I never once danced para para in my life

When you hit your 40s — or maybe it starts creeping in during your late 30s — there’s one thing you feel for certain.

You have no idea what young people are thinking.

Millennials, Gen Z. I have no idea what’s fun about TikTok, and I have no idea why anyone gets hooked on online games or FPS titles. I look at trending items and can’t see the appeal, and I have no idea what’s good about the celebrities or YouTubers everyone’s into.

This is bad.

That’s the simple old-man line of thinking, but the other day I watched Kimura Takuya on TV and for some reason a memory of an old scene suddenly came back to me.

I think it was a show called “SMAP×SMAP,” and the scene was Kimura Takuya dancing para para up on a platform. At the time, I was about as far from what people now call a “party person” as you could get, and that was the first time I’d ever seen para para. After that, the whole country went through an unprecedented para para boom. I have a vague memory of guys at school (I think I was in high school then) fooling around, dancing to music playing in the background.

Then it hit me.

I have never danced para para.

I never danced para para, I never wore Ralph Lauren, I never had a pager, and I never wore Air Max.

Even if I had been born as a member of Gen Z, I’m sure I still wouldn’t be on TikTok, and on YouTube I wouldn’t be watching the trending YouTubers — I’d probably just be watching niche stuff like physics experiment videos, Premier League highlight reels, or guitar technique breakdowns.

Nothing would change.

I’m just growing up steadily as myself, so of course there are things I don’t understand — that’s only natural. Even if I were the same age as them, I’m sure I still wouldn’t get it.

So there’s no need to worry about it too much. (Because that’s just how I’ve always been.)

So why does it bother me at all?

One reason is that I’m now on the side of “providing products and services.” In other words, I feel a semi-obsessive need to understand the market. But thinking about it calmly, even back when I was still young myself, I was making pretty niche products. My pride was in making something that wasn’t a hit with the masses but that landed properly with a small number of people. There’s no particular need to change that either. So if I want to sell into the youth market, all I need to do is find the young people who aren’t dancing para para.

If there’s another possible reason, maybe I’ve simply gotten weaker. Not just in my youth, but until fairly late in life, I held onto a fairly sharp-edged conviction: even if I end up the only one left in the world who believes it, I’ll stick to what I think is right. That was true for products and services, and it was true for my way of thinking itself. But now it’s a bit different. I’ve come to feel the limits of what I can do alone, and I’ve even started to feel that accomplishing something entirely by myself is hollow. I’m starting to find joy not just in bringing out my own performance, but in bringing out other people’s performance too. Having companions around, as much as possible, makes the shock of failure smaller and the joy of success bigger.

Maybe it would be nice to have companions dancing para para too. That might be what I actually think.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2022/06/905/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.