I’m Spending the Holidays Watching Cabin Builders on TikTok—While I Still Can

A wooded area. A roaring fire. A bit of gently falling snow. This is my happy place. Except, it’s not out my window; it’s on TikTok.

For months I have “taught” TikTok to serve me this content: people, usually dudes, building shelters by hand in the wilderness. Most of them are ultra-sped-up timelapses that start with a hole in the ground, an axe, and a pile of wood. Once, I watched a guy build a hobbit hole that looked like the, uh, entrance to a Dune sandworm. I landed on cabin-in-the-woods TikTok by way of outdoor-cast-iron-cooking TikTok, and I never want to leave. Of course, I might have to.

No one really knows what will happen to TikTok in the next few weeks. Back in April, US president Joe Biden signed a bill into law ordering the app’s owner, ByteDance, to divest and sell TikTok’s US operations to a non-Chinese company by January 19 or be blocked. TikTok sued, and—as of right now—the Supreme Court plans to hear the case on January 10 and potentially issue a ruling on whether or not the law violates free speech rights before the deadline.

So, between now and then, I’m going to be watching all of the cabin-building TikToks I can.

Let’s be real, I’d be doing this anyway. Dissociating on social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikToks—or scrolling Bluesky, or thumbing through Instagram, if those are more your jam—is about the best way to reset one’s brain. But TikTok rules for this. Sub-subgenres on the platform, like animal-fostering TikTok or furniture-refurbishing TikTok, remain one of the most effective forms of mental soothing around.

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