Look, I get it, this is the age of social media; we’re at a point in time where we feel so unprecedentedly disconnected from ourselves, that we feel the need to act out on camera in order to get a taste of whatever faux relevancy the moment may bring us. It’s easier to mold yourself into a product than to well and truly inhabit a space as a human being with a personality.
It is precisely these circumstances that might lead someone to carve out a slot in their very important schedule to livestream the writing of names on their sister’s car, urging the chat to like and subscribe so that their name can go on it.
But at the end of the day, there’s one aspect about the real world that the online world can never truly match up with; consequences.
TikTok‘s @emma16newman was the sister in question for this aforementioned stunt. Here we have the culprit mirthlessly scrubbing the car down, presumably as punishment for being such a petulant internet lemming rather than a person who thinks twice about vandalizing and damaging a car belonging to his sister. As for what he achieved with this act, the below video about sums it up.
Emma has hopefully gotten a new wrap since then, and a more recent update suggests that her brother may or may not have ended up paying for it. Perhaps it’s easy to scoff at everyone involved for seemingly being far too rich to have any true problems, but there are principles at play here. According to Scientific American, the more wealthy someone is, the less likely they are to feel compassion or empathy for others, which might explain why her brother didn’t seem to feel any remorse during or after the act. Emma’s just glad that he didn’t draw on her other Camaro. Go figure.
So at the end of the day, the whole ordeal is just an enormous nothing-burger; the brother did something stupid and got nothing out of it but some experience as a manual car washer, Emma was irritated that he vandalized and damaged something that she valued sentimentally, but is ultimately fine at the end of the day because she has too many Camaros to care. Meanwhile, the SCOTUS just pulled what could be an unthinkably cataclysmic trigger, democracy is falling apart (insofar as it was ever in place), and it seems we need more and more hands to count the number of humanitarian crises with every passing day.