this made me mad at my girl

TikTok is making us understand so many things about the collective us.

How we react to each other is how we react to posts on social media. Makes sense right?

Yet, it doesn’t feel like we’re reacting to a person when we’re using these platforms. It feels like we’re consuming content.

If you’re the kind of person who observes their own emotions/behaviour, then you’ll know exactly what I’m about to be talking about.

There’s someone you like, a lot. Let’s even say you fall in love with them. Let’s say that the dance that is playing is not one that you’re understanding.

In layman’s, you’re in the dark of what is going on with your relationship to this person that you so much love.

Whatever it is, there is something there that is out to take advantage of that gap in your understanding. It is ferocious and it strikes at the most opportune moment. Truly a beast.

It’s that voice that you hear, willing to vandalise your image of the person you love, just to feel some kind of way. Mostly feelings of jealousy, sadness, guilt, undeservedness.

You’ve gotta understand it’s all in your head

Even if it’s all in your head, assuming that it is of course 😉

there is still a cause, and we could try to find out if there is a causer as well. Point is, that you’re creating this absolute delusion and taking it for true. When you realise what’s going on, you might even call yourself the king or queen of jumping to conclusions.

That’s what it is. Jumping to conclusions. And that little voice is there, helping you jump, like it’s a pair of suspensions.

Why does TikTok matter?

Well, you might have noticed, if you’re scrolling quite a bit on the platform, that other people’s videos trigger deep emotions within you.

And then you get into your feelings.

Some videos are inspirational and rush dopamine throughout your body.

Some are stories that are so relatable to you, that you get mad at your girlfriend or boyfriend. It can even be generated with AI. It’s usually a story of the protagonist, who you must relate to, going through struggles with a significant other, and the story is so engrossing and aggravating, that you get mad at your girl.

This used to happen to me, I would get sucked into a story, and then somehow get emotional and identified with the negative emotions flowing through me.

These were artificially fabricated emotions. Not my real ones. Definitely not valid ones. This is another thing about emotions, that they are easily moulded, and can be manufactured through external input. So it’s very important that we do not validate all emotions.

Once I’ve had enough of this bs though, I started realising what was going on, and even though good stories affected me strongly in my feels, I would be able to dispel them with equally opposing emotional force. But it does annoy you, when you have to use tremendous mental energy just to undo the effects of a story.

This happened one day. It was the culmination. Rather, it was the beginning of a whole new perspective. The perspective of the collective enlightenment.

As usual, scrolling through TikTok, I came across this story that was supposedly taken from Reddit. It was from the perspective of a young adult. Guess what? A dude my age. Incredibly relatable. He was narrating something that happened with a girl that he fancied/he was with. We’ve all been there. And as usual, I could tell it was a good story, because it was drawing me in, and I was starting to generate negative emotions about the girl I like. Wow. Even when I’m aware of what’s happening, I still am not preventing it. Still, that’s another story.

After watching that video, I automatically clicked on the comment section to see what others said. This is when I was surprised. The first comment was “This made me mad at my girl”

Absolute wake up call for me, and I guess also for tens of thousands of others. Not only did I realise what these stories were doing to my internal motions, but many many others realised too. This all manifested in one simple comment, that was so accurate that it became viral. We all got it, we all knew what the comment meant as soon as we read it.

The collective was awakened to the trick. And it was all thanks to the push of the algorithm. The one that rewards content that people find addictive. The one that keeps us running on the wheel.

The only thing is, we caught on. And through repeated exposure, it was like a science experiment that we involuntarily took part of, being the experimenter and the experimentee at the same time.