenophobia. Consequently, Gen Z has an amplified problem with image obsession, short attention spans, technology addiction leading to self isolation, and skyrocketing depression and anxiety.

Gen Z is also routinely tortured by a future that cannot sustain the cost of living relative to minimum wage, the prospect of our favorite coastal cities being underwater or burned down by fire by 2060, or existing in an age in which our social media platforms front load us with others' successes and achievements, making us incredibly self conscious and competitive. The social fabric of a Gen Zer's young adulthood has completely mutated from what it was in the mid 2000s, even, and it's wreaking havoc on our happiness. There became a market for immediately gratifying, short content for comic relief and free/democratized self expression. It only made sense that a photo app such as Instagram would have to be followed up by something with slightly more complex content that also plays to our visually predisposed (and, honestly, mentally ill) culture.

I had just gotten off of a particularly shitty day, and it was in full blown shittiness by 6:30pm, right along with the fall sun and its orange creep down the horizon. One, the musician who I called out 5 years ago for publishing an article blatantly perpetuating sexism had never done his work to reflect on his actions and be better (I'll tell you what – a Gen Zer would have done the work, because we don't tolerate that shit even when we aren't aware that we're actively contributing to the issue). He had to maintain his image, he openly defends a rapist now. As a victim of a starkly similar situation right around the victim's same age, this all makes me feel physically ill. The jazz community shows little to no response or awareness.. Right after a day of teaching a new high school class, I also realize that I might not want to teach at the high school level at all. This might warrant getting a master's degree that I can't afford just so I can teach at the collegiate level for good.

On a more personal note, I'm freaking out about presenting and debuting six new pieces of music in addition to the six and a half on my new album, all of which are happening in an excruciatingly concentrated amount of time. After the anxiety attack that ensues, sometimes my brain has no functioning power left. It needs to be on the low battery mode setting, the dimmer set halfway. It's not a unique experience in today's day ad age to just want to be happy and do something mindless instead of constantly being outstandingly productive. Gen Z is burned out around the clock. So – at the swipe of a finger on a smartphone, we got our comic relief. Introducing, the glory of TikTok - the first social media app that Gen Z is truly driving in terms of content creation.

I always felt embarrassed to say I like TikTok. Maybe it's because I have no desire whatsoever to be a TikTok creator myself. I mostly resort to watching only. I don't personally like short clips in the organizational style of Vine or TikTok when it comes to music – I believe music deserves listening, the potential to engage with something for a long time, something to travel through and feel. It takes more than 10 seconds to tell, always. But when it comes to every kind of niche humor and instant gratification through video content, there is something for everybody on the app to get hooked on: a Russian cat who looks like a jaded divorcee sitting next to a different giant cocktail for each post. Lesbian thirst traps to make me forget about the fact that I somehow bother with straight men at all. A gay Princeton diver who dresses like he's permanently stuck in House of Yes and prefers “icon” or “bimbo” to any sexuality or gender labeling terms. A guy in Tacoma, WA under the name “Catluminati” who takes “cat walks” around his neighborhood and goes by all the houses to greet the local cats in the area by name. A guy with a 13 year old pug named Noodle who tells you what kind of day you're going to have by propping the pug upright and seeing if he collapses back down into his bed (a “no bones” day – be lazy, relax, etc.) or stays sitting (a “bones” day – be productive, take care of errands and workload). A girl living in San Francisco who makes clean cut, economical ASMR style cooking and organizational videos that make my brain feel like it's getting foam rolled.

I will also add that TikTok is full of a lot of bullshit content. This is where we actually thank the algorithm for stalking us and our online patterns diligently, since it weeds out all of the videos we don't want to see to just get to the ones that we want. Example: this weekend was Halloween. I thoroughly enjoyed a video of a girl cosplaying Voldemort exclaiming “Harry Pottah – the boy who lived!!!” with the Manhattan wind whipping around her cape in dramatic fashion. So TikTok proceeded to show me what everyone in Manhattan was doing on Halloween. So far, I've discovered someone riding the subway dressed as an ostrich and using their hand to be the ostrich's head and neck, a group of people who went as traffic cones who messed with traffic, and my personal favorite – chubby cats dressed as bats, Dracula (in this case, the cat's name is “Peach”, naturally lending itself to the nickname “Peach-ula”), and rotund pumpkins.

On a oxymoronic note, there are a slew of folks on TikTok with dark humor who joke about their night long manic episodes, their panic disorders, or their clinical depression. One could argue that that's problematic or appropriation of a serious subject, but given that this is a way that Gen Z regularly normalizes and copes their increased rates of mental illness, we all understand that this is what we do as a generation to make us feel better. There's this unspoken shared trauma that most of us have, coming at us from every possible angle – family life, natural disasters, sexual assault, self hatred and/or harm, painstaking work schedules – and it is as if the instantly redeeming quality of TikTok runs proportionally to how much we need to feel relief on a regular basis. Call it stupid or surface level, but it works. It works for us. Feelings are often visitors, not residents, but we need something to help for the time when they are visiting and there's nothing you can do at that moment to make them leave. (Particularly, while you're forcing yourself through that dreaded 9-5pm office job, that 15 minute break in a four hour rehearsal...)

I also have to notice that TikTok feels different from Instagram or Facebook because not everyone has used it as a business promotional service yet. I largely use both social media apps to promote my music, not for self aggrandizement or selfies. TikTok is the only social media app where I can escape from everyone in my business,. Most musicians are hardly even on Facebook or Instagram in the first place, so I certainly won't count on them to check out how many Berries and Cream remix videos I saved when I was high on a Thursday night after work. I don't have to be reminded of what gigs other folks have that I don't or what European city they're being featured in this or that night. I can just watch things that make me laugh. And sometimes that's all I really want – an outlet completely separate from my business socials.

On that note, I bid you all adieu for the week, and I encourage you to indulge in a little Gen Z style comic relief. Have a “no bones” day. Noodle is a glorified doggy-swami, after all, and the prophecy goes that we must all abide by his omniscience in the name of “everything-has-turned-to-eternal-shit”.I don't make the rules. :-)