The Theory of Tik Tok Brain

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

My fellow kiwis, have you ever met a person with absolutely no personality? That has nothing to really say about any subject given to them? Not just a person with genuine autism, but a person so apathetic to the world around them that they seem completely disconnected from it?
Let me start from the beginning. So I've held quite a few jobs and as a co-worker I like to be friendly and spark conversations, most of the time these go very well, I pride myself on my ability to keep a conversation going and entertaining for all parties involved. Though there have been a few times when I run into a person that has absolutely no interests, now let me be clear its not that they are not interested in the conversation as they do tend to be interested in what i have to say on various subjects and seek me out for conversation, but they never have anything to say on any subject. Before you say this is just autism, Ive met many autistics that while tricky to get started, will carry a conversation if you talk about a subject they are interested in (pokemon, trains, sonic, etc.). No this is something deeper than that, its as if this person has never had a single thought about anything. For a long time this behavior has confused me, how can someone live long enough to be a part of the work force but never encountered enough stimuli to develop any interests, let alone a personality?

Then it hit me, what if these people have no interests, because all they consumed was mindless nonsense?
I produce, The Tik Tok Brain Theory. When one consumes so much meaningless content that they never gain any culture and therefore never have time to attach themselves to any particular interest. Now I dont think this just applies to Tik Tok itself, but it is a major player, it could apply to any meaningless drivel on the Internet, Let's Plays, Unboxing videos, ASMR shit, what have you.

What are your thoughts? Have you encountered this person before? Is there an aspect I'm missing?

 

[オプセック]

What are your thoughts? Have you encountered this person before? Is there an aspect I'm missing?

Yes, that those guys have been around forever.
They just know that they can't tell you about their human bone trophy collection, so they don't.
And there isn't much time for other hobbies when you are into that.

 

[Nicholas Gur]

Never met anyone like this, but typically only older people want to have prolonged conversations while I'm at work, so maybe I just don't engage with that demographic.

 

[HarveyMCR]

Not just a person with genuine autism, but a person so apathetic to the world around them that they seem completely disconnected from it?

Then it hit me, what if these people have no interests, because all they consumed was mindless nonsense?
I produce, The Tik Tok Brain Theory. When one consumes so much meaningless content that they never gain any culture and therefore never have time to attach themselves to any particular interest.

My brother in Christ, you're just describing people with an IQ of 85-95. Literal cattle. Smart enough to dress, feed, and sustain themselves. Not smart enough to critically analyze something or think about long term strategy/cause and effect. They can probably talk about a certain number of subjects in-depth (Say, Pokemon or Baseball), but they're smart enough to know that they'll get dog-pilled by anyone who has a differing opinion or wants to philosophize about the media.

It's like constantly being surrounded by math PhDs while only having taken high school algebra. You've tried to voice your opinion about math before, but each time you've been shutdown by someone bringing up the fact that this problem was solved 300 years ago. So you keep your mouth shut so you don't get ridiculed.

Consuming TikTok content isn't the cause of being 85-95 IQ, it is a symptom of the fact.

Either that or you just have really bad vibes. I have plenty of coworkers/peers who I will not share any opinions with because they're going to be super annoying when they find out I don't support importing a million Indians and killing billionaires

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

My brother in Christ, you're just describing people with an IQ of 85-95. Literal cattle. Smart enough to dress, feed, and sustain themselves. Not smart enough to critically analyze something or think about long term strategy/cause and effect. They can probably talk about a certain number of subjects in-depth (Say, Pokemon or Baseball), but they're smart enough to know that they'll get dog-pilled by anyone who has a differing opinion or wants to philosophize about the media.

It's like constantly being surrounded by math PhDs while only having taken high school algebra. You've tried to voice your opinion about math before, but each time you've been shutdown by someone bringing up the fact that this problem was solved 300 years ago. So you keep your mouth shut so you don't get ridiculed.

Consuming TikTok content isn't the cause of being 85-95 IQ, it is a symptom of the fact.

Either that or you just have really bad vibes. I have plenty of coworkers/peers who I will not share any opinions with because they're going to be super annoying when they find out I don't support importing a million Indians and killing billionaires

I misread that as “don’t support killing a million Indians” and I almost got mad at you.

 

[Daddy's Angry Juice]

My brother in Christ, you're just describing people with an IQ of 85-95. Literal cattle. Smart enough to dress, feed, and sustain themselves. Not smart enough to critically analyze something or think about long term strategy/cause and effect. They can probably talk about a certain number of subjects in-depth (Say, Pokemon or Baseball), but they're smart enough to know that they'll get dog-pilled by anyone who has a differing opinion or wants to philosophize about the media.

It's like constantly being surrounded by math PhDs while only having taken high school algebra. You've tried to voice your opinion about math before, but each time you've been shutdown by someone bringing up the fact that this problem was solved 300 years ago. So you keep your mouth shut so you don't get ridiculed.

Consuming TikTok content isn't the cause of being 85-95 IQ, it is a symptom of the fact.

Either that or your just really bad vibes. I have plenty of coworkers/peers who I will not share any opinions with because they're going to be super annoying when they find out I don't support importing a million Indians and killing billionaires

while that may be part of the cause, ive met a lot of people that arent particularly smart, that have interests and personalities. Believe me, I wish it was that simple, but it just doesnt add up. There are gangstas that I have met that probably land in that range that have a ton to talk about because life, by default molds you into the person that you are. It's as if life just didnt do anything and they are the same blob of clay that they were at birth.

 

[Otterly]

Yeah I have. I remember a girl at work who kept inviting people out for drinks (in a group not dates) and when I politely refused she asked why. I said I was tired and I needed some alone time after work plus I had a long commute so booze near work couldn’t happen anyway. Made it clear that of they ever went out closer to where I lived I might occasionally be up for it but tonight I just wanted to go home and read a book.
She said to me, and I’ve never forgotten it, ‘doesn’t that scare you?’
I wasn’t sure what she meant so I asked her and she told me that she hated being alone - I lived alone at the time. I said after a day at work I needed time alone but hey everyone’s different you do you.
She said no, I mean like when I’m alone I get scared. I asked her why, She said that unless she had other people around her to talk to she felt like she stopped existing.
I asked if her if she liked reading books
She did not.
I asked her if she ever just needed time to think about stuff
She looked alarmed. On further probing she said she had no thoughts like that. No daydreams. Nothing. When she was alone she literally stopped thinking and felt like she stopped existing.
It was genuinely one of the weirdest conversations I’ve ever had in my life and I’ve often wondered how many people are like that.
This was a technical job, she wasn’t ‘stupid’ in the sense that she did the job, and it’s a job they only hire graduates. She wasn’t a bad person, or mean, or anything like that. Popular at work.
Recently I’ve seen those threads about whether people have an inner monologue or not and I always think of her.
And I think now there are more people like that and yes, I think it’s developmental. Children shoved in front of a screen do not experience things a in the real world. They do not play. They do not create fantasy worlds and they do not read.

 

[Beige]

Nah, I don’t think that’s TikTok, more just people who are dumb, boring, and work is really the only thing they have going on in their lives. I’ve really only encountered that type with unmarried, older middle-age women who seem like they do nothing but watch TV in their off time.

People who are actually really into TikTok, on the other hand, are some of the most obnoxious, aggressive, low IQ niggercattle I’ve ever met in my life. Useless human advertising billboards who never shut the fuck up, can’t read the room while they randomly sperg about politics at work, take everything they see on TV/social media at face value, and spend every spare moment not talking or staring at their phone listening to podcasts on their AirPods. Literally every single person I’ve met who falls into this category is the type who tells sob stories to anyone that will listen; nothing’s their fault, everything happens to them, inflicted with the kind of learned helplessness that halts all progress in life (I.e. Doesn’t clean up their trash, doesn’t read real books, flips their shit about “MUH ADD” when people point this out).

So yeah, bland and unintelligent manchildren, but the opposite of what you said insofar as disposition and behavior.

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

I have plenty of coworkers/peers who I will not share any opinions with because they're going to be super annoying when they find out I don't support importing a million Indians and killing billionaires

This was where my mind immediately went reading the OP.
Some personalities just don't mesh well. It's not even necessarily because either secretly thinks the other is an asshole. But there's some people that I simply have no desire to share my thoughts with even if prompted.
And if those thoughts take more than a few sentences to articulate, me shrugging my shoulders and playing dumb is sometimes just my way of saying "explaining this is more effort than it's worth for the time being."

 

[Sweetpeaa]

I would never use an app like that. You're not learning a fucking thing with these short swipe up videos and you're not retaining the information either.

The Tiktok brain would wear off if the user's stopped exposing themself to such mindless content. They're acquiring a type of ADHD in my opinion that creates a shorter attention span and disturbs their empathy IRL. That can appear a bit like Autism.

 

[BradeRunna]

I believe Tik Tok brain rot is real. I watched a documentary about it.

The retarded Tik Tok Zoomers can't even use Ok Boomer right. LOL

 

[Zhores Medvedev]

I would never use an app like that. You're not learning a fucking thing with these short swipe up videos and you're not retaining the information either.

A bit off topic but certainly in the same vein, You Should Quit Reddit is a pretty decent book on information retention from online platforms like reddit and tiktok. On reddit, your account is karma gated and have you have hundreds of thousands of users for any of the larger subs, many of them being new. This leads the same questions and discussions being had over and over again due to the large new user base being dumb and asking the same questions and any advice that goes "against the grain" is downvoted and hidden into obscurity. All of the large subs read like this and you would have exhausted the surface level information the sub can give you in a month.

Similarly tiktok gives the same shallow information in a different manner. Any of these "Information" tiktoks fall in to the "wide as an ocean deep as a puddle" problem. Take cooking for example. There are countless tiktok showing niche or generally useless pieces of culinary knowledge or have nothing to be gleaned from at all. Like "20 ways to peel garlic" or the "aesthetic" videos where no instruction on what they are doing is given or the end product is entirely fake. People scroll for hours and hours thinking they are learning, Thinking they are one day going to find a situation where all the useless bullshit they have retained will come in handy, but it never does. And of course the endless nature of these apps insures that the person never actually does the thing they are supposedly interested in and practices it, as that is the only thing would actually help them improve.

I produce, The Tik Tok Brain Theory. When one consumes so much meaningless content that they never gain any culture and therefore never have time to attach themselves to any particular interest.

A very startling statistic from this book is that your average tiktok user spends 5 hours a day average on the app. 5 fucking hours. I played a lot of games in my youth, but the hours I see zoomers and hell anyone who uses mainstream social media puts that shit to shame and made me really reconsider my habits. If you are sinking 5 hours a day every day just scrolling, its no shock that you are half a person. The internet has also become the primary means of information gathering. When I was a kid and wanted to learn something I ordered a book and read it. Or I asked my parents. It was hit or miss a lot of the time, but the information I learned in reading, then practicing what I read, was the norm and was encouraged. And in the event it was a miss, I still had the hunger to get better, I wasn't pacified by hours of endless bullshit.

Now your a kid, and going back to our cooking example its a gambit of tiktok retards, grifter influencers, and incompetent misinformation. The quality, depth and means to go back and reference information are severely dampened by the most common means of accessing information now a days.

If you ask these tictok or reddit people if they have hobbies, they will say yes, but they will just send you shitty tiktocs and reddit posts. It is the means by witch they experience the world, truly a marvel to see.

 

[Mike Matei's Penis]

Watching TV like Beavis and Butthead do was basically TikTok. These x-brained people have been around for a while

 

[The Internet Dick]

She said no, I mean like when I’m alone I get scared. I asked her why, She said that unless she had other people around her to talk to she felt like she stopped existing.

That's the stuff of horror stories right there. Think about it: What if your coworker really does stop existing and can only be in the real when other people--observers--are present? It's as if she's a sprite or an object or a wall in an old Wolfenstein-like video game, raycasted into existence only in those intervals where a real person is on her part of the map? Yikes.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

have you ever met a person with absolutely no personality? That has nothing to really say about any subject given to them?

This is like 98% of people I meet in real life, Tik Tok viewer or not.

 

[Otterly]

That's the stuff of horror stories right there. Think about it: What if your coworker really does stop existing and can only be in the real when other people--observers--are present? It's as if she's a sprite or an object or a wall in an old Wolfenstein-like video game, raycasted into existence only in those intervals where a real person is on her part of the map? Yikes.

It stayed with me. It would make a good horror story wouldn’t it? Or a short film.
That’s exactly what she was describing. As though the was simply a reflection. It gave me a sort of crawling sense of horror and I have never forgotten it

 

[Angry Alt Right Nerd]

Maybe they have hobbies but they don't want to talk about it with other people, especially in real life.

 

[⋖ cørdion ⋗]

Maybe they have hobbies but they don't want to talk about it with other people, especially in real life.

Yeah, in a time where even gaming interests are dictated by other people; streamers and content creators, surely that one drooling 20 year old is actually very deeply aware of model trains and chess.

Wait, chess actually spiked in relevancy recently. Why? Twitch..

 

[Caveman]

My brother in Christ, you're just describing people with an IQ of 85-95. Literal cattle. Smart enough to dress, feed, and sustain themselves. Not smart enough to critically analyze something or think about long term strategy/cause and effect. They can probably talk about a certain number of subjects in-depth (Say, Pokemon or Baseball), but they're smart enough to know that they'll get dog-pilled by anyone who has a differing opinion or wants to philosophize about the media.

It's like constantly being surrounded by math PhDs while only having taken high school algebra. You've tried to voice your opinion about math before, but each time you've been shutdown by someone bringing up the fact that this problem was solved 300 years ago. So you keep your mouth shut so you don't get ridiculed.

Consuming TikTok content isn't the cause of being 85-95 IQ, it is a symptom of the fact.

Either that or you just have really bad vibes. I have plenty of coworkers/peers who I will not share any opinions with because they're going to be super annoying when they find out I don't support importing a million Indians and killing billionaires

I disagree.

https://youtube.com/@markmolloy1381 This guy for example has scored 70 on an IQ test although he is probably actually higher anyways. He has a job at McDonald’s and is a good communicator. Even proved Jordan Peterson wrong. He now makes a bunch of schizoposts. It’s pretty clear he actually consumes philosophical shit, not random crap.

Even if a person had 85 IQ, if they watched actual stuff like Monthy Python, didn’t have a subordinate education and in general wanted to learn by watching education, then they would have something resembling intelligence.

But if you actually just watch random crap on TikTok and Friends sometimes, of course you gonna be actually retarded. Your intelligence depends on your life.

You are what you watch. This applies to any education level or intelligence.

Even let’s say a 120 IQ economic analyst can believe retarded shit like you being able to change your gender or communism being good because the media he watches reinforces it.

This is just a symptom of a culture circle jerking over passive consumption.

 

[Masturbator]

erudition vs intelligence are two massively different things