A glimpse of remote living with Parkinson’s draws viewers to unlikely TikTok star from Quebec

Daily TikTok uploads and the online friends he's made have helped Mark Hogben through the dark winter months. His videos of mundane chores attract millions of views.

With no running water and only a wood stove to heat his remote Quebec cabin, Mark Hogben starts each morning by making a fire and boiling lake water.

Then the 54-year-old signs in on TikTok to check the analytics of his latest videos and touch base with a global community of online friends, many of whom, like him, have Parkinson’s disease.

While TikTok is best known for viral videos of Gen Z dance trends and comedy sketches, the former Montrealer says he’s surprised to attract millions of views for self-shot clips of mundane chores that include chopping wood, fetching water and cleaning his chimney.

But what really caught viewers’ attention was the fact he does it all with a neurodegenerative condition. He says the first video in which his stage three symptoms are apparent drew the highest audience.

“I didn’t want to do a TikTok with my face in it because no matter how hard I try not to shake, it’s going to come through. After 200 videos, I made the first one where I talked and showed my face because I wanted to see how it would perform analytically. I introduced myself, secretly hoping I wouldn’t get any views. It got 2.7 million,” Hogben says of the clip, in which he does not explicitly reveal his condition.

“People recognized my Parkinson’s and started contacting me, asking me how I live remotely without any help and how long I’ve been in the bush for. I have talked to people all over the world who either have Parkinson’s or know someone who does.”

Hogben says he moved to his island refuge on Quebec’s Lake Kipawa about seven years ago, and has largely embraced the solitude — save for the twice-daily uploads for his nearly 164,000 online followers.

Before that Hogben spent 30 years in Montreal, where he worked for the computer game publisher Gameloft. His wife still lives there and visits him in the summer, along with their two adult sons.