On Aug. 20, a Zoom room will fill with influencers seeking group therapy. They’ll talk about algorithm anxiety, financial instability, loneliness, and the exhausting pressure to stay relevant. Welcome to CreatorCare — therapy for people whose job is to make everyone else think they know what they’re doing.
“I was sick of creators venting about their mental health and wanted to create a solution to help them,” said California-based co-founder Shira Lazar, a content creator and mental health advocate.
The creator economy is booming. Goldman Sachs Research projects it could soon approach half a trillion dollars. Children who once dreamed of becoming astronauts now tell pollsters they want brand collabs. Arizona State University has even launched a bachelor’s degree in content creation (out-of-state tuition can reach $250,000).
Yet behind the camera, many influencers are miserable. Academic papers with titles like “Exploitation & Burnout in Creator Culture” keep appearing. Magazines and social media are full of testimonials from people who left the industry. “I didn’t feel like I was helping anybody,” one recovering influencer said in a TikTok. “Going ‘offline,’ I found that the best photos are the ones that are not staged,” another wrote. “Wellness is a multibillion-dollar cult. Now I see through it,” a former clean-living Instagrammer told the Guardian.
Influencers are both envied and reviled. They are blamed for overcrowding once-obscure natural spots, harming children’s mental health, and even straining the world’s matcha supply. “Hating on influencers has become something of a sport,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a Cornell University professor who studies gender and social media labor. “There is a long history of making celebrities, and women in particular, the target of the joke, of serving them up for public scrutiny and dissecting their lives.”
The vitriol can turn extreme. Sydney Towle, a TikTok creator from Newburyport who documented her cancer journey after graduating from Dartmouth, faced accusations that she was faking her illness. “I literally feel like punching her in the face,” one Redditor wrote. Towle died of cancer on Aug. 6 at age 26.
On Nantucket last month, a shop owner posted a “No Influencers” sign. When influencer Paige Paul pushed back, arguing the sign “delegitimize[s] women,” the online backlash largely targeted the influencers rather than the shop. Popular comments called them “grifters looking for something for nothing” and told them, “You aren’t wanted everywhere, every single moment, of every single day.” Even Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy — himself a pizza influencer with a multimillion-dollar Nantucket property — recorded a video declaring he was against influencers coming to the island.
The vast majority of influencers are not getting rich. Only about 4 percent globally earn more than $100,000, according to Goldman Sachs. Still, many people remain unsympathetic. When the challenges came up in conversation, one friend replied simply: “Boo hoo.”
How hard can it be to film your breakfast? A recent study by Creators 4 Mental Health documented the real stressors: content performance anxiety, financial instability, isolation despite constant social presence, and identity conflict mixed with imposter syndrome. “There’s no warning,” one creator told researchers. “One day your views drop by 80 percent, and you’re left wondering what you did wrong.” Another said, “The likes dropped, and I immediately questioned everything — the concept, the caption, even my personality.” A third noted, “You’re surrounded by comments, but no one actually sees *you*.”
What even counts as an influencer? In simple terms, it’s someone who uses an online presence to shape opinions, inspire choices, and encourage purchases. The definition has grown almost meaninglessly broad. “There are dogs who are influencers,” said Johnny Hilbrant Partridge, who plays the viral rich-bro character “PE Guy.” Stanford associate professor Angèle Christin, author of the forthcoming *Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers*, asked the harder question: “Is Trump an influencer? Probably not, but is he behaving like one? Yes, he is.”
In the novel *Yesteryear*, a privileged tradwife influencer puts it this way: “The goal of an influencer is not to be loveable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words, addicting.”
Reporting on the downside of this world has forced me to rethink my own retirement plan. I had been hoping to fund a beach house the modern way — as a bunion influencer. I’m reconsidering.