Terrifyingly eye-opening. I’m a Xennial without children. Recently, I spent a week with a sibling and their teen kids to spend a little quality time together. I

Terrifyingly eye-opening. I’m a Xennial without children. Recently, I spent a week with a sibling and their teen kids to spend a little quality time together. I was mortified to find my nieces and nephews stumbling around like zombies, irritable if not entirely unresponsive and incapable of having any semblance of a conversation, seemingly unable to take interest or pleasure in anything until they were curled around their device and scrolling TikTok. It was infuriating and alarming. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around this. Perhaps I’ve just gotten old enough to take up the mantle of my parents, this is just the same thing I did to them and I should check myself before I make a hypocrite and a fool of myself. Except I don’t feel like this quite neatly explained the rift. > Understanding TikTok through the lens of ubiquitous reality TV allows us to see that oddly named phenomena like “Main Character Syndrome”—in which the overly online dramatize their lives—aren’t aberrations. If TikTokkers act like the stars of their own entertainment channels, that isn’t a psychological issue—it’s an accurate assessment of the media landscape that reality TV established. On TikTok, we really are encouraged to treat our online presence as the proscenium arch, a curated pass to our “real” lives, even when we’re producing content explicitly for entertainment. There we go. See, in _my day_ I was just a passive observer to other worlds. There were countless channels, films, games, etc. that created a reality that was often more vivid and compelling than meatspace. But for the most part, I was just the audience. I unplugged regularly to assert myself to the rest of the world, because that’s what I had learned I needed to do. Now, this alternate reality is bidirectional and real time. They aren’t merely observing, but interacting with the world through the lens of social media. And they’ve been doing it that way for the bulk of their lives, so it feels normal. Everything else doesn’t. This helps me empathize with them more, but not the other way around. It doesn’t really help me rejigger my interactions with them to make them more meaningful. And I can’t help but feel this way of interfacing with the world is disastrous.