Lately I’ve been sitting with the uncomfortable realization that a “vintage” clothing store I visited a few months ago while on vacation in Montreal was merely a collection of the same crap I lusted after in the 1990s when I was in middle and high school. Miss Sixty, Jordache, Guess, The Limited: you’re all here!
More disconcerting than feeling my age in that moment was the sense that “vintage” no longer indicated something nobler and better made—free of such fast-fashion scourges as elastane and flammable viscose. Then again, these historical pieces have survived all this time, haven’t they? Just like Twinkies. Plus, it’s comforting to know that the shit I liked when I was 17 is somehow likable to 17- or even 25-year-olds now.
In another time-warpy development, I’ve once again lost all ability to properly care for my face skin. It’s simultaneously dry and acne-prone; and I can see the beginnings of wrinkles on the corners of my mouth, which makes me preemptively dread the day when food or lipstick begins osmosing its way in there without my noticing. My right bicep is sore almost every day when I wake up, too, which I suspect is permanent; like, my arm is just bad now. It feels out of body in the way going through puberty was: Whose skin do I live in now? Where did I go—and so fast?
It’s simultaneously earth-shaking and totally mundane. I’m actually not mad about it.
Beyond the physical symptoms of time’s passage, evidence is slowly mounting that I’m aging out of the zeitgeist. It happens when things like the Stanley cup dominate the lifestyle news cycle for a couple weeks and I don’t bother to learn a thing about it, or when new words enter the vernacular, like “cheugy” (unnervingly relevant to this piece!), “hot girl dinner (pickles?),” “rizz” and “hype,” that I can’t bring myself to utter aloud. There’s also the slow fade into invisibility that comes with rejecting certain fashionable modes of communication and self-expression.
“You should do TikTok videos!” is advice I get a lot. It usually comes after someone brings up the dumpster fire that is newspaper and magazine journalism with their head cocked sympathetically to one side.
Is my resistance to these cultural shifts due to some deeper-rooted fear of becoming irrelevant? Admittedly, I’ve always been late to embrace trends, if at all. I never had a Spotify account, nor do I own an air fryer. I didn’t watch the first season of “White Lotus” until it had been out for almost a year. (Even worse, I still haven’t seen season two.) The main reason I refuse to start a TikTok account is I don’t like videos as much as reading and still frames, though I realize that this puts me at a massive disadvantage as a freelancer working in the information business.
The thread that most consistently connects me to the way we live in this very moment is restaurants, which is what I spend most of my time observing, writing and thinking about. They count among our most direct lines to the daily-shifting tides of trends at the local level. Farm to table. Scandinavian minimalism. Millennial pink. Merch is fashionable (aka cool aka HYPE) again. QR codes. Maximalism. Nostalgia. Martinis!
As a restaurant critic, I get to take up space bemoaning certain shifts, like the digitization of even sit-down restaurants. But maybe my ire that dinner increasingly resembles the experience at an airport Maggiano’s is disproportionate to a broader acceptance of some direction in which our society is moving. Am I clinging to the past?
It’s indeed possible that I’m getting closer to some cranky point of no return. I’m already teetering on the edge of making decisions based mostly on physical comfort. That bar is too loud! Those shoes are too uncomfortable! That trendy food gives me indigestion! Do I have to stand the whole time that band is performing?
What’s more terrifying, though is whether we humans reach some life stage in which we settle so far into our ways that we can’t accept that new ones inevitably come along, and that they might even be better.
The quiet, constant evolution of language is a beautiful metaphor for this concept. Tidy dictionary definitions and grammatical rules might seem like sturdy guardrails, but in reality language never stops shifting or testing the boundaries of meaning as we move through the business of living. Some expressions stick (“Whatever!”), and some don’t (“Talk to the hand!”). Some achieve wonderfully mundane power. Consider, for example, how fascinating it is that we collectively adopt certain filler words like “um” and “like.”
“What a word means today is a Polaroid snapshot of its lexical life, long-lived and frequently under transformation,” wrote Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter in a New York Times piece called “The Secret Life of Words.”
I may be getting longer-lived, but I’m still evolving too, still frequently under transformation. Not too cranky yet, though I’m also not any closer to joining fucking TikTok.
Interestingly I also get the “you should do TikTok” thing a lot. I think it’s just the default answer for any one facing a challenge now.
I mean it's whatever, but fwiw you would crush at TikTok