TikTok knows me so well.
After only a few days of use, the app has already sussed my interests. They are, unsurprisingly, mostly animal related.
Every second post contains a cat and every third a dog. The rest are distributed equally between bendy ferrets, pet mice, and the Somebody come get huuuur, she’s dancin’ like a stripphuuur meme.
Never in my life did I expect to reach a point in my social media experience that I would so vividly crave mind-numbing yet expertly put together content that doesn’t really have any real purpose other than to entertain.
Social platforms have always been for me a means of consuming news, staying in touch with friends, and keeping up to date with which Love Island couples have finally ended their relationships.
They’ve never worked for switching off. They’ve been too palpable, demanding attention from the second you start scrolling to the moment to put your phone down.
Instead, I’ve tended to turn to things like cooking, going to the gym, or attending the pub on a Tuesday to forget about whatever worries happen to be plaguing me that particular week.
Naturally, Covid-19 has chucked a bit of a spanner in the works when it comes to most of the above (except for the cooking, which has thankfully succeeded in taking up a severe chunk of my free time in the evenings).
As difficult as it once was to switch off when stress was manifesting itself in menial concerns like negative Facebook comments and misplaced house keys, suddenly thinking about anything other than the coronavirus seemed impossible.
Call your parents? Get a secondhand RTÉ News report. Go for a walk? Witness social distancing in full swing. Host a video call with your mates? Be reminded, yet again, of how much you miss the simple real life presence of other people.
Then came TikTok, and suddenly, everything changed.
It was a release I didn’t know I needed, a contrary to the inherently gloomy acuteness of Twitter and the blatant tryhard-ity of Instagram.
TikTokkers aren’t pretending to know more about the spread of Covid-19 than actual virologists. Nor are they peppering your timeline with wholesome clout videos featuring them waving to an elderly woman through a window despite the fact that they wouldn’t have bothered to visit aunt Brenda anyway if life had continued on as normal.
Rather, TikTokkers are pulling pranks on their parents. They’re dropping slices of ham on their dogs. They’re shouting at sheep, making pancakes, and doing that new The Weeknd song dance challenge.
Yeah, they’ve probably got a mean age of 16, but the content they’re sharing is essentially pure.
It hasn’t been tainted by the constant and often repetitive coronavirus news cycle, or the fundamental loneliness that is palpable on most other apps. Over there, people are trying their best to demonstrate that they can continue on as normal – a feat that is ultimately proof that there’s nothing normal about this at all.
On TikTok, it all reads a bit more naturally. People are trying to create the perfect quarantine content but it doesn’t show. Most of what’s up there would be relevant outside of the coronavirus era – or if it isn’t, it’s still less anxiety-inducing to digest than that latest Twitter thread about why the manufacturing of face masks is a waste of time and money, actually.
It’s a moment to take a breather, power down, and laugh at some animals doing some weird shit. Its only flaw being that I’ve been finding it hard to leave.
I’ll enter the app to kill a couple of minutes before my fourth scheduled House Party call and find myself lying there two hours later, still scrolling, and laughing at cat-touching-tinfoil videos.
There are worse ways to spend self-isolation, in fairness.
