The flight to vacation can be quite tedious without the internet. MyMMO author Cedric Holmeier, however, has a trick on how TikTok can save GenZ from boredom.
Munich Airport, 12:00 PM, rush hour. After a stressful journey full of train cancellations and delays, I make my way to the airplane. The destination is Malta, my vacation country of choice as a break from the dreary German late winter. Once I reach my window seat on the airplane, I usually ask myself, “How am I going to pass the time now?”, but not this time. This time I am prepared.
Two hours and thirty minutes
As part of Generation Z, I am accustomed to many stereotypes. One of them: We spend too much time on social media. And yes – guilty as charged. My screen time is already high due to my profession, but in my free time, I also indulge in a good dose of dog and cat videos, travel and vacation tips, and the latest restaurant recommendations within a radius of 150 kilometers.
That’s why I spend more time on TikTok than I’d sometimes like to admit. Too often, I find myself in a snooze-button spiral – just one more video, then I’ll stop. But this time, that was going to pay off.
Just as we reached cruising altitude, I read the last tweets on my updated timeline before switching to TikTok. On this flight, there’s no Wi-Fi – yet I will spend the next 2 hours on the app.
On the evening before my flight, I lie awake in bed staring at the ceiling. Suddenly, a video I saw months ago pops into my head. “Wasn’t there this hidden TikTok feature?” I grab my phone, search in the settings, and actually find the feature from my flash of insight.
It is located when you go to your profile, under the three lines at the top right. Then go to “Settings” → “Cache and Mobile Data” → “Offline Videos”. Here you can also set how many videos you want to download.
This very feature saved my flight. Instead of playing half-fun offline games out of boredom, I scroll through my videos as usual. Since I also watched some videos related to my travel destination beforehand, I immediately receive restaurant recommendations, sights, and warnings about tourist traps while in the airplane.
Even before I finished watching the 200 videos, we were already preparing for landing. The fact that I can now also watch my favorite social medium in the airplane is fantastic, and on the return flight, I repeated the whole process with fresh videos. MyMMO is also active on TikTok: What ever happened to the Minecraft creator?
