TikTok Almost Ate My Brain

“Admitting you have a problem” -- well, you know the rest. It’s half the battle.

Joe didn’t hesitate to point this out when I shared that I was considering a Verity where I would admit to a formidable problem.

It was Sunday morning, and he wanted to know what I planned to do while he would be at work for four hours. This used to be an easy question to answer. I would watch “CBS Sunday Morning” and “Meet the Press,” dabble in some reading and writing, and water plants, and by the time he came home, the hours would have flown by.

But this was all before the incursion of TikTok.

“What are you planning to do this morning?” was met with the guilty realization that I would probably sit on the couch, bookended by our dogs, and scroll myself into a stupor on the video-serving app. My book would go unread. The plants would not be watered. I would put off shaving and dressing for the day until moments before his return.

Troye Sivan
on TikTok

Whether it was watching The Pioneer Woman’s homespun recipes (that I would never make), excerpts from pop sensation Troye Sivan’s world tour, or “What $2.5 million gets you on the Upper East Side,” it took only moments for me to settle into the thick miasma of algorithmic oblivion.

The algorithm was imperfect. Despite my clear loathing of Donald Trump, occasional MAGA content appeared in my feed, as frightening as that was. This intrusion made me think there was more than an algorithm and even more nefarious forces at play.

I once watched a video on narcissism, and then I regularly got served videos like “Narcissist Checklist” and “How to Live with a Malignant Narcissist.”

There was faintly redeeming content on TikTok, like BookTok—the corner of the app reserved for rabid readers making book recommendations. I saw many inside scoops on Broadway theater, which I am a fan of.

But for the most part, TikTok was an irredeemable, existentially nullifying, soul-sucking vampire. I am not sure how many 62-year-olds have my problem, but with this post, I am outing myself as a recovering TikTok addict.

How did I wrest myself? Cold turkey and by forcing myself to read. But the app is still on my phone, buried in a subfolder, beckoning like the bartender in The Shining who gives Jack Nicholson bourbon. 

The surgeon general recently issued a warning that social media poses a threat to teenagers’ mental health. While I am no teenager and not sure that TikTok threatened my mental health, it posed a grave menace to my intellect. It almost ate my brain.