The over-65 side of TikTok
“People just tend to leave the world when they get to 65,” says creator @dekinaus44.
Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Have you done your civic duty and sent your parents a TikTok today?—Kate
No matter how many videos I send them, my parents will not use TikTok. I understand, because at first, or fifteenth, glance, the app is not a place for people over 30. You have to dive into a For You page of lowest-common-denominator content (teens dancing, Karens being covertly filmed in parking lots) and spend the next few days whittling it down into your exact tastes by navigating an algorithm no one really understands. It’s a legitimate barrier to entry, which is why the app is disproportionately made up of younger users who are typically more nimble with the technology.
While there are older creators on the app, the fact they’re older tends to be their schtick in a way that’s a little bit too goofy for my taste. It certainly isn’t representative of their actual lives the way TikTok can be for so many other demographics. Which is why I was immediately struck by Deborah’s content. Deborah, who is 65 and lives in Melbourne, joined TikTok during the pandemic along with everyone else. But over the past year, she’s been more regularly posting outfit videos, and receives tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of views from users so clearly shocked to see a woman of her age living an aspirational life.
“It’s filling some sort of gap of an approachable older woman,” Deborah told me when we hopped on Zoom. “I fear that young people are not having older people they can connect to…They just see being old as being awful.”
Deborah originally joined TikTok in hopes of connecting with other women her age, but while other over-65s are proving hard to come across on the app, she’s sticking around because of the way her videos are resonating with the younger generations and changing their perception of what it means to age.
In this (truly lovely, if I do say so myself) conversation for paid subscribers, Deborah and I talk about fashion, what drew her to TikTok, the way society thinks about aging, and how social media allows older women to still be seen.
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Maybe we can start really general—who are you, and how did you come across TikTok?
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