What Makes This Video Internet Sensation?

There is a popular, new genre of TikTok videos making the rounds.

This is the video of someone documenting an average day in their life. You see them wake up in the morning, make breakfast, drive to work, eat lunch, etc. Nothing extraordinary or even mildly interesting happens. The only thing unusual about the day, as they document it, is that they are documenting it.

I watch these videos fascinated only by the number of camera angles they use and cuts they have to make. As a content creator myself — as much as I absolutely despise that title — I can’t help but marvel at the effort that must go into creating this sort of content. Not to mention the public embarrassment you must endure when other shoppers at the grocery store see you setting up your tripod to capture footage of yourself picking up a bag of green peppers or whatever. It all seems very bizarre. What is being filmed isn’t bizarre, but rather the fact that it’s being filmed at all.

But maybe the joke’s on me. These videos seem totally pointless from my perspective, and yet they tend to provoke a strong reaction from many people on the internet. Then again, everything provokes a strong reaction on the internet. The internet has never shrugged its shoulders at anything and said, “Oh okay. That’s fine. Whatever.” Nothing is fine. Everything is either really terrible or really amazing, and there is no room for anything to exist anywhere else on that continuum. So these “day in the life” videos must either be amazing or terrible, and usually they are judged to be the latter.

That has been the consensus over the past several days as videos from some random guy on TikTok have gone viral. The videos — I’ve seen three of them circulating — all show this guy, whose name I don’t know, going about his daily routine. Again, nothing remarkable happens. There’s nothing strange, interesting, or notable about it. But the videos have elicited a strong and often negative reaction.

Let’s look at this one now and then read a few of the comments. Here it is:

Imagine living like this until you die. Horrifying. pic.twitter.com/3S5zIoLTWO

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) April 21, 2024

Riveting stuff. The guy wakes up, has a smoothie for breakfast, takes the trash out, goes to work at his office job, comes home, takes his dog out, then gets changed into sweat pants and relaxes for the night. A very normal day.

A normal dude doing normal things. It’s only a one minute snap shot. There are 17 or 18 waking hours in the average day, so most of it will be left out. The guy also has a wife who we don’t see in the video, and apparently his wife is also pregnant. That fact isn’t featured in the clip, but the one minute snapshot we do see is totally fine and unobjectionable. Granted, again, the fact that we’re given this snapshot — the fact that he’s filming this in the first place — is strange. There are criticisms you could levy against this type of content. But there’s nothing offensive about the thing that’s being documented — the 9-to-5 routine itself.

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And yet the peanut gallery on Twitter/X has responded to this video like it’s an image of pure despair and horror. Someone named Keith Woods, who advertises himself in his bio as one of the “top 200 most influential Twitter users” left this caption when he reposted that video:

Imagine living like this until you die. Horrifying.

That had nearly 5 thousand likes. Many other comments agreed with the sentiment. Reading a few:

I don’t know if it’s this guys demeanour or just how empty his life seems, but this is literally the most depressing video I’ve ever seen

This is slavery with a nicer kitchen and bed

Hell on earth.

I agree, it is horrifying.

Many other comments along these lines, calling the guy a wage slave, declaring that his 9-5 lifestyle is a nightmare beyond all imagining, and generally reacting to a video of a guy going to work as if it’s a snuff film.

I tweeted that I don’t quite see the problem with the way this guy is living, and many people responded with comments informing me that I only have that opinion because I am also a soulless robot. Here’s one comment for reference:

Chances are 10 out of 10 Matt is a super basic automaton conservatard irl. Nothing remotely novel or interesting about him.

Now, I would obviously disagree with the “automaton” and “conservatard” labels, but the rest I’ll accept. I’m not sure what a “super basic” life is, but if that’s my life, fine. I go to work. I take care of my family. Perhaps it’s a basic life in that way. I’m okay with that. I’m also not striving to live in a way that random social media accounts would find “novel and interesting.” In fact if “novelty” is a guiding principle of your life then it is virtually guaranteed that you’re a dysfunctional loser. Functional adults with responsibilities don’t go around chasing novelty.

At any rate, I can guarantee that the people who pretend to recoil in horror at 9-to-5 jobs, and who lambast the rest of us for living uninteresting lives, are not themselves doing anything interesting at all. These people aren’t jungle explorers or engineers working on building a rocket ship to take humans to Mars or anything like that. These are losers who have lives far more monotonous and pointless than the average middle class 9-to-5 worker.

These people sit around on their fat asses staring at screens all day and then declare that office jobs are beneath them. “I need something more fulfilling and worthwhile and fascinating to satisfy my wild and inquisitive nature,” declares the guy who’s been scrolling through TikTok videos for the past seven and a half hours.

There is a certain irony to it.

Yet it has become very popular to hate on the 9-to-5 routine. You hear it from people on the Left, who say that the normal work day is somehow oppressive to the human spirit. And now we hear it even from some on the Right, who have adopted the same language to describe the lives of normal people who go to work every day to provide for themselves and their families. Both sides — or at least a vocal (and often younger) element on both sides — have come to a consensus that your average 9-to-5 job is a nightmare worse than death itself. It is slavery, they say.

Let me make two points about this. First of all, I don’t have a normal 9-to-5 job myself. I earn a living in a way that is somewhat unusual. Everyone on Earth has a podcast these days, so there’s nothing unique about that. But it is relatively unusual to make enough money to support a family this way. And yet I would never look down on the average 9-to-5 office worker. Most of them are doing jobs far more essential than what I do for a living. In fact, office workers basically run the world. Nothing would work without those guys doing those jobs. But no matter how essential or inessential any of those jobs may seem, I respect anyone who earns an honest living to care for themselves and their families. Calling average middle class workers “automatons” and “drones” and “slaves” is about the snobbiest, most elitist position you can take. And it’s even worse because, as we’ve established, many of the people who’ve taken this elitist position are by no means, and by no measure, actually elite in any sense of the word.

Second, adult life is one of work and routine. There is no way around the work part unless you’re on welfare or you were born a billionaire. In which case — in either case — you have no right to judge anyone who actually works for a living, no matter what kind of job they have. As for the second part, there’s no way around routine even if you’re a billionaire or a welfare queen.

Everyone has a routine. Life is dominated by routine. And establishing effective routines — routines that help you to be productive, and fulfill your responsibilities — is an essential part of growing up and maturing. Nobody has an exciting daily routine. Even people with interesting jobs don’t have exciting daily routines. Batman doesn’t have an exciting daily routine. The only people who have no routines at all are homeless schizophrenics. For everyone else, the only question about your routine is whether it is productive or not.

Work and routine. That is what the lion’s share of life consists of. Welcome to human existence. This is what it’s like, this is how it goes. So if you are horrified by a guy with a job and a routine, it is not the job or the routine you loathe. It’s existence itself. You apparently find human existence, by its very nature, to be awful and oppressive. And that’s a problem, because there is only one alternative to existence. If you don’t want to avail yourself of that option — and I hope you don’t — then you need to get used to life, and learn to find joy in it.

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