“Creator burnout is real”: Risk,responsibility,and un/speakability in the creator economy

Historical antecedents of labor precarity and risk

Despite the relatively recent emergence of the “creator economy,” accounts of creator precarity and instability index long-standing conditions of creative labor. Previous studies highlighted a widely held belief about the itinerant nature of media work, namely, “you’re only as good as your last job” (Blair, 2001; Jones, 1996). This phrase captures the project-based, insecure nature of creative work, in which future employment is contingent on recent performance rather than long-term stability. In their theorization of immaterial labor—including work related to cultural production, knowledge, and communication—Hardt and Negri (2000, 2009) conceptualize precarity as a defining feature of labor under post-Fordism. Indeed, following a wave of optimistic narratives and policy-driven hype about the creative economy that emerged in the aughts (e.g. Florida, 2002, 2005), scholars have foregrounded the structural challenges and personal vulnerabilities associated with cultural and media work. Gill and Pratt (2008), for example, contend that the labor of artists, designers, and new media workers is akin to toiling in “factories without walls.” The hallmark features of the precariat include temporary and mobile employment; long hours and uneven work cycles; blurred boundaries between work, play, and self; and persistent insecurity and anxiety about one’s livelihood. These characteristics collectively capture the endemic uncertainties faced by cultural workers, in which risk is normalized—and even glamorized (Neff et al., 2005).

Scholars have also examined precarization as a process through which workers internalize risk and uncertainty, often through euphemistic discourses of flexibility and autonomy (Brophy and De Peuter, 2007). In this process, individuals are promised freedom while simultaneously being subjected to the normalization and privatization of risk (Lorey, 2015). Yet structural precarity manifests in workers’ daily experiences in distinctive ways. In their study of the UK television industry, for instance, Hesmondhalgh and Baker (2013 [2011]) analyze the pressures associated with maintaining good working relationships across short-term projects to secure future employment, highlighting the anxiety produced by this labor environment. They conclude that creative work is precarious not only because of the inherent uncertainty of cultural industries, but also because of how precariousness is registered, managed, and negotiated in workers’ everyday lives, particularly through forms of emotional labor (see also Caldwell, 2023). Meanwhile, drawing on her research on young women working in the UK creative economy, McRobbie (2018) identifies key characteristics of this sector: individualization of responsibility, the “cultural entrepreneur” ethos, the necessity of holding multiple jobs simultaneously, reliance on self-promotion, and the ambiguity of depending on informal networks in the absence of institutional or collective labor protections. Together, these dynamics intensify pressure and insecurity for contemporary cultural workers, although experiences of precarity vary across contexts, with creative work outside the West particularly precarious and shaped by broader political, social, and economic uncertainties (Alacovska and Gill, 2019; see also Bidav, 2025; Lukan and Čehovin Zajc, 2025).

In more recent years, perhaps enlivened by pandemic-era accounts of work strain, scholars have turned attention to the physical and emotional costs borne by media and cultural workers. In their study of journalists’ well-being, Bélair-Gagnon et al. (2024) conceptualize burnout as an “occupational risk,” positioning it not as an individual failure but, rather, as a structural condition of certain media industries (see also Bossio et al., 2024). Caldwell (2023), meanwhile, describes the role of “stress aesthetics”—a justification posture used by Hollywood workers—as part of a system of self-exploitation that helps drive wages down in a “race to the bottom” (p. 163). Using a similar structural lens, Deuze (2025) weaves together industry reports with research across media sectors to illuminate a worldwide mental health crisis facing media professionals. Deuze’s work traces depression, anxiety, and other stress-related conditions among media workers to factors such as the high cost of living in urban media centers, the informality of creative workplaces, the normalization of unsafe alcohol and drug use, nontraditional work schedules, and extended periods of unemployment. His assumption about the distinctiveness of creative careers—“where intrinsic motivation, technological transformation, and pure business impulse meet” (p. 9)—underpins his thesis that “what makes you happy also makes you sick.” Passion and autonomy, in other words, simultaneously function as sources of fulfillment and harm within the media industries. Like these scholars, we acknowledge a high degree of slippage between legacy and digital media workers. Still, we argue that the labor of content creators is distinguished by their high degree of platform dependence, a structural reality that heightens labor-related risks (Nieborg and Poell, 2018).

The occupational hazards of platform-dependent work

In recent years, scholars have examined the distinctive infrastructures, economies, and governance mechanisms that contribute to the vulnerabilities of work in the creator economy (e.g. Jarrett, 2022; Poell et al., 2021). Some of these vulnerabilities are a direct upshot of relations of dependence between platform companies and laborers, including the risks of demonetization and/or deplatforming (Are and Briggs, 2023; Caplan and Gillespie, 2020), algorithmic discrimination (Christin and Lu, 2024; Duffy and Meisner, 2023; Glatt, 2022; Rauchberg, 2025), and shadowbanning and censorship (Are, 2022; Cotter, 2023; Savolainen, 2022). Other vulnerabilities are traced to audience relations mediated by platforms. Creators are thus expected to cultivate intimacy with audiences through practices such as liking, sharing, and responding to comments; maintaining regular interactions with followers; and sharing “behind-the-scenes” images of their personal lives in a bid to project relatability and ordinariness (Abidin, 2015; Bishop, 2018; Cunningham and Craig, 2017; Homant and Sender, 2019; Hund, 2023). These activities constitute forms of relational labor (Baym, 2018) that intensify pressures within what is already a highly demanding, time-intensive, and affectively loaded form of work. Yet these parasocial dynamics also introduce new forms of risk, forcing laborers to individually shoulder the burdens of public scrutiny and online harassment (Abidin, 2019; Duffy et al., 2024; Meisner, 2023).

Under these conditions, it is perhaps unsurprising that burnout emerges as one of the key occupational risks of work in the creator economy. In fact, survey data from 500 creators across North America indicate high levels of psychosocial strain, with 62% reporting burnout, 69% financial stress, and nearly two-thirds anxiety or depression (Lazar, 2025). While there has been a groundswell of industry reports about creator burnout, academic research on this phenomenon remains overwhelmingly limited to medicine and public health. Drawing on interviews with creators in Iran, Kiani and Rahimi (2023) contend that creators experience a complex intersection of psychological, social, and platform-driven pressures that significantly affect their mental health. Their findings identify burnout as one of several occupational stressors, alongside algorithmic uncertainty and income instability. More recently, Ghelani and Pandey (2025) analyzed a corpus of publicly available creator-generated posts to examine stressors contributing to burnout, categorizing them as economic, individual, and environmental. ²

Such findings index a need for further inquiries into the communication dynamics and complexities of creator labor and well-being. Not only is mental health a stigmatized topic, but it is rendered more fraught given the labor dynamics that structure the independent economy. There are, moreover, powerful sanctions against ‘speaking out’ about workplaces refracted through a glamorized prism. Consider, for example, how workers in legacy media environments have been reluctant to address gender inequity despite striking power imbalances—a situation that Rosalind Gill (2014) described as “unspeakable inequalities.” Given creators’ public personae, platform-dependent status, and persistent mental health stigma, it seems important to consider how they communicate this topic to different audiences. Our study responds to this need for insight by centering on creators’ sense-making and communicative practices, including how they discuss burnout, where they assign responsibility, and how they attempt to mitigate its harms. In particular, we examine what is considered speakable and unspeakable in discussions of creator burnout, and by whom.

Defining burnout: Risks, conditions, and effects

In their contentions that creator burnout is real, creators tended to take for granted the definition and symptoms of burnout. In a rare clinical account, creator and mental health expert Kati Morton described burnout physiologically, as the amygdala’s response to “misalignment between the effort put into both work and everyday life and the rewards, or lack thereof” (Ifeanyi, 2022). YouTuber and mental health specialist Raffael Boccamazzo (2023), meanwhile, cited a model of occupational burnout used by the World Health Organization. Notwithstanding such accounts—both furnished by individuals who specialize in mental health—creators were far more likely to address burnout in experiential rather than diagnostic terms.

Across both public and private self-reports, creators invoked remarkably similar metaphors to describe chronic fatigue and a sense of creative depletion. “YouTube is a treadmill . . . if you stop for a second, you’re dead,” YouTube gamer Drake McWhorter told then-CNN reporter Kaya Yurieff (2019). Or, as YouTube vlogger Lizzy Capri shared in an article exploring creator loneliness, “It’s exhausting and repetitive, and you feel like you’re on this hamster wheel. And you can’t get out because your whole business will crumble” (Liederman, 2023). Cyclical metaphors were common in interviews, too. Mark, a first-generation creator who later went into consulting, explained a tendency among creators to “dash out of the gate [and onto] that treadmill.” He added, “Pumping out content starts to take its toll. It’s mentally challenging. The criticism is tough.” Educational content creator Allen, meanwhile, described how creators are expected to “spin our wheels as much as possible.” To be sure, references to churns and cycles are not unprecedented; as sociologist Hartmut Rosa (2014) explains, the metaphor of the hamster wheel speaks to wider structures of labor acceleration under systems of advanced capitalism. In digital contexts, however, cyclical references capture the “always on” nature of social media and the infinite scroll feature adopted by many platforms.

Some creators—while communicating about their labor to audiences and the wider public—seemed to venerate work strain, casting it as a necessary sacrifice on their artistic journeys. As YouTuber-filmaker Casey Neistat (2019) explained,

What it took for me to get this channel from 200,000 subscribers to 10 million was not sleeping, was uploading every single day for two and a half years. I busted my ass to build this channel, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who aren’t willing to do that but want the success. Hard work is always required to get to where you want to be.

Much like the MrBeast confessional reported in the introduction, Neistat appeals to a masculine-coded version of entrepreneurship—one marked by radical individualism, self-sacrifice, and avowals of a talent-based meritocracy (Lusoli, 2025; Marwick, 2013). Tech reviewer Brannon Neary (2025), similarly, noted how pervasive burnout is among his YouTube peers before assuring audiences, “I’m not quitting. I’m going to continue to grind.” Accounts of sacrificial labor and projections of “stress aesthetics” (Caldwell, 2023) appeared in press reports, too. YouTuber and author George McMichael Moyer described his relationship with YouTube as a “sick obsession,” adding, “I think about YouTube while I eat and sleep” (Raza, 2024). He went on to detail the necessity of this work ethic, justifying, “You have to put in the work in anything to be successful; it’s just not going to be handed to you” (Raza, 2024). From these accounts, neither “sick obsessions” nor self-neglect are pathologized; they are, rather, artistic avowals that construct an imagined boundary between “real” creators and those far less committed to their craft.

Not all creators publicly glorified “the grind.” In a video titled “Creator Burnout | Why It Occurs and How To Avoid It,” YouTuber-artist Emily Artful (2019) chronicled her own struggle to come to grips with the demands of the job:

When there were moments available for me to rest, I instead doubled down on my work, staying up late while fighting back 101-degree fever. “I’m fine,” I keep telling myself, “I’m pumped full of Advil and caffeine. There is absolutely no way this could go wrong.” Oh, how wrong it did go. I suddenly began to have random fits of sweating, shaking and dizziness that would completely stop me in my tracks. Eventually I was forced to take a break because my body would simply not let me carry on the way I was.

Unlike those who continued to “grind,” Emily described the moment when she was forced to finally reckon with the psychological experiences of burnout. While this fits within a broader narrative of transformation, a theme to which we later return, it suggests the harm-inducing potential of work in the platform-dependent economy. Such critiques resounded in our one-on-one interviews with creators. Social media creator-turned-consultant Ada admitted that the mental health cost was among the reasons she had moved away from full-time creation, explaining, “Creators and influencers oftentimes don’t really take as seriously burnout and their own mental health.” Or, as gamer-streamer Kelsey confessed,

[It takes a] massive toll on your mental health 100%. Especially when you’re spending X amount of hours a day streaming and then X amount of hours on your mobile device, PC, just trying to create content . . . It’s just a never-ending cycle.

Together, these accounts instantiate the potential for the “dream job” of social media content creation to exact a profound toll on workers.

Casting blame and (not) speaking out

Alongside reports of burnout and other career-related risks, creators offered widely different perspectives about why full-time creators may be especially susceptible to overwork. Some seemed to individually shoulder the blame, citing their own failures at boundary-setting or management. Consider, for instance, how lifestyle influencer Alisha Marie (2018) chronicled the missteps in her own professional journey:

I used to be so naive, like last year I would see YouTubers stop uploading. I would be like, “Oh shoot, they’re off their game let me hustle more,” and I would hustle and hustle. I pushed myself to upload so many times in the summer, and I would vlog every single day towards the end of the year, and it was a lot, and I was just like, “I can do it. I can do it.” I would push myself.

By describing her own “naive[te],” Alisha assumes responsibility for her compulsion to create and remain competitive in a hypersaturated content marketplace.

In other instances, creators blamed the managerial incompetence of their peers. In a panel discussion posted on the Think Media YouTube channel, Derral Eves argued that burnout and fatigue happen because creators “are not willing to let go [delegate], they’re control freaks. They’re not scaling their business” (Think Media, 2020). On another panel—one not incidentally hosted by YouTube—former vlogger Elle Mills seems to engage in defensive containment, rebuffing the assumption that platform dynamics compel creators toward overwork.

A lot of it falls onto the creators to make it better. YouTube can only do so much. [The] creator’s the one who is saying yes or no to those things, they have control over their schedule and how much pressure they put on themselves. (YouTube Creators, 2019)

This same spirit of self-blame emerged in the articles, too, as creators seemed to recast blame from work conditions onto individual failures. After conceding that YouTube prefers a steady stream of content, then-vlogger Charlie McDonnell reasoned, “I’m hesitant to badmouth the algorithm too much. I feel like YouTubers can use it as a bit of a scapegoat sometimes, because it feels like an unknown thing” (Stokel-Walker, 2018). Together, these creators and entrepreneurs place the onus for burnout on laboring subjectivities, emphasizing personal failure of skills or capability rather than the structural conditions of platform-dependent work.

Yet, another faction of creators did directly blame external forces for the burnout epidemic—be it demanding platforms or audiences starved for content provisions. Across our sample, creators called out platform features—especially the synecdochic “algorithm”—for driving them toward fatigue. Indeed, the earlier-mentioned accounts of the YouTube treadmill and potentially “crumbling businesses” were hitched to fears that the platforms’ algorithms would punish creators who paused content creation. As lifestyle content creator Vitasta Bhat put it, “Constantly posting on Instagram gets to me a lot. Even if I am tired and want to take about 2-3 days off from social media, my reach drops” (Patwa, 2022). During an interview, TikToker Mia similarly shared her fear that she might get “dinged by the algorithm” if she took any sort of posting break.

It is perhaps not surprising that, during interviews, creators were especially likely to cast blame on platform logics and systems. “There’s a ton of . . . creator burnout in our space, and it’s not spoken enough about,” one former creator turned advocate confessed to us. Then invoking culpability, she added, “The platforms are relying on creators as an anchor for their algorithms to constantly push out new content, but then they don’t really understand the demands of that.” Menswear fashion creator Thomas, meanwhile, shared that he had recently “spun out about the algorithms” to the point that he was having regular conversations with a therapist about how to separate his self-worth from platform markers of success. In other words, creators experienced a profound level of what has been described in another context as “algorithmic anxiety” (Jhaver et al., 2018).

It bears repeating that these latter critiques took place in the context of research interviews rather than in a public setting. Communicating a critique about a platform on the platform raises the possibility of retaliation—directly or indirectly through forms of redacted platform reach. While platforms systematically deny the issue of such punishment—instantiating what Cotter (2023) and others dub algorithmic gaslighting—our interviews shared their own accounts of platform retribution. As one creator confessed, “I notice that when I speak about TikTok as a platform negatively, I often—my next few videos after that will be shadow banned.” Another Instagrammer who waged a public critique against algorithmic discrimination on Instagram shared that her account continued to suffer.

I still use Instagram, because that’s my biggest platform . . . I love that I can still make money from it and work with friends. But . . . I know that I am still shadow banned as much as Instagram will say that I’m not. My reach isn’t where it is, where it used to be because I did speak out about it.

That she uses the explicit refrain of “speak[ing] out” suggests how platform-dependent creators face a situation akin to “biting the hand that feeds you.”

Along with their (public and private) critiques of platform demands, creators addressed how the perceived expectations of audiences pushed them to continuously self-produce. Before announcing her public departure, YouTuber Elle Mills told then-CNN reporter Kaya Yurieff,

I refrain from taking too many breaks because then people are less forgiving. Every once in a while, they’re like, “OK, we get it, it’s been a lot,” but if you keep on taking too many breaks, then I feel like the loyalty starts to fade. (Yurieff, 2019)

In other cases, the audiences and algorithms were described as a singular force. As gamer-comedian Matt Lees offered, “The audience expects consistency. They expect frequency. Without these, it’s incredibly easy to slip off the radar and lose favor with the algorithm that gave you your wings” (Parkin, 2018). Lifestyle influencer Alisha Marie confessed to a reporter, “I honestly had never seen a creator actually take a break successfully. A whole bunch of creators had taken a break, but to be very blunt, everyone saw them as now irrelevant” (Chang, 2021). Whether expressly retaliating or through algorithmic distance, the result was the same: taking a break was seen as a direct threat to creators’ livelihoods.

The imagined audience was not only a catalyst of burnout but also, crucially, a source that prevented creators from speaking out about the intensity of their careers. Some creators acknowledged the fraught dynamics while speaking directly to audiences. YouTuber Emily Artful (2019) thus explained how the feeling of chronic exhaustion was complicated by a sense of “feeling guilty”: “I can’t believe I even have thoughts of being tired. I am so lucky to be able to do this as a living. It would be wrong to even complain.” Or, as creator-entrepreneur Roberto Blake (2020) put it, “It’s legit hard, but then you don’t talk about it because you don’t think you can. Because there is this guilt and it’s the shaming, like oh get a real job or oh that’s not hard.”

The assumption that audiences would lack empathy—or worse, shame creators—was a powerful deterrent to labor-related complaints. As Devron Harris put it, “When creators do try to speak out on being bullied or burned out or not being treated as human, the comments all say, ‘You’re an influencer, get over it’” (Lorenz, 2021). Creators thus were expected to exhibit an air of gratitude toward their communities alongside a professed “passion for the job.” One TikToker, after disclosing to us that “[Creators are] always stressed, they’re always having panic attacks,” noted how these confessions are relegated to their “friends-only” accounts. Much like media workers who repudiate conditions of gender-based inequity (Gill, 2014), creators’ gratitude may preclude them from expressing discontent with such a “dream job.”

Mitigating burnout: Resilience, recalibration, and retreat

If burnout is an unavoidable risk of platform-dependent content creation, then it seems important to consider the structures of mitigating risks and harms. While some of the articles mentioned industry-orchestrated measures—such as mental health videos supplied by platforms themselves (YouTube Creators, 2019)—the risk-reduction tactics were overwhelmingly individualized. They ranged from pampering and self-care to full-scale departures from content creation. To systematize these approaches, we categorize them as accounts that emphasize individual pluck and resilience, acts of creative reframing, and concerted breaks—either sabbaticals or retirement. Though the strategies of resilience, recalibration, and retreat were not mutually exclusive, they attest to a patchwork system of solutions that recasts the burden from institutional conditions onto individual laborers.

Narratives of personal resilience abounded in public accounts: creators spoke of intentional boundary-setting, acts of mindfulness and self-care, and their efforts to cultivate self-compassion and redefine success. Given the ethos of entrepreneurship that sustains creators, it is perhaps not surprising that some creators described “pushing through” the experiences of physical and psychic strain. Recall Brannon’s earlier-mentioned avowal to “continue to grind.” MrBeast, when asked whether there might be “a moment where you almost break,” replied, “I do have quite a few, but if you just take half a day off then you’re good. Just crank out like a season of anime in a night and then you’re good” (Impaulsive, 2021). Or, as filmmaker and YouTuber Van Neistat remarked in a clip discussing his daily routine, sometimes the routine creators use needs recalibrated. “. . . this burnout feels fake, cunning, baffling. Going to fight through it. This is the part of the marathon, where you’ve got to swallow your pride, and walk, slow down, but don’t stop” (Van Neistat, 2022).

That both of these accounts are issued by masculine public figures is not incidental; indeed, invocations of resilience seemed to fall along gender lines, with masculine grit sharply contrasted with feminine-coded self-care and restorative practices. Lifestyle influencer Sylvia Gani explained to Tubefilter how her response to burnout was one of self-care that included “doing things to destress, massages, spa, nails . . .” (Hale, 2018). More broadly, we observed marked gender dynamics in how creators address the symptoms and solution of burnout. Women tended to engage in self-blame and describe burnout as a visceral, embodied experience, while men were more likely to generalize burnout and attribute it to others’ mismanagement.

Beyond resilience, creators publicly described their efforts to revive their artistry and self-expression. In the earlier-mentioned Tubefilter Q&A, Joseph Alminawi detailed his own efforts to stave off burnout, namely by—to use a favorite euphemism—pivoting.

It’s only when it feels like I don’t have enough variety that I get the burnout vibes. What I’ve found has worked best for me is to occasionally try something completely different to keep things interesting—maybe a different game genre, or maybe a cooking video.

He went on to describe the potential for such recalibrations to boost audience engagement: “Sometimes I get surprised with an outstanding community response!” In this instance, Alminawi casts his content pivot as a win-win—staving off burnout while engaging audiences (Hale, 2019).

Other creators advised a different sort of recalibration—one that focused on non-metric indices of success. In an appeal to fellow creators, Greg Smith (2022) advised them to shift attention away from metric performance: “Instead of striving to hit 100,000 views, set a goal of up-leveling your content—ask yourself how you can make something that people will love.” But Smith pitched his own solution, too: “As a creator with a long-running online course and the CEO of a company that helps thousands of creators earn revenue from their content, I have firsthand experience with creator burnout and how to avoid it” (Smith, 2022). Here, much like with Alminawi’s version, we can see how the problem of burnout (preoccupation with external markers of success) was simultaneously cast as the solution (look inward, success will come).

It is not incidental that several of the examples in our video sample focused on self-branded products and services packaged as remedies to burnout. Consider, for instance, how the founder of Momentum Productions (2021) pitches his services, “If you’re feeling that [burnout] it’s perfectly normal, I’ve been there. I hope you’re absorbing what I’m talking because I’ve gotten out of this burnout.” Or, as Katie Steckly (2023) put it, “Creating your Instagram content, coming up with social strategy, my team at Creatorly Media would love to help you out.” Much like the kinds of market devices that creator-entrepreneurs peddle (MacDonald, 2023), these creators sold their own version of burnout prevention.

But alongside those who found ways to cope with the harms—and even capitalize on them, a minority of creators reported retreating. Such departures included extended breaks, withdrawals, and—in some cases—retirement from their eminently public careers. Consider how longtime beauty vlogger Michelle Phan described her own decision to step away from such a high-visibility career, “I didn’t have the bandwidth. I just didn’t have the passion for it anymore. And I was depressed—I was getting so many hate comments” (Spangler, 2018). More recently, YouTuber Ellie Mills penned a widely circulated New York Times essay that opened, “My life so far has often been distilled to numbers: 1.7 million subscribers, 1.8 million total followers, 155 million views. At 12 years old, I started posting videos on YouTube. In November, at 24, I quit” (Mills, 2023). Significantly, these public departures were from high-profile creators who enjoyed enough success that they could pursue other economic opportunities. More often, creators find themselves trapped between constant productivity and full-scale departure.