A Guide to Kids Culture for Out-of-Touch Adults: What Is Fumbusching?
If you’re an adult who’s confused by the non-adults among us, I hope this weeklong trip down the rabbit hole of Gen Z and Gen Alpha culture brings you one step closer to enlightenment. Let me tell you why man-on-man phone calls are so popular and funny right now, what the word “fambush” means, and why you’re seeing so many disturbing videos of Will Smith eating spaghetti.
Calling a friend and saying “good night” is, in some ways, a useful and funny joke.
A couple of weeks ago, TikToker Miranda Faye posted this video of her boyfriend calling his friends to say goodnight. (I love a guy who immediately responds with, “What’s up, bitch?” That’s it, man.)
Overall, it’s a touching video that really says something about how men treat each other. It’s also hilarious, and exactly what started the trend. Guys all over the world soon started calling their friends for no reason other than to say “goodnight” and/or “sweet dreams,” leading to videos like these:
I love the guy who responds with “What are you talking about?” and how all his friends seem ready to call the police; that’s how unusual it is for men to call each other before bed to say “goodnight.”
Here is my favorite example:
The guy trying to hold back his laughter, coupled with his friends’ reactions, is gold . If you want to enjoy the endless stream of these videos, spend some time hashtag #goodnight .
Many TikTok commenters attribute this to an “epidemic of male loneliness,” or see friends calling friends as something men are supposed to do. But I think that’s stretching the truth too far. For the most part, the friends in these videos immediately ask the callers “Are you okay?” with genuine concern — I don’t see much male loneliness there. And there’s something admirable about this trait of not talking to friends about personal things unless it’s really important. The real sufferers of male loneliness are the many guys who don’t have friends they can gently poke fun at in videos.
What is fumbusching?
Since I’m covering useful trends this week, let’s talk about fambush. The word combines “family” and “ambush,” and refers to young people checking their parents’ locations on location-sharing apps to get free food — see your mom at Chipotle, you’ll probably ask for a burrito. Starbucks, too:
According to a representative for the family location-sharing app Life360 , teens who use the app are more likely to check on what their parents are doing than parents are to check on their kids. On the surface, this seems helpful and reassuring, but if I were to go back to my youth (long before cell phones), I would probably use the app to check on where my parents were so I wouldn’t get caught doing what I was doing.
Cher and Future’s Forgotten Collaboration Is Sickening the Nation
Sometimes Gens Z and A dig up a delightful piece of pop culture from the past to highlight how great it is. But that’s not the case with Cher and Future’s cover of Sly’s “Everyday People.” Nine years ago, these two very different artists collaborated with producer Zatoven on a Gap-sponsored ad that featured hilariously awkward chemistry, a complete lack of effort from everyone involved, and a downright cynical vibe. It’s so awful that it quickly becomes addictive. The more you watch it, the more uncomfortable details you notice, and soon you’re down a rabbit hole of horror you can’t escape.
In any case, the video didn’t make much of a splash when it was made, and has been quietly dormant on YouTube for nearly a decade. But a few weeks ago, kids noticed it . And they started spreading it around.
“I love how future sings in lowercase and she’s just screaming in his face,” wrote TikToker Maliha Zahid . “Why does future sound dehydrated 😭?” asked @jae._m1ll1y . “He looks like he’s listening to his grandma tell a story,” wrote @vvs.lizvrd . Ouch.
The song captured the imagination of young people so much that they began reproducing it in videos like this one:
and this:
Even Zaytoven’s son began to joke about this:
What does that mean? Nothing, really, but it reminds me of the showbiz saying, “Behind every bad movie there’s a good mortgage.”
The ‘Clothes I Wore in High School’ Trend Will Make You Feel Even More Ancient
There comes a time in people’s lives, usually around age 30, when they stop noticing changes in fashion. Thoughts like “I have to work all the time” and “ Is that a mole cancerous?” fill the brain. So for anyone who’s ever been told by a Gap clerk (Cher and Future’s favorite store!) to “try looser clothes,” the “ Outfits I Wore in High School ” TikTok trend will make you feel as old as the Crypt Keeper. Or even Cher.
In these videos, twentysomethings reveal their younger, more deluded selves by posting photos of outfits that I (and probably you) find indistinguishable from what’s being worn today. It’s partly a symptom of the nostalgia cycle collapsing in on itself — kids reminiscing about the “good old days” of 2017 — and partly the first blush of generational panic: “Wait… am I getting old, too?”
It’s all very cute until you realize the joke is on you. Your fashion faux pas aren’t nostalgic, they’re prehistoric — not even worthy of parody. You’re old and irrelevant. Which is kind of comforting.
Viral Video of the Week: Will Smith Eats Spaghetti, Replay
Back in 2023, Reddit user u/chaindrop created an AI-powered video using Stable Diffusion of Will Smith eating spaghetti. It went viral because it was a grotesque, surreal nightmare that terrified everyone who saw it. A year later, Will Smith himself posted a real video of Will Smith eating spaghetti . A few weeks ago, Google released Veo 3, an AI-powered video generation tool that creates realistic clips with dialogue and sound. So, of course, it was used to create a video of Will Smith eating pasta. Look how far AI has come:
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Visually, it’s not perfect — there are still traces of the unnatural shine and rubberiness of AI video — but it’s close. The audio, however, needs some work. I’ve heard of pasta being al dente , but Will Smith’s AI spaghetti is crunchy .
It sounds absurd that “Will Smith eats spaghetti” is a baseline test for AI video generation, but it’s actually a worthy challenge for AI: people eat pasta, too, which is something that’s hard for AI to “generalize” about. I also can’t deny that it’s technically amazing, but I’m not looking forward to the “we can’t tell the real from the fake” future that’s probably coming in about six weeks.