Why TikTok gives people existential angst

I’ve discovered the reason why the thought of becoming a TikTok creator fills me with dread. If you are over the age of 40, I bet that your aversion to TikTok—if you have one—is rooted in the same fetid soil. This angst is something more than the typical antipathy toward social media. It’s caused by none other than the spectre of death itself, whose reflection is clearest in the shiny pointlessness of TikTok.

Here’s why I have been obsessing about this topic as of late. Several friends have told me that I would be the perfect person to join TikTok. I identify as a funny person, have a history of producing silly videos, and am currently trying to gain social media traction to promote my writing endeavours. It’s a sentiment echoed by my publisher’s publicity team. Recently, I spent a few days attempting to envision myself as one of the millions of TikTokers churning out share-worthy video content in an attempt to increase my notoriety.  And I felt nothing but revulsion.

But why? On paper, TikTok should be exactly the kind of thing I enjoy. A chance for science communication in combination with bite-sized comedy shtick; my two favourite things. There are thousands of examples of science folks producing amazing content on TikTok, like the young shark scientist Jaida Elcock who provides bite-sized shark and animal facts. TikTok is lauded as an effective form of science outreach. Some scientists are not just singing the praises of TikTok but actively encouraging all scientists to get on it ASAP. And yet, I hesitate.

At first, I thought the problem was that I was simply too old for TikTok—that this was a young-person’s game. I sympathize with Andy Samberg who is not joining TikTok because he didn’t want “to be the old guy at the club”. For me and Andy, joining TikTok would be the equivalent of a middle-aged Steve Buscemi with a skateboard on his back trying to blend in with high-schoolers in a “how do you do, fellow kids” kind of way.

But there are plenty of old-scientist-types on TikTok, and they do not seem remotely out-of-place. The king of middle-aged science curmudgeons, Neil deGrasse Tyson, is on TiKTok telling dad jokes FFS. And he has millions of followers. Clearly, the young-ish demographic of TikTok has no problem letting a few old dogs into the party, and there’s no reason for me to avoid it because of my age. In fact, 30% of TikTok users are over the age of 40, so while it is a platform dominated by youth (25% of users are under the age of 19), there are plenty of Gen-Xers and Boomers burning up the TikToks. In any event, it’s not the age thing per se that generates the existential angst that I’m talking about.

Nor is it that I am bothered by the putative negative impacts that TikTik has on the (mental) health of the youth. There’s plenty of pearl-clutching about this subject, including a “study” from the Wall Street Journal that suggested that “TikTok can quickly drive teenagers, who are one of the biggest users of the app, into a rabbit hole of videos showing sex and drugs.”

But when compared to other forms of social media, TikTok is quite innocent. This study from last year found that TikTok has no negative impact on the well-being of users (i.e., their reported satisfaction with life and general positive mood). In fact, TikTok has become one of the major ways that youth are able to both talk about their mental health struggles with their peers and receive scientifically accurate information about mental health disorders. Dr. Kojo Sarfo is a nurse practitioner and psychotherapist with 1.9 million followers on TikTok. His mental health tips and advice are gobbled up by TikTok, where one in seven of the world’s youth (aged 10 to 17) suffer from a mental health disorder including depression and anxiety. TikTok is actually helping people be happier, so there’s no reason it should be giving me existential angst. So why does it?

One of the things TikTok does objectively poorly—and a reason anyone should give it the side-eye—is the way it rewards its content creators for the content they create. The social media juggernaut known as Hank Green recently posted a YouTube video explaining exactly how TikTok manages to screw its creators out of money through its self-serving creator fund, which is dispersing less money to creators as the platform grows more popular.

But since I wasn’t considering being a TikTok creator for the money, this problem is not my problem. My problem has always been death.

Humans, you see, are unique in that we are the only species that fully understands the inevitably of our own deaths. Almost all animal species can conceive of and fear death, as the philosopher Susana Monsó has elegantly argued in a series of articles and her recent book. But while animals might understand death, they are not necessarily able to imagine a far-future scenario in which they themselves are actually dead, nor comprehend that this is an inescapable fact. That kind of death wisdom is unique to our species.

It is this death wisdom that has given our species the drive to produce personal, cultural, and societal things that help us exert some control over our mortality. We long to create things that will outlive us, so that our lives seem meaningful. Ernest Becker famous dubbed these things “causa sui projects” or “immortality projects” as they would later be known. His Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death described the myriad kinds of immortality projects that humans create when contemplating our mortality; everything from the nations that we build to the children that we sire. But even the little things that we create could fall under the heading of immortality projects, like the macaroni and cheese recipe that we write down for our kids, or the poem that we read during open mic night down at the pub. If I am feeling introspective or tipsy, I often come to the conclusion that my own desire to write books is nothing more than an attempt to create something that will outlive me—a sturdy object that could sit on a shelf for a few centuries and bring pleasure to my great-grandchildren long after I am dead.

Which is exactly why TikTok bugs me. It feels like a waste of time to be a TikTok creator. And the reason for this is simple: TikTok videos are designed to be consumed in the moment and then forgotten about. You’re not supposed to re-visit them 20 years later and reminiscence about how meaningful they were to you when you were younger, like you might do with a battered copy of The Hunger Games. TikTok vids produce 15 seconds of joy, and then disappear into the ether of the upward swipe for all eternity. They are the most fleeting kind of online content out there; the antithesis of an immortality project. YouTube videos, on the other hands, are supposed to stick around and be enjoyed for years to come. But TikToks? They are the perfect metaphor for the human lifespan; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The thought of me sinking my energy into creating video after video that has—by design—no shelf-life at all, well, it just… fills me with unhappiness. If you’re prone to these kinds of existential thoughts, then I suspect that you too are repulsed by the thought of TikTok for similar reasons, even if you hadn’t thought about it like this before. It is the spectre of my own death that I see reflected in the blackness of my iPhone screen whenever my thumb threatens to open the TikTok app. I just don’t have the emotional resilience for it right now.

Of course, this too shall pass. It’s winter here in Canada. A bleak time. Much darkness. Much cold. And the Omicron virus still swirls in the air; an invisible reminder of what awaits us all in the end.

But soon it will be spring. The dandelions will poke through the snow. The sun will hang longer in the sky, warming our bodies and our souls. And maybe, just maybe, you will see me on TikTok by summer.