“I was addicted to my phone, I had the worst mental health possible that you can imagine,” Jain said. Her online friends were anonymous strangers, after all, not the kind of people you’d ask to pick you up from the airport or call up in the middle of the night. It was a vicious cycle: TikTok fed her loneliness but was also what she used to try to alleviate it.
Jain is the founder of mental health startup FullCircle. Running it was all-consuming work, but now she could barely concentrate. Her co-founder, Ankit Kukadia, began noticing how Jain was increasingly retreating to her phone, sneaking off during meetings to scroll through TikTok and neglecting her responsibilities. So, he staged a two-day protest to get Jain to delete the app, giving her an ultimatum that he’d refuse to work with her if she didn’t put a stop to her obsession. “The minute you think about opening up TikTok,” Kukadia said, “give me control of your phone.”