I don’t want to watch your TikToks
Back in 2024 we went to China for a trip to see my sister who was living in Guangzhou at the time, along with my dad, his partner, and Sofia (my partner), and we spent a few days travelling around the country to parts unknown and generally having a good time.
One thing that struck me was that, my goodness, people there absolutely were glued to their phones. Old, young, everything in between: it was just wall to wall TikTok scrolling, except the Chinese version called “Douyin”. I’ve never seen anything like it. The amount of truly mindless scrolling was unfathomable and at times fairly hard to watch.
We also saw many people trying to make their living on the platform. I’ll never forget the person standing on the bank of the Lijian river as we drifted by, who had no less than three different tripods with, naturally, three different phones, all streaming their dancing antics while they were dressed in local regalia and, by all accounts, seeming to be having a fairly good time. Whether or not that was just for the cameras is another story.
I want to add that I really respect people putting in the effort to create, I just wish it didn’t have to contribute to something that clearly, at least to me, is a problem that is getting worse and worse.
However, the mindless compulsion of the end users to flick their thumbs ever upwards culminated in one of the funniest and honestly, most disturbing, and indicative moments I’ve had in a very long time.
We were on a train going somewhere (Lanzhou I believe) and of course, the Tikety was in full swing from 98.4% of the passengers. Naja, I guess the landscapes outside the window were a tad barren, but I digress.
We were just a few minutes from the station, and doing the usual hubbub of standing up, awkwardly getting our bags onto shoulders or making sure rolly bags are taking up the entire walkway, and after all that is complete, I find myself hovering behind a young man who is sitting down at his seat, with his phone (or was it his second phone) out on the foldout table in front of him.
I can clearly see the screen and he’s on donyuan (obviously). He is, at that moment however, not looking at the phone on the table, which is, on repeat, showing one of the most perverse things I’ve seen.
On the screen is a small Shiba Inu dog, facing away from the camera, showing its butt directly to the cameraperson. Then, the persons hand appears in frame, index finger extended out like a finger gun, and they proceed to insert said finger directly into the dog’s anus, to which the dog is obviously not impressed, turning back toward the camera with teeth bared. The video ends and starts again.
I am stunned. It’s not just me standing there, there’s people all around him, and he’s busy completely checked out on the other phone or what have you, so it takes a few cycles of said video before I watch the back of his head slowly pivot towards the phone on the table, followed by a comic-level panicked jump in his chair as he rapidly reaches for the phone to lock the screen.
I am dying behind him trying to contain my laughter.
He clearly did not mean to do this. In fact, I doubt he ingested more than one of the last 3,562 tikkos he’d watched for the past hour, and probably most of them were innocuous enough to leave on the table while he tried to remember what universe he was currently situated in.
Despite being hilarious and something I immediately relayed to our fellowship the moment we got onto the platform, this felt like such a clear example of the colossal waste of time that EVERYONE we saw was engaged in. Shit, at least there was that one person creating something, but my god, when you’ve scrolled so far your just watching animal abuse videos, at what point do you say, “perhaps I should uninstall this…”.
I don’t care what you do, but I do hope whatever it is you are doing is fulfilling to you. If that’s scrolling until you find yourself watching some fuckwit fingering a dog, then may god have mercy on your soul (theirs: I don’t know). If you’re not fulfilled, then all I can say is that a hobby here or there never hurt anyone, but endlessly absorbing that much shit is robbing you of any discoveries you’re yet to make for, and about, yourself.
Seeing all that in China, and it’s clear parallels in Germany (albeit not nearly to the same levels), have really pushed me to pick up my old hobbies, start new ones (this blog for example), and generally just do anything that reminds me that it’s not all just scrolling that needs doing because everyone else is.
Happy Friday!