No, he doesn’t. What kind of out of touch, giga privileged perspective is that?
Being a streamer is one of the most comfortable careers in the world. You get to set your own times, you get to be your own boss, you get to do it from the comfort of your own home, and you get to keep all the money you make. That type of freedom, ownership, and flexibility is something that most people could only dream of. The very idea of owning your own businesses and making a good living from it is very appealing, which is so many people try to be content creators.
Most people fail at it because they don’t treat it like a serious job, they think just putting a camera in front of them is enough for the money to start rolling in, but that’s never true. Professional streamers, like Hasan, treat it like a real job. You have this misconception that streaming becomes your life, but that’s not true. Professional streamers have very firm boundaries between their personal lives and their work. They follow very strict streaming and uploading schedules, they have carefully curated and tweaked online persona that’s designed to attract and maintain an audience, and they’re very careful to not do anything that hurts their brand image with their core audience. They also make sure to never interact with or seek out how people talk about them online, because going down that rabbit hole will lead to your career’s demise, so most professionals don’t do this.
So the struggles that you’re attributing to Hasan aren’t really there. He has a private life different from his career, his streaming persona is different from his real personality, and he intentionally ignores what people say about him online. Does streaming require effort and commitment? Sure. Does it come with its own pressure and risks? Sure, it’s like any other job. Is it soul sucking? Not in the least.
Compare streaming to something actually soul sucking like construction work. As a construction worker, you have to commute to the construction site 5 days a week, you have to work long shifts outside, you get little to no breaks, you have deal with annoying managers who micromanage everything you do, you have to work your ass off to meet very tight deadlines or else you could get fired, you have to deal with loud noises and strong smells all day, you work in a dangerous environment that requires you to be alert at all time, you have to constantly lift and move heavy things and do physical maneuvers that are taxing on the body for long periods of time… all for paycheck that’s just a bit over minimum wage. When you clock out, you’re so exhausted physically and mentally, you feel like a zombie. You can’t do anything for the rest of the day besides eating a meal, taking a shower, and going to sleep… because you have to repeat everything again the next day and the next and the next. Before you know it, years have passed and you life hasn’t progressed at all because you don’t have time, money, or energy to do anything. Now THAT is soul sucking.
Calling streaming soul sucking feels very off to me. You don’t understand just how many people are willing to give up their crappy jobs to become streaming provocateurs.
DisgruntledGorillaGang@reddthat.com 1 week ago
That’s bullshit. Real jobs are physically demanding AND soul sucking. He has the luxury of a soul sucking job where he sits on his ass. Count your blessings.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
They really aren’t. I’ve worked quite a few different kinds of “real jobs”, and my soul was not sucked out. Maybe I put on a bit of a mask in customer-facing roles, but that’s temporary. All my customer-facing roles involved making myself a sort of blank company representative. No one cared about me or my identity, just my ability to navigate the customer’s demands of the business.
No “real job” has ever made any demands of my actual personality or identity. I was never judged on my opinions. I never had to modify my personality to cater to critics to secure income. That is a unique struggle of streamers. You can compare and contrast the physical difficulty or monotony of other jobs, but that wasn’t the claim. The claim is that streaming sucks out your soul in its own particular way.
DisgruntledGorillaGang@reddthat.com 1 week ago
I worked many real jobs too and they absolutely were soul-sucking. You are fortunate your jobs didn’t suck that hard.
Just because streamers have unique struggles, that doesn’t mean that no other jobs are soul-sucking.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yes, that was the entire claim. No one said other jobs don’t suck out your soul. The only claims were that there is a way which is unique to streaming, and that it’s basically universal in the industry. No one’s trying to negate the fact that other jobs suck.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I see you’ve never worked in sales
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I think sales touches on it, but still the persona you adopt is a “sales representative”. You are selling a product, your insincerity is locked to the product, with a few curated pithy anecdotes to flesh out the role. It’s closer to acting. You’re using charisma to make the sale, but you still take your hat off at the end of the day. You interact with a few individuals over the course of the day, and likely never see them again. If you do have an ongoing relationship with clients, it’s one-on-one and segregated. And you can choose how much you want to rely on a persona, you can do sales from a position of relative sincerity if you actually believe in the product.
With streamers, their identity is the product. They aren’t using charisma to sell cars or vacuum cleaners or medical equipment, they are selling their personality. A sales representative doesn’t have to change their being when market research demands a change in product. If a streamer wants to change their product, they have to change themselves, or at least their persistent persona. Because it isn’t one-on-one and segregated, they have to be their persona all the time for thousands of anonymous commenters at once. It’s fundamentally existential. You can’t do it another way, it’s endemic to the industry