I’m spending the holidays watching cabin builders on TikTok—while I still can

A wooded area. A roaring fire. Some gently falling snow. This is my happy place. Outside, it is not outside my window; it’s on TikTok.

For months I “taught” TikTok to serve me this content: people, usually guys, building shelters by hand in the desert. Most of them are ultra-sped-up timelapses that start with a hole in the ground, an ax and a pile of wood. Once, I looked at a man build a hobbit hole that looked like the entrance to a dune sand worm. I landed cabin-in-the-woods TikTok because of outdoor cast iron kitchen TikTok, and I never want to leave. Of course he could have.

No one really knows what will happen to TikTok in the coming weeks. In April, US President Joe Biden signed a bill in the law ordering the owner of the app, ByteDance, to give up and sell the operations of TikTok in the United States to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or be blocked. TikTok has sued, and, for now, the Supreme Court is considering doing so listen to the case on January 10 and potentially issue a decision on the law or not violates the rights of freedom of expression before the deadline.

So, from now on, I’m going to watch all the cabin building TikToks I can.

Let’s be real, I would do this anyway. Dissociating on social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikToks — or scrolling through Bluesky, or thumbing through Instagram, if that’s more your jam — is the best way to reset the brain But TikTok rules for that. Subgenres on the platform, like animal-friendly TikTok or furniture-enhancing TikTok, remain one of the most effective forms of mind-numbing around.

Even if TikTok prevails, there is no guarantee that my FYP will continue to provide forest survival content. While it’s still largely a platform for pop culture junk food and lip sync videos, a growing number of Americans are using TikTok as a new source. Since 2020, the share of adults who regularly receive news from the platform has increased from 3 percent to 17 percent, according to Pew Research Center. “No other social media platform we studied saw faster growth” in the news, the study’s authors wrote.