I think I speak for everybody when I say that hustle culture is getting out of hand. It’s one thing to take pride in your personal accomplishments and growth and what you put out into the world, but when your worthlessness quotient begins to expand with every single unproductive second you indulge in, it might be time to reevaluate.
Consider an airport layover. Is it well and truly the end of the world if you dare to relax during the handful of hours you have before your next flight? TikTok‘s @lockthatshitin certainly seems to think so, because this gentleman insisted on burning a few calories with an impromptu gymnastics routine, and let’s just say he’s not quite as aerodynamic as the planes might have inspired him to believe.
Distributed by one @wolfgangmemes, Vincente can be seen getting his jumping jacks in as he awaits the call for boarding, because you’d better believe he’s going to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of the time that so many others spend just sitting in wait. The thing about forcing yourself to be productive, though, is that it usually leads to complete and utter disaster.
And indeed, Vincente finishes up his jumping jacks and immediately readies his body for a backflip, loudly clarifying that he’s never done this before; a detail he’s about to make very apparent with his actions. One ill-prepared jump later, he promptly smacks his head on the floor at an angle that’s enough to make your stomach lurch. The miniature warning at the bottom of the video, alerting us that “participating in this activity could result in you or others getting hurt,” is infinitely cackle-worthy.
The commenters, as expected, extrapolated many a funny remark out of Vincente’s misfortunate, comparing the impact with that of a bowling ball, pointing out the lack of a reaction from the other patrons, and further pointing out how two women walked by him in the exact moment he tried this peculiar stunt. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the unspoken contract of the TikTok fail video. The TikToker provides the fail, and the commenters flesh out the fail’s nuances.
Now, Vincente’s mistake here is actually the result of a few smaller mistakes. First, he allowed his energy to get the best of him, and then he believed that he would be able to do a backflip despite having never done one before; only when he acted upon his belief did the karma of all these decisions come and sock him in the back of the head.
Because — and this may come as a shock to many of you — backflips take practice. You can’t just whip one out in the middle of an airport and expect things to go smoothly. According to Berg Movement, it’s imperative to train the body to feel rotations more naturally before trying to do a full-on backflip.
This can be done by rolling backwards on the ground with your knees to your chest, tucking your head for maximum rollability. From there, you can launch yourself into a back roll to further expand your comfort with rotating that way, and then you can take it a step further and roll backwards off of or over slight elevations. And that’s just the early phase, so you might say that if Vincente wants to impress people with his spontaneous airport gymnastics, he needs to flip his mindset first.