There's a myth that crows and magpies love to collect small, shiny silver objects, like the rings that adorn Eric Sedeño's fingers. But as we walked into the Lili and Cata nail salon in Brooklyn(opens in a new tab), the corvids must have been busy elsewhere.
Sedeño, too, is a collector of glistening things, rings and motivational phrases alike. The 26-year-old TikTok celebrity told me, as he stripped a Hannah Jewett piece off his finger in anticipation of the manicure, that he wanted to get more piercings, holes to hang even more jewelry from his ears. He has his earlobe pierced and once had a cartilage piercing — a notoriously tough piercing to heal. He took it out because, he said, "I choose joy."
Choosing joy is a term I usually reserve for irony. It’s a farmhouse sign at a craft store, hung alongside "gather" and "live laugh love"; it's what suburbanites say when they want a little drink with lunch; it's what fills the Pinterest boards of middle class American moms. "Choosing joy" is almost always a vaguely spiritual mantra for the self-help crowd. And while Sedeño uses it the same way he uses slay — with irony, but also a significant glimmer of sincerity — this phrase happens to be the remarkably genuine and non-cringey way that Sedeño has carved out his space online. He's chosen joy at every moment.
Sedeño grew up as a queer Mexican American in a suburb of Dallas, Texas that he said just "wasn't very interesting." He played soccer and football. He tells me he was a "full-bodied" middle schooler.
"It was really safe," he said, as a manicurist massages his hands. Sedeño thinks his finger nails are too big so instead of a full coverage polish, he asked the artist to put a simple dot in the center of each nail. "I was surrounded by people of different cultures, which was really nice. All my friends have been so different from me my whole life, and so I think that was lucky in that sense. But I grew up in a bubble."
Sedeño found ways to take imaginary excursions outside of this bubble. He loved watching That's So Raven and says, like Raven's character in the show, he envisioned going to high school and playing dress up and wearing wigs. But wigs weren't a commonplace accessory in his Plano, Texas high school, and neither, at the time, were other queer kids. He said he "always knew" he was gay.
"For a lot of my life I was very quiet, trying to hide pieces of myself,” he said. In high school, he got "crushes" on girls and women he admired. During his freshman year at college he came out at bisexual and, a few years later, as gay.
The first person he told that he kissed a boy was his best friend — a person he met in high school who he still considers his best friend; he describes her as "me as a woman." She is not very online and, Sedeño confesses, that's a trend in his friendships: Most of them are not online and even his real-life friends who are online don't ask him to collaborate. None of his childhood friends have ever tried to reconnect in any kind of gross, clout-chasing way, which might be a reflection of Sedeño himself — he never tries to mine his friends for content and, in return, they respect him as a person first and a content creator second.
Sedeño's dream to be his true self, come out of his shell, and wear wigs like Raven Simone didn't happen in high school. But he felt more free to express himself online. One of his best-performing videos, posted in October 2022 with 2.3 million views, is of him in a long black wig reimagining scenes from Twilight as Jacob. The video is captioned, "Jacob Black if he slayed."
"Eric is someone who is exactly who he is online," Tefi Pessoa, another creator who knows Sedeño through TikTok, told me, adding that he is someone warm, who smiles at you and goes in for a hug as soon as you walk into the door. Pessoa is one of Sedeño's all-time favorite creators on the app. "I am not surprised so many people have gravitated towards him because he really is the kind of friend you pray for as a kid. And he kills it in a wig, bitch."
Sedeño, an art director, graphic designer, and illustrator on top of his TikTok work, left Texas to live away from home for the first time for an internship in advertising in 2018 in New York City. He downloaded TikTok in 2019 for an advertising campaign and, at first, he said he "didn't get it." As he kept scrolling, the app grew on him. On a whim, he started posting to his 20 or so buddies who followed him there. It was March 2020, the beginning of stay at home measures for the covid-19 pandemic, he had just been dumped, he had just chopped off all of his hair, and he had just moved into a new apartment.
The oldest video on his page displays a peak pandemic experience. It is March 17, 2020, and he's recording himself striking some poses in a Zoom class. "Trying to act shy and innocent so my crush notices me during my virtual class," he wrote in the caption.
"I just had so much alone time and I'm a very social creature," Sedeño said of those early videos. "It was my way of being social by myself while I had to be at home working. It never felt awkward." Eventually, the views on his videos started stacking up. His first viral video showed him shaking his ass and garnered about 17,000 views. The second, a video of him asking his audience if he looked intimidating, reached more than 500,000 views.
He starts to develop a repertoire: he follows a trend, or he shakes his ass to whatever sound is popular on the app that day, or he tells stories directly to the camera. Sedeño’s joy comes through even in his earliest videos.
"I feel like I started TikTok because I loved myself and I loved what I was doing and I was like, 'Let me show other people,'" Sedeño said.
As pandemic restrictions lifted, other people started occasionally popping into his videos, but that was still quite rare. Some of his videos use the #foryoupage tag – generally deployed by creators to help their videos go viral – and others don't. Sedeño is smart. He knows that his videos have the potential to get views, and also preserves a feeling that his content is a glimpse into something candid, as if his joy is so radiant that it simply must be captured and shared. Nothing reads as rehearsed or practiced. He seems to be having a silly, goofy, slightly unhinged time.
From the start, Sedeño seemed to naturally know a central fact about being online that others take years to learn. "The first step to doing anything well is to enjoy yourself and be yourself doing that thing," Sedeño said. "I started TikTok because I loved myself and I loved what I was doing and I wanted to show other people."
Now, Sedeño, aka @RicoTaquito(opens in a new tab), has over 1 million social media followers and over 81 million likes. He's partnered with Denny’s, Spotify, Google, eBay, Adidas, Warby Parker, Hulu, Supergoop, Calvin Klein, Garnier Fructis, to name a few He has been featured in Vogue(opens in a new tab), Teen Vogue(opens in a new tab), and PAPER(opens in a new tab). Sedeño makes comedic videos, DIY tutorials, and he recently launched Groove Gives(opens in a new tab), a candle company partnered with whose proceeds go to donating meals to families and children in need — so far, they've donated more than 15,000 meals.
Sedeño's space online is a predominately kind one, but with any virality comes the unfortunate reality of trolls — and the need to set boundaries with parasocial relationships.
"The internet can be hard. It can be a cruel place," Sedeño said. "I've had moments where I'm like, 'Oh my God, people are so mean.'"
He said he feels like some people don't want to hear about his problems, and he doesn't necessarily want to share all of them, either. Being a creator like Sedeño involves finding a balance between sharing parts of your life that your audience wants to know and that makes them feel connected to you, all while maintaining boundaries and privacy. Getting the balance wrong in either direction can result in alarming consequences.
"I'm OK with not sharing everything with the whole world," Sedeño said. "I skew towards, like, if I'm not having the best day, I'm not gonna fake it. If I'm not in a funny mood, I'm not gonna force myself to sit down and make content."
Sedeño, like all of us, sometimes feels the urge to post his way through an upsetting or difficult moment. He has, in the past, taken those videos down a few hours later.
But, usually, he is in a funny mood. He says he tries to start every day with a smile, and people online are mostly kind to him. "For me, who you see online is who you get in person. And so it's very authentically just me being myself," something the internet seems to respond to. That also means, though, that trolls can cut deep. "When people don't like me, it used to hurt me a lot because it really is me," he said.
He has no plans to stop making videos any time soon, but he also wants to spend more time focusing on other creative pursuits. He's a brilliant artist and designer, and recently made a zine that he hopes to start selling. He wants to make an interactive website and — for what it's worth — it's looking pretty good right now(opens in a new tab). He wants to start a podcast this year. These are all things he has wanted to do for a while, he tells me, but his word for 2023 is "consistency." He will get it done, he promises.
Like any creator, Sedeño is looking for ways to monetize his following by tapping into the joy his followers turn to him to see and feel. The cynical part of me wants to see this as the TikTok version of a "choose joy" farmhouse sign. But sitting across from him, it is difficult to feel cynical. I'm reminded of the early days of the pandemic, when he first joined TikTok. Every day we were surrounded by uncertainty and fear. Finding any joy at that time was an act of resilience and resistance. When Sedeño first started making his videos, he chose joy on TikTok. He never stopped.
I'm taken by his perseverance and consistency, by his devotion to joy. His steadfast commitment to joy on social media — a place quite literally designed to make users unhappy(opens in a new tab) — reminds me of meteorologists on the news during a hurricane, standing in the middle of the storm and giving the report despite the conditions that demand they stop. He's not impervious to the effects of his surroundings, but he isn't budging.
After we got our nails done, we walked over to get a slice of pizza at Paulie Gee's in Greenpoint. As we sat down, he told me about his first job as an assistant manager at a pizza place when he was 17 years old. He talked about working at TopGolf, Best Buy, and a Christian furniture company. He called himself a "personality hire" at each of these jobs, and his personality seems to still be carrying him through his gig on TikTok, too.
But unlike TopGolf or a pizza place, he has hundreds of thousands of eyes on him now. He said he is "really trying to get back to that delusion of loving myself regardless of anything wrong with me." Sedeño wants to "have fun and be stupid." In my ideal world, that is all the internet would be.
