CNF: Running Out of Time

by Ken Malatesta

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]

Ask even the angstiest teenager 20 or 30 years ago what they wanted to be and it was something concrete. A business person, a doctor, a fireman.  Ask today, and it’s a YouTuber, a gamer, or the latest social media incarnation, a Tik Tokker .

I have never seen a Tik Tok video, but I tolerate its presence, joke about it and tease my students about it. But when I read in The Atlantic that Tik Tokker, Charli DiAmelio wanted to buy her sister Dixie a pair of $32,000 shoes, I wanted to vomit. I can’t say I was surprised. The Kardashians flaunted their opulence and insipidity for a decade during Charli and her peers’ formative years. But is anyone else terrified? That an entire generation’s aspirations dead-end at shoes.

As a teacher who peddles literature at the low low cost of a free public education I don’t stand a chance.

Some would argue that Tik Tok and the like are merely kids being kids. Creating their own world and language. Dancing. Didn’t Elvis scandalize the country and corrupt America’s youth? Elvis’ hip shaking is tame by today’s standards, and most of Tik Tok’s hand jive copycat dances are harmless or so I have heard (As a teacher and parent I would never deign to cross the threshold into the teenage world). But you lost me at  $32,000 shoes.

When I visited Graceland  25 years ago, it was only evolving into the absurd commercial pilgrimage it is today. But I was struck by the relative modesty of the biggest star in the world’s house. I’ve seen bigger swimming pools in the Chicago suburb where I teach. The whole thing could probably fit neatly inside the bathroom of Donald Trump’s gilded penthouse.

So what? You might say. Try teaching a bunch of teenagers that there is value in words and literature and goodness beyond material things when the instant fame carrot dangles, or sits rather in the palm of their hand every second of their waking hours.

I can’t fault a kid for having lofty aspirations, but what happens to our culture and our value system if everyone pursues a career making dance videos? Where will the next doctors, lawyers, and yes artists come from? This is an extreme scenario, of course. Someone will wake up and realize that all that dancing is hard on your knees and even the Tik Tok generation will grow old and may develop heart problems. But the pandemic has driven America’s youth even further into themselves, and  may push our value system into the abyss. This is comparable to the one in a million hopes of professional sports stardom so prevalent in the 90’s and early aughts, particularly with inner city youth. But the youTube and Tik Tok trend is more widespread and more alluring because most Tik Tokkers start in the confines of their bedrooms. Chinese spying be damned!

The confines are what bother me. Sure, these teenagers will hang up their dancing shoes (or arms?) and emerge as the next generation of adults, and there is no returning from the cultural and entertainment fragmentation the internet has spawned, but I worry about the long term effects. Yes it has allowed more opportunities and more mediums beyond the traditional Hollywood track, but what does normalizing $32,000 shoes do to a teenager’s perception?  I may be beating a dead horse, but this is the equivalent of many Americans’ annual income. Elvis loved his belt buckles, jumpsuits, and badges, but I don’t think even he could condone 5 figures for a pair of shoes. Celebrities have always been opulent, what bothers me is how easily someone like D’Amelio can become profligate. Won’t her proverbial fifteen minutes be up sometime next week?  Or ten minutes from now? But then that is the dream. A few minutes of renown. It’s the shoes that bother me. Not everyone is gonna make it on Tik Tok. Just like most won’t make it in Hollywood or the NBA, but as long as everyone keeps angling for a slice of that pie people will be distracted enough not to revolt or aspire to something more noble and worthwhile, or at the least practical. They don’t know there’s not enough pie to go around. There never was.

How can schools and parents compete with a medium that promises instant riches? Write an analytical essay about mortality and biblical allusions in contemporary narratives, or film a forty second video of yourself dancing the most recent trend? Which would a teenager choose? The internet, video games, and social media have already decimated attention spans, but the promise of monetizing a hobby is social media’s version of the Lottery. Why bother with school, let alone value it? Students do, but increasingly for all the wrong reasons. Students are being spoon fed corporate stratagems and legitimate philosophies cannibalized into modern business lingo:  “mindfulness”, “growth mindset” (a lesser version of Nietszche), and the worst of the bunch “executive functioning”, along with so much more  psycho babble George Orwell is rolling in his grave. Contemporary education’s aim is to cultivate automatons.To administrators and politicians, children are numbers. Data to be crunched. Info scraps to be fed to the tech behemoth. It’s no wonder kids have turned to Tik Tok and the like as a ticket out. They just don’t realize it’s all the same train.

And time is running out. As an English teacher and a humanities promoter I feel like I am their last opportunity for truth, the last line of defense against the onslaught of illusions sold on the internet. Solomon doesn’t mention Tik Tok in Ecclesiastes, but his wisdom on the nature of chance seems too applicable to the nature of internet fame- “…nor yet favor to men of skill.”

Maybe this isn’t the end of the world. Or is it? With the pandemic dragging on, young people are slipping further and further into virtual worlds. Will we ever return to reality? What will the world look like a generation or two from now? Are we doomed to zombified populace Tik Toking their way to the apocalypse? We owe our children and ourselves more than that.

 

 

Ken Malatesta is a teacher. 0riginally from Chicago, he now lives in Skokie, Illinois. His work has appeared in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Fatherly, and The Hopper.

 

See what happens when you click below.

Check out the write-up of the journal in The Writer.

Matter Press recently released titles from Meg Boscov, Abby Frucht, Robert McBrearty, Tori Bond, Kathy Fish, and Christopher Allen. Click here.

Matter Press is now offering private flash fiction workshops and critiques of flash fiction collections here.

Submissions

Poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction/prose poetry submissions are now closed. The reading period for standard submissions opens again September 15, 2025. Submit here.

Upcoming

05/04 • Leath Tonino
05/11 • Chris Pellizzari
05/18 • Chris Clemens
05/25 • Clayton Eccard
06/01 • TBD
06/08 • TBD
06/15 • TBD
06/22 • TBD
06/29 • TBD
07/06 • TBD
07/13 • TBD
07/20 • TBD
07/27 • TBD
08/03 • TBD
08/10 • TBD
08/17 • TBD
08/24 • TBD
08/31 • TBD
09/07 • TBD
09/14 • TBD
09/21 • TBD