There’s one romantic trope I’ve never understood: I love you so much that we can never be! “Just be!” I think when I encounter it, whether uttered by a tortured Regency lord or a Scottish, swamp-dwelling ogre. “Come on! What’s stopping you?” It never really made sense to me: loving someone so much that you have to let them go. At least until I downloaded TikTok.
I think TikTok is gorgeous. It has bewitched me, body and soul. I love it so much because it is a direct window into a million lives. Let me deliver them to you, just as the app delivers them to me. A man who has built a little wooden pub for mice! A woman who dresses like Dr Nick Riviera from The Simpsons! A pep-talk from a grandma! An Alabama sorority girl who pronounces “pen” as “pin”!
Thanks to TikTok, I have watched a man dumpster dive for discarded supermarket flowers before placing them on strangers’ graves. I’ve walked through the cafeteria in the Olympic Village. I’ve visited countries before I’ve touched down in them, better understanding how to dress and what to expect.
A few months ago, I was chatting to a friend of mine who lives properly (marathons, botanic gardens, salmon for tea). “I just can’t imagine you flopping on to your bed and procrastinating,” I mused. Then she told me I was wrong. “Sometimes,” she replied, “I come home from work and scroll on Instagram – when I look up, ten minutes have passed!”
Ten minutes. Can you imagine? I can’t tell you the longest I’ve ever spent on TikTok, but I can tell you this. The app lets you set self-imposed limits; in my case, it flashes up a warning after 20 minutes have gone by. But then it lets you dismiss the warning and the timer starts again. I have dismissed these warnings six times in a single session.
You understand, then, that I loved TikTok so much that I had to let it go. I recently deleted the app from my phone and finally felt the power of a peaceful day. But then. But then. But then. I clicked on the YouTube app and navigated my thumb to somewhere it had never been. YouTube Shorts.
YouTube Shorts are like TikToks but worse. TikTok’s mysterious algorithm can devour a man’s entire brain and show him exactly what he wants to see – YouTube just throws loud and bright in your face. But listen: I love loud and bright. Have you ever noticed that loud and bright is so great? So a week after deleting TikTok, I was spending hours a day watching YouTube Shorts.
So I had to delete the YouTube app. You’ve noticed a pattern here – a better word is a “descent”. Because after deleting YouTube and experiencing a day or so of productivity, I clicked a little button at the bottom of my Instagram screen. Those in the know are already recoiling in horror.
There is an elevator in the hottest, darkest, loneliest pit of hell – take it a further 50 floors down and you will reach Instagram Reels. Here you will discover categories of people you never knew existed, such as: Harry Potter Christians. Here are videos earnestly captioned, “Tips for welcoming your husband home excellently.” Here is a man stirring some oats into some jelly and claiming it is the best way to lose weight.
I can spend, on a really bad day, a total of three to four hours watching videos like these. Here’s a short list of things I regularly claim I don’t have time to do: cook / exercise / get someone to fix the bit of the bathroom door where the wood has expanded / make appointments that require me to look up a phone number and stay on hold. I absolutely do have time. I don’t have a child or a dog. I don’t have an ailing great aunt who wants me to read aloud from the bible.
What I do have, though, is an addiction to vertical video. My brain craves flashy, ten-second clips one after the other after the other. I used to waste my time by watching 20-minute YouTube videos – it’s horrifying and laughable that these now seem like the distinguished, intellectual choice to me, akin to settling down with a book.
In the face of video after video, my self-control has proved useless – only cold turkey works. Sadly I have now had to delete Instagram, which means I can’t use the only social network I truly consider social – the place where I see my friends’ holidays and book recommendations and dogs.
People often worry that phones make us unhappy, but I think there’s another danger: I think they can make us too happy. I’ve never felt bad or gross after watching too much TikTok, the same way I might feel if I drank too much or binged too much TV. There seems to be no mechanism in my body that signals I’ve over-indulged in vertical vids. I just feel good.
It’s troubling that these apps took such a hold on me, a grown adult woman who occasionally does eat salmon. What hope does a child have? According to the software company Qustodio, British children spend more time on TikTok than those in any other country, averaging an astounding 127 minutes a day. I don’t necessarily believe that there’s anything inherently evil about screentime, but I do know that it stops me getting out of bed, pulls me away from books and means that my bathroom door still isn’t fixed.
And I also know that when I recently stumbled upon a television clip from the 1970s, I couldn’t believe how slowly and calmly the presenter spoke. I truly can’t imagine anyone watching anything like that now.
I wish I could think of a solution. I don’t think TikTok should be banned as I really do believe it’s an unprecedented window to the world. Probably the app’s screentime controls should be more autocratic, making it physically impossible to watch another video after 20 minutes (but what company would curtail itself like that?). So for now, all I can do is delete app after app. But can I promise I won’t redownload them?
[See also: TikTok will destroy our sense of political history]
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