TikTok is Ruining Your Life

And that goes for reels, shorts, and the like

When TikTok was getting big, I didn’t really understand the hype.

Everywhere I looked people were scrolling away on TikTok.

I would see kids with their parents at the grocery store or mall, doing these random dances, and had no idea what it was.

It was a few years of TikTok being popular before I finally downloaded it… and I immediately understood what was going on.

As I scrolled I could literally feel my brain lighting up from all the novelty and stimulation.

After about 10 minutes of that, I deleted it and committed to never using the app again. I could feel how addictive it was, and I wanted no part of it.

Crisis averted.

That is, until they added Reels to Instagram, and Shorts to Facebook and Youtube.

Now this short form, highly stimulating, mind numbing content was everywhere, and just avoiding it was no longer a viable option.

But maybe I was wrong… Is rapid fire, short form content really that bad?

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The Destruction of your Attention

It didn’t take much digging to discover that TikTok (when I say TikTok I’m including all kinds of similar content) affects our brain negatively.

For one, it wrecks our attention span.

I mean, if you’re still reading this blog it’s basically a miracle in our day and age.

All these 15-30 second clips are destroying our ability to focus on any one concept or idea for very long.

You watch a 30 second video on gardening, followed by a 15 second clip of some girl dancing, followed by a cooking video, followed by… you get it.

The complete randomness of the content encourages us to jump from idea to idea, concept to concept, the second we get bored.

Very few people read books these days, and more people are forgoing long form content in favor of the shorter version.

It’s like this quote from Naval Ravikant:

People have become suckers for TL;DRs. “Don’t give me the lecture, give me the book. Don’t give me the book, give me the blog post. Don’t give me the blog post, give me the tweet. Don’t give me the tweet, I already know!”

Short form content makes us want our information as fast and easy as possible… or not at all.

If we can’t focus on a single idea for more than a few seconds or minutes at a time, how can we understand anything deeply?

The Death of Boredom

Boredom is amazing.

When my daughter was about 3 or 4 years old, she started with the “I’m bored” thing.

What that meant to her is “I want to watch a tablet, a phone, TV”… basically easy entertainment.

But her Mom and I were committed to not just slapping an iPad in front of her and calling it a day.

So we would encourage her to find things to do, and the results honestly amazed me (I’m her Dad so of course I’m a biased party)

She would:

• Make crafts out of random things like tape, play-doh, tissues, and paper.

• Use a tape measure to measure things around the house.

• Build houses with her legos.

• Do her makeup.

• Color and draw different pictures from imagination.

It was great to see her get bored, realize there was no easy way out of the boredom, and then come up with fun things to do.

Back to our TikTok discussion… there is NO boredom when it comes to our phones.

The second we feel a tinge of boredom, we can whip out our phone and start scrolling. Especially with forms of content like TikTok, we have an endless stream of content that ensures we’re never bored again.

The thing is, boredom is essential to coming up with new, creative, original ideas.

If you never sit alone with your thoughts and really explore what’s in your mind, you’re operating at the surface of your intellect, and your thoughts and ideas will be shallow… unexplored.

Not only that, but it makes it extremely hard to sit down and do something that requires concentration and effort.

Again, most people these days don’t and/or can’t read books. They get a page or two in, and they’re already itching for the phone.

“Well let me just check my email/socials real quick”

Next thing you know that novel on your desk is collecting dust while your screen time is on the rise.

There’s a saying they’d tell us in the military: “You’ve gotta train like you fight”.

If you constantly distract yourself, but think when it comes to the important stuff you’re going to be able to concentrate… you’re mistaken.

If you train your brain for distraction, even when you need to focus you won’t know how.

We have to train our focus like our work depends on it… because it does.

Leave It Behind

I could go on and on about the issues with TikTok.

• It makes it impossible to get meaningful work done, because it feels so much better to just scroll.

• It directly correlates to a decrease in mental health (as does most social media).

• It restructures the developing brain in harmful ways.

We wouldn’t hand our kids a pack of cigarettes and say “go wild”, but that’s basically what you’re doing if you hand your kid a phone unsupervised and let them scroll their life away.

And we certainly shouldn’t do it to ourselves either.

“TikTok Brain” became a saying for a reason… it’s real.

Everywhere you look there are people drowning in the endless stream of content. Using it to escape any momentary unhappiness, boredom, or discomfort.

What we’re left with is a generation of people with the attention span of a fruit fly, who are utterly addicted to their phone and don’t even realize it.

My recommendation here is a simple one — delete the app.

Unless you make a substantial amount of money using it, just delete it.

And as for all the other apps with their version of TikTok, avoid the feature as much as possible.

Do that for a few weeks and you’ll be amazed how much you can improve your concentration, mood, and the flood of new ideas you’ll start to get when your brain isn’t in a constant state of overstimulation.

They say we’re in the “Attention Economy”…

Our attention is the product, and it’s being stolen from us everywhere we look.

There’s nothing wrong with giving your attention to entertainment, but do it intentionally.

Otherwise, you might find that all this social media is taking a lot more from you than you think.

Thanks for reading,

– Josh