TikTok is getting banned. I promise you’ll be okay

Brainrot isn’t cool, it never was.

Will the end of days be foretold by an Earth underwater, or the sun turned black and red, or the inability to take a shit without looking at a screen?

I quit Instagram for New Year’s and I don’t miss doomscrolling.

Okay, so I didn’t quit it completely. I’ve been logging in on my laptop to keep up with group chats, watch Stories, and go through my feed. Most updates regard sort-of-friend’s little sister’s last semesters of college and the like, to which I’m more than happy to receive. I think I’ve cracked the code to a positive Instagram experience: using social media for the sole purpose of socializing.

Even so, I would never deny myself the pleasure of looking at the memes that pop up on my feed. People are funny and I like to laugh. But, and this is really the point of it all, the Instagram Reels tab has remained unclicked-on.

I deleted TikTok at least a year and a half ago for the same reasons that I deleted Instagram two weeks ago; I was spending way too much time consuming the short form content that was being fed to me. When I transitioned to Instagram’s version, I figured it’d be easier to log off since the algorithm hadn’t yet adapted to my preferences, tastes, and personality. That worked out alright until it absolutely didn’t.

It wasn’t long before one, two, and then three hours of my day were starting to go by like poof, zap. My time was gone forever and all I had to show for it were eyes glazed over, a slackened jaw, and drool dripping onto my chin.

I used to joke that screen time before bed was one of my favorite hobbies. It’s a passion!, I quipped. Of course for a joke to be funny, it has to be, in part, true.

And it was! There is something insanely comforting about wrapping myself up in my sheets, pulling my comforter over my head, and consuming several hours worth of thirty second videos in the dark.

Nights spent with my phone held inches away from my nose were followed by days where a low humming buzz of aggravation constituted my baseline. I’d feel like a rubber band pulled taught and reverberating with a foul energy smelling of anxiety, stress, and ill-humor about nothing. I feared that a state of vexation was my default.

However my predispositions may make me, I figured there was probably something connected to the brainrot of it all. The daily frying off of dopamine receptors was bound to catch up with me at some point. I thought I’d experiment with detox therapy.

Several times a day I’ll catch myself compulsively, absent-mindedly, picking up my phone to open Instagram before remembering that I’ve deleted it. Instead, I’m forced to look up, take stock of my surroundings, and drop into my body. It’s about as woo-woo as any phrase can be, but it’s been good for me.

On a January 1st flight back to Spain from Berlin, sitting with my back straight in the middle seat of a RyanAir flight, I felt overwhelmed with overstimulation. Babies were crying, flight attendants were shuffling people still drunk from the night before into seats, bags were being slammed into bins and rearranged directly overhead. Not to mention the raging hangover. Unable to distract myself with my screen, all I could do was let myself feel it.

And it felt like a return to humanhood.

People are genuinely freaking out about the TikTok ban. I get it. For the past five years it’s been a way to decompress after a long day, to learn something new, and to have fun.

A dear friend of mine argued that people who let brainrot get to them is because they don’t have self control. I do think personal responsibility is a big factor in shaping your interaction with these apps. But the issue is just that: the format of these apps makes it really hard to be responsible.

Humans are pleasure-seeking, habit-forming creatures by nature. And when habits become habitual they begin to feel natural (even if staying on the toilet to scroll after you’ve done your business is entirely unnatural).

I’m worried for us. People are preemptively downloading competitor platform “RedNote,” mainly used by Mandarin-speaking audiences, to soothe the scrolling itch (and also to spite American owned companies).

It should be noted that the U.S. government doesn’t give a shit about whether we’re dumb and lazy or not, and the reason they’re deleting TikTok is for fear that the Chinese will own our data, as if the American elite (Zuckerburg) don’t already. But maybe we can use it as an opportunity to take our power back.

I’m worried that we’re not going to be able to do anything unless the code is written for it. A TikTok ban might be exactly what we needed.

We’ve forgotten what putting actual effort into our lives feels like. We’re forgetting how to let ourselves be.

We forget that it can be nice over here, in the real world.