#25: The Commodification of Emotional Experiences on Social Media

Crying on camera, realities of parenthood, and capitalizing on milestones: how prioritizing my human experience makes me a bad creator.

I’m going to pull the curtain back on the wizard here, and talk about my job as a content creator / influencer (RIP to the label of blogger) today.

I rarely talk about my job, because, quite frankly, talking about the ins and outs of what it’s like to be a creator is a conversation that I usually don’t have much desire to do; not because it’s not interesting to talk about (I actually think it’s one of the best anthropological experiments on a capitalistic society unfolding before our eyes), but rather because it’s a much more intricate, layered job than most people are willing to give credence to. The amount of hate and belittling that this job title gets is fascinating to me, and is an occupation that everyone thinks they could easily succeed at and do every day.

This now-behemoth of an industry (worth over $16 billion in market size, as of 2022) is not going anywhere, despite the doomsday sayers— it will simply continue to evolve, as it rapidly has been over the last 10 years.

okay miranda

As someone who has been working as a creator since the industry’s inception and sharing her life on the internet through various platforms for a decade, I do feel uniquely qualified as one of the grandmother dinosaur generation of creators to talk about how being an influencer long-term changes your life and rewires your brain.