In a story that highlights the ongoing plight of being too online, 28-year-old Riley Thomas has burnt the candle at both ends by watching TikTok for a record-breaking four hours and 20 minutes straight.
According to Riley, she was managing her work/life balance just fine until she opened the TikTok app on her phone.
“My accounting job is pretty easy actually — I don’t work that hard at it,” Riley told reporters gathered around her while she was recovering in bed. “But it was all of the TikToks that really pushed me over the edge. I mean, I watched 25 ‘Get Ready With Me’’s. 25! Can you even imagine that?”
Burnout is described in the International Classification of Diseases as a syndrome resulting from unsuccessfully managed chronic workplace stress, causing feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy. While Riley’s TikTok consumption is not technically related to her professional life, she claims that it takes up even more of her daily life, thus making it virtually the same as a second job for her.
“She does this every week,” Riley’s roommate Veronica Lyken told reporters. “And then she has the audacity to tell me that she can’t clean the bathroom this week because she’s ‘so burnt out’. I get that times are crazy right now, but I don’t really think ‘doom scrolling’ is really a good excuse to get out of doing chores.”
Riley has noticed that this is the typical response when people hear about her TikTok-related burnout.
“Obviously not everyone’s going to get it,” she said. “I mean, it’s hard work to watch more than 300 TikToks with no food, water, or bathroom breaks in-between, and not everyone’s cut out for it. However, it surely doesn’t help when people judge me for it. As you can see, I’ve already been through a lot.”
At this moment, Riley gestured to herself sitting in bed, which she had already been doing all day.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Riley’s roommate Veronica told reporters. “But isn’t she totally in control of how many TikToks she watches?”
As a response to this statement, Riley mumbled something unintelligible about the “algorithm” and “current attention economy right now”.
