BeReal? More like GET REAL

I'm 30 years old.

My 20s couldn't have ended more recently but it's happened already: I'm an old fart.

I can't blame BeReal: the herald of this revelation. It's just a vessel shedding light on one of life's inevitable truths. It's something I always believed would happen. But maybe not to me? Such a smug, naive delusion this was. I'm embarrassed I ever believed it. 

The signs were there of course.

"Rick 'n' Morty is so original and funny." Ok. 

"You have you heard the new Billy Eilish? it's iconic." Holy fuckin' hell. Ok whatever floats your boat kid.

"Oh fuck! I'm being cyberbullied!" Oh no. Sorry I didn't mean for that to sound that sarcastic. 

Like every generation before me, I was excited about the youth. What will be their contribution to culture? How will they find new ways to stick it to the man? I was set to be stunned. And I was...

...stunned with disappointment. 

I was ready to shamelessly be the old guy at their gigs. 

To speak aloud their internet-age mantras in public. 

Their end of the bargain was to be cool. The way society and culture counts on them to be. 

But I suppose my anxiety at trying to be down-with-the-kids as I carried on getting older dissipated. 

Their culture blows harder than I could've possibly predicated. From their face tattoos right down to their ironic Greggs crocs (yeah. that joke will never get old. Seriously GenZ's humour is as bad as the boomer's). They sold their souls in exchange for the guitar's deletion from music and a 25 second attention span. 

But it was a social media app which made me finally lose hope. 

A younger friend brought it to my attention: "Have you heard of BeReal?"

In my old age I thought she was talking about B-Real of Cypress Hill fame. The dangerous panacea of hope trickled in. But no. It's an app. 

I'm not going to rant about the app being bad or anything like that. It just made me painfully aware of something true. A bitter pill: this app is trying to solve a problem I'm too old to have. 

If you don't know, BeReal is an app which is meant to alleviate a big problem with social media: that everyone appears fake and presents an unrealistic/better version of themselves. It does this by catching you each day and forcing you to post a picture of your face and what you're looking at on the spot, there and then. Perhaps you're on the toilet. Perhaps you're jacking off. Maybe you're in the middle of a funeral, or you're getting fired. Or treated for haemorrhoids. In my case it was exclusively pictures of my miserable bedsit. Perhaps learning about how poor I am and how mundane my life is boosted some young person's self esteem. If so, you're welcome kid. 

But for me, it just seems as though the younger generation are unable to switch social media off. 

Unlike kids today, I remember a time before social media. If social media became detrimental, those of my age group would turn it off. Most of us anyway. And it saddens me that young people need to ween themselves onto this nightmare. Unlike the other many intergenerational struggles of our time, this app highlights a people having to help each other through a hell of their own making. It is their own vanity that oppresses their peers. Their sense of righteous indignation fuelling extreme polarity on Twitter. 

Maybe as they mature, the generation below us will improve. There's still time to learn that social media isn't real life and become a worthy ally in wresting the property from the boomers (just kidding don't arrest me). 

Or perhaps we'll just have to wait and see if the next lot can do any better. 

All that said I do love TikTok.

(the editor) Dan.