The Pit
High school is almost over. You got good grades, but not good enough for a full-ride scholarship and community college is staring at you licking its lips. The past four years of school were brutal enough, and you struggle to outline a reasonable life plan to your parents. They fold their arms, tap their toe, and check their watches, a resentment building within them that your 18th year is approaching and you don’t seem to be ready to leave the nest.
You want to take advantage of your new-found freedom after graduation, but spending another four years in school crippling yourself financially while having no idea what you want to do doesn’t sound like the smartest idea, despite being pushed in that direction by every single responsible person in your orbit. The military isn’t an option because you’re not physically fit to serve, and on top of that you’d be too frightened to go through with such a commitment anyway. That freedom you yearn for would be even further stifled by having your every hour regimented by an arm of the United States military.
In school you were a bit of a weird loner. You had one or two close-ish friends, but they always seemed more interested in hanging out with other people, and you could never really open up to them. You were interested in a wide variety of political topics and enjoyed discussing ideas with people even if the ideas themselves were uncomfortable to think about or contentious in general. This made you off-putting to people. You wanted this connection with someone, but whenever you reached out you were met with confused glances and awkward laughs followed by a quick change of subject.
There must be people out there like you. A scattered diaspora of introverted politically-inclined people that also had an unanswered desire for debating what you used to call “the serious questions.” You don’t really go out much, but you watch a lot of content that is posted to the Internet and spend most of your free time on YouTube. Much of the time you don’t actively engage, but you listen to people like you talk about things while you’re cleaning the apartment or taking the subway to another job interview, and you begin to think that you might have something valuable to contribute.
That thought gets put out of your mind at first, because obviously who are you to put your voice out there? These people have thought things through way more extensively than you ever have. What’s the point? Your parents keep asking about how the interviews went, and you think they went pretty well. But even for menial jobs it doesn’t appear that you’re getting calls back. Just then, an idea flashes into your head. The people you listen to online that post about politics regularly receive donations from their audience. You might be able to kill two birds with one stone here! Find a community that welcomes you, understands you, and eventually provides for you to think and speak about your interests and ideas.
So you explain to your parents that you’ll continue to look for a job, but on the side you’ll start posting on YouTube to see if it goes anywhere. They roll their eyes and insist that looking for a job is your top priority, and so long as creating content doesn’t interfere with that you’re free to start. You manage to find a job working in a thrift shop sorting through the old donated clothes that come through. You listen to audio books written by political philosophers and historians while you work to ensure that you have some sort of foundation to work from, and you genuinely begin to formulate what you think, feel, and believe as an independent person about these “big questions.”
After a few months of posting content and interacting with larger political communities you start to gain a little bit of a following. It’s not much, but it’s enough to net you about $200 a month, and with the money you’ve saved from your thrift store job it gives you enough for first, last, and security on an apartment. After you move out and set up your studio in your studio, you discover a trend forming. It seems like the most passionate you are about a given topic the more money comes in. The more aggressive you are, the more people rally behind you. It would be nice to eventually quit your job and make content full time. Besides, you necessarily need to say anything that you don’t agree with in order to ham it up a little bit for the camera. Maybe instead of saying, “might be a good idea to” you throw in an “imperative.” Maybe instead of saying, “misinformed” you say, “stupid.” Instead of “missing the forest for the trees” you say, “get your head out of your ass.”
This really gets things going. Comments start rolling in about how this is a “breath of fresh air” and that you were “finally saying what everyone is thinking.” You’ll realize later that the folks in the comments are living vicariously through your words. They wish that they could say this to people in their real lives, but they can’t, and so they rely on you for a sort of political catharsis. Where they don’t need to be respectful or put on airs for those around them. They use you to laugh at and ridicule their loved ones over their political beliefs in secret.
Eventually, you say something aggressive that your audience doesn’t agree with. You assume that they value your aggression and passion, but in reality they were using you as a conduit for something else. You’re almost making enough to quit your job after a few years. You’re 21 now. Do you walk it back? Do you ignore it? Does the retention of an audience or your beliefs matter more? Obviously the beliefs matter more, but that damn day job is so labor intensive and takes away from effort you could be spending making much more high quality content.
You try to ride the line and say something like, “I understand why people were so upset about how aggressive I was. I still believe what I believe, but I’m not one to shy away from criticism. I appreciate you guys even if we end up disagreeing. Maybe it’s time for me to change my tone a little.” The replies are mixed. Some say that they are happy that you are receptive to their feedback, some of them say you’re a coward that’s sucking off his bitchy fans because they got mad at you for disagreeing with them in classic “you” fashion.
That sour pang of restriction that you felt in high school is back once again, as is the resentment. You discover that keeping these people happy is part of the job. It was too good to be true thinking that being an online political commentator would have no significant drawbacks. You end up riding out that scandal, losing some of the people that admired your brashness, but gaining in steam as other political creators take note of you. They “shout you out” in their videos and on various other social media platforms and you notice your follower and viewer base growing day-by-day, and you feel like you are contributing something valuable to these people and as a result, the world.
Your subscriber count goes up. 2,500. 5,000. 10,000. 25,000. 50,000. 75,000. 100,000. People tune in from all across the world now to hear your thoughts about current affairs. Donations start rolling in because you’re providing something unique. Either your writing or speaking style is compelling, perhaps you’ve started to learn about video editing so the visuals are more captivating while you speak, perhaps you’re a skilled interviewer and end up having fun and contentious conversations with other more prominent figures that drag you into the limelight via their coattails.
As you start to get more and more popular though, you notice that you are having responsibilities thrust upon you that you are not ready for. People start expecting you to know everything, to say everything the right way, they speak of your “power” and “influence” while you rant into a microphone in your kitchen. The world is speaking about you too, as opposed to the safety of an unknown you speaking about it without it being able to reply. Now it speaks of you loudly and harshly. Every movement and punctuation mark of yours is now run through a meticulous screening process. Your every hypocrisy, inconsistency, insensitive or incorrect statement will be center stage for all to see and treated with the seriousness of a murder trial.
No matter where you are, or what phase of life you are in, you start to feel, always, as if you’re sitting in a defendant's chair all alone without any idea what you’ve done. Surrounded by people with angry faces waiting in silence and wondering what you could possibly say for yourself. Now, regardless of circumstance, your every hiccup might lead you to the cold splintered wood of that seat. Many of your fans start relying on you for their thoughts on all things political, and if you’re wrong (or change your mind) it feels like something of a betrayal. Like you opened them up to look stupid. They pay you money so that this wouldn’t happen.
All of your relationships in the field are ambiguous and on shaky ground. You don’t know whether they are friendships or business relationships, and a criticism of a friend/business partner can lead to a loss of income and that is treated as a betrayal as well. However, refusing to criticize a friend or business partner can also be seen as a betrayal of your principles if you were passionately against certain things during your fiery ascent. Even if you did change your mind, it would look cynical and self-serving. You must make a choice. Criticize them and stay true to a persona that you unwittingly invented for yourself when you were young and immature, or stay silent and be widely tarred as an unforgivable hypocrite now that you’re popular? All of your friends and business partners are looking at you, and asking themselves the same questions as well.
You’re getting even popular so you quit your job as you planned. You surrendered your income. You’ve stopped making content because you’re passionate about it. Now you’re making content because you have to in order to maintain whatever ideal fans/creators have in their minds of you to stay afloat. Eventually you abandon most of your agency to this storm. The money, the relationships, focusing on being politically consistent, caveatting every statement to avoid hostile accusations, fending off convincing lies of people that hate you, the desperate attempts to meld the real you with the persona you show to people online.
You start to do this stuff on autopilot until you realize what you’ve done. You let yourself get thrown into the pit of a Colosseum made of eggshells, where you’re expected to both fight and not break anything. All you wanted to do at the start was find other misfits like you. But they’re all in the pit with you, and your lives depend on surviving in it. Someone publicly eviscerates you for pushing an eggshell toward their foot after they stab someone else for stepping on one. The crowd hisses and boos at you. Another misfit is sliced down the middle and tries to wriggle his detached torso away from the brittle shells and the crowd laughs. You laugh along with them out of panic. You throw a knife at someone and it sticks into their chest. The crowd cheers.
The crowd is splitting now. They’re allowed to revere you or spit on you over whatever they please whenever they please. You unknowingly made yourself the star of a bloody reality TV freak show. The freedom is all gone. Your only option is to keep on contorting yourself to the roar of the crowd, your public reputation has already been defined by the time you’ve spent in the pit, there is no where else you can go in this field aside from obscurity. You know what you would do different, but it’s too late now.
They love you, then they hate you, then they forget you, then they laugh at you, then they love you, then they’re indifferent about you, they push and pull their dollar bills in and out of your throat depending on whether or not you live up to whatever expectation they demand of you at any given moment which you naively helped to reinforce when you were young, lonely, and full of hope. If you quit, you’re back to being that weird loner with no one to talk to and all the existential pain that coincides with feeling so deeply alone, boring, and average. The strings are being tied around your wrists now. Then the ankles. The neck. All the while you keep smiling convincingly, say thank you for the donation, and let them know that you’re just happy they’re watching.