Recently, I was tasked with writing a personal essay about pop culture in my Creative Writing class at Denison. “Write about something that you keep returning to,” our professor asked of us, and immediately I thought of TikTok.
A lot of students wrote about an album they always listen to in order to calm their anxiety or a movie that comforts them in times of distress. I chose to address the prompt in a different way – to talk about something I return to even though I know it’s so bad for me.
I first downloaded TikTok as a joke. Really, I just wanted to make fun of it. So, I logged into my account (my Musically account from middle school, I should add) and laughed at the dozens of cringy videos. My plan was to delete the app after this first exposure, but that, of course, is not what happened. Since then, I have spent an inordinate amount of time mindlessly scrolling through the app. And what was supposed to be a fun little escape is no longer fun or an escape.
I am constantly comparing myself to others. I no longer escape reality when I am bombarded with videos of people experiencing hardships no one should ever have to go through. Worst of all, my attention span is awful now. I struggle to watch YouTube and Netflix. I mean, c’mon! That’s plain pathetic!
My conclusion to the paper is that I actually have no idea why I keep returning. Writing down all of the reasons I like TikTok followed by the massive list of reasons I hate it truly made me question why. My paper was almost entirely a critique of the app. So, I decided to challenge myself. Spend a week off TikTok. This would have been exponentially more difficult had I tried this during the summer, but because I am constantly drowning in work, it wasn’t impossible.
Not surprisingly, I noticed that I was going to bed earlier. I get into bed when I’m tired, but because TikTok shows really short videos, my brain has always said, “perfect, just watch a few videos and then go to bed.”
…We all know that is false. But it is not possible on Youtube or Netflix. And you can’t watch a quarter of an episode or half of a video. You have to finish it. Because I didn’t want to stay up to watch a whole video or episode, I just went to bed.
I still compared myself to others because of Instagram and other forms of social media, so I can’t say that that detrimental effect was lessened. I believe that I would have to delete all social media in order to stop the comparison.
A week was certainly not long enough, and I have watched videos on the app since that week, but my usage has generally decreased. Maybe one day I’ll get up the courage to delete all of my social media, or at least spend a week without using any apps. In the meantime, not using TikTok has been peaceful and something I will continue into the future.