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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.

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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.

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- agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
  
  Steaming may be soul-sucking in unique ways
  
  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.
  
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  - DisgruntledGorillaGang@reddthat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    You literally did…
    
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    SeptugenarianSenate@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    “Real jobs don’t attack your soul in the same way” comprehension
    
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Gorilladrums@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

No “real job” has ever made any demands of my actual personality or identity.

I see you’ve never worked in sales

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- 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
  
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  - Gorilladrums@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    Online personalities, like professional streamers, don’t actual reveal their real personalities and identities. They use personas that are carefully curated to grow and maintain their audience. These personas are the brand, that’s what they’re selling. Like sure, you need to be witty and charismatic to draw people in, but that could be said about any job in any field. The same could be said about people changing due to their job. A person’s job is a big part of their identity, and so it makes sense that streamers are influenced by their jobs like everybody else. I don’t see anything that’s uniquely stressful to being a professional streamer.
    
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    agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
    It’s not a question of stress, it’s a question of soul-sucking. Pulling out what makes you, you. Wearing that persona in all your frequent streamed behavior, especially when it’s ostensibly “you” to begin with, definitely warps your mind over time.
    
    If you wear the mask all the time, it starts to cling. You start to become the marketable character.
    
    The unique thing is the way it directly and fundamentally interacts with the worker’s personality. Yes charisma is broadly useful in any industry, but this is the industry that is selling the charisma itself. The personality is the product.
    
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