Why We Can’t Stop Watching People Die on TikTok

A note before this: the details of Bailey Hutchins’ and Sydney Towle’s stories referenced here are drawn from my own viewing of their journeys on TikTok. This piece was written in the days immediately following Sydney’s death on 8.5.2026.

There is a specific kind of TikTok that has become impossible to scroll past. A terminally ill young person sits in front of the camera and says something like: today was a hard day. Or: I am still here. Or, in the case of one account I followed for a long time, simply: I am alive. Then she posts it, and thousands of strangers watch, and some of them cry, and almost none of them have ever met her.

We don’t have a good name for what’s happening in that exchange. So I want to give it one.

I’m calling it terminal witness: the practice of documenting one’s own terminal illness and dying in real time, for an audience of strangers, on a platform built for entertainment and used, increasingly, for something else entirely. And the audience’s role in receiving it, not as content, but as attendance.

For most of human history, witnessing death wasn’t optional.