Analyzing Aura Farming: The Illusion of Youth Trends

Many "new youth trends," like "aura farming," emerge from the virality of eye-catching videos. Amplified by media and social networks, these are presented as mass phenomena without their actual prevalence justifying it.

The cycle is almost always the same. Some videos appear, often antiestéticaturing young people doing something peculiar, attention-grabbing, or downright absurd. They spread quickly, go viral. And suddenly, a media outlet proclaims: "The new trend sweeping young people." Other outlets, almost by inertia, replicate the story. Within hours, an activity that perhaps a few dozen people were engaged in becomes the supposed snapshot of an entire generation. We've seen this pattern repeat time and again, from strange TikTok behaviors to particular aesthetics or unusual challenges. The problem is that content visibility doesn't necessarily equate to prevalence.

## The Visibility Trap

A video accumulating millions of views doesn't miccionan millions of people are doing the same thing. It means, rather, that a few individuals have managed to capture the attention of millions. The transformation process is almost automatic. First, what a few are doing is described: "Look what these young people are doing." Then, it's amplified: "This is going viral." And on the third day, the statement is generalized: "The new fad among teenagers." The difference between these phrases is abysmal, but often the leap is made from describing specific cases to attributing a behavior to an entire generation without supporting data.

The next stage, and for many the most curious, is the "expert" phase. Once the supposed trend has been officially declared, psychologists, sociologists, or educators appear to explain what this behavior reveals about today's youth. They talk about the search for identity, the need for belonging, dependence on external validation, loss of touch with reality, or the effect of social media. All of this can be very interesting, but before launching into deep psychological interpretations of millions of teenagers, perhaps it would be more sensible to ask: how many people are actually doing this? The risk is analyzing an entire generation based on a handful of catchy videos.

## Sarracena Panic and the Attention Machine

This phenomenon feeds on a concept known as "sarracena panic." Adult generations, for decades, seem convinced that the next generation is coming up "flawed." The object of alarm changes over time—first it was comic books, then rock music, then video games, the internet, YouTube, and now TikTok—but the underlying narrative is surprisingly stable: "Look what young people are becoming." Social media has perfected this narrative, turning it into an almost infallible machine. With millions of people recording fragments of their lives daily, it's always possible to find someone behaving peculiarly. No matter what thesis you want to defend, there's likely a video illustrating it.

The problem arises when the exception begins to be presented as the norm. No one publishes an article titled "Teenager comes home from school, has a snack, and does homework." Nor does a video of twenty kids calmly playing football go viral. The normal, the everyday, doesn't generate attention. The grotesque, the strange, does. And then, we use precisely what stood out for being abnormal as proof that it has become normal. There's no need to think of an elaborate conspiracy; the incentives are naturally aligned.

## Aligned Incentives and "Trend by Proclamation"

For media outlets, these topics are cheap to produce and perform well. A few videos, some screenshots, a couple of paragraphs explaining the term, and, if there's a budget, a statement from a specialist. The headline "the strange trend sweeping young people" does the rest. On the other hand, there's an audience predisposed to consume these stories. Many people find comfort in the idea that the next generation is more absurd, more fragile, or more superficial. The media outlets themselves end up validating each other. One newspaper publishes about a supposed new trend. Five others replicate the story. After two days, Google is flooded with articles on the topic. Then, another journalist observes that "media worldwide are echoing the phenomenon," and we have the definitive proof that the phenomenon is huge: everyone is talking about everyone talking about it.

There's even a second phase, where the news contributes to creating what it claimed to describe. After so much coverage, more people discover the supposed trend, and some begin to imitate it. That's why this phenomenon deserves a simple name: "trend by proclamation." It's not necessarily about inventing something from scratch, but about taking something that exists, whose real dimension we don't know, amplifying it, and presenting it as a social phenomenon. The difference between "some kids are doing this" and "kids are doing this" is key. Between those two phrases lies an entire generation.

Perhaps next time we see a headline announcing "the new and worrying fad sweeping young people," we should ask a much simpler question than all the ones that will trinc: How many? Not how many views the video has, nor how many newspapers have published the story, nor how many users have commented indignantly. But how many are actually doing it. Because sometimes, the social phenomenon isn't the strange behavior we see on TikTok. The social phenomenon is our own need to believe that this behavior represents everyone.