This Viral "Third Wheel" TikTok Has Everything: Romance, Drama, Deep Existential Panic

And the inaugural TikTok Oscar goes to…

In all seriousness, a recent video shared to TikTok and Instagram by Max Z Zavidow, a.k.a. formerteenheartthrob, is an undeniable feat of short-form storytelling. We begin with a deceptively innocuous-seeming setup not unlike the sugary sweet, painfully inoffensive couples-centered content readily available at a constant clip elsewhere.

Without spoiling too much here, just know that things start to crumble, confusion starts to set in, and the viewer is challenged to ponder some perhaps uncomfortable truths about their own lives, all in less than four minutes. Adding to the existential malaise at the heart of the video is the use of Third Eye Blind’s breakthrough 1997 hit "Semi-Charmed Life," itself a meditation on such topics from the perspective of a narrator awash in fleeting highs.

"Tricycle no more," reads the caption, while #thirdwheel and #couple hashtags serve as a logline, of sorts, for three minutes and 41 seconds of ever-escalating existential question marks. These questions stack higher and higher and higher until reaching their inevitable peak, namely an apparent resignation at the realization that one’s self-inflicted carousel of mundanity has started up again, thus ensuring familiar outcomes and gradually diminished emotional stakes for the foreseeable future.

As expected, the “tricycle no more” discourse has been lively, complete with Mulholland Drive and Twin Peaks comparisons. See a sampling below.

Experience the video in full up top, but only if you’re good and ready to engage in a variety of all-consuming thoughts including, but certainly not limited to, the following:

• Is a fear of change keeping you trapped in a loop of your own making, and notably one you're not even aware that you're in?
• If you're not aware that you're repeating yourself, on and on forever throughout time, then how are you to break free from the cycle?
• Zooming out a bit more, what if trying to embrace change is itself a vicious cycle, and you're merely hopping from one instance of dramatic change to another in an unspoken and surely futile effort to dodge actual responsibilities and commitments?
• Comfort kills.

• Also, comfort is awesome.
• But it kills :(