Do we agree what a bad day looks like? TikTokers have been describing their low-key “days from hell” – and it has made me wonder. Mine would involve getting up before 5am after a sleepless night to find a “morning person” house guest already in the kitchen, drinking the last of the coffee from my special mug and wanting to talk politics. Trying to work, I’d face a soundscape of nearby pneumatic drilling and Capital FM, and be regularly interrupted by spam calls from “HMRC”. After an afternoon at the dentist, dinner would be plain farfalle (the worst pasta). I’d have to go out in the evening by car and parallel park, then get home to realise I’d lost my keys. Would that bother anyone else? Or is the small stuff people sweat – and it is small, truly the definition of first world problems – entirely personal?
Conducting a survey (that is, watching many TikToks of dewy young people pointing to bullet-pointed lists in their notes apps) revealed a few commonalities. A very high proportion of their annoying days start with waking up in someone else’s house, hungover, which does, I agree, sound suboptimal. The TikTokers also really hate being hot, which is probably a function of when this trend is emerging (ask them in January and I suspect you’d get a different answer), but relatable. Forgotten or unwelcome social plans that can’t be cancelled without guilt, technological snafus and exercise classes too expensive to skip also recurred regularly.
After that, the consensus crumbles. Everyone has their own loathed chores, modes of transport or parts of town: there’s a beautiful specificity to the likes of getting into platform 16 at Leeds station, a Hinge date booking “Caffè Concerto in Piccadilly Circus” or “shopping for a present for a six-year-old boy in Westfield Stratford”. But one thing seems to unite TikTok and, I suspect, everyone beyond: that there is no mild discomfort like a mobile phone with less than 10% juice and no charger.
