Cats. Turtles covered in barnacles. Sexism. Cats. Will this paint turn mint or turquoise? Family guy spliced with mobile games. Cats. 5 things you absolutely must do to potatoes. Today we’re trying Bradley Cooper’s new cheesesteak restaurant. Cats. Racism. Better ways to organise your cupboards. Kanye ranting. Cats. Womanhood is both a curse and a blessing. These leggings totally change the game! Cats.
I’m bored of the monotony of the algorithm.
I remember when TikTok could be identified as Musical.ly and my peers used to dance in the corner of classrooms to sped up hits. I downloaded it as it was progressing into TikTok and I can’t say I became obsessed straight away. All I remember is a lot of dancing and food.
Over the pandemic there wasn’t really much to do except facetime with my then boyfriend, give myself a buzz cut and learn to rollerskate (it was a dark time). TikTok became flooded with whipped coffee, the strawberry cow remix and people vlogging their vaccinations. In a time that felt so lonely there was a community of millions surrounding me separated by glass. After the pandemic passed, I kept watching and kept consuming. I felt I had perfected my algorithm: a lot of cats, people wandering around cool places and cooking inspiration. My relationship with the app grew and deepened: we’d wake up together every morning and go to sleep together. I would sit and have TikTok time with those I was closest to and it felt like show and tell. We could sit together and show each other these inane little videos that actually were a nice distraction from the hellscape of sickness and fear lying outside the house.
This relationship was beneficial for everyone: I was consuming and TikTok was rewarding me with the perfect algorithm. Everything I needed to see or hear was one tap away. Since the beginning of 2025 things started to go downhill, my videos weren’t quite as tailored. Video would show up with under 50 likes that I wasn’t interested in at all and to be honest I began to get bored.
One day I decided to check in on my screen time, it had been a slow week where I’d been mindlessly scrolling a little more than usual.
16 hours I’d spent that week on the app. Which if we do the maths is almost a full day, two full nights of sleep and enough time for my body to replenish over 6 million red blood cells. How much of my life have I wasted with content that sated me but didn’t improve me in any way! I’ve fed my stupid phone so much data and what have I gotten back? Silly little videos!
So as you can see I was handling this information well.
To anyone that knows me in real life: you know that this wasn’t going to go down lightly. This meant that it was time for some serious self improvement. I could’ve just learned this information then moved on, but no! Time to make my life difficult!
I decided to set myself the insane limit of 15 minutes a day meaning this was a drop of around 2 hours and 15 minutes. I had the 16 hour realisation at around 2.30 in the morning (healthy, I know) so when I began the limit, I’d already used up my time for the day. I decided to satiate my yearning for the clock app with YouTube, and for the sake of this experiment YouTube is healthy because it typically focuses on one subject for at least 20 mins.
For anyone unfamiliar with apple time limits, the app was totally shut down for the day and weirdly I felt relief. The next day was when the trouble began, I still felt good about the little experiment but I clicked into the app one too many times out of habit. When I did this I felt a shift in my “for you page” and the content was always: the cutest cat you’d ever seen, hate crimes or baking. The interesting shift is that I no longer had content that I recognised and it felt like TikTok making sensational attempts to grab my attention.
If I’m being honest the biggest thing that scared me about the process was being out of the loop – I love connecting with people over the app. But when I thought about it more: my connections aren’t dependent on the inane videos I send but it’s the thought behind them. On day three, I felt like a new routine was starting to emerge. When I had a free few hours and I sat on the sofa: not quiet enough to be productive but not loud enough to be engaged. I went back to Pinterest.
I used Pinterest for hours from the age of around 11 till I was about 13. I used to collate every beautiful thing into a box and in a way it was the perfect app: you could be as serious as you wanted, you could encourage yourself to grow (new hobbies, styles etc.) and there was barely any connection. To me, Pinterest wasn’t about numbers or being the first to embrace an idea, it was simply about organising and browsing. My Pinterest isn’t nearly as impressive as it used to be: I had my 20s, my wedding and my future home all planned out. Maybe it’s time to start getting excited for the future again.
I can barely remember the last time I opened TikTok and I’m happy.