The Social Role of the Creator

Lately I’ve been sensing a particular kind of depression in the air — not the intimate kind that lives inside a person, but the structural kind that leaks out of systems when they begin to tighten.

The internet isn’t where these pressures begin, but it’s often where they become easier to observe. Platforms that once looked like opportunities now behave like rationing zones. Micro-tasks disappear in two seconds. Surveys are gone before your nervous system can even register the button. People fight over the last crumbs of disposable income that can still be extracted from a late-stage digital economy — while AI quietly moves in like an unpaid intern that never sleeps.

It’s easy to read that as a personal failure and try to be faster, more optimized, more efficient — and unfortunately, many of us do. But it isn’t personal. It feels like a broader shift in the climate we’re operating in.

And that climate is telling the same story everywhere: the middle class is being squeezed, geopolitical tension is no longer background noise, and the post-pandemic hangover is settling into something colder than anxiety — something closer to resignation. The internet, once sold as a frontier, now feels like a crowded room where the oxygen is running out.

What fascinates me is how creation behaves under these conditions.

During the pandemic, a strange cultural glitch occurred. People who never cared about making anything suddenly cared a lot. Everyone was writing, posting, building “brands,” launching newsletters, experimenting with affiliate links — chasing the last accessible forms of money in a world that had temporarily frozen. It looked like a renaissance.

But in hindsight, it wasn’t a renaissance. It was an evacuation. A migration toward the one space that still appeared open when the offline economy became unstable — and it’s hard to blame people for that.

However, for me, the pandemic didn’t just change the economics. It changed the species of people who entered the room.

Before COVID, the internet — at least the corners I lived in — felt like a strange sanctuary. Not serious. Not respectable — sometimes even a little weird. Not optimized. Not loud. An incubator of meaning. A place where misfits could build small rituals to survive years that didn’t offer much structure.

Then the corporate world arrived with its vocabulary intact: KPIs, funnels, personal brands, growth slogans, performance dashboards — as if a private forest had suddenly been mapped, fenced, and turned into an industrial farm. And something in me refused to participate. I didn’t stop creating. I stopped publishing. For a while, silence felt cleaner than joining the race.

That was my first clear signal that what I had treated as a refuge was becoming an economy — and economies don’t preserve sanctuaries for long.

Now that the emergency phase has ended, you can watch the reverse migration happen in real time. Most people don’t “quit creating” as a dramatic betrayal. They simply return to normality — to jobs, routines, corporate identities, the quiet safety of predictable wages. The internet creation phase was never a calling. It was a temporary coping strategy. And this is where the uncomfortable truth appears: there are two kinds of creators:

One type creates because a technological cycle temporarily makes it profitable. They make content the way people mine a resource: as long as the extraction is worth it. When the market collapses, they leave without nostalgia — the same way you walk away from a toy that stopped producing dopamine.

The other type creates because they can’t not create. Not in the romantic sense — not as a slogan — but as a structural fact of their psychology. Their output is not a hustle. It’s a way of staying awake. A way of integrating experience. A way of keeping agency in a world that constantly tries to outsource it.

This second type is where the real problem begins, because society doesn’t quite know what to do with them.

There’s a sentence I once heard from Lia Kim, a dancer I deeply respect, and it stayed with me because of how brutally honest it was. Paraphrased, it was something like: “Nothing will happen if you don’t become a dancer.” As in: go home. The world will continue. No one is waiting for you.

If you were trying to become a doctor, a firefighter, someone visibly useful to the collective body, people might encourage you: one more year, one more attempt. But a dancer? A writer? A choreographer? A creator? That’s different.

Because those roles don’t come packaged as social necessity. They come packaged as desire. And desire, socially speaking, is suspicious. It looks selfish. It looks optional. It looks like someone is asking the world to fund their private need for meaning.

This is the part people don’t like to say out loud, but it’s the core of it: the creator role is structurally egoistic. Not egoistic as an insult — egoistic as a description. It doesn’t treat disease. It doesn’t keep the streets safe. It doesn’t extinguish fires. It produces something softer: symbols, beauty, rhythm, perspective, language. And society loves consuming those products. It just doesn’t love paying the upfront cost of their production.

We all watch the performances. We eat dinner to podcasts. We borrow inspiration from artists the way we borrow heat from a fire. But the path that produces those outputs is rarely supported in real time, because the path itself is economically irrational and socially inconvenient. It doesn’t align with the standard keys: stability, status, predictability, and visible usefulness.

So the filtering mechanism kicks in.

Most people won’t do it, because most people can’t afford to do it — psychologically, financially, socially. And even for those who try, the feedback is often silence. Not a critique. Not rejection. Just silence. You publish. Nothing happens. You practice. No one cares. You invest in equipment, training, platforms, studio time — and the world responds with a neutral stare.

That silence is not cruelty. It’s a feature of how the role is positioned inside the social organism. The reward is delayed and probabilistic. The cost is immediate and absolute.

This is why the romance of the starving artist is such an effective cultural myth: it converts structural refusal into a noble narrative. A real artist must suffer. Convenient. It allows society to keep consuming art while moralizing the absence of a real ladder. And yet — some people still keep walking.

Not because they believe they deserve applause, but because the alternative is a subtler death: the loss of expression, the loss of integration, the slow atrophy of a part of the self that refuses to be traded for comfort.

In that sense, the most honest conclusion is also the least comforting one: If you choose this path, you are not choosing a career. You are choosing a life-form.

You are choosing years of cost without guarantees in exchange for the one thing that cannot be outsourced: the right to live in alignment with your own inner structure. The success isn’t fame. It isn’t money. It’s the fact that you get to keep doing it — that you remain awake in a world engineered to sedate you.

And nothing will happen if you stop.

Which is precisely how you know whether you were just passing through — or whether you were built for it.