In order to see less of what you’re not interested in, TikTok recommends long-pressing on videos and simply hitting the “not interested” button to remould your FYP. I briefly considered this approach but worried that by smacking the algorithm whenever it misbehaved I might end up getting bounced to some weird random corner of the app, like sheep-shearing TikTok. I decided this tactic would be cheating, but still resolved to take a more proactive approach the next day.
Date About three
Rather than trust the algorithm, I decided to take matters into my own hands and actively look for content more befitting the state of my love life, or lack thereof. As I ventured for the first time into the Explore section of the app, I clocked my suggested searches: “boyfriend gift ideas,” “cuddles with boyfriend,” “boyfriend appreciation.” For fuck’s sake. I had never searched for any of these things in my life yet TikTok was basically calling me a simp to my face. I ignored the slander and instead used the manual search option to find and furiously engage with every video I could under hashtags like #breakup, #heartbreak, and #dumped.
As it turned out, I was late to the party: break up TikTok is actually one of many app’s extremely active subcultures (the #breakup hashtag alone has over 9 billion views). It was here I found weepy, snivvily solace among dozens of Gen Z-ers documenting their breakups day-by-day by shooting on their own sobbing, mulling more than their destroyed people, or doling aside sobering pointers.
Was this self care or self-destructive? I wondered. To answer that, I reached out to Gillian Myhill, a sex and relationship expert who once ran her own tech company. We agreed algorithms can be cruel things and she assured me it wasn’t unnatural to be annoyed by the couples polluting my FYP, rather, “you’re more in tune to it” when you’ve been through a breakup. “You have a different tint on your vision,” she said.
Thus is delving on the #separation TikTok proper dealing system, up coming? “In my opinion because the people we discover solace or understanding knowing we are not truly the only of them, to know we’re not by yourself – there are many more someone going through may be,” Gillian explained. “You will find a kind of companionship you can find from this. Often if you find yourself sad you should be to people that see the pain otherwise that are experiencing they. It is part of the new healing process in which you disappear completely and you may eat the injuries – and you will a way you could potentially reflect on the relationship would be to talk to almost every other human beings concerning your problems along with your experience.”
Day Four
My foray into the miserable world of breakup content seemed to have worked. Perhaps spurred on by the fresh new re also-release of Taylor Swift’s disastrous breakup record album Reddish, 12 videos about the now painfully relatable “All Too Well” jumped up at me. In some of them, women joked from site de rencontre professionnel excitГ© the breaking up along with their men for the sole purpose of fully immersing themselves in the song’s much anticipated 10-minute version (I mean. be careful what you wish for). Maybe TikTok was just reflecting the cultural moment as it should, or maybe it was finally reading the room. To keep the momentum going, I doubled back through my liked videos and forwarded all the sad ones onto my friends for good measure. In Taylor’s words, this was exhausting.
I was not the original person to get this problem. Lydia Venn, twenty-four, a fellow TikTok associate just who experience a separation earlier this 12 months, common my personal problems. “From what From the it will be felt like new formula was geared to video clips I might noticed while in a romance,” she appreciated. “I’d to improve my formula and so i wouldn’t be shown them as it is definitely not really what we want to pick in the midst of a separation.”