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.