Today is Day 5 of Jake Hutcheson’s challenge to himself to become more articulate. Earlier this week he posted a video saying he needed more words. So he went to Barnes and Noble with his dad and bought a book. “30 days to a more powerful vocabulary”. He’s taking us on this journey with him. He is not the first nor the last person to go to Tik Tok and use it as a way to be accountable but to me he is the most interesting.
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Jake Hutcheson began his video the way few Tik Tok journeys begin. He had a want. The first thing you learn in screenwriting is that a character’s want drives the story. One of the first things we should learn about a character is their want, which is why I’m disinterested in most Tik Tok journeys. Disney musicals open their movies with the most flat out version of this inner desire. The I wish song. Jake Hutchinson’s I wish song was a Tik Tok video about his desire for more words. He gives us all the exposition we need to follow him on his hero’s journey.
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Of course on TikTok, visual storytelling is important. Often the only exposition we receive about a character is what they visually present to us. Jake gives us a location tag, a white shirt, and a hat. He’s from Orlando Florida, he’s, for all intents and purposes, a typical twenty something, and he wants more words. He tells us his inspiration for more words, a Tyler the Creator interview where he talked about being able to express himself better than the people around him. Jake admires him for that and aspires to be that.
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With almost brilliantly crafted exposition, Jake has begun his journey. For the next thirty days we will follow him as he tries to become more articulate or as he so charmingly states “gets more words.” I find his desire to learn endearing and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t curious about how to expand one’s vocabulary at this point in my life. Of course, in the hero’s journey the desire to learn more words would be metaphorical but on TikTok, this journey is very literal and the audience will be learning with Jake, more so than watching his narrative journey. We may see his dark night of the soul but we don’t know when it’s coming. The fun and games of this journey may be unintelligible from the death and rebirth. However the next thirty days pass, he is our hero and this is his journey.
There are a lot of people who take us on their journeys. Weight Loss, cooking, exercise, various other ways of self betterment. Some are planned to get views and some are planned for accountability. Others do challenges for something to do. We love to follow people on their journeys. As much as we love the never ending random world of tiktok, what keeps us coming back, aside from the dopamine addiction that Tik Tok feeds, is the stories. We love the rise and fall of certain creators. The purposeful journey’s some take us on and the accidental ones people don’t know they’re revealing. It takes all kinds and this most recent iteration is my favorite. Every so often a creator with a step by step plan or daily check in will arise and after a few days people will say it’s the only thing keeping them going. It’s like no bones day guy; or the DnD sandwich guy; or the eel guy.
Each account that keeps people engaged with a daily check in has a kind of built in audience. People like having a reason to come back. They like their familiar characters and they help fill out the ongoing soap opera that is Tik Tok. As much as I love what these people contribute to the Tik Tok ecosystem, they personally are not for me. Until now. I check in daily with Josh. I want to see if he is keeping up with his progress. I want to learn what he is learning. I had no desire to find someone who checks in daily to keep me going because none of it appealed to me. I hate the No Bones Pug. All of DnD sandwich guy sandwiches look gross and I have no interest in eels. Jake though appeals to my lifelong love of learning, in a way the others have not.
As a semi-recent college graduate who is struggling to find my path in life, I have been left with a feeling of “is this it?” “am I done learning in this life?” “Do I know everything I am supposed to know and anything I didn’t learn is beyond my knowledge?” It's not a feeling of knowing everything but a feeling of knowing nothing and feeling knowledge is closed to me. I worry that I will never read Russian literature because no one made me read it. Or that I can never exceed beyond the tools I have been given. Or that I am unhireable because I have a BFA in screenwriting. So few on Tik Tok have put forth a schedule for learning like Jake Hutcheson. He saw a failing in his life and sought to correct it. He is learning and as he learns, we learn with him.
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He is the perfect Tik Tok teacher. He does not have the grating millennial nerd way of explaining things. Mostly because he’s not a know it all telling us we’re wrong but someone trying his best to convey information he himself just learned. He has the Gen Z naturalism and the white boy confidence that always translates on camera. He may not have a newscaster's voice or diction but his accent gives him character. The humility of admitting he doesn’t know something and wants to learn. I am willing to follow his journey until the very end and hopefully my vocabulary gets better just as his does.
I don’t have TikTok, but I’m rooting for this kid. Good on him for wanting to improve his vocabulary.
P.S. It’s not too late to take a Russian Lit class! I really enjoyed taking mine. “We” by Zamyatin is good, as is Solzhenitsyn‘s (yes I copy/pasted that) “Gulag Archipelago.”
This is a stirring one