I’m spending the holidays watching Cabin Builders on TikTok—while I still can

Wooded area. Roaring fire. Lightly falling snow. This is my happy place. Except it’s not through my window; it’s on TikTok.

For months, I’ve been “teaching” TikTok to provide me with this content: people, usually dudes, building shelters by hand in the desert. Most of them are ultra-fast timelapses that start with a hole in the ground, an ax and a pile of wood. Once, me a man was watching built a hobbit hole that looked like the entrance to Dune sand worm. I landed on cabin-in-the-woods TikTok via cast iron outdoor cooking TikTok and I never want to leave. Of course, it may be necessary.

No one knows what will happen to TikTok in the next few weeks. Back in April, US President Joe Biden signed account in a law ordering the app’s owner, ByteDance, to divest itself and sell TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19 or face being blocked. TikTok sued and – as of right now – the Supreme Court plans to do so hear the case on Jan. 10 and potentially issue a ruling on whether or not the law violates the right to free speech before the deadline.

So between now and then I’ll be watching all the cabin building TikToks I can.

Let’s be real, I would do it anyway. Binging on social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikToks — or scrolling through Bluesky, or scrolling through Instagram, if those are more your thing — is the best way to reset your brain. But TikTok rules for that. Sub-sub-genres of the platform, like TikTok for raising animals or TikTok for refurbishing furniture, remain some of the most effective forms of mental relaxation around.

Even if TikTok prevails, there’s no guarantee that my FYP will continue to provide jungle-style survival content. While it’s still largely a platform for pop culture junk food and lip-sync videos, a growing number of Americans are using TikTok as a new source. From 2020 the share of adults who regularly get news from the platform increased from 3 percent to 17 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. “No other social media platform we studied saw faster growth” in news, the study’s authors wrote.