Tiktok Is the Giant Deconstructed Slumber Party I Need Right Now

In a time when real, intimate social contact is rare, I can’t stop thinking about sleepovers. The nostalgia is, as they say, “hitting different” right now. I catch myself daydreaming about rating guys on a multifactor scale (Is he hot? Is he chill? Is he nice? Does he have his driver’s license?); breaking out the Ouija board; swapping pseudo-therapeutic advice cribbed directly from Tumblr; smushing together household ingredients and calling the resulting goop a “face scrub”; and divulging deep, dark secrets in a 4 a.m. stupor, through tears and giggles. All of these things made sleepovers the pinnacle of teen hangouts, a space for freedom from parental/public scrutiny and the construct of “a reasonable bedtime.”

Time, age, and the danger of gathering with people outside our households rendered the sleepover distant from me. Why would I, an Adult, want to be at someone else’s house unless we were sleeping... together? Lately though, when I can’t help but long for the sleepovers of my youth, I can turn to the app that’s hijacked pop culture during COVID: TikTok. 

Anyone looking to take the temperature on what “kids these days'' are into would be an absolute fool to head anywhere besides TikTok. According to Statista, a solid 32 percent of the app’s user base is below age 19, and per data from MarketingCharts, 69 percent of teens in the U.S. were TikTok users by fall 2020. That popularity is clearly reflected in the trends the app drives (remember whipped coffee?) and the way it’s shaped how teenagers emote physically (ever wondered why your cool younger cousin keeps pointing like that?). The app’s culture, and the wealth of content created on it, can be confusing to outside observers—especially people consuming TikToks second-hand, via Instagram Reels or Twitter. Even the app itself can be overwhelming to navigate, with the same “infinite scroll” format that made Tumblr, its spiritual predecessor, so captivating.

For all the fervor over how inscrutable and alien the app’s Gen Z user base is, the little diversions that make up the bread and butter of TikTok’s content remind me of how I spent my free time as a teen. Users confess, gossip, brag, crush, pull pranks, devise stunts, and swap at-home beauty recipes—all things my pre-college social life revolved around. With all that in mind, here are a few subgenres of TikTok that make me feel like it’s 2:30 in the morning and somebody just asked everyone to say whether we’d rather get married on the beach or on a mountain.

There’s nothing more fun than talking about yourself. Young people understand this, which is why so many games revolve around telling outrageous personal stories—“Never Have I Ever,” “Would You Rather,” “Truth or Dare,” and “Dealbreaker” all revolve around the same giddy disclosure. You wouldn’t! You didn’t! Oh my god! 

On TikTok, users love to tell the same kind of stories—but for a much wider audience. Sometimes, they do so by playing similar games, like “Put a finger down if…” or “This or That?”

Other times, people air their dirty laundry totally unprompted, which is… even better. I have seen people on TikTok divulge things I would not tell 99 percent of the people who know me. I have watched divorces get inked, seen how-tos on insurance fraud, and heard confessions a priest would interrupt by saying, “Oh, uh, actually, I don’t think we have to go into that.” All this with faces attached! It’s deeply personal, occasionally horrifying, often relatable, and basically impossible to look away from. 

What were sleepovers for, if not talking and fantasizing about crushes? The familiar contours of love-slash-obsession are all over TikTok, where users trade stories about the dumbest things they’ve done for a guy, the depths to which they’ve cyber-stalked, and the bimbos, himbos, and thembos they’ve taught to parallel park.

Whether users are reliving their Directioner phase, mocking each others’ celebrity crushes, or just waxing poetic on m*n as a concept, TikTok is rife with the kind of delirious crush energy only teenagers have willpower and free time to maintain. 

Skincare might not have us by the throat the same way it did in 2017, but my personal routine has come a long way since I was in high school, throwing together whatever I could find in a kitchen cabinet and putting it on my face, or hair, or body. 

Did it ever work? Not really! But that wasn’t going to stop me—or any of the people on TikTok advocating for the kind of at-home beauty treatments sourced straight from Wikihow and pre-woke Teen Vogue. 

Yes, a lot of the beauty treatments on TikTok probably won’t have the desired effect—but that’s not entirely the point, is it? What’s a little brown sugar green tea honey face mask avocado mayo hair overnight scrub cuticle softener coconut oil cinnamon lip plump DIY among friends? 

I would punch a dog in the face to be in a room with all of my friends right now. Unfortunately, that offer isn’t on the table, so in the meantime, I’ll have to settle for watching people hang out with each other online. Whatever “food porn” is to Instagram, these videos are to TikTok—wholesome content that nonetheless induces intense longing.

Friendship is just a different beast when you’re young and less encumbered by things like “networking” or “having a full-time job” or “dating three different people”—you know, life’s “responsibilities” that loom larger post-grad.  

Pre-pandemic, it was much easier to take adult friendships and time spent with friends for granted. Now? I won’t say “never again,” but I will say binging the equivalent of “best friend porn” on TikTok has me reaching out to the people I love, telling them how much I miss them, and maybe even plotting a sleepover or two for the future. 

Follow Katie Way on Twitter.