Tiktok: “I’m so hungry that I would eat … just that person!” The trend that awakens the ghosts of the past

Tiktok is giving us a new trend that makes you laugh a lot but also makes you think. It comes from a simple and ironic but potentially explosive expression: “I’m so hungry that I would eat …” So far, all in the norm, until the phrase closes not with the name of a delicious snack but with that of a person who panics the interlocutor: An ex forgotten (perhaps), an old crush, a colleague who disappeared from the radars, the friend with whom we would have imagined to age before separating ourselves to a crossroads, a bench partner. In short, someone that the victim of the joke would never expect to hear by surprise.

Like this daughter who brings about the mother’s ex -boyfriend in front of her current partner, her reaction is a whole program.

Or this other mother who chuckles and blushes when her daughter quotes her high school coke, with her husband sitting next to her, visibly confused.

Even men are not safe or immune to certain ghosts of the past. Just do some scrolling to see them pale, one after the other, when that girl are mentioned with whom they went to the dance or that fraternal friend with whom they shared unforgettable moments before she disappeared in the hyperspace.

The success of the trend lies all in the surprise effect and in activating that sentimental memory that we all have, even if we do not admit it. The videos collect millions of views because they tell us an uncomfortable truth: not all doors are really locked within us, sometimes they are just ajar. We all have at least one name that, if re -emerged from nowhere, would make us falter.

So here is that the trend becomes a small domestic psychodrama. Between laughter and embarrassments, an annoying question is insinuated in the comments: “What if one day it touched me? If he jumped out the name of that person I thought I had digested and who instead returns to torment myself as if it were a pesantuccia dish? “

Thus was born a trend in the trend: users who imagine the future reaction (far from calm) who could have if a nephew, a son, partner or a new friend would bring up that unnameable person of the past between 10-20 years.

Because it’s not just nostalgia. It is the fear of still being vulnerable. Of never really closed certain accounts. To discover that, after years, a name can still have a certain effect.

In short, Tiktok’s trend amuses but stings and the celebrities are not safe. Penn Badgley, interpreter of the ruthless stalker Joe Goldberg of Youuhe was surprised when one of his colleague said to him: “I am so hungry that I would eat …” and then quote name and surname of his old childhood friend. What effect does, dear Joe? To be the one in the sights of the investigations on one’s private life this time?

And in your life? Who is the unnameable you fear can be used against you in this joke?