What’s it like to be young, with your whole life ahead of you? According to a recent trend on TikTok called auramaxxing, consciousness is basically an endless task of scoring yourself and others according to every little thing you do. Every day is about judging and scoring, in a 24-7 attempt to grow “aura points,” a made-up, fluid metric range that can be thought of as The Coolest Person in the World at one end of the spectrum and a shunned, unloved outsider at the other.
When I first learned of this trend (a play on another worrying TikTok trend, looksmaxxing), I first thought, “Oh, it’s just an online expression of time-honored self-obsession (one of the developmental stages of the teen brain)," so nothing to see here. But as I’ve seen the concept ladder up all the way to the presidential campaign, I’m wondering if there’s not something full-on creepy about this whole way of thinking—especially for teens.
Auramaxxing clips are deceptively breezy, with arbitrarily assigned numerical losses and gains. In one TikTok, someone trips so they lose 1,000 aura points. In a second clip, a guy fails to lift a heavy barbell: -5,000 points. In a third, a person walks to the subway with their backpack flapping open, that’s -10,000 points. What’s most upsetting to me is this: I'm a grown-ass woman (and parent to a teen) who cringed through these exact occurrences in my life, before the hive mind had created an arbitrary scoring system that would amplify my embarrassment. So I can only imagine how mortifying this gameified daily existence is now, to today's stressed-out, sensitive teens. I'm fearful that auramaxxing is only going to make young people more self-conscious and inhibited rather than community-focused and outgoing. I don’t want the digital realm to discourage Gen Z from exploring their physical world, lest they trip, drop the barbell or carry an open backpack.
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I don’t want the digital realm to discourage Gen Z from exploring their physical world, lest they trip, drop the barbell or carry an open backpack.