A dense forest. A roaring fire. A little bit of gently falling snow. This is my happy place Except it's not outside my window; it is on TikTok.
For months, I have been “teaching” TikTok to serve me this content: people, usually boys, building shelters with their own hands in the wilderness. Most of them are extremely quick bursts of time, starting with a hole in the ground, an ax, and a pile of wood. One time, me followed a guy Build a hobbit hole that looks like an entrance sand dunes Sandworms. I landed cabin in the woods TikTok by the way Outdoor cooking with cast iron TikTok and I never want to leave. 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 it an invoice issued a law requiring the app's owner, ByteDance, to divest and sell TikTok's US operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or face being blocked. TikTok has sued and — as of now — the Supreme Court plans to listen to the case on January 10 and is likely to rule on whether the law violates freedom of speech ahead of time.
So from now on, I'm going to watch all the cabin building TikTok videos I can.
Let's be honest, I would have done this anyway. Social media dissociation is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikToks—or scrolling through Bluesky or scrolling through Instagram, if that's your thing—is the best way to resetting one's brain. But TikTok rules for this. Sub-genres on the platform, like animal feeding TikToks or furniture refurbishing TikToks, remain some of the most effective forms of emotional relief today.
Even if TikTok takes over, there's no guarantee that my FYP will continue to deliver backwoods survival content. While it remains largely a platform for lip-syncing videos and pop culture snacks, more and more Americans are using TikTok as a new source. Since 2020, the proportion of adults who regularly get news from the platform has increased from 3% to 17%, according to Pew Research Center. “No social media platform we studied had faster growth” in news, the study's authors wrote.