TikTok is deliberately poisoning a generation

This is the first video in a long time that fatigued my brain to work on. There’s so much to this that I either didn’t get into or didn’t get in depth on, so apologies if I left anything out. There’s always room for part 2 ;D

(also, I had a 60 Minutes clip in here that those clowns tried copyright claiming THREE TIMES. So, again, apologies for not including the actual clip of Tristan Harris speaking about China/TikTok. I summarized his ideas, but it’s always nicer hearing it from someone other than me haha)

As a mom to a child with Tourettes, the people who fake it for clout infuriate me. Just a few days ago my poor baby spent the entire night in tears because everyone on her basketball team save for 1 girl had been mocking her and making fun of her tics. She got so stressed out it sent her into a tic attack. The people who fake these disorders make things harder for the people who legitimately have them.

When I was really little I didn’t understand why my parents would regulate how much time I spent using technology, especially when it came to video games. Now, as an adult, I’m incredibly grateful that they did so because I could have struggled with a lot of attention span issues.

After my best friend started using tiktok a few years back, she very quickly developed almost all of these symptoms. She would spend hours every day on tiktok and forget to text me. She would be distracted so easily to the point where it was so hard to hold a coherent conversation with her. She suddenly out of nowhere came out as they/them and bisexual even though about a year before this she would say these things were silly and made no sense. She would start having these weird tics but insist they weren’t tics because she’s not “following the trend”.

I still love her and she is still my best friend but she has changed so dramatically after she started using tiktok. I tried confronting her several times about it and saying that I’m pretty sure it’s tiktok that is having a negative affect on her but every time she would get so defensive and say I was wrong. It’s so frustrating. But what can you do? 🙁

As always, thank you for the video, Sydney. This was a difficult one for me to watch; I couldn’t do it in one sitting. TikTok irritates me so badly that I just… can’t…

One of the things that drives me absolutely nuts these days – how this video isn’t really saying anything that we don’t already know / shouldn’t be bloody obvious, and yet TikTok *still* keeps growing and growing in popularity.

I swear, humans are just so many lemmings running for the nearest cliff.

I like the mother complaining about her 3 kids on TikTok, yet it’s most likely she’s the one that introduced the vapid app to them in the first place.

A friend of mine got sucked into TikTok. We even got into an argument when I commented on how addictive it is, her defending it like her new vice… There are funny videos on there sometimes that she shares but I get concerned that’s all she does. Social media has really bred this “vulnerable” narcissist behavior. It would be fascinating to look deeper into it…… but I’d also love to avoid too many doom pills.

I remember going out into the woods and rivers with dad learning how to catch a fish, clean a fish, build a shelter, start a fire and fire a rifle. And I eventually took off myself to go do those things and it became an addiction. An addiction my mom was actually proud of. Every weekend when I was living with my folks, I would grab my gear, my 22 and fishing pole, and all I had to do was say, “see ya Sunday Mom!” And she’d say be safe, she knew what I was going to go do. 😂 the woods and river is my happy place!!!

I don’t use TikTok and never have, but find the digital dementia thing very worrying. I spend plenty of time following nature and travel accounts on Instagram (adding some beauty to each day — North Texas is great, but not beautiful). There’s a bit of doom-scrolling when it comes to US and world affairs. I watch YT a lot. I’m a designer in the digital space and suspect now that it’s not just TikTok that can give you TikTok brain.

Fun fact:
With principle and self responsibility, you’re immune.
Pass it on to your kids.

You know … a fair bit of my childhood was “pre-internet”, and listening to you talk about the downsides of TikTok sure reminded me a lot of how my mom viewed TV in general. Me and my brother were allowed to play Nintendo, but within time limits. During the week, we had to read X amount to earn Y amount of game time. Weekends I think we got double the returns or something. Anyway, we were never allowed to watch regular TV. We could do movies, but cable? Nope. That wasn’t a thing in our house. “It’ll rot your brain out”. I remember as I got a little older I started to see a big difference between the other kids and us and how they about couldn’t function without a TV. Then as I hit early adulthood, everybody in my generation couldn’t fathom being without a TV and it was always on. Then the phone and youtube generations hit, and now here we are at the TikTok generation.

So is TikTok bad? Yes. I agree 100% it’s a messed up concept. Is it worse than cable TV? I honestly don’t think so. I think the only difference is it’s availability. Screens have been feeding us trash since they were created. TikTok just figured out how to feed it faster. If people had a shred of personal responsibility in them, these things wouldn’t be near the problem they are.

So, story time! I downloaded TikTok back in 2019 because I had a bunch of coworkers constantly making jokes and references to it that I didn’t understand and I wanted to know what was up. I had previously thought it to be dumb and I had never been a Vine person either. Fast forward a couple of years and if I ever opened the app, I’d be sucked in for like 5-6 hours. (Btw, I was 26 back then and I’m a woman.) I was fine at first but then I got SO addicted and when lockdown happened, it only got so much worse.
Last summer, I had had enough of social media. Not only was I wasting hours upon hours on it, but I was BORED of it. I truly took no more enjoyment from it, and I recognised that I was watching other people live their lives more than I was living my own. I also recognised that I had a severe addiction to my phone- I would grab it and look at it all the time, even if I had no reason to look at it. It got so bad when I realised this that two moments stood out to me- I once grabbed my phone to look at social media when I was cooking and only had maybe 10 seconds to wait for something, so I pretty much had no time to even look at my phone yet I still did, and I frequently grabbed it to scroll when I was /brushing my teeth./ What a nightmare!!

So I went on a social media cleanse and one of the first things I did was delete TikTok entirely. I didn’t just delete the app- I deleted my account, full stop. (I will say before I did this, I tried to make a second TikTok account and it kept banning me whenever I tried to edit my profile photo. So I would argue they’re cracking down on some weird things…)
And quite frankly, doing this cleanse was one of the BEST decisions of my life.
I just thought I’d gain back valuable time and improve my attention span, because it was shot after being so addicted to TikTok. I could hardly focus and I realised this when I’d get bored from listening to YouTube videos, which is a form of entertainment I love whilst I do other things. I also was not reading back then but I did want to get back into it. (Last year, I read a total of 6 books and this year, I’ve read one so far!)
But what I really gained was a sense of peace. I no longer feel this anxious need to watch everyone’s stories or keep up with all their posts. I found a nice balance of posting my own things and also consuming others’ content but in moderation. I still have strict time limits for them (thanks LeechBlock!) and I recently redownloaded Insta since it’s really the only platform I enjoy. Twitter stresses me out too much, everyone is just miserable on there so I will literally check notifications and then leave.

I didn’t think I was self comparing to everyone I saw online, but I was doing it subconsciously and it all just … melted away after a couple of months spent offline. I have had severe depression since I was 13 and I’ve been working hard at it the last couple of years, and I cannot begin to tell you how much being offline has helped it. I never thought that would be the case but it just allows you so much quiet and peace and alone time. I still enjoy YouTube, I hop onto my socials and Discord most days for a couple of minutes to check up on things, but overall, I’m spending less time on social media and more time being happier in my real life. :o) Also, even as an avid lifelong gamer, I’ve begun to find gaming boring too lol! I still game a bit but I just realised how some games I was addicted to yet took no joy in it. So I’ve begun to cull that down more and more and I can’t begin to tell you how much more fulfilling it is now and how much happier I am creating art and reading.
Cal Newton has some great talks about this but I began to love being bored again. It’s just nice to sit in silence and let your mind wander, it’s nice to go outside and be in nature. The ‘touch grass’ joke is so much more relevant and important than people realise, I think. I do actually fear for children these days. My nephew and niece were bad but they’re adults now, I am scared for the youngsters. I can’t imagine how hard it must be to parent nowadays. I think more people need to seriously get offline and I think we’re seeing that trend begin as well.

My best friend is 25. We’ve been friends since we were 5. She’s always been a trend follower and into celebrities and popular things and I always thought she was so cool for knowing about pop culture. We see each other about 1-2 times a year (we are in different states now) and don’t really text each other much. She’s very into kpop and I let her show me all the cool songs that have come out when she comes to visit. Since she got into tiktok about 2 years ago, it’s almost scary seeing her habits of scrolling through the app, it’s like she’s a zombie. She’s also started taking depression medication and vaping/using marijuana, and saying she has such and such mental disability, that she’s bi. She is in LA, of course.
I am very much the opposite to her, but we are still best friends.
I also want to add that when I told her I’m not vaccinated at all her response was not “you’re putting everyone at risk” it was more “how did you manage to travel and do regular things in life” (because of the restrictions)

Never been a fan of social media, and I’m 22, so you can imagine my irritation with my peers lol. Twitter was always full of mean people, snapchat was mostly for women, Instagram was shallow, Facebook was lacking in privacy, and Reddit was filled with more mean people except this time they were nerds. TikTok never really appealed to me, even when it wasn’t called TikTok. The constant scrolling seemed like a trap. Because it is. Our brains love this meaningless 10 second content.

My ex girlfriend loved this crap, thought that if I really cared about her then spending time with her didn’t always mean talking, or watching a movie, or kissing, it meant watching TikTok together. But not for 10 minutes, for 30, for an hour. Sometimes longer. I hated it. Not only was it curated specifically for her, and thus, didn’t attract me. It was absolutely draining. I just wanted to do something REAL. Even if that meant playing a videogame, which used to be the least real thing you could do. Mario Kart brought us together and we’d laugh, but she traded our relationship for an app.

I mean it makes a lot of sense. The dumber and fatter we get and the more distrust, misinformation, and infighting we experience here in the US, the easier it is to control us or even defeat us. It’s so saddening to see how the newer generations are so absorbed by their phones and social media, and how our attention spans have diminished so greatly. I’ll be 25 in a week, but I have trouble getting off YouTube, it’s all I do now tbh. But Im not completely sucked in as I’ve stopped using my social media accounts altogether except for when I go on them every now and then. But I can say that I’ve ALWAYS been against TikTok. At first I thought it was just dumb, but now I know it’s a plague.

I am an old school mama, who doesn’t allow my children to have social media, and I limit daily screen time. I make my kids go outside and I have daily reading time. My kids hear about tik tok and ask about it, but I tell them “unfortunately, there is some adult content on that platform, so I don’t want us to use that.”
I don’t even have it myself, so they know I’m consistent.
Their innocence is FAR more important to me, and I will protect it with all that I have while they are young and under my care.

I was literally talking about this with my 10 year old this morning! The gifted program has 5 kids in her whole grade…which is weird to me because when I was a kid we had 3 times that amount and my school was smaller. I also do not remember the types of things that happen in her class happening in my class. I was telling her tiktok was rotting their brains amd that’s the problem and I was serious! She nvr takes me seriously and thinks I’m paranoid. But shes gonna thank me in the future!

I never once installed an app and got the urge to do stupid dances, horrible lip-sync videos or outright cry my eyes out in full public. I think I’m too old to ever understand this mass psychosis happening.

Trying to understand is like banging your head against the wall – it only hurts.

I get really internally angry when I’m out in public and see kids in prams with technology. How are they supposed to learn how to function in society when they see none of it?? They should be touching, looking, interacting, and getting boundaries set like not running around pulling stuff off shelves, annoying other people ect! It hurts my brain 🤬

Sidney’s vids are definitely getting better and more thought engaging . Entertaining and well thought out. Good to see her grow.