TikTok Never Ruined Anyone's Life

Scrolling isn't distracting you from some grand adventure, it's filling a void of inactivity. If you didn't waste time on your phone, you'd waste it watching TV. If not for TV, you'd do nothing.

I often see people complaining that TikTok or Twitter or some other outside force is making them worse, and I reject this framing. You’ll see or hear comments constantly, either as self-deprecating humor, or older generations complaining about how “kids these days don’t want to work,” not realizing that no one ever in all of history has wanted to work every waking moment. In actuality, the time we spend scrolling has little to no impact on the time we would be working. Humanity has a long and storied history of doing nothing, and finding wondrous new ways to do nothing.

Eris’ tweet is based on two incorrect assumptions: that her smartphone usage is making her worse, and that she would be filling her time with something more productive if smartphones didn’t exist. The reality is that regardless of how people spend their time, no one does anything. If it was twenty years ago, most people would be wasting time watching TV; if it was one hundred years ago, it would be radio. Of course, plenty of people still consume their days listening to music and watching shows, and the way people fill dead time will always evolve (even as I write this post I’m playing sudoku on my phone) but the reality is that it’s the same type of activity, or lack thereof.

I also disagree with the implication that reading or TV is inherently better than scrolling short form content, there are countless low quality novels out there that you can read without getting anything from the experience. While long form media gives the illusion of not frying one’s attention span, I find this argument weak. The overall time spent scrolling short form content averages out to the same amount of sustained attention as watching a TV episode, because TV is also broken up into bursts of attention by being interspersed with commercial breaks (and try counting how many cuts each scene has in your typical cop or medical drama on top of that). Time spent scrolling isn’t stealing time from some higher calling, it’s filling the void of doing nothing.

Manvir Singh had this eye opening thread about how anthropologists studied various societies and found that the most common activity was “doing nothing.” This was true across continents and cultures–humans love to do nothing at all. In the screenshot below, you can see one society where the most common activity during waking hours was to do nothing, and they spent nearly a third of their time on this critical task.

The only real exception to this is seen in agricultural societies. Farming is hard, and though modern farming is still difficult, it takes way less time day to day than it did in the past, so this data point becomes increasingly obsolete. People love to theorize about the singularity and life in a post scarcity world, but we’ve already made it. The minimum essentials to survive are trivial to acquire these days, and the amount of time we have for leisure is immense. Most people who complain about "being worse" spend eight hours or less working or studying five days a week, and have another eight hours to fill as they wish. Outside of those with children, people may claim they have a commute, or some other obligations, but those are choices and trade offs that they choose to make.

You do nothing more than you know, and scrolling social media feels like an easy target to blame when the act of doing nothing is the true culprit. This is because filler activity like TV or scrolling is more memorable than doing nothing. Remembering how much time you spent doing nothing is like remembering how many breaths you took last week. Nothing blends together, stretches to infinity, and compresses to zero. This is how it is, always has been, and always will be. You are in a constant battle against doing nothing, because doing nothing is the default state. It is simple to do something, but it isn’t easy.

It should be noted that there is value in doing nothing, and it is good to reset when you can. One trick is to switch gears and have your down time filled with a valuable but dissimilar activity. If you work with your mind all day solving complex issues, then find a physical hobby or activity to keep yourself in shape and recharge your mental capacity.

Some people find a way to balance everything, but I tend to go for extremes. The classic label is work hard play hard, but I find that phrase to have morphed into a caricature of what it was intended to be. For four months last year, I took dozens of full-length practice LSATs, and did tons of drills and exercises to be ready for the exam. It was a rigorous period of study, but following this was an extended break where I didn’t write a single practice exam leading up to taking the actual test and getting a near-perfect score. I didn’t complete my CS degree, but I hold several highly sought after cybersecurity certifications that required passing 48 hour to two week long exams, during which I put in concentrated bursts of studying. I would spend all day in the office talking to my coworkers and helping their projects, then knock out all of my own technical work in a few hours of intense work. During all of these times, I would also play video games for hours a day, or read, or go on long drives to clear my head. Throughout my life I have been able to do an incredible number of things, yet I still manage to find time to do nothing.

The takeaway is not that you are powerless against the indomitable nothing, but rather that TikTok and other idle activities are simply filling a void that you could fill with something else. Sometimes you will, and sometimes you won’t, and the fact that you occasionally do nothing isn’t terminal. You have so much more time than you think, and though your natural inclination is to do nothing, or to fill that time with scrolling, your potential is not being ruined by some external influence. When you accept that TikTok is ruining you or those around you, you absolve yourself of accountability. If you have the capability to do more, you can simply choose to do so, and you have the time and ability to make it happen.