Sometimes I feel myself loosing time scrolling through short videos without remember anything watched, which feels similar to dissociation. This situation is not like what happened in extreme trauma cases or PTSD, but functioning as a daily pressure-coping method, a way of avoiding the reality.
For short-video creators, certain metrics are more important than what the audiences are familiar with including likes, saves, shares and view counts. Indicators such as the 2-second exit rate, 10-second watch rate and the overall video completion rate play a more direct role in boosting video exposure and the platforms’s recommendation algorithm push. That’s why dozens of short-videos can easily catch us with its bright colours, loud transitions, half-second cuts, text overlays, meme music and surprise endings- everything is well calculated and formulated. Thus, in this dense information realm, our brains cannot process everything, so they shut down the “conscious” layer and leave us in the half-present buffering mode.
ADHD communities often say short-videos feel like a “dopamine drip”. But the reality is no narrative, no continuity, no emotional arc or no time to breathe. This combination means our brain can’t form long-term memory, which leaves us with stimulation but no substance- the perfect recipe for dissociation.
In addition, people don’t open TikTok because they’re happy. They open it because they need to escape from work, anxiety, loneliness, the pressure to be productive, or overstimulation from everything else. So short- video scrolling becomes a ritual of “I don’t want to feel this, just make the world go quiet for a second.” But it’s the kind of quietness that leaves us hollow rather than rested.
What’s more, under a solidified efficiency-oriented mindset, we (at least myself) are always multitasking: watching videos while eating, listening to something while walking, etc. Eventually, we build a strange, paradoxical survival strategy for our nervous system where silence feels threatening and noise feels comforting. That explains when we scroll through videos, our brains slips into the familiar state where it feels half awake, half absent, safe but numb.
Something I find fascinating is that we used to describe dissociation as individual pathology, but now it’s becoming a meme, a casual phrase, and a cultural symptom. It is not that everyone suddenly has PTSD or ADHD. It’s that we are collectively living in an environment designed to pull our minds apart, fragment our focus, and overload our senses.