I made TikTok videos for years. I was regularly pulling out my phone to record myself sharing thoughts and streams of consciousness, each time hoping that it would start some kind of conversation in the comment section. It was fun for a while, but now, looking back, it feels a little embarrassing. I always thought I was being authentic, sharing thoughts from my brain straight to the app with no filter in between. The truth is, I was being so regularly influenced by what I was seeing online that the filter was inherently present. Not much of the content we see online is truly unique. Most of we see on social media is influenced by something that another creator has presented. Everything feels like a copy of a copy of a copy. And that was true of my own content – I thought I was sharing my two cents on a trending topic, but often, my opinions were so deeply influenced by everything I was consuming that it begs the question, are those opinions even my own?
I’ve been abstaining from posting and consuming content on TikTok for a few months. In the last week, I went back into my account and made almost all my TikTok videos private. I had a series of thoughts about it that left me reeling, feeling embarrassed about my entanglement with social media. For a long time, I was that guy who posted on TikTok, and was being reminded of it all the time by people in my life, friends and family who knew me outside of this online context. I had to shake that embarrassment, that feeling of actually being seen when someone in real life acknowledges the persona you present online. I had to confront the convergence where the abstraction of your online persona is seen by strangers you’re presenting to, meets the reality of that persona being seen by real people in your real life who know you on a deeper level. More often than not, these people were supportive. They thought it was cool I was putting myself out there like that. They told me they looked forward to my videos. Maybe they were just being nice.
One of the biggest things that pushed me away from TikTok is the never ending obsession with discourse. Everything becomes discourse once it is posted online. Once a video is recorded and posted, it creates a discourse economy. A single video could inspire hundreds of response videos. Even more response videos would be posted, responding to those responses, and soon enough, you have creators stitching response videos to a response video responding to an original video. Discourse becomes three, four, even five layers deep, context that only the most chronically online people would be able to decipher. I would be doomscrolling and find myself watching a video like this (dropped off, as they say), where I was three layers deep into some type of meaningless response with zero context, forcing me to stay on the app to search and backtrack in order to locate the original video that inspired this degree of response so I could get the full story. This trickle down system became tiring and predictable and, with every degree of response, the things being said became more deranged and unhinged and inspired to rage bait. At that point in the discourse economy, a smaller creator is using the traffic surrounding a certain video or topic, piggybacking on an already-existing conversation to generate attention to their video, and further inspire discussion in the comments by playing on negative emotions. It is an insidious trap that, without properly being able to identify it, could easily send you into anger or frustration. This is a way social media apps use your own emotions to keep you scrolling, engaging and staying in the app.
I was able to free myself from this feedback loop by simply deleting the app from my phone. Without being enthralled in the scroll, I can slow down and actually identify when a video is trying to play on my emotions like this. There are, of course, people in my life who haven’t broken this feedback loop, who continue to share internet discourse with me or with group chats I’m in, and try to further the discussion offline or in text message. At this point in my offline journey, bringing an isolated Internet discourse three layers deep that lives exclusively on TikTok or X to the dinner table or to our real life conversation is enough to give me goosebumps from embarrassment. But that’s mostly because I can recognize the countless times I did that to people in my own life who are offline, and it makes me cringe to think about. I can’t fault them for doing this, because I know all too well how encompassing these discussions feel when you’re so absorbed into the apps and engaging with these kinds of discussions in such an isolated context.
Engaging with discourse became unsatisfying and repellent for me once I understood all it was doing was making me upset. Opinions on social media become progressively more extreme for the purpose of eliciting engagement. When I was able to identify that social media was what was souring my mood and making me angry, I tested it, where every time I was scrolling and felt angry or annoyed or upset, I would put my phone down. Soon enough, I was putting my phone down a few seconds after opening the apps. Then I started experimenting with an app blocker, and I would leave the blocker on for longer and longer every day. I found my mood was changing. I was feeling lighter, as if I wasn’t carrying around the burden of the world’s worst opinions all the time. This was a change that was satisfying enough to inspire me to delete the app from my phone. I told myself I would only use the app on my laptop, in a way that’s reminiscent of a time before smartphones. These days, when I open TikTok dot com on my laptop, I scroll two videos at most before I get bored and close the tab. I simply do not want to doom scroll when I’m on my laptop. Staying away from the trap that is discourse is enough motivation for me to stay off social media like that.
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