Tiktok & the pathologization of experience
Are you anxiously-attached? Am I?
Sometimes, that little blue search bar on top of TikTok’s comment section anticipates my question about a recent pop culture reference, an oblique slang, an innuendo that my 8 years in America still hasn’t taught me.
Most of the time, the search bar is some strange new term that pathologizes and diagnose our life down to every behavior, experience, and emotion.
Because of my less-than-satisfactory dating life in the past six months, I took to TikTok for comfort and information: comfort that my experience (un)fortunately, is simply (or at least appears to be) one in a million; information about what might be wrong with me, what might be wrong with the other person, what might be wrong with this entire generation. I learn through graphs about what type of attachment that I have, anxious, avoidant, anxious-avoidant attachment, entire diagrams and presentations where I am taught about myself and how to fix it. I felt like my world was opened to a new realm of self-understanding.
In the beginning, the videos are short, 5-second clips with a simple sentence that, from the meticulously curated TikTok fyp, renders as a “relatable dating” experience. Some of these are somewhat relatable, joining a whole legion of '“universal” dating experience with povs — pov: talking to your 183rd abg, followed by a list of “predictable” , and the immediately post-ironic — pov: when your talking stage thinks your an abg. Or the humorously grotesque pov: guys before they kiss you.
Then there are the longer TikToks. Of the hundreds of thousands I’ve scrolled past, I remember one guy who draw out, literally, little figures to show the symptoms, rational behind, and solutions to the anxious attachment style. Not to out myself for my 24 subscribers, I did find his videos relatable and instructional. I squeezed my experiences, my analysis of self, my emotions into the little figures, and tried to imagine that yes, I am attached to certain people with certain characteristics because I lacked those characteristics in myself. The next step for anxious-attachments, the TikTok guy argued, is to slowly cultivate these characteristics in oneself.
But there was a small nag. This overly-clinical, singular reason couldn’t possibly encapsulate the entirety of attraction, of my attraction. But I kept interacting with these videos, hoping to medically extract the why and how. Maybe someone else’s video will unleash some repressed childhood memory, some traumatic experience but I didn’t recognize it at the time, that connects in unsuspecting ways why I put my phone on dnd but still check, every few minutes, for a text message that wasn’t going to come.
More videos, more "relatable” content. I click the comment section and see the “three-month rule” in the search bar and look it up, mentally calculating whether it’s been three months since I started seeing one person. I see “proximity attraction”, watch yet more related videos, diagnose myself. TikTok, of all places, seemed to provide all the easily-digestible content I needed towards self-healing.
My continual consumption and constant refurbishing of my concept of my attachment style still needed an output —— I complained about my dating life to my friends, and about these strange and defamiliarized representations of it in bitable content. Eventually, after several big crash outs, I was suddenly fine. I reviewed the TikToks I have consumed and decided that none of them absolutely applied to my experience. The villainy that I had taken from the TikTokers’ situation(ship)s and applied to mine wasn’t really there in the first place. Again, I thought about language, specifically diagnostic language, and how it transforms individual experience into uniform narrative.
The fundamental drive behind TikTok diagnoses1, these made-up rules, seem to be the comfort of shared experience, what I had initially sought out in the solitary knowledge of my own. As is with all storytelling, we turn to other people to recognize resonances across difference, truths in community.
However, there comes a point where these diagnoses fail. With TikTok’s platform, where everyone can be a content creator and cultural critic. The semi-intellectualism that these videos on attachment styles or these made-up rules emanate actually distance one’s experience and shortcuts more rigorous self-reflection into that of easy prescriptions. Did [this] happen to you? Then you must be [this], because of [this].
In a sea of content where everyone is an expert, or at least claims to be, there are videos that speak to and illuminate one’s experience. But a reliance on this medium, as I had developed, yielded a strange dissonance between my experience and my re-experiencing them through these narratives.
At the beginning of 2025, I deleted TikTok, only one month after I made my account public in my fight against my hatred of being perceived. The reason for which was, ironically, because of this TikTok I watched, calling for its audience to create instead of consume. Such is also the reason why I came back to finish writing this post that I had started in October (pre-crash out). A lot has changed since then. 2024 has passed, I made a resolution of writing one Substack article a month, and I’ve fortunately released myself from the depths of TikTok dating advice. Just the simple act of finishing this article made me remember just how much I love writing, the cadence of it, how words and sound co-create meaning out of the endless void of rants I would otherwise have dumped on my friends’ unfortunate ears. So for my friends reading this, thank you for always listening to my troubles, and thank you for reading this Substack. I hope to spend lots of time with you all in 2025.
I’m using the word diagnosis specifically in the context of these “fake” rules, like the “three-month rule”. While this doesn’t include the “real” attachment styles, I do think that the TikTokification, or dilution, of these more scientific fall into this category.
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