Tiktok

A new study has found that smartphones are a likely cause of falling American birth rates. Economists Caitlin K. Myers and Ezekiel Hooper tracked the rollout of the iPhone across the country and found that the more people used smartphones, the further birth rates fell. This was especially true for the youngest cohort of women. Between 2007 and 2011, use of the iPhone was correlated with between 33 to 52 percent of America’s fertility decline. There’s been a lot of discussion about smartphones and falling fertility rates lately. Most arguments go something like this: smartphones and social media are linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression, less sex and less in-person socializing.

There’s a question I’ve started being asked at work. Given I’m a psychiatrist, it isn’t one I’d ever expected to hear: “Do I have cancer?” A young woman with anxiety wants to know whether the lump on her neck is sinister; she has been watching a great deal of TikTok. A man in his late thirties, in for a routine review, mentions in passing that his sister has been referred for a colonoscopy and wonders whether he should be too. At a dinner party a few weeks ago, a friend leant across halfway through her low-alcohol natural wine and asked me, in a small voice, whether it was true her generation was getting cancer in their thirties. Yes, I said, perhaps a little too bluntly. She looked rather panicked for the rest of her evening.

For teenage girls on TikTok, the makeup routine is an almost sacred ritual. Manicured fingertips dart around at virtuosic speed, applying dabs of foundation, blush and highlighter with precise artistry. Normally the commentary is about the nuances of brushing and blending – but Sophie, a bewitchingly pretty 18-year-old from New Zealand, has something more pressing to discuss. ‘I’d been having headaches for about two months,’ she says, placing dots of concealer under her blue eyes. ‘And then one night – it was my [high school] graduation – I was having a few drinks, which you’re not meant to do when you have glandular fever, which is what we all thought I had. So I kind of expected to wake up hungover.

‘Very tasty,’ said my husband. ‘Very sweet.’ In a catchphrase from 1940 that must surely predate even his long tale of years, he had found an echo for one that has in recent days attracted millions on TikTok. The difference is that today it is called a meme. ‘You see how I do my make-up for work?’ says Jools Lebron in a video. ‘Very demure. Very mindful.’ It is funny, if it is funny, because the deadpan cosmetics tutorial is delivered by Jools Lebron, a great fat trans woman. The audience is addressed as ‘divas’. They are told: ‘I don’t come to work with a green-cut crease. I don’t look like a clown when I go to work.’ I didn’t understand ‘green-cut crease’, but it’s to do with how eyeshadow is applied.

The jibe, commonly attributed to Napoleon, that England is a nation of shopkeepers, was at least a sort of compliment. Britons embodied, it seemed to suggest, the bourgeois virtues of thrift, industry, self-reliance and pragmatism. But what would a latter-day Napoleon see if he looked at us now? A nation of busybodies, bluenoses and snitches intent not on minding the shop but on minding each-other’s business. That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from the news that Kirstie Allsopp has been reported to social services for allowing her 15-year-old son to travel round Europe with a friend to celebrate the end of his GCSEs.

Complaining about ‘toxic parents’ has been a viral hit on TikTok with videos on the topic racking up several billion views. Only one of those views is mine and there won’t be another because it was like peering through a window into a cross between a padded cell and a charnel house. In video after video, boys and girls across the English-speaking world – aged roughly 15 to 25 – share the trauma of what they’ve had to endure, courtesy of their terrible mothers and fathers. Many children suffer at the hands of the people who should protect them, but in this case what the kids find intolerable would, to anyone sane, look like normal, even responsible, parenting.