Young people are all over the place this week, recreating the meals on doomed ocean liners, eating Oreos with mustard, and getting all twee with each other. Here’s everything you should know about.
Trend of the week: The return of twee
I don’t want to alarm anyone, but the TikTok kids have discovered twee. The regrettable fashion and culture trendlet was hipster-popular around 2008, and featured self-consciously adorable music from Belle and Sebastian, movies like Juno and 500 Days of Summer, and women’s fashion like ballet flats and denim jackets—think Zooey Deschanel in her prime. (I don’t know what twee gentlemen wore, but maybe those popular-for-a-minute waxed mustaches and chunky glasses?) Check out TikTok’s #twee hashtag for more twee than you could ever want, and a look at how the new generation is changing its signature styles.
Subreddit of the week: r/Niceguys
Reddit’s “niceguys” board isn’t made up of fans of 2016’s Ryan Gosling vehicle The Nice Guys. It’s a subreddit dedicated to dudes who “mistake being spineless and pathetic for being ‘nice.’”
The never-ending stream of “funny, cringey images” features all kinds of “nice guy” content, like the important thoughts of this “literal fedora with arms,” as well as reports of famous nice guys like ancient electronic musician Moby. Clueless dudes mixing up kindness and weakness maybe deserve some pity, but the obviously sexist jerks who still consider themselves nice do not. And there are a ton of those guys.
The subreddit has nearly a million and a half members, and rather than just a place to bully weirdos, it seems to be acting as an object lesson on how not to be for Reddit’s mainly young, mainly male user base. Enjoy the weapon-grade cringe.
Viral video of the week: Recreating the last meal served on the Titanic
There’s way too much slick, professional content on YouTube, so I always celebrate anything homemade-looking that goes viral. This week, charmingly lo-fi YouTuber Brittany Broski is recreating the last meal served on the Titanic.
Broski is super-funny, but I wish she was a better cook. The meal of minted mushed pea timbales and salmon seems really foul in that cream-and-butter-heavy way rich people used to enjoy, but it’s not really a fair shake unless it’s made by someone with real kitchen skills. I suggest Lifehacker’s own Claire Lower for the job. Anyway, check out Recreating the Last Meal Served on the Titanic.
TikTok teens are diagnosing themselves with rare mental disorders
If a tween or teen you care about has begun telling you they have borderline personality disorder, they may be falling victim to the latest regrettable trend from the TikTok-verse. Kids are diagnosing themselves and others with rare psychological problems, from BPD to bipolar disorder, to dissociative-identity disorder.
While they are essentially doing the same thing you do with WebMD—looking up a symptom they are experiencing and imagining they have the most serious disease it’s associated with—TikTok’s spontaneously generated content makes it so much worse. Shady “therapists” posts videos encouraging self-diagnosis, peers reinforce the behavior, and it’s all exacerbated by a TikTok algorithm that feeds more and more videos about mental illness to freaked out kids who think they have them. It’s like a nightmarish feedback loop of horror and it’s given me Derealization Disorder.
Disgusting food trend of the week: Yellow mustard on Oreos
TikTok isn’t just for regrettable self-diagnostics, though—there’s also disgusting food. The kids are putting yellow mustard on Oreo cookies, eating it, and posting the videos to delight and nauseate others. As you’d expect, the videos include a message asking viewers to pass it on to a friend so they can try it too. The trend made it all the way up to singer Lizzo, who seemed to enjoy the barfy snack.
Because I am a brave and selfless man, I saved you all the effort and tried out the mustard Oreos myself. I also fed it to my Oreo-loving son. “This is gross. People on TikTok are really stupid,” he reported. I agree on both counts.
“Hype House” is streaming on Netflix
Do you want to go deep inside TikTok’s Hype House, the mansion in Moorpark, CA populated exclusively by influencers like Vinnie Hacker, Lil Huddy, and Larray Merritt? If you said “Please god, no!” I have bad news for you: The Hype House, a reality show that promises “an inside look at social media’s most talked-about stars as they navigate love, fame, and friendship while creating content and living together,” is streaming right now on Netflix.
“Imagine a fraternity filled with people that have millions of followers and dollars at their fingertips, with high school drama, and like, a ring light,” The Hype House star Nikita Dragun suggested on the show. I don’t think I will imagine that. I think I’ll imagine the sun running out of fuel and transforming into a red dwarf star that expands to annihilate the earth instead.