The penultimate paragraph of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, a 17th-century medical encyclopedia about “melancholy,” or, every conceivable mental illness as the 17th century understood it, ends with this final word of advice: “Only take this for a corollary and conclusion… observe this short precept, give not way to solitariness and idleness. ‘Be not solitary, be not idle.’”
Wise words. Idleness is, generally, the source of my troubles. There is a trend in my life (from where it spawns I don’t know and don’t care to find out) that during the Spring my brain goes extra haywire. The medically accepted term is “unwanted intrusive thoughts” and it is, for those who are in the know, perhaps the most obnoxious mental malady imaginable. Rather than describe it in detail, I’ll just say it’s as if your brain thought the most helpful thing for you in life would be to think, in any and all situations, the last thing you’d ever want to think about.
Unfortunately, there is no cure other than a 21st-century revision of Burton’s “Be not solitary, be not idle.”
So, to avoid the yearly tradition of a nervous breakdown during Spring Break, when I find myself most solitary and most idle, I decided to keep myself busy. At first, I fell into mild despair, “How can I keep myself busy for a week?” There’s always reading, but that takes mental energy and is not conducive to intrusive thoughts. I’d watch some movies, but I feel guilty if I watch more than one a day. Twenty-four hours, how to use them up? After asking the question I realized that every day, millions of people keep themselves continually occupied on TikTok. For though we speak often of “doing nothing,” this is impossible. If you are on TikTok, you are “doing something,” namely, watching TikTok. There’s a linguistic paradox here, the nothingness of the somethingness that is TikTok, wherein the Hegelian dialectic lays in plain sight (not that it helps make life any better).
Twice before I’ve had TikTok. The first time was back when TikTok consisted mostly of young people mouthing the words to songs. This failed to sustain my interest. Years later, I downloaded it again as it went through a resurgence. After too many videos showing content I would consider trauma-inducing, I deleted the app.
But this time would be different. I would cultivate the ultimate algorithm, giving me an endless stream of content I could lose myself in for hours and hours and finally live out Burton’s advice to never be solitary and never be idle.
The initial content of TikTok is so trash It isn’t worth going over and analyzing. Your usual suspects: self-help NPCs, Family Guy clips mixed with Chinese videos of people playing with Sand, people with low self-esteem dancing, etc.
I almost abandoned the project, but a video showing a group of Islamic people in Dubai dancing to Pop Smoke caught my attention. What an incredible blend of cultures! I’d never seen anything quite like it. I liked the video and shared it. Rewatched it a few times in astonishment.
After that, I entered the realm of no return. Within an hour my entire feed consisted of confused Muslim content. One moment I would get Muslims dancing to trap music, next I would get a video about the apocalyptic one-eyed anti-prophet Dajjal’s chaotic arrival on Earth. There were videos that felt like motivational videos but were about how gay people are going to Hell. There were trans and gay Muslims talking about how they find their balance between two seemingly contradictory identities, and these videos were coupled with jokes about having a hard time not having sex during Ramadan. For every silly Muslim video about the liberation of Palestine, there was a Muslim cat praying on a mat.
The near-nausea-inducing truth of TikTok is its vastness. It never ends. When you are thrust into the world of TikTok, and then introduced to a sub-culture of TikTok, and realize it never ends, you begin to understand just how wide the infinite depths of content spread.
This continued for some time and in all honesty I learned a lot, I think, about Muslim self-perception. But the truth is this wasn’t the content I wanted. I tried searching up things I was interested in, watching those videos, sharing them, and yet my algorithm seemed stuck on Islam, convinced that the person behind the phone, me, was indeed a Muslim.
But TikTok is smarter than that. Against the advice of nearly everybody, I let the app track me because I thought this would help cultivate the ultimate feed. I am openly paranoid, but to be honest I don’t care all that much about TikTok spying on me because the U.S. government already does that as well as the Chinese; and what can the Chinese do that the U.S. can’t? Target more ads, perhaps, but that’s the goal, it seems, of most powerful governments.
Before TikTok could figure out who I was, however, it went through a few growing pains. Near the end of my first day, TikTok surprised me with a shocking new genre: pro-North Korean Regime videos. While I’m sure there is a problematic algorithmic reason that Muslim content leads to North Korean content, I’d rather not think about it or try to figure it out. I leave that to the scientists. The videos showed happy children meeting the Supreme Leader, semi-abandoned streets in unremarkable cities, and the most depressing-looking snacks in grocery stores I’ve ever seen. Usually, these were accompanied by a voice-over that says something like, “Who said North Korea doesn’t have good snacks? Come visit North Korea!” Against my better impulses, I liked these videos and shared them, mostly because I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears.
On reflection, I wonder how serious these videos are. Usually, I am a good judge of satire or trolling, but with these, I genuinely cannot tell if they are earnest or not. My intuition says they are earnest, but they are poorly made and thus feel like satire. Perhaps it is the kind of thing you just need to see for yourself. I’ve included examples at the end of this article.
I went to bed that first night satisfied with my progress, and my thoughts hardly bothered me at all.
Muslim content kept me coming back, North Korean content maintained some variety, but it was the pro-Russia content that really got me wondering if someone in a Washington DC office building put me on a list.
I suppose there’s a natural progression from North Korea to Russia. The difference, however, is that North Korea is such an abstraction for Americans, such an over-the-top example of something at comic-book levels of evil, that it is more like a joke (sadly) than a reality.
Russia, however, we are unable to escape from. To see pro-Russian content on TikTok is like confronting the opposite of all the values you were told to hold dear. It felt dirty, then, waking up to Putin “owning political opponents” compilations or videos of Russian bros talking about how Ukraine is actually part of Russia.
Things were less fun on day two. Even the Muslim content moved away from Drill and Trap music and became restricted to the political/apocalyptic genres.
The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, was Andrew Tate.
For better or worse I could handle (somewhat) the pro-dictatorship content, I could even handle the content of a religion I do not follow. But when the Tate content made its way in, I sighed.
The problem with him, aside from the sex trafficking, misogyny, and false machismo, is that he’s so goddamn boring. His content is so uninteresting, unmoving to any degree that I could fathom someone deciding to base their life around what he said. The first video he appeared in was a clever algorithmic move; he discussed how in prison he read the Quran. The line between Islamic content and American right-wing content was bridged; an incredible feat. And from there, despite the fact that I did not like any videos or watch in full any videos of Tate, he and a legion of anti-trans, anti-queer, and anti-anything-remotely-left-leaning content creators. The content itself is not good and perversely anti-intellectual, but perhaps its greatest sin is just how boring, tired, and sad it all is.
I put my phone down for a while on day two and tried to read. Still hard. After an hour of failing, I went back to TikTok.
Now, in that hour or so between when I sighed and dropped the app and picked it up again, I also mentioned to Caroline how quickly my incredible algorithm of Islamic-North Korean-Russian content became confused with Andrew Tate-esque trash. I audibly moaned and complained that this wasn’t fair, and it was rather rude of an algorithm to assume that Islam or North Korea would even want to be associated with boring American discussions about identity.
Expecting my frustrations to continue upon picking up my phone, I was surprised by what the ForYouPage delivered. Right off the bat, three videos of variations on the trans theme of “passing,” along with reactions of straight people finding out their partner is trans. In a flurry, I started scrolling. What happened to the algorithm? And so fast? I kept going and going and realized the Muslim, North Korean, and Russian content was no more. Instead, the content consisted of any and all discussions about identity.
This isn’t a problem, per se, although now the content on my TikTok was neither things I actually was interested in watching, nor was it things I was fascinated by.
By the end of the second day, my TikTok began to revert to a slightly twisted version of what it is before the algorithm began doing any work. The videos were half-baked jokes and memes about sexual identity, mental illness, and bad relationships. How could this have happened? How would I fix this?
On day three I woke up and started scrolling. The first three videos were about Bi-Polar disorder, which last October I was diagnosed with. Endless videos of people cracking jokes about the bizarro feeling of being on Seroquel reminded me of how horrible those medications feel.
I felt sad.
Some videos about intrusive thoughts. Immensely unhelpful, I thought, for anyone who is struggling with this and does not know any better.
A few hours later my entire ForYouPage consisted of a depressing reflection of everything I’d rather not think about. How mental illness is persistent, how we often don’t know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about it, and how it is both chic and woke to brag about your struggle and simultaneously act like you know how to handle it–even though you can’t.
The algorithm saw through a facade and quickly figured out I was not an Islamic Pro-North Korean man, it saw me as I would rather not see myself as but what, to some degree, I am: a fundamentally broken person who, like anyone else, seeks company for my occasional bouts of misery.
When I see people younger than me make videos chronicling their spirals of destruction, I grow hopeless and miserable and wish I never took a look into this digital hellscape, this voyeuristic simulacrum of whatever reality really consists of.
Ad revenue generated through the exploitation of the mentally unstable, the racially oppressed, the economically silenced, and all those on the lower registers.
They do not speak for you.
While I am left somewhat hopeless for my own generation, I take great joy in knowing that resistance to the mind-numbing tedium and exploitation of mega-corporations and governments will one day arrive. In a few generations, people will say “Enough!” They always do.
For now, we are left with quiet resistance, the unremembered acts of love that carry, perhaps, a legacy; sowing seeds for change down a line we may never live to see. I’m reminded of Winston and Julia in Orwell’s 1984, and how their greatest act of resistance was hiding in the woods, away from the screens, to make love. Radical love is radical resistance.
In my Spring Break’s solitary idleness, I reflect that “melancholy” in all its forms, though terrible, is intermixed with a newfound hope for a less solitary, less idle, truly active, truly free, truly fulfilling life. Whether the better life comes or not is, like all things, both up to us and up to fate; let’s not leave it all to fate.
It’s best to click these without knowing what you are getting into.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRc7vL1T/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcv1hXA/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRc7nTCR/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcvfhHg/
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTRcbVVY3/
