Taste moves like a pendulum because we cannot bear to want the same thing as everyone else. When bodies bronzed under toil and soil, paleness meant an escape. Now that we live in fluorescent caves, we pay to tan ourselves into the appearance of leisure. The cruelty is elegant: we chase whatever feels just out of reach.

I’ve been thinking about how this same pendulum governs creation in the age of parasocial intimacy. Just as our beauty standards swing between extremes, our appetite for content oscillates between the polished and the raw—and creators get caught in the whiplash. They face an impossible paradox, success devours authenticity.

There was a time when we demanded aspiration. MTV Cribs. Exotic locales. The kind of wealth that announced itself through marble countertops and infinity pools. We wanted to press our faces against the glass of lives we’d never touch. But aspiration, it turned out, was exhausting to watch. The performance became transparent, then grotesque. We began to recognize the crass stage lights, the manufactured production, the tastelessness of plastic fruits.

So we pivoted. We decided we wanted authenticity instead, which is to say we wanted a different kind of performance, one that convinced us it wasn’t a performance at all. The underlit, underscripted, and underplanned content, where creators like Emma Chamberlain proliferated because they were precisely the opposite of unattainable. They spoke like a chronically underslept friend at 3am through a smudged lens. This was what was real, we told ourselves, though of course the authenticity to their core self diffused at the moment it became profitable.

This is the violence of attention: it transfigures everything it touches. Success begins as small betrayals—a ring light here, a scheduled post there. What the creator does next determines whether their audience thrives or decays.

Watch them try to thread this needle. They must appear effortless while revealing effort. Graceful while exposing ungraceful machinery of trying. They cannot hide the work entirely—audiences have become attuned to detecting the artificial. But neither can they reveal too much. Show us the full cost of consistency, the mental arithmetic of engagement, the way you’ve learned to schedule out pieces of yourself like careful doses, and we’ll call you a sellout. We’ll say you’ve lost what made you special.

The harshness lies in this: when you’ve been our dealer of cheap dopamine, we revolt upon discovering that your consistency requires inhuman discipline. It takes particular finesse to sweat the right amount in public. The creator must peel back layers incrementally, never ripping off the band-aid.

I’ve watched creators attempt this balance and seen most fail. They reveal too much too quickly, pulling back the curtain with one swift motion instead of the slow unveiling their audience demands. Or they become so careful about maintaining their image that they calcify into a parody of their former selves.

We want to believe in magic while being shown how the trick works. This requires contradiction.

The ones who survive understand something about reframing suffering itself. They learn to present their effort not as work but as play. Not as obligation but as choice. They show us the discipline but call it joy. They show the grinding daily practice as their source of flow, as if they’re just as surprised as we are by what emerges.

This is perhaps the only honest way to be dishonest about creative work: to present your tenacity as if it were effortless, your calculation as if it were spontaneous, your performance as if it were improvised. To make your audience complicit in a fiction in which what they are witnessing is not a constructed simulacrum but a window into something real.

Even this essay is that kind of performance. Each metaphor chosen to appear both precise and accidental. Each confession calculated to seem spontaneous. I’m consuming myself to create something that looks unconsumed.

It’s not about hiding the system—it’s about making the effort machinery itself appear graceful. The alternative is to stop performing entirely. But then, of course, you would cease to exist.