Why are people gathering for the weirdest things?
There is something sort of comforting about knowing that, in the right circumstances, hundredsof people will abandon whatever they’re doing to join others for the most random reasons. Due to our online world, people have never been more connected, yet we find ourselves gathering in crowds for simple, basic events that have a viral impact online.
Just a few weeks ago in Edinburgh, for the second year in a row hundreds of people gathered to watch a man fold a fitted bedsheet. It wasn’t anything exciting. It was simply one man and a fitted bedsheet. Comedian Dan Boerman put flyers around the city that read “hey come watch me fold a fitted bedsheet up the top of Calton Hill on the grass.” He advertised it exactly as it was; he didn’t make it sound exciting, yet it attracted a crowd of hundreds. It sounds ridiculous… because it is. However, it also shows a lot about the way that we live now. If you give people a reason to gather, no matter how simple or strange it may seem, they will show up.
I think the first time I noticed the rise in these simple community events, specifically within Gen Z, was when the celebrity lookalike contests went viral on TikTok. In 2024, a crowd of thousands gathered in Washington Square Park in New York City for a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest. People loved the concept so much, and it gained so much online attention that Timothée Chalamet himself showed up to the event. However, even two years later this lookalike trend is still going, with the most recent event to go viral being the Belmont Cameli lookalike contest, the star of the Amazon Prime show Off Campus, that went viral online for his costarAntonio Cipriano showing up to the event and entering the competition.
People might claim that these events are popular because the premise is surrounding a celebrity, but when you look at the broader picture, the celebrity aspect feels secondary. The real appeal seems to be the opportunity to just show up and experience it. There is no deeper purpose– these are not professionally planned events with a guaranteed outcome; people just want to be there because they know that it is something they get to share with other people. You just turn up, stand alongside hundreds of strangers, and collectively participate in something that, on paper, is completely ridiculous.
And perhaps that is why we like it.
In a world where so much of our social lives take place through a screen, it is refreshing to see people want to be someplace simply because other people are there too. The internet may have made us more connected than we ever have been, but it also gives us endless opportunities to experience everything alone. We can watch concerts from our bedrooms, order food without speaking to anyone, and maintain friendships without ever phyisically seeing each other. Yet, you show people a TikTok sharing that a bunch of guys are meeting in a park to see who looks the most like Timothée Chalamet, and suddenly we’re desperate to leave the house.
The event itself doesn’t really matter. The random man folding a fitted sheet, a lookalike contest, a niche pop-up or a random challenge are just the excuses for people to gather. What we reallyshow up for is the feeling of being part of something, however small or stupid that might be.
I guess that is what makes the phrase “the people yearn for community” so accurate. It might be a phrase that’s posted ironically underneath videos of crowds gathering for absurd reasons. However, underneath the joke is something sincere. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. At the root of it, people really do just want to be around other people.
