Forest zone. A blazing flame. Snow falling little by little. This is my happy place. However, that’s not out my window. It’s on TikTok.
For months, I’ve been “teaching” TikTok to serve this content. People, usually men, build handmade shelters in the wilderness. Most of them are super-fast time-lapses that start with a hole in the ground, an axe, and a pile of wood. Once I saw a man build a hobbit hole that looked like an entrance to the Dune Sandworm. I went through TikToks of outdoor cast iron cooking, which led me to TikToks of cabins in the woods. And I don’t want to leave. Of course, you might have to.
No one knows what will happen to TikTok in the coming weeks. Back in April, US President Joe Biden ordered the app’s owner, ByteDance, to sell TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or be blocked. I signed a bill mandating this. TikTok has filed a lawsuit, and the Supreme Court is currently scheduled to hear the case on January 10th and rule on whether the law violates the right to freedom of expression by the deadline.
So for a while now, I’m going to be watching TikToks where I build every shed I can.
Let’s be real, I would do this anyway. Social media distancing has practically become a holiday tradition, and with only 11 days left in 2024, watching TikTok, scrolling through Bluesky, or skimming Instagram is a must. , is the best way to reset your brain. However, TikTok has this as a rule. Subgenres on the platform, such as animal fostering TikTok and furniture repair TikTok, remain among the most effective forms of spiritual healing.
Even if TikTok becomes popular, there is no guarantee that my FYP will continue to provide survival content like the forest. While TikTok remains primarily a platform for pop culture junk food and lip-syncing videos, more Americans are turning to it as a new source of information. Since 2020, the percentage of adults who regularly get news from platforms has increased from 3% to 17%, according to the Pew Research Center. “None of the social media platforms we studied showed such rapid growth,” the study authors wrote in the News.
