What Happened When an Extremely Offline Person Tried TikTok

For this week’s Infinite Scroll column, Cal Newport is filling in for Kyle Chayka.

In 2013, I wrote a blog post titled “Why I Never Joined Facebook.” Social media had grown so ubiquitous that I felt obligated to justify my abstention; I pointed out that I didn’t need it because it didn’t solve any actual problems in my life. The post prompted an energetic discussion in the comments section, leading to a series of follow-up essays in which I tried to rebut the arguments for platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. “Fear of missing out . . . is not a valid argument for trashing what you already have,” I observed in one earnest passage. In 2016, I consolidated my ideas into a book chapter called “Quit Social Media,” and, when I adapted them into a TEDx talk and a Times op-ed, both went viral.

I had upset many techno-optimists. The technology writer and researcher Alexandra Samuel, for example, joined me on a radio show and said, “I think it’s far more useful to ask yourself how this incredibly powerful medium can actually support you in your own personal goals.” But things changed after the 2016 election, one of many unsettling upheavals shaped in part by social media. Public opinion gradually turned against big-tech platforms, and my offline status no longer seemed so alarming. I moved on, happily disconnected from whatever the world’s five billion social-media users were doing with their online lives.

Then, last month, I had surgery and found myself at home for several weeks, recovering. Seeking something both interesting and relatively undemanding to occupy my time, I began revisiting my decade-old arguments for quitting social media and wondering how much they still applied. I was particularly interested in TikTok, which launched in 2017 and quickly displaced Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for many young people. It caught my attention because it was so common among the college students I teach, and the Supreme Court was in the process of deciding whether the U.S. should be allowed to ban it—or else force its Chinese owners to sell. (A ruling will be released any day now.) So I took a step that would have nauseated an earlier version of myself: I downloaded the TikTok app, while I still could, to find out what all the fuss was about.

When I sign in for the first time, TikTok asks me to choose my interests from a long list illustrated by cheerful emojis. I select “Life Hacks,” “Science and Education,” and “Sports.” Then I’m off. The first video shows the Clemson University baseball team playing an exhibition game against the Savannah Bananas, a professional touring squad. The Clemson infield, for some inscrutable reason, starts dancing. I swipe up. A new video begins, showing someone selecting shoes at a store. The video is only ten seconds long; by the time I’ve finished jotting down some notes, it has already started replaying. I hastily swipe again. The next video plays tranquil music while a car slowly drives toward Yosemite National Park. The algorithm must have noticed that I lingered on the wintry scene: the next video shows someone sweeping snow off a porch with some kind of rotating broom contraption. Then the feed takes a darker turn, which makes me want to scroll even faster. I see a news story about a person being pushed onto subway tracks in Manhattan—swipe—a Trump video set to ominous music—swipe—“Top 15 Most Ghetto High Schools in New Jersey”—swipe—and someone making fun of a server’s accent in a restaurant. I shut down the app.

The velocity of the clips and the rawness of their emotion is breathtaking. I immediately feel old, like a grandparent encountering a smartphone for the first time. What I notice most, though, is TikTok’s lack of obvious purpose. In a 2013 blog post called “Why I’m (Still) Not Going to Join Facebook,” I described a common argument in favor of legacy social media: that it “makes it possible to maintain lightweight, high-frequency contact with a large number of people.” This is clearly not the function of TikTok, which does not revolve around following friends or posting updates about one’s life. When I first signed up, the app didn’t even require me to pick a username; it asked only for my phone number and birthday. According to Pew Research, the typical TikTok user never adds information to their account’s “bio” field. They’re happy to remain anonymous consumers of content. (I’d later learn that many people share TikToks via texts or instant messages.)

My blog post also considered the once sacrosanct idea that social media provides important “professional benefits.” After I wrote my Times piece, the paper went so far as to publish a rebuttal from Patrick Gillooly, then the director of digital communications and social media at Monster, a Web site for recruiters and job seekers. “As someone who spends the majority of his work time on social media helping people find careers they’ll love, I disagree with his assessment,” Gillooly said of my piece. “I believe that you should not quit social media—and that doing so will actually damage your career.” Does anyone other than TikTok influencers think that TikTok is somehow beneficial to their career? The opposite possibility, that a social post could get you fired, might be more likely. (Fittingly, videos about getting fired for posting on TikTok are a popular genre on TikTok.)

Then there’s the once popular argument that social media is an online “town square”—that a Twitter trend, a widely read Facebook post, or an Instagram meme can become a locus of collective conversation. Some legacy platforms, most notably X, still cling to this notion, but TikTok and Reels, the part of Instagram that spotlights short-form video, don’t seem to care about shared experiences. Some videos might get viewed millions of times, but, in general, feeds are customized by each user’s individualized curation algorithm. My encounters with dancing baseball players and rotating snow brooms were not grist for the mill of public discussion; this experience was unique to me.

I found these realizations dislocating. A decade ago, I understood the arguments in favor of social media, even if I didn’t always agree with them. But I was learning that I had no idea what fuels its current appeal. Seeking clarity, I called Zack, a twenty-four-year-old former student of mine. I had a simple question for him: why?

“I use it pretty much exclusively either to view content that my friends have shared with me,” Zack tells me, “or to look for content to share with my friends and family.” As if on cue, he’s interrupted by a text message from a friend. It links to a TikTok video, which he forwards to me. The clip, which is captioned “Always ready,” opens with a shot of feet on a bedroom carpet, along with the text: “Golf: ‘buddy be ready by 8am.’ ” Expectant music plays as the feet walk toward what appears to be a sleeping figure on a bed. When a hand pulls back the covers, however, the camera suddenly pans up to reveal a young man standing on the bed in full golf attire, holding a club as though ready to swing. The text changes: “me at 7:59 am.” The music swells. Then it’s done. I’m shocked by how short it is.

“That’s it?” I ask.

“It’s funny!” Zack says.

He forwards me another TikTok that his brother enjoyed. It shows the Swiss national soccer team playing a match, along with the words, “Me explaining what toblerone is to someone that’s never had 1.” An announcer uses the phrase “neat little Swiss triangles.” Five seconds have passed; the video ends.

I sense that funny TikToks take on a special challenge: using visuals to encode as much information as possible in as little time as possible. For the viewer, there’s a joy in decoding them. Zack sends me a calculus gag: a man and a woman are on a date, having a drink. A caption floats above the woman: “I’ll change him.” Near her face is d/dx, the mathematical symbol for taking a derivative. Superimposed on the man is the function e^x. You have to have studied calculus to know that the derivative of e^x is itself e^x. I let out an audible chortle. Then I ask myself, How many people could possibly appreciate this? “That meme format also requires context to understand,” Zack says. “Very specific humor for a small subset of people.”

Sometimes when Zack hangs out with his brother, they’ll browse clips on TikTok. “We’ll watch them and laugh together,” he explains. His sister, however, is less interested in comedy than in getting glimpses of various activities. “I feel like I’m living in other peoples’ lives,” she recently told him.

I ask another of my students, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate named Lizzie, how she uses TikTok. She describes a sense of authenticity that comes with the democratic nature of the platform: “anyone can go viral.” She sends me a minute-long montage of soldiers coming home from deployment and surprising their kids, played against patriotic background music. It’s not a slick production, but it’s undeniably touching.

She also sends a TikTok that shows the making of a Caprese-style sandwich. Watching the basil getting crushed and the crusty bread being sliced is oddly hypnotic. But can someone actually follow these recipes, given how quickly they roll past? “People use them for relaxation and learning,” she says.

A decade ago, I viewed social media as Manichaean: these platforms could distract and mislead their users, but they could also topple dictators and enable free expression. These competing impulses have always been at war with each other. Serious thinkers have written articles and books about how to make social media a force for good, while critics such as Jaron Lanier, who wrote a 2018 book titled “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now,” expressed skepticism about that vision. But much of the content on TikTok, and on comparable services like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, borders on nihilism. It seems to revel in meaninglessness, sometimes even poking fun at the idea that a video should be useful. The most popular platforms are saying the quiet part out loud—that there is no deeply meaningful justification for their digital wares—and their users seem to understand and accept this new agreement. TikTok is “a gold mine for people with short attention spans who crave quick bursts of dopamine,” Lizzie told me. As if to underscore this point, she forwarded me a video of dog barks that sound like human speech. “I love you,” a blue-eyed husky mix appears to growl.

Somehow, this state of affairs seems less dangerous to me than the landscape a decade ago. In those days, I felt a strong cultural compulsion to use social media. I’ve written about how, at the time, arguments against such technologies were seen as not only eccentric but also problematic—a glitch in the matrix to be repaired. These pressures have largely dissipated. A platform like TikTok is too self-evidently trivial and proudly individualized to demand that everyone take part. Zack said that, if he stopped using the app tomorrow, “no one would notice.” At the same time, legacy platforms such as X and Facebook have grown politically polarized, fractured, and out of touch with the users who used to defend them. It’s difficult to remember a time when it was this easy to forgo social media.

To be sure, there is something disturbing about videos that are so effectively optimized to capture our attention. Social-media companies are still scarily good at persuading us to keep scrolling; TikTok reached a billion active monthly users faster than any of its competitors. And then there is the grim possibility raised by many lawmakers, that TikTok’s ubiquity on American phones poses a national-security threat from China. Still, the content I saw seemed less sinister than the tribalism, mobbing, and outrage-farming that has been so common on older platforms. Some of the videos were stupid, but in a weirdly comforting way; some were sneakily smart. It’s a form of concentrated escapism marketed to a weary generation that is only now reaching adulthood.

Strikingly, the young people I interviewed didn’t seem to harbor any particular loyalty to TikTok. Zack also uses Instagram Reels, which has emerged in recent years as his favorite TikTok clone. Indeed, during our conversation, he often forgot which platform first served him some specific clip that came to mind. (He sometimes browses YouTube Shorts, too, but he considers its algorithm less effective at surfacing material he really likes.) None of my sources offered a full-throated defense of today’s platforms, as so many commentators were eager to do a decade ago; yesterday’s techno-utopianism has been replaced by shoulder-shrugging amusement.

When I was finally able to get out of bed again, and my schedule once again began to fill up, I found I had no interest in continuing to use the apps I’d tested. Maybe the pace is just too fast; maybe the endless references and self-aware irony are too nimble for my middle-aged brain. I appreciate a good calculus joke, but I don’t need to see a dozen more; my kids need my attention, my back still hurts from surgery, and I have another college lecture to prepare. Someone else, someone younger, may have to write their own arguments for why they’ve never joined TikTok. Still, I found this new encounter with social media surprisingly heartening. When Zack told me that no one would care if he left TikTok, I asked how he himself would feel about quitting. He thought for a moment, then said, “I would probably forget about it in a short amount of time.” ♦