The Instant Upsides of Returning to the Real World

(and an argument against working towards full-time influencing, if you're anything like me)

So, I’m halfway through my first week back in a W2 job after over 5 years on W9s as a full time content creator and freelancer. My first impression is: OOPS.

My second first impression was: Yep. This is why people always complain when a creator goes full-time. I’ve noticed the shift that takes place in others’ content too but never explored or articulated it too deeply myself, probably out of fear of facing something I didn’t want to hear.

Personally, I didn't realize how much I missed being on a team. Working with others towards common goals, having a specific role and direction that fits my skillset.

Doing everything that goes into a piece of content got disproportionately exhausting for me. Just about any video outside of the “brute force more views with a lot of text superimposed on a very short looping video” genre involves tasks I have absolutely no real interest in.

When Tiktok blew up and Instagram shifted to Reels in response, I complained to friends that I never signed up to be a script writer or video producer/director/editor. I’m definitely not an actress or a sketch comedian. Or dancer. That’s why I don’t do skits and dances. Really not into the “laughing at you, not with you” method of getting traction in the algorithms.

I’m a writer. I can take okayish photos to pair with my writing. Video production is not my thing. I’m passable at it now thanks to very user-friendly mobile video editing apps, but it’s never going to be something I feel excited about doing just to do it. Video just isn’t how my brain is wired to see the world or to communicate with it.

Going back to missing being on a team: It became so lonely and limiting to be a one-person operation. I treasure the friendships I’ve made with other content creators, and we definitely kvetch and commiserate, but ultimately it’s parallel play. Not a team effort.

Over the past five years, the only times I've really worked with a team were during short-term engagements for brand partnerships. And that’s different. I wasn’t really part of the team; I was just the outside contractor brought in to fulfill a brief that their team created. My only real consistent “coworker” type relationship is with my agent, and as great as he and his predecessor are, it’s not the same thing.

I’ve worked in some great teams over the years. I know how they can elevate any task, any job. The best team I’ve ever been on was, unfortunately, at the worst job, and I’m pretty sure I stayed on months longer than I should have because of the team. That job got so stressful near the end that I was crying in the shower multiple times a week and constantly cranky and stretched to my last nerve—it’s one of the reasons I’ve hesitated to get back into the corporate world in the first place. The team I’m on now seems just as fab, and the leadership appears to be infinitely better. I’m so stoked about this.

Going back to my second first impression of being back in the “real job” world, there’s a reason critics of online influencers often say they lose something when they go full-time. The paradox of freedom is that for some of us, having too much freedom becomes extremely limiting. When you can choose to do whatever you want with your time and you can choose whichever direction you want to take your work, the scope of your life and creativity can shrink.

It becomes tempting to just stick to what you already like and enjoy. What you find easy. Or, in some cases, what your analytics tell you viewers want. Because you have to earn your freedom by bringing in views and money. In either case, staleness creeps in, either into the content or into your experience of making it.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to all creators who go full time. I know a few who’ve maintained consistently excellent work and apparent job satisfaction after years in the game. I have so much respect for that. In some cases it’s because they assemble their own teams—editors, assistants, and such—and in others it’s because they genuinely thrive on being a one-person operation. That is, apparently, not me.

Having external structure hits different. I remember working full time in tech media, finishing up my workday, then happily putting in hours on my blog in the evening. Applying things I learned in my day job to my side hustle. And yes, those were wild times for K-beauty bloggers in general and everything was exciting for everyone, but in retrospect, the tension between the external structure of my job and the internal drive to create my own content generated a creative spark that total freedom actually smothered.

There’s something about having a burning idea and then having to wait to execute on it, instead of being able to impulsively rush it to completion. The time in between getting the idea (and jotting it down somewhere so it doesn’t disappear forever in the smooth potato brain) and executing it is time that I can spend ruminating on it, developing it, figuring out all the things I want to say. For example, this post has been through a few rounds of edits over the past week as I run through it and add things I didn’t think of the first time. I developed thoughts that were a little thin in the first draft. I cleaned up and tightened some language because I tend towards wordiness.

Plus, I learn more when I’m not the one in charge of my learning. Being self-taught is great, and can get you surprisingly far. But for me, if I’m self-teaching, I tend to only learn what I want to learn. Usually whatever’s easier for me to learn, due to my natural aptitudes or lack thereof. This leaves gaps of things I should learn but don’t feel like learning, don’t know I should learn, don’t know how to learn. Being accountable to someone else for my learning means I’ll grow more, and in different directions, than I would on my own.

Don’t get me wrong. I have grown in the past five years. We are all growing and evolving all the time. I’ve grown in ways that surprised me. But at a certain point, I stopped growing in other areas. Getting back into a team feels like reviving a growth area that’s stagnated for ages.

I recognize that I’m in a very lucky position. My job is remote and my schedule is flexible. So I will still be able to execute on some ideas and interact with the community to some extent. But even if it weren’t, I think I’d still feel the same way right now.

Obviously this is just a first impression. It’s the equivalent of the first time I swatch a new sunscreen on my hand. I’ll be sorting through and processing my experiences of the last 5 years for a while. But my feelings about the full-time influencer life are clear. I’m very very grateful to have had that and to have made it work for as long as I did. I had a lot of fun, made some true friends, got to experience a side of life that I would never have imagined a decade or so ago. I still love the access to incredible beauty products (and ones that aren’t incredible but are fun to clown on). I spent the early months of lockdown writing my book, and seeing it in print was a lifelong dream come true. But I’m very very VERY glad to be able to move on and get back into the flow of civilization. And to be able to come here for fun. Not because I have to.

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me! Let’s discover the next stage together.

Also, if you’re reading this, here’s a sneak preview of something upcoming: I’m sitting on receipts of some shady vendor behavior that I think I’ll finally do something with soon.