{"id":617749,"date":"2023-03-14T09:49:09","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T14:49:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/14\/tiktok-is-changing-what-it-means-to-be-old\/"},"modified":"2023-03-14T09:49:09","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T14:49:09","slug":"tiktok-is-changing-what-it-means-to-be-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/14\/tiktok-is-changing-what-it-means-to-be-old\/","title":{"rendered":"TikTok Is Changing What It Means to Be \u2018Old\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Kelsey Laurier doesn\u2019t<\/span> really get hate comments. She\u2019s built up a following of some 400,000 people since she started making lifestyle TikTok<\/a>s in 2021\u2014more than 90 percent of her audience is women, and Laurier describes her comment section as a \u201cpeaceful\u201d place. Still, every so often she\u2019ll get some \u201cangry men\u201d who turn up and call her \u201cwashed up, miserable, and old.\u201d And sometimes\u2014when she reveals her age in a video\u2014she\u2019ll get backhanded compliments from women: \u201cThey\u2019re like,\u00a0Oh! I can\u2019t believe it! You look so young!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

What makes these comments particularly surprising is that Laurier is 29.<\/p>\n

Ageism is age-old, so it\u2019s no surprise that it\u2019s made its way to TikTok<\/a>. In the past, 73-year-old positive aging champion Margret Manning has\u00a0spoken out<\/a> about her experiences on the app: \u201cThere seems to be this incredible focus with other women here on TikTok to just not accept aging,\u201d she said. But TikTok isn\u2019t just reinforcing pre-existing negativity around growing older; it\u2019s also changing our definition of what \u201cold\u201d means.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In late February, the Teenage Look filter took over the app. True to its name, the tool allows older TikTokkers to transform into their younger selves. In one\u00a0video<\/a> with more than 15.8 million views, a middle-aged (or possibly younger) woman tearfully greets her teenage self. The top comment, with more than 30,000 likes, reads \u201cI don\u2019t want to grow old,\u201d followed by three crying emoji.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI started noticing this trend of people who are essentially your peers, they\u2019re a few years younger than you, addressing people who are older than them like they\u2019re elderly, talking to them like they\u2019re a senior citizen,\u201d says Laurier, who is based in the US state of Georgia. In January, she made a\u00a0TikTok<\/a> about the \u201crampant\u201d ageism she sees on the app. \u201cThe way that it is normal these days for someone in their late teens or early twenties to call someone in their late twenties or thirties \u2018old\u2019 or \u2018washed up\u2019 \u2026 I just find that really disturbing,\u201d she said in the video.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Perhaps people have always called anyone older than them \u201cold\u201d\u2014but historically this is something they would have said in private. Unlike Facebook or MySpace before it, TikTok has attracted a wide range of users, allowing people of all ages to interact in unprecedented ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe always used to say, \u201829 is old, 30 is old\u2019 when we were younger, but we weren\u2019t on the internet as much,\u201d Laurier says, \u201cAll of these kids now have this place to go where everyone can see what they\u2019re talking about and everyone knows how they feel about certain things.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Toward the end of 2022, 8.8 million people watched a\u00a0TikTok<\/a> in which a young woman warned viewers: \u201cStop sleeping on your stomach\/side or your face will droop.\u201d One tweeted\u00a0response<\/a> to the video later earned more than 6,000 likes. It reads: \u201c[It\u2019s] terrifying that the anti-aging industry has wormed its way into younger and younger audiences. Teenage girls shouldn\u2019t have to feel constantly terrified that everything they do is causing their face to look older.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Why are young TikTokkers so afraid of growing older? Julia Twigg, an age studies researcher and sociology professor at the University of Kent, says people shouldn\u2019t \u201cnaturalize\u201d ageism by making it sound inevitable, even though it is a \u201cdeeply entrenched set of ideas.\u201d While youth has historically been valorized in most cultures, Twigg says, we should also look at modern phenomena that reinforce ageism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cSocial media has much the same issues with aging as print media, except the online world is capable of being much harsher and much more openly hostile,\u201d Twigg says. The internet, she adds, \u201cenables [harsher opinions] to emerge into the public sphere in a way that doesn\u2019t happen when they\u2019re filtered through magazines and through an editorial lens.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ashton Applewhite, author of\u00a0This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism<\/em>, adds that we can\u2019t divorce ageism from modern capitalism. \u201cNo one makes money off satisfaction,\u201d Applewhite says, \u201cWhen natural biological transitions are pathologized or problematized, people make money off them.\u201d While anti-aging creams have existed for\u00a0centuries<\/a>, TikTok has enabled the constant buying and selling of these products. Thanks to the TikTok Shop, users can purchase anti-aging serums, concealers, acids, creams, eye gels, and \u201clight therapy masks\u201d without even leaving the app. Influencers are incentivized to flog these products because they earn a cut of whatever sells.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSomeone who\u2019s in their mid-twenties knows about anti-aging marketing and they\u2019re not wrapped up in the idea that if they get one wrinkle they\u2019re gonna die,\u201d Laurier says. \u201cBut if you market that to a 12-year-old, they\u2019re really going to internalize that and take it to the next level.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

One possible solution is exposure. \u201cThere are literally studies that show the more you know about aging, the less fear it holds,\u201d Applewhite says, adding we also need to dismantle \u201cthe false idea that we have most in common with people our own age.\u201d Theoretically, this is something TikTok could help with\u2014hobbyists can meet under hashtags no matter where they\u2019re from or how old they are.<\/p>\n

Laurier says that people her age should also think about how they talk on the TikTok app. \u201cI think people who are in their thirties and up need to stop joking about being \u2018old,\u2019\u201d she says, \u201cPeople make a lot of jokes about, \u2018Oh, I can\u2019t move my body anymore,\u2019 \u2018Oh, my knees are turning to dust.\u2019 I know people mean well and it\u2019s self-deprecation, but I do think these jokes can have an effect on how people actually view you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Laurier has another suggestion, and it\u2019s simple enough. \u201cI think,\u201d she says, \u201cpeople who are older should start showing their lives more online. They should show these kids that life doesn\u2019t end in your twenties. Life is really just beginning after that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Amelia Tait<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kelsey Laurier doesn\u2019t really get hate comments. She\u2019s built up a following of some 400,000 people since she started making lifestyle TikToks in 2021\u2014more than 90 percent of her audience is women, and Laurier describes her comment section as a \u201cpeaceful\u201d place. Still, every so often she\u2019ll get some \u201cangry men\u201d who turn up and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":617750,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[395,46,2442],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-617749","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-changing","8":"category-technology","9":"category-tiktok"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617749","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617749"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617749\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617749"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617749"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617749"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}