TikTok Influencer Blames Social Media for Modern Commitment Crisis

Laureano Gieco is twenty-five years old, from Entre Ríos province in Argentina, and he has become something like an emotional translator for a generation that doesn't quite know how to love anymore. His viral phrase—"Tiro un facto y me voy," a colloquial way of saying he's dropping a truth and leaving—has resonated with millions of people scrolling through TikTok, looking for someone to name the thing they're all feeling: that modern relationships have become impossibly complicated, that commitment feels like a luxury nobody can afford, that everyone is always looking over their shoulder for something better.

Gieco didn't set out to be a relationship guru. He started as a graphic designer, making thumbnails for YouTube streamers—people like Davo Xeneize and even the footballer Sergio Agüero. But somewhere along the way, he felt the pull to create his own content, to be the one in front of the camera rather than behind it. He began posting videos mixing design work with humor, and it was his close friends who noticed something else: he had a gift for talking about how people connect, or fail to connect, with a clarity and depth that felt rare. They pushed him to lean into it. A four-year struggle with anxiety following a difficult relationship gave him material that felt true. He wrote a book called "The Manual of Modern Relationships," then another on anxiety itself. The people watching started asking him to talk about ghosting, emotional responsibility, self-love. He obliged. And the videos started spreading.

What Gieco is describing, in conversation and in his content, is a specific kind of modern paralysis. Everyone wants to connect with someone, he says, but the rules have become unreadable. There is zero communication, no real commitment, and almost nobody wants to actually invest. The digital world has given us infinite options—the person you're talking to is always aware that there are others, that there might be someone better just a swipe away. This creates a kind of perpetual dissatisfaction, a dopamine-driven restlessness that makes it almost impossible to settle, to choose, to say yes to one person and mean it. People are moving through relationships from a place of emptiness, he observes, trying to fill a void rather than building something real. They ask for emotional intelligence, empathy, basic consideration—and they get rejected for asking too much.

When Gieco talks about what makes commitment so difficult now, he points to fear. Not fear of being hurt, but fear of missing out on something better. We are, he says, deeply dissatisfied people. We can't quite value the person in front of us because we're always wondering about the alternatives, always worried we're losing our freedom. This anxiety lives in the body—your nervous system tells you when a relationship is draining you, when you're giving more than you're getting, when there's no peace. The trick is listening to that signal instead of overriding it with hope or obligation.

He has been in therapy for six years. He has learned to manage his own emotions, to understand what emotional intelligence actually means, to know himself well enough to set boundaries. And he is clear about what those boundaries should protect: your dignity, your sense of what you deserve. The line between patience and self-abandonment is thin, he says. It lives in knowing how much you're willing to tolerate, and being honest about it. Many people stay in situations that hurt them because they're afraid they won't find anything better, because they've convinced themselves they don't deserve better. They mistake staying for loyalty. They mistake pain for love.

On the question of how to grieve a relationship that simply didn't work—where nothing terrible happened, it just ended—Gieco is firm: you have to actually feel it. People want to move fast now, to connect quickly and disconnect quickly, to skip the messy part where you actually miss someone. But if you invested three months or six months or a year, if you felt something real, then you owe yourself the time to process that. Grief is part of the deal. You don't get to skip it.

The forms of emotional irresponsibility that have become normalized are subtle and pervasive. Minimizing what someone else feels. Saying one thing and doing another. Making promises you know you can't keep. Nurturing feelings in someone when you know you won't sustain them. Honesty is good, Gieco says, but only if it comes without the intention to wound. You can be truthful and still care about the impact of your words. What you cannot do is use honesty as a weapon and call it integrity.

Gieco has noticed that people often tie their entire sense of worth to whether someone chooses them. They give that other person enormous power—the power to determine if they matter, if they're valuable, if they're enough. But that's backwards. A person who enters your life should come to add something, not to validate your existence. You should know you don't need them; you should choose to have them there. And you'll know if they're choosing you back by their actions, not their words. Words are free. Actions cost something. If the actions don't match the words, it's the same as nothing at all.