20251015
I woke up early today and walked around the neighborhood. Nothing beats the cold morning breeze and the sunlight peeking through the leaves. I never realized how much I love the mornings until Chev and I realized we're both morning people!
I got hooked on TikTok over the past couple of days, and now I'm slowly starting to feel the negative effects. The main reason why I got on it in the first place was the recipes that I wanted to recreate. One thing led to another, I fell into the rabbit hole and stumbled upon some photography and scrapbooking content, which inspired me to create and upload my own. I got some sort of excitement whenever someone liked my post. Wow, validation from strangers! Now, I want to make more! The algorithm has also consistently fed me content where people are said to be earning just by posting or even just scrolling. That's it, I'm going to make it my goal to be TikTok famous and finally be financially comfortable!
Good god, the people behind making this app addictive are on some other level!
To be honest, I really enjoyed creating part of it. I get in the zone and lose track of time, you know, the flow state type of thing. I guess that the negative part of this is the feeling of losing some sort of agency over my attention, how I spend my time, or even what to think. Kind of like being tricked or lured without me noticing!
And that is the reason why I deleted the app for now. I previously talked about wanting to document my life better, and I thought I could do it on TikTok because of the creator communities on there. Seeing other people's work inspired me to share my own. I got curious about this phenomenon, so I looked it up. It seems like everything I wrote above is a common experience of users!
I don't know if I'll keep making content there. But what is clear to me is how this is part of a bigger attention economy, and I'm concerned about the long-term negative impacts of this on our society, especially in the current digital age.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this!