Must We All Be Making Reels to ‘Make It’ in Our Careers?

Words: Rosa-Lee O’Reilly

Joan Didion once sat in her study all day and did nothing but write, interrupted only by the occasional call of the telephone or her husband asking her what she wanted for tea. The same cannot be said of anyone pursuing a creative career nowadays: you must be everywhere at once, answering every Instagram DM, Slack notification, and email, all the while, somehow, miraculously meeting your deadlines.

In today’s digital culture, you are no longer just a writer, musician, or artist – you are a personal brand, a full-time content creator, and an algorithm hacker. Upskilling doesn’t mean finishing a training module – it means mastering trending audio, keeping up with platform shifts, and curating a persona that can compete with an endless feed of influencers.

Not only does our work require us to create art, but it also necessitates an understanding of the algorithmic machinery. This is the “algorithmized self”: a version of you that exists not in flesh and blood, but as content: the curated, pixelated performance of your life that must keep producing, optimising, and reshaping itself to feed the machine.

As the personal brand slowly becomes more important than the person, the physical self has turned into a metaphysical entity to the algorithm, dancing in thirty-second reels to a trending Addison Rae audio (preferably with your tits out, if you could) and keeping up with #hashtags. Creative labour has been TikTokified. But is this endless cycle really the only way forward?
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Lola Stoodley, a 27-year-old London-based musician and fashion sound designer, sees the TikTokification of creativity as the death of artistic mystery. “You really get taught by big labels or industry people that you ‘need people to like you first and then they’ll tune into your music’ – but that means you lose the mystery behind it and people’s ability to apply it to their own lives.”

Music is supposed to be ambiguous, yet today’s musicians are expected to overexplain their entire creative process in quick consumerable clips, completely undermining the magic. “There comes a point where there’s so much oversaturation about what the thing actually is about that the thing becomes more meaningless,” Lola says. 

But is constant content production really essential to career success? “If success is money and visibility, then yes, you have to do these things in the current environment. To be signed to a big record label, you have to have a certain amount of followers, a certain amount of views every week, a certain amount of social media engagement. You have to hit all of these specific targets,” she explains. “But if your success is making art because you’re obsessed with the process, then just doing it is enough. I hope as a society we can lean back into the beauty of art, rather than saturated content for content’s sake.”

“The speed of social media feels counterintuitive to writing – because writing takes a lot of time. Yet, it’s kind of this necessary evil.”

It’s a reality that young creative professionals have a heightened awareness of the infrastructure of algorithmically-dictated social media platforms. Anya Konstantine Baranova, 27, a freelance creative director and fashion photographer from Ukraine, now based in New Zealand, uses social media like LinkedIn. “I see social media as a job, or at least part of the job in being creative. I use it to promote my work: I post behind the scenes Reels and try to keep to a posting schedule.” 

For most freelancers in the creative industry, transforming yourself into a business feels mandatory. “We really are in an environment where it’s a numbers game, and the more followers you have, the wider the opportunities,” explains Anya. 

Operating in an influencer economy, where creators are landing major book, podcast and record deals, the message is clear. To survive in a sea of influencers, you have to play the same game. “In the last editorial I posted, I spent 29 pounds boosting ads, and people recognised my work. Social media definitely helps open doors – you can DM someone you want to work with or connect with people overseas,” she continues. “After posting, I spend hours responding to comments because that engagement matters – it’s either that, or you have to be amazing at networking and a huge social butterfly. But social media allows you to network and connect to people from your bed.”

Writers, perhaps, feel this paradox most acutely. Eva Wyles, a 28-year-old London-based writer and author of Deliverywoman, finds the expectation to market her work on social media deeply stressful. “When it feels like an extension of what I’m doing, like resharing when someone tags my book, that feels okay,” Wyles explains. “But when I try to post about writing, it feels like real labour, because I’m taking something private and filled with fear and moving it into a product space.”

For writers, the fit into the algorithm is awkward: words don’t bend easily into bite-sized tidbit-style content. However, #BookTok has become an undeniable market force, reviving publishing sales and catapulting certain authors into the spotlight. “I am not on TikTok and sometimes I wonder if I’ve missed out on something,” Eva admits. “I know friends whose books became massive on TikTok, but my brain doesn’t work that way. I’ve resigned to the fact it’s not me, and I don’t mind missing out. More exposure doesn’t always mean better. For me, it’s all too anxiety-inducing.” 

For now, the idea of creating content crosses the line that Eva isn’t comfortable with. “Maybe it is because there is this expectation that feels very capitalist? It is what you're meant to do to commercialise yourself, and I suppose I have a funny way of feeling about that. I want to contain some mystery.” 

“The speed of social media feels counterintuitive to writing – because writing takes a lot of time. Yet, it’s kind of this necessary evil.”

Success without social media is possible but requires other scaffolding: an agent, a local writing community, publishing contacts. The real question is whether the algorithm should dictate who gets to thrive. Constant content production might bring visibility, but it can also corrode the very conditions creativity needs: time, focus, quiet. 

Perhaps the pendulum will swing back. Culture is cyclical. The mystery of ’90s music videos, the intimacy of printed books, and the slowness of analogue film have all already resurfaced in reaction to hyper-speed content. Largely, however, the paradox remains: to exist as artists, we must also be content creators, but to create meaningful art, we sometimes need to log off, disappear, and remember who we are without a refreshing feed.

While most of us long to be Joan Didion, sitting in solitude, perpetually logged out forever, we all know that in this day and age, this is simply an idealistic fantasy. The trick, however, might be learning to use social media in a way that works for us, before it uses us.