Sienna Bentley

“God, imagine if people were all the same,” I thought to myself, crammed into a Piccadilly line tube carriage on a dreary Tuesday evening. “What a miserable fucking existence that would be.”

Aside from the obvious misery of being stuffed like a sardine into a metal box hurtling to and from corporate nothingness, that is.

I looked around and silently marvelled at humanity and all of its quirks; differences in style, appearance, mannerisms.

It struck me in that moment that TikTok and social media generally with its fast fads and microtrends is gradually morphing everyone into clones. No one is forced to be themselves and find their personal style on their own, as we’re being drip-fed what to wear, what’s cool, how we should behave. As chronically online as this generation is, it’s no surprise that we’re internalising the repetition that we can’t get away from.

The desire to be different

On the other side of that, it is this sameness that is fuelling the desire to stand out – we spend countless hours online trying to prove (to who?) that we are different. While social media is integral now for creatives to get their work seen and can be attributed to the rise of many successful and deserving artists out there, it has also destroyed culture as something that just happens. We watch people ‘create culture’ and internalise that as being the only way for culture to develop – instead of just living life. We then feel this intense pressure to add something to the culture-building, with the alternative being to simply resign to being an observer of those who are designing it themselves (or appear to be, because social media isn’t actually real).

No one wants to be the person stuck at home watching TikTok videos of other people getting out and doing things – so we feel forced to ‘do’ or create, when that pull should come from within. It’s more about being observed as someone who is creating rather than creating for art’s sake in fear of not being culturally relevant.

Human connection

Going out and existing with and alongside people and having sincere conversations about art and culture is so undervalued. We risk losing the simplicity of connecting with each other in the chase of appearing important online.

With the digital space playing such a key role in the careers of most creatives now, it is difficult to take a step back and reassess its importance in our actual lives. The whole “if you didn’t record it, did it even happen?” question is piercing the veil of culture now in that culture is seeming to unfold online and you’re only contributing to it if you’re sharing it, when actually in real life it’s not happening at all.

While it has many advantages, social media keeps us static – literally and culturally.