Our culture is heavily consumed and influenced by social media, TikTok being arguably the most predominant. I noticed these patterns in my own life, and haven’t been on TikTok since the beginning of the semester — and let me just say it’s been a change for the better.
Over one billion TikTok videos are watched daily. This statistic is a true testament to the effect of the app. It’s easy to sit down and scroll through videos for hours, especially for procrastinators like me. Before deleting TikTok, I periodically checked my screen time on the app, and I noticed that the hours spent mindlessly scrolling were increasing pretty steadily. I was embarrassed by how much time I wasted doing practically nothing.
Not only does TikTok hinder time-management skills, but it can also be dangerous, especially for young minds. TikTok was investigated by multiple states at the beginning of 2022, including Massachusetts. The goal of the investigation was to determine if TikTok was violating the law by aiming its platform towards younger audiences.
The largest proportion of TikTok users — 25% of them — are ages 10 to 19. Younger audiences, by nature, are likely to follow trends on TikTok, despite the impact they may have on themselves or others. A more recent harmful TikTok trend involves cooking chicken in NyQuil and eating it. Another popular one was the “devious licks” in 2021, where students began stealing from and vandalizing school property.
It’s no doubt that TikTok provides the perfect platform to easily spread misinformation and encourage harmful behavior. On the other hand, it’s also a great place to learn from others, make connections, and has lots of quality, personalized entertainment. The app gained momentum so quickly because of these reasons, and because of how digestible and addicting the short video clips can be.
It took me two tries to finally get rid of the app for good. Since boycotting it, I have been much more conscious of my screen time, and it has had a noticeable effect on my connection to reality. When you surround yourself with videos concerning other peoples’ lives, it can be easy to feel detached from your own life. The disconnect I had been feeling also caused me to lose focus quickly and procrastinate more than usual. Now, while my phone still serves as a distraction from my work, I am much less likely to spend hours at a time on it instead of being productive.
One big thing I have noticed since deleting TikTok was that I am not caught up on new slang words and phrases. Videos and trends are often referenced in conversation, and I can no longer keep up, which felt a little disheartening at first. But now I appreciate being able to figure these things out on my own, and keep up with TikTok through word of mouth instead of overloading myself with the app.
It has also been surprisingly easy to stumble across TikTok trends on other forms of social media and in articles online. While the trends I discover outside of TikTok are delayed from the time they are trending, it allows me to keep up with what my friends are taking away from the app every day, and it also gives me the ability to select the content that I want to stay up to date with.
If you feel that putting your phone down while watching TikToks is getting to be a little too difficult, I encourage you to try taking a break. For me, it has opened my eyes to the dangers the app has, and the influence it had on me. It has been surprising to reveal to myself how much TikTok actually impacted my own life, and I believe it to be beneficial for everyone to take a step back and see how it impacts theirs.
While there is nothing quite effective for filling the TikTok-sized hole in your life once you make the change, you will soon realize that deleting the app is a small price to pay for a more positive and present headspace. You’ll never know the difference it’s making until it’s gone.
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