Influencer culture is forcing everything into an endless, senseless trend Ive had enough

Back in college, when my roommate announced she was making “Gigi Hadid Pasta” for dinner, I expected some carb-free miracle meal.Instead, my friend served up a regular plate of ziti with vodka sauce, plus a few lonely flakes of red pepper.No secret ingredient or supermodel twist — just a famous name slapped onto something normal.Still, six years after Hadid filmed herself cooking the basic dish during the COVID lockdown, social media has treated a glob of vodka sauce like a Michelin-starred breakthrough.

This isn’t an isolated trend — it’s the foundation of contemporary internet culture.Long-practiced behaviors get repackaged with star-studded branding, and because we’re all chronically online, we view the content as important and new instead of just routine.As a 22-year-old, TikTok is my go-to search engine for virtually everything — from outfit inspiration to dinner recipes on a $20 budget.

But when I see new trends flooding my feed with claims of being “brand-new,” I am constantly asking myself, ‘Hasn’t this always been a thing?’I hate to agree with my Gen X parents who say my generation has no originality.To them, every song sounds the same and every trend is recycled from years past — and they’re not wrong.

Anytime my parents learn of a “new” online trend or hear my friends and me talk about something circulating on social media, they’re quick to point out that their generation has already been doing or saying that for years.Take the “partless slickback” that Kylie Jenner wore to a Knicks game in August.

The standard ponytail Jenner wore to the game was identical to the one my mom brushed into my hair for every elementary school picture day.But TikTok instantly exploded in “get-the-look” tutorials, calling the lip kit guru “iconic,” when she was just sporting a regular hairstyle.

Hairstyles and trends come and go, but for a generation that spends hours on the internet, it sometimes still seems like other Gen ...