You hear about us as being hopelessly in thrall to the infinite scroll of social media; obsessed with micro-influencers whose fame doesn’t even last 45 seconds, let alone 15 minutes; and ever on the verge of falling into eating disorders or self-harm as a result of the images and ideas that flash before our truncated attention spans. We are the “anxious generation”, mind-controlled by apps designed to be as addictive as possible. More specifically, we are framed as victims of a Chinese app called TikTok.

To be clear, the TikTok-girl crises I sketched above are all too real. But the older generation’s discourse around them more or less ignores what the people who are in need of rescue have to say for themselves. As a result, it misses the granular details that could make for better and more realistic reforms, if reforms are needed.

Famehungry — a new piece of performance art about TikTok being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival — is a good example of how such critiques go wrong. In it, the London-based theatre artist Louise Orwin explores the big question — TikTok, good or evil? — in a multimedia format that streams simultaneously on TikTok Live and integrates the app in interesting ways with the in-person performance. Audience members who still have the tabooed and sort-of-banned app can like or comment as the play unfolds; everyone sees Orwin acting into her phone and her screen-view is projected onto the stage. It could have been fun, but the performance was chaotic and overwhelmed by a too-on-the-nose “concern message” about people like me.

Orwin’s breakout performance in 2014 was a project called Pretty Ugly that examined the online identities of teenage girls. Famehungry covers some of the same territory, asking about the app’s effects on the mental health, self-esteem, and happiness of girls and young women.

The new work opens with Orwin sprawled onstage in various positions illuminated only by the glow of her phone. It’s a commentary on the social-media era: we only exist as we are seen online. I could relate to it some; it reminded me of staying up late with only the light of my phone in my room. She is wearing a red Adidas track suit and clashing neon green bodysuit, and she writhes around while loud and jarring ambient music plays. Next she sits down at a desk covered in pink hair and starts babytalking and making scrunchy faces into the camera. “Just waiting for a few more people to join”, she repeats, over and over and over. She also performs a few TikTok stereotypes, like waving and saying hi, drinking from her Stanley, and eating stuff off her acrylic nails (eating videos are called mukbang, from the Korean words meaning “eat” and “broadcast”).

Orwin explains during the play that she joined TikTok because she missed performing live during the pandemic, and she discovered that one of her former students, a 15-year-old named Jax Valentine, had 20,000 followers. She wondered if she could get up to that number, which was more than she’d ever achieved in a theatre in real life. During the performance, she’s hoping to achieve 20,000 likes and promises she’ll “do something amazing” for the audience if she does. Jax makes live guest appearances on another screen to coach her.

A long middle section of the play talks about what Orwin likes about TikTok. She picks the weird, outlandish, or simply brainrot videos — people running in slow motion, girls dancing in turtle-outfits — and says she likes to see all this human variety from around the world. She believes the app “democratizes the flow of information” and “makes space for marginalized communities”. But she offers this praise while walking on a treadmill, speaking in an increasingly frantic voice, and she follows it up with all the rules of how you have to act to be liked, implying that the app only rewards certain types of behavior and punishes others: turtle-dancing, yes; “fake smoking while covered in fake blood,” no. (I’m glad that content moderation prevents violent videos.) She also does attention-getting things like violently splash her face with water or eating with food hanging out of her mouth — more mukbang. During her final dance number, she pours a pink drink that looks like a strawberry Yoo-hoo over her head.

The play concludes with the artist venting mixed but mostly negative feelings. The attention is nice, Orwin thinks, but other than that, TikTok is “a black hole of nothing”. It’s “mostly people doing the same thing over and over again”, and she is disgusted with herself for participating. She also seems to be disgusted — or at least, negatively impacted — by many of her previous non-online performances. She tells the audience about ones in which she’d asked men to hit her or done other self-destructive or sexually gross things. Talking at the end with her back to the audience, she says she’s tired of “the precarious way I earn a living”, “the constant checking and rechecking”, the “dystopia”, and “making work in a system that’s broken”. She wonders why she’s doing it, and if she should have planned for her future or gotten a real job instead.

Yet what Orwin portrays goes so far beyond what the generally young, female user base of TikTok is like. I was insulted that a grown woman would put on an act that mocks young girls in the name of spotlighting their supposed misery. Orwin is a performance artist, exaggerating to make an effect, but the baby voices and the determination to humiliate herself seemed more about her than about most of us. If someone on TikTok says they’re “just waiting for a few more people to join”, it’s because they’re legitimately waiting. Sometimes people do rage-bait — act obnoxious to get attention — but the influencers who are famous and making money aren’t the ones doing that. They’re usually offering positive messages and running real businesses.

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I also thought maybe that Orwin was on the app for the wrong reasons. She went there because she was “fame hungry”, and all she cared about was getting followers. And she searched out the weird live content from around the world because that was her personal preference. I sometimes see that kind of content advertised in my feed, but I don’t watch them. My followers are mostly my friends, and I don’t obsess about getting more of them from among the strangers online. I use TikTok as a side tool in life; it’s meant to be fun. I capture fun moments with friends in nice outfits, take clips of interesting city views, and follow fashion, health, and beauty content. I didn’t mind deleting the app because as long as everyone was off of it, I wasn’t missing anything.

Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok. Some people might act foolish and inappropriate (especially when they have an audience of one to five people, who are probably just bots), and that isn’t good for them. But it’s also a mistake on that person’s part, not solely the fault of the app. Orwin herself is a good example, because she tells us she has been making disturbing and self-harming work long before TikTok existed.

I don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids, but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see. I stay mentally healthy despite the stress of the junior year of high school by getting a lot of exercise, eating real food, and spending time with my friends. Orwin poured soda into her Stanley, mocking a teen-girl cliché. I carry a Stanley everywhere, I admit, because I go from school to sports practice, and I get headaches when I’m dehydrated. Mine is always full of water enhanced with Liquid IV electrolyte powder, which is good at preventing them. It really works — I learned about it on TikTok.

My own response to her cutting was pretty minimal. I saw the scars on her arm, but rather than move into pro-active hyperdrive, I barely acknowledged them. I was taking a gamble, and I knew it. Of course, I was far from indifferent to her pain. But I felt that sometimes moving into a full therapeutic response has the opposite effect of that intended: it might indulge with amped-up seriousness what might simply be an otherwise painful but manageable part of life. I knew that the wound caused by her father would take time to heal, time and other happier things to fill up her heart. And I wanted her to get better without the pathologising rigmarole. But how?

What a professional or a parent can’t accomplish, a friend often can. My daughter was partnered with a group of three boys in her home economics cooking class, all of them “toxically” — and wonderfully — male: irreverent, funny, and just the right amount of mean. “Don’t let Nat get near the knife!” they’d tease. “Knives are for cutting vegetables, Nat. Vegetables.”

This ridicule might strike some as unusually cruel, a form of bullying and an instance of an “unsafe place” in her public school. But it was the mockery and jokes which were precisely what was healing for Nat. In her words: “It showed that they cared because they acknowledged my hurt, but they also showed that I didn’t have to let it overcome me. By drawing attention to my scars, they showed me that I didn’t have to feel ashamed of them. By laughing at me, they showed me that it was okay to laugh at myself.” And just like that, her cutting stopped.

But as I see it, there was another, deeper aspect to their ridicule that helped her to heal. It was the faith they had that she would take the jokes with a good spirit. Implicit in their teasing was their understanding that N would join in on the fun. And the bond created by that faith was the healing she needed. They trusted her to know that implicit in their mockery was care and love. Their leap of faith meant she felt less alone.

A university chaplain once told me something that seems to capture the spirit of our age: the highest ethic for the students she talks to, she said, is to not hurt another person’s feelings. That is a line that the kids will not cross. Not only do we not presume to tell one another how to live, we affirm others in their choices (largely to feel affirmed ourselves in our ethical, nonjudgmental behaviours. We are all such good people). Yet this seems to me to be profoundly anti-life, as well as deeply disrespectful of another’s capacity for good faith. How can one even begin to form real relationships if one is too afraid to hurt another person? How can we discuss ideas and feelings, debate them or contest them? How can we be authentic if we are constantly monitoring our every thought and action so as to not disrupt another’s sense of well-being?

It all reminds me of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Most of us have at least a passing acquaintance with its two main characters, the swashbuckling Petruchio and the fiery-tongued Kate, the shrew. Even if one is inclined to look punitively at Petruchio’s “taming” of Kate, as many are, one cannot help but smile at the repartee between the two. They build upon each other’s insults and innuendos. The true lovers that they are, they go for the jugular, like the lover’s pinch, which, as Shakespeare’s Cleopatra says, “hurts and is desired”.

In this, Kate and Petruchio are like other beloved Shakespearian lovers, Beatrice and Benedict, who never fail to land a hit. When Shakespeare has couples hurl barbs and banter, it is a reliable measure of their mutual affection, of their fitness for true friendship, and a measure of their equality. The brilliance of their mutual ridicule is a sign of respect. As Slavoj Žižek says: “The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other.”

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If we refrain from ridiculing even the most sensitive thing about a friend, it reveals our belief in a friend’s weakness, not in his strength. Through our “respect for another”, we demonstrate our low view of their capacity for grace. In a reversal of morals, we come to believe that respect means to tiptoe around the sensitivities of another rather than to treat them with humour and good faith. Yet it is precisely both those things which can lead to healing because the good faith itself creates the bonds of love.

Making a joke is always a risk and an act of faith. Comedy, says comedian Charlie Demurs, is “like throwing a rock into a window and turning it into stain glass”. Something is broken: a placid surface, an ideal, a politeness. But the breaking of a social nicety is only the prequel to a more beautiful transformation. We laugh. Laughing makes us feel better. We have had faith in others. That faith creates a connection.

“It is somehow very typical of the modern sense of self,” writes Rowan Williams, “that when we speak about ‘self-confidence’ these days, we’re often talking about something that is in us – rather than having the courage to engage, to venture out, to be confident enough to exchange perspectives, truths, insights, to move into a particular kind of conversation or dialogue.” Or the courage to tell a joke, the courage to make fun of something, or even of someone. The difference between being merely mean and being funny is obvious. The spirit of the person is the determining factor, though of course even ridicule that is intended to cause hurt can be turned to nothing if one meets it with unselfconscious laughter; an insult loses its power if one refuses to feel insulted.

Consider this anecdote: a friend of mine has a son-in-law who is a trans man. This friend, who is the mother-in-law, was once waiting to use the restroom while her son-in-law was in it. When he came out of the restroom — at last — carrying with him a magazine my friend said to him: “Just like a man! To take so long using the toilet.” It was meant good humouredly, clearly. She not only embraced her son-in-law’s identity, but felt self-confident enough to, as Williams says, venture out, to include him in a joke about men. But instead of laughing the son-in-law bristled, feeling offended by his mother-in-law’s teasing about his toilet etiquette as a man.

Why is this, I wonder. First of all, it is possible that he still felt some compunction around discussing restroom use, perhaps left over from his upbringing as a girl. But I wonder if it is because a joke at your expense necessitates a moment of vulnerability — the breaking of the window, to use Demurs’s metaphor — which means that there is a moment when one isn’t in control, where one’s sense of self is not in one’s own hands but handled, somewhat roughly, by the observations of another. Here is Williams again: if we “take for granted a basic individualist model, the hard core to which everything has got to accommodate itself, you drift towards a steady expectation that the best relationship you can be in to the world is control. The best place to be is a place where you can never be surprised.” This sounds right, and why, as Matthew B Crawford has pointed out, propaganda is somehow the opposite of funny. Jokes require a letting go, not just a release of tension, but a transformation of it.

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I am not suggesting that trans individuals are all unfunny, of course not. But, rather, that in a society in which individuals are thought to come into being through a process of inward-looking self-discovery, one is bound to be fragile, self-protective, and preoccupied with control. Surprises, such as those a punchline delivers, would be felt not as a delight but as a punch to the ego. The individualist wants to protect her self-identity, which can lead to controlling how others speak and behave, which can lead to isolation, which can lead to more desire for connection with others, which can lead to frustration, defensiveness, fragility and increased isolation. And so it goes. It is our openness to being surprised by others that may lead us out of our alienation from others.

The most surprising thing anyone has ever said to me came in the form of an unexpected joke. I told a man I was dating how I said goodbye to my closest friend the last time I saw her, not knowing that it would be the last time, as she was struck and killed by a car just days after. The loss of this friend still feels like an open wound, and the fact that I had the chance to hug her and tell her I loved her before we parted for the last time has always been a comfort. It was a moment of real vulnerability for me to express these things to this man. He listened intently. Then he said, quietly and calmly, “Well. Maybe if you hadn’t had such a beautiful final goodbye, she wouldn’t have died.”

It was the most shocking thing anyone has ever said to me. Ever. I stood stunned for a moment then doubled over, clutching my stomach and reeling. It felt like I had been sucker-punched in the gut. I had been taken utterly by surprise.

And what did I do to the man who dared to say such a thing? I married him! A man who had such faith that I would take his remark as it was intended — as a joke that in itself was intended to show his faith in me — deserves all my faith, and my openness, and my willingness to let go of control, and to be endlessly surprised. He has since held me close and spoke tenderly to me of the passing of my friend in ways that I did not always expect, and which have brought not only healing but also, of course, laughter.