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Sunday, May 11, 2025

Anxiously attached to my TikTok algorithm

I lie to TikTok and it lies back

 

By ABHINAYA KASAGANI— akasagani@ucdavis.edu

 

Most days, I scroll through TikTok absentmindedly, typing in phrases like “disorganized attachment,” “What if I love my partner but don’t like them?” or “Am I operating out of fear or instinct?” TikTok has none of my answers, but that doesn’t stop me.

Sometimes, I lie about my questions, conceiving impractical scenarios to beget impractical answers. It is amusing to note how TikTok repackages attachment theory into archetypes, reducing psychology into bite-sized, emotionally flattened aesthetics. Do not get me wrong: Attachment theory is a useful clinical framework in which one understands relational patterns, and TikTok has been accomplished in making these tools accessible to the user. Despite its usefulness, this prevalence of “packaged” information has encouraged people to self-diagnose and leverage their dysfunctions as excuses; a cavalier “TikTok told me that I….” misplaces all accountability.

Attachment theory was originally developed by John Bowlby and later expanded by Mary Ainsworth, explaining how caregiver relationships (especially between mothers and children) shaped the child’s approach to emotional control and their understanding of intimacy. Bowlby and Ainsworth’s work resulted in the four major attachment styles: secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized. Operating on a flexible spectrum that explained the psychological inclinations of the child, these were seen as informative tools that made sense of these behaviors — not to be confused with fixed personality types or rigid roles.

If you, like me, are chronically online, you might be asking yourself: Why is everyone an avoidant nowadays? Reducing these behaviors into easily consumable archetypes allows one to dramatize these tendencies. The “anxious girl” is an overthinker who only likes people who do not seem to reciprocate. You laugh both at the truth it conceals and at the lie it presents. These dynamics are romanticized to contend with the presence of a pattern, of being trapped in a cycle: wanting something and getting another. The Internet is known to monetize anything even remotely “relatable,” so you are not confused as to why this happens.

The Internet loves checking boxes, labeling categories and forcing things into boundaries of black and white. Think of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), Enneagram or astrology. This prevalence of memes, infographics and point-of-views (POVs) on these subjects results in the establishment of personalities as performance — the strategic use of therapy-speak makes surface-level understandings feel insightful.

Oversimplifying these behaviors can cause misdiagnosis or a glamorization of these proclivities that then allows one to believe that as an “anxious” attachment style, they are fated to seek out “avoidants” and are forever bound to this cycle. They quit any attempts to break it. Others might use it to excuse their mistreatment of others, making no effort to address it — “I am who I am” is a terrible excuse.

Attachment theory was intended to help understand and solve the gaps in our patterns of communication, and TikTok offers up these patterns that were previously taboo or confusing to us on a silver platter. The paradox of TikTok psychology is that, despite its desire to educate, it leverages therapy-speak as social capital, concealing the amount of work that needs to be done.

So, the clock ticks and you scroll through posts for nearly an hour and a half. Your anxious attachment to your phone is why you are so easily lied to and misguided — break the cycle or don’t. Use what you’re told or put your phone away. To aestheticize all talk and no action is dangerous; nothing that is 60 seconds long can do the work alone.

 

Written by: Abhinaya Kasagani— akasagani@ucdavis.edu

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual columnists belong to the columnists alone and do not necessarily indicate the views and opinions held by The California Aggie.

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