fragmentation of the online self

online creators are exhausted / gen z is deleting all social media and I get it

We talk a lot about overwhelm of information and how our generation is growing up with a billion different sources battling for our attention- nothing new here. But there’s a deeper type of overwhelm that I find when I exist as a creator on the internet. And the lines of who is a creator on the internet today are indeed very blurred. You can start a Substack and be a creator; you can post a few TikToks and suddenly you’re thinking about creating content; you can use your personal Instagram to start sharing your work and passions and little by little, get sucked into being a creator that’s looking for the next best way to optimize their content for views and engagement.

I love social media and I love content creation as someone who’s received dozens of wonderful opportunities as a result of growing up in the age of the internet. I’m a firm believer in the effects of showing your work, putting yourself out there to make the most of the tools you have at your disposal at this unprecedented time, attracting the right people you wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise, and working smart - which sometimes boils down to where and how you show up for yourself and your work. But oh my god, how exhasting it can be to look around only to find that you’ve landed in content creator land - this is now you, and now everything that’s happening on social media platforms, optimization updates, content strategies, concern you, too. You’ve started showing up for yourself online, and now what? It’s time to navigate a whirlwind of information to make sure you’re using your time and effort as wisely as possible, and that’s a daunting and difficult task.

My own personal example: I never thought of myself as a content creator, but I’ve always been on social media. My Twitter account already had 10,000+ followers when I was 18 and didn’t yet have any idea what I wanted to do with my life (just a result of posting a lot and sharing my interests when I was young). I run a social media marketing agency, so I’ve always been creating content for brands too and helping my team do the same. Always up to date on every strategy and trend that I should know. Now I’m on Substack, sharing my writing because it’s what I love the most, but weighed down by the knowledge that if I was also sharing that on TikTok, I could grow my Substack and attract more writing opportunities, more like-minded people, and so on, and so on.

It seems like there is never an end to how much better you could be doing online in terms of sharing your interests and growing your personal brand and sharing your work in all the right places. There’s always more people to reach, more content you could be creating, and most overwhelmingly, more questions about how your content could be performing better across platforms that can only be answered by the thousands of daily 5-minute TikToks that you’ll watch at 2x speed sharing the latest platform updates and things you should know. And somehow they’re also all contradicting each other, so you don’t know who to listen to, but you end up with 15 different voices and experts and strategies in your head fighting each other about what your strategy should be, how often you should be posting, how you’ll grow.

This becomes even harder when you’re somewhat multi-hyphenate in your interests and work. I’ve written before about the very social-media-age problem of feeling like you have to categorize yourself somehow and fit into an easily defined niche, even though that’s inherently opposed to our human nature and our natural quest for self-exploration. I got a TikTok following by sharing my photography. I went viral a few times, found an audience that loved my photos, and found it easy to get reach and grow every time I posted after a few months of growing my account. Now I don’t spend enough time on my photography to justify posting so much about it. But I wrote a book about careers and the future of work, and I spend a lot of my time on my writing. I need to promote my book and I want to talk about that topic, but posting about that on my TikTok is confusing the poor algorithm, that understands me only as a photographer and strictly nothing else. You grow and your social media algorithm doesn’t, and the more you grow and explore (the most natural thing to do in your 20s), the harder it is to use social media to access all the opportunities you know you could be accessing. Instead you now have to start over, make a new account, retrain the algorithm, your self fragmented between different passions and stages of being because that’s the only way the internet will allow your online self to exist.

This is more of a rant about the nature of online content creation today. Even as someone whose literal job is being a social media strategist, I am exhausted. I created my home country’s social media strategy when I was 20 years old; still doesn’t help me navigate this any better, which makes me think that most people probably feel the same. The urge to delete all social media is so strong, and it’s a trend I’ve been noticing a lot especially on YouTube, where creators share their experience going months or years without social media. I think this is a good trend, and I wish I could follow it myself, but I am plagued by the knowledge of how much I could be helping myself, my career, and my passions by continuing to create online and doing the best I can on each platform that’s promised to help me in ways I couldn’t access offline.

The effects of that are hard to predict. Gen Alpha is growing up in this space from a much younger age. Their online selves are, to them, even more directly tied to their physical selves than they were for us growing up. What happens when they think growing and experimenting in a certain direction isn’t right for them because their TikTok algorithm keeps pushing them another way? Their friends and followers aren’t engaging as much, so maybe that’s not the right way to go? Social media interaction will be even more real to them than it’s been to us.

It’s very difficult and frankly exhausting to navigate the state of content creation today when you’re someone that’s growing and exploring themselves, and trying to make the most of the tools you have at the same time. Social media algorithms aren’t made to grasp the constant metamorphosis and exploration of your 20s, and I’m trying my best to exist in that space and navigate the conflicting advice, content burnout, and confusion that that brings. To me it feels like the gift of opportunity that comes with an online world of content creation is also a massive weight — especially for Gen Z and those in experimental and exploratory phases of their life. This is just my best attempt at concretizing that weight and giving a name to the confusion and overwhelm that I imagine a lot of others experience as well, whether consciously or subconsciously.

---