I’m spending the holidays watching cabin makers on TikTok, while I still can

Wooded area. Burning fire. A little gentle snowfall. This is my happy place. Except it’s not outside my window. It’s on Tik Tok.

For months, I’ve been “teaching” TikTok to give me this content: people, usually men, building shelters with their own hands in the wilderness. Most of them are super-fast time-lapses that start with a hole in the ground, an ax, and a pile of wood. Once, I I saw a man Build a hobbit hole that looks like Entrance A Sand dunes Sand worm. I landed on Cabin in the woods Tik Tok via Cast iron outdoor cooking TikTok, and I never want to leave. Of course, I might have to.

No one really knows what will happen to TikTok in the next few weeks. Last April, US President Joe Biden signed invoice The law orders the app’s owner, ByteDance, to divest and sell TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or be banned. TikTok has filed a lawsuit, and the Supreme Court — as of now — plans to do so Hear the case on January 10 and will likely issue a ruling on whether the law will be implemented or not Violates freedom of expression rights Before the deadline.

So, between now and then, I’ll be monitoring every TikTok I can to build the cabin.

Let’s be real, I’d do this anyway. Disconnecting from social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikToks — or browsing Bluesky, or scrolling Instagram, if that’s what bothers you the most — is the best way to reset your brain. But TikTok rules this. Subgenres on the platform, such as TikTok for animal care or TikTok for furniture renovation, remain one of the most effective forms of mental soothing.

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