Yyou can count calories, steps, streams of your favorite song – and now you can assign a number to how cool you are. See: aura points, a way to calculate your rizz. (That’s what the kids call charisma, and if you didn’t know, you just lost 100 aura points.)
Ask someone out and get a yes? That’s 100 aura points for you. Still on Snapchat past the age of 19? Rough and Suspicious… dock 1,000 aura points. Confidently answer a question in class but get it wrong? You are now in the red.
Or so go the TikToks that explain the idea. According to the Wall Street Journal’s report on trend, posts on the app with the hashtag #aurapoints rose 378% from May to June. “When you have a really, really, really good aura, I feel like that really translates from online to the other end of the phone,” Hina Sabatine, a 27-year-old Los Angeles content creator, told the outlet . “Some people just have it.”
Yes, the elusive “it” quality, first used to describe liberated silent screen icons like Clara Bow and Evelyn Nesbit, is getting a rebrand for the under-30s. Collect aura points and you are part of the cool kids club. Lose them at your peril.
On TikTok, young people share cases in which they earned, or lost, points. Winning aura points usually comes from acting in a breezy and unruffled but confident manner. For example, you’ll get points for moving on quickly from a breakup and not messily sharing the dirty details with friends. But stay with a cheater, and it’s minus 100 points – anyone who has aura will never put up with it. Some cases border on the absurd. (Q: “How many aura points did I lose when I took his toothbrush and rubbed it on my tampon?” A: “If he wronged you +1000.”)
It is not a very serious system. Yet some creators use it to describe dramatic moments of growth. One woman said she got aura points when she “stepped aside from my bf’s coffin when his ex showed up so she could have closure too” – a moment of solidarity during an unimaginable time that signifies maturity, kindness and girl power.
A recent graduate said she was “shocked” when her estranged father, whom she hadn’t seen or spoken to in five years, showed up at her ceremony out of nowhere to say he loved her. “How many aura points have I lost?” she asked, sparking a discussion about absent fathers in the comments section.
For Julian Baggini, a philosopher and co-founder of the Philosophers’ Magazine (and Guardian contributor), aura points align with gen Z’s reported love of astrology and other cosmic belief systems. “There’s this kind of zeitgeist right now around karma and energy, so they put it in terms of aura,” he said. “It’s tongue-in-cheek, and it also seems to be some kind of weird contemporary code of honor.”
Aura Points may seem like a new TikTok phenomenon, but some philosophers say elements of the trend come from ancient history. “It’s consistent with what’s known as virtue ethics, which originated with Aristotle and is popular in Greek and Roman philosophy,” said Ellie Anderson, an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College and co-host of the Think over podcast. This theory of how to live a moral life places emphasis on the quality of a person’s character, rather than how well they follow rules or a higher authority.
“This trend is about people thinking about whether or not their everyday lives fit an idea,” Anderson said. “It encourages us to talk to others about what we do in life, and whether it’s good or not. Even though aura points follow a cool factor, it doesn’t seem to do so in a purely superficial sense.”
Paul Blaschko, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, likens aura points to moral credit, or the idea that every “good” action or decision a person makes can potentially offset future “bad” ones. “These concepts are a way to talk about status, to use a gamified system to make a specific judgment about someone’s actions, and to invite people [in the comments] to criticize you,” Blaschko added.
The philosopher Alain de Botton described “status anxiety” as “anxiety about what others think of us; about whether we are judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser”. Blaschko sees echoes of this in aura points. “We constantly ask this question about our own self-worth, and it’s mediated by how we think others will see us, and aura points let us negotiate that with other people,” he said. “Users invite others to criticize them, but are also part of that status transaction by posting their opinions.”
Do you understand the philosophy behind a simple TikTok trend? That’s 1,000 aura points for you.
