My Beef with the Modern Commodification of the Self

Why "getting paid to exist" isn't all it's cut out to be (and other thoughts on the rise of excessively performative content creation)

Introduction

I loved seeing those highly inspirational/aspirational posts on social media that speak of “being paid to exist” and how awesome social media is for allowing this opportunity to exist, and I won’t lie, I was swayed. Convinced even. I found the notion of being able to just post my life and get riches for it to be compelling, and I even tried it out. Well, what I learned shocked me. Turns out, that shit sucks. I mean suuuuckssssss.

As a marketing girl, I know how the industry works. Between pain points, branding, funnels, you name it, I’ve got the framework for it. So when it came time for me to try it out for my own personal brand, I absolutely hated it.

As an experiment, I created a cozy self care personal brand with pillars surrounding cozy living, self care, and cozy eats. I had hopes so high that I even applied to a speaking engagement, confident that this is the life for me. That this is the path I wanted to pave for myself. I too wanted to get paid to exist and receive opportunities beyond my comprehension. I had spent Q1 of 2025 planning out content pillars, content ideas, and more, and once April rolled around, I was ready for the world to see me.

I had filmed a ton of content over the past year and edited several pieces down to create 3 posts per week, and in that first week of April, I had launched my personal brand.

It was sharp as hell, the quality was high, and I was doing very well especially for my first personal brand (I have a 5 year old skincare brand that I have on hiatus with 1k+ followers, so I am used to the rhythms of content creation. However, product based business is much different than crafting a personal brand).

I’ve learned and realized a lot, and honestly I don’t quite know if I’ll keep running my personal brand, even with the fact that I got accepted to speak at that speaking engagement and even had a great crowd and some emails that I could funnel to sell some products to.

I just don’t know if I’m quite sold on this notion of selling ourselves to create income or community for that matter, despite the ease of opportunity online. I feel like today’s algorithms have shaped the modality of digital expression a little too much for me.

I Envy No One (making money influencing or with a personal brand)

One of the first things I noticed when running my personal brand is that when your life becomes your personal brand, your life becomes your work. This is much different than my experience with running my product based business (skincare brand) in which my products were my work. If I was creating a new batch of products or designing packaging and I wanted to record content for social media, that is simply what I would record. No narrations, no storytelling, no story arc, just me quite literally showing BTS of me creating a product. Running a personal brand is simply not the same, especially these days when the path to social media success has become so formulaic and honestly, overdone.

Plus, with the algorithms corroborating the necessity for following these new trends in content creation, such as showing your face more often than not, narrating over your content, adding subtitles on the screen, focusing on reels, using certain effects, having a certain HD quality for your content, and more, it’s becoming even more obvious to me that content creating for a personal brand is not the dreamland that I had imagined that it could be. And don’t even get me started on the algorithmic preference for rage baiting and inflammatory content.

Where Are the Real People?

Where does sharing our content to share ourselves end and sharing our content to be seen begin?

I am personally someone who has no problem with putting myself out there. Again, with the context of my product based business and how I shared and grew my business through Instagram, monthly markets, and collaborations, I am well-versed in the art of putting myself out there. But what I realized while actively posting on my personal brand’s page is that even if you are creating boundaries by keeping your brand away from facets of the intimate details of your life, it’s still quite hard to truly express yourself as you are still beholden to showing up on social media a certain way, lest you risk not being seen at all.

And let’s be real; what’s the point of showing up on social media at all if it isn’t to be seen in the first place? Why go through that entire humiliation ritual just to not be picked up by the algorithm?

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Humor me with a quick thought experiment, will you? Let’s say that you are passionate about ceramics, a craft that you wish to share with the world, and you want to put yourself out there by utilizing Instagram.

You want to share pictures of your ceramic creations, but you quickly realize that simply sharing photos of your craft simply doesn’t provide the eyeballs that video based content provides due to the way that the algorithm has been programmed. You realize that you have to turn to the video format in order to have the best opportunity at crafting the community that you wish to create.

You could go on to YouTube and create videos like “studio vlogs”, but the long form is daunting and takes a lot of time to edit such long videos. Not to mention, YouTube takes a lot more dedication as it takes a longer time to create an audience on that platform.

Sites with shortened forms, such as Instagram or TikTok, are more inviting and user friendly, plus there’s countless guides from internet gurus that claim to have the formula to creating the audience of your dreams, which can thus provide you with the opportunities of your dreams. All you have to do is batch film, edit in a certain way, upload a certain amount of times each week, utilize trends and trending audios, and most importantly stay consistent—lest you upset the algorithm and miss your chance of hitting it big!

The time you dedicate to marketing yourself and putting yourself out there has now been lessened by the choice to go short form, and the techniques and templates keep you full of ideas of how to share yourself effectively, but now you’re truly just another ceramicist on the internet, vying to be picked up by the algorithm.

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Here’s a perfect example of someone who has done a year long experiment to mold his form of creation (photography) into a form of expression valued by the algorithm so that he too could take advantage of the opportunities present on the platform in order to grow his photography business. A great watch to understand more of how we contort ourselves and the ways in which we express ourselves for online visibility.

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If the form is who you are, then of course you are truly putting yourself out there, but the reality is that there is nothing natural or “like” oneself about sharing videos in this distinct Instagram-esque style in which, yes, you are sharing behind the scenes looks at what it looks like to be engaging in your craft or living your life, but you are also just curating and fabricating the idea of what it looks like to be engaging with and partaking in your craft.

The camera angles, the positioning your body in a certain way, the turning on certain lights so that you look better through the lens, the filming in certain areas over others due to how the background looks behind you, the being dressed in a presentable manner, it’s all the illusion of the scenes behind the craft and it’s such an overlooked and under-referenced concept when we speak of the “fakeness” of social media.

Because yes, of course we’re all just sharing “highlight reels” of our lives, thus showing a version of ourselves and our lives that isn’t real when you boil it down and think about what the entire scope of someone’s life actually looks like, but when you relate it to the creative process and showing up to show that process, I think it genuinely gets muddy on social media when we consider if this content is truly a representation of our selves.

Maybe a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

The turn away from long form videos and the short form of an image into short form video content has truly ruined everything (in my opinion, of course). If a picture was supposed to be worth a thousand words, and videos have the capacity to contain a thousand words, then what worth does a short form video have? It’s nice to have the convenience that the short form gifts us with; quick bites of information, learning about someone’s three year process in one minute, getting a quick synopsis of a book/movie that we may be interested in. But just like at the convenience store, there’s always a fee that you pay from going for the quick, convenient option, and short form content is no different.

The shortened form gives the illusion of having learned so much more than we already have, and in a way, it reduces the potential for further inquiry to deepen our understanding of the topic at hand. If we’ve gleaned everything that is to glean on a topic from a one minute video, and we’re led to believe that that’s all there is to it, then what else is there to wonder about? What else is there to be curious about?

This is where the short form flattens our understanding of the world and of one another, and where we begin to flatten the ways in which we express ourselves online. We cull and snip and trim away the fats of our “process” (take our ceramicist example above, for instance) in order to stay within the guidelines for attaining successes in the digital realm, and in turn we create a product that doesn’t even fully articulate and express ourselves in the end.

I guess one could say the same about any medium, but my distinction is in the opportunity to express oneself. The long form (maybe a YouTube video, or maybe even a Podcast) gives one the opportunity to fully express oneself in your own way. The longform is subjected to an algorithm and a “template”, but that form is so much looser due to the length of the content for the medium. A picture, in the same way, is also subjected to the algorithm but not so much a “template”, as again the medium makes it a bit harder to create an all encompassing form that could please an algorithm and rocket you to the top of your niche.

But the short form is just so much different. It provides us with a shortened medium that allows us the opportunity to copy one another with ease, all to please the algorithm and to achieve the level of visibility that we yearn for. Copying each other’s forms and techniques like this is not an articulation of our selves, this is just us gamifying the system with the context of the subject matter that we’re positioning ourselves as an “expert” in.

This differs from long form content—take vlogs for example—in which one could of course copy someone else’s thumbnail format, but at the end of the day it would be quite challenging to replicate someone else’s viral 10 minute vlog highlighting their day outside running errands with your 10 minute vlog highlighting your day outside running errands, which is part of why you see so many cries for plagiarism on various short form social media sites (the IGs and TikToks of the world) versus places like YouTube or even Podcast mediums like Spotify or Apple Music. Hell, I don’t think I’ve even heard of someone outright plagiarizing an entire book and having it published. There are stories of lifted passages and ideas, but an entire work being stolen? That is something that keeps the long form or even just a photo a bit more protected from the gamification of short form content that keeps us all ripping off one another incessantly.

The Normalization of it All

There’s nothing normal about posting videos of ourselves lip syncing to songs to get recognition and attention on the crafts we dedicate ourselves to, the businesses we are forging, or the interests we have in the world. Imagine if back in the 2000s when you were a kid watching Nickelodeon (of course considering that you were also kid in that time period) you were met with several ads back to back of people showing off a thing that they had created while lip singing to a random song that was popular on the radio at the time. Wouldn’t that be so bizarre? There’s a somewhat modern form of this dystopian example that I’ve created, and we can turn to the series of ads that T-Mobile created in 2024 for the Super Bowl.

The big difference between my dystopian example and the example above is that the basis of the video is meant to be a Musical themed advertisement, and although the song being utilized is derived from a preexisting song, it’s not only sang by the individuals in the video but the lyrics are written by T-Mobile, thus allowing it to be a parody and it’s own form of original creation. It’s not like they’re lip syncing Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” while waving around wi-fi modems. They’re literally singing a handmade song used to articulate what is being sold in the video.

Then, there’s also the internet trend of showing small clips of moments that are supposed to articulate a “vibe” or convey some sort of “meaning” (this is primarily seen on personal brand pages, but this is also seen sometimes on product based brand pages). I now look at these videos with a level of scrutiny that I didn’t possess until I had tried it out for myself and I grapple with the meaning that is supposed to be made in such a shortened, shallow format. I also see the ways in which it makes sense that rage baiting is used so frequently to force meaning onto such shortened content. Not only is nuance removed, but even the context of the original clip being shown in an inflammatory manner has been removed (and even in some cases, the author of the post will highlight these facts despite having chopped it down and posted it themselves).

And don’t get me started on things like food content in which folks are out here presenting multiple panned clips of the meal at hand, a biting shot, a shot of you approving or disproving the meal, an establishing shot of the restaurant, a far away shot of you at the table eating your meal with your friend (or setting up and sitting at the table at the beginning of the meal), and so on and so forth. Like friends, this isn’t normal! Why are we buying into the performance of social media so hard that we are performing actions like this over and over and over again just to please an algorithm and have the chance at scrumptious, tantalizing internet income. (I recognize that I answered my own question, but my question is why haven’t we even fought back to change the internet “meta” into something that isn’t so performative and instead is more real and indicative of our truest most authentic expression?)

I am spoiled in that I was able to utilize the internet to build my business during a time when it made sense to simply post your products and talk about your products with much less emphasis on following internet trends for traction. Yes, trends existed, but they weren’t your livelihood back then. Nowadays, you really have to leverage trending audios, trending content creation methods, and quality boosting tools to stand out and create an audience that will engage with what you’re sending out into the world. Due to these factors, I view the current state of short form content creation to be one lacking true expression of self, and I also see expression on these platforms primarily as a means of doing what it takes to be visible rather than doing what it takes to show up as ourselves (fully, without guidelines or goalposts).

I know that there will be many people who continue to begin a content creation passion with the goal of making it into a career, and I know that there will continue to be people who are willing to do precisely what it takes to achieve the visibility that they desire, but I do believe that social media is swinging in a direction away from its original vibe—of being odd enough to put yourself onto the world wide web to be seen—and becoming a place where as long as you’re willing to check the boxes and do what is “necessary” in order to be seen, then you’ll be awarded visibility in lieu of anyone who just doesn’t want to play the social media algorithm game.