A wooded area. A blazing fire. It is snowing lightly. This is my happy place. Except, it’s not outside my window; it’s on tiktok,
For several months I have “taught” TikTok to serve this content: People, usually men, building shelters by hand in the forest. Most of them are ultra-speeded-up timelapses that start with a hole in the ground, an axe, and a pile of wood. Once, I saw a man Build a Hobbit hole that looks like the entrance to, uh, dune sand wormI landed the cabin in the Woods via tiktok outdoor-cast-iron-cooking TikTok, and I never want to leave it. Of course, I might have to.
No one really knows what will happen to TikTok in the next few weeks. Back in April, US President Joe Biden signed a bill The law orders app owner ByteDance to divest and sell TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or it will be blocked. TikTok was sued, and is currently planning a Supreme Court case hear the case A ruling on whether the law will go into effect and potentially on January 10 Violates the right to freedom of expression Before the deadline.
So, between now and then, I’ll be watching all the cabin-building TikToks I can.
Let’s be real, I’d do it anyway. Disengaging on social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikTok — or scrolling BlueSky, or thumbing through Instagram, if those are more your jam — is taking over anyone’s mind. The best way to reset. But TikTok makes rules for this. Sub-subgenres on the platform, like the animal-raising TikTok or the furniture-refurbishing TikTok, are one of the most effective forms of sanity.
Even if TikTok prevails, there is no guarantee that my FYP will continue to provide Woodsy Survival content. Although it is still largely a platform for pop culture junk food and lip-sync videos, a growing number of Americans use TikTok as a new source of entertainment. Since 2020, the share of adults who regularly get news from the platform has increased from 3 percent to 17 percent. According to Pew Research Center“None of the social media platforms we studied showed rapid growth,” the study authors wrote.
