The Out-of-Touch Adults' Guide to Kid Culture: Bigfoot Vlogs

You'd better be nice to me while I tell you about youth culture this week.

Credit: Bigfoot Unleashed, X & Nae, unknownpixelz - TikTok

A weekly deep dive into the current trends, slang, and viral videos of youth culture in terms that even the squarest can understand.

If there's a single theme to youth these days, it's the lack of a theme. It's fractional out here, cousin, so this week's column is all over the place. But maybe the mix makes an intuitive kind of sense in 2025? So let's work together to connect 16 million people simultaneously tending virtual gardens, AI creating fake Bigfoot vlogs, Gen Z reinventing relationship dynamics through memes, and a 62-year-old B-side becoming the soundtrack to millions of TikToks.

What is "Grow a Garden" in Roblox?

The Roblox game "Grow a Garden" recently broke the record for most concurrent users in a video game when over 16 million players logged on on June 14, up from five million concurrent players on May 17. For perspective, that's more people playing a game at one time than there are residents of Australia, a continent.

The colorful, free-to-play farming game requires little skill, and the vibe is mellow, as you'd probably expect from a game about growing plants. Here's how it works: Players plant seeds. The seeds grow, even while users are offline. Eventually, you can harvest your crops, buy different/better seeds, etc. Once you get the hang of it, you can check in periodically instead of spending all day online, making it an extremely casual game. But there are timed releases of seeds and pets that require anyone who wants it to be online to buy it, and being friends with others will award you bonuses. So it combines Minecraft’s player-driven vibe (every garden is different), a FOMO element (rare drops and timed releases), and real incentive to be social. Maybe the genius of the game is that it's fun to be online to work on your garden, but there's no penalty for being offline. It's also simple enough that anyone can play it.

As AI continues its relentless, joyless takeover of everything, I avoid hopelessness by clinging to the idea that young people will use the technology in some unimaginable, innovative way that doesn't destroy the human spirit. Then we can have a future that's at least not totally dystopian. I'm not sure these two current AI trends fit the bill, however. The first is AI ASMR. AI, apparently, is pretty good at making this kind of content—particularly because it can easily create videos that are impossible in real life, like spreading diamonds on toast:

slicing fruit made of glass:

or eating lava:

I have no idea if these videos do whatever ASMR videos are supposed to do, but there's a growing collection of them on TikTok under the #AiSMR tag to enjoy if that's your thing.

The second AI-created meme of the week is more traditional: using AI to create realistic looking vlogs from a Yeti. If it works for Jesus, it ought to work for Bigfoot too, right? Kids are putting Sasquatch in all kinds of ridiculous scenarios, like accidentally dosing himself on weed-laced brownies:

interrupting backwoods KKK meetings:

And doing more drugs:

Are these videos funny? Not to me, but I'm not the target audience. Judging by the millions of views some of them have, someone must be amused. Did this provide any evidence that AI will be used for something awesome? No. But I remain hopeful.

Two relationship memes that explain Gen Z relationships

Young people have always been hyper-focused on relationships—hormones and all that—but Gen Z is doing it differently, and these two viral meme formats reveal something about how they're approaching gender dynamics by turning them on their head.

"Bark like you want it" features couples making videos to Sir Mix-A-Lot's track of the same name. The format is a simple but subversive role-reversal with a '90s beat: a guy lip syncs "And just when I thought I could palm it," his girlfriend responds with "You better drop to your knees and bark like you want it," and then we see the man turning in a circle like a dog. It's easier to see than explain, so check it out:

"You better say nice things" videos take a different approach to challenging masculine stereotypes. These feature what Tim Marcin at our partner site Mashable describes as "strong women protecting the pure, soft-spoken men in their lives as they show off their interests." The format involves women delivering "faux-menacing threats" to the audience before their boyfriend nerds out about his quiet hobby, whether it's houseplants, cooking, or crafting. The women are essentially saying "don't you dare mock my sensitive boyfriend for caring about something."

Both memes feel like responses to the rising tide of toxic masculinity online and off. They celebrate men who are comfortable being vulnerable and playful in their relationships. The dudes in these videos have partners who seem to adore them, which is the most effective counter-argument to manosphere rhetoric you could ask for. It's as if Gen Z is saying: Actually, the dudes getting girlfriends are the ones secure enough to bark like dogs on TikTok, not the ones posting about being "alpha males" all day.

Viral song of the week: Connie Francis?

"Pretty Little Baby" by Connie Francis was released in 1962 as the B-side to "I'm Gonna Be Warm This Winter," the last single from Connie Francis Sings Second Hand Love & Other Hits, an album that peaked at number 111 on the Billboard Top LPs chart. Francis herself (she's still alive at 87) said she didn't remember recording the song. In other words, this was an obscure tune, but TikTok fell in love with it recently, and over 1.4 million videos (and growing rapidly) have been posted using Francis' song, resulting in more than 10 billion cumulative streams, propelling "Pretty Little Baby" to the #1 on TikTok's Viral 50 and Top 50 charts, the top of the charts of every other video platform and music service, making a song even its own singer forgot into a Gen Z anthem

So what is it about this track that the kids like? I think it's a combination of being a great little pop song, Francis' arrestingly over enunciated lyrical delivery, the irony-free vibe that borders on creepy, and the fact that it goes with any kind of video. It will works equally well with actual babies:

ceramic glazing:

and underwater roller coasters: