And, meanwhile, Jamie is dancing
Sometimes I have a little bit of spare time to stop and think about what goes on in the world. Lately, this is not happening as often as I would like — which is why I haven’t been writing so much in the past months — and maybe the reason I most often give as an excuse is not the fact that I am busy working as a freelance designer but that, unconsciously, I rather not go down the rabbit hole. It is a defense mechanism that I believe most of us have developed over time, which has also been accentuated in the past years as a way to mentally cope and avoid an overwhelming feeling of doom. And social media platforms such as TikTok have seen — and exploited with our consent — the potential of engaging in dissociation. Needless to say, they have done a terrific job.
This is Jamie. If you are not on TikTok, what I am about to expose might be difficult to understand. While the world was, once again, descending into chaos with Russia invading Ukraine, TikTok users discovered Jamie’s video. The short clip shows Jamie dancing in front of a bathroom mirror to Nelly Furtado’s song Say It Right. Nothing extraordinary here at first glance. However, the video has now over 200 million views. Why? Because people saw something else. This was not just a dancing video like the thousand others that populate the app. It was what we needed to cope with the current events. Thousands of users jump right away to share their videos dancing with Jamie, a shared experience of belonging to an alternate reality that was still in peace, away from the chaos of the outside world. Jamie’s video, in its simplicity and wholesomeness, conquered an audience hungry for a reason to believe in humanity, to reassure ourselves that there was hope, that not everything has been lost yet.
I am 31 years old, so I have grown alongside the internet and social media. I have lived through the rise of internet culture from chats to blogs to Instagram’s food obsession and Twitter trolls. But I have never seen a platform develop such an intense and widespread subculture within the internet. The closest I can think of would be Twitter. Instagram never made the collective impact TikTok has generated in so little time. Jamie’s phenomenon would probably have never happened outside of TikTok and outside the sociocultural context in which we are all playing our part. The pandemic altered our world in such a way that no amount of influencers’ perfect life or Netflix shows could help us mitigate our need for dissociation.
I don’t consider dissociating a bad thing per se. We need it in order to avoid overthinking, burnout, anxiety, stress, and a whole range of other feelings that I can only sum up with a question I find myself asking a lot lately, “what’s the point?”. And that is a dangerous question to have flying over the head like a dark cloud. There is a lot happening in the world at a very high speed, and we don’t get enough time to process it all while worrying about meetings, basic needs, and self-care. So we crave for an escape route that can help us forget about the anxious sensation of perpetual doom.
But of course, when dissociating goes too far, we become victims of our own desire to forget, covering ourselves with a protective blanket made out of powerful anesthesia while scrolling through TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter to name a few. We can see something horrific on the social media feed and forget about it just one second after moving on to another post. This numbness is definitely dangerous and insensitive, but it’s not social media’s fault in its entirety. It is just a symptom, a consequence of how close we are as a society to the brink of collapse and how little we care if we fall.
We are tired, frustrated, drained, mentally and emotionally exhausted. So when we see even the tiniest glimpse of joy, we fight to grab it, no matter how silly or ridiculous it may seem to others. And at that moment, we feel we are part of something good and wholesome in the middle of chaos. We feel human again, something that, in this time and age, seems to need a constant reminder. Jamie was the hero we didn’t know we desperately needed. And, while the world is burning, Jamie dances to save us all.
