Back to the Ground: Leaving the Creator Economy
The Vegas Strip of Socials
When I finally stepped back toward art as a career, I did what everyone said you’re supposed to do: I walked straight onto the neon promenade of the platforms. It was all there — the carnival barkers with growth hacks, the slot machines of “post more, post smarter,” the endless buffet of “build your brand,” “be everywhere, anywhere, all at once.” The music was loud, the lights were warmer than the sun, and every sign insisted that if I could keep dancing, clapping, and handing out samples of myself, I’d win.
It felt exhilarating for about five minutes and then like a bad trip I was too polite to leave. The Strip never closes; the rules change hourly; the bouncers are invisible; and the house only pays in attention, which looks like money until rent is due. I kept thinking: maybe the next reel, the next collab, the next “drop” will work. I learned the patter, learned the angles, learned the poses that communicate “effortless,” learned to splice serious work into cheerful clips so the room wouldn’t turn on me.
What I didn’t notice at first — the way you don’t notice you’re hungry in a casino — is that I had traded one customer service script for another. I wasn’t the artist; I was the greeter, the cashier, the shelf, the signage, and the free sample tray, all in one. “Can I help you find anything?” but make it a smiling caption. This time the line never ended.
The Apprenticeship That Never Ended
I didn’t begin in a casino. I started with paper under my hands and a plan: pre-animation and illustration, and an aspiration to study illustration further once my professional portfolio sang in the way that college courses of that sort would like well enough to accept me; critique rooms that smelled like pencil shavings, instructors who could tell from across the studio if your line was guessing or deciding. I didn’t finish that degree — life has a way of turning majors into weather — but the muscle stayed. The way you place a line. The way you hold an image until it answers you back. The stubbornness that keeps you at the desk.
To survive, I got good at the theater of customer service. I could apologize for another person’s bad day. I could absorb blame like a sponge. I could perform cheerful competence through a double shift and then split tips with someone who’d been on their phone the whole time. That’s a real skill, the kind that makes rent and keeps the lights on. It is also a habit: you learn to edit yourself out of the room. You learn to crouch.
When I came back to art with the intention to leave service work behind, I didn’t realize I’d packed that crouch with me. Suddenly I was writing captions like a manager reviews: Thank you for your time, sorry for the prices, hope this isn’t too much trouble. Tact can be love; it can also be a muzzle. The internet loves a muzzled artist. It taught me quickly that the safest posture was the same one I’d learned behind the counter: deferential, available, non-threatening. I’ve never liked being watched, but every system I worked in told me that being watchable was the rent for existence. So I learned to endure the glare, even as I kept flinching from it.
The Hustle Mirage
There’s a religion to it. The catechism goes: consistency is king; authenticity is a costume you can buy; engagement is community; exposure is pay; and burnout is proof that you believe. There are priests of this faith. They speak in carousels and trilogies and cross-platform optimizations. They carry graphs like gospel. They tell you, kindly, that you should work for free until the market recognizes your value, and that any day now it might. They preach hustle and call it hope.
So I hustled. I learned what hours the app was hungry. I learned to atomize finished work into an “engaging” sequence: the tidy desk, the first stroke, the half-done reveal, the little joke that lets a stranger treat your process like a sitcom. I added hashtags. I dutifully said yes to opportunities that paid in “visibility,” which turns out to be the currency of platforms because it costs them nothing and costs you everything.
Day by day I became the product and the producer and the ad inventory. My studio became a set. My ideas queued behind “what will perform.” I never wanted to perform — I wanted to work. But the algorithm, like every manager I’d ever had, mistook diligence for personality and demanded a smile to go with it. The more I gave, the more the room wanted — because the room isn’t a room. It’s an engine that eats time and thanks you with data. It was astonishing how closely it resembled the worst parts of the jobs I was trying to escape: the smile that never reached my ribs, the sense that if I stopped moving I would vanish.
Hitting the Wall
Then the wheel came off. The day jobs dried up. Applications went quiet like a stage after lights down. In a small town, “not hiring” can mean “not hiring you,” and I started to suspect that walking out mid-shift from a place that made my ribs feel like kindling didn’t help my references. Whether anyone blacklisted me or not, the result was the same: no shifts, no paychecks, no script to hide behind.
What I felt next wasn’t withdrawal from attention — it was relief from surveillance. For the first time in years I wasn’t required to act cheerful for strangers. No headset, no algorithm, no customer-is-always-right, no please-remember-to-smile. Just quiet. The quiet was strange, but it wasn’t empty. It was the sound of not being looked at as entertainment.
I realized I’d spent a decade in different costumes of servitude: hotel clerk, barista apron, algorithmic influencer, each one insisting that my worth lived in someone else’s satisfaction. Losing those scripts hurt, but it also meant I could hear myself think again. The question that rose in that stillness wasn’t How do I get their attention back? It was What would I make if no one were grading my smile?
The answers didn’t arrive like a plan. They arrived like muscle memory — the feel of a pencil finding its weight, the slow confidence of craft that doesn’t need an audience to be real.
Rediscovering the Old Roads
Silence didn’t mean absence; it meant perspective. From that quiet I started to see the outlines of the world that had been there all along.
It turned out the old roads never closed. They just don’t glow in the dark. They look like newsletters with names, not blasts with metrics. They look like a table at the community center, a folding chair, and a person who buys a print because it will live over their sink. They look like a gallery co-op that takes consignments and actually calls you back. They look like a bead supplier who knows your work by sight and slides a bag across the counter saying, “These are the good ones.” They look like a tattooer who critiques the line you thought no one would see and then feeds you, because craft has always been hospitality with a spine.
There are still zine fests where cash changes hands and then jokes and then addresses. There are still small shops that stock three of your pieces, not because they think you’ll go viral, but because their customers trust their eye. There are still commissions that begin with a conversation and a deposit and end with something both of you are proud to hang. There are still listservs and forums — yes, actual forums — where people trade studies and sources without filming it for applause. There are still open studios that smell like turpentine and tea. There are still collectors who will pay, not to own you, but to live with what you made.
Even online, the old roads are steady: a storefront you run, where the cart works and the copy is written in your voice; a mailing list that respects attention as a gift, not as a metric; a site with your name on it that is not trying to keep the visitor captive. None of this is new. It’s just quieter than the Strip. It asks for patience, for skill, for finishing. It pays in money, not in hypotheticals.
And because someone will ask: yes, commerce belongs here. I run a store. I like getting paid. Money is not corruption; it’s circulation. It means the object you carried across the hours has somewhere to live that isn’t your desk. The problem was never money. The problem was captivity — a system that taxed every exchange in attention and called it generosity while keeping the cash drawer out of reach.
The “creator economy” didn’t replace real art economies; it obscured them. An ad network is not a scene. A dashboard is not a patron. A feed is not a community. Communities are reciprocal. Scenes are ecologies. Economies have prices and delivery and hand-to-hand respect. The old roads run on those things. The Strip runs on churn.
Back to Ground
So I stepped off the Strip. Not as an exile from applause — I was never chasing applause — but as a worker walking out of a rigged shift. I just kept walking until the noise thinned and the ground under my shoes felt like ground again. Out here there is weather. There is time that belongs to making, not measuring. There are mornings when the first thing I do is draw instead of perform drawing. There are afternoons when I set a price and do not apologize for it because it reflects hours and materials and a promise to keep doing this next month.
I haven’t renounced the internet. I’ve renounced the hallucination that it is the only street in town. I still post, but I don’t worship. I still market, but I don’t kneel. I still speak to people there, but I don’t let a platform be the only room where my work can shake someone’s shoulder awake.
The apprenticeship never ended; it simply changed cities without telling me. It led through restaurants and retail and reels and back, finally, to a studio with a door I can close. The skills I learned in service taught me endurance; the lesson I had to unlearn was apologizing for needing more than survival. The platforms taught me how to be loud; the old roads taught me how to be heard.
If the Strip wants me back, it can keep the lights on for someone else. I’ll be at a table where I know the names of the people who buy my work and they know mine. I’ll be in the shop that carries three pieces this season because three is honest. I’ll be at the community sale where somebody sets a cup of coffee by my elbow and says, “Tell me about this one,” and I do.
I am not escaping the economy. I am escaping the scam.
I’m back on the ground. And the ground still makes room for art.
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