A video showing how a woman's plan to shoot some "nice scenery" on a beach took an unexpected turn has gone viral on TikTok.
The moment was captured in a clip shared by Tiffany Cajigas (@nytif), a 30-year-old officer worker based in New York City who does photography on the side, she told Newsweek. The footage has garnered more than 2.6 million views since it was first posted on June 9.
A note overlaid on the clip reads: "Me: Let me put my phone down in the sand & take a video."
"The ocean: Ok but let's make it entertaining," the note adds.
The footage, taken on May 15 on a beach in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, shows Cajigas walking into the water before she later stands in the sand, facing the water.
"I just wanted to take a video of myself with the nice scenery in the background. But I was alone since my husband was in the resort, so I decided to put my phone in the sand, using my flip-flop [slipper] to hold it up," Cajigas said.
The clip later shows the waves crashing in toward Cajigas, who is knocked off her feet and onto the sand, while the camera appears to have been submerged in water.
The video then proceeds with a trippy sequence of underwater shots, featuring a sea of green with the occasional flash of sunrays penetrating the water and splashes of sediment across the screen as the frame takes on a golden-yellow hue.
While Cajigas was just "trying to be cute," rather than obsessing over getting the perfect shot of herself, the desire to do so isn't unusual in the modern age because "selfitis" is a genuine mental condition, noted a study published in March 2020 in the IOSR Journal of Dental and Medical Sciences.
The study noted that the "selfitis" term was first coined in a hoax news story in 2014 that said that the American Psychiatric Association had "established a new mental disorder called 'selfitis' and stated that obsessive photo taking, and posting is a way to gain attention, compensate for low self-esteem, and compensate for lack of intimacy."
The "selfitis" phenomenon has been explored by several studies since, including one published in 2018 in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction.
The study identified six underlying factors of selfitis, which include "environmental enhancement [a sense of feeling good, self-expression, creating better memories], social competition, attention seeking, mood modification, self-confidence, and social conformity."
'I Failed To Catch It'
The footage in the aforementioned viral video was captured on an iPhone 14 Pro Max and "it did not have a waterproof case on it," Cajigas told Newsweek.
She was able to get up immediately after being knocked over by the waves and run toward her phone. She said, "I saw it but I failed to catch it, lost a nail in the process and almost lost my flip-flop, too," while trying to retrieve the phone.
Cajigas later deployed the help of a local swimmer in the area. Explaining what happened, she "asked if he could look for it," as she saw that he had snorkeling gear with him.
Cajigas said: "He told me to show him exactly where it happened. I did, and he went in. I think it took him less than two minutes to find it. Luckily, I had a metal cap in the back of my phone, and that helped him locate it quick. At the end of the video, you can hear him say in Spanish that it was already getting covered up by sand, and he saw it because of the metal cap."
Cajigas added that the footage recorded on the phone was 34 minutes long, counting from the moment she set the device down in the sand to the moment the local swimmer found it and handed it to her.
The phone was on for a while after it was taken out of the water, "but the screen went white" for around 20 minutes before it fully died. Cajigas said she later asked the resort for some rice in an attempt to drain the water out of the phone by leaving it in the rice for over 24 hours, "but it didn't do anything."
Cajigas said: "Once I got to New York City, I took it to a third-party repair store, and they replaced the screen, and the phone continued to work fine."
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