Selling Sunshine in a Bottle
Introduction
Our digital lives inherently express distorted imagery - the smoke and mirrors create a fictitious facadé that warps reality around it. As we plug into cyberspace we don our masks and become somebody else. We either become the best or the worst of ourselves; usually attaching ourselves to the best and externally showing it while we hide anonymously to express our shadowy thoughts. We scroll endlessly past good-looking meals, and beautiful friends, connect with people we don’t know, and give our hearts to heartless minds. When we consume content and culture we often only engage with the positive sides deliberately showcased by the creator or a carefully curated vulnerability.
If we are to believe the countless vlogs, blogs and social media posts coursing through the veins of the collective cyber-consciousness the algorithmic truth is that everyone is happy, fulfilled and doing what they love every single day. Then if you have a fleshy heart in the centre of your meat suit and not a galvanised steel one you’re filled with envy and despair as you jump from post to post, thinking what your life would be if you only disconnected and went out there and pursued your dreams. This text is about this, both from the perspective of a creator and a consumer, as I am both and suffer twice because of it.
Each side is a unique perspective and both bring their own challenges, there’s a lot of downsides but also upsides to being constantly connected to the rest of the world. We have unfiltered and unlimited access to culture, knowledge, human connection, entertainment and so much more - all at the tip of our fingers.
This can both inspire and completely kill the ambitious who are not prepared to face the sensory overload which is the internet. As humans, we want to share and connect with others, but the need to constantly compete and compare with others is also amplified in this digital amphitheatre; the human experience in this binary space is further complicated when money is involved. A lot of content creators and digital personalities will try their best to sell you sunshine in a bottle - a promise that life could be better or some magical product to instantly improve it.
Data Processors and Purveyors of Digital Delight
A phrase that has been turning up a lot more in recent years is “toxic positivity”. It’s defined as dysfunctional emotional management that disregards the acknowledgement of negative feelings like sadness, anger and more. It’s an attitude towards life that requires you to feel positive all the time - an extreme version of optimism that completely avoids negative feelings forcing a cheerful facadé. This mentality has become prevalent in our hustle culture where if you just put your mind to it you’ll have it, and while I believe that to be true that if there is a will there's a way - that way isn’t as straightforward and as easy as some people want us to believe. To some extent, you can fake it til you make it but if you want to keep that progress and to experience genuine happiness you have to be able to feel, deal with and heal the negative emotional states you endure as well. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, and pushing it deeper and deeper eventually just leads to all this pent-up rage, sadness or whatever it is to explode and cause a crisis in your life. The gurus and snake oil salesmen who sell you this idea are doing so because it profits them and because they try their best to delude themselves. As emotional beings, we of course prefer feeling good, and most of us enjoy content that makes us feel good, to look at the bright side of life and to share our joy with others.
I believe this is where our want to share and partake in community is rooted, we don’t have the same appetite when we eat alone and even sharing that moment with somebody through a screen appeals to us on some very fundamental biological and social level. We live vicariously through these digital connections and we form parasocial relationships, and this goes both ways. Creators form bonds with their audience and their audience with the creator, both create an unhealthy and unrealistic expectation of the other. Fame and social recognition get to the head of many people, and we see many examples in our day to day of people who become unhinged and delusional when they believe that people worship the ground they walk on and that they can do no wrong. While both parts to some extent care for the other there’s also an unrealistic expectation of that relationship - both can believe it to be more personal than it is. Truth is that the glue between these two parts is the creative expression of the creator and that is what both attach to. This can be painful for an audience to realise that a creator doesn’t create for them specifically but also painful for a creator to realise that an audience doesn’t care for them specifically and them as an individual. This dichotomy between artist and audience creates unhealthy expectations from both parties, and one of them is reinforced positivity.
As with any kind of public face, no matter how small your audience is you have a certain need to maintain your face and exude brilliance, confidence and well-being. This adds to the pressure of already performing well but to also love and cherish every single part of it. It’s such a blessing to do what you love after all and to say anything to the contrary just means you’re ungrateful or undeserving of what you have. Consumers tend to create unrealistic expectations from artists they love - especially if they’re creative themselves, or have aspirations to make a living from their work. A lot of people think it’s easy to be an artist and that if you make a living from music, painting or any cultural work really that you’re just lucky and you’ve won the lottery. It’s not “real” work and it doesn’t have any drawbacks, it’s all just sunshine and all creative and cultural work should just be voluntary hobbies. This can make it difficult to express hardships as an artist - because it's seen as whiny or spoiled, but most people who are creative understand that the process isn’t straightforward, and anyone who has practised any craft knows that it takes a lot of time and energy to create. Because of this, a lot of people who are sharing their work online either feel external or internal pressure to stay positive and to only engage with positivity and eventually a lot of creators reach a breaking point where this mask drops and they have a mental breakdown. What follows is an unfair exchange for both parties - because creators shouldn’t be expected to always feel amazing and constantly perform with this fake positivity but the audience isn’t some sort of singular entity that acts as a therapist and it is not the job of a bunch of faceless strangers to deal with the negatives in a creator’s life. There needs to be a balance and mutual respect where both sides can recognise reality and not enforce a fantasy ideal of eternal sunshine.
Dark Side of the Moon
As with everything, there are negatives to everything, and every object in the light casts a shadow. It’s important to recognise that and to come to terms with it. The images we see online don’t tell the whole truth and there’s no reason to compare your life to that of others. Everybody struggles in one way or another, and no diamond is perfectly flawless. It’s important to focus on what you do and your own life rather than comparing it to that of strangers, and when sharing your work and your life with others its important to be realistic about it and to be honest, both towards others and yourself. The purpose of artists isn’t to sell sunshine in a bottle and the promise of immortal happiness, but rather to share and convey parts of the human experience. Life is filled with light and dark and all kinds of colourful hues, and it's important to experience the full spectrum not only to understand what the opposite is but also to discern the Light from dark, the rain makes you appreciate the sunshine and without the rain, the sun would kill you.
The negatives are similar for both consumer and creator and both run the risk of forming unhealthy parasocial relationships with the other. Both need to be wary of this create a healthy distance, and remember that even if they are linked together through a piece of media or culture they are not personally linked. The relationship is symbiotic and should remain so and not turn parasitic, and that goes both ways. Online content can be a wonderful way to bring people together and be a wholesome place for community but it can also create echo chambers and cesspools of toxicity. Hiveminds form easily and because of the usually consequence-free nature of the internet toxicity and hostility tend to thrive. Being the proud face of one of the world’s largest audiences I am happy to say that we have a wholesome and creative space in which development and artistic truth leads the individual of this collective towards a higher knowledge. For smaller creators, it might be more difficult.
It’s okay to acknowledge the fact that doing what you love or having your dream job doesn’t mean that it’s perfect all the time or that you don’t struggle with aspects of it. Creative work is very demanding in other ways than physical, and the mental damage is often irreparable and the fragile egg-shelled minds will never recover from being cracked open so fiercely to survive this world. However a creator also needs to remember that the audience does not owe them anything and that you’re always at their mercy, they are not responsible for your actions or choices and they can’t act as your therapist, so while it is okay to share vulnerability there has to be a balance, and seeking sympathy from faceless strangers on the internet isn’t the way to heal. Life isn’t all sunshine and it’s not all sleet either.
Final Words
Ultimately what helps me both as a creator and consumer is to distance myself from the content and lives of the creators. I work under an alias because I don’t want it to be personal, I want you to interact with my work because it appeals to you, not because of your relationship or how you feel about me as a person. I’m not all sunshine and I’m not all moody gloom either, just like you and everyone else there’s a bit of everything. Like most other artists I go through the same struggles, and fighting against the algorithm and the constant self-pressure to perform in a certain way is very tiresome, I’ve never worked as much in my life as I do currently, but it’s a different kind of work and I am happy to do it most days. Recently I’ve had to learn to distance myself a bit from it and to not worry too much about the hustle culture around it, and just keep focused on taking one step at a time.
It is a privilege to work with what you love but it’s a lot of hard work as well, and nobody can take that away. There’s no easy way to earn quick money, fame or whatever it is you want, everything takes time and a lot of it. We have to reconcile with this fact and the fact that everything isn’t perfect and positive all the time; indeed, we have to take the time to be in the negative and to fully feel it to get past it.
