You Absolutely Must Delete Tiktok

a tirade

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It’s possible this rant is extremely ill-timed, as the fate of TikTok depends on the Supreme Court electing to save it in the next three days. I think it’s plausible that they will save it, and if they don’t, some copy will spring up in its place. Anyway.

how you look watching tiktok

In January 2024 I deleted TikTok from my phone for good. My screen time was becoming a depressing reminder that I was wasting my literal one and only life on Earth, and the app was becoming clogged with insidious “TikTok Shop” content. When I would put down my phone after a scroll, I would feel unhappy after having been rage baited on important issues or blue balls-ed over something “satisfying.”

This is an embarrassing way to spend my time, I remember thinking. Why am I watching some 22 year old have a “cozy day” and not creating one for myself? Why am I watching a grown man lip sync the words to a movie scene? Why am I gorging myself at this trough of ads for useless kitchen gadgets, interspersed with real ads for a mental health app?

I decided to evaluate what I was even watching on the app. I gave myself a challenge: I would watch 5 minutes of TikToks and if I could remember even one helpful or interesting thing I had watched that genuinely improved my life, the app could stay. I lost the challenge easily, having been unable to even remember one specific video.

I deleted the app and got through the first few days of my withdrawal on the high of moral superiority. But I wasn’t completely off the sauce. Liam was still on the app and would give me a little “best of” before we went to bed. Eventually he, too, would run out of good videos to show me, and we resorted to “hitting from the tap,” or scrolling back months of his liked videos, and watching a little curated collection from before TikTok got so bleak. Liam ended up deleting the app too.

I tried to watch Instagram Reels, but their algorithm was insistent on me watching super Christian videos, and I had no genuine interest in watching an “aesthetic” bible study or how some beefhead works out for Jesus.

The thing about these video scrolling apps is, the entire thing is anti-pleasure. The absence of pleasure. Please note that I am using pleasure in the Dionysian/hedonistic sense, not the sexual one. The use of “pleasure” in that context makes me feel yucky.

When you watch someone unbox a luxury bag or whatever, you get a tiny little high of imagining what it must be like to have something so shiny and new, but you don’t get to actually feel the leather. When you watch a French chocolatier make a photorealistic plum out of white chocolate, you don’t get to actually taste it. When you watch a Chipotle public freakout, you don’t actually get to slap someone.

After having all those experiences, what have you actually done for yourself? Besides the alleged prevalence of human trafficking at gas stations, or which celebrities have veneers, what did you actually learn? Did you even choose to learn those things or did someone else decide that you should know? Suddenly you are advertising dollars incarnate, and your void is easily capitalized upon. You are not even a human, but a receptacle for other people’s psychopathic need to share. And honestly it’s not very becoming of a young lady.

I felt the same when I recently had the need for a quick lunch in Manhattan on a Saturday, and ended up eating at a Sweetgreen alone. It was like descending into the pits of vibe hell, where joy and beauty have starved to death. I ate my harvest bowl in silence, after having taken the judgement of the Sweetgreen workers like a good little piggy. My friend Leah correctly noted I “may as well have used a feed bag.” I dutifully ate my slop and returned to the real world fundamentally changed for the worse. Plus, I didn’t even finish my salad out of desperation to leave, and left hungry and out seventeen dollars. The next time I had a hungry hour to kill, I got a taco and went to the used book store like a real person would do.

Since I left TikTok, I have taken my leave of social media further. I don’t have anything scrollable on my phone (save Pinterest, where a scroll can at least be labeled as research for my job) and I can only use Instagram for 30 minutes a day on my laptop. I have mentally re-labeled all those websites as “boring” and have re-invested in tactile interests, such as cooking, painting, and being cozy. I have a giant jar of caramelized onions in my fridge. I have a pile of books to read next to my bed. I managed to avoid actually seeing the “demure, mindful” videos for two whole weeks. I do all of these things in relative privacy, and they count even though I didn’t post about them.

If this rant seems holier-than-thou, that’s because it is. You Could Be Holy Too with this one secret trick advertisers hate.

Plus, it’s not like people can’t just send me TikTok links whenever they find something I really need to see. A few months ago I got sent a link to a video where a dog “barks out of his asshole” so maybe I really am missing out on the fun.