When A Boomer Hits The Wall in 11 Seconds…

Collecting data on why the 2026 wedding season is so very slow, I found a mess of articles on couples rethinikng their plans, staying close to home and DIYing the heck out of the event by trying their hand at Pinterest inspiration boards. Why? Consensus from major wedding sites, publications and news outlets via poll data is this: Trump administration tariffs and government shutdowns and staff reductions plus fear of the stock market fluctuations cemented paranoia over what their money could buy when the wedding happens. Weddings book a year or more in advance so summer 2026 couples locked down their venues by late spring of 2025. 

Fun fact if it’s been a minute since you were around wedding planning; couples must obtain their marriage license no SOONER than 30 days prior to the wedding. Imagine a destination venue at the top of a beautiful peninsula where guests must secure lodging many months prior to beat the summer tourists to the limited lodging choices. And the deposits are non-refundable. And you may be calling your guests two weeks from the wedding date to say it’s cancelled because the few people left to process the marriage license say they can’t guarantee delivery of said license in time. 

If it was me, I would go ahead and do all the fun party stuff and then go back to my local courthouse and handle the civil stuff after the fact. But that’s not how couples think. To avoid the possible headaches and the loss of all their deposit monies for venue, caterer, photographer, cake baker, florist etc., they just decided to not book the destination dream venue at all. Fear of the wine, flower and other import tariffs making their event way more expensive than it would have been a year earlier had them cutting their plans in half and doing it hyper local to their homes. 

How to advertise in this new era- I’m already on Instagram and Pinterest and even here on Facebook, though the Facebook business feed is decidedly more the 60 and over crowd who might see us and share with their kids or grandkids. 

So where do you go to grab the attention of younger couples looking for their dream location for this year, now that they’ve exhausted themselves trying to make due with much less than they dreamed for their 2026 wedding? 

Answer: Tik Tok. It’s where all of my industry is currently being led to place our advertisements in front of our target demographic. So, off I went to Tik Tok land. Me. A 71 year old, fairly tech savvy broad braving the Internet passageway that is currently spewing streams of videos that hypnotize viewers for hours at a time. 

Got my account. Opened the hellmouth portal and stepped in. 11 seconds. That’s how long I lasted swiping up on post after post of the most random river of debris I’ve waded into outside of my fictional sojourns into my beloved sci-fi stories. Here’s what I escaped the portal with… 

Tik Tok is a chaotic vomitorium of fever dream fears and wishes; imagined beauty and horror and every random musing of attention seeking arrested adolescents. It is 10% joy and wonder and 90% post apocalyptic cyber punk dominance displays of desperate individuals who fear they will perish without feeding daily on the anonymous parasocial relationship ocean that would not even blink its eye if they disappeared altogether. It’s like walking into an Altered Carbon scene and trying to discern which is the door least likely to get you killed right after you open it. 

The dregs of waking dreams and the acrid scent of desperation clings to every post like the flop sweat brow of the 7 am Vegas gambler trying to win back the home they gambled away last night. 

I am too old for this shit. Boomer down. The Universe knows this and that’s why I’m gearing up to retire. Right now. Send help. And chocolate. Maybe a puppy too. 

And for the love of Thor, can we get that asshole and everyone tied to him out of the White House and far, far away from anyplace they can do further damage to this once great nation? An island perhaps? I hear there’s one available for cheap…