Jordan Hart
- I'm 23 years old, and I went undercover as a 50-year-old TikTok user to see what Gen X is watching
- It took time for the algorithm to tailor my feed — then I was getting parent jokes and silly skits.
- Both generations are still working through the feeling that we grew up too fast.
As a 23-year-old, I consider myself an elder Gen Zer who understands references from both 30-year-olds and teenagers, but Gen X and its sense of humor stumped me.
I spent nearly a month scrolling a foreign TikTok For You Page with a new account set to my birthday — except 50 years ago in 1973. I created the alternative profile so that I could browse the content of Gen X — those born between 1965 and 1981 — and compare it to my Gen Z-focused feed that caters to those born between 1997 and 2012.
The younger generation has become dependent on the app that many of us — myself included — use as a search engine for recipes, honest reviews, and restaurant recommendations. It made me curious to see how people my mom's age use TikTok since there are only estimates on how much each generation is using the app.
It took some time to identify the content more fitting for Gen X because a fresh TikTok account's "For You" feed is mostly viral videos and motivational speeches. But I engaged for weeks with parenting content, skits about work, and "Gen X Thought of the Day" videos, and my experiment finally landed me among older users.
Here's what a few weeks on the other side taught me.
Gen X has quite a few complaints
As I scrolled TikTok undercover as a 50-year-old, it seemed like most of the humorous content centered around incompetent coworkers, bratty children, and making fun of other generations.
Gen Zers don't take themselves too seriously, but, at the same time, we know when it's time to speak up for change and advocate for ourselves. That said, I found that Gen Z's humor on TikTok relies less on complaining about others and more on making jokes about our own personal experiences.
Even work-related content from the younger generation is less about bad bosses and more about our anxiety surrounding making work friends. Typical Gen Zers work on their own terms and are not afraid to ditch a job instead of soldiering through it.
Gen Z keeps it painfully real
A lot of the time, Gen Z is the butt of its own jokes. "You're so real for this" is one of the highest compliments a creator can receive from Gen Z viewers — meaning the content is authentic and unfiltered.
In popular content on the Gen Z side of TikTok, creators often make themselves the punchline in scenarios meant to be relatable to viewers. It was a pattern I didn't recognize on Gen X's TikTok, where a lot of the videos involved the creator griping about something or someone else.
Even with parenting content, I found myself identifying more with the teenagers they complained about than the creators themselves. Most times, I could at least understand the joke, but other times the punchline fell flat with me.
Both generations probably grew up too fast
Self-proclaimed "Level 50 Gen Xer" therealslimsherri boasts nearly 600,000 TikTok followers, and her content includes a "Gen X Thought of the Day" series, which hits on growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, comparisons to other generations, and how "times have changed."
One "Gen X Thought of the Day" installment, receiving more than three million views, says that Gen X adults "refuse to grow up" because they were forced to be independent at a very young age.
"We're like the Benjamin Buttons of the world, we're only going backwards with age," the 50-year-old said.
The sentiment is something Gen Z could understand possibly more than Gen Xers realize. Access to the internet and widespread information pushed many to mature faster as Gen Z learned at a quicker rate than others. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Gen Z harder than any other generation when it comes to stress about the future.
Now, at the end of my time on Gen X TikTok, I've learned a lot more about the generation that raised me and my millennial siblings. I think both generations joined the app to make ourselves and others smile, and they've achieved that on their side of TikTok.