I’m three months clean of TikTok. I’m one week clean of Instagram Reels. I’m five hours clean of YouTube Shorts.
It was a Sunday afternoon like any other. I was lounging on my futon, scrolling on TikTok absentmindedly, as one does, when I realized that it was no longer afternoon at all. The birds no longer sang, the sun had retreated and darkness had fallen — it was 8 p.m. Embarrassingly, this was far from the first time the algorithm had robbed hours from my day, but this particular instance became an impetus for change.
That day, I had intended to watch Good Will Hunting but got sucked into a TikTok rabbit hole before I could even press play on the film. The addictive app distracting me from schoolwork was one thing, but preventing me from indulging in meaningful entertainment — that crossed a line. TikTok had to go.
With the app gone, I had plenty of time to reflect on how and why I used it. TikTok was almost a cheat code to stay in touch with friends I didn’t see very often; if it had been a while since I’d last spoken to them, I could easily shoot them a TikTok, hoping it would spark conversation. Not having TikTok made me feel like I was failing to uphold my end of this sacred bond.
My friends sure let me know that I was failing to uphold this expectation, pestering me for days on end to reinstall the app so my eyes and ears could be blessed with whatever beautiful bullshit they wanted me to see. It wasn’t the videos themselves that I missed, but the Christmas-morning-like feeling of opening thoughtfully hand-picked videos from a friend each time I opened the app. There was a TikTok-shaped hole in my heart, yet the app remained deleted.
This sounds like a victory. The object of my addiction was gone and I had parted with short-form content for good — right? Unfortunately, that’s not how it panned out. Parting with TikTok was challenging, but parting with short-form content altogether would be another beast entirely. I had to get my short-form fix somewhere, so I pivoted to Instagram Reels.
Short-form videos are all that TikTok has to offer, so when you click that music note app icon, you know what you’re getting into. Instagram, on the other hand, has short-form videos interspersed throughout the Explore page. On more occasions than I could count, I would be tapping through Instagram just to realize five minutes later that I had unintentionally begun scrolling through Reels. The way that Instagram so seamlessly and slyly incorporates short-form videos is so genius and so evil.
When I realized how easily Instagram could rope me into watching Reels, I created a self-imposed screen time limit of twenty minutes for the app. Setting this limit made me feel like I had gamed the system; I had substantially limited my time consuming short-form videos and I didn’t even have to part with them completely. But then I realized that this was my journey to quit short-form content, not to cut back on it. So like TikTok before it, I deleted Instagram from my phone.
Once again, my appetite for short-form videos had to be whetted somehow. With both TikTok and Instagram out of the question, I sunk my teeth into all that was left: the dregs of short-form content, YouTube Shorts. I have nothing nice to say about Shorts. They don’t play a role in maintaining friendships like TikToks and don’t have the charm of Instagram Reels. They truly are trash, so awful and uninteresting that I couldn’t spend more than five consecutive minutes watching them if my life depended on it.
