For a week I counted how long I dedicated Tiktok. I got to over 10 hours. I decided to remove it for a month. Of course, I still didn’t use that time to follow a computer course, however, some things about our relationship with social networks I managed to understand them.
Tiktok is L‘app that I use most. I know since I installed it at the end of 2019. She had recently arrived in Italy and was still acquiring its identity. Just over a month ago I decided to look at the data in the section Time of use of my phone. I reconstruct my week. Monday: 16 minutes. I was traveling and I almost didn’t take the phone in my hand. Tuesday 31 minutes. Always travel. Wednesday: 1 hour and 52 minutes. Regular day: home-term-in-term-home home.
Other regular days. Thursday: 1 hour and 34 minutes. Friday: 1 hour and 41 minutes. Saturday: 1 hour and 23 minutes. Sunday: 3 hours and 30 minutes. In the morning I made a long run in the sun and I needed a Sofa afternoon to recover me. Which was then only long according to my standards: they will have been 10 kilometers scarce.
How long I spent on Tiktok in a week
In total, for seven days I spent 647 minutes on Tiktok. Specific. Not public video on the platform, I don’t use it to chat e I’m not a fan of the live. I am 647 minutes Pass to watch short videos, put some listless likes, save travel videos, suggestions of good manners and Reports to send to my colleagues or to be pinned for the next articles.
The filter to become “chubby” that we didn’t need: “ridicule our body”
647 minutes in a week are More than 10 hours. Which means 40 hours a monththe equivalent of a Five daily working weeki with eight -hour shifts. It is true. The time used for Tiktok it is often cut out. Travels on a meter. The break when you get home after work, the time before going to bed if you are alone or that at night when you can’t sleep. Obviously wash your face with the blue light of the smartphone It doesn’t help sleep.
After the account I decided to Remove the app. 10 hours a week are 520 hours a year. The equivalent of basic programming course that I always promise to do. It’s too much. It was not a decision meditated for a long time. I had to change the phone and reinstall all the apps one after the other. When I got to Tiktok I stopped. I didn’t open it for a month. And these are the three things I learned.
1. The dependence of the algorithm
Premise. The time I spend in front of the phone screen it is already a lot. Arrival quietly also to 10 hours of screen time per day. A little because it’s my job, I am a journalist. In those hours there are phone calls, emails, data to be controlled messages but also newspapers to read and videos to watch. A little because I like to study, read and understand what It happens with social networks.
It is not an object that demonizes. Smartphones, like many other things, I’m just an instrument. You can take notes for a good book or solve all Candy Crush puzzles. It’s up to you. But the line I passed with Tiktok is far from the times of use of any other app. Especially because I always surprise myself to renegotiate it.
I tell myself: “I still watch four videos and then close”. Or: “If I don’t find between three videos I like I close”. And the Eternal: “Today you are tired, watch some videos”. It is not very different since I smoked and I tried to reduce cigarettes: “One to celebrate this”, “Today is a crooked day, I can smoke a little more”.
2. The illusion of knowledge
I have been for a few years I don’t have a first appointment. Fortunately. If I had to organize one the first thing I would do today, it is propose an exchange. Almost a reinterpretation of Perfect strangers. No aperitifs with watered cocktails, no oversharing of past relationships, let’s pass the phones and Let’s compare the for you of Tiktok. Algorithm reads our tastes. It adapts them every day and offers us videos that can be interested in. He asks us just the year of birth, maybe the name and where we connect. But over time learns much more. If you are wrong patience. We slide up and see the next.
The illusion with which I open Tiktok is always the same: “Maybe I find something useful to us”. In the month I did without Tiktok I realized that in the end There is almost never anything useful. I never made a recipe that I saved on Tiktok. I went right In two or three of the dozens of places I saved. I didn’t do any trekking recommended by the algorithm. Real. Sometimes I found a Good starting point for an article. Sometimes I discovered a podcast or a new book. But if I had to measure the time taken to find something and the result that I got the budget would be at a loss. Nightly. The point is that Time on Tiktok remains on Tiktok. It rarely turns into something else.
3. What to do without Tiktok
What I did all of it Time I didn’t use on Tiktok? Now, to return to smoking, the paradox is that of cigarette money. In the list of all the excellent reasons to quit smoking the question of money always returns. A 20 -it package now costs at least 5 euros. Even smoking 10 cigarettes per day means spending 2.50 euros per day to smoke. In a year you get quietly reached 900 euros.
When you stop smoking though You don’t feel automatically richer. Here the money goes from other parts, they lose themselves or remain but do not make the difference so much. It is the same for Tiktok. Time without Tiktok has not turned into that basic programming course.
Yet this month his benefits had them. A few more books. A few podcasts. And especially hours and hours of blue light on my eyes. Not to mention the peace of not having occupied some brain space to understand where Cappuccina dancer came from or listen to some theory on ONE PIECE FINAL. It’s nice, I know but the manga is enough for me. In the end, for work, I had to put it back. However, I set up a limit: 30 minutes a day. It already seems to me too much.
