I was a strictly no-social-media kid. My parents were adamantly against technology for much of my life. Without the chance to scroll aimlessly, I grew up almost exclusively on books. At the time, I was fine with that; reading brought me joy on its own. But there was an added benefit: whenever adults would compliment my vocabulary or tell my parents how lucky they were to have a child like me, I felt delightfully validated.
But even the highest praise fades. As I grew up and entered the early years of elementary school, reared on my father’s old sci-fi books and “dad rock”, I realized I was completely clueless to the cultural references my classmates and friends made around me. I would watch people record TikTok dances to songs I didn’t know and new slang seemed to emerge from nowhere every other week. I didn’t care about not understanding until I saw how it disconnected me more and more from my peers.
I once found the need to fit in incredibly stupid. But the more culturally isolated I felt, the more my pride about being unique faded. Pretty soon, I ashamedly found myself fake-laughing at jokes I didn’t understand and obsessing over how I presented myself. I eventually realized the problem was my lack of access to the holy grail of trends: TikTok.
In an attempt to convince my parents to let me download the app I heard so much about, I made a twenty-minute slideshow for TikTok. Maybe not my finest moment…
It went downhill from there.
The TikTok I ended up downloading was nothing like what I presented to my parents; I had shown them art and music, showcasing the creativity and community that the app fostered. What I found instead was an algorithm that tried to sell my teenage body anti-aging products and botox while convincing me that none of my dreams would come true unless I shared a video to 10 people.
After about a year of using it, I was tired. I would spend hours, usually past 3 or 4 am, scrolling with my phone while hiding under my blanket.
I should sleep.
One more video.
I’m so tired though.
Just one more video.
I have a test tomorrow.
I want to wake up early to shower.
This video is boring, though.
End on a good one.
One more.
Very little of the content I consumed actually interested me. Maybe twenty percent of the art I engaged with was stolen or traced, borrowed motifs repeated over and over. The pattern was predictable: a video would do well. The algorithm would bless a creator with a month of fame that could fuse a creator with their content. The rest of us call that a “niche” — until other people would latch on, hoping to catch a ride before the wave of views crashed. Then they’d become lost once again—as quickly as they had blown up—to an endless sea of videos.
My parents eventually stopped my nightly compulsion. I wasn’t resentful. Instead, I was thankful when my father made me delete TikTok. But by then, it was too late; short form content had spread to Instagram (though I didn’t use it at the time) and to YouTube, where I began to watch YouTube shorts despite my growing vitriol for the repetitive slop I was being fed. My brain was hardwired to always be consuming something, and unfortunately, YouTube’s algorithm was even less original than TikTok. It had ten times more of the parts of TikTok I hated. But still, hours would pass before I could exert enough self-control to close the app.
That is the point, after all. I mean, the hours I wasted on reels I didn’t even care for are a success story for the companies that own these platforms. Our online world is an economy that runs entirely on attention; multinational corporations get their money from my screen time. It’s so commonly known now that it’s practically axiomatic that their algorithms are designed to maximize addiction, no matter what that might do to the user’s brain or life or human potential.
It’s one of the paradoxes of human development: we’re so obsessed with individuality— that uniqueness that makes us interesting— that we pursue it to the point of total conformity. From pick-your-aesthetic-core’s to GRWMs (Get Ready With Me videos) laced with brand deals and not-so-subtle advertising, new, original ideas are buried under.
Everyone follows because it is the safe thing to do. It’s easy. They could have resisted and embodied the difference that everyone always says they want to be. But they found their niche, right? So why try something different?
We like to think that we are always looking forward, entrepreneurs searching for a solution—something new to help us break away from whatever is holding us back at the time. Our problem is that we overuse our discoveries too quickly, creating an endless stream of waste and shaky identities. All I wanted was a deeper connection with my peers, and I thought that social media would give me that. It didn’t. Instead, I destroyed my attention span with videos that made me strive to be just like everybody else.