Scroll Fast, Die Slow
So I recently made a boxing TikTok that kind of took off — 814K views and counting. I paired the slow-mo clip with a trending audio (“Put your head on my shoulderrr…”) and voila. Just 15 minutes in CapCut and now almost 1M total views.
I followed that up with a second slow-mo clip that overlaid the iconic Mona Lisa and Scream paintings above, and labeled the video simply with the word “art.” The idea being that my pugilistic skill, especially when viewed at 0.10x speed, was indeed poetry in motion. The video didn’t go mega-viral like the first one, but it still made the rounds (120K views). Who knows, maybe I’ve cracked the code as far as how to make viral boxing content goes.
Of course, seeing thousands of views and likes pouring in seemingly every time I open TikTok is thrilling. My dopaminergic cup runneth over — and is yet still bottomless.
And then my next few uploads didn’t even hit 1K. Maybe I haven’t cracked the code after all.
I should mention that I work at TikTok on the Social team, where my job is literally to make TikTok videos. (The technical answer being that I make content that drives awareness to and adoption of our ad units.)
So all this is to say, I’m surrounded by content and the idea of content all the time. I’m a 35-year-old man working in social media and my primary KPI is likes, comments, shares. And in my personal life, I’m flirting with the idea of trying to make it as a boxing creator to boot.
Content truly is king. Now all hail the supreme leader that governs us all.
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I’m in San Diego right now for a marketing and social media conference sponsored by TikTok. We’re all content mercenaries for the brands we represent. A lot of discourse on stage has focused on content optimization. Working with creators. Placating the Almighty Algorithm. Using AI to flood the FYP with even more content. And my favorite: how to effectively reach those people who are “chronically online” (their words).
Eventually I had to remove myself from the conversation. So after lunch on Day 2, instead of going back into the event room, I went outside and found a large patch of turf nearby and just sprawled out spread-eagle, letting the SoCal sun kiss every inch of my body. It soothed me with its stillness. I laid there, feeling the soft prickle of the manicured turf on my backside for over an hour.
The physical world just hits different.
The good life
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One of the great ironies of this conference is how, while people are on stage presenting about social media, a huge chunk of the audience isn’t even tuned in; they have their heads down, clearly ignoring the keynotes in favor of yes, checking their own social medias. A guy seated to my right kept opening Instagram every couple minutes. A woman who looked to be in her 50s in front of me was doom-scrolling Facebook Reels. (I didn’t know anyone does that.) I was no better; I kept looking through X, although seeing everyone else perusing their phones motivated me to actually put mine down and pay attention to the speakers on stage.
I mentioned earlier there was a presenter who said the strategy for the popular candy brand whose social media she manages was to target and lean into those people who are chronically online. You know, addicts. Which is all of us at this point, but I couldn’t help but feel the glaring lack of conversation about ethics — not just during her session but throughout the conference — spoke volumes about the kind of society we inhabit in 2025.
Like, we used to use the internet. Now we’re used by it. I know that’s not a deep insight anymore; The Social Dilemma came out during Covid and a billion articles and YouTube videos about attention hijack have sprouted since, and everyone knows that algorithms are dopaminergic poison and that we’re all better off without them.
And yet … when is the last time you actively resisted the Almighty FYP? Do you ever engage with TikTok through the Following tab instead? Or sort YouTube videos through the Subscriptions page? Have you ever told Instagram to snooze Suggested Posts (which you can only do for a max of 30 days anyway)? Does anyone actually use Bluesky, the knockoff X with a chronological-only feed? Why do my friends keep sending me Instagram Reels?!
I recently tried using X through the Following tab — meaning I was only shown posts by accounts I follow — and what a flat experience. Like, I was getting withdrawals from missing out on the most viral posts from the last few hours. And so I fell back off the wagon and into the For You vortex almost immediately.
We know by now how algorithms addict: they optimize to create a new dopamine baseline from which it’s basically impossible to come down. Excuse the vulgarity but imagine having wild orgies every night, then suddenly switching to having a single partner only — and with whom you have to use a condom every time, no less! From Dan Bilzerian to … Dan Rather, I guess? This just in but I’d rather not. Looking out to a still and flat world is absolutely unacceptable when the profusion of technological potential to hyper-charge life is always at our fingertips. And so we’ll push onward and upward.
I don’t mean to sound so grim and defeatist but the time for the Frankenstein conversation about digital ethics has passed. Or maybe we had it and decided that unfettered access to scaled robot-fed dopamine was worth humanity’s collective brainrot in the end. Maybe what our species has been optimizing for this whole time is what the phones and algorithms more broadly represent: instant gratification and hyper hyper-convenience (yes, double hyper). Not these silly antiquated notions of love, fulfillment, meaning and purpose! Maybe love was never the end, but the biological utility to give thousands and thousands of generations of humans a reason to procreate — the ultimate unbroken chain of FLESH and FEELING that carried us just far enough … to invent something better than both.
Now excuse me for one quick second while I scroll TikTok for the next five hours.
Ethics be damned
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And I’m back.
One thought I’m wrestling with is that apps like TikTok allow for democratized creativity and visibility — which are good things — and yet we still all get the feeling that there’s something fundamentally and almost morally wrong with them. So what negative am I looking to extract here? For awhile I thought the problem was the idea of more content. Like at my conference, the constant preaching about reach and resonance and capturing attention through macro and niche creators and the acceleration of the content production cycle with new AI tools that threaten our very jobs in the first place — all this assumes that we’ve subscribed to the intrinsic notion that more content = good. (The irony then being that nobody really gets to resonate when the scroll becomes infinite.)
But then I thought, more content can’t necessarily be bad. If every creator in the US decided tomorrow to start penning the next great American novel, I think we’d all say that that strive for more is indeed commendable.
So then what is the real issue, if more is not intrinsically bad, and if these apps are, in fact, actually powering people’s creativity and ability to be seen and heard at scale (my boxing TikToks being a prime example)?
I think the answer is simply that we just can’t breathe. I picture the perfect combination of volume, which is never-ending; pace, which is lighting fast; interface, which is seamless and entirely without friction; reward system, which feeds the brain with endless surges of dopamine; and finally purpose, which seems to be about fragmented and compulsive escape only — it’s all that fitted into one booted foot that presses against our necks for nearly every one of our waking moments.
In other words, the apps’ engineering is completely fucked up.
So even if Scorsese made the greatest TikTok video of all time, it’d still get steamrolled by the totality of a design that, by nature, won’t allow it a second to breathe or be reflected on.
But on the opposite end of the spectrum, you have reading a book, which always feels nutritive. Why? After all, you’re still in consumptive mode. (Hell, things have gotten so bad in 2025 that even watching a full-length movie and resisting the urge to pick up your phone during it feels like a productive two hours now.) Maybe it’s because what’s demanded of you is the exact opposite of every design choice our social media apps optimize for. Reading is active. It’s sloooow. It requires sustained attention and narrative memory — closing the book before you sleep, only to pick back up where you left off the following night, cannot be overstated as a wonderful design principle. Reading doesn’t do much to your dopamine levels — it’s basically boring in a good way. There’s no all-powerful machine exploiting the inputs of billions of our reading behavioral data points to try serving us the most addicting story on every single page so we’ll stay longer and read more ads. And so the escape, while immersive, could never feel compulsive.
There’s that word again. Compulsive. I think we’ve all found that the digital world habitually pulls us in with the weight of its addictive force — how many times in the day do we reach for our phone and swipe it open without any actual intent? But while these apps continue to serve and feed us an endless supply of dopamine, they still starve us of the very ingredients that make escape nourishing: things like stillness, space, tension, peace and quiet.
Some of that stuff that used to make life, life.
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So basically everything I’ve written up until now, I was contemplating on that turfy area outside the conference. (Funny what a few minutes deprived of digital noise can do for the brain.) And in the total stillness and silence that I occupied during that hour or so where I did nothing but bask in the physicalness of the actual world I live in, I came up with a name that I think encapsulates exactly the type of movement or brand I want to be part of. I’m calling it OFF THE LINE.|
“Off the line” is a boxing term you use to tell someone how to avoid being hit. Your opponent’s jab and cross shoot straight out, usually in a direct line toward your face. Ducking or slipping to get your head off of this imaginary center line is an effective way to prevent those shots from landing. Hence, get your head off the line. (See video here for demonstration.)
In the context of the digital world and algorithmic addiction, “off the line” of course nods to the idea of getting oneself offline.
And still another way I interpret “off the line” is the idea of operating and living in such a way that feels true to oneself and steers clear of brain-deadness and conformity for conformity’s sake. I imagine a queue where ten million people are lined up to receive their rations of approved thoughts and acceptable actions for the day. (If I can get a quick word in about politics, this is where the tribalists would queue in preparation to toe their party’s line.) I never liked standing there. I want to always strive to be an independent thinker and player.
And so, getting and keeping my head OFF THE LINE.|
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I recently saw the teaser for the new Frankenstein movie coming out in November (now it’s my turn to thank YouTube’s algorithm). If you don’t remember the original story, it’s basically about a scientist named Frankenstein who creates a monster then instantly regrets his creation. It’s a model lesson on how ambition and progress can backfire when we fail to put so much as a thought into the ethics and consequences of the things we’re willing into existence. The new movie’s release timing is particularly apt for the world we inhabit in 2025. Is instant gratification via algorithmic infinity the pinnacle of human civilization? Are we truly ready to DIE — to accept Dopamine Is Everything? Will the content people at this conference about content ever get the great irony of their attention being stolen from the stage’s contents to TikTok, Instagram, and for that 50-year-old lady, Facebook content? At least Frankenstein showed enough decency of guilty spirit to disappear once he saw the monster he’d created. But in our storyline, we willingly feed the beast with more and more and more till its sheer size and weight flattens us and all we can do is raise our hands feebly to open our phones just to watch the next video this monster decides mathematically to serve us.
I’m not asking for a world without Instagram. I’m asking for us to look up from our phones long enough to contemplate the kind of relationship we want to have with these apps and technology at large. When the content professional at the conference boasts of her social strategy that hinges on targeting “chronically online” users, and then never stops to consider the ethics of intentionally feeding addicts more of the same — that kind of shamelessness really rubs me the wrong way.
But am I any better sitting on my high horse — which just so happens to be at a desk atop the 57th floor of a NYC skyscraper where the leasee is one TikTok Inc.? Of course not. It’s the best job I’ve had and I’ve been at it for five years, and here’s to another five while I’m at it. Sue me.
But I think my own personal solution — and maybe salvation — is to do what I’m doing now. Trade the phone and apps in for longer periods of time to pursue things like writing, which requires stillness and clarity and patience and discipline and the ability to overcome all kinds of friction, up to and including one’s own self. This is my attempt to embody OFF THE LINE.|
I want to explore more interesting topics in my writing, like why gun lobbies are so effective at blocking new legislation, the history of street names in Manhattan, and the conception of a new theoretical social and economic contract that uses game-theory design to ensure collective honesty and eliminate corruption once and for all. You know, light reading topics. And I’d like to write amply about boxing technique and strategy.
Speaking of, if I check my viral boxing TikTok’s current view count now … 925K. That’s right, over 100K new views and two weeks of life in the physical world have passed since I started writing this piece.
In the quiet of this moment, I reflect and say the slow burn that’s intrinsic to the creative process is fantastic. Worthwhile things always take time.
Now, it’s just a question of if we’re still able to give it to ourselves.