Why TikTok Makes You Depressed
0:03 There's a lot to like about Tick-Tock. I can't say I use it every day, but I do use it pretty often. It scratches an itch if I don't have enough time to start watching a YouTube video, but still want something to watch. It's there. The algorithm knows me well enough so that most of the videos that pop up are relatively to my liking, and if they're not, I can always just keep scrolling until I find one that is.
From the creator's side, I also think there's a lot to like. The barriers to entry are low. If you have a phone, you can upload. There's an immense power to this: everyone has a platform, and everyone has a voice whose power is largely equal — about a minute max to talk, ideally. If you make good content, the algorithm will pick it up and you'll be rewarded — ideally, that is.
I don't know if the app actually works like this, but whenever I close the app, I feel strange. No matter how much time I spend on it, I get this feeling. It's as if, despite the hours watched, countless videos scrolled through, I watched nothing — nothing at all. I'm not alone in experiencing this, either. For whatever reason, this vague
1:04 notion of emptiness seems relatively common. Why? Well, the app's addicting. That's not much of a revelation, but it's also addicting by design. How do we know this? Well, the infinite scroll, arguably the main cosmetic feature of the app, was designed in 2006 by this guy — he's a Raskin. And though he didn't set out to addict people when he designed it, he's admitted that the infinite scroll has done just that: addict people. And though I can't say the Tick-Tock designers, or any app designers for that matter, have implemented the feature specifically to addict people, those implementing it now can hardly be ignorant of its efficacy and increasing time spent using the app. Two hundred thousand lifetimes are wasted per day thanks to the infinite scroll, by Ace's estimates. I don't think many app designers are passing that up. The obvious mental health declines associated with addiction need not even be mentioned.
What I think is unique about Tick-Tock addiction, though, is what we're infinitely scrolling through: videos. This is different from Instagram or a
2:04 news feed, where you're essentially scrolling through infinitely static content. An unending stream is already disorienting. Add to this an unending stream of movement — different movements at different times, from different angles, at different speeds, match with different songs — and you have an infinite constellation of moving differences. According to educational research, this is part of what furnishes the addiction: infinitely moving difference, which keeps the eyes busy.
Personally, I think this is also why the app feels like nothing, and why it's depressing. The psychologist William James said that there can't be a difference anywhere that doesn't make a difference elsewhere. If the concrete facts aren't changed, there's nothing meaningful about what's going on. Being constantly enthralled and attached to difference, nothing ever becomes different. I'm speaking firsthand — I'll just be sitting there swiping my finger while nothing changes, nothing becomes different.
The cultural theorist John Baudriard has called this infinitely dense mass of
3:05 information a state of indifference, in which events follow one upon the other, canceling each other out. As soon as you've watched one video, you've already forgotten about it and moved on to the next. It's a phenomenon that's deeply disorienting. Many report seeing hundreds of funny, witty, and smart people, all more so than themselves.
The sociologist Harmut Rosa has called this perception a contraction of the present. Living out in the world, time spans of action are relatively certain: you can predict how long things will be and how long they will take. But under a glut of infinitely moving information, this certainty collapses as the reliability of experiences and expectations decay quicker and quicker. The next video is entirely unpredictable, and yet all-absorbing just the same, and that's the point.
It shouldn't be surprising, then, that this phenomenon of doing nothing while feeling infinitely overwhelmed gives way to a feeling of frozen time without a meaningful past and future — a depressing inertia where everything feels like
4:08 nothing.
In some sense, then, this is a first-world problem. You don't really have time to feel nothingness when you have to work all day, every day. In another sense, though, it isn't. What results here has been called time poverty and attention poverty — that persistent feeling that you have too much to do, but not enough time to do it; too much to pay attention to, but not enough attention to distribute. Since its data has shown that low-income workers experience this more than their higher-paid counterparts. Of course, Tick-Tock itself wasn't recorded by the census; what was recorded was available time, a figure which diminished according to income.
The experience of Tick-Tock, though, is part of a broader social phenomenon associated with poverty. The philosopher of speed, Paul Verillo, has called this phenomenon societal arrhythmia — a stripping of the sutures that bind society-wide experiences of space and time. In this chrono-diversity, or diversity of rhythms, lower-paid individuals operate at accelerating rates of information production, while higher-paid individuals operate at
5:08 accelerating rates of information consumption, always under fear of suspicion that we might miss the next trend or even the next video. We're stuck.
It's a feeling that I have experienced myself. I don't want to close the app because I'm always curious what could come next. In this "television glaucoma," as Verillo has described it, time becomes everything, space nothing.
In perhaps the most terrifying twist involved here, each of us, in a certain sense, merges with the problems that previously higher-paid individuals only dealt with. In early capitalism, the capitalists couldn't pause and rest, stop the race and secure his position. There was no point of equilibrium, since standing still was equivalent to falling behind. The motor of production had to keep turning. Now, we have all taken up the capitalist mantle of information production and consumption — constantly moving, reading, and consuming. Moments of deceleration or depressive inertia then become, in this socialized capitalism of information, mere moments in an increasingly broader,
6:10 ever-accelerating pace of life.
Though I can't speak for everyone, I don't think that the end conclusion of these remarks is "technology bad, return to monkey." No, the technology is here. The important questions in my mind are: how are we going to use it, and who's benefiting from it?
I don't think it's enough to just take a break from Tick-Tock as an individual. Sure, that's the most you and I can do right now, but you and I alone can't stop what's going on here. Knowing that there are structures acting on us to make it happen is part and parcel of eventually changing it.
We consume more information now than ever before. At the same time, though, people have allegedly been complaining about information overload since the Middle Ages. I don't think that this is a problem that'll go away soon, but what I hope I've done here is help you come to a fuller understanding or at least knowledge of it. These feelings aren't just you — they're part of a world that's rotten in ways many of us can hardly
7:10 begin to understand.
This is Mr. Amazing. Thank you for watching.
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