Rosita Boland: Anyone who thinks that TikTok is only for the young is totally wrong

TikTok. I confess, I am obsessed. I was never one for Facebook. Twitter was fun until it wasn’t, and since Your Man bought it, I’ve scarcely engaged. Instagram didn’t interest me either. But TikTok. Ob-sessed.

Anyone who thinks that TikTok is only for the young is totally wrong. I would not like to tell you how many hours I have whiled away scrolling blissfully through this Chinese-owned app. I don’t consider any of these hours wasted time. Where else could I be following “characters” on a Nine Month World Cruise, that left Florida a few weeks ago, and who are now somewhere off Brazil?

There are about 1,500 passengers on Serenade of the Seas. The cheapest ticket for this 274-day cruise was a windowless $60,000 cabin per person (how anyone can live in a windowless cabin for months on end is beyond me, but I am agog just the same), and priciest was $760,000 per person.

The official title of the cruise is the Ultimate World Cruise, but everyone on TikTok commenting on it calls it the Nine Month World Cruise. They have reframed the cruise as a sailing reality show, analysing the TikToks that several people aboard are regularly posting, and making these people into characters. My favourite person is the one called Little Rat Brain, because with a name like that, of course it is.

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They are a few weeks in, and the bitching about the lesser mortals – those who signed up for “segments” of the cruise rather than then entire 274 days – is now starting to go down. “Ship Tea” is spilled every day by the people on TikTok watching the TikToks people on the ship are posting. It is meta and ouroboros and I am here for it.

[ Irish-language influencers: ‘TikTok is where young people’s eyes are nowadays’ ]

I never post anything on TikTok myself, follow nothing, and rarely “like” anything, so the whole thing is like a social media lucky-bag. I do know that the longer you spend watching certain posts, the more the app gathers information about what engages you, and thus starts curating what you see.

For me, and clearly for the one billion other people on TikTok, there is something not just addictive about the app, but some reason that keeps us interested and scrolling. Partly it’s the fun stuff that shows up in my timeline: Taylor Swift, fancy apartment listings, antique jewellery, people living in the Arctic in cabins, whipsmart content makers such as Tamsin (human) and Rhubarb (dog), the British guy who is always on some first-class flight or luxury train somewhere, “testing” their facilities, the “story times” ordinary people tell about the minutiae of their lives, with an openness that amazes me, the tiny marvel of a child who snowboards and skis like an Olympian, a kangaroo sanctuary in Australia, a rich kid in Singapore who is always shopping.

There was a time a few months ago when all the news I was hearing was bad. I burrowed down into a few specific TikToks; ones that all featured miniature cooking. I cannot tell you how calming it was to watch the tiniest portions of stir fry, or cakes, or milkshakes, or steak frites being painstakingly created by anonymous hands, on teeny tiny woks and ovens lit with tea lights. It was like seeing the work of fairies. I loved it beyond almost anything else going on in my life right then.

Then I got into watching Lego Cooking, where it looks like Lego is being made into food. Then I found a TikTok called Julie and Bella, where a small child eats all manner of Japanese food alongside her parents with joy, and joyfully went down that rabbit hole for a long time.

I don’t know how my love of miniature cooking, and a guy posting content from first class on planes, and footage of orphaned kangaroos created an algorithm where TikTok thought I’d like to see Katie Hopkins’s hateful rants

Part of what keeps me coming back to TikTok is discovering on a daily basis what people are obsessing about on that particular day. The day I’m writing this, it’s definitely the sexist “jokes” Golden Globes presenter Jo Koy came out with the previous night, the worst of which was directed at the phenomenally successful Barbie movie, describing it as: “A plastic doll with big boobies”. There was also a deeply unfunny dig at Taylor Swift and the person she’s dating.

Yes, I know all this has been widely covered in the media, but in TikTok land, you can see everything so plainly. It’s not like reading some news report, or opinion piece; what you are watching are real people in their homes passionately mouthing off in almost real time, and there’s a veracity to this kind of reaction that is both fascinating and utterly engaging.

The odd time, virtual bombs of content have arrived in my infinity scroll. There was Katie Hopkins, wine glass in hand, spewing xenophobia about pretty much everything; popping up on my phone like a toad from a toilet. I don’t know how my love of miniature cooking, and a guy posting content from first class on planes, and footage of orphaned kangaroos created an algorithm where TikTok thought I’d like to see Katie Hopkins’s hateful rants, but the internet is truly a mystery. I tapped “Not Interested” and she vanished, only to mysteriously return every few weeks.

I still read books. I still have meaningful conversations. I still cook actual human-sized meals. It’s slightly terrifying how my Little Rat Brain can adapt to almost anything. Some day, I’ll move on to a new obsession, but for now, TikTok remains an unexpected and true daily joy.