I know it’s been a minute since I’ve published one of my normal essays. I’ll be returning to these soon as the chaos of the Slow Productivity launch dissipates.
In the meantime, I wanted to share two quick notes: one about the book, and one about something interesting (but completely unrelated) that several of you have sent in my direction recently…
A note about the book
On Saturday, March 16th at 3:00pm, I’ll be appearing at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. I’ll be joined in conversation with David Epstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Range. We’ll talk Slow Productivity and take questions from the audience. (For a preview, see my recent interview in Dave’s excellent newsletter.)
This is my first live event of the book tour, so if you’re in the DC area, I’d love to see you there! (More details.)
(You might also be interested in my most recent essay for The New Yorker, titled “How I Learned to Concentrate,” which discusses how my early years at MIT shaped almost everything I’ve written about ever since. I had fun writing this one: lots of Stata Center nostalgia!)
A note about something completely unrelated
Several readers have recently pointed me toward a fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal titled “Why Some 20-Somethings Are Saying No to TikTok.”
TikTok users between the ages of 18 to 24 dropped by around 9% between 2022 and 2023. Which is a lot for a single year.
The article’s author, Julie Jargon, talks to some of these ex-TikTok users to find out why they left. What she discovers is that many were unnerved by the application’s addictiveness.
One subject reported neglecting laundry and dishes to keep scrolling TikTok. Another reported that he lost the ability to do anything without the app in sight:
“He took out the trash while watching TikTok, but could only carry one bag at a time because his phone was in the other hand. When he cooked, he would stop chopping ingredients to scroll to the next video.”
This is all vaguely icky, but what caught my attention more was the fact that once these users broke their TikTok addiction, they were happy to move on. It was hard to put down, but ultimately not that important.
As I wrote in The New Yorker in 2022, this is the fatal flaw of TikTok. By focusing exclusively on addictiveness instead of slowly growing a hard-to-replicate social graph, like those that provide the foundation for legacy social platforms like Facebook and Instagram, TikTok gained lots of users quickly, but maintains only a weak grasp on them.
TikTok provides pure entertainment. If it unnerves you, as it has for the many 20-somethings who recently quit, there isn’t much cost to leaving — no careful collection of friend links or follower relationships to lose. You’re instead only walking away from an abstract stream of brain stem stimulation.
In my New Yorker piece I predicted that this trend toward pure distraction would lead to more turnover and tumult in the attention economy application space. We may be seeing the beginning of this trend starting to play out.
The post Come See Me Saturday in DC + TikTok Falters appeared first on Cal Newport.