An academic said people should 'never be at home' if they want to be successful and went viral. TikTokers are rebelling against the controversial advice.

• A Wall Street Journal interview with NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway blew up on TikTok.
• Galloway said people should only use their home to sleep, and pursue success outdoors the rest of the time.

TikTokers are rebelling against a professor's advice to limit their home time to seven hours a day in pursuit of success by giving tours of their cozy interiors instead.

On May 24, the Wall Street Journal posted a video to its TikTok account that featured a snippet of an interview with Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University.

In the 14-second-long clip, which was part of a longer conversation about work-life balance and "technology's effect on a young person's emotional intelligence" according to the WSJ, Galloway dished out some advice for how young people should spend their personal time.

"You should never be at home," Galloway said in the video. "Home is for seven hours of sleep and that's it. The amount of time you spend at home is inversely correlated to your success professionally and romantically. You need to be out of the house."

The clip, which was filmed at the WSJ CEO Council event held in May, was viewed over 9.2 million times and received over 28,300 comments who appeared to largely reject the suggestion.

"One of my measures of success is how long I can stay in my home without talking or meeting with other people," one viewer wrote in a top comment that received over 19,300 likes.

Many also wrote that the outside world was pretty expensive, and so was their rent, so the idea of paying for a place to live, to then only spend seven hours a day at home made little sense to them. Then there were those who commented to say the advice wasn't practical because they worked from home for longer than that time period anyway, and didn't want to go outside and socialize afterwards.

Since the video was shared to TikTok, over 200 people have posted responses using Galloway's quote as the background audio, highlighting their interior havens which they appear to have little intention of leaving.

One of the most popular examples, posted by a TikToker who goes by @lexie.lah, featured a six-second montage of a bedroom and received over 1.4 million views and over 320 comments that echoed similar points made beneath the original video. Many added that the advice was better suited to extroverts, and they'd rather stay at home than follow

The concept seems likely to be a generational split. Various studies published in the late 2010s showed that young people were increasingly choosing to spend more time at home, a trend that was often attributed to technological advances minimizing our need to go outside, as most things can be done from the comfort of a couch. In a post-pandemic world, most young people are extremely accustomed to staying in for prolonged periods of time, and are more likely than ever before to do their jobs from home too, so it stands to reason that Galloway's advice may not quite land as he'd hoped.

As far as romantic relationships go, however, Gen Z does appear to be finding romance among their friendship groups, as an increasing number of Americans report having a negative experience using dating apps, Business Insider previously reported.

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