If Seneca ever wrote on TikTok his exact thoughts have not been passed down to us, but I think we can surmise what he would have said based on one of his letters to Lucilius, which is the second most important collection of Stoic writing after Meditations by Emperor Marcus Aurelius (in my opinion).
The relevant passages from Seneca’s letter are:
You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind. To be everywhere is to be nowhere.
A multitude of books only gets in one’s way.
Each day, too, acquire something which will help you to face poverty, or death, and other ills as well. After running over a lot of different thoughts, pick out one to be digested thoroughly that day.
-Letter II from Seneca to Lucilius
TikTok breaks a lot of these rules. Firstly, while there is undoubtedly some genius on TikTok, the majority of content on the app is decidedly mediocre. Secondly, TikTok encourages you to consume content from a multitude of creators (again, most of which are mediocre). Lastly, the content on TikTok largely does not help one face poverty, death, and other aspects of life; at its core TikTok sells escapism and the idea that if you buy X or do Y your life will (when that is almost always not the case).
There are those who claim they learn a lot from TikTok, but they are fooling themselves. What most of these people call “learning” is the superficial memorization of a fact to be regurgitated at a future dinner party to make them seem well informed. This is not deep learning.
It always has and always will take effort to appreciate the full value of an idea. One must see how well it maps onto their life experiences, probe for weaknesses, test edge cases, search for a deeper explanation, and compare it to other relevant ideas. Only then will one begin to appreciate the richness of an idea and be able to do more than parrot it, but expand, edit, and personalize it to enrich their life. This takes more than the microsecond between bits of content, often hours, sometimes days.
So despite any insight that may be found on TikTok, consuming it via TikTok makes the insight impotent. The medium is the message and the message of TikTok is “don’t dwell on this for more than a second, on to the next one”.
If you truly want to learn deeply, make better use of your time, and live a richer life, delete TikTok. If you want to hear more arguments why from someone other than me, Jaron Lanier does an excellent job.
That said, deleting TikTok is not enough. You must do something else with the time you are freeing up. You must train yourself to return to your thoughts and continue to polish them until all you are left with is the distilled essence of an idea that rings true when you touch it.