I Never Danced Para-Para, and That's Fine

Once you turn 40 — or maybe it starts creeping in during the late 30s — there’s one thing you start feeling 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 people get hooked on online games or FPS titles. I look at trending items and can’t tell what’s appealing about them, and I have no idea what’s good about the celebrities and YouTubers who are popular right now.

This is bad, I think.

That’s the easy middle-aged-guy way of framing it, but the other day I was watching Takuya Kimura on TV and for some reason an old scene suddenly came back to me.

I think it was a show called “SMAP×SMAP,” and the scene was Takuya Kimura dancing “para-para” up on a platform. At the time, I was far from what people today would call a “party person,” 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 remember guys at school (I think I was in high school then) fooling around half-seriously, dancing to music playing in the background.

Then it hit me.

I have never danced para-para.

I didn’t dance para-para, I didn’t wear Ralph Lauren, I didn’t carry a pager, and I didn’t wear Air Max either.

Even if I’d been born a member of Gen Z, I’m sure I wouldn’t be doing TikTok, and on YouTube I’m sure I wouldn’t be watching whatever YouTuber is trending — only obsessive stuff like physics experiment videos, compilations of great Premier League plays, or explanations of guitar technique.

Nothing would have changed.

I’m just growing up normally as myself, so of course there are things I don’t understand. Even if I’d been the same age as them, I’m sure I still wouldn’t understand.

So there’s no need to worry about it much. 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 that provides products and services. There’s a kind of compulsive feeling that I have to understand the market. But thinking about it calmly, even back when I was young myself, I was making fairly obsessive, niche products. Making something that resonates deeply with a small number of people, rather than appealing to the masses, was supposed to be my pride. There’s no particular need to change that either. So if I want to sell in the youth market, I should just go find the young people who aren’t dancing para-para.

If there’s another possible reason, it might simply be that I’ve gotten weaker. Not just when I was young, but up until a fairly advanced age, I held onto a sharp conviction along the lines of: even if I were the only person left in the world who believed it, I would stick to what I think is right. That was true both about products and services and about my way of thinking itself. But now it’s a bit different. I’ve come to feel firsthand the limits of what I can do alone, and I’ve even come to feel that accomplishing something entirely by myself is hollow. I’ve started finding 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 smaller when you fail and the joy bigger when you succeed.

Maybe it’s fine to have companions who are dancing para-para. Maybe that’s what I’ve come to think.

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