TikTok Scrolling Is Damaging My Self-Trust
If I feel particularly indecisive, I open my TikTok. Then, I swipe through videos until I find one that at all resonates with the situation. I like the video and then continue scrolling. Repeat.
Eventually, one of the videos will tell me what to do. Or, so I think. Soon after, I attempt to apply this decision and often fail — so I go back on TikTok, begging the algorithm to iterate my life into perfection. It doesn’t.
As a millennial who remembers my “analog existence” (Princess Nokia, Smart Girl Club Radio,) I end up turning to a proven resource: silent sitting meditation. I anchor with my breath and find stillness in my body, sitting crosslegged on the floor of my apartment. I set a timer and allow the joy of having nothing that I need to do until I hear the gentle sounds of the timer. And then, five minutes after I end my angel number, 2 minute and 22 second meditation… I open TikTok. Just to make sure I found the right answer.
My false-reliance on TikTok for problem solving is slowly incapacitating my own self-trust. The other day, I used another typical millennial trick to source an answer from my subconscious. Before bed, I engaged in a silent self-dialogue:
“Hi subconscious! How are you?”
“Good!” (← my subconscious)
“I was wondering; could you please give me dreams tonight to show me if this guy is actually good for me? Like, we’ve been friends for a while and I just want to know, for once and or all, if it’s time to say goodbye?”
That night, my dream world answered in abundance. I went, scene by scene, through each way in which this particular guy was not healthy for me and how we could never date successfully. There were scenes, in first person, where I experienced being dismissed, betrayed, deceived, and beyond. Over time, in my waking-life, I had gathered sufficient data (consciously and unconsciously) to know what’s right for me. From myself and within myself, I had achieved the full capacity for effective decision making within this situation — without TikTok!
Yet, a day later, I was scrolling once again. My “For You Page” is an endless stream of self-help, femininity, predictive spirituality (“readings,”) philosophy, and psychology. This set of themes is precisely the content that makes me doubt my own ability of discernment-without-outside-input. I am being trained into reliance upon outside ‘help’ — upon an algorithm that sorts short videos from humans across the globe (well, mostly the U.S.) as a source of information, above my own mind and body. And, as I scrolled, I thought twice. “Maybe I was wrong?” “Maybe my dreams were somehow based in gendered bias?”
The cruel irony is that TikTok has impact my subconscious, too. Thus — in a sick and internet-y paradox — my decision making ability is potentially more flawed (even in my dreams!) because of my increasing dependance on the input of the algorithm. This is, unfortunately, not a science fiction short story. This is an informal essay about my current-day experience with the psychological self-distrust created by an app on my phone. As a neurodiverse, relatively healthy, and relatively educated 30 year old woman, I am losing my ability to believe myself about almost anything… in direct correlation with my TikTok usage.
Above my own intuition, I have begun to turn to TikTok for problem solving. This is not only reckless, but actively disconnecting me from my own experience of the truth. Ultimately, relying on TikTok for help with making choices in my life, particularly social choices, is an act of radically harmful disembodiment. My relationship to my own mind is being permuted by endlessly available sound and movement from a screen. My five-senses are losing value as self-sourced data, in favor of advice or predictions from strangers (further sifted through an algorithmic curation).
If this is not your experience, then you have found a form of willpower that still evades me. Or, maybe, you have a manner of avoiding indecision in the first place: my own ongoing propensity for feeling confused and rushed to understand the world around me has pushed me faster toward TikTok for answers. Maybe I would avoid this supposed problem solving ‘resource’ if I experienced more abundant self-assurance to begin with.
Unfortunately, I am not putting forth a solution. Nor is this parody; I am merely documenting my own experience of diminishing self-directive capacities in relation to my misuse of TikTok. This is perhaps nothing more than an alert. But, don’t let this create doubt in you. The best decision making skill is to stick to one choice, believe it’s fine, and then see how it turns out and evolve from there. Personally, that methodological process has been inhibited by TikTok, maybe by my use of social media as a whole. Because of TikTok, my life feels increasingly and almost painfully more elaborate. In the words of a boyfriend I had when I was 20, “nothing gets better or worse, it just gets more complex.” (To be fair, he was quoting his dad.)
Self-doubt has crept in like a guaranteed accompaniment to my scrolling, posting, deleting, commenting, liking, and views. Behind the glow of my phone screen lurks an increasing threat: the disembodiment and distrust of my sensory, three-dimensional human experience. This, after all, is the greatest aspect of being human in the first place. What’s more, the experience of embodied living is one thing that the algorithm cannot know. Not yet.
