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Authenticity in its flop era

Being someone whose job is basically posting for a living (articles, blogs, photos, etc), productivity and a sense of purpose have always been but a cheeky little ✉️ send ✉️ away. It’s easy enough to feel like a Person™ when I can leak my thoughts and image to the public for small hits of dopamine and also money. It is a great occupation for someone like me who loves to be in the house and is endlessly enraptured by the device that allows me to see the world.

Not posting is usually the best practice when you have nothing of note to broadcast. But did you know that once the posting-to-dopamine synapses have fired and thus wired together, you simply cannot not be posting. Even as someone with enough sense to not post my way to ruin, that doesn’t prevent the feelings of urgency to post on topics I may or may not have strong feelings about.

Posting gets a lot of credit for thinking and doing — two (three) things I’ve not been engaging with lately, and lemme tell you: it is rather show-ass to reconsider your motives beyond what parts of it can be produced for flattering effect. If I give it a proper think, I find that there’s no reason for me to post at all. All my thoughts in my chosen field have been published. It’s in bookstores! My face is the same and already on the internet several times. And my other opinions are not so enriching that the whole world needs to know them. Most of the time. Bad news for my savings.

Of course, one may nevertheless, she posted for the sake of it (and income). But again, I’ve been Thinking™! Defining your values and principles is like taking home stray kittens — once you name them, you form an attachment. I’ve reached a point in my so-far chosen career that succeeding further in it would very likely mean distancing myself from them (maybe not values, but intentions). It’s not my intention to encourage people to invest further into industries that impose zero-sum dynamics upon success and revolve around replicating the class and status hierarchies that make everyone feel lacking to the point of frantic consumerism and self-optimization.

It seems as though, if you want money you can post aspirational lifestyle content, and if you want clout you post authentic/relatable lifestyle content (actually you can still post aspirational lifestyle content but it’s a different kind of clout that requires a delicate balance of fans and haters keeping your SEO churning).

OK but I actually love Flexmami, she is so hehe and this made me chortle

We post romantic couple content when our relationship is in the midst of mistrustful turmoil. We post lavish vacation pics while suffering gastrointestinal distress. And we post hot, hot thirst traps in the spiral of loneliness and rejection. When our desire for being seen eclipses our fear of being known, we post something a bit to the left of what we’re feeling, missing the connection that would fulfill and assuage both. The result is no one truly knows anyone but we all feel a bit worse about ourselves somehow. Wack.