Will TikTok Make People Perform as Hard as Instagram Did?

We hire social media to create a virtual representation of the life we want to live, but never actually live it.

I wonder if this is as true in the TikTok era as it was in the Instagram era. It seems that TikTok has much less "self seriousness" than Twitter and Instagram did -- there's less on the line due to the silly meme based culture?^[1] Weirdly, influencers on TikTok are less household names than YouTube and Twitch who are already niche. What happened to all those hype houses?

Unfortunately, all the cars/flashy houses/flaunting went to the crypto boys, and hype houses couldn't keep up with TikTok's awful creator payment plan.

There’s a phrase going around that you should “buy experiences, not things.” People, it’s claimed, think that having a lot of stuff is what’s going to make them happy. But they’re mistaken. A Lamborghini may be fun to drive for the first days or weeks, but pretty soon it fades into the background of your life. The drive to accumulate stuff is an evolutionary relic that no longer fits our modern situation. Better to embrace minimalism and focus on immaterial things like experiences, whose memories you can treasure forever.
While I appreciate the Stoic-style appraisal of what really brings happiness, economically, this analysis seems precisely backward. It amounts to saying that in an age of industrialization and globalism, when material goods are cheaper than ever, we should avoid partaking of this abundance. Instead, we should consume services afflicted by Baumol’s cost disease, taking long vacations and getting expensive haircuts which are just as hard to produce as ever. (View Highlight)

Admit it, you’re not really traveling because you want to visit every corner of the world. You’re doing it because all of your friends have the unrealistic goal of traveling the whole world.

TikTok has other problems like promoting fake tics and self victimization for pity engagement ↩︎