Imagine a world without TikTok, where we didn’t have access to an infinite feed of 10- to 120-second videos. Just think of the films we’d watch, the books we’d read—all of that time we’d get back to be better spent (even if it’s consuming longer-form, more substantive, pieces of media). Imagine the money we’d save without the TikTok Shop and the barrage of influencers coercing us into consumption. In January, American TikTok users got a taste of this freedom, for 12 hours at least, before Donald Trump “saved” the app.
This debacle in the US led me to reflect on my own TikTok use. I noticed that on hungover Sunday nights I find myself falling into a rabbit hole of watching bizarre but compulsively watchable “Sunday reset” videos by various lifestyle influencers. In the name of starting the week in an organised fashion, these videos promote gross overconsumption. They essentially entail each influencer taking every grocery or toiletry item they own out of its original packaging and placing it inside another, more aesthetically pleasing piece of cheap plastic—no doubt purchased on Amazon and available on their TikTok shops for frighteningly low prices. Then there are the Shein hauls, in which tiny women submerge themselves in mountains of polyester, hunting for pieces of flimsy fabric individually packaged in polyethylene bags. And don’t even get me started on the 12-step skincare regimes, performed theatrically before the glow of a ring-light, with all fine lines and pores filtered into oblivion.
Of course, the primary objective of social media platforms is to hoard as much of our attention as possible. TikTok, however, feels like the worst of the bunch. It is the absolute pinnacle of late-stage capitalism, with its slew of micro trends and increasingly niche aesthetics (ballet-core, eclectic grandpa-core, cottage-core, et cetera) that drive users to buy and buy and buy in a desperate bid to remain “on trend”.
Beyond the more obvious marketing ploys, another odd phenomenon is users describing everything as a “theory”. These theories, which include fashion tips like the “red nail theory” or thought experiments like “apple in a box theory”, are explained through bizarre, vaguely narrated videos with odd, innocuous captions. These videos “hook” you into checking the comments for an explanation—where you’ll often find other confused users searching for the answers too. Before you know it, you’re sucked into another TikTok vortex, searching for a meaning that—in all honesty—isn’t really there. And those are precious minutes you’re never getting back.
My own theory about these increasingly niche and far-fetched “theories” is that it’s a way for content creators cultivate a feeling of exclusivity within the app. Those who are “in the know” can feel “included” in the online micro-communities that TikTok’s algorithm helps to create. It encourages people to spend more time online so that they can “keep up” and feel a part of something—all in the absence of communities offline, which seem to be less and less available.
While I do my absolute best to keep my screen time below an average of two hours a day (a stat I’m pretty pleased with, I will admit), I do occasionally indulge in a TikTok scroll-session. My “For You Page” (an algorithmically generated echo chamber designed to feed me the content that will keep me in the app for as long as I can keep my eyes open), mostly consists of funny skits made by creators who, if it weren’t for TikTok, wouldn’t be able to make such funny content for a living.
Credit where credit is due: TikTok has enabled thousands of creators to reach audiences they never would have otherwise found. Jools Lebron, the inventor of the “very demure, very mindful” trend that blew up in the summer of 2024, has been able to finance her gender-affirming surgery thanks to the money she earned from her original audio.
And I’m painfully aware that, as someone who wants to make writing their fulltime job, whose work often focuses on gen Z trends, I need to keep a finger firmly on the pulse of online activity. In fact, I often think I should be spending more time consuming and creating on the platform, in order to… stay relevant. It looks like I might be increasing my screen time and spending more time on TikTok, after all.
