There is a certain permeability between art and life, and pleasure in perceiving it: We take satisfaction in recognizing our lives in onscreen plot lines, as we thrill to real-life moments that feel “just like a movie.” But TikTok’s video-based format has wildly amplified the impulse to collapse the distance between the two and imagine yourself as an onscreen character. The app’s tools make it easy for people to film and edit footage of themselves, narrating their own stories in breezy narrative beats — making life look like an episode of television. The result is a perfect ecosystem for watching and being watched, where once-passive audiences are encouraged to see themselves as the writers, directors and stars of their own motion pictures.
Charles Taylor:
To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization. To the extent that people are seeking a moral ideal here, this self-immuring is self-stultifying; it destroys the condition in which the ideal can be realized.
TikTok: destroying not just happiness, but even its very possibility.
But don’t let that stop you…