The Draper Option

Being an “online person” carries psychic costs, especially for those who earn part or all of their livelihood from creative work tied to their personal image, such as a podcast, a YouTube channel, or a Substack.

“You make money online and can support yourself from doing so? Wow.” They say. “I wish I had that.”

No, they don’t. They’d just be complaining about it like they are about their office job.

The projections. The parasociality. The hate and the love. The latter can actually be more damning, as you just get cheerled toward being more cringe. The understandable desire to know how your work has been received can easily turn into a subtle desperation that pulls you into the screen, allowing digital voices to worm their way into your head.

Most who play the game understand this, make do, and continue their performance, saying to themselves: “this is just the tradeoff of playing.” True. Yet this acceptance portals them into the nebulous addictions that come with getting validated (and fearing being invalidated) by their audience, or, dare I say, “community.”

The problem: there is no community without communion. Hence, whatever is being sought as validation is not a community. It’s something else. One popular phrase from the extremely online is egregore: an occult term for a non-physical entity that emerges from collective minds.

Are online influencers just summoning egregores that end up entrapping them on the screens, along with their communities?!

Yep.

One option is escape: just get off. Stop playing. Delete yo self. Unscreen and touch grass forever. Starve the egregore and log off while you still can.

I’ve considered this more than once, which, if I am honest, has the same quality as the fantasizing I indulged in when I worked an office job: dramatically quitting and riding a motorcycle across Canada, finding my true passion somewhere between Toronto and Vancouver. Maybe in Alberta??

There is another option. The best option. It’s the “I don’t think about you at all” option. Let’s call it The Draper Option, based on the popular meme from Mad Men.

It’s the hardest option, because you still play the game, but you become impenetrable, build an inner citadel. You put things out there and don’t care. Don’t check. Don’t know. You create, but not for your egregoric pet that eventually makes you its pet.

No. You create for something else.

You can start creating just for “yourself,” which feels insane, but if you persist in this, something very interesting happens.