Inside the addictive unreality of TikTok
WORDS BY MIKAYLA EMERSON
EDITED BY VISMITHA MANJUNATH YAJI
Bryan Sanchez calls it a click, snapping his fingers for effect. The sound reverbs through the air like the whistle before a race. In and out. When Bryan is out, he is a third-year student at Queens College committed to the long run of a Computer Science major. He is a part-time worker at a Swiss shoe brand’s Williamsburg location. He is an avid 24/7 gym bro, a white-walled (new) apartment renter, a Bleach enjoyer, and a recovering quinceañera chambelan. He is an uncle, a brother, a son, a boyfriend, and a best friend.
When he is in, he is nothing but a blank observer.
On TikTok, you don’t have to exist. Clocking in over the summer with an average of twenty-seven hours a week on the app, he spends more than 1/7 of his time not existing. TikTok is a site he goes to, but it is not a place. It does not function as a physical space. No upkeep. No operating hours. Nobody he has to be, to be in it. If reality is waking up every morning at 6:30 am to move his car (city street cleaning and parking regulations), then TikTok is the opposite, an unreality, a place he has to click out of to get back to real life.
Real life means real-life commitments—Monday to Thursday, college classes and eight-hour shifts. It can be a disappointment, a bore with no relief, a race with no distinct finish line. Sometimes the work day is slow, with no orders to fulfill or inventory to backstock, and time drags to a painstaking crawl. There is no way to leave physically without breaking company regulations, though there is a way to escape.
Click.
“I’m just watching and watching. There’ll be times when nobody comes in. I’ll be in it. I forget I’m here.” He does not post. He does not share videos with friends. He does, however, have 16,000 videos in his saved tab. He muses about dying and having his TikTok archives passed down with the note, look at this, this is what my life was like in college. The shared footage would be every reality but his own. Bryan Sanchez is completely absent from his app. That is the point.
Wiped clean from the place he spends hours every day, opening TikTok is a temporary suicide. It is a way not to exist, and it is addictive. Every moment of idle time is no longer free time but time that has to be passed. In an accelerating world, the app cuts the distance between one activity and another. Outside of work, outside of school, outside of real-life obligations, “If I’m not doing anything, I’m on TikTok.” This kind of nonexistence is not one he can rest in peace with. Despite the constant impulse click, pull the trigger, “I feel horrible,” “It’s useless,” “I’m wasting my time,” and “What’s wrong with me?” plague his mind while under.
One out of ten videos makes him laugh. Yet, the minuscule happiness he finds in this gamble can be more enticing than real life. “While I feel awful using it, the only consequence I have with TikTok is, oops, I spent two hours here. I’ll try better tomorrow. It’s easy to escape into it instead of dealing with life.” Justifications are always thought of in the moment. Before coming back to reality, while in the fugue state of TikTok hypnosis, it is first instinct to reason why he let himself go under. Post-click, the logic does not stick. Seeing his hour usage so high at the end of the week is too self damning. “I know I could do something else that would make me genuinely happy instead of getting little seconds of laughter.” However, knowing and wanting are two entirely different things.
Bryan often throws in a ‘you know?’ when speaking, or he changes the I pronoun to you. “When you’re in it, your mind goes blank. It happens to me, too. You don’t even realize what’s happening until you snap out of it,” quotes Bryan. He knows his experience is far from unique. Social media applications have adopted the never-ending TikTok For You Page, from Instagram Reels to Twitter’s For You tab. If it is not TikTok, it is something else. With 90 percent of teens ages thirteen to seventeen in the United States using their smartphone to pass the time as reported on PubMed Central, these algorithm-based content models offer an easily accessible place to not exist until the next time reality calls.
It is a thoughtless, seemingly painless, way to pass the time. It does not do anything else besides that—pass time. When I first checked my time usage on applications like TikTok, I was frustrated that I so passively spent hours looking at things I didn’t even know I would like, instead letting an algorithm spit anything, meaning everything, at me. I know, like Bryan, that there are many other things I want to do instead. Why is that not enough, then, to delete the app, get off my phone, and put the metaphorical gun down?
With screentime filling up entire days of our week, it is becoming clear just how much reality needs us, if it needs us at all. But do we want to be needed? It is too easy to not exist. As Bryan states, “Because there are so many videos, you get trapped inside of it.” Opening the app may feel like standing in one spot, but our lives still race on. The question isn’t just when real life will call us back, it’s whether we will choose to return.
Click.
Mikayla Emerson is a journalism student at The New School for Social Research interested in memory, alternative histories, and doing the “right” thing. In her free time she likes to collect Goodwill mugs and stare at fish in the market.
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