TikTok Said “Big Light Bad”
Now I have 12 IKEA lamps, 4 color temperatures, and a life that is ruled by WiFi
How Lighting Became a Moral Argument
Walk into any dark room 150 years ago and you were either holding a candle or learning a very painful lesson about furniture placement. Forget electricity, Edison doesn’t get enough credit for the number of toes he saved.
Before electricity, we had fire. Fire captured in candles and lanterns guided us through streets and homes.
Then one day, we got another option.
Imagine you’re among the first.
The guy who tells people he got electricity before it was cool.
You check the box on a brochure, lick a stamp, and send your lamp request by post. (No Amazon back then).
Weeks pass. Not days.
The lamp arrives in a box so large it feels disrespectful to the object inside.
You fight through layers of packing peanuts, reminded of the delicate journey it took by horse and carriage. (Almost certainly over-insured).
Finally you lift the bulb from its foam tomb like a pastor presenting the Eucharist.
Somewhere during this unnecessarily epic unboxing, (why such a large box for such a small object?) the sun has set.
The room is dark.
Perfect.
Who was the first person to look at this glass vacuum filled with tungsten and magic and think, “Let’s put it directly above everyone’s head?”
Daylight at Midnight
Factories
Edison built his first power plant in 1882. Before then, factory work was done in large warehouses with massive windows. Ever try to attach a widget to a doo-dad by candlelight? Not easy. Gas task lamps peppered factories, but most work was done during daytime hours, with light that flooded in. Natural.
Natural has limitations.
Sunlight was generous, but unreliable.
Winter shortened shifts.
Night stopped work entirely.
That’s the problem the power plant solved.
One ceiling-mounted electric system could replace dozens of gas lamps. Spread those out across the entire factory, fewer shadows, fewer accidents, more productivity.
Early factories adopting this electric lifestyle were described as “daylight at midnight.”
A pitch that brought smiling faces to factory managers across the globe.
Offices
With the promise of work that could be done at all hours, overhead lighting bled its way into office buildings. The early 1900s saw the same system adopted wholesale.
Shadowless, unambiguous light is a perk, but it’s also measurable. And once something is measurable, it can monetized.
Overhead lighting allowed for standardization across new office buildings designed for maximum efficiency. You can now plot lumens per square foot like you’re measuring productivity per hour.
Homes
Electricity enters our abodes, and in comes factory logic.
Light wasn’t much of a choice for the homeowner.
The overhead model had proven itself.
It was simple and easy to reproduce.
A single switch per room was efficient.
Fewer wires made it easier to code-regulate.
Now we’re here, and real estate agents market recessed lighting like it’s heated seats in a car.
Our Biology & Light
Michel Siffre was a French chronobiologist who apparently didn’t like people very much. His hunger for solitude took a scientific turn when he descended into a Swiss Alps cave, isolating himself from sunlight and clocks. Just firelight and vibes. For two months.
I’d chew my arm off after three days without getting a pump or a WiFi connection, but Siffre lived to tell the tale. Here’s what he found:
His internal day drifted from 24 hours to about 25
He slept longer
His stress levels dropped
His sense of time dissolved almost completely
We can strap electrodes to you, throw you in an MRI, and we know the impacts of light on the body. Hormones, alertness, stress, sleep, all of it shifts with exposure.
Floods of daylight signal chemicals in the brain very differently than dim firelight does. Change that relationship, change the amounts, and what happens to millions of years of programming?
Big light bad
TikTok tells us the same thing that Siffre intuited and science later confirmed.
Our feeds are probably different, but try this as an experiment. Search “lamps” on TikTok or Instagram. Within seconds, your explore page will be flooded with one very specific genre: soft light porn.
The videos all start the same way. A slow push-in on a dimly lit living room. The snare or snap in whatever viral tune accompanies the video transitions the darkness into a newly transformed bukkake of light.
Various shades, color temperatures, and intensities pepper the space while we’re told this is the evolved home.
No overhead lights here. Big light bad.
I love these videos.
You probably do too.
They tickle a part of my brain that feels the same emotional confusion toward a system we never consciously adopted, only inherited. Yes, little lamps!
But what I don’t love is the moral framing -
Okay, I turn on the overheads… so now I’m a bad person?
The pendulum swings hard. Instead of being showered with overhead light, the implicit, if not outspoken, solution becomes lamps. All of the lamps. We’ve replaced a ton of light with a ton of light.
One that now requires a New York subway map and an uninterrupted WiFi network to operate.
Indiscriminate light is the problem
I made a vow to myself not to let this essay turn into a master’s-level thesis, which I’m very capable of doing. I’m extremely tempted to drift into mental health correlations as they relate to the ubiquity of electricity. That’s another needle to thread, and a future rant.
Instead, I’ll bow my head to the TikTokers who’ve spoken a real truth into the world.
Our evolutionary past leaves our brains slightly misfiring in modern environments.
That visceral mismatch shows up aesthetically online. But I’d like to amend the response with an armchair psychologist’s observation:
Light equals focus.
Pre-Electricity, you had limited options.
Wherever your flame was, that’s where your attention went.
Try this. Turn your power off and light a single candle. See how hard it is to multitask.
Now ask yourself what happens when you walk into your home, tap a switch, and illuminate everything at once.
Your attention gets pulled from one thing to the next.
If everything is lit, then what gets attention?
Lamps can help. Turn off the house lights and place one or two in a nook or cranny.
Vibes go up. Focus sharpens.
Maybe you feel a little less scatterbrained.
But notice how this isn’t just a “big light bad” problem.
Turning off the overheads is a step in the right direction, but it often leaves you with more problems than you started with.
The overhead light isn’t the villain.
Indiscriminate light is.
Instead of moralizing, light should be treated as a tool for discernment.
Not a rule, but a way of thinking.
Warmth is rest
Coolness is wakefulness and creativity
Softness is safety
Hardness is decision
Shadow is reflection