Here’s what I actually believe: social media is a terrible place to build a career. It’s a great place to build an audience, and an audience can become a career, but the thing you’re building isn’t stability or meaning or even money. It’s attention. And attention is a drug. And drugs have diminishing returns.
Marcus,
On a Tuesday morning in October, Emma got an email that made her coffee turn to acid in her stomach. OnlyFans.2023.Sarah.Arabic.Girthmasterr.XXX.720...
The interview was less an interview and more a courtship. Marcus talked for forty-five minutes about his vision for the new vertical—working title: The Grind —which would be “edgy, authentic, and unafraid to call out corporate bullshit while simultaneously helping our audience navigate it.” He used the word “disrupt” seven times. He used the word “monetize” twelve times. He never once asked Emma what she wanted to make.
“Marcus, I have a question.”
The second video went live two days later. It was two minutes long—a risk, because longer videos had lower completion rates, but she needed the time. The video opened with the same smiling face, the same candle, the same text overlay. Then she let the smile drop.
The second result was a video from a career coach she’d never met, repurposing Emma’s clip about Taylor Swift’s rerecordings into a three-second soundbite with a caption that read: “The real masterclass is knowing when to quit your shitty job.” The career coach had 300,000 followers. Emma had 180,000. Here’s what I actually believe: social media is
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