Hi Amy, sorry to interrupt but I opened TikTok to watch endless variations on the dance from Wednesday, and instead there was all this stuff about a garage party in Fitzroy? What happened? OK, so a bunch of lads decided to have a garage/laneway party in inner Melbourne about three days ago. We know this because it is Anno Domini 2022, so some of the attendees uploaded montages to TikTok. Seemed like a good, if cringe time. Prayer hands, vintage outfits, head shaves, the boys doing their little dancey-dances for each other (and the ubiquitous cameras). One of the first uploads by Andrew Davie officially named the gathering ‘Fitzroy garage sesh’ with the caption “the vibes are here’ #Melbourne”. It has had 2.8m views. For reasons known only to TikTok, that clip and subsequent videos of the same sesh, offering differing angles, were pushed mercilessly on the FYP (For You page). Meaning if you have the clock app, you would have seen the boys, their moustaches, air punches and their particular brand of self-conscious self-confidence everywhere. Of course, because we are all bored and there is still some time until the Australia Day culture war gets whirring, the sesh very quickly became something everyone else on TikTok needed to have an opinion on. And what was that opinion? That it was cringe. And then came the defences. And of course there were the instant parodies. So, was it cringe? I mean, isn’t everything in your early 20s a bit cringe? One person’s cool is always another’s cringe, but the issue here seems to be a bunch of miserly millennials getting mad we aren’t the ones holding garage seshes any more (our backs hurt, it’s a bit hot out and no one knows for sure if the brews are gluten-free). Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Sure, if this party was a person, it would ask if you knew Post Malone discovered Ozzy Osbourne, but I once asked my mum if she knew who John Lennon was so … There are people reacting to it from, like, Canada. Why do they care? Or are we all literally or metaphorically snowed in and desperate for content? It’s been a while since we’ve had a social media tizz to keep us occupied over the Christmas break – the last few years have been spent worrying about staying alive. That so many people have had the social energy to care about a bunch of blokes having a harmless, moderately lame party speaks to how far we’ve come. There may not be anyone willing to claim that 2023 is going to be their year, but it’s a tentative sign of hope for the country at large that we are consumed with such pettiness. Surely there’s more to it though. Is there any depth to the pettiness? Well there is a whole other discourse about how the Fitzroy garage sesh was an unthinking and selfish event celebrating the gentrification of a working-class area. Never mind that the median house price in Fitzroy is about $1.5m, or that it will cost you about the same as 12 cases of Stomping Ground craft beer a week to rent there these days. Fitzroy was once working class, and young people who enjoy things like garage seshes are apparently the reason it’s no longer so. Really? That’s the discourse. Forget decades of neoliberalist policies pursued by both major political parties which have left us with an ever greater divide between the haves and the have-nots; the complete absence of political will to do anything about the housing market (because 11 million Australians own homes and no politician wants to lose their votes by doing something which may lower the value of said property); the last 10 years of record low wage growth; the loss of major industries like car manufacturing; the crushing of unions and the elevation of landlords as a protected species. No, it’s the children who are wrong. Why are we still talking about this, three days later? Again, I have to blame millennials for this. It took some time, as it always does, to migrate over to Instagram. But once it hit those reels it got a second wind, as everyone over the age of 25 who isn’t terminally online tried to work out why their feeds were full of memes about people partying in garages. Think of it as the meme equivalent of having a little vom and coming back to the party stronger than ever. Have we heard from the party people themselves? Are they chastened? Or emboldened? So far the lads have only seemed to respond to commenters on their videos. As it should be.