I’m Spending the Holidays Watching Cabin Builders on TikTok—While I Still Can

Wooded area. A raging fire. Little by little snowflakes fell gently. This is my happy place. It’s not outside my window, though; Already turned on Tik Tok.

For months, I’ve been “teaching” TikTok to provide me with this content: people, often men, hand-building shelters in the wilderness. Most of them are super-accelerated timelapses that start with a hole in the ground, an axe, and a pile of wood. Once, I looking at someone Build a hobbit hole that looks like, uh, an entrance dune Sandworm. i landed on cabin in the woods TikTok via Outdoor cast iron cooking TikTok, I never want to leave. Of course, I might have to.

No one really knows what will happen with TikTok in the coming weeks. Back in April, President Joe Biden signed a bill The law requires ByteDance, the app’s owner, to spin off and sell TikTok’s U.S. operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or face being blocked. TikTok files lawsuit, now Supreme Court plans hearing cases on January 10 and may rule on whether the law applies Infringement of the right to free speech before the deadline.

So between now and then, I’m going to watch every TikTok about building a cabin that I can.

To be honest, I would do it anyway. Chilling out on social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left until 2024, watching TikTok (or Bluesky, or Instagram, if you prefer those) might be the best way to reset your brain. But TikTok has rules about this. Subgenres on the platform, such as the animal-raising TikTok or the furniture-renovating TikTok, remain one of the most effective forms of mental soothing.

Even if TikTok wins, there is no guarantee that my FYP will continue to provide forest survival content. While it remains largely a platform for pop culture junk food and lip-sync videos, more and more Americans are using TikTok as a new source. Since 2020, the share of adults who regularly get news from the platform has increased from 3% to 17%, According to the Pew Research Center. “None of the social media platforms we studied experienced faster news growth,” the study’s authors wrote.